Tell No One (France, 2006, 131 Min. dir: Guillaume Canet, cast: Francois Cluzet, Kristin Scott Thomas, Gilles Lellouche)

The irony of Tell No One is a French film based on an American novel by a kid from Newark, New Jersey.  Once upon a time American action filmmakers prided themselves and telling really great stories. No more. Shutter Island is a mess, and French cliffhangers like Tell No One are excelling at a genre we thought we owned.

It gets more embarrassing. Once this film became a hit in American art cinemas, Hollywood decided to remake it. Kathleen Kennedy, a big time feature producer, is transferring the action back to the US where it was set in the first place. Whether the remake will every see daylight is dubious.

Meanwhile the French, along with the Germans and the Koreans, are creating some of the best action and suspense films anywhere. Tell No One is a hard-plotted story of a guy who goes skinny-dipping with his wife, is hit over the head, and wakes up to find her dead. Or at least she is dead for several years until he starts getting disturbing notes from her. Then her best friend, who knows more, is killed. And then he is stalked by both the killers and the cops.

You want to see heart stopping ingenious action? Watch the chase across the Paris Paripherique expressway. Watch it again and again. American stunt men usually slow the traffic and speed up the camera. This is different: an intricate ballet between men and machines.

And when you’re finished analyzing that action sequence, take a look at District 13, also on MovieWihMe.com. It’s another amazing action picture that is supposedly in work for an American remake (called Brick Mansion). Don’t make any bets you’ll see it at a theater near you soon. Better to watch the original versions and marvel at truly great filmmaking. And then read some of Harlan Coben’s other novels, he’s a first rate storyteller.

Title: One False Move
Year: 1992
Director: Carl Franklin
Writers: Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson
Stars: Bill Paxton, Cynda Williams, Billy Bob Thornton, Michael Beach
The Story: Three drug dealers pull off a violent heist in L.A. and head for Arkansas. LA. police detectives are one step ahead of them and head east to await their arrival with an unsophisticated small-town sheriff.

Why It’s Great: Most first-time screenplays have the same problem: everybody talks the same, or, almost as bad, likable people talk one way and unlikable people talk the other way. Everybody here always has a unique voice, black or white, cop or criminal, and each one of them has at least some humanity and inhumanity inside them. I have two big rules for writing believable dialogue: “People only want what they want” and “Nobody listens to each other”. It’s hard to hold yourself to those rules. You have to know everything about your characters, all of their history and hopes and dreams, but then you have to remind yourself that your characters won’t ever understand those things about each other (or even about themselves, half the time.)

Find two more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan.

Title: It’s Always Fair Weather
Year: 1955
Director: Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly (On the Town, Singing in the Rain)
Writers: Betty Comden and Adolph Green
Stars: Gene Kelly, Cyd Charisse (Tension), Dan Dailey, Michael Kidd, Dolores Gray

The Story: Three old war buddies show up for a reunion ten years later, only to discover that they’ve each abandoned their dreams. Only when their reunion is exploited by a smarmy live TV show does each confront his own failings.

One Reason Why It’s Great: In 1948, Donen, Kelly, Comden and Green had made the zany sailors-on-leave musical On the Town. Somehow they all found the guts to reunite seven years later for a semi-sequel that would reflect the disappointments of the postwar years. The triumph and camaraderie of wartime America had soured, dissolving into angst and acrimony. Things had soured at MGM, too. Dore Schary’s fabled musical unit was winding down. The Golden Age of Hollywood had come to an end and the dawning age of TV seemed to those left behind like a tacky little replacement. How on earth did they make such an entertaining movie out of this bleak material? The satirical touches are way ahead of their time. A Face in the Crowd‘s attack on TV and The Apartment‘s skewering of corporate-ese both seem a little less daring once you realize that a toe-tapping musical beat them to the punch.

Two more reasons over at Cockeyed Caravan.

Title: Nothing But A Man
Year: 1964
Director: Michael Roemer (The Plot Against Harry)
Writers: Roemer and Robert Young
Stars: Ivan Dixon (“Hogan’s Heroes”), Abbey Lincoln (The Girl Can’t Help It), Yaphet Kotto (“Homicide”)

The Story: An easygoing railroad worker courts the daughter of prominent preacher who kowtows to the white power structure. She leaves her family behind to marry this proud man, but life together isn’t easy, especially after he gets a rep as an “agitator”.

Why It’s Great: What did it cost to maintain a little dignity in the black south of 1964? We hear a lot of hagiography about the civil rights movement every January and February, but the history we get is set in a fantasy world of easy heroes and villains. Modern schoolkids wouldn’t guess that the decision to be a “race man” (or woman) was a tough one that each black person had to make on their own, and you ran the risk of alienating just as many blacks as whites. Dixon’s performance is amazingly relaxed and raw. Sydney Poitier had become a big star by this point, but, with the big exception of Raisin in the Sun, he’d been stuck playing an endless succession of bloodless saints in well-meaning liberal exposes. These movies sought to prove that blacks weren’t bad people by presenting them as a monolithic force for righteousness. Dixon must have made Poitier pretty jealous by landing a complex, three-dimensional role like this one (though I’m sure he got paid peanuts)

Three more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan.

