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

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

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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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Title: The Landlord
Year: 1970
Director: Hal Ashby
Writers: Bill Gunn, based on a novel by Kristin Hunter
Stars: Beau Bridges, Lee Grant, Diana Sands, Walter Brooke, Lou Gossett, Pearl Bailey

The Story: A directionless young preppie decides on a whim to buy a slum tenement and fix it up nice, as soon as he can get the deadbeat black tenants out. Instead, he gets mixed up in their lives and comes to realize how callous his own life and upbringing has been. It could have been treachly, but the execution is unsentimental, smart, and surreal.

Why It’s Great: After Easy Rider hit big, a fired-up group of anti-establishment moviemakers swept into power convinced that there were no more rules. They succeeded in creating a great American renaissance on the big screen, but they quickly discovered that they could only push a fickle public so far. There was one big rule that remained decidedly unbroken: Don’t Talk About Race! Certainly not in a morally complex, funny, profane, satirical way. Thankfully, Ashby didn’t know that yet. (And it helped immensely that the novelist and screenwriter were black.) I had remembered this movie as being set in Harlem, which would have made the attempts at gentrification somewhat quixotic, but I felt a twinge of pain when I realized that it was actually set in Park Slope, Brooklyn, which means that these residents were bound to lose utterly in the end. Even the white people I know aren’t white enough to stay in Park Slope anymore. Our last two friends who lived there knew the writing was on the wall when a fresh-from-the-oven doggy-treat bakery opened up across the street. The next month their rent was doubled and they, too, were forced out.

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Title: La Ronde
Year: 1950
Director: Max Ophuls
Writers: Jacques Natanson and Max Ophuls from the play by Arthur Schnitzler
Stars: Anton Walbrook, Simone Signoret, Serge Reggiani, Simone Simon, Daniel Gelin, Danielle Darrieux, Fernand Gravey, Odette Joyeux, Jean-Louis Barrault, Isa Miranda, Gerard Philipe

The Story: Ophuls adapts Arthur Schnitzler’s perpetually shocking 1900 play, about a chain of duplicitous sexual encounters, taking us though every level of Vienna’s hierarchy and back again. Along the way he artfully dissects the language of desire without ever chilling its basic naughtiness.

Why It’s Great: It’s shocking how little has changed in the world of seduction in 110 years, despite several sexual revolutions and counter-revolutions. Schinitzler and Ophuls explore the central paradox of civilization: all of the rules seem to be set up to empower men and disempower women, and yet men are always trying to flee from those rules while women are always trying to enforce them, so something must not be as it seems. The encounters are fleeting, and at first they seem as meaningless to us as they are to the lovers, but soon their meaning deepens through sly repetition. We see a lover innocently offer a protestation once, and believe them, then they repeat the line just as innocently in the next encounter, and this time we’re shocked at their audacity. Soon, we hear another lover say a similar line for the first time and we instantly suspect them, too. The film takes us from innocence, to cynicism and back around again to the non-judgmental magnanimity of the worldly-wise. Ophuls is famous for long, sumptuous travelling shots, but these camera moves don’t convey the lyrical freedom that other directors might create, since we often begin and end on baroque compositions, in which characters are claustrophobically enmeshed in a dense collage of objects and shadows. The result enforces the theme: the ways in which liberation itself can be a mousetrap.

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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

Year: 1970
Director: Sam Peckinpah
Writers: John Crawford and Edmund Penney
Stars: Jason Robards, Stella Stevens, David Warner, Strother Martin, Slim Pickins, L. Q. Jones

The Story: A laid-back outlaw is abandoned by his no-good buddies in the middle of the desert. Wandering until he’s on the verge of death, he finally finds water, right where the stagecoach companies happen to need a watering hole. Teaming up with a randy preacher and big-hearted hooker, he follows an arc that mirrors the rise and fall of American capitalism, (all while pursuing the world’s laziest quest for revenge.)

How it Came to be Underrated: Fans and critics who were blown away by Peckinpah’s previous movie The Wild Bunch didn’t know what to make of this scruffy, sweet little follow-up. Unfortunately, Peckinpah listened to their complaints and quickly descended into self-parody, endlessly trying to re-create the previous movie’s ultra-violent appeal in his later efforts. This gem, meanwhile, quickly become forgotten. Like Blast of Silence and Brother From Another Planet, this is another modestly-budgeted movie that isn’t ashamed to extrapolate one small journey into a grander parable about the stages of man. It’s surprising to see something this funny and laid back quietly accrue so much meaning. It sneaks up on you. Let me also say something about how great Stella Stevens is here: Even in the “free love” early ’70s, there was a stark divide between the actresses who engaged in naked shenanigans and those who got taken seriously. Stevens was a former playboy bunny who got lots of “go-go girl” roles but didn’t get anything serious until Peckinpah saw something great in her. The worst crime of this movie’s lack of success was that not enough people saw what should have been a breakthrough performance. This is one of the sweetest on-screen love stories you’ll ever see.

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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: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Year: 1962
Director: Tony Richardson
Writers: Alan Sillitoe, based on his short story.
Stars: Tom Courtenay, Michael Redgrave

The Story: Courtenay’s angry young man gets sent to a youth prison, where a cheerful warden tries to mold him into a long-distance runner, hoping that they can beat the boys from a nearby boarding school in an upcoming meet. As the young man prepares, he thinks about how he got there and what victory means to him.

Why It’s Great: The great British “angry young man” films of the early ’60s have become the forgotten missing link between the French New Wave and the American renaissance that flowered in the late ’60s. Richardson, Lester, Reisz, Anderson, et al. deserve to remain household names. This one only recently appeared on DVD, so it’s ripe for rediscovery. This has always been a favorite of mine (I took Betsy to see it at a revival house on one of our first dates) but seeing it again I can see how nicely it fits into my latest motto: “Anybody can be a hero, but nobody can become a hero by doing what anybody would do.” A hero’s triumph must stem from his unique personality. The ending of this movie may be the ultimate example of that.

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