Free Men (Thursday, March 22, 2012) (31)

Free Men, co-written by Ismael Ferroukhi and Alain-Michel Blanc and directed by Ferroukhi, deals with a hidden-in-recent-history moment of World War II-era Paris when North African Muslims helped and fought along with the Resistance. Most interestingly, the story is presented in a very human and naturalistic style -- similar to preWWII-era French cinema (think something like Renoir's The Crime of M. Lange or Carné's Port of Shadows).

As the film opens, Paris has already fallen to the Nazis and we see the familiar tapestry of policemen, with SS and Vichy officers elbowing to get power. In a mosque in Paris, the imam, Si Kaddour Ben Ghabrit (Michel Lonsdale), has a mini empire where he leads his faithful, but also protects several Jews, many of whom also come from Algeria and Morocco. Into this garden comes Younes (the fabulous Tahar Rahim), a petty criminal and black marketeer who is looking to get away from the heat of police after a few sloppy jobs. He falls in love with the people in this corner of Paris, particularly a singer of Arabic ballads (who happens to be Jewish) and a woman, Leila (Lubna Azabal), who happens to be a communist agitator.

This is not a fancy movie with elaborate formal qualities or complicated plot twists. It is a nice and straightforward film about a moment in time, where the history of Nazis and Vichy bureaucrats, Germans and French, Muslims and Jews, Arabs and Whites, French and North Africans came into direct contact. It has the loving, humanist tenor of a Renoir work, deeply believing in the goodness of people to fix bad situations through working together. This is a clever decision. It's not a flashy action flick, which it could have been, but is a more gentle, elegant story.

Rahim, who formally lead A Prophet, Audiard's masterpiece from 2010, is fantastic here again. He's confident without being arrogant, young but not immature. He's such a joy to see on screen, brightening up any shot with his movie-star magnetism. Lonsdale is, of course, great -- just as he's been for the past 40-some years. Azabel, who has a few more pictures coming up soon, is intelligent and beautiful -- an interesting Arab answer to Betty Bacall or Ingrid Bergman (though she's more like Bacall in To Have and Have Not here than Bergman in Casablanca).

I'm surprised we're not taught more about the role of North Africans in the Resistance movement in history class. This film is illuminating, but also warm and well made.

Stars: 3 of 4

An Encounter with Simone Weil (Tuesday, March 6, 2012) (23)

Simone Weil was a less-than-totally-well-known French philosopher active mostly during the period between the two world wars. A consummate humanist, she struggled with the nature and scale of human suffering and wrote volumes and volumes of journals about it. She began as a Marxist, concerned with the rights of workers in French factories and moved on to other post-Communist concerns about people suffering under totalitarian organizations of any scale.

Raised as a secular Jew in an intellectual family, she became interested in the spiritual and mystical side of Christianity, as a way of understanding pain, suffering and exaltation. Ultimately Weil died in London in 1943, while working for the Free French Government, largely as a result of a near-starvation regime meant to symbolize a connection between herself and the people of France (Occupied and Vichy), who were not eating well.

In her film, An Encounter with Simone Weil, director Julia Haslett presents a fascinating biodoc about Weil, but from a very personal, almost avante-garde point of view. Haslett explains early on that her father suffered with mental illness through his life and committed suicide when she was 17; her brother, an academic also concerned with the history of suffering of blacks in America, deals with his own depression and thoughts of suicide.

The film is not a standard biodoc, however, but rather is more of a personal diary or collection of thoughts by Haslett, mostly about Weil, but also about suffering of people in her family and others. She is as much the subject of her doc as is Weil.

As the film moves along, we see the very typical still scans of photographs of Weil as well as copies of her hand-written journals and essays; Haslett interviews some of her family members who are still alive in France as well as contemporary philosophers, academics and researchers who are using her writings for their work.

The most daring element, though, is that Haslett has an actress playing Weil, has her study her writings and then interviews her. This is the very literal encounter with Simone Weil. As she is doing it, Haslett speaks about how she doesn't know exactly what she is going to get out of it. It's a very bold and interesting device -- to see if through the craft of acting, one might be able to unlock doors into a deeper meaning of the text. As a thought experiment this is a rather brilliant tool; I'm not sure it finds any specific success, although I appreciate the effort.

There is a real beauty to the way the film acts a bit like Haslett's journal, as she's researching Weil, who kept journals herself. I like the way Haslett tells Weil's full biography and gives a picture of her soul, and subtly shows her own emotional biography, as it relates to her father and brother. It's cut together really elegantly.

This is a very interesting, well made film that does more than just tell the story of a relatively unknown thinker. It is clear that this is a very personal film, which might lead to how good it is, but it also clear that Haslett is a daring filmmaker, interested in film form and structure as much as in narrative history. I always appreciate any film that breaks rules and pushes boundaries -- and this one does it very well.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Woman with the Five Elephants (2011) (Thursday, February 23, 2012) (155)

The so-called "five elephants" in the title of the German documentary The Woman with the Five Elephants are the five major novels by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the eponymous woman is Svetlana Geier, one of the most important translators of Russian literature into German who has spent the past 25 years working on those paper pachyderms.

