Trailers – Page 197 – LFM: Libertas Film Magazine

Polo, Drugs, and Rock & Roll: LFM Reviews Beware of Mr. Baker

By Joe Bendel. Notorious British Rock and Jazz drummer Ginger Baker is the sort of difficult individual people often call a “character” to be polite. There is plenty of “character” talk going on throughout a new warts-and-all documentary profile of the former Cream musician. However, some of his very former colleagues choose not to mince their words in Jay Bulger’s Beware of Mr. Baker, which opens this Wednesday at Film Forum.

Baker is the king of widely acclaimed but short-lived bands, like Cream, Blind Faith, Ginger Baker’s Airforce, Masters of Reality, and a dynamite legit jazz band Baker formed during his Colorado residency. He is a major reason why each outfit struck a chord with listeners and critics alike, and also the primary cause of their premature demise. Just ask Eric Clapton, Baker’s colleague from Cream and Blind Faith. Bulger does exactly that. While the timeless guitarist tries to be diplomatic, it is clear Baker the Wildman scared the holy heck out of him—and probably still does.

It is mind-blowing to watch Baker’s repeating pattern of career comebacks cut short by self-sabotage. A case in point would be his African sojourn, partly documented in Tony Palmer’s rather engaging Ginger Baker in Africa. Arguably at the height of his fame, Baker went off the grid, traveling to a decidedly unstable Nigeria to explore traditional forms of music. Yet somehow he managed to fall in with Fela Kuti, who was not particularly inclined towards Europeans appropriators, only to alienate the musician-activist by joining the Nigerian ruling class’s Polo Club (that part Palmer misses out on).

In fact, polo has often been the downfall of Mr. Baker. Those ponies are expensive and they draw the attention of tax inspectors like a magnet. Still, the polo club Baker founded in Colorado and the jazz concerts his group gave after matches emerges in Bulger’s account as a brief high point in the drummer’s chaotic life.

While not Bulger’s uppermost concern, Beware makes a compelling case on behalf of Colorado’s local jazz talent. If you can satisfy Ginger Baker, than you can play with anyone. In fact, he had a great ear, recruiting excellent musicians like Fred Hess and trumpeter Ron Miles, who also appears as an interview subject. Of course, most of the film’s potential audience will be more interested in the likes of Clapton, Steve Winwood, Stones drummer Charlie Watts, Cream bassist Jack Bruce, Johnny Rotten, Lars Ulrich, Stewart Copeland, Femi Kuti, and various ex-wives. If there is anyone Bulger couldn’t get, they aren’t missed.

There is something perversely inspiring about Baker’s resiliency. He keeps doing it his way, regardless of the consequences. Beware captures all the madness of the Ginger Baker experience, but Bulger tries his best not to let it overshadow the music. Naturally, Baker is often his own worst enemy in this respect. Yet, somehow viewers will want to listen to Baker’s classic tracks after witnessing his spectacularly anti-social behavior. That is a neat trick Bulger deserves mucho credit for pulling off. A thoroughly entertaining documentary chocked full of unforgettable headshaking, face-palming moments, Beware of Mr. Baker is recommended for fans of rock, jazz, world music, and all around excess when it opens this Wednesday (11/28) at New York’s Film Forum.

LFM GRADE: A

Posted on November 27th, 2012 at 11:21am.

LFM Reviews Re-Emerging: The Jews of Nigeria @ The African Diaspora International Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. They lack the official recognition of the Falasha Ethiopians, but a small group of Igbo Nigerians remain convinced they are part of one of the ten lost tribes of Israel. ‘Small’ would be the word to emphasize here; in a country almost entirely divided between Christian and Muslim believers, Jewish Nigerians are a distinct minority. Nonetheless, growing numbers of Igbos are embracing Judaism as part of their heritage. Jeff L. Lieberman documents their lives and faith in Re-Emerging: The Jews of Nigeria, which screens as part of the 2012 African Diaspora International Film Festival in New York.

It is complicated, but many Igbo believe they are the modern day descendants of the Tribe of Gad. It could certainly be possible, but it would have been one arduous trek. One has to have a little faith. Still, the Jewish Igbo point to striking ways their language and culture corresponds to Hebrew and Jewish religious practices. Tragically, the Igbo experience during the 1967-1970 Nigerian Civil War also somewhat paralleled that of European Jewry during World War II, with an estimated three million Igbo killed due to the massacres and economic blockades perpetrated by the Muslim north.

ReEmergingJewsofNigeria — From "Re-Emerging: The Jews of Nigeria."

