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THE SWEET HEREAFTER d: Atom Egoyan

THE SWEET HEREAFTER Review: Part I
Nichole is also hamhandedly used as a symbol when she recites Robert Browning’s poem The Pied Piper of Hamelin. The idea of lost children is so obvious in The Sweet Hereafter that the reason Egoyan adds this touch is bewildering, save that he — bizarrely — felt the loss wasn’t evident enough. That begs the question of just how confident Egoyan was in Banks’ original work, for the poem is only one of many elements in the film that are supposed to be significantly different from the book.
Another side story focuses — of course — on the lone man in town, Billy Ansell, who, [...]

THREE MONKEYS in New York City

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s drama Three Monkeys, which earned Ceylan the best director award at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, opened Friday in New York City.
Three Monkeys, which also happens to have been Turkey’s submission for the 2009 best foreign language film Academy Awards, is currently playing at the Cinema Village 12th Street and the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas.
 

THE LIMEY d: Steven Soderbergh

The Limey (1999)
Direction: Steven Soderbergh
Screenplay: Lem Dobbs
Cast: Terence Stamp, Lesley Ann Warren, Luis Guzman, Peter Fonda, Barry Newman, Joe Dallesandro, Nicky Katt, Amelia Heinle, Melissa George

 

 
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
Director Steven Soderbergh’s 1999 so-called crime drama The Limey is easily the best Soderbergh effort I’ve seen. That’s partly due to the innovative narrative structure, which makes all but the last few minutes of this great film a flashback. The rest is due to an excellent script by Lem Dobbs, whose other great success came a year earlier, in Alex Proyas’ sci-fi thriller Dark City. Both films, despite their apparent differences, are acutely focused on human memory and [...]

THE LIMEY II – Terence Stamp

THE LIMEY – Part I
Aside from memory, there are superbly rendered details that distill the characters: Wilson radiates affection for Eduardo’s help in tracking down Valentine by fondly calling him Sancho (as in Panza). All of these things — along with Eduardo’s and Elaine’s motivations, and the portrayal of the relationship between the hitmen — work well. In fact, they work so well precisely because there are no specifics, but generalities sharply etched so that the viewer ‘feels,’ as well as understands, the motivations and relationships. That allows the viewer to feel what goes on inside Wilson, thus creating a stronger identification with him than would be gotten were all things laid [...]

LADY WINDERMERE’S FAN – Ronald Colman – d: Ernst Lubitsch

Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925)
Direction: Ernst Lubitsch
Screenplay: Julien Josephson; titles: Maude Fulton and Erik Yorke; from Oscar Wilde’s play
Cast: Ronald Colman, May McAvoy, Bert Lytell, Irene Rich, Edward Martindel

 
Bert Lytell is the nice husband, May McAvoy the jealous wife, Ronald Colman the other man, and Irene Rich (above) the scene stealer in Ernst Lubitsch’s delightful film version of Oscar Wilde’s play Lady Windermere’s Fan.
In the film, Rich plays Mrs. Erlynne, a woman of the world in search of a lordly husband. McAvoy is her clueless daughter, Lady Windermere: she doesn’t know her mother’s identity and mistakenly believes that Mrs. Erlynne has set her sights on handsome Lord Windermere (Lytell).
Petulant child that she is, Lady Windermere goes after eligible [...]

TOKYO SONATA d: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Tokyo Sonata (2008)
Direction: Kyoshi Kurosawa
Screenplay: Kyoshi Kurosawa, Max Mannix, Tachiko Tanaka
Cast: Teruyuki Kagawa, Kyôko Koizumi, Inowaki Kai, Yû Koyanagi, Kôji Yakusho, Haruka Igawa, Kanji Tsuda, Kazuya Kogima

 

 
Some reviews and commentaries describe Tokyo Sonata, winner of this year’s Asian Film Awards for best film and best screenplay, as showing the disintegration of an "ordinary" Japanese family after the husband-father gets laid off from his administrative post at a big corporation. Although technically that is an accurate summary of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s study of social and personal roles in Japanese society, it doesn’t quite indicate all that happens in this curious, beautifully shot, delicately directed, and capably acted drama.
Written by Kurosawa (known for his horror films, and no relation to Akira), Max [...]

SOLD FOR MARRIAGE – Lillian Gish

Sold for Marriage (1916)
Direction: Christy Cabanne
Screenplay: William E. Wing
Cast: Lillian Gish, Frank Bennett, Walter Long, Allan Sears, Pearl Elmore, Curt Rehfeld
 

Though all but completely forgotten today, Christy Cabanne (at times billed as William Christy Cabanne) was a respected name in the 1910s and 1920s. Among his credits are the1916 Douglas Fairbanks vehicle The Mystery of the Leaping Fish, considered by some Fairbanks’ best film of the 1910s; the highly successful 1925 actioner The Midshipman, which helped to seal Ramon Novarro’s stardom; and several key scenes in the mammoth 1925 version of Ben-Hur, also starring Novarro.
An apprentice to D. W. Griffith, Cabanne seems to have not only learned a good deal from the (now all but insufferable) Master, but [...]

