Month: December 2011

The Cinema of Liberty: The Top 10 Pro-Freedom Films of 2011 + LFM’s Jason Apuzzo to Blog at The Huffington Post

Dominic Cooper in "The Devil's Double," Michelle Yeoh in "The Lady," and Colin Farrell in "The Way Back."

[Editor’s Note: this post appears today on the front page of The Huffington Post. Jason is very pleased to now be blogging at The Huffington Post.]

By Govindini Murty & Jason Apuzzo. Freedom is one of the most important prerequisites of artistic excellence. 2011 was distinctive for producing a number of critically acclaimed films that celebrated the history of the arts and of the cinema itself – from Martin Scorsese’s Hugo and Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist, to Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. Yet filmmaking never takes place in a vacuum, and these superb, literate films – which value knowledge, humanity, and civilization – are nonetheless the outgrowth of a free society, and would have had difficulty being made under circumstances of political tyranny.

It’s therefore worthwhile to celebrate the notable movies of 2011 that took the risk of advocating for democratic freedom, the political principle that makes so much film artistry possible. Some of these are foreign films created under the most difficult circumstances, while others are mainstream Hollywood productions made within the freedom of democratic society. Whether spectacular or intimate, tragic or comic, these films dramatized to audiences around the world the importance of liberty. With the revolutions of the Arab Spring, citizen protests in China, and the recent democracy demonstrations in Russia, 2011 was a remarkable year for democratic action and this year’s pro-freedom films often reflected this.

Given that many of these are foreign or independent films with multi-year releases, we thought it fair to include films that had their first theatrical or DVD release in the U.S. in 2011, or that screened in a U.S. film festival in 2011. Also, this is merely a list – not a ranking – so please consider each film on this list to have its own unique value.

Jafar Panahi in "This is Not a Film."

1. This is Not a Film – Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Iran

This is Not a Film depicts in heartbreaking detail the house arrest of acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who was accused in 2010 of making a film critical of the Iranian government. Panahi vehemently denies the charges, yet he currently faces six years in jail and a twenty-year ban on filmmaking. Nonetheless, in This is Not a Film Panahi not only documents his own house arrest, revealing how the banal details of daily confinement can crush the human spirit; he also reveals how the creative impulse can survive even the most repressive circumstances, and inspire hope.

2. The Way Back – Peter Weir, U.S.

Starring Ed Harris, Colin Farrell, Jim Sturgess, and Saoirse Ronan and directed by Peter Weir, this epic and moving film based on real events tells the story of a group of Polish, American, and Russian political prisoners who escaped from a brutal Soviet gulag in 1941 and walked 4000 miles from Siberia to India and freedom. An extraordinary paean to liberty, The Way Back‘s courageous protagonists repeatedly affirm their willingness to die in freedom rather than live out their lives in the slavery of Soviet communism. The film’s concluding montage depicting the events of the Cold War is a long overdue acknowledgment from Hollywood of how the fall of European communism freed millions of Poles, Czechs, Russians, and Eastern Europeans.

Jessica Chastain, Octavia Spencer in "The Help."

3. The Help – Tate Taylor, U.S.

The civil rights drama The Help reveals how the struggle for freedom is equally urgent when it comes to racial equality in America. With gripping performances from Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and a powerful ensemble cast, The Help portrays the plight of African-American women who labored as house maids in the American South of the 1960s. The Help depicts the daily humiliations and injustices that grind down the human spirit and that form an ‘internal prison’ of despair that can be as destructive as any war, or act of violence. Taking place within recognizable domestic circumstances, The Help shows that our respect for civil rights in America is as important as our fight for human rights around the world.

4. Petition – Zhao Liang, China

A member of the ‘Digital Generation’ of independent Chinese documentarians, Zhao Liang depicts in Petition the Kafkaesque struggle of the Chinese people for justice from their own government. Petition follows real citizens, often poor and powerless, who travel from all across China to Beijing to petition the government for redress against local injustices. Zhao Liang goes into the petitioners’ shanty towns to hear their tragic tales of official malfeasance: unlawful imprisonment, confiscations of property, torture and death at the hands of local authorities. The petitioners wait months and sometimes years for their cases to be heard, and in the meantime eke out miserable existences in cardboard hovels on the sidewalks of Beijing. Following on Zhao Liang’s powerful Crime and Punishment, Petition is essential viewing for anyone who wishes to understand the abysmal state of human rights in communist China.