This documentary starts out as a profile of Geier showing her method for translation, involving two rounds, one where she dictates to a lady who types (on a typewriter) what she says, and a second where she rereads what she put down with another linguistic and literary scholar. We see that she is a grandmother in Freiburg with a big family, she works for several hours a day and also takes care of cooking family meals for celebrations.

At some point one of her sons gets injured in an accident and she stops her translation work to take care of him, cooking for him and visiting him in the hospital. In this period she is asked by her alma mater in Kiev, Ukraine to visit and speak to students about her methods and her work. She sets off on a train trip, with one of her granddaughters, back to her hometown that she left during the war.

We then see her back story. In the Ukraine, she was a star German student and when the Nazis took control of Kiev, she got a few lucky breaks thanks to some of the officers who lived with her mother and her. At some point she was offered a scholarship to study at the University of Freiburg, where she moved with her mother before the end of the war.

There is an interesting passage where Geier reflects on her own luck and on "freedom" as described and written about by Dostoyevsky. Although she doesn't say it, it is clear she is thinking about how her own personal success and life was a result of Nazis, the archetypal group who would deny other such freedom, being kind to her.

This is a nice movie, although I feel like it's various threads don't totally connect (outside of this one sequence). I feel like there are really two stories here, one about the world's greatest Russian-to-German translator and another one about a young Ukrainian woman who got lucky early in life thanks to the Nazis. Perhaps this is very contemporary and young of me to feel, but it all doesn't really matter that much to me.

She's a wonderful woman, a loving grandmother, and has an intricate past but not all that interesting as a human. This is another case where I feel a 40-minute short would have been more compelling, showing one part of her story or another.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

In Darkness (2011) (Friday, February 10, 2012) (152)

Agnieszka Holland's film In Darkness is not a typical Holocuast film, although it certainly has many similar threads and themes that are familiar to the genre. This is the more unseen view of things -- literally unseen. The film tells the story of a group of Jews in the Lvov Ghetto in Poland who snuck into the sewer in an effort to escape their dire situation. When they got down there, they ran into Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), a non-partisan Catholic sewer inspector who figured he could make a bit of money from them by showing them a good hiding place and keeping them stocked with food and other goods they would need for survival.

Once he put them in a relatively secret spot in an off-tunnel, insisting that only a dozen of them could live down there, he found that such a pure business relationship was not totally morally fulfilling. He and his corpulent wife Wanda (Kinga Preis) found themselves caring for the Jews more and more, ultimately risking their own lives for these people. Once the Ghetto was liquidated in 1943 their challenge increased as Nazi and Polish police inspections sped up and intensified.

There is something particularly interesting about a film that is mostly shot in darkness (as the title would suggest). There is a strange power to the mixture of grays and blacks, shadows and peeks of light that is rather mystifying. Of course, there is something particularly unsettling about no knowing what is coming in the distance or from around the corner. Probably most powerful about this film, and the cinematography by Jolanta Dylewska, is that we are put in the exact psychological space of the hiding Jews. As they hear distant noises in the far-off tunnels, which might be humans and might just be water, steam or gas, they are afraid... but so are we.

This is also a film about living in shit - literally. For years and years these people live in and next to a lagoon of human waste that seems to be everywhere in their space. They must eat and clean themselves, take care of mundane life things and then get into more specialized ones all within the nose of such a place. That some of the people try to have sex in it (totally ignoring for a moment that they're doing it next to their colleagues) is both disgusting and compellingly human. Add to this the greasy, dirty shots of tunnels (one of which looks particularly vulvic) and there's an interesting interplay between the disgusting and the erotic.

What is done technically with this film is really beautiful and the story Holland tells is as amazing and heroic as any from the Holocaust. Still, I feel there is a slight lack of thematic interest for me in what is shown. Yes, this is a great film, but something about it feels a bit like just another harrowing story of survival. Like a beautiful impressionist painting, there is not much to dislike about this film, but it still leaves me wanting a bit more to chew on. Perhaps this is unfair and I should merely appreciate a good story told well, but I still feel a bit less than totally thrilled.

Stars: 3 of 4

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Thursday, December 22, 2011) (122)

I recently re-read my review of the Swedish adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo from last year in advance of seeing this newer update from David Fincher and screenwriter Steven Zaillian (it's fine, you can tell me my methods are unfair). After seeing this new version, I can tell you it's almost exactly the same movie and the things I said about that version I would say again here.

This film has a nice fast pace, the acting is solid throughout -- even considering the corny Swedish accents all the actors have to use (including the honest-to-goodness Swedes in the cast who almost sound more American than anything else) -- there is nothing particularly Swedish or Scandanavian in feeling in the style here (sorry, Ingmar and Carl Theodor), and overall it's a fun, pulpy movie that leads you down six different roads and pulls them all back together nicely at the end.

