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

The White Ribbon (Germany 2009, 144 min. dir: Michael Heneke, cast:Christian Friedel, Ernst Jacobi,Lionie Benesch, Susanne Lothar, Urlich Tukur, Ursina Lardi, Detlev Buck).

Director Michael Heneke is not good on conclusions. The Piano Teacher, Funny Games, and Cache are fascinating to watch but frustrating. So it is with The White Ribbon.

A small German town witnesses a horse and riser felled by a cruel trip wire, a woman falling to her death on a rotten plank, a man hanged upside down in the mill. What does it all mean? God’s warning about the war to come that will change life here forever? The scenes are brilliant, the intellectual postulations lofty. I only wish Michael Heneke would bevel his story with a finer corner at the end.

His trademark has become the fade out and credits while his audience is left to puzzle the meaning. You can’t but be caught up in the story, the setting, the characters and fine performances by all. As if to emphasize the small rooms and camped world of the story, Heneke rarely moves the camera. Take a look at the scene where Eva’s father (Detlev Buck) grills the school teacher (Christian Friedel) about his intentions to marry his daughter. We rarely cut between faces and reactions, but the charged emotions fly around the room.

Shooting in black and white adds to the period feel, as does the weary voice of the teacher as an old man (Ernst Jacobi) telling us his recollections of the events we witness.

I’d love to put Heneke in a room with a writer and see who comes out alive. It might be another hanging or garroting by trip wire.

Palindromes (USA 2004, 100 min. dir: Todd Solondz, cast: Ellen Barkin, Richard Masur. Matthew Fabur).

Locked away in some dusty attic is the small dollhouse in which Todd Solondz played out his childhood fantasies. There are droll dolls, pervert dolls, and dead dolls. No wonder his first film was Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995).

The meaning of Palindromes is frozen among cobwebs in one of the dusty doll rooms; as if it were a single cell in the director’s mind. This is to say you can’t understand a Todd Solondz movie unless you know the inside of that dollhouse, and nobody has been there or ever will be except for Todd.

The best the rest of us can do is sniff at the scent of genius and an order of depravity as we watch movies like Palindromes. But we must always remember that the whole is not the some of its parts, the whole is a hole. The parts are all. Some are delightful, some confounding, some are stupid.

The theme of Palindromes is a pubescent high school girl played by various actresses who wants desperately to get pregnant. You can read the rest of the plot at Wikipedia.

Cousin Mark (Matthew Faber, my favorite character in the film) says that life is like a palindrome where everything is only self-referential. “It doesn’t matter if you gain 50 pounds or lose 50 pounds or you have a sex change: what have you, all these shapes and sizes in the center; is a part of ourselves that is palindromic by nature.”

He alone really understands the dollhouse. The rest of us are tour visitors wandering from room to room in hope we’ll either found the toilet or the exit. Either way, it’s a journey worth making at least once.

Water (India 2005, 117 min. dir: Deepa Mehta, cast: Sarala, Lisa Ray, Ronica Sajnani.

All movies shot in India are fabulous on a 46-inch flat screen. Water makes you want to swim in the Ganges. Seeing Water it’s hard to imagine this sacred river is filled with pee, chicken feathers, dead cows, and worse. Sacred sewer is probably a better description.

But Deepa Mehta is not a filmmaker focused on ecology. His river is serene even though the people who live along it are troubled, spiritual and venal. This doesn’t include Kalyani (Lisa Ray) or her hopeful lover, Kunti (Ronica Sajnani). Both are beautiful.

And even though the movie takes place in 1938 against the rise of Gandhi and Lisa Ray plays a prostitute; she looks like she has her hair styled at Jean Louis David. Ronica Sajnami wears three-day whiskers a la mode. I don’t think Indians in 1938 were anything but clean-shaven. But then, I don’t want to seem petty.

The story is about Chuyia (Sarala), who was wed in an arranged childhood marriage and saw her old husband die soon after. She’s carted off to the windows’ ashram where she is supposed to live the rest of her life. Her she has her head shaved and meets the group of flinty old harpies she must live with and who try to crush her childish yen for freedom and fun.