From "The Red Chapel."

5. The Red Chapel – Mads Brügger, Denmark

In one of the bravest films in recent memory, director Mads Brügger and Danish-Korean comedians Simon Jul Jørgensen and Jacob Nossell risk their lives traveling to North Korea to tweak/punk that nation’s tyrannical communist regime. Ostensibly visiting North Korea for the purpose of putting on a Danish socialist comedy show as an ‘inter-cultural exchange,’ the filmmakers’ true purpose is to document the censorship and inhumanity of the North Korean government. Referring to the communist dictatorship as “the most heartless and brutal totalitarian state ever created,” Brügger and his comedians repeatedly make fools of the authorities in this blackly satirical, poignant and insightful documentary. All the more relevant after the demise of Kim Jong Il, The Red Chapel follows on the heels of North Korea-themed films like Kimjongilia, Yodok Stories, and The Juche Idea in illustrating how the cinema can advocate for freedom by exposing tyranny. Continue reading The Cinema of Liberty: The Top 10 Pro-Freedom Films of 2011 + LFM’s Jason Apuzzo to Blog at The Huffington Post

The Man in the Hood: LFM Reviews El Sicario, Room 164

By Joe Bendel. Don’t ask who that masked man is. You don’t want to know. In 2009, a ‘sicario’ (a professional killer working for the Mexican drug cartels) gave an in-depth interview to Charles Bowden for a revealing Harper’s article. Despite the cartel’s $250,000 bounty, he subsequently consented to a lengthy on-camera interview with Bowden’s filmmaker colleague Gianfranco Rosi, who shaped his pseudo-confession into the documentary El Sicario, Room 164 (trailer below), now playing in New York at Film Forum.

Rosi and Bowden are deliberately sketchy about the details, but the film was shot in a border town hotel room (number 164), where the masked sicario once held and tortured someone who owed money to his cartel. Eventually, he turned the battered man over to another team of sicarios. While he does not know his victim’s ultimate fate, he knowledgeably assumes a grisly end. Though this disturbing information seems to lend considerable significance to the location, it quickly becomes apparent the sicario has done such crimes innumerable times before in similar motels and so-called “safe houses” on either side of the border.

The sicario might very well be embellishing a host of individual details, but the broad strokes he sketches out ring chillingly true. Like a talented young baseball player, the sicario was recruited by his cartel at a young age. After serving a drug-running apprenticeship, the cartel greased his way into the police academy. Yes, the killer is also a copper. He estimates about a quarter of the graduates of all Mexico’s law enforcement academies are cartel plants. Not surprisingly, the free access to squad cars greatly simplifies the kidnapping process.

164 is all kinds of scary. Frankly, it makes it pretty clear narco-terrorist warlords have taken over the country. This is not happening in remote Afghanistan, but along our southern border. It is also evident the current administration is not capable of thinking sufficiently strategically over the long term to combat them in any meaningful way. Sending them a bunch of free guns as part of Operation Fast & Furious just is not going to do it. Continue reading The Man in the Hood: LFM Reviews El Sicario, Room 164

Italy’s Oscar Submission: LFM Reviews Terraferma

By Joe Bendel. The tiny Sicilian island of Linosa looks like a Mediterranean paradise. Unfortunately, regular work can only be found there two months out the year. In addition to tourists, illegal immigrants from North Africa have also been flocking to the isle, further complicating the local economy. Indeed, immigration is the driving concern of Emanuele Crialese’s Terraferma (trailer here), which has been officially submitted by Italy for Academy Award consideration as the best foreign language film of the year.

Filippo is not too bright, but the kid has not had a lot of breaks in life. After his father was lost at sea, his grandfather and uncle have waged a cold war over his future. The old salt-of-the-earth Ernesto wants Filippo to be a fisherman like his father before him, whereas the smarmy Nino offers his nephew seasonal work catering to tourists. Unsatisfied with either dead-end option for her son, Giulietta resolves to leave the island after the upcoming season, a decision that does not sit well with Filippo.

Even though Filippo remains determined to stay, a series of disparate new arrivals will challenge his family’s traditional way of life. First, his mother rents out their home to three tourists from the “dry land,” including the very noticeable Maura. Soon thereafter, Ernesto and Filippo fish out several drowning Ethiopians from the sea, secretly sheltering the pregnant Sara and her young son. For their efforts, Ernesto’s boat is confiscated. From this point on, Terraferma is not very subtle.

