For anybody who read the news two years ago that a nearly complete 16mm negative of METROPOLIS was discovered in Buenos Aires (including 30 minutes of additional footage previously thought lost forever), the anticipation and excitement has been building for when the film would finally be restored and we could all see Fritz Lang’s original cut of his masterpiece for the first time since its Berlin premiere in 1927.
The time has now come. After a premiere in Berlin earlier this year and a North American premiere in Los Angeles this past April, the film is finally being screened in theaters across the U.S. and Canada – all leading up to the DVD release of the Complete METROPOLIS in November 2010.
The tale of METROPOLIS – originally panned by critics and disliked by audiences on its initial release in Germany, and later mutilated by international distributors, who turned the film into a diluted Frankenstein story (a quarter of Lang’s original film was thought lost for decades, one of the ultimate “lost masterpieces” of the silent era) – is a tale well known to classic movie fans and silent cinema enthusiasts. This latest chapter in the film’s life only enhances its mystique and mystery. Almost 40 minutes of this landmark film was lost for nearly a century only to be found hidden away in a Buenos Aires museum in 2008. What was found in Argentina is now the most complete version to date. The print was deemed nearly complete because of the way it matched up to the original Gottfried Huppertz score (the only complete document still in existence from the 1927 premiere). With almost 30 minutes of film time restored, this newest version of METROPOLIS is the closest we might ever come to seeing the film the way Fritz Lang intended.
I was fortunate enough to attend a screening of the Complete METROPOLIS at the Detroit Film Theater earlier this month. It was one of the best movie experiences I’ve had in a long while, thrilling and impressive, making me fall in love with METROPOLIS all over again. Continue reading LFM Review: The Complete Metropolis
[Editor’s Note: those of us here at LFM love the ‘Cold War lifestyle’ – the spies, the bikinis, the shiny orbiting satellites and dry martinis. We return today to an occasional series from LFM contributor Steve Greaves, “Loving the Cold War Lifestyle,” that takes us back to that altogether tastier, less politically-correct era.]
This recurring joke and banter like it would probably win a regular Joe today a new level of intimacy with the old rolling pin – that is, if wives still packed rolling pins. Welcome to the world of 1967’s A Guide for the Married Man (see the trailer here), a sharp-looking, box-office-winning and cleverly-written comedy that hasn’t been on DVD for long and might be easy to overlook. And overlooking it would be a shame.
This vintage sex farce finds Walter Matthau playing Paul, a suburban Every Husband of the nuclear era. An investment counselor by day, the man who has it all is nonetheless lacking a certain something come night: namely, variety. Gorgeous Inger Stevens is a dream wife, which makes Matthau’s eventual wanderlust that much more poignant (and inane). Mid 60’s superstar Robert Morse is perfect as Matthau’s lascivious pal Ed, who steps up to coach his new protege on the finer points of straying “the right way,” i.e., so as not to get caught and to otherwise protect the feelings of one’s betrothed. This simple “educational” device sets up a romp that allows for plenty of hilarious sequences between the two, but also for a parade of cameos wherein great comedy stars of the era enact episodes of other chaps’ successes or failures, recounted by Morse for illustrative purposes. I can’t think of another film like this one in terms of the format, though one could make a case that it relates to period English comedies like Bedazzled, or even confessionals like Alfie that share the device of ongoing “how to” tutorials. Continue reading Loving the Cold War Lifestyle: A Guide For The Married Man
By Joe Bendel. It was the most dangerous duty station on Earth, but for the men of the Second Platoon, B Company, 2nd Battallion, 503rd Infantry Regiment of the 173rd Army Airborne Brigade, Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley was home. For just over a year, the Second Platoon served in harm’s way every day at the isolated Korengal Outpost (KOP) that was unofficially renamed in honor of the Platoon’s fallen medic, PFC. Juan Restrepo. For much of that time journalists (a term used without irony in this case) Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger were embedded with Second Platoon, recording the realities of war without editorial comment for the documentary, Restrepo (trailer above), which opened this past week.
