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

Mostly Martha (Germany 2002, 106 min, dir: Sandra Nettelbeck, cast: Martina Gedeck, August Zirner). No Reservations (USA 2007, 104 min, dir: Scott Hicks, cast Katherine Zeta-Jones, Aaron Eckhart Bob Balaban)

An expensive meal in a posh restaurant leaves you full and poorer. Next morning, can you remember what you ate? These two films are a mash-up of good cooking and elegant service. So why does one delight and the other push us away from the table?

Let’s cut the cute talk. Mostly Martha is mostly director Sandra Nettelbeck coaxing a charming performance out of Martina Gedeck. If you think Gedeck is just another breezy actress who is a natural for this part, take a look at her in The Lives of Others and The Baader Meinhof Complex. From neurotic chef who never has a hair out of place to brooding terrorist, she’s got an amazing range.

Then try Katherine Zeta-Jones in the same role, directed by Scott Hicks. It’s an easy comparison because both films have the same story almost scene for scene. Didn’t anybody say, “wait a minute, do we really need to copy even the song by Paolo Conte (Via con Me)? Martha is the lonely perfectionist who rules over a chic restaurant kitchen. Everything changes when her niece is suddenly orphaned and must come to live with her. Complications mean a sous chef needs to help her cook. Enter August Zirner (German version) and Aaron Eckhart (USA).

I kind of prefer Eckhart, even though he tries too hard. And Zeta-Jones is okay, even though Gedeck is more gegrubel (brooding). Mostly Martha was a big hit in Germany. No Reservations was a dud here. Why? Every Make & Remake comparison is different, but here I think it is about expectations. German audiences liked sexy aunt Martha slowly getting seduced by a man, and food. It’s Kultur (culture).

American audiences don’t give a shit about Kultur. If it’s food: there should be a lot of it, and if it sex: let’s get their clothes off. Here’s a place where a pie-in-the-face food fight followed by hot sex on the prep counter might have given us so memorable a scene that it would be endlessly played in those Academy Award clip reels of classic movies. But instead we got a gentle remake. Toss the souffle and gives us Ben & Jerry’s Stephen Colbert’s AmeriCone Dream ice cream. Fuck Kultur, Americans want to eat.

Rolling over the television range like a dust storm, HBO’s publicity campaign for its New Orleans mini-series, Treme, is gritty and gustful. Multiple characters strut and cake walk through languid sub plots. There are about 115 million HUTS in American (households using television). About 41 million of those get HBO.

When you’re talking multimillions of dollars per episode plus promotion, the question is: what’s the benefit? In the old days HBO justified the giant costs of these tent pole shows by saying they cut down the churn. That means they stopped people from disconnecting.

Today, there is less need to address churn because the subscriber base keeps growing nicely; in large part because of big mass appeal shows like Treme. But HBO still reaches little more than about one third of the HUTS. They’re leaving a lot of money on the table.

Many of those HUTS are filled with younger viewers who are more comfortable watching on laptops and smart phones. Let’s put HBO’s 41 million subscribers in perspective. Hulu, the online TV service, passed the 41 million unique viewer mark in the summer of 2009. Then it was less than two years old. It took HBO forty years to achieve the same number.

HBO understands this, and is launching it’s own online service called “TV Everywhere.” But you need to be a cable subscriber in order to get it. This is not an audience builder; it is merely a cable customer convenience. The premium cable services like HBO, Showtime, and Starz need to redefine themselves as streaming content providers instead of cable premium services. Since MovieWithMe.com is about streaming media, we want to encourage them.

Jeff Bewkes (Time Warner CEO) ought to look at Hertz and Zip Car. Hertz sees itself as a car rental company. Zip Car sees itself as a convenience company. You rent from Hertz to go someplace, you rent from Zip Car to do errands. Hertz makes you come to its offices, rents by the day and punishes you if you don’t put in gas. Zip Car tells you where the nearest car is parked, gives you the keys and gas ( and your membership card does the rest).

Isn’t this what all those HULU watchers want? Time for Time-Warner to see the HULUS from the HUTS.

Netflix is a pay service, so ads (so far) have not been an issue. Or are they? Even though Netflix is ad free, most of the DVDs it rents are not. They usually contain at least three trailers for other films. These are placed by the distributor, not Netflix. (If you know the secret of the “skip” button on your remote, you can usually get by them). If this is acceptable on DVDs, can streamed movies remain immune, or will streaming ads be too tantalizing to resist?

