a_film_you_should_see_take_2 ever dumbening blathe length maintenance committee aaaaaaaand action! a_film_you_should_see was getting a bit long. and just to start things off (even though i haven't seen this one for a while), i'll say, um, the cook the thief his wife and her lover. watch the use of color. not for the faint of heart. 080616 ... cr0wl robert bresson's "mouchette" i've watched it several times. it has played in my pick-up truck on the portable dvd player for three weeks now. (and i haven't wrecked...yet.) it's one of those films that are so expertly shot and so rich with metaphor that it requires speed ups and rewinds and pauses up the yin yang. if you see it, let me know, i would love to discuss it with you and see if you know what i'm saying. 080617 ... ever dumbening ooooh, shit. it's on now. gots me some netflix action hap'nin. instantly (yes, friends, that's right, i said instantly) watched _blame it on fidel_. quite good. it's fun to watch anna's world build and shift bit by bit. the young actress is truly talented. 080621 ... cr0wl truffaut's "400 blows" i am in love with 60's films from french directors. i eat them. 080622 ... ever dumbening blame it on fidel is french, and the story starts in the 60's, does that count? ;) 080622 ... ever dumbening belle epoque. divine. fun funny sexy. i'm going to marry ariadna gil--let it be known. ~~~ kontroll was strange and interesting. cool tunes. i seriously have a netflix problem. oh my. 080628 ... cr0wl 4 months 3 weeks 2 days 080629 ... ever dumbening ha. that's crazy. i just watched that last night. enjoyable, but wasn't blown away. very textural. i've always had the hots for romanian women, ever since i was six and fell for nadia comaneci at the '76 olympics. [yes, i'm aware that sexual attraction might not be an appropriate response given the nature of the film (or maybe it's exactly the right response).] also watched ong bak (great opening scene, and great chase on foot scene, otherwise decent but too long). 080629 ... birdmad and his penchant for excess i blame E.D. but some more Greenaway coming your way Prospero's Books 8-1/2 Women and i've probably put it on the previous list but, The Pillow Book. 080630 ... cr0wl godard's first feature... "breathless" belmondo and seberg! 080630 ... ever dumbening wristcutters: a love story kind of a blather anthem 080702 ... cr0wl the return a russian film that won the 2003 silver lion award at the venice film festival. i'm ukrainian (my last name translates as cuckoobird, no shit) and so the film resonated in my subconcious quite nicely. it's a stunningly beautiful piece of work by a first time director. 080705 ... birdmad Black Book (Zwartboek) Paul Verhoeven gets back to his Dutch roots in this story of a young Jewish woman's struggles with life, love and death and betrayal in Nazi-occupied Holland in 1944-45. Carice van Houten delivers an impressive performance as Rachel/Ellis, never quite able to be certain who are her real allies and enemies. As with much of Verhoeven's work, he does not shy away from the use of sex and violence in the telling of the tale, so some may want to take note of that 080707 ... ever netflixening yo b-mad, you been readin' my netflix queue or what? that's next on my list! 080707 ... ebird grendeling neighbor rented it and then let me borrow it before he took it back...quelle coincidence, non? 080708 ... c r 0 w l surfwise documentary about the pascowitz family's surfing odyssey...dad, mom, 8 boys, 1 girl, traveling the best surf brakes in a 24' camper...no schooling except for reading and classical music...explores the crazy but fascinating mind of the dad's reasons for doing it and interviews the kids now that they've grown and can process the goods and bads of the experience... 080803 ... cr0wl bella 080809 ... crOwl badlands terrence malick's first film featuring a teen-aged sissy spacek and a james dean-like martin sheen 080902 ... cr0wl the life before her eyes during a high school shooting, the gunman confronts two girls in the girls' bathroom and forces them to decide which one will die. from the director of "the house of sand and fog." ...gorgeous cinematography 080906 ... unhinged the darjeeling limited owen wilson, adrien brody, and jason schwartzman as brothers on a spiritual journey through india. (i know i know, i'm not as indie as y'all) i want to go on my own spiritual journey through india on a train someday. i am now enamoured of trains thanks to taking the amtrak to chicago. still have that net flix problem e.d.? 080906 ... eatingstars ever_dumbening mentioned this on a_film_you_should see : Das Leben Der Anderen but i thought I'd mention the english title as well : The Lives Of Others it's about the secret police in east germany listening to everyones secrets, because they want to know everything it's amazing 080906 ... eatingstars rather.. a_film_you_should_see 080906 ... c r 0 w l hunger steve mcqueen's (no not that one) first feature film...flesh becomes words. in prison he writes his words on a small piece of paper, rolls it up, and places it in his mouth. when he kisses her on a visit, she takes the words from him to the outside... 080907 ... crOwl red road a film from glascow, fascinating storytelling using the subject of surveillance cameras... 2006 cannes award winner 080913 ... cr0wl freaks and geeks dvd / tv series 080914 ... jane war dance a documentary about children in a displacement camp in northern uganda who compete in their country's national music and dance festival. nominated for an oscar. tagline: The war stole everything, except their music. 080915 ... ever dumbening maybe this one should be a_films_you_should_see, since it would behoove you to watch both. in honor of mr newman, i highly recommend watching the hustler and the color of money, back to back. the hustler is slow, smokey, sultry—the black and white framing it perfectly. we get to see the brash "fast eddie" felson (played by newman) get humbled by minnesota fats (a brilliant jackie gleason). many years later, now in color and directed by scorsese, we get to see newman go from student to teacher. tom cruise is now the reckless one. one of my favorite things about the connection of the two movies is the game that is played in each. in the hustler, it's straight pool—exacting, precise, lengthy, a classic game for masters. while in the color of money the game is nine-ball—an explosive, fast, and risky romp that is up for grabs at any point. the hustler even has george c. scott. what more do you need? okay, then how about i throw in a small part for forest whitaker in the color of money. "i'm back, baby!" 080927 ... c r 0 w l the fall son of rambow 080928 ... jane e.d. - if you're on a pool movie streak you should watch "turn the river" starring famke janssen (who is not only incredibly attractive but also an intriguing actor). it also has rip torn who is always great. it is by no means an upper of a movie (that is to say it's no feel-good flick) but it is well-acted and well produced. 