Over the course of ten trips to the Korengal Valley, sometimes together, sometime separately, Hetherington and Junger saw the fifteen men of Restrepo up close and under fire. The mountainous terrain surrounding the outpost could have been tailor-made for guerilla insurgencies. The Platoon built it during the dead of night while simultaneously holding off Taliban attacks. Many soldiers described its mere completion as a turning point in their effort to stem the violence flowing from the Korengal region. However, in early 2009 a decision was made to close Restrepo because its presence was considered provocative.
The audience only meets PFC. Restrepo in crude video shot on a hand-held device just before their deployment to Korengal. In truth, the quality of the footage is hardly distinguishable from that shot by Hetherington and Junger, due to the chaotic combat situations they faced. Certainly it gives viewers a strong impression of Restrepo’s personality and why he was so popular with his comrades. Indeed, despite his brief posthumous appearance, Restrepo emerges as the true protagonist of the film that bears his name.
Despite the greater screen time allotted them, the audience does not come to know the other soldiers particularly well as individuals during the course of Restrepo. However, they do get a keen sense of what day-to-day life was like for the Platoon. Soldiers are indeed wounded and even die in the film, but Hetherington and Junger were sensitive to the men and their families in what they chose to show from these fatal encounters, never letting the proceedings degenerate to the level of “anti-war” snuff films.
More context would probably help some viewers understand how the events documented in Restrepo fit into the overall scheme of the Afghanistan conflict. Yet this was obviously a slippery slope the director-reporters scrupulously sought to avoid, at least for their film. (Based on the first few chapters, Junger’s companion book War seems similarly averse to editorializing, except perhaps with some criticism of the inflexible absurdity of military bureaucracy.) Continue reading LFM Review: With the Second Platoon in Restrepo
[Editor’s Note: LFM has recently been covering a series of provocative films debuting at The Los Angeles Film Festival.]
By Jason Apuzzo. Chris Morris’ striking new film Four Lions, which showed yesterday at The Los Angeles Film Festival is so wickedly funny, shatters so many taboos, and is so brazen in its satire of Islamic terrorism – and the vacuous political correctness that supports it – that it’s a wonder Morris isn’t in a witness protection program right now. Not that he would need to be protected from jihadis, whom I imagine spend little time watching indie cinema – but from the Western cultural establishment, whose protective covering over the lunacy of Islamic radicalism Morris rips away with comic gusto and flair in this marvelous new film.
Four Lions was a big hit at Sundance earlier this year, and has already done killer business at the indie box office in the UK (it opened the same weekend as Iron Man 2, yet had a better per-screen average), but the film has yet to secure distribution here in the U.S. Seeing the film last night, it’s not hard to understand why. This uproariously funny and sophisticated film, that had the audience in hysterics from the opening scene on, is nonetheless so subversive in its vision of Islamic terrorism – so thoroughly and mercilessly dismissive of any justification for terrorism – that by the end of the film any lingering shred of sympathy that might exist toward the terrorists’ point of view has simply been pulverized. Imagine starting up a heavy-metal band fresh off watching Spinal Tap, or becoming a French police officer after watching Peter Sellars play Inspector Clouseau, and you can imagine the kind of effect Four Lions must have on young Brits thinking of starting up a terror cell.
Total morons.
Four Lions is about a bumbling UK terror cell living in Sheffield. The two key leaders of the cell are Omar (Riz Ahmed) – the only reasonably sane or professional one in the group, around whom most of the film revolves – and Azzam al-Britanni (or ‘Barry’ to his friends, played with Falstaffian flair by Nigel Lindsay), who’s actually just an abrasive, working class white-guy convert to Islam. Nigel Lindsay’s portrayal of Azzam al-Britanni almost steals the show; the combination of belligerence and stupidity he brings to the character is pitch-perfect. Other guys in the terror cell include the sweet but utterly moronic Waj (Kayvan Novak), and Faisal (Adeel Akhtar) – a mumbling doofus who for some reason is convinced he can train crows to be suicide bombers. A fifth member of the group, Hassan (Arsher Ali), is a pretentious wanna-be rapper (his music conducts a ‘jihad of the mind’) who is recruited while Omar and Waj are in Pakistan botching their terrorist training.
