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

Lemon Tree (Israel 2008, 106, dir: Eran Riklis, cast: Hiam Abbas, Ali Suliman)

If you’ve seen recent Israeli movies, you know Israel has already lost the war. Art usually precedes events. A nation that walls off its enemy while reserving the right to invade at will is blind: even with night vision goggles. Anything said of the Israelis can apply to us. Iraq, Afghanistan, and Viet Nam are not yet finished. At some point our guns will not protect us.

Lemon Tree is a simple tale about a backyard fence erected in the name of security. Nobody dies, nobody goes to prison. But nobody who puts up the fence thinks of the human cost. The human cost is what new Israeli films are about. Waltz with Bashir, also on MovieWithMe.com, is a complex narrative about Israeli sanctioned slaughter. Here as well, the human cost-not only to the enemy but to the Israeli soldiers: is never factored in. Films like these speak to moral fractures that can only widen.

In Lemon Tree, the new Israeli Defense Minister decides to build his dream country house right on the border with West Bank Palestine (a little improbably, but what the hell). His neighbor across the wire is a Palestinian woman who has been tending the lemon grove that was planted by her father. The minister’s security men decide the lemon grove offers potential cover to terrorist encroachment, and must be cut down. They offer to compensate the woman, but she doesn’t want the money, she wants her land and her lemons.

A young Palestinian lawyer takes her case and argues all the way to the Israeli Supreme Court. He achieves a partial victory: they will cut down the trees near the border fence, and leave some of the ones farther away. It doesn’t help, and the person who seems to understand her plight, and her powerlessness the most; is the wife of the Defense Minister. They eye each other across the backyard border throughout the movie, yet meet only once, briefly, in court. Their eyes seem to ask: is this the only way we can live, do we actually understand each other better than we know?

In their rush to seal the border against all threats are the Israelis never pausing to see their enemy is also human? Regardless of your feelings on the politics, the performance of the Palestinian woman and her lawyer are so rich and subtle that the film is always engaging and human. Haim Abbas carries the weight of the Palestinian people in her eyes.

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?

Title: Bright Young Things
Year: 2003
Director: Steven Fry
Writer: Steven Fry, based on the novel “Vile Bodies” by Evelyn Waugh
Stars: Stephen Campbell Moore, Emily Mortimer, James McAvoy, Michael Sheen, David Tennant, Jim Broadbent, Simon Callow, Peter O’Toole

The Story: A young novelist lacks the money to marry his posh sweetheart, so he becomes an anonymous gossip columnist, casting his withering eye on a frivolous world of partying aristocrats.

Why It’s Great: Waugh always presented himself as a Catholic moralist, supposedly on the side of the disapproving status quo against the dissolute gadabouts he portrayed, but it was never very convincing. He seemed to enjoy the revelry too much. Oh, his disgust was real enough, but the source of it was his own internal conflict, his irrepressible urge to subvert and debauch the aristocratic world that he’d been raised to revere. Fascism and economic ruin are always lurking around the edges, but Fry finds in Waugh’s story a uncanny presentiment that, against all odds, the moral poison that would actually come to define the coming world was the tyranny of the pleasure principle.

Two more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan.

Nine Queens (Argentina, 2000, 114 min, dir: Fabian Bielinsky, cast: Ricardo Darin, Gaston Pauls, Leticia Bredice)

Criminal (USA 2004, 87 min, dir: Gregory Jacobs, cast: John C. Reilly, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Diego Luna)

How can one movie be a hit and the remake a dud? What goes wrong is always a mystery but it follows the old rule: you never know how it will turn out.Nine Queens is an Argentinean classic.

A clever grifter recruits an understudy to help him with the big one: he’s got his hands on forgeries of a priceless stamp collection (the nine queens are the faces on the stamps). He’s going to sell them to a visiting billionaire for big bucks. Most of the action takes place in the hotel where the billionaire is staying, and where the con man’s sister is, conveniently, the concierge. The deal gets rough when the billionaire throws in an added condition: he wants to sleep with the grifter’s sister. She hates her brother, and grinds him into the ground on the deal for her ass.

