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

A Mighty Wind (USA, 2003, 91 min. dir: Christopher Guest, cast: Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Michael McKean, Bob Balaban, Parker Posey)

Can a movie escape the chains of its own maker and soar as something completely different? A Mighty Wind had that possibility and I wish Christopher Guest had seen the greater opportunity he stumbled upon.

Here’s the set-up. A famous talent agent for all the great folk song acts of the 1950s and 1960s has died. His son decides to stage a tribute to his father at Town Hall, New York City, featuring all the great groups. Typical of Christopher Guest docs like Best of Show and Waiting For Guffman, this is an easy-to-view mash-up of satire, shtick, and really good stage numbers.  This last is always part of Guest’s shrewd understanding of his audience.

We know we are seeing satire, but we’ll only stays attentive as long as it is GOOD satire. That means the tap dancer, or a show dog, or the folk group had better be damn talented. A Mighty Wind may be satirizing old folk groups, but the original music and performance is first rate (one song even won an Oscar).

Mitch & Mickey could be based on any number of duos of the era. Played by Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara are the best. Who knew Levy could sing and be a romantic lead? There should be an Oscar for switching personas.Just getting them to see each other again after the painful break-up years before is a triumph of the agent’s art. Once they are on stage again, their performance is the showstopper.

A Mighty Wind could have been a much mightier wind by pumping the story of these two falling for each other again. They relight the flame in middle age, with gray hair and wrinkles. They leave the rest of the movie behind. Chemistry is the toughest part of casting a movie. It can fool you until you see the film cut together. A Mighty Wind pulls back at the very moment it could have given us more. Very frustrating, but that’s what makes the movie making process so fascinating: you never know how it will turn out.

Sin Nombre (2009 Mexico 96 min, dir: Cary Joji Fukunaga, cast: Edgar Flores, Paulina Gaitan).

Hollywood calls a director like Cary Fukunaga “a shooter.” In private screening rooms, card rooms at Hillcrest, and The Grill in BH, “a shooter” is said with the kind of reverence the Mafia reserves for a stealthy hit man.

Shooters know how to make the lean, mean, visual pictures (that means “films” in Hollywood) that have been the high art of American cinema since John Ford made his first Western. Cary Fukunaga got attention when he did a short called Victoria para Chino about Mexican immigrants left in a truck in Texas to die. Sin Nombre (translation: Without a Name) explores more of the subculture he got to know while growing up in various places from Oakland to Japan to France to Mexico City to New York.

Sin Nombre is tough, sinewy, and as relentless as the train that drives the rhythm of the story. A Mexican drug gang is the background for a classic film noir that would probably have starred someone like Paul Muni if it had been made by Warner Brothers during the classic gangster film era.

Casper saves Sayra from rape by killing the boss of his gang while they rob helpless migrants atop a train bound for the US. He knows the gang will not stop until he is dead. It is not dying that frightens him, he confesses, but not knowing when or where it will come. It comes at the very instant they are almost across the border. He dies, she goes on to a new life, mourning her love.

This is a tale usually told amid wars and revolutions. Perhaps that is part of Fukunaga’s message: there is an unseen rising that moves toward our border with the slow deliberateness of a freight train. It carries a human cargo that possesses nothing more than hope . Watch the movie, and watch the next from Cary Fukunaga, the shooter.

Best in Show ( USA 2000, 90 min, dir: Christopher Guest, cast: Parker Posey, Eugene Levy, Michael McKean, Bob Balaban, Christopher Guest, Ed Begley, jr.)

Christopher Guest once appeared in my office pitching Spinal Tap. I turned him down. If I had said yes would my life be different? Well, at least I’d have bragging rights. Truth be told, his movies don’t pitch well because there is never a story. Instead there are great inventive bits strung on the backs of marvelous character types/comedians.

Note there is a difference (at least to me) between dramatic characters and character types. Character types are blank slates to be sketched in by very talented comedians combining scripted situations, brilliant improv and precise direction.Did Larry David (Curb Your Enthusiasm HBO series) learn from Chris Guest or what?

Chris always chooses the situation that offers a full plate of absurdity. A rock band on the road, a small town talent show, a dog show, a folk singer reunion.Did you ever recognize Eugene Levy or Michael McKean or Bob Balaban before they became Chris Guest players? Probably not, because they were treated by others as actors, not as creative phosphorous.

This is very different from Sasha Baron Cohen’s (and Larry Charles) view of improv; which takes poor unsuspecting schnooks and makes them the victims of their comedy. That’s like mowing down the Indians in an old Western with a machine gun.Best of Show is really first class stuff. Not a stall, not a repetition, not an ego riff. Christopher Guest doesn’t allow it and his films are excellent for that reason.  If you don’t believe me, see Borat and then see Best in Show. Then you’ll understand ha ha sloppiness versus really on-the-mark funny.