The film follows the different members of the group as they struggle to conceal their activities, aided only by blind luck – and a kind of inane cunning – with the film climaxing in the terror cell’s effort to bomb the London Marathon. That last sequence in particular is a tour-de-force of action, comic-timing, suspense … and ultimately, great emotional power. Without giving away the film’s ending, let’s say simply that Four Lions does not exist to pull punches about the full tragedy and inhumanity of terrorism.
Trying to light a bomb.
What struck me the most about this film was the intelligence and sophistication Chris Morris and his actors brought to this material. The trailer for the film (see below) captures the opera buffa aspects of Four Lions – but not necessarily the anarchic, Paddy Chayefskyian verve and insight of the film’s satire. Having made a film on this subject matter myself, I can tell you that Morris has accomplished no small feat in bringing out the sheer lunacy of the terrorist worldview – while keeping the tone light, and respecting the earthy humanity of the characters. The inevitable question that films like Four Lions or The Infidel or Living with the Infidels or Kalifornistan always inspire is: is the film ‘humanizing’ terrorists? And the answer is, of course, yes … which is exactly what real-world terrorists, intoxicated with their self-image as divinely inspired warriors, never want. In the real world terrorists do not consider themselves mere human beings … but jihadis inspired by Allah. This is the pompous bubble that Four Lions exists to pop. And pop it the film does, with the force of an atomic blast.
What has happened to American filmmaking that we let the Brits get to this subject matter first? Watching Four Lions I was reminded of how utterly repressed, how politically correct, how tendentious and boring American filmmaking has become of late. How have we become so morally clouded and unsure of ourselves, so confused by our own basic humanity, that we can’t make clear-eyed films like this anymore? As recently as the 1970s, I think a film like Four Lions would’ve still been possible to make in the United States. For now, however, it apparently takes the Brits to make a film like this – and the only way to see it for the moment here in the U.S. will be through bootlegged copies, digitally smuggled-in via the internet. It’s almost like we’re living in the the old Soviet Union, actually. Congratulations to the LA Film Festival for breaking the blockade. Memo to Fox News, talk radio, the blogosphere and related alternative media: you should get behind this film NOW, and bang every pot and pan you’ve got, so that this film gets proper distribution. Or else this film will basically not be seen here in the U.S. – and that would be a genuine tragedy.
One final note: Govindini and I had a nice chat after the screening with actor Kayvan Novak, who plays the clueless ‘Waj’ in the film. He did a wonderful job in Four Lions – there’s nothing tougher than playing dumb on camera, and doing it in an entertaining and engaging way – and we wish him and this scintillating film the very best.
[Editor’s Note: LFM is currently covering a series of provocative films debuting this week and next at The Los Angeles Film Festival.]
By Joe Bendel. For China, the earthquake that devastated Sichuan province on May 12, 2008 has been like Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf oil spill combined. It has laid bare public corruption and put the local and national authorities on the defensive. Like Katrina, it has also been widely documented in films like the Oscar nominated short China’s Unnatural Disaster and Du Haibin’s feature 1428 (the winner of the 66th Venice Film Festival’s Best Documentary Award), which screens tonight at 8:00pm at the 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival. See the trailer below.
At 14:28 hours (2:28 pm) China was hit with what is considered the nineteenth worst earthquake in history, just three months before the Beijing Olympics were scheduled to open. The Communist government’s official response has been controversial to say the least. Despite the quake’s severity, many suspect it would not have been as deadly had government construction been less shoddy, particularly at schools. Promises have been made to Sichuan survivors, usually by politicians orchestrating media ops, but the delivery of relief has been slow and problematic.
Du focuses his lens on the haunted faces of Sichuan’s dispossessed. They live in shanty towns and temporary housing, enduring shortages of food and power. Many would like to return home, but following a truly perverse plan of action, the government has begun demolishing houses that withstood the quake. Such is the efficiency of China’s emergency management. For many survivors, it appears all the authorities have to offer is an opportunity to wave at the Premier’s tour bus as his motorcade blows through town.
Stylistically compatible with China’s so-called D-Generation (D for Digital) filmmaking, Du eschews conventional documentary techniques, like formal interviews and voiceover narration. Instead, he lets the camera roll, capturing the unfiltered reality of the quake’s aftermath at intervals of ten and two hundred ten days after the disaster. It is not pretty.