080928 ... cr0wl a state of mind three uk film makers are permitted inside north korea to make a doc about the mass games and beautifully reveal the bizarre world of communism. 081020 ... cr0wl snow angels personal story of the unwinding and winding up of minds...sam rockwell is brilliant as a pyscho/born again/delusional/mamma's boy. olivia thirby is the photogeek/intellectual/soulmate/everyman's girl well photographed. 081103 ... cr0wl paranoid park gus van sant's trippy skateboard drama set in portland 081106 ... c r 0 w l the visitor poignant immigration story set in modern day nyc from tom mccarthy the writer/director of "the station agent" 081107 ... cr0wl dvd of "this american life" complete season from showtime and killer films riveting, provocative, and addictive 081108 ... cr0wl transsiberian breath-takingly photographed train journey from china to moscow turns into drug trafficking thriller 081115 ... cr0wl twety-eight weeks later hand-held jerky and unique camera angles zombie gore 081116 ... bsc twenty, give me that "n" back zombie fuck! 081116 ... birdmad Control, rock Photographer Anton Corbijn's biography of Joy_Division frontman Ian Curtis, as based on Deborah Curtis' memoir "Touching from a Distance" Images kept in black and white, a photo-album come to moving life haunting, maybe even a little heart-breaking portrait of a man, his genius and his flaws 081117 ... cr0wl my name is lisa 2007 winner best short film/youtube shelton films 081117 ... cr0wl down to the bone outstanding anti-drug film vera farmiga/hugh dillon 081203 ... unhinged slumdog millionaire had free passes to an advance screening yesterday. don't remember the name of the director or anything like that, but it was a heart wrenching story about two orphan brothers in india. and a couple of m.i.a. songs are in it ;-) 081203 ... birdmad Lust, Caution 色，戒 (Se Jie) Political intrigue, personal intrigue, sex, death and betrayal in WWII-era China. Good film from Ang Lee and works as an oddly appropriate companion piece to Paul Verhoeven's "Zwartboek" ("Black Book") 081204 ... birdmad The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert most awesome goddamn movie EVARRRRRRR (Plus the hilarity of General Zod, Agent Smith/Lord ELrond and the guy from Memento as convincingly fabulous queens = BRILLIANT!) 081204 ... jane not sure if i put this yet, but "flight from death: the quest for immortality" if you are in the mood for an incredible documentary. www.flightfromdeath.com "Narrated by Gabriel Byrne (Usual Suspects, Vanity Fair, Miller's Crossing), this seven-time Best Documentary award-winning film (Silver Lake Film Festival, Beverly Hills Film Festival) is the most comprehensive and mind-blowing investigation of humankind's relationship with death ever captured on film. Hailed by many viewers as a "life-transformational film," Flight from Death uncovers death anxiety as a possible root cause of many of our behaviors on a psychological, spiritual, and cultural level. Following the work of the late cultural anthropologist, Ernest Becker, and his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Denial of Death, this documentary explores the ongoing research of a group of social psychologists that may forever change the way we look at ourselves and the world. Over the last twenty-five years, this team of researchers has conducted over 300 laboratory studies, which substantiate Becker's claim that death anxiety is a primary motivator of human behavior, specifically aggression and violence. Flight from Death features an all-star cast of scholars, authors, philosophers, and researchers including Sam Keen, Robert Jay Lifton, Irvin Yalom, and Sheldon Solomon culminating in a film that is "not only thought-provoking but also entertaining and put together with a lot of class" (Eric Campos, Film Threat). Three years in the making and beautifully photographed in eight different countries, Flight from Death is "a stimulating, ultimately life-affirming film, filled with big ideas and revelatory footage" (Jeff Shannon, Seattle Times). " 081204 ... birdmad needs a blackjack table The Cooler William H. Macy as a man whose bad luck is so contagious that he is indentured to a casino boss to sour other people's luck at his tables until the day he becomes lucky in love with Maria Bello and begins to see a little light as both of them look for their lucky break 081205 ... cr0wl the lookout an intelligent crime thriller from the writer of get shorty and out of sight...reminded me slightly of memento, not as in being told backwards, but the joseph gordon-levitt character is brain damaged and must write things down lest he forgets them which figures smartly in this gripping, can't turn away from film... 081205 ... cr0wl stephanie daley drama follows pregnant forensic psychologist as she investigates a case in which a 16 year-old girl is accused of killing her newborn. in trying to determine whether the girl hid her pregnancy, gave birth and then murdered her baby, the doctor comes face to face with her own grief. 081206 ... cocoon Boy A Theres so much to say, but all I knew when I watched it was that it had won a (TV) BAFTA and it looked really good. And Im the kind of person who enjoys not knowing whats coming. It was good, but god I cried at the end. Probably never watching it again for that reason. Way too sad for me. I had thought I'd read the book as well, but no. I'd probably break down on the train :S Although I really want to talk about it with somoeone. It got me thinking. 081207 ... cr0wl blame it on fidel a french look at a 1970's child swept away into the world of her parent's involvement in revolution... 