THE ITALIAN d: Reginald Barker

The Italian (1915)
Direction: Reginald Barker
Screenplay: Thomas H. Ince and C. Gardner Sullivan
Cast: George Beban, Clara Williams, J. Frank Burke
 

 
George Beban (right) was a renowned stage and vaudeville star. Even though he never became a major film name, Beban appeared in nearly 20 films from the mid-1910s to the mid-1920s, almost invariably in the role of an Italian. His first feature film, in fact, was quite succinctly called The Italian.
Directed by the respected Reginald Barker (among whose credits is the 1916 William S. Hart vehicle The Aryan), The Italian depicts the plight of an Italian immigrant who arrives in the Land of Plenty only to find poverty, heartbreak, and death (no, not his own).
A not uncommon theme for the [...]

TESS OF THE STORM COUNTRY – Mary Pickford

Tess of the Storm Country (1914)
Direction: Edwin S. Porter
Screenplay: B. P. Schulberg; from Grace Miller White’s novel
Cast: Mary Pickford, Harold Lockwood, Olive Carey (as Olive Golden), David Hartford, Louise Dunlap
 

 
Directed by Edwin S. Porter (of The Great Train Robbery fame), the 1914 version of Tess of the Storm Country is both technically primitive and thematically saccharine. However, this shamelessly manipulative melodrama about a bratty waif who manages to save her father from prison and to marry a rich, good-looking guy boasts a solid comic performance by Mary Pickford, at the time probably the most popular film performer in the world. Pickford is so good, in fact, that she succeeds in making the maudlin material at worst bearable [...]

DAYS OF ‘36 d: Theo Angelopoulos

Meres tou ‘36 / Days of ‘36 (1972)
Direction: Theo Angelopoulos
Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos, Petros Markaris, Thanassis Valtinos and Stratis Karras
Cast: Giorgos Kiritsis, Christoforos Chimaras, Takis Doukakos, Kostas Pavlou, Petros Zarkadis, Christophoros Nezer
 

 
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
Greek film director Theo Angelopoulos‘ 1972 effort Meres Tou ‘36 / Days of ‘36, winner of the International Film Critics Association award at the Berlin Film Festival, is the least of the several films of his that I’ve seen. It is also, by over a decade and a half, the earliest one I’ve seen so far, and at one hour and 45 minutes it is by a good margin the shortest as well. [...]

TAKEN – Liam Neeson

Taken (2008)
Direction: Pierre Morel
Screenplay: Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen
Cast: Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen, Xander Berkeley, Katie Cassidy, Olivier Rabourdin
 

 

Taken, directed by Pierre Morel and written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, is a remarkably effective action thriller. Liam Neeson stars as Bryan Mills, an ex-CIA agent who quit his job so as to salvage his relationship with his daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace). Bryan had already sacrificed his marriage to his (by now) ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) and doesn’t want to repeat the same mistake.
After Bryan saves a flippant singer from a would-be attacker, he encounters a situation infinitely more dangerous than his CIA assignments. Though hesitant, Bryan allows Kim to go to Paris with her friend [...]

BLADE RUNNER – Harrison Ford – d: Ridley Scott

Blade Runner (1982)
Direction: Ridley Scott
Screenplay: Hampton Fancher and David Peoples; from Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Cast: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos, M. Emmet Walsh, Daryl Hannah, Joanna Cassidy, Brion James
 

 

By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
Director Ridley Scott’s dystopian 1982 sci-fi drama Blade Runner is one of those Hollywood productions whose initially mixed reviews were actually closer to the mark than the decades of hagiography that followed. That’s not to say that Blade Runner is a bad film; it’s only a much-ballyhooed mediocrity — due mostly to its sluggish screenplay — rather than a great film.
Adapted by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples [...]

CASABLANCA VII – Final Commentary

Dooley Wilson, Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca

CASABLANCA Review Part VI
On the plus side, Casablanca is quite modern in terms of pacing (and in some aspects of editing), for within the first ten or twelve minutes you feel as if you know these archetypal characters (for good or ill), as if you’d already had a full movie’s worth of them under your belt. This is part of the reason why the film sucks you into its vortex, and gets (subjectively) better as it goes on, even if, objectively, it’s fairly static in terms of plot.
On the downside, Casablanca has not dated well because of its poor special effects (at the level of Alfred [...]