Y Tu Mama Tambien (Mexico, 2001 105 min. dir: Alfonso Cuaron, cast: Maribel Verdu, Gael Garcia Bernal, Diego Luna).

Is this a coming of age movie for two teenage boys or a loss of innocence movie for a whole country? Sex is a big part of it (and Maribel Verdu does it so well). But there is one scene, never commented upon by the characters. The two teenage boys driving Luisa to the beach in hopes of fucking her pass police rounding up Mexican peasants. As the car passes, the police roughly line up the peasants in a scene where we fear the next image will be their execution. It is chilling, but the car drives on without comment. We want to say, “Stop so we can see what happens?”

Many films, like many songs, wear disguises. “Puff the Magic Dragon” has been a favorite children’s song but is really about the pleasures of smoking dope. “Ring Around the Rosie” is about death from the bubonic plague in 14^th Century Europe. High Noon is about the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950′s. Bound for Glory argues for socialism in America. The creators of these works knew one thing: if you want to send a message, you are better wrapping it in entertainment.

The mystery of what lies beneath Y Tu Mama Tambien was answered by a film professor and historian, Ernesto R. Acevedo-Munoz. He saw references throughout the movie to class struggles between rich and poor in Mexico. Luisa (from Madrid) has the last name Cortes. Julio, the working class kid, is named Zapata. The rich boy’s first name is Tenoch. Cortes was the Spanish conqueror of Mexico. Zapata was the peasant who started a revolution. Tenoch is from Tenochtitlan; the Aztec name for Mexico City. Professor Acevedo-Munoz explains that rich politicians of the ruling PRI party often named their children Aztec names as a way of conveying upper class patriotism.

Once you catch on, you can find several more instances of class conflict in this sweet and sexy film. Julio’s sister studies sociology and supports the revolution in Chiapas. The boys are stopped in a Mexico City traffic jam caused by a political demonstration.

The Mexico of Y Tu Mama Tambien was going through a debt crisis, an uprising on its southern border, and a bloody attempt to unseat the corrupt right wing ruling party. Sometimes the only way to tell a serious story is to pretend it is something else that will prove popular enough for wide distribution. Those who understand will push farther to find the real message.

Don’t be misled by the headline, I really mean Vudu, the company that was trying to stay afloat selling overpriced boxes pre-loaded with Hollywood movies. Then they made the wise choice to ditch the boxes in favor of a website only, pay per view approach. Now that has paid off handsomely with Walmart buying them out. Walmart (Wal-Mart) plans to run their own streaming service onto the new streaming capable TVs and Blu-rays they sell.

The reasoning is okay as far as it goes, but I don’t think that is far enough.First let’s take the Blu-ray. Nobody has come up with a good reason to buy it unless you are a gamer, or you enjoy seeing movie images so sharp you can see the sweat under every actor’s arms. But people have been buying the players because it’s a cheap way to get streaming movies. The reasoning: for the price of the player, you get streaming services AND Blu-ray (if you ever choose to buy an overpriced Blu-ray disk).

But is Walmart missing something? The reason streaming devices are exciting is because everyone wants total access to the net on their TVs. Why keep a cable subscription if you can get Hulu on your 50 inch flat screen TV? Movies are a small part of it, though an important part. That’s why God invented Netflix. What we don’t need is more add-on devices giving us the ability to pay to buy and rent movies that are the same movies we can get other places (no studio allows movies to go on any of the services including Netflix, Vudu or Roxio Cinema Now before the DVDs are in the stores).

I think I would rather put a new movie in my Netflix queue and wait until it shows up in my mailbox(or streaming) like an old friend I forgot. Walmart would probably argue that their new Vudu service is not for me, it is for the less sophisticated movie watcher. Okay, if you are buying and promoting a service for the unwashed, why are you selling organic produce in your Walmart food markets? I think Mr. Organic is the same shopper that might be interested in a new TV with a streaming device. And if he reads Cnet, he’ll know your Vudu is, at least at present, way behind the curve (it can’t be used on MAC, it requires its own player to be downloaded etc).

Congratulations to the venture capitalists who just got a big pay day on Vudu. I am sure they are breathing a sigh of relief all the way to the bank.

Title: Summer of Sam
Year: 1999
Director: Spike Lee
Writers: Victor Coliccio, Michael Imperioli (Christopher from “The Sopranos”), and Spike Lee
Stars: John Leguizamo, Adrian Body, Mira Sorvino, Jennifer Esposito

The Story: Young Italian-Americans in 1977 New York grapple with a serial killer on the loose, a heat wave and a blackout, but the real threats come from their own fears and flaws.