Lovers of the Arctic Circle (Spain 1998, 112 min, dir: Julio Medem, cast: Najwa Nimri, Fele Martinez)

Some directors live in dream time. Reality is elastic. Waking sounds mingle with deep fantasies. Precariously balanced in this limbo space are the sensuous, sexual, time-ruptured fantasies that Julio Medem cultivates in his movies. The earth from which they grow covers the parched slopes of the north of Spain. Films like The Red Squirrel and Tierra live in this country. Sex and Lucia, one of the sexiest movies ever made, translates the emptiness of the Basque landscape to a sea-bleached island.

Lovers of the Arctic Circle also favors isolation, but here it is emotional. Ana and Otto meet as children and are instantly soul mates. Their parents: one divorced, one widowed, fall in love and bring the teenage Ana and Otto together to be lovers for an instant. Just and instant–before the death of one parent separates their emotions and their lives.

Medem’s time line shifts back and forth, showing flashes of time future and time present. He crochets with intricate stitches until, far into the movie; we see the shape of the design. This is true of all his movies. It pleasures are delights like sensual intensity.

Like an aviation map, the time line leads to the skies far above an Arctic lake. Otto works as bush pilot and is setting up to land on a nameless blue lake. And swimming the lake, by a rustic cabin built for romantic encounters: waits Ana. She listens to the sounds of the engine as the plane skims the water and rides the dark surface towards their embrace. After all the missed moments, love finally awaits them.

Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi (Israel 2003, 94 min. dir: Shemi Zarhin, cast: Oshri Cohen, Aya Steinovitz Koren, Arieh Elias, Esti Zakheim).

What’s with fat Israelis living in small apartments and screaming at each other? If the Arabs didn’t wish them death, their blood pressure would kill them quicker. Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi starts out with all the negatives of a crazy family picture, but quickly makes a turn into a unique, heartfelt, lovable movie. Shlomi is the teenager of the title, and the “Bonjour Monsieur” part is his grandfather’s daily attempt to speak French (why French? More craziness). In this dysfunctional household Shlomi is never given a second look and gets al the tasks like cooking and cleaning. He’s though to be a dullard until his teacher at school takes and interest and re-tests him.

Turns out he’s a genius at math. This fact does no dissuade his older brother and sister from making fun of him and his divorced mother from continually warning him that he’ll amount to nothing and is behaving like a Moroccan Jew (apparently a Jew’s worst nightmare). Slice of life is more like slice of salami in this house, but Shemi Zarhin makes the characters so fresh we are always surprised.

The tentative, tender, blooming love story between Shlomi and next-door neighbor Rona (Israeli best supporting actress nomination) aches with repression until he confronts her with his brother’s diary and she tells him he is the only one for her. Rona is what we all want in a next-door neighbor and Shlomi’s story is our dream of breaking away from the walls that hold us, and finding freedom with the lover of our dreams.

The Namesake (USA 2006, 122min, dir: Mira Nair, cast: Kal Penn, Tabu, Jacinda Barrett, Brooke Smith, Irrfan Khan)

The girl your parents really want you to marry is sexy, hot, dangerous and fickle. Is this too wonderful even to dream? Let’s add this: you are both first generation American-born immigrants from India and marrying one of your own satisfies the fine print on your birth certificate. Gogol’s struggle with his name, his culture, and his place in the American parade is an everyman tale that will bring tears and nods of recognition to the face of anyone who has ever had to break free from parents raised in the old country and find his/her place in the great saga we call these United States.

I guess this description applies to all of us (unless you are a Native American). Mira Nair is a most talented filmmaker (when she’s not making clunkers like Amelia). I’d love to take Namesake back to show the Pilgrims’ kids at Plymouth Rock back in about 1640 (if AMC had opened Plymouth Rock 18 stadium seating multiplex by then). They’d sit in their white bib collars, eating multicolored maze popcorn, and shouting, “Go thee dude, right on thou.”

The energy of these characters as they the search for place and meaning is common to all of us whether we came to the US from India, Ukraine or Burkina Faso. The story has been told before in many ways. Elia Kazan’s “Amerika” is one I especially remember. And here it is Mira Nair’s turn to reawaken the ageless saga of the New World and bring the same tears to our eyes as “by the rivers of Babylon, where we sat down, and cried our eyes when we remembered Zion.”

Strangers we are in a strange world, but our collective stories are the lullabies that keep us safe. See “Namesake” when you have the time to dream.

Brick Lane (Britain 2007, 102 min, dir: Sarah Gavron, cast: Tannishtha Chatterjee, Sastish Kaushik, Christopher Simpson)

Someone once confided to me that the real tragedy of being an immigrant to another culture is that your kids will never know who you are. They’ll be English, or French, or Dutch, or American and you’ll be a stranger from another place who carries a life of memories and joys that your family has no patience to understand. The older you get the less comfort and the more loneliness. Brick Road is not about an old person.