Kalyani befriends her. She’s the pretty one so the harpies have not shaved off her hair. This way they can make some money pimping out her sexual services to pay the rent. Wouldn’t you know, handsome Kunti falls in love with her without knowing she’s servicing his father?

There’s a lot that is good in Water, even though it’s fun to pick apart the plot contrivances and glamor excesses. Not the least of the important stuff is the rise of Gandhi, the awakening of women, the injustice of the caste system, and the transformation of the British colony to an independent state.

It’s also worth noting that Lisa Ray gives an impressive performance. For a Canadian girl who started as a swimsuit model and didn’t speak a word of Hindi (she learned for the film, but was later dubbed), Water is quite an accomplishment.

Mary and Max (Australia 2009, 92 min. dir: Adam Elliot, cast: Toni Collette, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Humphries).

Can clay figurines assume more emotion than flesh and blood humans? If the answer is no we can throw out all those statues of Jesus. If the answer is yes we ought to take a close look at Mary and Max.

What Adam Elliot does with clay figures to create the very real emotions of Mary and Max is amazing. These are two very complex and needy people. Mary is growing up in a dysfunctional home in Melbourne, Australia, while Max is binge eating his way to corpulence in his New York apartment. There is no love for them at either end of the postal spectrum. Yes, postal: they actually write letters to each other in an age before email. Mary’s chance encounter with a library phonebook page links them together.

Actually is a relative term here. The story never really happened, but fragments of it did occur within the circle of friends and family of director/writer Adam Elliot. From childhood he had an incurable twitch, probably Tourette Syndrome that made him as much an outcast as he made Mary with her forehead birthmark.

It makes sense that a lonely kid who grew up on a shrimp farm in Australia found his way into the equally remote and silent realm of tabletop film animation. Elliot did several acclaimed Claymation shorts before Mary and Max.

If there is a future for filmmaking it will be hugged by lonely artists in airless rooms creating personal visions like this one. Box office champs may still be called “films,” but the better name invented by Aldus Huxley in 1984 was “feelies.” Real film, the progeny of Eisenstein and Spottiswoode is the medium of artists like Elliot. It exists frame by frame, and it creates worlds that cannot exist elsewhere.

Mary and Max is pure filmmaking. First it is Claymation. That is the name given to the tedious process of moving objects made of clay one frame at a time. Wallace & Gromit popularized Claymation, but the tabletop technique goes back to the films of Ray Harryhausen and before (King Kong, for example).

I won’t describe the plot, you can Google it. The voices of Toni Collette and Philip Seymour Hoffman are perfect. The music by Dale Cornelius, even though a bit over used, is a memorable movie theme. My only question is how Mary and Max’s movie could sneak into theaters, get awards, and disappear without leaving a ripple on the water? I’m glad at least I found it.

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 Girl on the Train (France 2009, 105, dir: Andre Techine, cast: Emilie Dequenne, Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Demy, Ronit Elkabetz, Michel Blanc).

Tough enough to make a good film about something real that really happened. Almost as tough to make a film about something real that really didn’t happen. The Girl on the Train never comes to grips with the dark mind of the paranoid imaginer who made up this amazing story; or her motivation. Jeanne (Emile Dequenne) is a young woman in bitter battle with her mother Louise (Catherine Deneuve). She finds her revenge against mother and the world by claiming she has been attacked by black toughs on a suburban commuter train outside Paris.

The commuter lines of the RER go lots of places around Paris. The trouble with Andre Techine’s movie is it doesn’t go anywhere. At the end we learn that she faked the whole episode. That’s disappointing for a film so interesting to watch; and gripping while you still think there’s a truth lurking around the corner.

Where The Girl on the Train becomes even more intriguing is when you look beyond the movie to the event that inspired it. In 2004 Marie Lionie Leblanc claimed that she had been attacked on the RER by a gang of blacks who ripped her clothes, cut her hair, and drew a swastika on her stomach. In the violence they knocked over her infant baby’s carriage. Passengers looked on but did nothing to help.