The story has not changed much from the book (which I've never read) or that other movie. Mikael Bloomkvist (Daniel Craig) is a journalist who starts to research a murder on a remote island for a billionaire industrialist. At some point he hires a research assistant, Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), who has a checkered life, an awesome libido and an inky back. The deeper they dig into this family history, the more they find Nazism, sexual abuse and weird culty murders. Add on top of this a sprinkling of leather camp and sexual torture and you got yourself a blockbuster!

It's hard to say if this is a particularly Fincher-ific movie. Much of the story happens to take place at night (when Fincher really comes alive, like the cyber-noir director he's meant to be), the heroine is written as a Goth who rides a motorcycle and there's already some delicious torture porn elements to the story. Having never read the book and only knowing the story from the Swedish film, I can't say much about any details that were in the book that Fincher extracted or what he might have injected himself, but I will say that this seems like a generally light amount of Fincherese (mostly seen in the sex torture parts). Mostly this feels like a very well made, polished Hollywood movie -- a bit of a director-for-hire piece than any standout in his oeuvre (like Se7en, Fight Club or Zodiac are).

There's really nothing negative to say about this film. It's very long (as was the Swedish version... I guess that's the result of a long and intricate book... and I'd much rather a 160-minute movie to a two-part piece, like they did with the last books of the Harry Potter or Twilight series), very detailed and somewhat complex in terms of familial relationships and who did what to whom and when. I guess I would say that all of that is a bit of complexity for complexity's sake; I'm not sure it's a particularly richer movie because of the baroque plot. It's a bit of bread and circus, but it's pretty tasty.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Sarah's Key (Sunday, August 7, 2011) (66)

There have been a handful of thematically and intellectually offensive movies about the Holocaust in recent years: Life is Beautiful, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Schindler's List, to name just three. We can now add Sarah's Key to that list. All of these films take the already emotionally charged and boldly "good versus evil" elements of Nazis, death camps and murdered children and trivialize them until we get these cumbersome tales so thick with shallow sadness it is hard to breath.

Sarah's Key is so emotionally superficial and sentimental that it makes us feel angry that someone would have so little sense as to make such a work of dreck. The story is utterly forgettable and recycled and has such an accusatory tone that the meta-film, the concept of how the French respond to the Holocaust inside a Holocaust film, becomes more important than the narrative itself. This is a French film in the style of an American Hollywood film. The symbolism is blatant and hackneyed and historical details are pushed aside for manipulative devices. The film is facile to a fault and disgusting in its tone.

Julia (Kristin Scott Thomas) is an American journalist married to a Frenchman and living in Paris where she writes features for a magazine. She and her husband (and their early-teen daughter) are about to movie into his family's apartment in the Marais and are busy renovating and updating it. Meanwhile Julia begins writing a story about the collaborationist French government's arrest and deportation of French Jews in July 1942, known as the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup. (This is indeed a largely unknown atrocity in the history of the Holocaust, one that is not taught often in American schools, at any rate.)

The deeper she gets into the story, the more she finds out about the fact that her husband's family probably moved into their apartment days after the previous tenants (a Jewish family) were sent to their deaths. She discovers that the daughter of that family, Sarah, might have escaped and survived after the war (well, really she just finds that there are no records of her in the Nazi records, so she assumes she survived - whatever). She goes off in search of the girl, who somehow represents the hope of happiness and freedom she is missing in her marriage (or something like that).

The film is told by bouncing back and forth between the present with KST and the past where Jews are rounded up and sent off to their deaths. Most of the time, however, the moments where we jump from the past to the present or from the present backwards seem absolutely arbitrary and more motivated by script structure than by anything thematic or resonant. Most of the transitions happen when the young Sarah, who is trying to escape the Nazis to go find her younger brother who was locked in a closet in the apartment, is in a particularly precarious position - just in case you thought Nazi roundups were all sunshine and daisies.

This tedious manipulation and banality is so omnipresent in the film, it's hard to even single out a specific moment. At one point, when Julia is telling her journalist colleagues what she is uncovering in her research, one of them says, "When you think that such terrible things happened, it really gives you pause." Gee, thanks. I wasn't aware that an anecdote about thousands of people being rounded up and put into a filthy stadium before being sent off to their deaths was sad and terrible. Thanks for making that clear to me.

I have said in the past that nearly all contemporary French films deal with national guilt over the nation's role in the Holocaust, North Africa or other colonial outposts and here we have yet another example. (I should say that this is not a negative thing, but just an observation. Audiard's A Prophet is loosely about North Africa and colonialism, but is brilliant.) What's unusual here (and not unusual in a good way) is that the story is about an American digging into the story rather than a French person. When Julia's family seems to not be interested in the story of their apartment, she gets angry and judges them for their aloofness.

This feels like director/co-writer Gilles Paquet-Brenner is both a criticizing French society for not being more interested in the history of such a bad event as well as a strange celebration of American tactlessness. Why in the world would a woman shove a painful story down the throats of her family (and then later suggest that she regrets having done it)? When has it ever been acceptable to air dirty family laundry when nobody was asking about it? What's so wrong with people wanting to live naïve lives where they don't dig into the corners of historical events for which they're not guilty? Make no mistake, Julia is an asshole in this story and she is treated like a hero.