There is clearly a lot of anger in Sichuan that survivors do not seem to know how to express. One frustrated old man offers perhaps the most direct censure of the government, complaining: “The policies of the Communist Party are good in essence but they have been carried out wrongly.” In fact, the survivors seen in 1428 are much more guarded in their grievances than the grieving parents featured in Unnatural. Of course, it is worth bearing in mind Du’s footage was shot a mere nine years after the Tiananmen Square massacre, so he might well have been more circumspect in what he choose to include, for his subjects’ sake.
Like many of the D-Generation films, 1428 obliquely criticizes the Chinese Communist government from a perspective that would be considered left of center in the west. One elderly Taoist mystic (with much prompting) links the earthquake to the lack of observance of the Earth-God (perhaps implying a corresponding paucity of respect for the Earth by extension). However, the most heartbreaking footage of 1428 involves bereaved parents searching for the remains of their missing children amid the wreckage of their schools.
1428 is an eye-opening dose of reality, straight-up without any external editorializing. It is not the popular image of contemporary China the government has worked to cultivate. In truth, it does require some patience (though not as much as Du’s previous film Umbrella) because it so scrupulously represents life as it is for the Sichuan survivors. Consistently illuminating, it is definitely recommended to anyone in the City of Angels when it screens tonight at 8:00pm at the LA Film Fest (6/21).
[Editor’s Note: LFM is currently covering a series of provocative films debuting this week and next at The Los Angeles Film Festival.]
By Jason Apuzzo. Why, exactly, did the West win the Cold War?
There are many theories. Most of them identify Ronald Reagan’s proposed Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or ‘Star Wars’ missile defense system as having been the final tipping point in that epochal conflict, after which point the Soviet Union was no longer capable – militarily, economically, or perhaps even psychologically – of sustaining its Cold War arms race with the United States.
This is certainly true, so far as it goes – and Jaak Kilmi and Kiur Aarma’s extraordinary new documentary Disco & Atomic War certainly credits Reagan’s bold proposal as having had its desired psychological effect on the Soviets. But that isn’t really the story their film exists to tell.
What if the Cold War was instead won … by David Hasselhoff? What if American TV shows like Knight Rider and Dallas, or movies like Star Wars and Ninotchka – or lurid, 70s soft-core erotica like Emmanuelle – played an equal (and perhaps even greater) role in bringing down the communist system? This, essentially, is the subject matter of the compelling and drolly amusing Estonian/Finnish documentary Disco & Atomic War currently showing at The Los Angeles Film Festival (6/20).
Don't hassle the Hoff: in Estonia he won the Cold War.
Before proceeding further, let me briefly point out that I had the chance to visit Finland and the old Soviet Union during the time period depicted in this documentary – roughly the late 80s. Finland at that time was a kind of strange, anxious no-man’s land – a Western country that was nonetheless very much within the Soviet sphere of influence. As a teenager I remember taking the train from Finland into the Soviet Union, and idly fretting over the fact that I was carrying a paperback copy of Tom Clancy’s thriller The Hunt for Red October in my backpack. Would it get confiscated? Would I be labelled a spy? Would some Red Army jerk put a boot in my face?
If such fears seem quaint now, Disco & Atomic War brings them all back in vivid detail – because the purpose of this documentary is to examine the so-called ‘soft power’ influence of American and Western culture on the minds of Soviet citizens living in Estonia at that time, who were able through clever means to watch Finnish television broadcasts emanating from just over the border. As the film informs us, American popular culture – especially in the form of glamorous TV shows like Dallas – was deeply feared by Soviet authorities due to the ideas and expectations such programming planted in the minds of Soviet citizens.
If what you’re expecting from this film is a dry recitation of Cold War history, though, think again – because Disco & Atomic War is quite simply one of the funniest and most inventive movies I’ve seen in some time. The film wasn’t at all what I was expecting, or what you should expect from what might otherwise be labelled ‘an Estonian/Finnish documentary about the Cold War’ … which on the face of it sounds rather dull. Disco is actually a riot of surprises, a mash-up of historical documentary and personal narrative that attempts to put you into the mind of a young person living in a closed, totalitarian society – who is suddenly and shockingly exposed by bootleg TV antennas to … sex and disco, Texas millionaires, robot super-cars, and Luke Skywalker.