CASABLANCA

Casablanca (1942)
Direction: Michael Curtiz
Screenplay: Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch; from Murray Burnett and Joan Alison’s unproduced play "Everybody Comes to Rick’s"
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Conrad Veidt, S. Z. Sakall, Dooley Wilson, Joy Page
 

Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca
 

By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
About three years ago, I finally gave in to watch It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) for the first time. I had hesitated because of the five- and ten-minute snippets of the film I had seen, and for its reputation as a hokey Christmas story ‘chestnut.’ Well, was I wrong, for It’s a Wonderful Life is a truly great film — arguably the best [...]

MAN BITES DOG d: Benoît Poelvoorde, Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel

C’est arrivé près de chez vous / Man Bites Dog aka It Happened in Your Neighborhood (1992)
Direction: Benoît Poelvoorde, Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel. Screenplay: Benoît Poelvoorde, Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, Vincent Tavier. Cast: Benoît Poelvoorde, Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, Jean-Marc Chenut, Alain Oppexxi, Vincent Tavier
 

 
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
The 1992 Belgian mockumentary C’est arrivé près de chez vous / Man Bites Dog (or, somewhat literally, It Happened in Your Neighborhood) is one of those films that is neither bad nor good, and not really its own "thing," either. By that I mean that it is manifestly influenced by works that came before it, so it is nothing original, while also displaying techniques that [...]

PURPLE VIOLETS d: Edward Burns

Purple Violets (2007)
Direction and screenplay: Edward Burns. Cast: Selma Blair, Patrick Wilson, Edward Burns, Debra Messing, Dennis Farina, Donal Logue.
 

Writer-director Edward Burns’ perfectly watchable Purple Violets is a romantic drama about relationships and, to a lesser extent, the world of fiction writing. The film’s focal point is Patti Petalson (Selma Blair), a real-estate agent who has been married for seven years to overbearing chef Chazz Coleman (Donal Logue) and who longs to indulge her true passion, fiction writing. A former college boyfriend, Brian Callahan (Patrick Wilson), is actually living that dream, having become a famous novelist. Brian is so successful, in fact, that his detective [...]

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN d: Tomas Alfredson

Låt den rätte komma in / Let the Right One In (2008)
Direction: Tomas Alfredson. Screenplay: John Ajvide Lindqvist, from his novel. Cast: Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson, Per Ragnar, Henrik Dahl, Karin Bergquist.
 

Directed by Tomas Alfredson from a screenplay by John Ajvide Lindqvist, Låt den rätte komma in / Let the Right One In is not only a satisfying horror film from beginning to end — one of the best entries in the vampire genre since Blade, Interview with a Vampire, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula — but it’s also a subtle love story, which happens to add an intricate ingredient to the film’s memorability.
Where 30 Days of Night was more concerned with setting up [...]

YOUNG PEOPLE FUCKING d: Martin Gero

Young People Fucking (2008)
Direction: Martin Gero. Screenplay: Martin Gero and Aaron Abrams. Cast: Aaron Abrams, Diora Baird, Sonja Bennett, Callum Blue, Kristin Booth, Josh Cooke, Josh Dean, Ennis Esmer, Natalie Lisinska, Peter Oldring, Carly Pope
 

 
Directed by Martin Gero and written by Gero and Aaron Abrams, Young People Fucking is a film about, you guessed it, young adults engaging in sexual intercourse, the situations surrounding the acts, and the lives of the participants. The situations are: The Friends, The Couple, The First Date, The Roommates, and The Exes. The sexual acts involved are Prelude, Foreplay, Sex, Interlude, Orgasm, and Afterglow.
The ballsy title alone draws one’s attention to this romantic comedy, while [...]

WILD WOMEN OF WONGO d: James L. Wolcott

Wild Women of Wongo (1958)
Direction: James L. Wolcott. Screenplay: Cedric Rutherford. Cast: Jean Hawkshaw, Adrienne Borbeau, Ed Fury, Mary Ann Webb, Cande Gerrard, Johnny Walsh, Zuni Dyer
 
At first, these women in The Wild Women of Wongo don’t look so "wild." They are compliant and obedient to their Wongo male counterparts, sporting perfectly coiffed hair and donning custom-made summer wear. (I guess beauticians and tailors were plentiful around 1,000 BCE.) But when a handsome male member of the neighboring Goona tribe washes ashore to negotiate for a Wongo bride, the women are so smitten by him that they rise up against their men to prevent them from killing the Goona guy, knocking over an [...]

