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

Title: Queen Christina
Year: 1933
Director: Rouben Mamoulian
Writers: H. M. Harwood, Salka Viertel, Margaret P. Levino, and S. N. Behrman
Stars: Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, Ian Keith, Lewis Stone, Elizabeth Young

The Story: The kick-ass 17th century Swedish queen reads books, dresses like a man, and refuses to get married, laughing at those who try to impose gender roles on her. You’d almost think she was a lesbian if she didn’t have so much uninhibited sex with men. She’s allowed to get away with all of it until she tries to shut down the military-industrial complex, resulting in a whisper campaign that brings her regency to a crisis.

Why It’s Great: Mamoulian combined the sensuousness of Ophuls with the brazen good-naturedness of Hawks, but only in recent years have moves like this, Applause and Love Me Tonight been treated like the masterpieces they are. This movie is very much a product of that magical period from 1929-1933, after the arrival of sound but before the strict enforcement of the production code, when Hollywood movies enjoyed a brief flowering of sexual sophistication. Most “pre-code” movies used that freedom to tell tales that were lurid and dark, but this was one of the few that used its frankness to celebrate sexual liberation in a way that was positive, political, and progressive. It’s pretty gobsmacking to watch it today.

Three more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan…

Title: Funny Bones
Year: 1995
Director: Peter Chelsom
Writers: Chelsom and Peter Flannery
Stars: Oliver Platt, Lee Evans, Jerry Lewis, Leslie Caron

The Story: Surreal, funny, heartbreaking magic-realist comedy-drama about a failed American comedian who absconds to the faded resort town of Blackpool, England, where his father performed when he was a child, hoping to steal material from the local comics. Instead, he uncovers his father’s secrets and discovers he has a monstrously funny half-brother.

Why It’s Great: This movie seemed to announce Chelsom as a major writer/director, but his follow-up (The Mighty) was a flop and his next (Town and Country) was a notorious mega-flop, so he was done, and this movie was unfortunately forgotten. This movie also seemed like it would turn Platt and Evans into major stars. They both give intense lead performances. Platt has been too often relegated to “fat friend” roles, which was perhaps inevitable, but the utter disappearance of Evans is stranger. He’s a revelation here, like a strange combination of Sean Penn and Jim Carrey. He’s been rarely seen again, which makes this one of the great one-off performances I’ve seen. This is a funny movie, but it’s more interested in being aboutcomedy, which is an inherently painful subject. The opening sequence, where Platt bombs in Vegas, is as excruciating as a horror film. The whole movie explores the symbiotic relationship between comedy and brutality. As Evans rhetorically asks, “You can’t pull your punches, can you?”

There’s a heck of a lot of drinking in this movie. But there’s also a heck of a lot of fun. In fact, The Thin Man is a delight from start to finish.

It begins as a standard, noir-like mystery-thriller of the period (1934). We meet some characters, most not very savory, and we soon realize that something none-too-good will happen. And it does.

There’s a murder but we’re not sure who committed it (though we’re given some possible suspects). And there is yet another mystery which we’re not necessarily aware of yet (the mysterious Wynant) — it will develop as the film goes on.

Only after we’ve been given all this story set up do we finally meet the stars of the film, William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles, the cocktail loving, free-spirited couple who, between drinks, may poke their noses into a mystery or two. (Oh yes, there is their dog, Asta, too.)

Upon meeting Nick and Nora, the tone of the film abruptly changes. The pair party, wisecrack and generally take everything that comes into their lives breezily. Everything is a passing amusement.

From a noirish piece, we’re now into a comedy. (Maybe it’s more accurate to say a comedy has been laid over the thriller — more or less smothering it. And that’s more than okay. It’s a great comedy.)

Nick and Nora are absolutely charming. They’re always witty — which is remarkable since Nick, at least, is almost always tipsy. Powell plays it perfectly, not simply with the intonation of his lines but also to getting a bit of a slur into his voice.

While there is a great supporting cast this movie works primarily because of its stars, Powell and Loy. They work beautifully together. Loy is the perfect foil to Powell since she rarely takes anything he says seriously. She’s as casual as he is.

The movie also works due to its quick pace. Remarkably, with all the amusing nonsense going on, it also manages to be suspenseful. It wraps up with one of the best “gathering of all the suspects” scenes ever as Powell’s Nick tries to determine who the murderer is (he hasn’t a clue, but he doesn’t let anyone other than Nora know that).

This is definitely a movie about dialogue, of which Powell is a master.