081214 ... cr0wl the bicycle thief vittorio de sica's 1948 special oscar winner from italy devastating father-son story that spookily resonates in today's financial gloom... 081215 ... cr0wl reprise Reprise is a playful film about friendship, madness and creativity, about love and sorrow, great ambitions and the often unpleasant clash between youthful presumptions and reality. With its somewhat un-Norwegian structure, Reprise has a distinct style and narrative technique which moves the story forward in a rich and enthusiastic manner. Summary Erik and Phillip are trying to make it as writers. Erik is rejected by publishers as lacking in talent, while Phillip’s manuscript is accepted and the young man becomes a major name on the Norwegian cultural scene practically overnight. Six months later, Erik and his friends come to visit Phillip at a psychiatric hospital to bring him home after long-term treatment. Writing is the last thing on Phillip’s mind, but Erik is continuing his literary attempts and tries to convince his friend to go back to writing. This film could be seen as a subtle reflection on youth as a time of promise, plans and hopes which gradually dissolve under the impact of life experiences. If the style of the narration is reminiscent of the poetic works of the French New Wave, it’s no coincidence: the director admits to the influence of François Truffaut, in particular, the latter’s Jules and Jim, in which fundamental themes are treated with an enchantingly light touch. Director biography: Joachim Trier (b. 1974, Norway) is a graduate of the National Film and Television School in England (2000). Trier has already made a string of celebrated short films. Three of them, Procter (2002), Pietà (2000) and Still (2000), have been screened at more than thirty international film festivals and won many awards. The most important accolades include the Prix UIP and the Kodak Short Film Bureau Award for Best British and Best European Film, which Procter garnered at the Edinburgh Festival in 2002. Trier also directed commercials in England and Norway for the company Moland Film AS. The film Reprise (2006) is his feature debut. Joachim has twice been the National Skateboard Champion in Norway. Reprise (2006), Procter (2002), Still (2001), Pietá (1999), Passport (1998), The Tranpararency of Evil (1996) and Fatal Strategies (1995). (source) 090104 ... cr0wl Todd Solondz's "Palindromes" is a brave and challenging film for which there may not be much of an audience. That is not a fault of the film, which does not want to be liked and only casually hopes to be understood. What it wants is to provoke. You do not emerge untouched from a Solondz film. You may hate it, but you have seen it, and in a strange way it has seen you. "Palindromes" contains characters in favor of abortion and characters opposed to it, and finds fault with all of them. The film has no heroes without flaws and no villains without virtues, and that is true no matter who you think the heroes and villains are. To ambiguity it adds perplexity by providing us with a central character named Aviva, a girl of about 12 played by eight different actors, two of them adults, one a boy, one a 6-year-old girl. She is not always called Aviva. The point, I think, is to begin with the fact of a girl becoming pregnant at a too-early age and then show us how that situation might play out in different kinds of families with different kinds of girls. The method by which Aviva becomes pregnant is illegal in all cases, since she is underage, but there is a vast difference between a scenario in which Aviva persuades the reluctant son of family friends to experiment with sex, and another where she runs away from home and meets a truck driver. Perhaps Solondz is suggesting that our response to Aviva's pregnancy depends on the circumstances. He doesn't take an obvious position on anything in the movie, but simply presents it and leaves us to sort it out. We probably can't. "Palindromes" is like life: We know what we consider to be good and bad, but we can't always be sure how to apply our beliefs in the messy real world. Consider an early scene in the film where one of the Avivas gets pregnant and wants to have the child. Her mother (Ellen Barkin) argues that this will destroy her life; an abortion will allow her to continue her education and grow up to be a normal adolescent, rather than being a mother at 13. The mother goes on to make a long list of possible birth defects that might occur in an underage pregnancy. Later in the film, we meet the "Sunshine Family," a household full of adopted children with birth defects: One with Down Syndrome, one born without arms, etc. It occurs to us that these are the hypothetical children Barkin did not want her daughter to bear. The children are happy and seem pleased to be alive. Yes, but does Solondz consider the adoptive parents of the Sunshine Family to be good and moral people? Not precisely, not after we find Father Sunshine conspiring to bring about a murder. The plot circles relentlessly, setting up moral situations and then pulling the moral ground out from under them. The movie is almost reckless in the way it refuses to provide us with a place to stand. It is all made of paradoxes. Pregnancy is pregnancy, rape is rape, abortion is abortion, murder is murder, and yet in the world of "Palindromes" the facts and categories shift under the pressure of human motives -- some good, some bad, some misguided, some well-intentioned but disastrous. We look for a clue in the movie's title. A "palindrome" is a word which is spelled the same way forward and backward: Aviva, for example, or madam or racecar. Is Solondz saying that it doesn't matter which side of the issue we enter from, it's all the same and we'll wind up where we started? While following the news during the Terry Schiavo case, I was struck by how absolutely sure of their opinions everyone was, on both sides. Could the reporters have found a few people willing to say that after giving the matter a lot of thought, they'd decided it was a tragedy no matter which way you looked at it? Solondz is perhaps arguing for moral relativism, for the idea that what is good in a situation is defined by the situation itself, not by absolute abstractions imposed