BAGHEAD d: Jay and Mark Duplass

Baghead (2008)
Direction and Screenplay: Jay Duplass, Mark Duplass. Cast: Ross Partridge, Greta Gerwig, Steve Zissis, Elise Muller
 

 
Baghead, the newest release by the brothers Jay and Mark Duplass, played at Montreal’s Just For Laughs Film Festival to a packed audience. Baghead has been advertised as a creepy movie about young people in a cabin in the woods, who are stalked and hunted. In truth, Baghead is more about four young extras who decide to take control of their own future by writing a feature film starring themselves, and then setting out to make it.
Brothers Matt and Chad (Ross Partridge and Steve Zissis) convince their friends Catherine and Michelle (Elise Muller and Greta Gerwig) to go to their uncle’s cabin [...]

VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA – Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz – d: Woody Allen

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)
Direction and Screenplay: Woody Allen. Cast: Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson, Rebecca Hall, Patricia Clarkson, Kevin Dunn, Chris Messina
 

I saw Woody Allen’s latest film at its Canadian premiere at the 32nd Montreal World Film Festival to a sold-out crowd in the beautiful Italian Renaissance-styled Imperial Theatre. The audience — people of all ages and types — had been there for nearly an hour before the show started.
Now, one thing I have been hearing or reading a lot about new Woody Allen films is that people long for the "old" Woody. They complain that new Woody Allen films are not really Woody Allen films. Well, I hate those comments. It is so easy for audience members [...]

FIRE d: Deepa Mehta

Fire (1996)
Direction and screenplay: Deepa Mehta. Cast: Shabana Azmi, Nandita Das, Jaaved Jaaferi, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Ranjit Chowdhry, Kushal Rekhi, Alice Poon
 
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
I watched the 1996 Canadian film Fire by Indian filmmaker Deepa Mehta after having long heard of its taboo nature based mainly on its depiction of lesbianism. And while not a silly film — such as the softcore When Night Is Falling or the horrid Hollywood ‘Hook’em’ Brokeback Mountain — Fire is nowhere near a great film, either.
As for the lesbianism, there is very little skin and the ‘love story’ is rather demure. On the other hand, there is far too much radical Feminist (capital F) ideology that lowers the intellectual argument of Mehta’s film — [...]

PINEAPPLE EXPRESS – Seth Rogen, James Franco

Pineapple Express (2008)
Direction: David Gordon Green. Screenplay: Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen; from a story by Goldberg, Rogen, and Judd Apatow. Cast: Seth Rogen, James Franco, Danny McBride, Gary Cole, Rosie Perez, Craig Robinson, Kevin Corrigan
 

 
I saw the newest Apatovian effort, Pineapple Express, at a Just for Laughs Film Festival press screening in Montreal. Directed by David Gordon Green, with a screenplay by Seth Rogen and his close friend Evan Goldberg (both of Superbad fame), Pineapple Express was a pleasant surprise. I was expecting the film to be silly, rude, immature, tripe, and common. And while it is silly, rude, and immature, it is also hilarious and happens to be neither common nor tripe. Now, I must admit that these [...]

COBRA – Rudolph Valentino, Nita Naldi

Cobra (1925)
Direction: Joseph Henabery. Screenplay: Anthony Coldeway; from Martin Brown’s play. Cast: Rudolph Valentino, Nita Naldi, Casson Ferguson, Gertrude Olmstead, Eileen Percy, Lillian Langdon, Hector Sarno
 
Cobra is my favorite Rudolph Valentino film. Directed by Joseph Henabery, with a screenplay by Anthony Coldewey from a play by Martin Brown, this was Valentino’s finest moment. He is at the height of his beauty, impeccably shot by J. D. Hennings and Harry Fischbeck — despite the glare from the gallon of pomade in his hair.
In Cobra, Valentino plays Rodrigo Torriani, a dissolute, debt-ridden playboy living in a mansion inherited from his likewise randy ancestors. Rodrigo’s problem is that he is an irresistible magnet for women. They stick to him like white on rice, [...]

BAGHDAD HIGH d: Ivan O’Mahoney and Laura Winter

The Boys from Baghdad High / Baghdad High (TV, 2008)
Direction: Ivan O’Mahoney and Laura Winter. Featuring: Hayder Khalid, Mohammad Raed, Anmar Refat, Ali Shadman
 

 
When I sat down to watch Ivan O’Mahoney and Laura Winter’s Baghdad High — The Boys of Baghdad High in the United Kingdom, where it was initially shown — I didn’t know what to expect.
Baghdad High is a documentary about four Baghdad male youths entering their final year of high school. They have each been given cameras and asked to document their experiences. The year is 2006, which was a grueling time for Iraq. In October ‘06, the month they began school, 2,722 Iraqis were killed — most of them because of their ethnicity and/or [...]

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