Roger Ebert puts it best, I think, when he says, “William Powell is to dialogue as Fred Astaire is to dance.” (For another great Powell performance, see My Man Godfrey.)

The Thin Man is absolutely great entertainment. It still plays well and it’s easy to see why it spawned a number of sequels. Together, William Powell and Myrna Loy are utterly charming.

Departures (Japan 2008, 130 min, dir: Yojiro Takita, cast: Masahiro Motoki, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Rokoyo Hirosue, Kazuko Yoshiyuki, Kimiko Yo).

If you want to know about cultural differences watch Departures after a few episodes of TV’s Dexter. One comes from a thousand year tradition and the other from a twenty-minute idea sketched on a napkin.

That’s not to say either is better, just different. Daigo (Masahiro Motoki) isn’t a righteous serial killer like Dexter; he’s an out of work cello player who falls into an obsession with the dead because of a misprint in a newspaper want ad. His job is giving people a good send off after they are dead. Dexter’s mission is similar except he gives people a good send off by making them dead.

Daigo becomes an assistant funeral preparer, learning from his boss, Ikuei (Tsutomu Yamazaki). The Japanese go through an elaborate ritual of washing and preparing the dead before they are put in a coffin and cremated. It’s apparently the way things are done, even though it seems like a lot of work and waste of materials. Don’t the Japanese get it about green and recycling?

First repulsed, Daigo becomes fascinated with his work; though never admitting his new profession to his wife. He tells her he’s in “ceremonies.” Like Dexter, you can’t make a movie about death without some humor. In fact there is a lot of humor. From the opening scene where they are preparing a body they discover is an hermaphrodite, to later sequences with his boss, Ikuei, who does body prep between endless cigarettes.

The power of the movie is not only making something repulsive into something beautiful, but asking and (finally) answering the question of why a nice kid who plays a good classical cello would want to do this. In each of us there is a core of something never understood, always present, and rarely resolved. With Daigo it is his childhood abandonment by his father.

Returning to his own village, taking a bizarre job that exposes him to other people’s emotions at the moment of final loss, and confronting the death of the man he never knew; is his own way of reaching into his secret place and freeing himself. It is his departure. Two things worth noting here: the rather amazing screenplay by Kundo Koyama (who has written a lot of Japanese TV). How does anyone get an idea like this? And the performance of Tsutomu Yamazaki as the world-weary boss who is a substitute father. Also Tsutomu as the brother in Kurosawa’s Kagemusha (1980). Don’t know that one? Shame on you.

Title: Million Dollar Legs
Year: 1932
Director: Edward F. Cline
Writers: Joseph L. Mankiewicz (!) and Henry Myers
Stars: W. C. Fields, Jack Oakie, Susan Fleming, Andy Clyde

The Story: Fields has retained the presidency of a treacherous little country called Klopstockia thanks to his arm-wrestling prowess, but now his enemies are going to take it all away. Luckily, an American brush salesman who wants to marry his daughter has a plan to save the country: win all the medals in the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics!

Why It’s Great: W. C. Fields’s movies, most of which are from the early sound era, have been in terrible shape for a while, which hurts his chances of finding new audiences. Even worse, this one has never been on available an American DVD. The tagline on the poster says it all: “It’s insane — It’s joyous!” and the storyline couldn’t be crazier, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hold together, in its own odd way. There’s actually a lot of “set-up and pay-off”. Each one of the special skills that they wind up needing in the Olympics has been established beforehand in a fairly organic way, as far as anything can be said to organic is utterly absurd movie.

Three more reasons over at Cockeyed Caravan…

Storytelling (USA 2001, 87 min, dir: Todd Solondz cast: Selma Blair, Robert Wisdom, Paul Giamatti, Mark Webber, John Goodman, Noah Fleiss).

Explaining Tood Solondz’s humor is like trying to parse a sick joke that everyone laughs at so hard they pee in their pants; at least if they are stoned. Storytelling should be up there with The Big Lebowski as one of the all time, never-get-tired-of-it stoner comedies.

Where else can you take gleeful satisfaction in the white suburban high school girl hanging with her black lit professor as he commands her to strip naked in his apartment and fucks her from behind while making her scream “fuck me hard nigger.” (I watched the R-rated version from Netflix). When she writes an essay about the fucking in her lit class, the other girls criticize it mercilessly until it becomes obvious they have all done the same deed with Mr. Teacher.

