Category: Watch Movies!

LFM Review: My Piece of the Pie @ Tribeca 2011

By Joe Bendel. Steve Delarue is a financial shark. France Leroi is a single mother, who is laid-off when her factory abruptly closes (but what a name she has). The former is so obviously the villain and the latter is so clearly the victim, we can surely put our brains on auto-pilot. Yet, Cédric Klapisch’s latest film is surprisingly more interesting than that (perhaps unintentionally so, but it still counts). Drawing on three year-old headlines, Klapisch tells a messy morality tale in My Piece of the Pie, which screens during the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival.

Karin Viard and Gilles Lellouche.

France Leroi is indeed a victim. That is not a subjective judgment; it is the essence of her identity. A union worker thrown out of work by her factory’s financial collapse, she attempts suicide during a birthday party, with her home filled with children. Fortunately she soon recovers, leaving Dunkirk to seek employment in Paris. Through a friend of a friend, she lands a gig working as the cleaning lady for Steve Delarue, a Bonfire of the Vanities style Master of the Universe recently returned to France the country after a long stint in London. Delarue is the kind of guy who administers the death knell to struggling enterprises, like Leroi’s former employer. In fact, unbeknownst to Leroi, he was exactly that guy.

Delarue dates supermodels, but treats them little better than servants like Leroi. Not surprisingly, he’s terrible father material, but fortunately Leroi is there when Delarue’s three year-old son Alban is dumped in his lap. In fact, as she assumes the duties of a nanny, employer and employee start to warm toward each other. However, a perceived betrayal launches Leroi on a reckless course of action. Continue reading LFM Review: My Piece of the Pie @ Tribeca 2011

Tim Hetherington, 1970-2011 & His Diary

By Jason Apuzzo. War photographer and documentarian Tim Hetherington was killed yesterday in Libya, while covering the civil war there. The New York Times reports on the incident here. We extend our condolences to his friends, family and colleagues.

Tim Hetherington.

Hetherington’s extraordinary documentary about the Afghanistan war, Restrepo, was nominated for an Oscar just last year (read Joe Bendel’s Libertas review here). Hetherington was one of the leading photographers and documentarians of his generation, a courageous and poetic soul who studied literature at Oxford and who brought a writer’s sensibility to his work. He will be missed.

I invite Libertas readers to take a few moments and watch what was apparently Hetherington’s last film effort, a short film called Diary which I’ve embedded above. It’s really an astonishing piece of filmmaking – richly suggestive of what a talent Hetherington was, and of the depth of his passion for justice.

Posted on April 21st, 2011 at 9:44am.

New 12-minute Battlefield 3 Trailer Shows Marines Fighting Iran-backed Insurgents in Iraq

By Jason Apuzzo. EA has released a new 12-minute trailer (featuring extensive game play) for Battlefield 3, depicting U.S. Marines involved in intense urban warfare in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq against Iranian-backed insurgents along the Iran/Iraq border (the game is set in 2014). See the full 12-minute trailer above. The trailer is gripping and intense, and astonishingly realistic in its imagery. NOTE: THIS NSFW TRAILER FEATURES VIOLENCE AND STRONG LANGUAGE. The trailer was posted at YouTube on Thursday, and as of the writing of this post already has over 1.3 millions views.

Screen grab from "Battlefield 3."

Battlefield 3 is a first-person shooter game, and a follow-up to EA’s popular Battlefield series. The game is set to debut on November 2nd, and will apparently feature battlefields in Sulaymaniyah, Tehran, Paris and New York.

Watching the trailer, I’m left with the usual questions: namely, why can’t Hollywood do something like this? I mean, fighting space aliens in downtown Los Angeles is great, but why must stories about these real world, epochal military conflicts of ours be relegated to the (admittedly large) ghetto of video gaming? The imagery in this trailer is astonishing in its detail and subtlety, and thoroughly ‘cinematic’ in its execution – to the point that I actually felt like I was watching a war documentary for much of it. And yet a full eight years after the invasion of Iraq, we’re still waiting on any sort of large-scale Hollywood effort to depict the war, while the gaming industry proves each year that there is a massive market for this kind of material.

Does EA have a movie division? They might want to consider starting one.

Posted on April 18th, 2011 at 11:55am.

LFM Review: Armadillo & The War in Afghanistan

By Joe Bendel. Just because they are Danish soldiers, that does not mean they should trust the media any more than their American counterparts. A group of Danes serving in Afghanistan learns this PR lesson the hard way in Janus Metz’s embed-style documentary Armadillo, which opened yesterday in New York and elsewhere.