I doubt if anyone in Hollywood has thought of the question yet. But their counterparts in streaming TV sure have. The battle raging right now is between TV networks and Hulu…that plucky online service, (which they own), that has become #2 to YouTube in streaming content. The networks and their content providers want Hulu to increase its ads per hour from six to nine. That would put them just about even with over-the-air TV. Hulu is resisting. Even though studies show people will sit still for more ads, Hulu doubts it. I think they are right.

There is increasing pressure from legacy media to either cram more commercials onto streaming services, or place the services behind pay walls. Either way the public loses, and ultimately the advertisers or content owners lose too. The future clearly belongs to two concepts: embedded ads targeted for relevance, and freemium pay walls (part free, part pay).

Servicing this new environment takes imagination. As much imagination as creating the shows or movies that draw people to the ads. Actually, it has always been thus. The media business is flaying in an era when it should be thrusting towards new concepts like ads as characters, ads as instruction manuals, ads as value added content.

Some of the cleverest ideas have come from amateur ads on YouTube. Most companies fear this because they can not control the outcome, nor can they measure it.Like it our not, it is part of the future, and the future is out of their control.

One of the benefits of Netflix’s streaming service, Watch Instantly, is the size of subtitles. I could kiss the ground, or CEO Reed Hastings, every time I see big yellow subtitles appear on my flat screen TV. Now Netflix Watch Instantly is coming to the new Apple iPad.

Netflix never built and app for the iPhone, so this is a big deal.My reasoning: the iPhone screen is just too small to read subtitles. Because Hollywood cold-shouldered Watch Instantly, a large part of the catalogue is subtitled foreign films. Someone at Netflix understood (at least in my fantasy) that providing an app for the iPhone with a diminished viewing experience would frustrate users. Better to wait than to do something half-ass-ed.

The iPad screen is large enough to accommodate good picture size, different aspect rations (wide screen or normal), and readable subtitles.Netflix will give iTunes some competition. Would you rather have a $10 subscription or pay $5.00 for each film?

The great good will of Netflix is understanding actually movie watching for those of us who like foreign movies. Most subtitles are either too small to see on TV or computer, or the white type blends with backgrounds.

On most films produced in the last two decades, this is easy to fix. The subtitles are usually carried in a separate file on the digital master. That is why you can choose your language from the main menu. Writing a program to automatically reformat the size, color, and font of subtitles is not difficult, yet few DVD distributors have bothered to do it.

With the iPad app, Netflix is announcing more strongly its intention to eventually banish the red envelope and make steaming the company’s main business. Now they should change its clunky name, Watch Instantly, to Instant Watch: since most of the users have already shortened it to that anyway.

When profits are threatened, the first instinct of any business is to protect its main revenue sources. With Cable TV, this is subscriptions. What’s the threat? Between Cable and Satellite, about 85% of American homes are served. Of that number, about 60% are Cable wired, making it the big Gorilla. That is why most of the cable channels are just that: owned by the Cable cabal, not satellite.

The cabal is feeling challenged these days. Younger viewers accustomed using Internet for access to everything see less reason to invest in a cable subscription. Hulu.com has risen to one of the most popular sites on the web with its offering of TV programs, less commercials, and Internet style search. And it’s free.

Cable’s answer to Hulu, first proposed by Time-Warner Chairman/Chief exec Jeff Bewkes, is “TV Everywhere.” Bewkes was formerly head of the HBO division and is sensitive to viewer defection from cable. Since his main customers for HBO, CNN and other Time/Warner-owned channels are the cable companies, he has to make them happy. TV Everywhere works like this: you will pay, as you do now, for all the channels you don’t want to get the few you really do want, but in addition, you’ll get a special code so you can watch these channels on the Internet as well.

Understand? You will again pay for what you don’t want (cable) to get what you do want (Internet). The advantage TV Everywhere will have over free Hulu is news, sports, and The Daily Show. You can’t currently get those on Hulu. Do the cable companies really expect you to pay full cable rates for the few things you really want? Hasn’t the iTunes model shown us that consumers prefer to select and pay for their preferred songs? Isn’t TV Everywhere another version of the old CD album?

Jeff Bewkes is a smart guy and I am sure he knows this. My guess is he’s egging on the cable industry to fail withTV Everywhere so he can introduce something similar to iTunes, direct from producers to consumers, cutting out the cable company middleman.