That water sure is blue, though. Not merely background color, the deep azure sea is a critically important visual element for the film. Crialese pointedly contrasts images of tourists playfully diving off pleasure cruisers with that of illegal immigrants desperately abandoning sinking makeshift vessels. It is heavy-handed, but striking.

Dazzlingly lensed by Fabio Cianchetti, Terraferma captures all the natural beauty of Linosa. He also evokes the chiaroscuro effect of old masters in several hushed scenes of good Samaritans ministering to the despised huddled masses. There are plenty of bikini shots as well, not that anyone will ever confuse the film with Beach Blanket Bingo.

The azure seas of Linosa.

Cianchetti’s camera also loves Mimmo Cuticchio, both an award winning puppeteer and an accomplished actor. Resembling a wiser, more weathered Andrew Weil, Cuticchio has the perfectly seasoned gravitas to serve as Ernesto, the film’s proletariat moral compass. Filippo Pucillo does not have any of that going on as his namesake. Granted, the twenty year-old is supposed to be immature, but one starts to wonder how he has gotten this far in life. Conversely, Donatella Finocchiaro plays mother Giulietta with a convincing world-weary earthiness, despite not looking particularly matronly. Former model Martina Codecasa also shows a bit of unexpected substance beyond mere eye candy as the topless sunbathing Maura.

Terraferma is mostly quite effective as a bit of fun in the sun with a guilty social conscience, though the spectacle of throngs of prospective asylum seekers overwhelming Filippo’s “borrowed” skiff like a horde of zombies nearly undermines the message. Regardless, it is an absolutely lovely looking film. Indeed, both the lush visuals and simplistic humanism ought to appeal both to Academy voters and to prospective distributors.

Posted on December 28th, 2011 at 8:57pm.

Serbia’s Oscar Submission: LFM Reviews Montevideo: Taste of a Dream

By Joe Bendel. In 1930, Yugoslavia’s national football (a.k.a. soccer) team had quite a run during the very first FIFA World Cup. If you think Serbia still remembers with pride that celebrated team consisted entirely of Serbians, you would be correct. The story of how a team of underdogs played their way into the tournament, in spite of a Croatian boycott, is dramatized in Dragan Bjelogrlic’s historical sports drama Montevideo: Taste of a Dream (sometimes also subtitled as God Bless You, trailer here), which has been officially submitted by Serbia for Academy Award consideration as the best foreign language film of the year.

Serbia is a long way away from Uruguay. With the memories and repercussions of WWI still very fresh for the newly formed country of Yugoslavia, the team requires a serious patron to underwrite their journey, like the king. He will need some convincing. Unfortunately, the national team is a motley bunch, largely overlapping with Belgrade’s sort of-kind of professional club, conveniently owned by their chairman. There is hope though when they sign the poor but cocky Tirke Tirnanić, who can do just about anything with a soccer ball (from here on, we’re sticking with the American vernacular). Still, he has a good heart, always looking out for the film’s Oliver Twisty narrator, Stanoje, a street urchin who must wear a leg brace.

Naturally, Tirnanić has a rival on the team, the comparatively well-heeled Mosha Blagoje Marjanović. Initially they clash over differences of style and then over two women: Rosa, the good girl barmaid and Valeria, the vampy artist. It is pretty clear who should be with whom, but somehow they get mismatched.

Montevideo might be an Oscar long shot, but a forward-thinking art-house distributor should snap it up fast. It is easily one of the most commercial films in contention. Soccer continues to grow in popularity, with American fans tending to be rather internationalist in their outlook (so subtitles should be no problem). As sports films go, Montevideo has plenty of on-field action to satisfy enthusiasts, as well as two beautiful women. Of course, it is also totally manipulative. It is a sports film, after all.

Nina Janković as Valeria.

Despite his baby-face, Petar Strugar makes a convincingly dashing rogue as Marjanović. While Miloš Biković’s nice guy right-winger (that is his position) comes across as something of an earnest stiff, such is the nature of sports movie protagonists. On the other hand, Nina Janković is downright fascinating as the nuanced troublemaker, Valeria.

