Our reviewers select and review the best independent and foreign films on amazon.com, cd universe, and netflix

Unstoppable (USA 2010, 98 min. dir: Tony Scott, cast: Denzel Washington, Chris Pine, Rosario Dawson).

For every boy who every wanted a Lionel train set, this movie is the present under the Christmas tree. Tony Scott’s big bicep film is replete with big engines, tough men, and enough train talk to satisfy the most finicky foamer (the name railroad pros give to amateur train lovers).

The story has been told before. In 1962 a locomotive broke away from a rail yard in East Syracuse, NY and got half way to Rochester. Kurosawa announced his plans to shoot the story. He never did, but his script was the basis for Runaway Train with Jon Voight. In 2005 engine 8888 broke away from Toledo, Ohio and made it to Kenton before being subdued. Railroaders called that engine the Crazy Eights. For years after, people in Ohio played the number 8888 in the lottery.

The power unit in Unstoppable is labeled 777 after that Crazy Eights engine. It breaks out of a yard in Pennsylvania and goes on an unstoppable rampage on the main line until Denzel Washington and Chris Pine can figure out how to control it. The unstoppable train is, of course, stoppable. We we know that from the beginning. But the economy of story telling and the power of Tony Scott’s streamlined visuals make the journey worth the predictable ending.

Making Unstoppable is probably as good a story as is on screen. Anyone who shoots a train movie should receive an award for frustration, patience, and persistence. You can’t turn these beasts around for another shot like a car. Every move takes hours. Even though the gags are done at slower speeds and made to look faster by computer re-imaging, every stunt is life threatening. A helicopter pilot was killed filming Runaway Train in Alaska.

Major railroads don’t want film companies on their tracks, so filmmakers need to find a little spur line with its own engines. Then you have to rent your own train of cars (called a �consist� in railroad lingo). When it’s all over you’ll talk like a railroad man and no matter how accurate you’ve tried to be, the foamers will tear your movie apart on their blogs by noting every inconsistency. Want to see the mistakes in Unstoppable? Go to TrainOrders.com.

Real Women Have Curves (USA 2002, 90 min, dir: Patricia Cardoso, cast: America Ferrara, Lupe Ontiveros, Ingrid Oliu, George Lopez, Jorge Cevera Jr.)

Before fatties became trendy in American movies and on television, Real Women Have Curves celebrated cellulite in the Mexican-American community of LA. The film was ahead of its time trying to give new meaning to the term jiggle.

The storyline could be a TV movie if it were not for America Ferrara. She came on the scene here, and hasn’t stopped. Most TV watchers know her as Ugly Betty in the American adaptation of the Spanish language TV show. This is fortunate because she is rumored not to speak much Spanish.

She’s not from the barrio. She grew up in Woodland Hills. That’s right, she’s a Valley Girl. It’s kind of cute to watch her handle the occasional Spanish phrase in this thoroughly American movie.

Her father Raul ( Jorge Cervera Jr.) works as a gardener, runs a leaf blower, and wears a straw hat. You couldn’t get more stereotypical in LA unless he ran a lunchero (taco truck). Mother (Lupe Ontiveros) is more interesting. She runs her own little dress making sweatshop with her older daughter Estela as the overseer (Ingrid Oliu).

Sweet Ana (America Ferrara) is forced into the trade because mamma and daddy don’t want to break up the family by letting her follow the pleas of school advisor Mr. Guzman (Geroge Lopez) and take a full tuition scholarship to Columbia University.

The movie is a sweet flan that is engaging and engrossing despite being a little too sugary. America Ferrara made her major debut in this picture. Her past work had been a student short at USC Film School (she married the director). What’s in a name? Would she be the major star she is if her name had been something like Graciela Pachuco? Not to take away from her talent, but a promotable name sure helps. Those old Hollywood publicists who named Kirk Douglas (Isur Danielovitch) and Cary Grant (Archie Leach) knew the game.

The Road (USA 2009, 111 min, die: John Hilcoat, cast: Viggo Mortsensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Robert Duvall, Charlize Theron)

versus

Glen and Randa, (USA1971, 93 min. dir: Jim McBride, cast: Steven Curry (Glen), Shelly Plimpton (Randa), Garry Goodrow (Magician).

Why does every post-apocalypse movie always feature abandoned cars strewn along the highways like a used car lot hit by a tornedo? Are we supposed to believe that the end of mankind climaxed with a demolition derby? Any news report of people freezing to death in the mountains are roasting to death in the desert usually has them quietly pulling off the road and waiting calmly for the end.