At the family dinner table, her slacker brother Scooby announces that if Hitler hadn’t ordered the Holocaust, the Jews wouldn’t have fled to American, and neither he, his sister, nor his parent would have been born. So, he reasons, they should all thank Adolph Hitler for their good fortune. Stuff like this doesn’t come out of a normal mind. It comes out of Todd Solodnz’s inspired mental process. No psychiatrist on the planet is up to explaining it. But any one of us who has suffered through American high school will have no comprehension problem.

Todd Solodnz has only given us too few films. Some are easy to see, some are tougher to fathom (like Palindromes). The big money in Hollywood abandoned him as he got more weird and kinky. But if he lived in Austin, Texas, he would be a national hero. Alas, there is no place for slacker heroism in Newark, NJ (his home town). It is not the place where a yearly Todd Solodnz film orgy will every be held. It will more likely play some college town theater with broken seats. Maybe Madison, WI, during exams, so all those students who find studying to be personally repressive can have an alternative. I’d fly there and bring my own beer.

Take an affluent couple with little regard for anything but themselves, pit them against each other, and you get The Awful Truth (1937), a genuinely great screwball comedy. Late in the movie, Lucy Warriner (Irene Dunne) quotes back to her husband Jerry (Cary Grant) his own words:

“Lend me an ear, I implore you, this comes from my heart:
I’ll always adore you, till death do us part.”

While it may not be great poetry, it succinctly states the theme of the film. The Warriners are social gadflies, each apparently going his or her own way with little regard for anything else around them, including each other. (However, this may be more true of Grant’s character than Dunne’s.)

As the movie begins, it turns out Grant’s character has been deceiving his wife. He’s a bit of a cad; a bit of a philanderer. He was supposed to be in Florida but wasn’t – he was off having fun elsewhere. He takes pains to keep this from her.

As it turns out, when he returns home he finds she is not there. He’s disappointed by this and a little put out. It’s okay for him to deceive his wife, but for her to deceive him? He’s outraged.

When she arrives, he only hears part of her story. He jumps to conclusions; he assumes she’s having an affair with her music teacher. An argument ensues and it leads (rather quickly, I might add) to divorce proceedings. Now the fight is on. Through the rest of the movie, they battle back and forth trying to get one another jealous, each trying to best the other.

They get so caught up in their fight, they don’t imagine what the actual consequences will be. It’s only when each starts to realize the end result, the other’s removal from their life, that they start getting doubts.

The above sounds much more serious than it plays. The film is supremely funny. The lines are quick and witty and Grant’s pratfalls are perfect.

The supporting cast, including Ralph Bellamy (who again gets to play the dull nice guy, as he would later in 1940?s His Girl Friday), are tremendous and truly add to the film. (They always do in films of that period.)

The chemistry between Grant and Dunne is wonderful. She meets and plays off of his quickness and facial expressions with great skill and ease. She often gets the best of him in a scene. They seem made for each other.

If there is any flaw in The Awful Truth it may be the ending, which may be a tad too sentimental. It works, but it nudges at that fine line.

If, like me, you love screwball comedies this movie is a must. It’s definitely one of the better ones. Highly recommended.

The Contender (USA 2000, 126 min, dir: Rod Lurie, cast: Joan Allen, Jeff Bridges, Gary Oldman, Sam Elliott, William Petersen, Christian Slater, Muriel Hemingway)

It would be fun to re-write The Contender with present and future nuances. In fact, it would be fun to re-write it every ten years.

It’s hard to remember there was a time when we were so curious about the President we made movies and TV shows about him. That was while we had guys in the White House who philandered and lied. Now we’ve got a guy who seems more honest and nobody cares.

Rod Lurie is a West Pointer who is best at making political movies about the secret world of Washington. The Contender has a Hillary premise: what if the vice president died and the president had a chance to name a woman to the job.  Not any woman; a woman senator with great creds except for two: pictures of her giving a blow job to two guys in a college frat house; and her seduction of, and marriage to, her best friend’s husband.

Lurie has given us Bill in Hillary’s body! This would truly be a hot concept if Joan Allen had any heat. Actually, I think I blow job from Hillary would be more interesting. Joan/Hillary is surrounded by guys who are brilliant at tactics and politics. Everyone in this movie is so smart you marvel that we once thought Washington was like this. Even the president is a cool guy who smokes a cigar at night with Joan/Hillary out on the White House lawn.

While we had a succession of opportunistic assholes running the country, we yearned for smarts, truth, and leadership. Obama brought a measure of those qualities but nobody rushed to make a movie about him. What happened?