A lovely period production, Montevideo captures all of Belgrade’s old world charm. Nemanja Petrovic’s design team’s attention to detail shows in every frame, while cinematographer Goran Volarevic gives it all a lush, nostalgic look. Still, given recent history in the Balkans, the occasional flash of nationalism remains a little scary, as when the crowd spontaneously bursts into the Serbian anthem after a pivotal game.

While a tad long at one hundred forty minutes, it is quite entertaining in a pleasingly old-fashioned way, with an appropriately hot and swinging-ish soundtrack. Considerably better than last year’s best foreign language Academy Award winner, Montevideo ought to have a further distribution life regardless of what Oscar does.

Posted on December 28th, 2011 at 8:56pm.

LFM Mini-Review: We Bought a Zoo

Maggie Elizabeth Jones and Scarlett Johansson.

By David Ross. THE PITCH: Grieving widower (Matt Damon) purchases and restores a ramshackle zoo. Surly teenage son and adorable moppet of a daughter work out psychological trauma of mom’s death, while lovable band of zookeeper misfits provides comic relief and romantic opportunity (Scarlett Johansson).

THE SKINNY: Having to choose this holiday season between a weepy Matt Damon and a gaggle of wise-ass cartoon chipmunks, I reluctantly choose the former. The group-therapy dynamic is gluey and interminable, but I don’t mind watching Scarlett Johansson lug buckets of raw meat in a zookeeper’s jumpsuit. Kids will of course enjoy the animals.

WHAT WORKS: • There are a few veiled penis jokes and booze references, and the above-mentioned moppet does use the word ‘d**k’ (they don’t make moppets the way they used to), but for the most part moms will not have to lunge in human earmuff mode.

• Matt Damon is a Hollywood packhorse; plodding along, he gets the job done, whatever the film, whatever the genre. What I take to be his genuine intelligence and good nature shine through. More than ever, he’s oddly rectangular, as if he’s made of Lego or gingerbread. The obvious analogy is to Spencer Tracy, another squat savior of otherwise mediocre films.

• Scarlett Johansson’s potbelly is long gone. Svelte and tomboyish only in quotation marks, she’s a little hard to believe in the role of zoo drudge. She’s become very good at conspiring in this kind of narrative hypocrisy. It’s not the flaunters who drive you crazy; it’s the figurative librarians in their figurative cardigans. Scarlett’s cardigan consists of her shyness and her husky voice and her imperfect features. We’re eventually blindsided by the realization of our initial error. Scarlett is such a fizzle as a model (Dolce and Gabbana) because none of this works in the context of negligee and deliberate smolder.

• The film’s only bad guy is a priggish little zoo inspector who wields his measuring tape like a sadist’s whip. The film is not trying to make a political point, but all the same it effectively silhouettes the state regulatory apparatus in its fascist aspect. Damon’s zoo owner must grovel and beg for permission to operate his business, all his dreams (not to mention his life savings) hinging on the whim of a petty bureaucrat. Matt Damon, this is what you vote for and would have us vote for! Learn a thing or two from your own movie.

Matt Damon stares at a tiger.

WHAT DOESN’T WORK: • The dwindling imagination of Hollywood can conceive of only two dramatic premises at this point: dead spouse or dead kid. The actuarial chance of a woman dying in the prime of life is one in many thousands; the actuarial chance of a woman dying in the prime of life in the average Hollywood ‘drama’ is about 50%. In a ‘supernatural thriller,’ the odds are 100%. If cancer doesn’t get her, then a wet road at night certainly will. The husband will have had a few drinks and must therefore ‘learn to forgive himself.’ This scenario is catnap to reviewers like Kenneth Turan, who know ‘surprising psychological complexity’ when they see it. I, for one, am tired of being subjected to this ghoulish graveyardism. No more flashbacks of picnics in fields strewn with spring flowers! No more wrinkled wallet photos and beery viewings of old home movies! No more bedtime attempts to explain what happened to mommy’s soul while scrupulously avoiding the specifics of Christian theology!

• Likewise, I’m sick of surly teenagers. I’m sure they exist. I’m sure they secretly yearn to stop sniffing glue and torturing cats and to be told how much they’re loved by their gruff but well-meaning fathers. But none of this is interesting. Hollywood’s endless riffling of Freud for Dummies has reduced nearly all of modern American film to therapeutic mush.

