Category: Movie Reviews

LFM Review: Cairo 6,7,8 and Women’s Freedom in Egypt

Poster for "Cairo 6,7,8."

By Joe Bendel. When CBS journalist Lara Logan was assaulted by a gang of rampaging men in Tahrir Square, it became clear that there is a real problem in how a sizeable portion of Egypt’s Islamic male population relates to women. When NPR had to delete scores of hateful comments on the Logan story and issue a scolding reminder to its readers (serviced by our tax dollars) that violence against women is always unacceptable, the western media’s deficiency handling issues like the conditions endured by women in Egypt (and in the wider Muslim world) also became blatantly clear. Now with his directorial debut, Mohamed Diab offers a blistering corrective to his country’s self-serving denial and outright misogyny in Cairo 6,7,8, which screens during the 2011 New Directors/New Films, co-presented by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Cairo’s buses are a groper’s playground. Fayza understands this only too well. Every time she files onto the titular 6/7/8 line, she is felt up. It is taking a toll on the traditional working class Muslim woman, depleting her spirit and further poisoning her already frosty relations with her boorish husband.

Modern and affluent, Seba was the victim of a large scale sexual assault during a soccer match that eerily parallels the subsequent Logan story. Naturally, her husband blamed her—not directly of course, but through his emotional distance. As part of her own recovery process, Seba begins teaching self-defense and empowerment classes for women, attracting Fayza as a student. Eventually, the two join forces with Nelly, a hip, aspiring stand-up comic who has launched the country’s’ first sexual harassment lawsuit. Continue reading LFM Review: Cairo 6,7,8 and Women’s Freedom in Egypt

Classic Cinema Obsession: HUMAN DESIRE (Fritz Lang, 1954)

By Jennifer Baldwin. This is about Film Noir, so here’s a flashback …

I went through a bit of a Glenn Ford/Gloria Grahame/THE BIG HEAT phase several years ago. I became obsessed with the movie and those two actors. I was like a junky, watching the movie over and over, memorizing lines, musing over the themes, showing the famous boiling coffee scene to anyone who would watch.

But eventually, no matter how much I loved THE BIG HEAT, it couldn’t withstand the over-obsession. I needed a new drug. I needed something else to give me that Glenn and Gloria fix.

Then I read about HUMAN DESIRE. It was made after THE BIG HEAT, starring Ford and Grahame, another scalding-hot 1950s noir directed by Fritz Lang. As soon as I found out about it, I had to have it. Only problem: it wasn’t on DVD. You couldn’t buy it in the store. It was as good as gone for someone like me out in the Michigan suburbs, with not a repertoire theater in sight.

I went into the shadows. I spent many a midnight hour searching the internet for a copy of the movie. I was bleary-eyed and half crazed with want. And then I found it. One of those online trading post/auction sites. Eight bucks plus shipping and handling and HUMAN DESIRE could be mine. It was someone’s homemade DVD copy, complete with fuzzy picture and bad sound, but buying it made me feel like I was the protagonist in my own film noir, swapping cash with some anonymous stranger on the black market for a “treasure” that was worn out and almost worthless.

But it was worth everything to me. I watched HUMAN DESIRE and loved it more than I had loved THE BIG HEAT. I don’t know if I loved it so much because it took all that effort to finally get a copy, or if I genuinely loved the movie more, but HUMAN DESIRE became one of my secret movie treasures.

Now it’s out on DVD, an official release from Columbia Pictures, with pristine picture and remastered sound, and I still think that it’s tops. I think it’s Gloria Grahame’s masterpiece. I think it’s misunderstood. I think Glenn Ford’s character is the real villain and that far from having a “happy” ending, it has one of the bleakest, most cynical endings in all of noir.

The misinterpretation of the film stems from the assumption that Grahame’s character is a traditional “femme fatale” evil woman type. She’s Gloria Grahame, after all, and she wants Glenn Ford to commit murder for her. But I couldn’t just slot her into the femme fatale role that easily. She might have murder in her heart, but it didn’t come there lightly. Continue reading Classic Cinema Obsession: HUMAN DESIRE (Fritz Lang, 1954)

LFM Review: The Neighbor

From "The Neighbor."

By Joe Bendel. The tragic events still unfolding in Japan even had repercussions at a screening of a Farsi-language feature at a Canadian film festival here in New York City. The producer Amir Naderi, who emigrated from Iran after several of his films were banned by the Islamist government, was in Japan working on his next project when the earthquake and tsunami hit. Clearly he was on the mind of his former editor Naghmeh Shirkhan this past weekend, despite the justly enthusiast reception for her directorial debut, The Neighbor (see the trailer below), at MoMA’s 2011 Canadian Front.

Though of somewhat middle-aged years, Shirin is still a strikingly beautiful woman. She is not particularly interested in men though, particularly the one she has been reluctantly seeing. In truth, there are not a lot of eligible men in Vancouver’s Iranian community. There are not a lot of men, period, and there is a very real phenomenon causing this demographic state. Frequently Iranian men working abroad who are called back on business or personal matters have trouble returning—or so they say. Such is the case for Leila, the attractive young woman who just moved in across the hall from Shirin with her little girl Parisa.