from outside. Solondz has made a career out of challenging us to figure out what side of any issue he's on. You can't walk out of one of his movies ("Welcome to the Dollhouse," "Happiness," "Storytelling") and make a list of the characters you like and the ones you don't. There's something to be said for and against everybody. Most movies, like most people, are so certain, and we like movies we can agree with; he makes movies where, like a member of the debate team, you sometimes feel like you're defending a position just because that's the side you were assigned. If the movie is a moral labyrinth, it is paradoxically straightforward and powerful in the moment; each individual story has an authenticity and impact of its own. Consider the pathos brought to Aviva by the actress Sharon Wilkins, who is a plus-size adult black woman playing a little girl, and who creates perhaps the most convincing little girl of them all. Or Jennifer Jason Leigh, three times as old as Aviva but barely seeming her age. These individual segments are so effective that at the end of each one we know how we feel, and why. It's just that the next segment invalidates our conclusions. I look at a movie like this, and I consider what courage it took to make it. Solondz from the beginning has made a career out of refusing to cater to broad safe tastes. He shows us transgressive or evil characters, invites us to identify with their pathos, then shows us that despite our sympathy they're rotten anyway. You walk out of one of his films feeling like you've just failed a class in ethics, and wondering if in this baffling world anyone ever passes. (source) 090126 ... cr0wl marion bridge, highly recommended Directed by Wiebke von Carolsfeld Not rated, 90 minutes When ''Marion Bridge,'' a small, exquisitely acted Canadian film, is observing the psychological tensions of three grown-up sisters attending their dying mother in a small Nova Scotia town, it uncovers a complexity and depth of feeling rarely glimpsed in a family drama. It's all in the details, as they say. And ''Marion Bridge,'' adapted by the director Wiebke von Carolsfeld from a play by Daniel MacIvor, takes the raw ingredients of soap opera -- the spilling of family secrets and the opening of old wounds as a parent slips away -- and spins them into something truthful and quietly compelling. The dying mother, Rose (Marguerite McNeil), is a thorny, willful alcoholic and devout Catholic who keeps a flask by her bed and sneaks as many cigarettes as she can cadge, even though two or three puffs produce uncontrollable coughing fits. Most of the drama is filtered through the sensibility of Agnes (Molly Parker), the restless youngest sister and the family's black sheep, who is in shaky recovery from alcohol and cocaine addiction. The most urbane of the sisters, Agnes lives in Toronto and has a history of stirring up trouble whenever she returns home and then disappearing, leaving others to clean up the mess. But this time Agnes is determined to face down her demons and act responsibly, and she begins by cleaning up the kitchen. But her siblings are still deeply suspicious of their reformed sister. As a teenager she was sexually molested by their father and had his child, who is now a teenager living nearby with an adoptive mother. The oldest sister, Theresa (Rebecca Jenkins), a grim, long-suffering refugee from a failed marriage, still visits her ex-husband and broods about reasons for the breakup. The middle sister, Louise (Stacy Smith), who spends all day watching hockey on television, is a repressed lesbian who is slowly gathering the courage to declare her feelings to her closest friend. The movie, which opens today in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New Orleans, is at its best when evoking the volatile mixture of small-town boredom and seething hothouse hostilities that threaten to turn an enforced family reunion into a battleground. But once the movie has laid out its characters and their histories, it doesn't know where to take them. In the most problematic scenes, Agnes steals away to visit her brash, sullen 15-year-old daughter, Joanie, who works in a crafts shop owned by her adoptive mother, Chrissy (Hollis McLaren). It isn't long before the girl, who has never been told of her parentage, begins to suspect the truth. Where the scenes of the sisters and the mother coexisting precariously are pitch-perfect, the other strands of the story, especially a meeting of the sisters with their doddering father, feel forced and dramatically indecisive. Despite its weaknesses, ''Marion Bridge,'' whose title refers to a homey folk song that carries symbolic importance to the family, is remarkable for its seamless ensemble performances, especially those of Ms. Parker, Ms. Jenkins and Ms. McNeil. ~STEPHEN HOLDEN,nytimes film critic 090201 ... c a note...canadian indie queen ellen page plays joanie, in perhaps one of her earliest film roles. 090201 ... cr0wl latcho drom The film Latcho Drom is a unique product, which is more like a 2 hour long music video, showcasing gypsy music from all around the world. This is an amazing way of seeing the common treads that unite roma (or gypsy) culture in all parts of the world, but also how these people have adapted to their surrounding by adopting bits and pieces of local music traditions. (source) 090216 ... jane Brazil. 090217 ... cr0wl Snow Cake is a 2006 independent drama film directed by Marc Evans and starring Alan Rickman, Sigourney Weaver, Carrie-Anne Moss, Emily Hampshire, and Callum Keith Rennie. It was released on September 8, 2006 in the UK. Filmed in Wawa, Ontario, Snow Cake is a drama about the friendship between Linda, an autistic woman (Weaver), and Alex (Rickman) who is traumatized after a car accident involving himself and Linda's daughter (Hampshire). (source) The movie was screened and discussed at Autism Cymru 2nd international conference in May 2006 as well as the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Seattle International Film Festival, among others. It was the opening night screening for the Berlin Film Festival as well Plot When Vivienne Freeman (Emily Hampshire) gets a ride from ex-convict Alex Hughes (Alan Rickman), she is killed by a truck crashing into the car, while Alex only gets a nosebleed. Everybody agrees that