Stylistically, Paquet-Brenner treads on the most cliched turf imaginable in film. Just like the "girl in the red dress" in Schindler's List, Sarah's key (a key she used to lock her brother in a hidden closet in their apartment before they were rounded up) becomes some sort of supersymbol that we see over and over again, always with the same superficial effect. Why does it need to be so literal? Don't we understand the pain Sarah and her family feel for their lost brother/son without needing a visual clue to explain it to us? Are we really that stupid that we can't understand the sadness of the murder of a child?

This film is much more of an American-feeling film than a French one. There is no depth to the discussion and seems to move along on a surface level, pulling on heartstrings (like introducing irrelevant other kids, just to kill them off... in case we didn't know that lots of kids died at the hands of the Nazis) rather than anything in our brains (and, yes, the average French movie is smarter than the average American movie... this probably has to do with production volumes as much as anything else).

Somehow Julia's quest, even though it shakes two family's to their foundations (despite nobody in either family ever doing anything offensive), is some sort of righteous experience. It is not, of course. Julia is a sociopath and utterly unaware of the fact that Sarah's story is unremarkable and irrelevant to the lives of contemporary people. Not to say that hidden stories are better, but exposing pain from long ago isn't always worth the trouble (Julia and Paquet-Brenner seem to think it is).

I don't need to be told that the murder of children and innocent people by the Nazis (and their Petainist collaborators) was a bad thing. I learned that lesson a long time ago. This is a case where the truth is so banal that it doesn't really set anyone free, but just makes them frustrated for finding it out - and for finding out in such a trite way.

Stars: 1 of 4

Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suss (Thursday, December 23, 2010) (160)

This is an interesting documentary about Veit Harlan, a German director who was commissioned by Joseph Goebbels to direct several anti-Semitic, nationalistic films for the Nazis in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The most well known and powerful of these films was a melodrama called The Jew Suss, which advocated Nazi party tropes of Jews being untrustworthy, filthy criminals who killed, raped and stole.

With strong Nazi backing, the film was released throughout Nazi-occupied Europe in 1940 and further inflamed the already scorching anti-Semitic sentiment of the people. After the war, Harlan continued to make films, but was always haunted by his decision to work with the Nazis. He was twice brought up on charges of collaborating with them as a propagandist but maintained his defense that Goebbels threatened his and his wife's lives so he had no choice.

In this documentary, we see how not only did the shadow of that film haunt Harlan himself, but also his kids, grand kids, nieces and nephews. Director Felix Moeller tells most of the story by having Harlan's living children, grandchildren talk about him. We get a very interesting, sometimes contradictory take on his life.

One of Harlan's sons, Thomas Harlan (an accomplished filmmaker and writer himself), explains how much he's struggled with his father's sin and how he is now convinced that because Harlan had his wife act in The Jew Suss, he could not have been coerced into making it. Another son, Kristian Harlan, takes a more tender view saying that it might not have been as black and white as his father said it was, that he thinks his father could have fought back a bit, but probably had no choice but to make the film.

Most interestingly are the views of the grandchildren who are all very separated from the passion of the story. They never met their grandfather, but have had to live with his name and the shame that comes with it (in Germany, at least). To them, this is a very distant mistake that they have to deal with on a more basic day-to-day level. They generally have a more nuanced view of the story. (Also interesting is that Stanley Kubrick's widow, Christiane, and her brother and long-time collaborator Jan Harlan are Veit Harlan's niece and nephew. They speak here too.)

This is a very interesting story about sin and who pays for it in the next generation. Some of the children have gone on to defend their father, some have turned their back on him as much as possible and blame him for doing something unspeakable. The documentary runs a bit long, perhaps, and might have been more powerful if it was trimmed by about 15 minutes. Still, it is a fascinating story and a very interesting, effective treatment of the material.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Marwencol (Sunday, October 31, 2010) (145)

Filmmaker Jeff Malmberg brings us the film Marwencol, a light-gonzo and wonderful documentary about Mark Hogancamp and his weird "hobby". Several years ago, Hogancamp had the crap beaten out of him (apparently for no particular reason, although maybe there was...) as he left a bar in Kingston, New York. After spending months recovering in the hospital, he found himself back in his modest house with serious brain damage.

At this point he began playing with large-size G.I. Joe-like action figures and created a world in his backyard where he re-enacted fabulous World War II scenes involving the Nazi occupation of the Belgian town of Marwencol (I'm not sure such a town exists). Hogancamp populated the village with figures representing himself (much taller and better looking, but plastic, of course), several of his friends and relations (his lawyer and the DA got figures for themselves), and a world of female bartenders and whores (though really nice and gold-hearted ones, dontcha know). Of course there is also a gang of Nazi soldiers who live in the town.

Hogancamp then began photographing the stories he would create to document the War and the day-t0-day life in the village. Sometimes the Nazi gang would take Mark's double and beat him (like he was beaten outside the bar), sometimes the American soldiers would beat up on the Nazis... because Nazi's are dicks. Sometimes they would all drink peaceably in the bar. Without knowing it, Mark created his own sort of "art therapy" to deal with the psychological pain (PTSD, to be sure) and get a handle on what happened to him.