It is about a Bangladeshi girl whose world is suddenly changed by the death of her mother. She is forced into an arranged marriage with an old man and sent to the Bangladeshi community around Brick Lane, in East London, to be his bride. The years give her two children but never improve the loveless marriage. Then a young man, around her age, comes into her life and, for the first time, she feels love.

The affair abruptly comes up against history. 9/11 puts all British Moslems under suspicion. Her lover says it is time to forsake this shadow life under the thumb of the British and go back to Bangladesh. It is what she has yearned for all her life: the chance to pick up the life she was torn away from as a teenage bride. Now she can return with a man she passionately loves. But where does she belong? Is she Bangladeshi or British? Where is her country?

Her decision is the heart of the film, and what makes it so much a story of unrequited hopes and dreams that finally yield to new understanding. There are many pilgrim stories in movies. They’ve played against backgrounds as varied as the American West and the plains of Africa. The paving stones of Brick Lane are yet another landscape for a story that is personal, heartfelt, and universal.

The old joke about the Golden Globes is they can’t find a restaurant for the awards dinner because all the members are waiters. It’s fashionable for anybody with a blog, column, show, or street corner shopping cart to comment on the awards: so it’s my turn. Certainly The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), which gives out the Golden Globes, has its best days behind it. Who can forget 1981 when they all got Rolex watches from Pia Zadora’s husband and decided to award her the Golden Globe for her role in Butterfly?

That was the Hollywood that made us smile. Journalists could be bought just like anyone else. The world was in balance. The HFPA show was banned from TV after that incident, but it didn’t last. They had a good name, “Golden Globes,” a nice statuette that looked good clutched to bosoms, and a date early enough that cable TV could use the news to tub thump for the Oscars. For the last decade the HFPA’s biggest problem has been where to spend all the money.

Now there is a new problem: no press. World-class newspapers like the Zagreb Daily Star and the Kharkiv Sun are going out of business fast. The HFPA members are out of jobs. So are they still a foreign press association when the presses have stopped? Legitimate journalists who work for well-known papers in London and Paris were never welcome at the HFPA. They preferred to draw their membership from the obscure (if you couldn’t write well, at least you could wait tables well).

They may need to change the name to the HFA and forget the word “press.” Nobody would notice. The irony: 90 plus waiters, horse players, and lottery squatters who make up the HFPA pick pretty much the same winners as over 5000 supposed film professionals in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

2005 Finland, 111 min, dir: Klaus Haro, cast: Topi Majaniemi, Marjaana Maijala, Brasse Brannstrom, Esko Salminen

War movies are similar to war itself. First come the big battles, then the wounded, the refugees, stragglers, and deserters. The big battle movies of World War Two are long gone, but the small stories of the stragglers are part of the moral compass of our age. Mother of Mine traces the story of Finnish children (70,000) packed up by their panicked families and sent off to Sweden. The Finns fought the Germans while the Swedes welcomed them to come eat gravlax and limpa bread.What is it liked to be packed up by your mother, put on a train full of kids, and delivered to an isolated farm where a childless husband and wife try to welcome you as the son they wish they had?

Would your instinct be to run? Where? And how could they convince you that all they wanted was a little of the child love they never had; in the brief time given them before the end of the war removed you from their lives forever?

The film starts with the boy, now an adult, coming back to make sense of those years. It brings up questions of how you resolve your mature feelings with misty memory. If there was a credo for MovieWithMe.com (and there is not) it would be to introduce you to fragments of feelings that films like Mother of Mine can put before your eyes and your heart.

Spain 2000, dir. Daniel Calparsoro 90 min, cast: Najwa Nimri)

One of these days I would like to string Najwa Nimri’s sex scenes together and see the body of her work along with her body. She’s nothing less than remarkable in films like Lovers of the Arctic Circle, Sex and Lucia, and Asfalto. This movie belongs to the period of Spanish productions when hip urban crime dramas emulating American pictures were thought to be the key to international distribution. Alas, producers chasing pots of money usually end up without a pot to piss in. But let’s thank movies like Salto al Vacio and Asfalto for discovering Najwa. She’s half Basque, half Jordanian. Her name in Arabic means “ecstasy.” Wow, how did her father know? (he’s the Arab in the family).

Asfalto is a drug-seal-gone-wrong kind of movie. Najwa is the girlfriend of one of the guys until she and the other one discover they have extreme heat for each other. So who gets to bed her? She can’t decide so invites both of them. Quite a good kinky scene follows. It turned the director on enough to marry her, and got the attention of Julio Medem who cast her in Lovers of the Arctic Circle (MovieWithMe.com) and Sex and Lucia (MovieWithMe.com).

She’s continued to work in many Spanish films although few have made it to the US. If you yearn for her you can sample her singing in the band Najwajean on iTunes. Her sound is not-so-good euro pop. Too bad she doesn’t sing Jordanian-Basque fusion. That could be hot.