Amazingly, as the film opens, the Danish unit stationed at the Helmand forward operating base (nicknamed Armadillo) has yet to suffer a fatal casualty. In fact, when the group of soldiers Metz follows from enlistment and basic training arrive at Armadillo, boredom seems to be their greatest foe. In a rather clumsy effort to be provocative, Metz makes much of their choice of entertainment: violent video games and run-of-the-mill porn, as if this were shocking for a group of twenty-something men serving in the middle of nowhere without any interaction with women.

The Danish soldiers make an effort to reach out to the locals, but they have trouble overcoming the widespread fear of Taliban reprisals. Isolated and untested, the Helmand outpost is simply too tempting a target for the Taliban to resist for long. Eventually they make their move. Unfortunately, it is impossible to really tell what went down in the soon-to-be-controversial incident. Most of the camerawork is a veritable blur, which is understandable considering that bullets were flying. However, Metz never establishes any reference points for area in question, or sets the scene in any way. Continue reading LFM Review: Armadillo & The War in Afghanistan

New Clip from The Devil’s Double at The Berlin Film Festival; Film Opens in U.S. on July 29th

By Jason Apuzzo. Scenes from the Sundance hit The Devil’s Double, the new film about the mobster-like lifestyle of Saddam Hussein’s son Uday, are slowly starting to trickle out onto the internet. The Devil’s Double just played last month at The Berlin Film Festival, and Lionsgate will be releasing the film here in the States on July 29th. Libertas’ Joe Bendel reviewed the film at Sundance in January and absolutely loved it (see his review here).

The scene above features Dominic Cooper as Uday Hussein’s body double Latif Yahia, as he practices his performance as ‘Uday’ in the mirror in the midst of an aerial bombardment during the first Gulf War. He’s soon joined by Uday’s mistress Sarrab, played by French actress Ludivine Sagnier. [Can anyone play mistresses better than French actresses?] Check out the scene to get a flavor of the film. Afterward, you can catch a bit of the film’s Berlin Film Festival press conference.

Based on what I’ve been seeing, the film looks like a total hoot – saucy, brutal and very entertaining. And also bold as hell. Note Sarrab’s wicked line about the Iraqi people not believe Saddam’s “crap.”

We’ll certainly be keeping an eye on the film in coming days …

Dominic Cooper and Ludivine Sagnier in "The Devil's Double."

Posted on April 12th, 2011 at 2:02pm.

The CBGB Film School: LFM Reviews Blank City

By Joe Bendel. In 1968, Amos Poe was a budding photographer visiting family in Czechoslovakia. For obvious reasons, the Soviet invasion cut short his photographic sojourn to the countryside. There were no such constraints in the lawless anarchy of late 1970s New York, where Poe became a trailblazer in the underground Super-8 filmmaking community. Céline Danhier profiles those squatter-auteurs in Blank City, which opens this Wednesday in New York at the IFC Center.

Abe Beam’s New York was about as pre-Giuliani as the City ever got. The rule of law was tenuous at best, but rents in the East Village were relatively affordable—not that anyone even bothered to pay. CBGB’s was the center of the musical universe, also hosting a number of early screenings of what would later be dubbed the “No Wave” movement.

Danhier scored interviews with just about every significant surviving figure on the scene at the time. A portrait emerges of a kind of dormitory-like atmosphere, where everyone knew each other, but nobody had a job. Though they do not confess it outright, “coolness” within the clique was clearly of primary importance. Musician-turned-filmmaker John Lurie admits he hid his saxophone, “because nobody was doing what they knew how to do . . . technique was so hated.”

The great irony of Blank is that Danhier’s doc is far easier to watch than a good many of the films it documents. Fortunately, just about every chaotic shoot generated its share of humorous anecdotes, which generously pepper Blank. Indeed, the film is at its best when filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch reminisce about their early days. However, it is hard to stifle the eye-rolling when her interview subjects get political. At least Lizzie Borden expresses grief for the World Trade Center terrorist attack, while acknowledging the awkward similarity between 9/11 and the conclusion of her film Born in Flame.

Granted, Poe’s Blank Generation is probably not at the top of a lot of Netflix queues. Still, it is bit of an eye-opener to see how many figures from the Blank scene either legitimately crossed over, like Jarmusch, Steve Buscemi, Debbie Harry, Susan Seidelman, and Ann Magnuson, or kind-of sort-of did, such as John Lurie, Charlie “Wild Style” Ahearn, and Bette Gordon.

Like the films under discussion, Blank is best when its participants do not take their illustrious careers too seriously. While the time spent with the subsequent “Cinema of Transgression” lacks the same charm, the film mostly works as a valentine to scruffy independent filmmaking. Surprisingly entertaining, Blank opens today at the IFC Center.

Posted on February 6th, 2011 at 3:24pm.