Malmberg treats Hogancamp's work with the utmost respect and non-judgement. He also frequently puts the camera down on the ground level so we are inside the world of Marwencol interacting with the toy figures. As Mark narrates the story of each scene, we feel the drama of the story he creates. It is really a beautiful presentation.

Ultimately Mark's work is discovered by the New York art world and he is offered a one-man show in Chelsea. We see him struggle with the trip down to the city... and with several secrets that he lives with on a daily basis (I'm not going to tell the secrets here, because they are revealed so wonderfully). Again, Malmberg's gentleness and respect of Hogancamp is wonderful to see in how he deals with his unusualness.

This is a very small movie, but also a very powerful one. I expected this to be rather silly, but it was deeply moving and interesting. What I love is that Hogancamp's "art" is really interesting and aesthetically fabulous and that he basically came up with this "therapy" entirely on his own... and that he wouldn't consider what he's doing either "art" of "therapy".

The presentation is fantastic and I particularly appreciate that Malmberg didn't try to do more with this film than just present the story. There are no significant interviews with art world elites, nor is much time spent on the medical background for what is happening. Malmberg's restraint in this case is especially admirable.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

A Film Unfinished (Monday, September 6, 2010) (115)

Yael Herzonski's A Film Unfinished is an interesting film, but not something all that fabulous. It is a documentary about a Nazi propaganda film that was shot in May 1942 in the Warsaw Ghetto. Herzonski shows clips from that film and then adds to it journals and first-hand accounts by some of the Jews who witnessed the filming first-hand. She then also shows survivors of the Ghetto and the camps watching the footage and reacting to it. All of these documents help to show us how the people lived and how the Nazis clearly exaggerated simple situations or staged fake ones to make a political point. This is a documentary about a documentary.

One thing we see clearly here is how desperately hungry the people in the Ghetto were and how the Nazis rather brazenly brushed past this fact. Historians over the years have known full well that this Warsaw documentary was a propaganda piece and that much of what we see was not nearly the truth. What Herzonski's research shows - and especially what the interviews with survivors show - is that even basic scenes of Jews going to a restaurant for a nice lunch were also pure fabrications. The survivors joke about how nobody went out to eat at restaurants because there was just simply no food to be found in the Ghetto. Not only that, but the interiors were much shabbier than what the Nazi's present. One man jokes about how nobody would have had a vase of flowers on a table because they would have eaten the flowers!

I always appreciate a critical analysis of the documentary form - I think it's one of the most compelling topics in film theory. The idea that a movie exists as a "non-fiction document" is an absolute red herring, allowing lousy and lazy technicians get away with all sorts of formal transgressions from outright propaganda and polemic to simply cheating with framing. All film - all art - is clearly subjective and subject to any number of outside influences. This film shows how even accepting the Nazi film as a propaganda piece doesn't mean that we fully understand the truth on the ground entirely. She shows how there are deeper levels of meaning to any single image.

As interesting as this dissection is, Herzonski's film is not really all that interesting or compelling. I think most Holocaust films play too strongly on our human emotions and reactions and I think the director sometimes lets our natural visceral reactions rule over a stronger insight. Basically, I think most films about the Holocaust are intellectually cheap and emotionally easy. The digging into the truth about the original film is lightly interesting, but it doesn't go incredibly deep with further questions. This could have been an effective doc short and I think it doesn't pull off the significance of a full feature.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

North Face (Friday, May 28, 2010) (46)

North Face is a German movie about the push to get to the top of the Eiger mountain by means of the northern side, the hardest climb in the Alps. The film takes place in 1935 after the Nazis are already in control of Germany. Some mysterious group of people, some mix of Nazis and journalists, decide that if a German team can summit the mountain before others, it will be a sign of Aryan might - especially ahead of the Berlin Olympics of 1936.

One duo, found by a Berlin newspaper, are two country boys who are amateur but accomplished hikers, who seem to be screwing around in some official capacity in the Nazi army. By the time they are convinced to go try the hike, there is another team of Austrians who are also making a go at it.

The two groups begin together and our German pair are clearly the more experienced and better team. At some point, the Austrians get into trouble that could foil the bids of both teams.

My main problem with this film is that it's really boring, it moves very slowly for an "action/adventure" film and there are too many characters with too silly sub-plots. I guess we're supposed to like the German guys because they're nice and friendly and don't seem to be Nazi party members. For a movie set in 1935 Germany (OK, Switzerland), Nazis are almost not present at all (the only real Nazi stand ins are the Austrians, who seem more interested in their Aryan heritage than the German guys.)

But there are layers and layers of ridiculous story lines and relationships. There is no need for a newspaper to be involved in this (even if it's historically true, I don't really care and it feels totally like an add-on to the story). What's worse, the main journalist is a young woman who is a childhood friend of the climbers. There are suggestions of a sexual affair between her and one of the guys, but this too goes nowhere. Then there's the woman's editor who makes untoward advances at her... as if I cared about her chastity in the first place.

