Brothers (two versions). (Denmark 2004 117 min. dir: Susanne Bier, cast: Ulrich Thomsen, Connie Nielsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas.USA 2009 105.min, dir: Jim Sheridan, cast: Tobey Maguire, Natalie Portman, Jake Gyllenhaal).

The most amazing fact about Brothers is that it was made twice. Once might have been more than enough. There is an old Hollywood story about the producer and the writer alone in the desert dying of thirst. They spot a cold clear jar of water. The writer says, ‘Shall we drink it?’ The producer says, “let’s piss in it first.”

Susanne Bier’s Brothers is a modest movie about the romantic yearnings of two people when one happens to be the brother of the other’s husband. The husband has conveniently been declared dead on an Afghani war mission. But he is really being held captive and we know he will return.

It’s a good movie (which is why it is included in MovieWithMe, we only review the ones we like). But it is plot driven rather than character driven. Things have to happen to push it forward, and the audience knows where it is headed. Plot driven movies are like building a fence around the property and thinking what kind of house you will put in the middle.

Taking this modest house and remodeling it so Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Natalie Portman can live in it ruins the architecture. To begin with, Tobey Maguire has no sex appeal. The Muppet of Spiderman is not a leading man. Natalie Portman has some heat with Jake Gyllenhaal, so did she marry Tobey?

Jim Sheridan is a very talented director, up there with Susanne Bier in all respects except one: he’s working from a script that has been remodeled like the house to suit the new star tenants. No subtlety is allowed. Many of the scenes are exactly alike, but the remake doesn’t play like the original. When the military messengers come to inform the wife that her husband is dead, Susanne Bier gets to do it almost without dialogue.

Jim Sheridan’s version is more concerned with the two cute, precocious little girls who open the door for the soldiers. Everybody has to talk and explain. I guess the producers wanted to make sure they milked every emotion from wife to children. Did I say milk? I started this review talking about a joke with water. Choose your liquid but don’t drink the remake. Somebody has pissed in it.

When you have any website with “Movie” in it, you’re fair game for totally irrelevant sites trying to build their Google search standing. “Movie” is so common a search word that all kinds of businesses hope to lead the innocent into their maw. If I search for “cable movies” I might land on CableTVProviders.net. If I search for “college movies” I might land on Bestonlinecolleges.com.

Or at least that is the hope. Galley slaves in obscure countries spend countless hours on computers searching and contacting sites like MovieWithMe.com  and suggesting articles like “10 Most Quotable Movies of All Time” would be “an interesting story for your readers to check out and discuss on your blog.”

What they seek is a link back that will boost their site ranking and give them an edge in search engine optimization. Google is continuelly fine tuning its search algorhythms to avoid this. The bigger question is why site owners pay good money for results that have bounce rate that is sky high (users go away as fast as they can click).

Of the two stories roseK112 and yelin.george thought would be interesting for us to check out, “10 Most Quotable Movies of All Time” is the most interesting, and most comprehensive. The movies are well chosen, even if if the quotes are not. Sample from A Few Good Men, “You can’t handle the truth.”   This is brought to us by CableTVProviders: a site that tells us channels and program line ups in our area.

“The 10 Most Overused Movie Quotes” on Best Online Colleges singles out the same “You can’t handle the truth” from A Few Good Men as one of the most over used. I would think a site that peddles college course info would suggests more than limp alternatives for overused lines. The suggested replacement for Jerry McGuire’s “You had me at hello” is “Stop talking, you won.” Is literature still taught in college?

My real curiosity is, who wrote these lists?” Where were they stolen from? Neither is credited to anybody. My disdain is reserved for the sites themselves. They are content farms with threadbare content. The more they impede our search objectives, the more frustrated and untrusting of search we become. Google is history. Intelligent search is the next big thing. I can’t wait

The old screenwriter rule that the size of the heavy is the size of the hero is the measure of any bad guy. As this list of 10 Movie Villains Whose Actions Were Totally Justified states it, “the bad guy actually has pretty good reasons for doing what he’s doing.”

It’s a fair list though I would have added Co. Hans Landa from Inglourius Bastards. Movie writing of villains is an art because we have to believe that someone’s motives are understandable, even if his or her actions are tragic. Col. Landa even takes the time to explain his motives, one of the best scenes in the film. And the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman is equally articulate about his reasons for revenge -something that was lost in the sequels when he became just another boring sadist.