At first, Leila wants nothing to do with the older woman. In time though, she starts exploiting Shirin as an emergency babysitter, much to her concern. It is not that Shirin does not enjoy spending time with Parisa—quite the contrary—but Leila’s erratic parenting is obviously not healthy for her little girl. Continue reading LFM Review: The Neighbor

LFM Review: Limitless, Produced with 20% Brain Functionality

By Joe Bendel. What happened to Obama? So ruthlessly effective on the campaign trail, these days he can hardly chose an iron for his approach shots. Maybe he ran out of NZT. A designer drug formulated to tap into the supposed 80% of the brain lying dormant in mere mortals (a myth says Snopes), NZT offers life changing opportunities to one sad sack would-be writer, but it also comes with a mess of trouble in Neil Burger’s Limitless, which took the top spot in this weekend’s box office.

Eddie Morra is a listless under-achiever. His girlfriend Lindy has finally given him the dumping he so richly deserved. Despondent, he mopes around the City until he bumps into his ex-brother-in-law Vernon (no, Lindy is not the first woman to issue Morra his walking papers.). Recognizing his former whatever is a bit glum, Vernon gives him a blue Matrix pill, which the big dummy takes for no good reason. Suddenly, Morra can talk his landlord’s wife into bed, dash off her law school paper on Oliver Wendell Holmes, and then churn out his own novel before calling it a night.

Unfortunately, he wakes up as the same old idiot in the morning, which prompts an emergency visit to his dear old ex-brother-in-law. For some reason, the shadowy cabal developing NZT has entrusted its distribution to a pusher leftover from the glory days of Studio 54. Of course, Vernon’s carelessness gets him killed, but Morra gets his stash. Fueled by smarty-pants pills, Morra takes Wall Street by storm, even attracting the attention of Robert De Niro’s shadowy financier, Thurston W. Focker-Gekko, III, or some such.

Morra might be amped on brainiac drugs, but in Limitless’s world any IQ cracking 100 constitutes genius levels. You would think anyone borrowing money from a loan shark for a quick succession of day trades would make a point of paying that off as soon as possible. Not if you’re a genius, evidently. It would have saved so much trouble, though. Continue reading LFM Review: Limitless, Produced with 20% Brain Functionality

LFM Review: Gift to Stalin

By Joe Bendel. One of the scarier aspects of Stalin’s reign of terror was the effectiveness of his cult of personality. His image was omnipresent, investing his iron-fisted rule with a secular idolatry which brooked no criticism. In fact, reverence for the dictator was so deeply ingrained in the Soviet people, many of those who suffered personal persecution under his regime reportedly still wept when news of Stalin’s death was released to the public. That emotional dichotomy is sensitively dramatized in Rustem Abdrashev’s The Gift to Stalin, which finally opens theatrically in New York after an extended festival run. Continue reading LFM Review: Gift to Stalin

EXCLUSIVE: Libertas Sees the ‘Uncensored’ Version of MGM’s New Red Dawn

Poster by George Joseph, RedDawn2011.com

By Jason Apuzzo. Last August, Libertas was the first and only media outlet invited to see MGM’s new version of Red Dawn, a remake of the original 1984 film written and directed by John Milius. We were invited to see the film by MGM executives due to our ongoing coverage here at Libertas of pro-freedom films – and of our coverage of the many recent films specifically dealing with the subject of communism (Salt, Mao’s Last Dancer, Farewell, Peter Weir’s recent The Way Back). Red Dawn screenwriter Carl Ellsworth was in attendance at our screening.

We postponed commenting on Red Dawn until this time due to the complex and delicate situation at MGM, and also due to the fact that the film as yet has no release date. MGM is under new management, however, and recently the LA Times broke the story that the film – which features the communist Chinese invading the mainland U.S. – is currently being re-edited and digitally altered by MGM’s new management team in order to make North Korea into the primary invading force.  References to the Chinese military are, according to the LA Times, being minimized wherever possible.  The film has apparently become a political hot potato, with MGM looking to sell the film – or  perhaps not release it at all.

We had been aware since last August that this was a possibility, in so far as the Chinese market represents a highly lucrative one to American film distributors – and that China would likely penalize any company distributing this new Red Dawn. It now appears that the fears expressed to us at the time by several MGM executives are becoming a reality, and that the film is, in effect, being politically censored due to pressures coming from potential distributors.

Needless to say, we find this kind of political re-editing of a film appalling – as well as unprecedented. In the case of Red Dawn, it’s also perversely ironic, in so far as the basic premise of the film involves the Chinese invading American in order to ‘collect’ on an economic debt America owes to them – a debt that in the real world, as it turns out, China will now be ‘collecting’ by MGM’s film simply being re-edited.

The cast of the new "Red Dawn."

As a further note, there is a certain racist crudeness in equating Chinese with Koreans (i.e., ‘Asians all the look the same’) of which MGM seems unmindful.

Here at Libertas we are committed to positively promoting films that celebrate freedom, democracy, and the dignity of the individual. Of late, for example, we’ve promoted a whole range of dissident, ‘D-Generation’ Chinese documentaries such as Disorder, Petition and Crime and Punishment that depict the full brutality and authoritarianism of China’s current regime.

We had hoped and intended to promote Red Dawn in the same light, because the original, ‘uncensored’ cut of the film we saw in August was one we liked – and we suspect American audiences would’ve liked it, as well.  (Chinese dissidents would’ve loved it – watching it on pirated copies.)  It was a rousing and patriotic film that in some respects resembled Battle: Los Angeles, currently in theaters, in terms of depicting a plucky and outnumbered group of Americans (teenagers, in this case) gamely taking on a vastly superior and oppressive invading force. Continue reading EXCLUSIVE: Libertas Sees the ‘Uncensored’ Version of MGM’s New Red Dawn