Great idea, very original. The writer/director was an assistant director most of his short career (he died at 47 of a heart attack while casting a commercial in Brazil). Nine Queens is his lasting memorial. You can’t find much wrong with it, and the casting of versatile Argentine actor Ricardo Darin (see clip: Son of the Bride on MovieWithMe.com) and fetching Leticia Bredice (click for her Playboy photos) is inspired.

So why did it bomb in the American remake? What are the clues? Remember the phrases “writer/director,” “versatile,” and “playboy.”

The American director, Gregory Jacobs, is also an accomplished first assistant director. Criminal is his one of his few (shared) writing credits, and his solo directing gig. I suspect he got this break because of pals on a lot of big Hollywood pictures he’d worked with as First A.D. Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney are the producers of Criminal. Their clout probably landed John C. Reilly and Maggie Gyllenhaal. THAT was the big mistake.

Movies are conceits. If you don’t believe what’s up on the screen is real you’ll take your popcorn and go home. Maggie Gyllenhaal is very talented, but upper class. I’ll NEVER believe she’s going to fuck a guy for her brother’s con game. Leticia Bredice will sell her body to anybody for the right price, including Playboy.

There’s an old saying in movies, “you can’t play working class, you either are or are not.” Maggie is a gifted actress, but she’s no Stella Kowalski (A Streetcar Named Desire). I’d cast her as Blanche Dubois.

John C. Reilly is no Ricardo Darin either. He’s also a wonderful character actor who specializes in sleazy bumblers. (see clip: The Good Girl on MovieWithMe.com). If he’s playing a bumbler and you know he will lose, so what’s the surprise?

Look at clips of the same scene from both movies. Leticia/Maggie are walking up to the billionaire’s hotel room door resolved to carry out their end of the bargain. See whom you believe.

Title: Gold Digger of 1933
Year: Guess…
Director: Melvyn LeRoy, musical sequences by Busby Berkeley
Writers: Erwin Gelsey, James Seymour, David Boehm and Ben Markson, based on a play by Avery Hopwood
Stars: Ginger Rogers, Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, Warren William, Joan Blondell, Aline MacMahon

The Story: Three showgirls are thrown out of work by the depression, but with a lot of dreaming and scheming they all get jobs in a toe-tapping show about the plight of the “forgotten man”.

Why It’s Great: Film histories can frequently perpetuate the myth that Hollywood movies succeeded during the Depression by pretending that nothing bad was going on. Hardly! This is a light musical comedy, but every single scene honestly confronts the bleak economic reality of its time in a clear-eyed way that current ‘topical’ movies wouldn’t dare replicate. This was the second of many pair-ups of toe-tappers Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell. Powell would eventually go on to show that he could handle a full range of rolls, not just song-and-dance. Keeler wasn’t so lucky. She specialized in roles about talentless singers and dancers. Guess why she developed that persona? Because she couldn’t sing or dance! And yet, she makes it work! She was the plucky little star who could be you! Hell, she was the star who wasn’t even as good as you!

Two more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan!

Goodbye, Lenin! (Germany 2003 121 min, dir: Wolfgang Becker, cast: Daniel Bruhl, Katrin Sass, Chulpan Khamatova)

This version of the American Rip Van Winkle legend is set in Germany. What if you went to asleep in East Berlin just before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, and woke up to a new world order? What if you were kept from seeing things had changed so completely because the shock might kill you? Alex’s mother wakes from a six month long coma after a heart she suffered just before the Wall crumbled.

The doctor warns him not to do anything that could upset her fragile recovery. He interprets this as his dictum to keep things exactly the same as before the Wall went down. So he recreates East German life in her apartment just as it was a year before. But life and history move on, and there comes the inevitable moment when she ventures out in her slippers to see what has become of her cherished country and countrymen (the scene in the clip).