The word villain derives from the latin term villanus. Someone who worked on a villa, or farm. Crude farmhands had no couth. So it is curious that the site , Online Degree, specializing in filtering college degree programs online ,should be interested in villains. Unless they are subtly saying that the way to avoid being a rough farmhand for the rest of your life is to earn a degree and be a hero.

Within the “Computers & IT” selections for “Find My Schools” the site lists just about everything except Search Engine Optimization. Since they are engaging in SEO by trolling for links with unrelated novelties like best movie villains, it seems they should boast about it as a speciality. After all, I’m writing about it, so they have succeeded in getting at least one small link that has nothing to do with  college degrees. But don’t they know the best movie makers all dropped out of school?

Reed Hastings’ email notice (Sept. 19) to all subscribers that Netflix is splitting into two companies has two overlooked components. The first is that Reed Hastings made the email his own. That suggest that either he, or Netflix, consider Reed such a well-known star that the customers follow his words as closely as Brad and Angelina. Maybe so.

The second component is that running a streaming video company is not the same as running a DVD rental company delivered over the the internet. Once Netflix is freed from DVDs, it is also freed from other people’s content and pricing models set from the rental business (so many per month, time limits, all you can eat).

Look forward a few years to tiered subscriptions offering premium content, special VOD offerings, original programming, advertising, and public affairs. Sounds a lot like a TV or cable network, doesn’t it? In fact the name “Netflix” may be just as anachronistic in five years as “HBO” is now. HBO, Home Box Office, started as a movie service to bring you films over cable. Now most people know it for original series and specials.

Martin Peers writes in the Wall Street Journal, “If anyone should pay attention, it is executives in big media companies that own cable-TV channels. These have become a license to print money, thanks to a business model that charges consumers for a package of channels whether they watch them or not.”

This is the real story. Any executive reading the Netflix announcement should take a new look at Hulu. Hulu is for sale and could become the rival to Netflix in the new world of multiple platforms, instant entertainment, and consumer friendly pricing.

The dowdy aunt is cable TV. Too expensive, two restrictive, too controlled. An industry that celebrates the iPad only as a new TV remote that can do what their set top boxes can’t is missing the bigger picture.

Beating the odds on Google search has become a complex pastime calling for expert help creating questionable content. From time to time MovieWithMe receives an email from some underpaid internet field hand asking for a post or a link to a blog article they feel is relevant to our users. I’m tempted to reply in Hindi (using Google translator, of course) since I suspect many of the names like Tim or Mary are actually nom d’internet chosen by Mugdha or Gupta.

The latest asks for us to post “14 Movies Every French Major Must See.” The choices are what you might expect of anyone who has leafed through an issue of Cahiers du Cinemas. But I was heartened they included Taxi and La Femme Nikita among the classics. They also squeezed in Le Placard; a perfectly mediocre movie.

The site that has this profound interest in the language skills of French majors is called BestCollegesOnline.com. It provides a way to scan through college sand courses. They also offer “14 Movies Every Journalism Major Must See,” ” 8 Acclaimed Screenplays that were born on College Campuses,”  and “Ten Incredibly Beautiful High Schools that put yours to Shame.”

All of this is useful information for someone, though I’m not sure it makes much difference if you are looking for college credit online. My fourteen movies for French majors would probably concentrate not on classic titles but on pronunciation. Most French movies use too much slang and mumbling that students can not understand. Who knows that shpa really means je ne sais quoi or that un bur is and Arab from North Africa. Few contemporary French films use the classic language, but those few are the ones students should see and hear.

Meanwhile I hope Gupta enjoys this post in case he ever plans to learn French.

The most overused phrase in filmmaking is “the music will carry it.” Whatever doesn’t work in shooting or editing gets a second chance when the perfect musical score deftly underscores emotions. The best composers know how to do this without telegraphing emotions. Classic film music techniques include creating a theme for every major character plus a broader thematic statement encompassing the whole movie. More contemporary scores from gifted composers like Stewart Copeland (drummer with The Police) mix classic techniques with rock innovation.

You might question why a blog post called “The 10 Most Overused Songs in Movie History” originated on a site called Online Certificates. The purpose is to get you online dental or medical or fitness certification online. But the authors have peppered their site with interesting “best” articles like “10 Unfinished Pieces of Art,” and “20 Best American Cities for Music Buffs.”