it is not Alex's fault. He visits the victim's mother Linda (Sigourney Weaver), who is autistic. She has been informed about her daughter's death a few hours before Alex's visit, but does not show any signs of grief. However, she has a cleanliness mania which involves her constantly making sure everything in her home is neat, and prevents her from touching garbage bags. Her problem is finding someone who will put the garbage outside to be collected, as this was always something done by her daughter. Linda insists that Alex stay a few days so that he can do it for her. He agrees and also arranges Vivienne's funeral. During his stay he begins a relationship with one of Linda's neighbours, Maggie (Carrie-Anne Moss), who Linda mistakenly thinks is a prostitute. The police warn Maggie against becoming close with Alex because he is not long out of jail for committing murder. Maggie does not confront Alex about the matter, but instead waits until he brings the subject up himself. Alex reveals that he killed the man who caused his son's death in a car crash while he was on his way to meet Alex for the first time — Alex had only recently learned about his existence, the result of an affair a long time ago. Linda dislikes Maggie to the point where she initially refuses her help. But after Alex leaves to see the mother of his son, she allows Maggie to come into her home and help her. Awards and critical recognition The film was nominated in 4 categories for the 27th Genie Awards in 2007: ? Best actress: Sigourney Weaver ? Best supporting actress: Emily Hampshire ? Best supporting actress: Carrie Anne Moss (Won) ? Cinematography: Steve Cosens Also, Snow Cake won the Zip.ca People's Choice Award at the 2007 Kingston Canadian Film Festival. 090218 ... ever dumbening saw the five oscar-nominated shorts with a friend of blather's own ouroboros. all five were quite good. on the whole, they were very intense and meaty. if pressed, i would choose _manon sur le bitume_. 090218 ... raze the red balloon (1956) [le ballon rouge] magical. i don't know what else to say about it. the ending is almost too much for me to take. kind of funny that a balloon of all things could inspire so many emotions in the space of just thirty four minutes. 090224 ... cr0wl coraline pure extravagance! bizarre! wicked! crazy! yikes! did she just do what i think she did? 090225 ... cr0wl the changeling i know this film has had many bad reviews and they are justified to an extent, however the story is awesome. angelina kind of floats through her various emotional states, like some kind of disrespected angel/woman. there are some amazing scenes, especially when the psycho-killer is hung and when one of the boys comes home...it's like a norman rockwell come to life, but a painting he might have done if he was inspired by a nightmare. 090227 ... cr0wl hbo/bbc's "five days" british sensationalism and mystery during a missing mother and her children case. had me wanting to figure out what happened to the mom... 090228 ... cr0wl ben x Ben is different. His life is a universe all to itself, where he avidly plays his favorite on-line computer game in an attempt to train for and block out the reality of his daily experiences. Ben has Asperger's Syndrome, a mild form of autism that prevents normal communication and makes him ideal fodder for all the school bullies. As the bullies' relentless attacks push him over the edge and out of control, his on-line dream girl, Scarlite, appears to him and helps him devise a perfect plan to confront the bullies and make them pay for their torment. Director Nic Balthazar's dazzling debut blends fantasy and harsh social realism, based on a true story, to bring us an utterly original and important film. Drama | Belgium | English Subtitles 8 Awards | 1 Nomination Belgium's Academy Award Submission for Best Foreign Language Film "Buttressed by strong performances particularly newcomer Timmermans in the lead the film has not an ounce of fat or histrionics. Rarely has so much emotion and excitement been compressed into 90 minutes of screen time." --Denis Seguin, Screen Daily 090313 ... rt rachel getting married Out of Rehab, Wreaking Havoc By A. O. SCOTT The problem in “Rachel Getting Married” — not the problem with the film, mind you — is that even though Rachel is the one getting married, it’s all about Kym, her younger sister. Kym, played by a decidedly un-princessy Anne Hathaway, is furloughed from rehab for the happy event, arriving at her father’s rambling Connecticut clapboard house on a toxic cloud of snark, cigarette smoke and wounded narcissism. With her pale, slack features and dark-rimmed eyes framed by severe bangs, Ms. Hathaway resembles the silent film star Louise Brooks in “Pandora’s Box,” except that Kym is less like the curious maiden of Greek mythology than like the box itself: a bottomless repository of guilt, destructiveness and general bad feeling. More About This Movie And yet she is also an undeniably magnetic figure, drawing the attention of her father (Bill Irwin) away from Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) and pulling both the film’s and her family’s center of gravity toward the self-loathing, self-pitying core of her damaged personality. And like the family the film, directed by Jonathan Demme from a screenplay by Jenny Lumet, both accommodates Kym’s need for recognition and struggles against it. The themes of dependency and recovery that Kym brings home in her overnight bag are familiar, even banal. Every unhappy family may be unique, but every addict is fundamentally the same, and if “Rachel Getting Married” had surrendered its story completely to Kym, it would have risked becoming as drab and familiar as a made-for-television 12-step homily. But Mr. Demme protects the film against such an unsatisfying fate. He is certainly sympathetic to Kym, even as he and Ms. Hathaway conspire to show her at her appalling worst. But he has never been one to restrict his sympathies, and the wonderful thing about “Rachel Getting Married” is how expansive it seems, in spite of the limits of its scope and the modesty of its ambitions. It’s a small movie, and in some ways a very sad one, but it has an undeniable and authentic vitality, an exuberance of spirit, that feels welcome and rare. Neither the conceit nor the approach