He knows the cable guys are hung up on the word “free.” They supply the pipes for most of our internet connections but get a measly 50 bucks a month for it. Without additional revenue from offering tiers of channels you must pay for but don’t want, plus more from set top boxes (STBs), video recorders (DVRs), and high definition (HD) service; they would cry poverty.

That old revenue model is sure tough to change. My guess is it must, and very soon. Napster appeared in 1999, and was shut down by recording industry lawsuits two years later. Six months after, iTunes was introduced.

How long will it be before the next unshaven entrepreneur explains how Comcast’s TV Everywhere drove him to invent his TV workaround out of concern for the millions of fed up cable watchers? Maybe he’s already here. Avnar Ronen, a slick Israeli, is doing the talk show circuit selling Boxee; his bid to be the ITunes of TV.He’s savvy enough to know he must offer it free at first, capture the market, and add pay services later.

Boxee says they will introduce their own STB this summer. You won’t even need a computer to connect, just a wifi signal. As soon as the numbers look appealing, you can bet the cable channels will start making deals. What would you pay for CNN? Comedy Central, HBO? Or would you rather pay for just Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart, and Larry David? You’ll get it any way you want to pay for it. Cable will still supply the pipes, but the programming revenue may circumvent them entirely.

I took a tour of downtown Philadelphia last weekend. The tour guide remarked that the AT&T building looks like a giant RJ-11 telephone wall jack and the Comcast Center looks like a giant USB flash drive. Will these be two memorials to a past age of glory when connection was more important than content?

Every conceivable solution has been proposed for the current dearth of financing for independent movies. Every major film festival offers a seminar where desperate filmmakers can pay to hear how much money they can make on YouTube and iTunes. The only people usually making money are the event organizers.

What is the solution to a broken system where advertising and promotion costs have jumped out of reach of most filmmakers, and theaters are even reluctant to rent a screen for a week? My solution is Penny Movies. That doesn’t mean making films for a penny. The costs of production have dropped because of ever cheaper digital cameras and computer post-production. But even filmmakers need to eat.

Penny movies are an idea that goes back to penny novels. Penny novels, or dime novels as they became with inflation, were popular from the 1850’s. They were eight page newspaper-like weekly publications featuring romance, adventure, crime, and fantasy. All the genres that are still popular today on TV and in the movies.

The nearest we have to them are probably South American telenovelas on Spanish TV. One of the most popular genres is called “narconovelas:”telenovelas about the romance of the illegal drug trade. A Colombian production that has swept the rating is Sin Senos No Hay Paraiso. Translation: “Without Breasts there is no Paradise.” Don’t tell me that wouldn’t clean up on A&E slotted just after “Breaking Bad.”

How can struggle filmmakers cash in on this? The first step is making films people want to see. Someone in Hollywood once said, “Genuine artistic merit is a great reason to make a movie but let us not forget that simple melodrama, rough action, and sexual desire have been the mainstays of drama for 3000 years.”

Here’s my plan. Filmmakers will post their first installment of three minutes on YouTube with a link to a pay site for further installments. The second installment costs a penny. If you like that, you can see the third for a little more, and if that proves popular, the price of every succeeding installment goes up according to demand. Filmmakers would need to create installments that left you wanting more. Difficult, but isn’t that what we call storytelling?

You say this can’t work? Go to Amiestreet.com. This is a music site where the price of songs is determined by listener demand. The more who like it, the more it costs. Of course, Aime Street’s biggest hit was Ashley Dupre’s What We Want. (She was Eliot Spitzer’s call girl). But they are still in business despite no new scandal singers.

I’ve registered PennyMovies. All filmmakers are welcome to test their first installments on the “Contender” page of MovieWithMe.com. Let’s hope it’s time some hot, original story ideas start appearing-hopefully in English.

Thank You For Smoking (USA, 2005, 92 min, dir: Jason Reitman, cast: Aaron Eckhart, Maria Bello)

Why are Hollywood moguls always portrayed as hucksters in movies? Because they are brilliant con men. Thank You for Smoking is a puff that will be remembered because it was director Jason Reitman’s first feature (based on Christopher Buckley’s book). Most of it doesn’t rise above Saturday Night Live: a very low bar to jump. One exception is the Hollywood mogul scene (see clip). “Mogul” is a term Hollywood appropriated from “Mughul:” a dynasty of kings descended from Genghis Kahn. That’s like claiming you own the Brooklyn Bridge because Washington Roebling (who built it) was your great great uncle.