I guess the rational is health certification isn’t exactly fun time, so you might as well read something interesting while you fill out the questionnaires. Among the most overused (a subjective judgment, I assume) are O Fortuna by Carl Orloff, Sweet Home Alabama (Lynyrd Skynyrd), and In the Hall of the Mountain King( Edvard Grieg). I think Carl Orff’s Musica Poetica that Terry Malick used in Badlands and has been overused ever since is an equally good list entry. But I won’t quibble with most of the others. You can see the whole list at: The 10 Most Overused Songs in Movie History. Take a look.

Cable everywhere, the new mantra of Time-Warner, Cablevision, and Comcast looks like cable not quite everywhere, and may soon be back to cable nowhere but your TV (where you can have it for about $85 a month).

The cable TV cartel, worried about younger consumers preference for viewing on their iPads, iPhones, Mac Books, Androids, and assorted netbooks; thought they had a solution. Under various snappy names, it is “cable everywhere.” As long as you pay the monthly cable bill, you can watch on any screen you want. That is, any screen in your own home connected to your wi-fi provided by your cable company (who also charges you for broadband).

The cable companies’ lawyers have studied their carriage contracts and concluded that they can deliver your favorite programs over any device in your home. They claim this right is already in their contracts with cable and broadcast channels like Discovery, ABC, and CBS. But Discovery, ABC, CBS plus a football team size group of other channels says “no.” Cable rights mean TV only, not portable platforms powered by an Internet signal.

The referees in this game are not the FCC but the program producers. They’re going to call these plays as illegal on both sides. They licensed TV rights to cable and broadcast channels, excluding Internet rights. In their eyes, the channels are now fighting with cable companies over rights neither has acquired.

Meanwhile Starz is going into retrograde motion by announcing cable nowhere. This is the cable channel that no one wants and everyone gets as part of the premium tier to get HBO. Now Starz is telling Netflix they will hold back new series for three months to stop Netflix subscribers from cutting their cable subscriptions.

And HBO has announced HBO GO that is their version of cable everywhere: as long as you pay for that premium tier you never watch. (At least HBO does own their own programming).

All this is beginning to look at lot like the old movie, The Magnificent Ambersons where the rich family of old money slowly falls apart. Son George, the last of the breed, is reduced to poverty and gets “his comeuppance.”

Someday RG-6 coaxial cable will be ripped off houses and tossed in landfills like old spaghetti. The media historians will remember big cable’s smarmy joy, year after year, in defeating the FCC’s appeals for a la carte programming (letting the subscriber pay for only those channels desired). And yet, that may be the very thing that could have saved them.

Viewers are defecting to portable devices because they are used to getting what they want, when they want it, where they want it, and at the price they want to pay. The idea that you’ve got to buy albums of anything went out with iTunes. That’s the core of the current problem, not how to walk around your house watching your iPad or being denied Starz on Netflix. A cartel that has gotten its way for forty years is left hanging while the audience moves on to better values and flexible choices.

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

Buying a big screen LED, LCD or Plasma TV ranks just below buying a car in complexity. The advantage of buying a car is you don’t need to connect it to your old car. With over 20 million Americans subscribing to Netflix, you would think there would be a gold rush of TV manufactures’ making it easy. Guess again.

The basic choice in big screen used to be LCD or Plasma. Now LED is the new LCD. LED is brighter, but what is the refresh rate? Is it 60 Hz or 120 Hz or 600 Hz? That’s the rate at which the picture redraws itself. Not important if you watch time-lapse photography on PBS, but real important for action movies and sporting events.

Nearly all the new (more expensive) models advertise “Internet ready or Netflix connection or 3D.” What this means is something inexplicable (at least in TV manufacturers terms). I’m Internet ready: I’ve been using the Internet for fifteen years. And “Netflix connection” seems to mean you can connect to Netflix until you learn you’ll need a connection box for another $75. That is, unless the TV has a built in Netflix router, for which they’ll charge you a few hundred dollars more. Why is it hundreds of dollars inside the TV when it is only $99 from Roku outside the TV?

Want this year’s new model rather than last year’s distressed stock sold at Wal-Mart? Don’t think you’ll be able to tell by the model numbers that start with the year like “2012 Ford Explorer.” The top of the line Panasonic is the TC-P55ST30. The Samsung is the UN55C7000WF. The LG is the 55LX9900. The Vizio is the VVT3D650SD. But even if you master these numbers you still must determine whether they are 3D ready or 3D equipped. What is the difference?