Hollywood movies believe that the dying will careen at top speed, slamming into other unfortunates in a race to destroy themselves. Or maybe it is just cheap set design to buy wrecked cars and cover them with rust paint and dust.

See I Am Legend for the big budget version of the road wreck of civilization. See The Road for the economy model. But don’t see The Road because you want a good movie experience. It is a dog. Bad story, bad acting, and boring.

So why review it here? Because it is a good contrast that was one of the best post apocalypse movies. Glen and Randa, a 1971 gem by Jim McBride. The Road is about a father and son traveling through a grim landscape pocked with lots of broken cars. The message of this mess is: the future without people will be kind of boring.

Glen and Randa trip through a land stripped of all but a hardy few who have survived by returned to primitivism. There’s The Magician (Gary Goodrow) who pushes and old wheelbarrow filled with glowing embers. He’s a magician because he has fire. Anybody who wants some has to barter with him. The lovers, Glen (Steven Curry) and Randa (Shelly Plimpton), are sort of Adamish and Evee hippy types who (as I remember) fuck in a tree and wander into abandoned Interstate rest stop restaurants for shelter.

When the movie was made the hippie movement was in full flower. Make Love Not War was written on every tie-dye t-shirt. Looking at the film now, it’s more of an ecological statement about our excesses. It has something to say whereas The Road makes only guttural sounds.

One scene I’ll never forget from Glen and Randa has them walking along the shoulder of a former Interstate highway. Randa needs a piece of string or wire for something (pardon my memory). Glen says there must be piece somewhere here, and starts searching the ground. Randa asks how he knows he will find it. Glen answers, “Because there’s everything everywhere.”

What he’s saying is that our wasteful society has thrown away so much, especially along American highways, that you can find whatever you need. And it’s true! Need a piece of wire to jimmy a lock? A length of rope to tie the trunk? A plastic bag to hold wet swimsuits? A cup to pour water in the radiator?

All you’ve got to do is hunt along the highway shoulder for a couple of minutes and you’ll see it’s true: everything is everywhere.

Post apocalypse America will be a place much like modern day American. It will be drowning it the shit we’ve thrown away for a century, and foraging primitives will depend on this bounty to survive. Nobody will care about stripping car hulks. The man who finds a beer can opener will be king.

It’s easy to see a copy of The Road but don’t. It’s tough to find a copy of Glen and Randa but worth the wait.

Sadly, you won’t find Glen and Randa in Netflix, but Amazon says they have a few copies. http://www.amazon.com/Glen-Randa-Steve-Curry/dp/B001UHKPHU/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1307567514&sr=1-1

Title: Where the Sidewalk Ends
Year: 1950
Director: Otto Preminger
Writers: Screenplay by Ben Hecht, “Adaptation by Victor Trivas, Frank P. Rosenberg and Robert E. Kent”, from a novel by William L. Stuart
Stars: Dana Andrews, Gene Tierney, Gary Merrill, Bert Freed, Karl Malden

The Story: Andrews already has one brutality-complaint too many against him, so he’s really in a jam when he punches out a war hero with a plate in his head who falls down dead. He tries to pin the body on a sleazy mobster, but instead he accidentally frames the cabbie father of the one woman who understands him.

Why It’s Great: This movie has been unfairly compared to an earlier noir with same leads and director, Laura. That classic is a glossy high-end noir, while this one was a low-budget quickie, so it never could match up. Like Edward Dmytryk or Anthony Mann, Preminger was brilliant at making little movies that didn’t cost much money, but lost a lot of his artistry when it came to the big prestige epics that Hollywood preferred him to make. Watching this hard little 94 minute gem, it’s hard to believe that Preminger would soon be routinely turning in cuts that were twice that length. One of the sub-genres of noir was the police procedural, where we would methodically follow each and every step on the circuitous route to solving a case. This is a little different: it’s the first police brutality procedural, calmly tracing each slippery step of a beating and botched cover-up. At the time, you might get the occasional movie where one bad cop was “on the take”, but how many movies from this era can you name where police brutality wasn’t just some scam made up by crooks trying to score sympathy points? Andrews doesn’t play him as a brute, either, just a smart detective who gave in one time too many to his flashes of prideful anger.

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Title: Fort Apache
Year: 1948
Director: John Ford
Writers: Frank S. Nugent, suggested by the story “Massacre” by James Warner Bellah
Stars: John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Shirley Temple, Pedro Arendariz, John Agar, Ward Bond, Victor McLaglen

The Story: A strict martinet, with his daughter in tow, takes over a remote Arizona army base where there’s much camaraderie but lax discipline. He refuses to listen to his more experienced men, who are attempting to maintain an uneasy truce with the Apache, and instead he uses their peacemaking efforts to lure the tribe into a trap, with disastrous consequences for all.