Whether Eri, fifth son of Gad, really made it to Nigeria hardly matters to Rabbi Howard Gorin, who emerges in Re-Emerging as one of the most impassioned international advocates for the Jewish Igbos. Like Rabbi Gorin, the Jewish scholars who have visited the Igbo community describe the experience for Lieberman as inspiring and even humbling.

Indeed, there are some surprisingly affecting moments in Re-Emerging. Lieberman also supplies a good deal of helpful cultural-historical context without bogging down the film in anthropological minutia. Nor does Lieberman turn a blind eye on the institutional corruption afflicting Nigeria at large. Yet he raises the intriguing question of what Igbo Judaism might mean for African-Americans, many of whom are descended from captured Igbo slaves, without fully exploring the implications.

Re-Emerging is an informative film that broadens one’s perspective on both the Jewish and African Diasporas. Indeed, it is a laudably inclusive selection of this year’s ADIFF that ought to expand the festival’s audience. Recommended for multicultural and multi-faith audiences, Re-Emerging: The Jews of Nigeria screens next Monday (12/3) at the Columbia Teachers College Chapel as the 2012 ADIFF continues in venues throughout New York.

LFM GRADE: B-

Posted on November 27th, 2012 at 11:21am.

The End is Near, Meditate Quickly: LFM Reviews The Mystical Laws

By Joe Bendel. An expansionist Eastern regime is dead set on war with Japan, at a time when America’s defense capacity and influence in the UN are both at all time lows. They say it’s the near future, but it feels only too near. Still, there may yet be hope in Isamu Imamake’s apocalyptic anime feature The Mystical Laws, created by executive producer Ryuho Okawa (founder of the controversial Japanese religious fusion movement, Happy Science) which opens this Friday in New York.

In an authoritarian country not identified as China, a shadowy military science officer named Tathagata Killer assumed power in a coup. Now known as the Godom Empire, his kingdom becomes the dominant super-power, thanks to the remarkable technology provided by the beautiful but mysterious industrialist Chan Leika.

The world slept while the demonic dictator consolidated power, except Hermes Wings. Partly a Doctors Without Borders-style NGO and partly a secret society dedicated to preserving free democratic values, Hermes Wings is considered the greatest threat to the Godom overlord, so he targets them accordingly. Through tragic circumstances, Sho Shishimaru rises to the top of Hermes Wings. There is a reason people have confidence in him: according to prophecies, he might be both the savior and the second coming of Buddha, which is an awful lot for any dude to live up to.

MysticalLaws2 — From "The Mystical Laws."

Mystical Laws could be described as a Buddhist Left Behind, with generous helpings of Christian symbolism thrown in for good measure. It is also anime. In truth, just about every conception of divinity is covered in Mystical, including the embodiment of the “Spirit of Japan,” who looks rather attractive. Some of the symbolism is impossible to miss, such as the swastikas the Godom army marches under, or the crosses on which they crucify enemies of the state. Still, if the slightly odd film represents an attempt to proselytize, it is dashed hard to tell what for.

Okay, so subtlety really isn’t Mystical’s thing. Nonetheless, the first two acts constitute a rather intriguing end-of-the-world/sci-fi conspiracy thriller. The relationship between Shishimaru and Leika is also nicely developed, and the Buddhist elements give it all a distinctive flavor. Unfortunately, the third act is largely given over to a Harry Potter-esque clash of fireballs and god-rays.

You have to take satisfaction from a Japanese film that bemoans the lack of American military bases. Indeed, it takes notions of faith, freedom, and sacrifice profoundly seriously. With art and characterization well within the anime industry standard, perhaps even slightly higher, it might be the most effective end-of-days religious thriller, well maybe ever (for what that’s worth). It certainly puts to shame impassioned but clunky evangelical films, like Jerusalem Countdown.

Mystical probably is not your Cheetos-eating fanboy’s anime. However, anyone interested in a film arguing that religion plays an essential role in a healthy society (and also implying a need for a strong military) might just get sucked in, in spite of themselves. Recommended for fans of challenging anime, aesthetically adventurous evangelicals, and nontraditional Buddhists (collectively a woefully underserved market), The Mystical Laws opens this Friday (11/23) in New York at the Cinema Village.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on November 23rd, 12:07pm.

LFM’s Jason Apuzzo at The Huffington Post and AOL-Moviefone: What a Surveillance State Looks Like: Barbara Revisits Cold War East Germany

[Editor’s Note: the post below appears today at The Huffington Post and at AOL-Moviefone.]

By Jason Apuzzo. Imagine being subjected to 24-hour secret police surveillance, or being surrounded by informers at your place of work – whose mission is to gain your confidence in order to evaluate your loyalty to the state.

Or imagine being subjected to random body searches, conducted by capricious security officials with too much time on their hands. (OK, admittedly we already have that – even if only at our nation’s airports.)