are all that unusual. In press materials Mr. Demme cites “A Wedding,” Robert Altman’s marvelously anarchic 1978 pageant of bourgeois dysfunction, as an inspiration. He also shows a clear debt to the ostentatiously austere methods of the fading Dogma 95 movement. The audience only hears music that the people in the movie hear as well, and the proceedings are recorded by a busily wandering video camera, giving “Rachel Getting Married” some of the rough, hectic intimacy of “The Celebration,” Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogma tour de force about a family party knocked off kilter by secrets and recriminations. Mr. Demme is neither as sadistic as Mr. Vinterberg nor as satirical as Mr. Altman. This is, after all, the man who directed “The Silence of the Lambs,” surely the most humane serial-killer movie in the annals of the genre, as well as the infinitely tolerant “Philadelphia.” (His more recent work consists of earnest documentaries like “Jimmy Carter Man From Plains” and “The Agronomist” and underrated updates of 1960s thrillers — “The Manchurian Candidate” and “The Truth About Charlie.”) He is the kind of filmmaker who gives Hollywood liberalism a good name, and the most striking aspect of “Rachel Getting Married” is how, without overt ideological posturing, it paints a faithful and affectionate (though hardly uncritical) portrait of blue-state America. And this is where the movie turns out to be, after all, about Rachel, a lovely and complicated young woman whose adoring fiancé, Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe), is black. Rachel and Kym’s stepmother, Carol (Anna Deavere Smith), is also African-American, as far as we can tell. These facts are never mentioned by anyone in the movie, which gathers races, traditions and generations in a pleasing display of genteel multiculturalism. It’s a big, messy gathering even without Kym’s melodrama, so there may be no time for expressions of prejudice or social unease. It might seem that this tableau is a kind of Utopian wish fulfillment, the naïve projection of a longed-for harmony that does not yet exist. To some extent this may be true, but the texture of “Rachel Getting Married” is so loose and lived in, its faces (many of them belonging to nonprofessional actors) so interesting and real, that it looks more plausibly like a mirror of the way things are. It is not that racial division is willed away or made to disappear, but rather that, on this particular weekend, other matters are more important. A wedding, after all, represents a symbolic as well as an actual union, an intimation of possible perfection in a decidedly imperfect world. And so it may be up to Kym, cynical and solipsistic, to save the movie from sentimentality, just as Rachel, embodied with calm intelligence by Ms. DeWitt, inoculates it against melodrama. Debra Winger, in a few quietly incandescent scenes as their mother, briefly lifts the movie onto another plane altogether, somehow combining movie-star charisma with an almost heartbreaking restraint and giving us a taste of what we’ve been missing in the years of her semi-retirement. In any case, it would be a shame to miss “Rachel Getting Married,” which may have its flaws, but which is so persuasively forgiving of the flaws of its inhabitants that you can only respond, in like spirit, with love. 090314 ... cr0wl Burden of dreams An extraordinary feature-length documentary about the messianic German director Werner Herzog struggling against desperate odds in the Amazon basin to make his epic feature, Fitzcarraldo. Burden of Dreams was honored with a British Academy Award for Best Documentary of 1982, and many critics consider it Blank's most awesome film.(source) herzog compares the 4 year experience of making the film to sisyphus, a challenge of the impossible. "it is the inner chronicle of who i am," he says. "we have to articulate who we are or we will just be cows in a field." 090318 ... cr0wl happy-go-lucky we're all like poppy in some way or another..."you know? yeah, i know." 090320 ... rt Pale Boy and Pale Vampire in a Still, Wintry Landscape By MANOHLA DARGIS The title of the spectrally beautiful Swedish vampire movie “Let the Right One In” comes from a song by Morrissey, a romantic fatalist who would surely appreciate this darkly perverse love story. “Let the right one in,” he sings in "Let the Right One Slip In." I’d say you were within your rights to bite/The right one and say, ‘What kept you so long?’ ” These may sound like words to live by, though in the case of a film about a boy and the girl next door who may just be a vampire, they could easily turn out to be words to die for. I’m not sure if the director Tomas Alfredson is a Morrissey fan, even if, like the singer, his movie smoothly and seemingly without effort works through a canny amalgamation of cool and hot, diffidence and passion. (John Ajvide Lindqvist, who adapted the screenplay from his horror novel, openly borrowed the title from Morrissey, a favorite.) The film’s cool is largely expressed in visual terms, in the enveloping snow, the wintry light and the cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema’s meticulously and steadily framed compositions. There is a remarkable stillness to many of the film’s most indelible images, particularly the exteriors, which are so carefully photographed, and without the usual tiresome camera jiggling, as to look almost frozen. It’s no wonder that pale, pale little Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) looks so cold. Pale and strange: with his light blond hair and alabaster skin, the 12-year-old Oskar appears not quite of this world, an alienation of body and spirit that causes him enormous pain but proves his salvation. The seemingly friendless only son of divorced, emotionally remote parents, he is also an outcast at school. The other children taunt him, particularly a pint-size sadist who grows crueler the more Oskar retreats into himself. But there are few other places he can go, which is how he ends up alone at night outside his apartment building thrusting a knife into a tree as if stabbing his tormentor. It’s an uneasy revenge fantasy that attracts the notice of a girl even paler than he is, Eli (Lina Leandersson), an outcast of a deadlier kind. The bedraggled Eli drops into Oskar’s