Why It’s Great: The great Arnold Weinstein has a theory about how his fellow American literary critics tend to only apply the term “serious literature” to works in which family and community are destroyed or abandoned, but dismiss any work where such things are strengthened as un-serious fluff. I think that this helps explains why some Ford movies are not as valued as others. Ford loved to use his rough Western settings to discuss his favorite topics: community-building and, yes, the value of domestication. But beyond that, I suspect that this movie is a victim, ironically, or being so far ahead of its time in its racial politics. Modern critics love to make excuses for movies like The Searchers, and their brutal depiction of the Indians, by finding nuance in them and explaining them away as products of their time, but that narrative falls apart when you see a movie like this, which gives a far more modern portrayal of the relentless victimization of the Apache, who kept trying to keep up their side of an endless parade of faithless deals. It’s embarrassing to see a movie this honest, even today. It can’t imagine how much courage it took to make it back then. A word about the casting: I love role-reversal movies, where two actors oddly play against type. Here we have Fonda as the swaggering macho-man vs. Wayne as the gentle peacemaker, and they give two of their best performances. Fonda usually played roles that matched his political views: progressive and kind. But here he plays a role that, alas, matched the unpleasant personality he seems to have displayed at home: an uncomfortable, unreasonable autocrat. He does beautiful work and breaks your heart.

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Title: Kind Hearts and Coronets
Year: 1949
Director: Robert Hamer
Writers: Hamer and John Dighton, based on the novel “Israel Rank� by Roy Horniman
Stars: Dennis Price, Valerie Hobson, Joan Greenwood, Alec Guinness

The Story: In this blackest of black comedies, an heiress marries for love and gets disowned, but she remains obsessed with the idea that her son is 12th in line for a dukedom. After her death, the son decides that there’s nothing to be done but kill off all the family members separating him from his rightful station.

Why It’s Great: Stories of Victorian England are all about class, of course, but usually deal with those who try and fail to make their peace with the arbitrary hierarchy that pigeonholes them for life. How refreshing to finally see an ahead-of-his-time protagonist who reacts the same way we would to all this madness: with a fine murderous rage. Though he’s fourth-billed, the movie is handily stolen by Guinness, who became an instant star by playing all 8 members of the same family that get killed off by Price. Though you would expect him to camp it up, he instead invests each of these inbred lords and ladies with enough dignity to pull against the satire and give the movie some strong moral tension.

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Food and movies together must excite some primitive oral/visual stimulation center hidden in our brain. Why else would eating be the perfect pastime while viewing? In the theater it is popcorn and cheese nachos. At home it is a wildly appetizing variety of food (better than sex which obscures the view of the screen).

Becky Thorn’s Movie Dinners: reel recipes from your favorite films, sophisticates our grazing urges by offering actual recipes paired with well-loved movies. We should watch All About Eve while drinking a Gibson, chomp a chili cheese dog during Dragnet, slurp poutine and slide into the booth of Diner, or crunch the BLT Adam Sandler makes in Spanglish. Some of her choices come from the films, others are just inspired pairings.

Becky Thorn is a Brit. Her taste may be a bit weird to American eaters. Who eats poutine except overweight Quebecois hockey fans? Her recipe for chilidogs includes mustard and ketchup. On a chilidog? Any late nighter at Tommy’s knows putting either of these on your dog means you’ll be permanently banished to the losers line at the auxiliary shack near Beverly Boulevard.

But the book shows its American cupboard by including a section called TV Diners, and ends with Ms. Thorn’s own Oscar speech, “Thank you, thank you, I can hardly believe this. I feel so blessed.” She then goes on to thank her agent and editor. Cute.

She’s on to something bigger than she knows. I’ve noticed dining room tables are rarely used anymore because coffee tables, in front of the couch, are the proper eating distance from the giant flat screen across the room. This is an improvement over the TV trays, at sitting height, that were once manufactured to hold our Swanson frozen TV diners (now available at garage sales across America).

The great thing about eating while watching movies at home is you can hit pause to pour another glass of wine. Most available surveys of TV eating focus on childhood obesity and the lack of full family dining. No one has done a study of the joys of TV eating, or the fact that we all secretly love it. A 2001 one survey found that over 50% of the population admitted to TV eating. And that was before big flat screen TVs!

If American truly wants to cure obesity, put ads on TV showing great looking, sexy people having a great time giggling and copping some foreplay while eating carrots sticks. If it look good in the watching, it will taste good in the eating.