I think the deceit of George Bush (credit to Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rove) followed by the Crash Of ‘08 removed any shred of respect for Washington. Americans’ approval of government has always been low, but now it is what Nielsen calls BLM (below measurable standards).

When The Contender was made, the Internet only mattered because it could spread nasty rumors (probably a reference to the Drudge Report, which now seems tame). No bloggers, no YouTube, no Digg, No Gawker. Not even the phrase “social networking.”

Joan/Hillary gave a blow job in college? What’s the web address for it? Let’s see it in slow motion. What do color commentators on cable news think? Fox interviews a woman who specializes in blow job therapy. She says the photos show a gagging reaction (very common) that is probably a manifestation of childhood EDDS (Emotional Denial Distraction Syndrome). Lord, how can we have a Vice President with EDDS?

Yes, it would be fun to re-write The Contender. Today it would be a crowdsourcing project on Facebook with enraged contributors accusing Mark Zuckerberg of rewriting them. What will it be tomorrow? That is why The Contender is far more interesting today than when it was made and why it deserves to be seen to show how far we have come and to be amazed we once believed in moral rectitude. Disqualified by a blow job in college: no way. Give that lady her own political talk show!

Title: The White Sheik
Year: 1952
Director: Federico Fellini
Writers: Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, and Ennio Flaiano. Story by Fellini, Pinelli and Michaelangelo Antonioni (!)
Stars: Alberto Sordi, Brunella Bovo, Leopoldo Trieste, Giuletta Masina

The Story: A young couple from the sticks comes into Rome for their honeymoon. The husband has everything planned to the second, culminating in a meeting with the Pope, but his shy young wife disappears at the first chance she gets–it turns out that she is secretly in love with the title character, who is the hero of her favorite comic book.

Why It’s Great: Fellini is beloved for his oddly uplifting movies about existential ennui, but this, his first movie as a solo director, was one of his few straight-up comedies, causing American critics to mostly ignore it. That’s a shame, since it’s a masterful and touching farce. Woody Allen named it as his favorite comedy of all time! It’s a romp, but also very ambitious, in that it manages to be wholly sympathetic to two totally conflicting points of view. We appreciate both the thrill of her liberation and the exquisiteness agony of his suffering, even though one is causing the other. It was this big-hearted munificence that would come to define Fellini’s world-view.

Three more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan…

The Baader Meinhof Complex (Germany 2008, 150 min, dir Uli Edel, cast: Martina Gedeck, Moritz Bleibtreu, Johanna Wokalek).

Well-educated twenty-something Americans suddenly become Al Qaeda and Pakistani terrorists. Go back to 1967, substitute German names, and you have Baader-Meinhof. The pressure to preserve wealth and power always creates outliers.

Ulrike Meinhof was a journalist. She was married with two children. Her generation grew up in the shadow of Hitler and could not understand how Germany would consort with dictators and support the United States in Vietnam. If the Nazi era was supposed to never be forgotten, what was the lesson?

Benno Ohnesorg was killed in 1967 in a Berlin riot protesting the brutality of the Shah of Iran. We know today that the policeman who killed him was actually an agent for the Stasi, the East German secret police. But no one would know that for 40 years, and it still isn’t clear whether Karl-Heinz Kurras pulled the trigger because he was instructed to escalate the demonstration by his Stasi handlers.

But this act, the Kent State of Germany (the Kent State killings were in 1970) was proof that no justice would ever be achieved, and that only terrorism and violence would purify a western society corrupted by capitalism. Sound familiar? If we were not so afraid to actually hear what the current wave of terrorists have to say, maybe it would sound similar.

And let’s not forget that Islam has always been a religion of profound intellectualism. Isn’t it strange we believe all the young Islamic terrorists are being corrupted by deceitful mullahs? Isn’t it odd that some of the best and the brightest of a new generation are planting the bombs? The press remains incurious. To get press attention it helps to have a catchy name with “bad” coupled with a word that sounds like Mein Kampf (Hitler’s best-seller). The exploits of the Baader-Meinhof gang with its Bonnie and Clyde overtones were great for tabloid journalism.

The Baader Meinhof Complex is about how terrorism starts, why it starts, and how it grows in every generation that is summoned to action by the affront of corrupted power. How it ends is another story; that too is covered in this long, detailed, and very important film. Know the past and know the future,or you are doomed to know only what those who own the present think you should know.

Watch for Martina Gedeck as Ulrike Meinhof. She plays Martha in Mostly Martha, also on MovieWithMe.com. Only here you get to see what’s underneath that chef’s uniform.