For the most part, however, Americans only have a dim sense of what it’s like to live in a truly repressive society – such as East Germany was behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. And this, ultimately, is the true value of director Christian Petzold’s gripping new film Barbara, which starts its U.S. theatrical run in December and recently screened at the AFI Festival in Hollywood. Germany’s official submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Barbara is the most compelling depiction since The Lives of Others of day-to-day life in a modern surveillance state, in this case the communist East Germany of the early 1980s.

Already the winner of the Silver Bear for Best Director (Christian Petzold) at the Berlin Film Festival, Barbara stars Nina Hoss in the title role as a pediatric surgeon whose promising career at the prestigious Charité hospital in East Berlin is cut short when she files for an Ausreiseantrag, officially expressing her desire to leave East Germany. A terse and enigmatic blonde, Dr. Barbara Wolff also happens to be in the midst of a torrid, secret affair with a West German businessman – who’s quietly arranging for her escape to the West, as he makes officially sanctioned business trips into East Germany.

As punishment for her desire to leave East Germany, Barbara is sent to a rural hospital near the Baltic Sea, where she works under the watchful eye of Dr. André Reiser (actor Ronald Zehrfeld), who heads a modest pediatric unit. André tries to get chummy with Barbara, which she resists – suspecting him of being an informant for the Stasi (the East German secret police), who periodically arrive at her front door to strip search her or otherwise harass her.

Just another day in East Germany’s worker-paradise, you might say.

As the story unfolds, however, Barbara slowly warms up to André, as she gradually comprehends his quiet, understated resistance to the inhumanity around them. She also grows absorbed in her clinical work with children – especially Stella, a pregnant escapee from a socialist labor camp, whose only wish is to raise her child in the freedom of the West. Barbara’s feelings of professional and personal responsibility for Stella complicate her own plans to defect, leading to the film’s suspenseful finale.

‘Understated’ really is the word for Barbara. Don’t expect lengthy speeches about tyranny, or furniture-smashing sex scenes in this film. More like an austere German drama from the 1970s (Volker Schlöndorff’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum comes to mind), Barbara gets most of its mileage out of quiet moments of drama between people who by force of circumstance are incapable of trusting each other.

As such, the film becomes a profound indictment against the type of society in which allegiance to a political system overwhelms common humanity.

Having myself visited East Germany and the Soviet Union prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and having known Soviet dissidents (including one who worked in the Kremlin), my sense is that Barbara gets the details right in terms of depicting the inauthentic, paranoid lives people led behind the Iron Curtain – particularly those with secrets to keep. The film also captures the creepy voyeurism that fuels the modern surveillance state – where the bogus imperatives of political fanatics justify shocking levels of access into people’s private lives.

Nina Hoss is already getting Oscar buzz for her performance as Barbara, and with good reason: she brings a distinctly European mixture of intelligence, world-weariness and discreet sexiness to her role. (It’s easy to imagine Deborah Kerr or Eleanor Parker playing her role in another era.) The rest of the cast fares similarly well – particularly Rainer Bock as the chief Stasi officer. By contrast, Ronald Zehrfeld sometimes seems too soft and cuddly as André, a man ostensibly doing double-duty as head of a clinic and state’s informer – but in the film’s sweeter, more intimate moments he shines.

Barbara_hoss4 — The cost of a conscience.

The main takeaway of Barbara is that we don’t want our own society ever looking like East Germany does in this film – dreary, lifeless and deeply fearful. It’s a punitive, masochistic world lacking any defining features beyond those associated with mindless (and heartless) political conformity.

Of course, the totalitarian society shown in Barbara is also one that was doomed to collapse, in no small measure due to the type of quiet heroism and compassion depicted in the film. That’s Barbara‘s other big takeaway – the importance of individual heroism, and fidelity to one’s conscience – and it’s a message that’s as important today as it was when the Wall came down.

Posted on November 19th, 2012 at 12:47pm.

Escaping Russia: LFM Reviews Purge, Submitted by Finland for the Oscars

By Joe Bendel. Finland and the Soviet Union shared some complicated history over the last hundred years or so. They fought at least two wars against each other, give or take, and then brought the world the term “Findlandization.” In contrast, Estonia and the U.S.S.R.’s relations were more straight-forward. The latter forcibly dominated the former, and the Baltic Republic did not like it one little bit. Although it tells an Estonian story, Sofi Oksanen’s novel has had great resonance for Finnish readers. In fact, former East Carolina University basketball recruit Antti J. Jokinen’s adaptation of Oksanen’s international bestseller Purge has been selected by Finland as their official foreign language Academy Award submission.