Forget the numbers, just go shopping. Online you can go to a dozen sites that seem to carry the same TV, but use their own stock numbers so you can’t compare. A better way might be to compare technical specs; if only the bigger sellers included them (most don’t, or don’t in a way you can easily compare). Shopping in stores usually means going to Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart of your favorite big box store. Wal-Mart gives cursory information and Target almost no information. And what you can read is only on the TVs mounted on the lower display rack. For the upper tier prices and specs you’ll need binoculars.

Best Buy has a unique approach. Each TV displayed has a QR (matrix) barcode on the price tag that you can scan with your smart phone, as long as it is equipped with a code scanner (many free apps for this). Just point your camera phone at the little code square, it takes a picture automatically, and all the technical specs appear on your screen in a minute. Charming. Delightful. But if Best Buy is pushing this idea you would think they would at least provide a free wi-fi signal in their stores. No. And since the code readers, at least the free ones, caution you in their terms of service that they may use some of the data they collect, you would think Best Buy would be eagerly collecting data on you. No.

If I walk around a Best Buy store for an hour and sample tech specs of ten TVs I would think Best Buy would have a very good idea of what I was shopping for and make me an offer on my smart phone I couldn’t refuse. “Dear Roberto, instead of walking around our store looking at endless TV’s with Netflix connections and ports to connect your old peripherals, we’ll give you a great deal on the Samsung that has everything you want. If you buy now, it is $100 off the store price and we’ll throw in a blu-ray player.” That offer is, sadly, years in the future.

And don’t even ask about the past. Buying a new TV means it will have at least four HDMI input jacks (ports), but few or no jacks for composite, component, DVI, S-Video and basic cable.(The only one I found with adequate old ports was a Sharp, and it was outrageously overpriced compared to the others). They expect you to junk your DVD player, Roku box, Apple TV (original), and Stereo amplifier. That is, unless you want to buy converter boxes that cost anywhere from $75 to $300. If you have an older cable set top box without HDMI, you’ll need to get a new, more expensive HD one from your cable company.

And don’t try to find more information on Google. Your search for facts will lead you to eHow and Answers.com where galley slave writers churn out worthless blabber content on any popular subject that will boost these companies to the top of the page and make them rich on ad buys. The guy with the real answers has a blog buried on page ten of your Google search. Chances are you’ll give up and watch your old TV before you ever find him.

This year’s Academy Award track is running frisky ponies. The Social Network and The King’s Speech were fast out of the gate and looked like winners. But here comes a big-hoofed galloper with Jeff Bridges urging him on like the Big Lebowski in spurs. True Grit came from nowhere to ten nominations.

How did this happen? Even the Coen Brothers, who directed it, said they were surprised. The Oscar season is supposed to be handicapped on the Golden Globes racing form; where True Grit was a 20 to one shot. The winner-picking ability of these hundred straggling journalists who can’t afford admission to the clubhouse at Hollywood Park Raceway has always been so good they usually do the scratch sheet for the 5000 elite members of the motion picture academy.

But this upset should surprise no one. True Grit is great filmmaking. That’s what the scribes of HFPA (Hollywood Foreign Press Association) can’t understand because they are not moviemakers. It is what the members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences do understand perfectly.

Filmmaking is not just putting a good story together. The Social Network and The King’s Speech (along with several other films this year) do that quite well. But the True Grit kind of movie is the soul of Hollywood. Old timers used to call films like True Grit “Movie movies.”

Movie movies are not stories on film, they’re windows into another world where we are abruptly set down, must quickly learn the rules, and then participate in an evolving drama so full of big characters they take our breath away. That’s a movie movie. It can be called Lawrence of Arabia or Gone with the Wind or The Wizard of Oz or Chinatown or ET.

The people who make movies in Hollywood know how to make movie movies. They know it better than anyone else in the world. Many of them came to Hollywood because they saw one of these films as a child and decided they wanted to be there, in the movies.

When they see a film like True Grit it reawakens all those reasons for what they do, all the craft they feel proud of, and all the reasons they put up with the assholes they suffer day after day to work in the movies.

To the stringers who write star interviews for papers like the Zagreb Post and the Latvia Times, True Grit is another Western. To the people who toil in Hollywood, it is a reason to believe movie movies are still possible. And giving True Grit ten nominations is an affirmation of the true grit of American moviemaking, and an affirmation of the value of all the Hollywood people as bit players on a big screen.