In an effort to forward the tobacco lobby’s campaign to get people smoking again, their chief spokesman, Nick, visits a Hollywood super agent. In short order, in front of a Japanese print meant to invoke the Hollywood mogul’s bible, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War; the Powerful One outlines a movie to promote smoking. Set it in the future, he consuls. People are put off by smoking now, but in a future, on a space station, it could be cool again.

It is parody. It is also brilliant. His description of a future couple lighting up cigarettes after weightless sex evokes an image of kinky sensuality. Therein lies the contradiction that goes through dozens of films where the Hollywood mogul scene is played out: he is always a misanthropic con man who is brilliant. Take a look at the mogul scenes in these movies: Alex in Wonderland (1970), The Last Tycoon (1976), The Player (1992), Swimming With Sharks (1994), Wag the Dog (1997), Tropic Thunder (2008) and don’t forget six years of the HBO series, Entourage.

Even the Motion Picture Academy has noted this brilliance by inventing a special mogul Oscar award. They call it the Irving G. Thalberg Award for “Creative producers, whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production.” Thalberg, a Hollywood exec and producer of the 1930’s, was the prototype for the Hollywood mogul. He cast a shadow so long that F. Scott Fitzgerald used him for his hero, Monroe Stahr, in his unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western. (Robert De Niro played him in the movie, The Last Tycoon).

Producers fight to force the Academy to give them a “Thalberg.” It’s not a regular Oscar, it’s a separate award modeled on the head of Irving Thalberg. The question I asked myself when I saw the Hollywood mogul scene in Thank You for Smoking was: what motivates such extraordinary brilliance that we never tire of parodying it? Most Hollywood insiders would give you a short answer: money. They are wrong. You can make money lots of other ways and you don’t have to read screenplays all weekend. I think it is the need to tell stories.

In the soul of every great con man is a great storyteller. How else can you convince the mark to put down his money? Motion pictures were merely a new medium for the flimflammer’s art. And who is to say all great art doesn’t have at least a little of the same brilliance? If we could get Michelangelo to kick back and talk in his office, he’d probably tell us he had a great idea for a naked David placed right in the public’s eye: where they’d have to look up at his penis from below. “Wow, ” he’d say with his feet on his desk and his hands gesturing, “I can see the crowds!”

Americans hate cable. They hate the price, they hate the service, they hate the selection. Now there is something new to hate: cable wars with broadcast networks. The major broadcast networks have always had the option of offering their programs to the cable companies on the basis of either “must carry” or “retransmission.”

Under the FCC’s “must carry” rule, a network (through its local station) has the right to insist that the local cable operator transmit its programming. If the network does not insist, and the cable operator still wants to carry the programming, he must pay the network for the cable retransmission of network programs at a rate negotiated between the two parties.None of this mattered much for many years, but now the networks say they need those cable fees to survive.

This new desire for cash has led to the Cable Wars. The biggest so far is Cablevision vs. ABC/Disney. ABC threatened to cut off the Academy Awards 2010 show to New York City area subscribers if Cablevision did not meet its subscriber fee demands. The show is always pretty bad, but people wanted to at least have the option to see it. The war went to the newspapers where Cablevision subscribers read between the lines and saw both sides preparing them for rate increases. (We didn’t want to raise you bill but they made us do it!)

Too much has been written about this. The one guy who sees beyond it (besides me) is Holman W. Jenkins writing the World Business column on the Opinion page of the Wall Street Journal (be careful using this link, the Journal has a pay wall).

There’s no doubt the cable companies’ current business plan is doomed. (Unload your stock in the next few years.) The systems are too old to fix, the fees too high, and the three-in-one plan with VOIP phone service is about $35 a month more than Skype. (Skype is free). The only place cable companies can raise revenue is by offering you higher speeds and more content on their broadband pipes.

The broadband explosion already underway is toward video. How will a system designed in the 1960’s for military data be expected to transmit iTunes movies and Google Earth? Any plumber who ever cut costs and put in a one-inch water pipe instead of a two-inch one knows the answer: drip drip drip.

The ready solution to this cyber gridlock is expanding the bandwidth allocated to broadband wifi and mobile. This is why Google is rushing to build super speed wifi networks in cities across the country. They are counting on citizen delighted with the results pressuring the FCC to free up more bandwidth.

Where will it come from? The bandwidth hogs are the over-the-air TV stations who have been hoarding bandwidth since the analogue days when they needed lots more of it than they do with new digital transmission. The easy answer to the coming download doomsday is to snatch this unused reserve bandwidth and award it to wifi and mobile.