Scarlett Johansson and Matt Damon..

• Cameron Crowe, once a renegade reporter for Rolling Stone, is now so mired in Hollywood formula that he probably can’t shave without peering deeply into the mirror and pondering the toll of the passing years.

• Is there a Guinness Record for number of emotionally wringing false endings? It seems to me that We Bought a Zoo has four or five. End the damn movie already!

THE BOTTOM LINE: We Bought a Zoo connects the emotional dots in all the predictable ways. Kids will enjoy it without remembering it for very long; parents will be pleased with their own parenting (“I’m so glad we didn’t let the kids see those chipmunks”). What a film like this doesn’t teach or even recognize is the old fairy tale stuff: irony, energy, danger, mystery, the dark declivities of the true Freud – the stuff that children instinctively reenact in their games of pretend. It’s a film for an era of calculated blandness and diminished pop-cultural expectations.

P.S. We Bought a Zoo opens with a coming attraction for Big Miracle, which may be the most gag-inducing film ever released. Drew Barrymore plays a Greenpeace type who must rescue a pair of whales trapped in the arctic. She’s predictably outraged that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. don’t immediately drop what they’re doing (trying to win the Cold War) and come to the whales’ rescue. “The whales are just like us!” wails Barrymore. “They love! They hurt! They develop adolescent drug problems and wind up dating second-rate rock stars!” The whole scenario leaves me longing for the old days of Japanese industrial whaling. Incidentally, was ever a film endowed with such a preposterously lazy title?

Posted on December 27th, 2011 at 7:17pm.

The Dutch Cat Woman: LFM Reviews Miss Minoes

By Joe Bendel. Do not call Miss Minoes catty. The proper term is feline. She should know what passes for political correctness amongst the cat population. She used to be one. Indeed, she has a difficult time acclimating to the human world in Vincent Bal’s Miss Minoes (trailer above), which opened Friday in New York.

After an unfortunate accident involving a mysterious barrel of chemicals from the local deodorant factory, Miss Minoes suddenly transforms into a human. However, she retains many of her feline characteristics, including a taste for fish, the fear of dogs, and an ability to caterwaul. Though some of her former friends now shun her, she can still communicate with the cats of Killendoorn, whom she uses as a network of informers for Tibbe, the incompetent journalist temporarily sheltering her. Naturally, newsmakers do not think twice about talking in front of cats. They are commonplace in this quaint little town and frankly rather disposable.

For a while, Tibbe becomes top dog at the paper. Unfortunately, when Miss Minoes and her feline associates goad him into writing an unsourced attack on the deodorant factory owner (a secret animal hater) he becomes the Mikael Blomkvist of Killendoorn. Still, a philanthropic industrialist will surely be no match for a woman with the mentality of a house cat and the eight year old girl living below Tibbe.

Without question, Carice van Houten’s work as Miss Minoes is quite a pleasant surprise. Her twitchy, cat-like mannerisms and wide-eyed naivety are rather disarmingly winning. Though an international star, she is clearly not afraid to look silly, which is cool. On the other hand, Theo Maassen’s Tibbe is just a big lunkhead. He might be somewhat “likable,” but it is hard to invest in a character that is dumber than the animals around him.

Yet the biggest problem with the film is the standard issue villain, Mr. Ellemeet of the DEO factory (broadly but flatly played by Pierre Bokma). Frankly, the nefarious businessman-slash-hypocritical fussbudget is such a cliché even the cats in the film seem bored with him. It really is a shame, because his subplots are so rote and uninspired, they weigh the film down like an albatross around its neck.

Indeed, there are some nice elements to be found in Miss Minoes, including an appealingly eccentric lead turn from van Houten. Cinematographer Walther Vanden Ende’s warm lighting and autumnal color palette are also quite inviting. They just get no help whatsoever from the inert, paint-by-numbers screenplay, based on Annie M.G. Schmidt’s Dutch children’s book. For cat loving little girls, it is probably still quite engaging, but parents should be warned, there is some mild, dubbed cursing. Cineastes should also beware, the dubbing is considerably below current anime standards. Mostly harmless and occasionally charming, despite trafficking in the worst class-based stereotypes, Miss Minoes opened Friday in New York at the Cinema Village and the Elinor Bunim Munroe Film Center.

Posted on December 27th, 2011 at 7:43pm.