Why It’s Great: This is the ultimate antidote to the corrosive cliches of most serial-killer stories. Having seen too many movies, every fear-addled New Yorker decides they can solve these crimes on their own by “getting inside the brain of the killer,” but the real killer isn’t driven to kill because he’s a crazed vet, or a priest, or gay, or a punk. He’s doing it because his dog told him to. Everybody wants to see the killer as a judgment for society’s failings, but he’s not. He’s just crazy. Lee caught a lot of flak for showing the title character talking, but that’s the whole point. If your dog told you to, you’d do it too.

Three more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan.

The Sky Crawlers (2008 Japan, 122 min. dir: Mamoru Oshii (story and characters by Hiroshi Mori) cast: voices only

The creator of The Sky Crawlers only got one thing wrong: the kids actually go up in the planes. If you substitute UAS drones (unmanned aerial system) for fighter planes, and joy sticks for throttles, this film is deadly accurate about our own future. The pilots, male and female, are trapped in an endless adolescence that provides the sharp responses and reaction times needed for split second aerial dogfights. But they lack the emotional resources needed for love and maturity. Sounds like the ideal modern soldier, doesn’t it? They are called “kildren” in this future age where a perpetual war rages against who knows who? Does it really make a difference anymore? Pilot Yuichi falls in love with his new commander, but he is flustered and shy. In the skies, however, he is a demon.

The great films about pilot’s lives have all been made except this one. The dizzying aerial dogfights in animation are so intense they are almost three-dimensional. The story in between the aerial sequences is full of boredom and dreams. Dreams of love, dreams of life beyond the squad room. But reality is the never-ending series of life-days measured out between climbing into the fighters and doing battle in brilliant skies where only death tumbles you back.

Mamoru Oshii gave us Ghost in the Shell, parts I and II, and also Jin Roh (also reviewed on MovieWithMe.com). In each of his films there is a simmering, romantic nihilism that suggests our world has removed the possibility enduring love. In Jin Roh, the romance is between a police-trained high tech killer and a girl whose best friend was killed by him.

Existential Japanese anime has no equivalent in US films, yet its roots are probably our own film noir movies. Watch as it slowly unfolds with the same sense of destiny as these darkly intense movies from our own movie past.

Title: Brother From Another Planet
Year: 1984
Director: John Sayles (Eight Men Out)
Writers: John Sayles
Stars: Joe Morton (“The Good Wife”), Steve James, Tom Wright, David Strathairn (Good Night and Good Luck)

The Story: A strange, silent being crash-lands on Ellis Island. He’s an intergalactic refugee with a healing touch, but he’s no “E.T.” Because he looks a black man, he winds up in Harlem, where his potential goes mostly unrecognized. Gradually, he find his way in the world, but two “men in black”-style slavecatchers from his home planet are hunting for him…

Why It’s Great: Who is John Sayles to make a movie about Harlem? Can a college-educated white guy make a movie about characters who mostly have less money, less education and a different cultural heritage than he does? Should he? How can he find universal points of identification without ignoring the uniqueness of the culture he’s portraying? The first inclination is to say: “don’t do it”. At worst, you’re going to offend a lot of people, at best, you’re going to be imitating other voices rather than finding your own. But this movie justifies itself beautifully. (It doesn’t hurt that Sayles empowered local filmmakers along the way, including cinematographer Ernest R. Dickerson, who went on to help Spike Lee make hismovies.)

Three more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan.

Title: Junebug
Year: 2005
Director: Phil Morrison
Writer: Angus MacLachlan
Stars: Amy Adams (Enchanted), Embeth Davidtz (“Mad Men”), Alessandro Nivolla, Ben McKenzie (“Southland”)

The Story: A chic Chicago gallery owner marries a hunky transplant from North Carolina. When she wants to do business with an untrained painter who lives near his hometown, she quickly gets wrapped up in ups and downs of his family, especially his effervescent sister-in-law.

Why It’s Great: The supposed “red state / blue state divide” has so thoroughly poisoned the American dialogue that it’s now shocking to see a movie that’s equally sympathetic towards both big city art-dealers and their small-town religious kin. Davidtz refuses to understand the attitudes of her husband’s family and they do no better with her, but we quietly realize that the conflicts across the cultural divide are just the symptoms of the long-simmering conflicts within each culture. Class resentment becomes the scapegoat for the unspoken resentments at the heart of both families. The direction and the acting tease a lot of meaning out of the understated script. With each line, we understand instantly (a) what the person is trying to say, (b) what they’re unintentionally revealing about themselves, and (c) how the other person is hearing something completely different. And yet, while we’re acutely aware of everyone’s failings, we remain sympathetic to them all.

FOUR more reasons in the super-sized entry over at Cockeyed Caravan.