All I really want is a story about two guys hiking up a mountain, and due to bad planning of others and bad weather, they had a hard time doing it. I didn't need all the other stuff. I mean don't show me Nazis and then suggest that a successful climb would be good for German propaganda and then do nothing with that (I mean I can't even get a single scene with Goebbels in it?! C'mon!).

Beyond this, the characters are really boring (I think that's actually part of the point. They're simple, boring guys who love climbing mountains. They are not political and don't care about the propaganda) and the technical parts of the film (the photography, music, editing) seem banal (even as beautiful as shooting in snow generally looks onscreen, this is just trite and unimpressive).

Director and co-writer Philipp Stölzl does a really lousy job of making me care at all about what is going on with the hike or the ridiculous sub-plot about the journalists off the mountain. It's basically a lot of snow and frostbite with some dull action scenes (that might have been shot on a sound-stage) and a mess of a story.

Stars: 1 of 4

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Friday, March 19, 2010) (20)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a film adaptation of the first book of the trilogy written by Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson. The rather complicated story is about an investigative journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, who gets a job from a mega-rich industrialist, Henrik Vanger, to investigate the murder of his teenage niece some forty years before. As soon as Blomkvist begins the search on a remote island where the Vanger clan all have their houses, he is joined by computer-hacker extraordinaire Lisbeth Salander who has taken an interest in Blomkvist (who has been disgraced by a recent libel case against him). She has a thing against men who abuse and hurt women (which goes back to her own troubled childhood).

The two begin to look into the possible suspects inside the Vanger family and uncover a world of rape, abuse, Nazi love and murder, all covered up by the family's status and political power. And just when you think the story has concluded, there is another chapter (the total run time is more than 2 hours 30 minutes).

The story is very complex with several threads going on at once. Lisbeth (the eponymous inked girl) has a whole subplot of her own where she has a financial guardian who abuses and rapes her and tells her she will be cut off from her money if she tells anyone about it. She ultimately gets a very graphic, sadistic revenge on the man. It seems like the multiplicity of narrative threads in the film would work better in the novel than onscreen. For a viewer, it seems like a bit of a hat on a hat and that some of these extra subplots could have been cut out.

The acting is very good throughout. Michael Nyqvist is great as Blomkvist. He's a smart journalist who seems to have a good moral sense about him. He's a diligent researcher and knows how to bend the rules to get what he needs. Nyqvist looks very smart and clever, with a brightness in his eyes that's refreshing to see. Noomi Rapace is also great as Lisbeth. She is very quiet and methodical, but clearly knows what's going on below the surface of an event. She's flirty at times (though clearly she has had bad interactions with men) and also has a zeal in her gaze that's nice to see.

I was rather surprised by how frank and violent the film was. The scene where Lisbeth is getting raped by her accountant we basically see the whole thing - but also see close ups of her face as she cries out and winces in pain. This is pretty shocking. Then we see in great detail exactly how she savagely takes revenge on the man. Later we see several very violent acts shown without any apologies or filters. Director Niels Arden Oplev (a Danish man, not a Swede) clearly thinks that showing exactly what is happening is the best way to present the material (as opposed to, say, suggesting what is happening offscreen). It is powerful stuff, though not for the easily shocked.

I guess it's unfair to hope that every Swedish movie should look particularly "Swedish", by which, I guess, I mean "look like Bergman". Still, this film comes off much more like a fast-paced American action film than anything I've ever seen from Scandinavia. It does move along from one point to another very smoothly and very fast. There is something nice about this, definitely. Still, I have to ask myself that if this was a Hollywood production with big action stars in it, would I like it at all - and I'm not sure that I would. I think there is something nice and refreshing in the straightforwardness of it - something that is ultimately Swedish that I like.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Shutter Island (Saturday, February 20, 2010) (15)

It has been a very long time since Martin Scorsese made a great movie, and also a long time since he made even a good movie (I guess one could argue for The Departed or Gangs of New York - but I thought both were only OK and mostly derivative of earlier stuff of his). Shutter Island falls into a growing category of his recent films: terrible movies.

The story is about Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio)a U.S. Marshal in the 1950s who is called out to the eponymous island, an insane asylum and jail, in the Boston Harbor where a violent woman criminal has broken out of her cell mysteriously. Somehow, though it's not clear what exactly he's doing there, he is supposed to find her on this isolated island he's never seen before (because the guards who know the island well are unable to do it).

We find out that Daniels' wife and kids were murdered recently and the man who did the job is on this island behind bars. Daniels also doesn't know his brand new partner, Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), who just started in his department the morning they start the case. The bald-headed doctor on the island, Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) is super weird and mysterious too. Oh, and it's foggy and rainy the whole time - because sunny and clear wouldn't be scary enough.

As Daniels tracks the missing woman around the island, he becomes more concerned that the inmates are being mistreated with electro-shock treatments and begins to question his own sanity. He has flashbacks to his time in World War II when he liberated a concentration camp and found out about some of the electro-shock experiments the Nazis had done to some of Jews. Oh - and one of the doctors on the staff of the hospital is German. Blah, blah, blah.