French politicians wasted no time in condemning the incident and Ariel Sharon told French Jews they had better pack up and immigrate to Israel to avoid this new “wildest Anti-Semitism.” The only problem was: Marie made it all up. No witness every came forward and within days the police proved she was lying.

That happened in 2004. But it echoed a 1987 incident that is almost the flip side. A 15 year-old black girl from Wappinger, New York (less than an hour north of New York City) claimed six white men raped her. Tawana Brawly said several of them were policeman, and one was a district attorney. The politicians went wild.

Black politician Al Sharpton seized upon it as proof of police hatred of blacks just as Ariel Sharon grabbed on to the RER incident as proof that the French hated Jews. Tawana never recanted her story. The grand jury did it for her. They failed to vote even a single indictment.

So the real story of The Girl on the Train should have been more about the mind of the fibber. What kind of person makes up this stuff? In the case of Tawana, and I suspect the same might apply to Marie; it is a hopelessly paranoid individual who can best make human contact by playing the victim. Tawana converted to Islam and moved from Wappinger Falls to tiny Claremont, Virginia. She changed her name, bought an attack dog, and began working as a nurse in a nursing home.

She’s never married, keeps to herself, and rarely ventures beyond Claremont except when she accepts free flights and limousines on returns to New York as a guest at United Africa Movement events.

I wish the film made clearer the pattern of a paranoid mind that understands how to jump on a hot button issue and sprinkle just enough truth to feed the flames. The reward is 15 minutes of fame and a celebrity glow that, if you play your paranoia right, can last your whole life.

Title : Stanley Ka Dabba
Year : 2011
Directed By Amol Gupte
Starring : Partho (Director’s son), Amol Gupte (Director himself), Divya Dutta and more

Amol Gupte, the real man behind the highly acclaimed Taare Zameen Par (as the writer and creative director of the film), strikes back with his own film, once again revolving around children and their emotional school journey seen through the eyes of an innocent, helpless yet courageous child named Stanley.

If you wish to compare it with TZP, then Yes, visibly SKD does have a similar look to that of TZP since it has been conceptualized by the same creative person and director. But content wise it simply deals with another more important and universal problem of child education, which unarguably takes Stanley Ka Dabba to much greater heights as compared to TZP. Hence with that point of view SKD can easily be stated as a few steps ahead of TZP.

However, instead of going into any comparison I would like to talk about STANLEY KA DIBBA alone and the cinematic excellence achieved by its director Amol Gupte through his honest and sincere efforts. In few words, SKD is a very simple, sober and free of any gimmick kind of movie made on a sensitive subject related with child education. It is a soulful journey into the small world of the little masters, their truthful friendships, their innocent planning and their lovable concern for each other.

It reminds you of those carefree years spent in the early school days, when there was no tension, greed or cunningness in our hearts for each other. When we used to demand very funny things from the GOD with our eyes closed and hands folded.

It reminds you of the time when we used to sing the latest movies Songs loudly in absence of any teacher in the class, playing the rhythm on our desks.

-The time when we used to wait for the recess period just to check each other’s tiffin boxes to see that what they have brought today from their homes and there always used to be one or two friends whose tiffins were pretty famous in the whole class for their quality of food.

-The time when we used to eat in the class under the table and if not allowed then asked for ‘a water break’ to drink some water till the recess bell rings.

-The time when we all had crush on the same teacher, in most of the cases our English Teacher, who looked beautiful with her fabulous dress sense and had a magical fragrance.

-The time when a few continuous absents of a class-mate used to make us worried as hell (and in our days we even didn’t have any phones from which we could make a few calls to his home.)

-The time when the same project of ours was appreciated by one teacher and disapproved by the other.

-The time when we used to give our own funny names to each and every teacher of ours, including the ones we loved dearly.

And the time when one boy or girl of our group suddenly became the Hero of the School after participating in a reputed competition and we all cheered for him shouting as loud as we could running all over the school premises.

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