life like a blessing, though initially she seems more like a curse. Mr. Alfredson has an elevated sense of visual beauty, but he knows how to deliver the splattery goods. One of the earliest scenes features Eli’s guardian or slave (it’s never clear which), a defeated-looking middle-aged man named Hakan (Per Ragnar), headed into the night with a little black kit, the contents of which — a knife, a plastic container, a funnel (ick) — are soon put to deadly use on a strung-up victim. The ensuing stream of red is all the more gruesome for being so matter-of-fact, though the sudden and comical appearance of an inquisitive poodle quickly eased at least one violently churning stomach. There are other interested animals in this story, and many more unsettling excuses to laugh. Yet while Mr. Alfredson takes a darkly amused attitude toward the little world he has fashioned with such care, he also takes the morbid unhappiness of his young characters seriously. Both are achingly alone, and it is the ordinary fact of their loneliness rather than their extraordinary circumstances that makes the film more than the sum of its chills and estimable technique. Eli seizes on Oskar immediately, slipping her hand under his, writing him notes, becoming his protector, baring her fangs. “Are you a vampire?” he asks tremulously at one point. Her answer may surprise you, but it’s another of his questions — “Will you be my girlfriend?” — that will floor you. “Let the Right One In” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Dripping and gushing blood, as well as some knife work. 090328 ... cr0wl time crimes spanish with subtitles mind-bending, time traveling suspense middle-aged man attempts to fix up his past fuck-up by creating multiple versions of himself. 090401 ... j city_of_god 090401 ... Ouroboros children of men This movie is haunting and fanciful, following the last generation of humans, where no one can reproduce, where the government scapegoats and abducts foreigners (and the citizens follow along apathetically,) where the schools are empty and the government passes out suicide kits. In all of this, we follow our protagonist, who seems dead already, into his past that was filled with love and family, to events that may give his (and everyone's) current life a tiny kernel of hope. 090401 ... cr0wl i've loved you so long a raw kristin scott thomas plays a sister fresh out of prison for the "conviction" of murdering her 6 year-old son. the story is how she tries to rebuild a fractured relationship with her sister. french with subtitles. tres bien. 090405 ... raze just watched a great french film myself---patrice leconte's "man on the train". it took me a while to realize that edith scob has a bit part (interesting to see her in something so different from "les yeux sans visage"). the ending is pure poetry. i just hope the projected hollywood remake never happens... 090406 ... rt "The Spirit of the Beehive," directed by Víctor Erice, takes place in a small, isolated Spanish town in 1940, shortly after the end of the civil war that inaugurated the long reign of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. The film was made in 1973, near the end of Franco's dictatorship, at a time when Spanish cinema was just starting to reawaken, and to probe, carefully and hesitantly, the buried traumas of the recent past. Perhaps fittingly, one of Mr. Erice's themes is repression — not so much the stifling of thought by political authority as the willed avoidance of painful experience. Mr. Erice's adult characters, who are seen mainly through the eyes of two young girls, seemed absorbed in brooding, evasive silence, which they break only to speak in riddles. The children themselves are more talkative and also more clearsighted, though they may not exactly understand what they see, hear or say. Mr. Erice's method is correspondingly oblique. The story that emerges from his lovely, lovingly considered images is at once lucid and enigmatic, poised between adult longing and childlike eagerness, sorrowful knowledge and startled innocence. "The Spirit of the Beehive," like "Cinema Paradiso," also takes place at the particular intersection of reality and fantasy defined by youthful moviegoing. The first scenes announce a screening, in the local town hall, of a dubbed print of James Whale's "Frankenstein," an event to which the villagers (old women and young children, in particular) drag chairs, cushions and even charcoal braziers. Ana and Isabel, sisters who live in an enormous manor house, are in the audience. Ana (Ana Torrent), the wide-eyed younger girl, is especially taken with Boris Karloff's misunderstood monster and unsettled by his fate. Isabel (Isabel Tellería), a fantasist and a mischief-maker, fills her credulous sister's head with tales about a similar creature who supposedly lives near an abandoned grange. Meanwhile, the girls' parents, Fernando (Fernando Fernán Gómez) and Teresa (Teresa Gimpera), exist at a melancholy remove from their daughters, from each other, and, it often seems, from their own lives. Fernando spends his days tending bees and his evenings writing elliptical prose poems about the insects and their habits. Teresa writes mournful letters, perhaps to a lover, and avoids contact with her husband. Though their father takes them to gather mushrooms, Ana and Isabel are frequently left to their own devices, in a state of scary, thrilling freedom that gives "The Spirit of the Beehive" a fairy-tale shimmer. Nothing especially dramatic happens until the end, when Ana's fantasies, fed by Isabel and "Frankenstein," appear to come true. At that moment, the bandages of denial and morose silence that had covered the wound of the civil war briefly slip, and Ana learns the difference between the titillations of make-believe and the fact of death. "She's had a powerful experience," the doctor tells Teresa, "but she'll get over it." This is meant to be reassuring, and it is, but it also transmits a sting of regret, since it is precisely the intensity of Ana's experiences that makes this extraordinary film impossible to forget. ~a.o. scott, ny times review 090516 ... unhinged lars and the real girl 090519 ... rt Kelly Reichardt’s latest film, “Wendy and Lucy,” is 80 minutes long — it would fit inside Baz Luhrmann’s “Australia” twice, with room