It's hard to imagine a cast of such talented actors (DiCaprio, Ruffalo, Kingsley, Patricia Clarkson, Max von Sydow, Jackie Earle Haley, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer) could all put out such consistently bad work throughout this film. All around the acting almost not serious it is so overdone. That Marty didn't see this is shocking to me; that he would direct actors this way is also shocking. And then they all struggle with the Boston accent. I think Leo is a very good actor, but I don't think he has the chops for accents the way some actors do. He's very naturalistic and organic and he struggles with the accent here as much as he did in Gangs of New York.

The script by Laeta Kalogridis, based on the Dennis Lehane book is a freaking joke. (I've never heard of her, but I see she was a producer on Avatar, so she has *that* going for her and hopefully she's made enough money from that that she won't ever have to work again... Oh, God I hope so!). It jumps back and forth between the present and the past and a fantasy world that it's almost impossible to figure out. Then it twists so many times - and not all that unexpectedly - that you end up getting a very different movie than you started with (like The Sixth Sense meets the Bird Man of Alcatraz). What's worse, the twists are telegraphed three scenes before they happen so it's impossible not to see them coming before they do.

(I would also like to say here that of the three Dennis Lehane books that have been adapted to the screen - this one, Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone - it surprising to me how good and how bad some of them are. In order, Gone Baby Gone, directed by Ben Affleck is the best, Mystic River, directed by Clint Eastwood, is very OK but not worth the Oscar attention it got, and this turd is the worst. So you have Affleck is better than Eastwood who is better than Scorsese... I never would have believed that!)

This film is directed terribly. I don't know how it's possible, but Marty has clearly lost something. The dubbing is terrible so you can hear when looped in dialogue is clumsily spliced into certain spots. In the few scenes where blood is seen, it looks like Marty went to the Hammer Studios makeup department and got some ketchup to spread all over the place (a big change for a man who used to deal beautifully with blood - in Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and Goodfellas). There also seems to be no control on the story or the script. It goes on for at least 30 minutes too long, running 2 hours and 18 minutes. There is absolutely no need for this last 18 minutes, but it should be even shorter than that. What ever happened to a nice 112-minute movie, Marty?

There is nothing good about this film whatsoever. It is boring, totally trite and totally confusing. The acting, directing and writing is terrible. I guess the photography by Robert Richardson is nice, but I thought it was generally too cliche (grays and blues outside and blacks and golds inside - boring). Somewhere in the middle of the film, maybe in one of the many Nazi flashbacks, I strongly considered walking out because the story was going nowhere and I the twists coming down the pike were uninspiring. I stuck with it, but now I'm considering whether that was a good way to spend those 70 minutes of my life. I'm not sure it was.

Stars: .5 of 4

Four Seasons Lodge (2009) (Wednesday, January 27, 2010) (219)

Four Seasons Lodge is a small documentary about a Jewish Catskills bungalow camp where a group of several dozen Holocaust survivor families spend their summers. Now in their 70s, 80s and 90s, these men and women look back at their pre-War lives, reflect on the painful memories of life in the concentration camps and play politics in and around the community.

The summer the film was shot was an important one in its history as the members had previously voted to close and sell the camp to an outside group. As the summer proceeds, many of them have second thoughts despite the vocal grumblings of the camp president who spends his days doing upkeep on the failing infrastructure.

The structure of the film is very straightforward as we see the opening ceremony party on the first night of the summer and follow individual guests throughout getting each one's story. We see how each of these people survived their terrible histories and lived to create successful lives in the U.S. We see how some have re-married and some have created lives of mutual care with dear friends.

There is a certain comedic element to the film, which might on paper seem like a dramatic story. Both the camp president and superintendent are asked to work the entire day to make the fastidious guests happy. They constantly make faces at the camera and back-handed comments. All of this is done with love after twenty-some years of knowing everybody. Old people are funny - especially when dancing and telling jokes. There's something sweet and kitschy about the borscht-belty comedians and singers who come to the camp to entertain the people.

In the end, this is a cousin to films like A Walk on the Moon and Dirty Dancing, but not a replacement for them. This shows one reality of a camp in this region, but it is clearly a specific one connected to the Holocaust. The survivors each have their own stories and their own perspective on the War. This is a very nice film, if not totally brilliant.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

My Fuhrer (2009) (Tuesday, January 19, 2010) (218)

The tag-line of this film is "The bastard love child of Chaplin's Great Dictator & Mel Brooks' The Producers". This is about right, although I think it's much closer to Brooks than Chaplin (and anyhow, the Chaplin film is not one of his best, aside from the iconic scene of the Hitlerian dictator bouncing an earth-like beach ball around the office).