Nikolai, crafty creator of contraband TV antennas.
As a young person living in California at the time these things were exciting enough to me … but for young people in Estonia, co-directors Jaak Kilmi and Kiur Aarma make it clear that these pop culture phenomena were nothing short of revolutionary. Disco & Atomic War meticulously re-creates the Estonia of the late 70s-late 80s, which was apparently used by the Soviet regime as a kind of laboratory experiment for determining the exact repercussions of having a population subjected to a steady stream of Western influence.
That’s right. [SPOILER ALERT.] The Soviets secretly allowed the Estonian population to be exposed to Western entertainment emanating from Finland, in order to gauge how their people would respond. It was a dangerous experiment – one that would prove fatal to the communists’ grip on power.
As Kilmi and Aarma tell it, Estonia was a kind of quiet, Soviet backwater state at the time that just happened to find itself in close proximity not only to Finland … but to giant TV towers constructed by the Finns (with, it was understood, U.S. backing) in order to broadcast American entertainment directly into the Evil Empire. And what exactly did these daring, constantly-under-threat Finnish TV stations broadcast into Soviet Estonia? Frothy TV fare like Dallas (a show which, in the eyes of the Estonians, featured “men with brilliant white teeth, and beautiful but unhappy women … in a land where everyone is a millionaire … a captivating, spiritual seance”); or shows featuring dancing girls and discos (the Americans’ “secret weapon”); or late night reruns of Ninotchka, the delightful Greta Garbo-Billy Wilder satire on Soviet bureaucrats. There was also Star Wars, George Lucas’ electrifying spectacle that strangely seemed to prefigure both the collapse of the Soviet evil Empire, and the very means (the ‘Star Wars’ missile defense system) by which that Empire was cowed into defeat.
Western siren: Sylvia Kristel as Emmanuelle.
Nothing seems to have had such a great effect on the Estonians, however, as David Hasselhoff’s Knight Rider series … and also the lurid, 70s nudie classic, Emmanuelle. The two most hilarious sequences in Disco & Atomic War involve recreations of how young Estonian kids would gather around foreign cars and begin speaking into their shiny new digital wrist watches, hoping that the cars would come alive like Hasselhoff’s Pontiac. In a later sequence, we see almost the entire nation of Estonia struggle with antennas (some made of simple metal pipes, others made with mercury from thermometers) in order to catch fleeting glimpses of curvaceous Sylvia Kristel writhe in passion in Emmanuelle.
What Disco & Atomic War captures is how utterly hopeless Soviet efforts were to counteract these seductive Western entertainments … and if you’re sensing some parallels with our current struggle against the Islamo-fascists, you’re right on the money. If you watch films like the recent No One Knows About Persian Cats (see the LFM review here), you will form the inescapable conclusion that Iran’s youth are exactly where Estonia’s were some twenty years ago … watching bootlegged Western music and movies, copping rebellious youth attitudes (including punk music), ignoring state restrictions in their daily quest for sex and excitement. Disco & Atomic War is a kind of visual treatise on this type of ‘soft’ Western power, as opposed to military modes of power, and how utterly explosive these modes of influence can be on shaping the imaginations of a population. As the film relates, it’s probably no coincidence that the same year Dallas reruns stopped playing illicitly on Soviet TV screens, the Soviet Union collapsed. [In fact, in his only on-camera interview since being ousted from office, the Soviet puppet dictator of Estonia directly blames Finnish/Western TV broadcasts for the collapse of his own regime.]
I can’t recommend Disco & Atomic War enough, and if you’re in LA on Sunday, June 20th – and anywhere near the vicinity of the downtown around 10pm – I recommend you pop in and see it. [Click here for more details.] If there’s any justice in the world, the film will be short-listed for Oscar consideration. It will show you a side of the Cold War we don’t hear enough about … and give you a sense of what remains our most potent weapon in the battle against tyranny: the alluring freedom of our popular culture.
I’ve embedded the trailer below – which, unfortunately, does not quite do justice to the baroque wit and sophistication of this magnificent little film.
By Jennifer Baldwin. With almost 30 minutes of lost footage restored, The Complete METROPOLIS is a true cinematic event.