One fateful night, Zara, a sex slave fleeing her Russian mobster captors, seeks refuge at Aliide’s remote farm house. The old woman is instantly suspicious, but she takes in the exploited woman nonetheless. As it happens, Zara did not make her way there by accident. Their tragic histories are intertwined, as the audience learns in a series of flashbacks.

Aliide was always a little strange. While she fell head over heels for the dashing Hans Pekk, it is her sister Ingel who turns his head. Yet Aliide is more than willing to help Ingel shelter her former freedom fighter brother-in-law from the Soviet authorities. Frankly, she kind of likes knowing exactly where he is at all times. Decades later, that secret hiding space under the floor boards will come in handy again.

In a case of ironic symmetry, both women will suffer tremendously at the hands of Russians. Even though Aliide eventually marries a true believer, she still cannot avoid seeing the inside of a Communist torture chamber. Despite all the humiliations Zara endures as an unwilling prostitute, Aliide’s torments are probably even worse. As a result, Purge is often a difficult film to watch, but it is never exploitative or morally ambiguous in the ways it presents such horrors. Whether motivated by ideology or sadism, the reality of rape and assault remain the same.

Laura Birn gives an incredible performance as the mid-twentieth century Aliide. A twitchy young woman in an apparent state of arrested development, she is not the sort of victim figure viewers can easily embrace. In truth, she has a bit of a Machiavellian streak, yet she still experiences more pain and degradation than anyone could possibly deserve.

Jokinen is not afraid to confront his audience with all manner of atrocities. Nonetheless, he also shows a deft touch with the quiet moments occasionally stolen by the Estonian lovers. He clearly differentiates each time period without resorting to distracting visual gimmicks, balancing each narrative relatively evenhandedly.

Purge might be a dark horse contender, but Jokinen has Hollywood ties, having directed Hillary Swank-Kadyrov and Jeffrey Dean Morgan in The Resident, so who knows? Purge is certainly a quality period production, which often counts for something with Academy voters. It might be a bit too honest for their tastes, though. Regardless, Purge would be an enormously worthy nominee, definitely recommended for patrons who have a chance to catch it on the festival circuit.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on November 19th, 2012 at 12:46pm.

Occupation and Collaboration in France: LFM Reviews La Rafle (The Round Up)

By Joe Bendel. Conveniently, the infamous Winter Velodrome no longer stands in Paris. Yet, perversely, cycling races were still held in the venue as late as 1958, well after it served as a temporary holding facility for 13,000 Jewish Parisians, forcibly “rounded up” at the request of the occupying National Socialists. It was an episode of history France preferred to forget, since it was the Vichy authorities doing the rounding-up. While the actual event went scrupulously undocumented, Rose Bosch dramatizes the tragic events in La Rafle (The Round Up), which opens today in New York.

The fatality rate of those imprisoned in the Velodrome was nearly one hundred percent. Viewers will have no illusions where the captives are ultimately headed, but those in the Velodrome held out hope their next accommodations would be better. We come to meet many of the roughly detained, including children like Joseph Weismann and his friends, the Zygler brothers. While they used to run free through the streets of Montmartre, the boys suddenly find themselves enduring the heat and inadequate water and sanitation of the Velodrome. Fellow prisoner Dr. David Sheinbaum is the sole extent of the medical treatment available until the arrival of solitary Protestant charity nurse Annette Monod.

Based on years of research, Bosch takes pains to show both the good and bad sides of the French national character. While the Weismann’s anti-Semitic neighbors cheer their deportation, the Parisian fire department reacts with shock and empathy, struggling to improve conditions in the Velodrome, against the gendarmerie’s express wishes.

Those who have seen Sarah’s Key or read the novel on which it is based will be familiar with the 1942 Roundup. Designer Olivier Raoux’s recreated Velodrome has the look and feel of a real life, slightly past its prime building, collapsing under the weight of its involuntary guests. Bosch’s scenes within its confines have a visceral you-are-there impact. However, the intermittent depictions of Hitler and the craven Petain lack the same power, only serving as a wan indictment of their banal evil.

In a bit of a surprise, it is Jean Reno who masterfully serves as the film’s moral center, portraying Dr. Sheinbaum with a profound spirit of world weary humanity. The impossible romantic tension that develops between him and Mélanie Laurent’s Monod is also deeply touching. That sense of “if only thing were different” palpably hangs in the air between them as they labor to ease the suffering around them as best they can.

Post-Schindler’s List, there have been a number of well-meaning dramas that have addressed the Holocaust, with varying degrees of success. La Rafle ranks as one of the more accomplished due to its technical merit and Reno’s assured, anchoring performance. Recommended for connoisseurs of French cinema and WWII films, it opens today (11/16) in New York at the Quad Cinema.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on November 16th, 2012 at 10:38am.