In Germany this film unleashed a wave of “ostolgy,” the German-English term for nostalgia for the old East Germany (someone has even started manufacturing Spreewald pickles again). Goodbye Lenin! could easily have been a crass, one-line comedy. It’s not that at all.

The deeper story is of Alex finally learning the truth about his father (who fled to the West when he was a toddler), and understanding how to free himself from the confining world he has created around himself and his mother.

Who is the real Rip Van Winkle asleep in Good bye Lenin!? Alex has been dreaming all his life and now must shake himself awake and find a life in the wider world beyond the apartment, and beyond the Wall that once protected him as well as isolated him. Washington Irving’s short story is about a man who falls asleep just before the American Revolution and wakes up twenty years later, still proclaiming his loyalty to King George. What we take as a children’s tale is not that at all, but a serious look at change and denial. History rushes past us every instant of our lives. Those of us who choose to sleepwalker can never feel the breeze.

The Country Teacher (Czech Republic 2008, 103 min, dir: Bohdan Slama, cast: Pavel Liska, Zuzana Bydzovska, Ladislav Sedivy)

Sex hangs heavily in the air like the scent of new cut grass. The woman farmer in The Country Teacher is neither young nor beautiful: but manages to charge every scene with her sensuality. A pretty amazing feat in jeans and a woolen shirt.

MovieWithMe.com also reviewed The Girl From Paris, which could be a companion piece to The Country Teacher. The first is French, the second Czech: both are detailed glimpses of actual life on a farm, and the blunt, rough characters that inhabit this environment. But The Girl from Paris is looking for a guy, while The Country Teacher is a gay refugee from the city looking for a place to recover from his broken relationship.

He finds room and board at a farmhouse near the school with a woman farmer and her teenage son. She wants romance, he wants her son. It could be the log line for a Hollywood remake. What saves the film from a one-line fate is the subtle sketching of the characters, all struggling under intense emotional needs.

The woman farmer maintains an incredible sensuality despite her daily routine of hay harvesting or cow herding. Her son’s brute courtship of his girlfriend is the only way he knows; even though she resists at every turn yearning for more civility. When she goes to college in the city he follows her, finding himself more out of place than ever. She rejects him and sends him home.

Back at the farm, the lad’s schoolteacher tries to seduce him. The intent is not so much to have the boy as to find some tenderness to fill his loneliness. The boy rejects him, and the result is the teacher’s exile. What is so wonderful about this film is its amazing slice-of-life quality creating empathy for a mother, a son, and a teacher: all of who cross each other’s lives, all of whom frustrate the other’s love, and all of whom we deeply feel deserve happiness.

Title: Hopscotch
Year: 1980
Director: Ronald Neame
Writers: Brian Garfield and Bryan Forbes, based on the novel by Garfield
Stars: Walter Matthau, Glenda Jackson, Sam Waterson, Ned Beatty

The Story: A laid-back old-school CIA man gets unceremoniously fired by his new neo-con boss. Rather than fade away, he decides to set off a few bombshells, in the form of a tell-all memoir. But does he really want to blow the whistle or is he just jerking their chain? He keeps everybody guessing right until the climax.

Why It’s Great: Ronald Neame (The Horse’s Mouth) was a fine but anonymous director. By consistently letting story take precedence over style, he ensured that his movies would be good but also that his name would be forgotten. Matthau’s infinite charm makes this movie a lot of fun, but what gives it its bite is the underlying horror about the dirty tricks that had recently been revealed by Congress’s Church Committee. Amazingly, every time Matthau mentions a “dirty trick” in his memoir, it’s a real-world accusation, the sorts of things that hadn’t been confirmed at the time but are accepted as fact now, featuring names such as Duvalier and Somoza. I love super-spy movies, but all that imaginary derring-do has hidden one fact from the world, that real down-in-the-mud spy work is actually quite fascinating. Very few movies have dared to turn over that rock and get to know the worms squirming underneath, but this movie shows how much fun dirty work can be.

Two more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan.

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!”