to spare — and does not contain a superfluous word or shot. Like “Old Joy” (2006), Ms. Reichardt’s modest and critically beloved second feature, “Wendy and Lucy” takes place mainly outdoors and registers the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest with unostentatious affection. Instead of a musical soundtrack there is, for the most part, the sighing of the wind in the trees, the rumbling of freight trains and trucks and, sometimes, the absent-minded humming of Michelle Williams, who plays Wendy, a young woman drifting through Oregon and Washington on her way to Alaska. The Northwestern setting might put you in mind of a story by Raymond Carver, whose clean-lined prose has something in common with Ms. Reichardt’s reserved and attentive shooting style. At first glance “Wendy and Lucy” looks so modest and prosaic that it seems like little more than an extended anecdote. A young woman pauses on her journey in a nondescript, weary town and encounters a run of bad luck, some of it brought about by her own bad decisions. Her car breaks down. She is arrested for shoplifting. Her dog goes missing. But underneath this plain narrative surface — or rather, resting on it the way a smooth stone rests in your palm — is a lucid and melancholy inquiry into the current state of American society. Much as “Old Joy” turned a simple encounter between two longtime friends into a meditation on manhood and responsibility at a time of war and political confusion, so does “Wendy and Lucy” find, in one woman’s partly self-created hard luck, an intimation of more widespread hard times ahead. This movie, which was shot in August 2007 and made its way through various international festivals before arriving in Manhattan on Wednesday, seems uncannily well suited, in mood and manner, to this grim, recessionary season. We may be seeing more like it, which I suppose would be a silver lining of sorts. Ms. Reichardt, quietly establishing herself as an indispensable American filmmaker, explores some paradigmatic and contradictory native themes: the nature of solidarity in a culture of individualism; the tension between the lure of the open road and the longing for home; the competing demands of freedom and obligation. But these lofty ideas — the same ones that animated Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild,” another movie about a young person’s trek toward Alaska — are grounded in an unyielding material reality, subject to the remorseless logic of the cash nexus. The most expressive, most heartbreaking moment in “Wendy and Lucy” involves a small sum of money changing hands, a gesture that encapsulates both Ms. Reichardt’s humanism and her unsentimental sense of economic reality. Whatever big dreams may be driving Wendy, her mind is necessarily focused on dollars and cents. Ms. Williams, always a thoughtful, risk-taking actress (see everything from “Brokeback Mountain” to “I’m Not There” to “Synecdoche, New York”), here expunges all traces of movie star glamour, dressing in brown, knee-length cut-off shorts and a shapeless blue sweatshirt, and framing her delicate, slightly elfin face with drab dark hair. Wendy’s manner is wary and diffident, and she calculates the dangers and possibilities of every encounter as if she were counting out pennies and dimes. She confronts a casually indifferent, intermittently compassionate world with an attitude that seems at once independent and helpless. Contemplating the final leg of her journey, which began in Indiana, Wendy is resilient and determined. Also lost, terrified and alone. Except, that is, for Lucy, the yellow-brown mutt who is her companion, her responsibility and one of the few fixtures in Wendy’s mobile, minimal world. She has, in addition to her dog, an old Honda Accord, a money belt and a notebook in which she carefully records mileage and expenses. Her plan is to find work in a fish cannery, maybe in Ketchikan. “I hear they need people up there,” she says. It’s a plain and practical statement that is also terribly sad in its implications. Apart from Lucy, there may not be anyone else who needs or wants Wendy. When Wendy calls her sister back in Indiana from a pay phone, the sister is curt and suspicious, expecting a request for money or assistance. Some of the strangers Wendy meets are a little more generous and encouraging, but always within the constraints of their own circumstances. A parking lot security guard (Walter Dalton) becomes the closest thing she has to a friend, but only after he has shooed her off the premises. A mechanic (Will Patton) knocks a few dollars off his towing fee and gives her the benefit of his automotive expertise, which may hurt more than it helps. With one exception — a young supermarket worker (John Robinson) who insists on strict enforcement of the store’s zero-tolerance policy toward shoplifters — people give Wendy a break when they can. Ms. Williams and the filmmakers (Ms. Reichardt wrote the screenplay with Jon Raymond, from whose story “Train Choir” “Wendy and Lucy” is adapted) refrain from making too overt a play for our sympathy. Like the locals Wendy encounters, we don’t know enough about her to form a clear judgment, and we may subject her to our own doubts and prejudices. I think the film’s neutral, nonexpository style encourages this, allowing the more conventional-minded among us to wonder if driving to Alaska is really the best idea, or to question the wisdom of other aspects of Wendy’s plan. Disapproving of Wendy’s choices is one route to caring about her, which in turn leads to some difficult, uncomfortable questions. What would any of us do in her situation? What would we do if we met someone like her? How can we be sure we haven’t? What will happen to her? The strength of this short, simple, perfect story of a young woman and her dog is that this does not seem, by the end, to be an idle or trivial question. What happens to Wendy — and to Lucy — matters a lot, which is to say that “Wendy and Lucy,” for all its modesty, matters a lot too. ...ny times review 090612 ... ever dumbening kev, saw coraline tonight. thought of you the whole time. fantastic film. 091024 ... rt sex and lucia 101120 ... no reason away we go also, if you're in new york or LA http://casinojack-movie.com/showtimes-date/ 101217 what's it to you? who go blather from