Meanwhile Becky Thorn’s book is worth some serious mastication. I wish she’d do a follow up matching take-out food available for delivery with favorite movies to watch on your flat screen LED 3-D Hi-Def 128hz 55 incher.

And a further note to fans of movie watching on TV: watch your favorite films with Comcast TV

Title: Alice’s Restaurant
Year: 1969
Director: Arthur Penn
Writers: Venable Herndon and Arthur Penn, based on a song by Arlo Guthrie
Stars: Arlo Guthrie, Pat Quinn, James Broderick, Geoff Outlaw, Micheal McClanathan, and Officer Obie as himself

The Story: Arlo Guthrie plays himself: bouncing around the country, trying to stay out of the army, getting picked on for his long hair, occasionally visiting his dying father, and eventually coming together with his hippie brethren to form a makeshift commune in a deconsecrated church in Stockbridge, Mass. There we get a complex portrait of the ups and downs of the countercultural life. Happier incidents like the one you may know of as the “Alice’s Restaurant Thanksgiving Massacree” are interwoven with sadder tales of those that don’t survive the journey.

Why It’s Great: Because it was based on a funny song, and the cast mixed actors with amateurs playing themselves, many people falsely assume that this is a mere novelty, rather than the profound and heartbreaking tale of life in the ’60s that it is. It’s a much stronger portrait of that year than Easy Rider or, god forbid, Zabreski Point. Like Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, the theme here is the slippery relationship between warmth and cold as we grow older. Moments of great joy keep sliding down into sadness. As Arlo asks the last time he sees his father: “Now that they’re finally not after me to do what I don’t wanna do, what do I wanna do?” Or, put another way: “Can you get everything you want at Alice’s Restaurant?” Only an existential storyteller like Penn could find so much meaning in such an innocent question.

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Title: Kansas City
Year: 1996
Director: Robert Altman
Writers: Robert Altman and Frank Barhydt
Stars: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Miranda Richardson, Harry Bellafonte, Steve Buscemi, Dermot Mulroney, Michael Murphy, Brooke Smith, Jane Addams

The Story: Altman does what he does best: a big sprawling portrait of an interconnected city, rich and poor, black and white, crooks and victims and in-between. On Election Day 1934, a gun moll kidnaps the governor’s wife, hoping that the governor will use his influence to get her husband freed from the clutches of a jazz-loving black gangster (with lots of other little storylines snaking in and out, of course)

Why It’s Great: Whenever a veteran filmmaker makes a movie set in the city of their youth, you know that they’ve started thinking about what really matters to them. Altman’s Kansas City is the ultimate American No Man’s Land, straddling the border between two states, between East and West, between North and South, modern and backward. They fought on both sides of the Civil War, except they started fighting early and then kept fighting afterwards. For Leigh’s character, a brunette named “Blondie”, the two competing gods of Kansas City are Jean Harlow and Joan Crawford: One light, one dark, one genuine, one phony… A lady who played tramps and a tramp who played ladies. Both were local girls who had found unfulfilling success in Hollywood. So it’s fitting that this works as both a drama and a comedy. The tragic elements are paired with lots of droll laughs from the laudanum-crazed non-sequiters of Richardson’s society wife to the ultra-cynical musings of Belafonte’s ruthless gangster. You’ll laugh until you choke on it.

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Title: Salesman
Year: 1968
Writer-Directors: Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin
Stars: Paul “The Badger” Brennan, Charles “The Gipper” McDevitt, James “The Rabbit” Baker, Raymond “The Bull” Martos

The Story: Four increasingly desperate door-to-door bible salesmen bluff their way into working-class homes, trying to get wary housewives to buy a deluxe $50 bible on the installment plan.

How it Came to be Underrated: This is one of the most influential documentaries ever made, but most DVD renters wouldn’t know anything about that. You can still get people to watch ’60s verite classics like Don’t Look Back or Monterey Pop today, but the non-musical verites don’t get watched enough. This was an amazing new way to make documentaries, not based around a subject but around characters, just like a real movie. Though the “verite” movement stressed reality, eschewing voiceover or interviews, the Maysles and Zwerin unashamedly shape their footage into a traditional narrative, with winners and losers and villains and narrative arcs. We aren’t sure that we approve of these guys, but they become very sympathetic in comparison to their cold-blooded, glad-handing boss, who rides them hard and doesn’t want to hear any excuses. In my favorite scene, the boss blithely leads them through a role-play to show how easy it is. As soon as the salesmen get to role-play the reluctant customer, they revel in the chance to humiliate their boss with every baffling refusal they’ve ever heard. He doesn’t appreciate it.

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