It is a very weird, small comedy about a Jewish acting teacher who is hired by the Nazis to coach Hitler in preparation for a major speech he is giving in 1945. As the Nazi forces begin to lose in post-D-Day Europe, Hitler gets more and more depressed until he finally loses his speaking mojo. Goebbles, knowing the Fuhrer needs to address his people in order to restore some pride and joy in the country, takes Adolf Grunbaum out of the concentration camp and gets him to work with Hitler on his public delivery. Grunbaum is, of course, faced with the moral dilemma of helping his people's greatest enemy, but is taken in by Hitler's kindness to him and his almost pitiful innocence. He leverages his work to get his family our of the camps as well, but then faces pressure from them to take action to kill the dictator.

The tone of the movie is very strange. It's a very silly, over-the-top comedy that has some very sad, touching moments in it as well. Hitler is portrayed as a bumbling fool and an almost childlike relationship to the world. His high command keep information from him and spy through holes in paintings around the office wall. It is in fact a very Brooksian view of the guy - really he's just a punching bag, and we mostly laugh because we can laugh at him, rather than because his actions are necessarily funny or clever.

It is never clear that this story is either historical or fantasy - it doesn't go nearly as far as Inglorious Basterds in showing that it's all a big fake joke, but it also doesn't totally seem all that serious. Writer/director Dani Levy, a Jewish man from Switzerland, seems to be mostly retaliating over a grudge (OK, a grudge is not really what it is), more than giving us any real incisive critique or comedic piece.

Grunbaum is played by Ulrich Mühe (who beautifully played the Stasi agent from The Lives of Others a few years ago). He is very good, as are most of the other actors. But they are somewhat left out flapping in the wind with the film lacking much of a story. I didn't really feel there was anything for them to grab onto thematically or tonally throughout. Are all the characters other than Hitler supposed to be straight men and the whole thing is some massive joke (that goes rather above my head)? Are these great dramatic performances or comedic ones? This is mostly a silly and small movie - two adjectives that don't fit well naturally in connection to the Holocaust. I don't think it's terribly successful or insightful.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

Killing Kasztner (Saturday, December 5, 2009) (185)

Killing Kasztner is a very interesting and complicated documentary about a controversial man, Israel Kasztner, and his role in saving 1700 Hungarian Jews from being killed in Nazi death camps. There are three parts to this documentary that are layered on top of one another throughout the course of the film.

The first part addresses the historical story of Kasztner in Budapest during the Nazi occupation there. As the Nazis were quickly moving Hungarian Jews to concentration camps, Kasztner met with Adolf Eichmann, the head of the SS in the Hungarian region, to figure out a deal to save as many people as he could. Through an elaborate and still-unclear deal involving bribes, Kasztner secured a trainload of people who were ultimately given passage to Switzerland.

The second part of the story shows how after most of these people moved to the newly-formed nation of Israel in the late 1940s and early 1950s, they were treated as second-class citizens, as it was believed that considering they didn't fight or struggle (they were rescued and never went to concentration camps) they were less honorable and heroic. In the mid-1950s, Kasztner was the target of a right wing Israeli tabloid attack accusing him of colluding with the Nazis for personal gain. The argument was that he mad a deal with Eichmann to save his family and and friends and got a percentage of money that was taken from the passengers on his train. In addition, he was considered guilty of killing the Hungarian Jews who died in German camps because he did not rescue all of them.

Kasztner sued the publisher of the paper for libel and the court case took on epic proportions in Israel in the late 1950s. To many (especially on the Right) he was seen as a symbol of corruption and weakness in their government. Exactly how he was supposed to rescue so many people was never totally discussed - I think the suggestion is that it would have been better for everybody to die than for some to live and most to die. In any event, he was shot in the street by a radical Right Wing group as part of a larger political signal against the Israeli government.

The third part of the film shows the present-day survivors of the so-called Kasztner Train and their children as well as Kasztner's own family, his daughter and granddaughters. Much of the history of bile has been forgotten in the past 50 years, but they now fight to get their story, the story of Kasztner's rescue of their families, recognized by people the way Oskar Schindler's act is. In most holocaust museum's, including Jerusalem's Yad Vashem, Kasztner is simply not mentioned and the fact that he saved 1700 people is totally glossed over because the topic is seen as too explosive. To many, he is still a cowardly traitor who made a deal with the enemy and was responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of souls.

This is a fascinating film about a topic I really didn't know anything about. The politics are very interesting and the moral dilemma is very compelling. Is it acceptable to save 1700 people, knowing that thousands more you can't save are going to die? If one person in a group is going to die, should everybody die? Is it fair for a single man to decide who is going to live while others not selected die? Is it more acceptable if that man doesn't know the people who he's condemning to death? Is it right for people who were saved, as passive passengers, to be treated like weaklings because they did not fight for their salvation?

I think it's a great shame that this story is not taught along side those of Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg as examples of people being enterprising in securing as many lives as they could. Taking politics and guilt out of the situation, he did save many lives and deserves credit for doing that - and the people he saved should not be held as culpable traitors themselves.

I found the film engrossing throughout, though I think it ran a bit long. At just over two hours, I think director Gaylen Ross should have cut out 10-15 minutes. I think the story could have been simplified a bit; the understanding of the historical narrative was not helped by inter-cutting the three parts. I think a more chronological approach would have been clearer and more appealing overall.

Stars: 2.5 of 4