But the Internet is still as fast as the slowest part. If packets are routed to Venezuela on their way to New York, “loading” will mean “slow” in two languages. The longer view solution says we should modify the way digital video is delivered to portable devices so that it can use a wider spectrum. The old word for that spectrum is Television.

In the future, TV will send packets rather than programs, and mobile receivers will filter these to give you only the movie you want, just like broadband Internet. “As fast as the slowest part” will no longer apply. But getting there takes vision; and a lot of courage not to give in to the technology of the near moment at the expense of the technology of the farther future.

In the 1960’s, Los Angeles dug up a magnificent interurban rail system and replaced it with roads. Cars were faster and did not need rails. In the 1990’s Los Angles began the expensive process of re-acquiring and re-railing the old rights-of-way to put in a new interurban rail system. Now rails are faster than cars. Think what they could have saved by just leaving things alone for thirty years?

Hopefully, this will be the last word on the Academy Awards: get out of high school. The Golden Globes has grown into a slick TV show while the Oscars is still a high school musical. The problem with Oscar is he thinks he is the BMOC (big man on campus). But while he is waiting his college acceptance letter s to the top schools, kids like Grammy and Globe are kicking butt.

The biggest embarrassment this year was the banishment of The Hurt Locker producer Nick Chartier because he wrote emails to Academy members asking votes for his team and cited the unfairness of the other team’s (Avatar) giant budget for uniforms and equipment. Oscar punished him by banning him from awards night and not allowing him to collect his trophy on stage with the other kids..

Now doesn’t this sound like high school? Kids would call it pathetic. Parents and teachers would call it silly. Only at Hollywood High is this kind of behavior taken seriously. You can just hear the kids saying, “But Mom, it’s REALLY important.”

Ratings were up this year; proving turmoil and more nominees do make it more interesting. But the audience is fickle, and higher ratings might be a blip on the Neilsen graph. Here are some suggestions to make Oscar more telegenic. Produce an Oscar YouTube race where contestants vie for the amateur Oscar (voted by the Academy members). Interview Academy members waiting in Hollywood unemployment lines and hear how anger they are and how that effects how they will cast their vote. Organize and annual Academy versus Golden Globes softball game.

Once you leave high school for the real world, you’ve got to learn to compete or the next guy will get your job.

Before the Academy Awards spouts and blows, let’s credit a Muse that surely influenced director/writer Jim Cameron, the self-proclaimed King of the World and master of movies. The name of the Muse is C.J. Cherryh and she’s one of the best American science fiction writers ever. Back in 1981 she published Down Below Station.

That’s the same year Jim Cameron directed his first movie, Piranha Part II: The Spawning. Ever see that one? You can rent it on Netflix or buy it on Amazon.com for less than four dollars. That doesn’t suggest a lot of demand. But Down Below Station won the Hugo Award, is an all-time classic, and never out of print.

In the thirty years since Down Below Station, C.J. has written many wonderful and popular books. Cameron as directed several good movies and written one good screenplay (The Terminator 1984). In private, many in Hollywood say Avatar is, “movie 3D, screenplay 1D”. So where did the inspiration come from for the beautiful and gentle creatures who inhabit Avatar?

Down Below Station is set on a permanent space station hovering over a distant planet we are trying to exploit for its natural resources. But many among us see the beautiful and gentle creatures who inhabit this world as threatened by out intrusion. Some go down to the planet on a mission to save these creatures and protect their primitive, naturalistic way of life. Some actually “go native” and begin living among the alien creatures. Sound familiar?

Movies don’t know the word plagiarism, and that is as it should be. Ideas are the soul of creativity, and they can come from anywhere and everywhere. But it would be nice if the King of The World could stand on one of those stages while receiving one of those awards and say, “years ago I read a book by a gifted woman who was, at that time, teaching school in Oklahoma City each day, and writing at home every night. Her imagination and her characters inspired me to think up Avatar, and I would like to thank C.J. Cherryh for being my main Muse.”

Of course, if James Cameron every even thought those words, the 20th/Fox lawyers would cut out his tongue. But they don’t need to worry. His ego long ago erased everyone from his creative universe save himself. Some say he even believes he sunk the real Titanic. When the Academy Awards and Avatar have come and gone; curl up with a copy of Down Below Station or Cyteen or Hellburner or any of the other books in her Alliance-Union series. You don’t need to put on 3-D glasses either.