Fingers (USA 1978, 90 min, dir: James Toback, cast: Harvey Keitel, Tissa Farrow, James Brown) The Beat That My Heart Skipped (France 2005, 108 min, dir; Jacques Audiard, cast: Romain Duris, Aure Atika)

Rarely is an American movie remade as a French one. Usually it is the reverse. What’s clear is our style is brute confrontation and theirs is subtle manipulation. These two films, both excellent, are a Rosetta stone of Anglo-French cultural understanding.

James Toback made Fingers in 1978 with a young Harvey Keitel. You have to forgive him carrying a boom box everywhere on his shoulder: not even Sony Walkmans had been invented yet. Jacques Audiard makes Romain Duris a Belmondo-like thug who hides his musical ambition as a concert pianist by playing imaginary keyboards on cafe tables.

Audiard also adds characters and levels of plot absent from Fingers. It would be easy to say the French version has more depth and polish. But it is easier to improve than create from nothing. I think the American version is actually subtler for what it leaves out, and more electric for emotions that are not stated.

Witness the two love scenes. Harvey Keitel is crude and forceful. Romain Duris is expressive, romantic, yearning and wanting. One is a trashing animal ready to climb on his conquest. The other is opening himself up to feelings long simmering. But which has more heat, and what is more honest in human passion? I think Toback takes the prize and his film, though less sophisticated and less of a successful character study; finally has more raw power. See them both together and acknowledge them both as excellent. See them for Tissa Farrow and Aure Atika adding very sexual interpretations to the same part. Then go on see Toback’s Tyson and Audiard’s The Prophet to understand the extent of their cinema art.

A Woman in Berlin (Germany 2008, 131 min, dir: Max Faberbock, cast: Nina Hoss, Yevgeni Sidikhin)

Gone With the Wind persists because it is America’s great survival story. A Woman in Berlin is Gone With the Wind without the romance. We’d all like to behave like Scarlet and vow, “As God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again.”

But would the music swell and would be feel the same pride in deciding to fuck a Russian officer for a bar of soap and a bath? Germans don’t want to see the truth of war anymore than we do. When the book from which the film is taken was first published it caused such an outrage that it was withdrawn. The author declared it could only be published after her death, and then anonymously.

Anonyma (the name used for Nina Hoss’s unnamed character) is a high-styled photojournalist as World War Two is closing in on Berlin. The Russian are racing in from the East and the city is about to fall. But the music plays on and the dancers do no cease their step until brutality devours them like a beast.

Death in the streets is graphically detailed with drunken Russian soldiers looting and killing. Anonyma and the others are grabbed and raped repeatedly. The lucky ones are left alive and retreat to an empty apartment house where they seek shelter from the chaos outside. Anonyma is pretty enough and lucky enough to catch the eye of a Russian officer. He decides to make her his mistress.

Up to this point we can see Scarlet dressing in her only gown, gratefully accepting the offer of a bar of soap and a bath in exchange for her favors. What happens next is what caused the outrage against the book. She falls in love with him. We all want to be Scarlet, but if she fell in love with a Yankee, audiences would have thrown Coca Cola bottles at the screen.

When her lover receives new orders to leave Berlin, she is left as well. Other women spit at her and shun her as a whore of the conquerors. It has been three-quarters of a century since Margaret Mitchell published her fairy tale about a woman’s survival in the War Between the States. It is time we give up our fairy tales and see the reality of war’s consequences. Survival is not for sissies.

Title: Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice
Year: 1969
Director: Paul Mazursky
Writers: Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker
Stars: Natalie Wood, Robert Culp, Elliott Gould, Dyan Cannon

The Story: Bob and Carol are a laid-back middle class couple who attend a consciousness-raising seminar and then insist that everyone they know get in touch with their feelings. Their uptight friends Ted and Alice are initially repulsed, but then they begin if maybe they could use a little liberation too.

Why It’s Great: Mazursky and Tucker had written I Love You Alice B. Toklas, which was turned into one of those condescending “Let’s fool around with the hippie generation and then condemn them” comedies that aging Hollywood directors churned out in the late sixties. Mazursky wasn’t happy with the result and decided to start directing his own work. The result was a movie that was the absolute opposite of those clunkers. The satire is wicked but the empathy for everyone and what they’re going through is enormous. How cutting edge was this movie? It was the greatest satire of America in the 1970s even though it was made in 1969! Southern California has always been ahead of the country in terms of trends, and here they were giving the country a flashforward to the coming of EST and the hi-fi and gazpacho and Acapulco Gold.

Two more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan…

Title: Kontroll
Year: 2003
Director: Nimrod Antal
Writers: Nimrod Antal
Stars: Sandor Csanyi, Zoltan Mucsi, Csaba Pindroch , Sandor Badar, Zsolt Nagy

The Story: A traumatized subway ticket inspector works the trains beneath Budapest, terrified to re-enter the surface world. In the meantime, he befriends his fellow antisocial inspectors, courts a girl in a bear suit, and tries to catch the hooded man who’s been pushing people onto the tracks.

Why It’s Great: This movie impressed Hollywood, who hired Antal away to make movies like the upcoming Predator reboot, but it didn’t break out in America the way it could have. The sort of American who enjoys high-energy action-thrillers like this one doesn’t want to read subtitles. Where is the great American subway action movie? The location provides so many atmospheric visuals: on the platform, inside the train, on the tracks, in the tunnels… So many opportunities for danger! This one shows us how to do it. This movie does a great job showing the psychological toll of living underground. It puts us in the shoes of the hero by making the subway system our whole world. By the end we’re as desperate for fresh air as he is. The fantastic documentary Dark Days, about the homeless tunnel-dwellers who live beneath New York, is the closest American equivalent to this movie.

Two more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan…

Sugar (USA 2008, 120 min. dir: Anna Boden, cast: Algenis Perez Soto, Rayniel Rufino, Ellary Porterfield)

The Wizard of Oz is about a girl from Kansas who lands in a strange land and wants to go home. Sugar is about a boy from Oz who lands in Kansas and he just wants to go home too.

Oz is the green fields and palm-shaded towns of the Dominican Republic. Sugar is a baseball pitcher good enough to (maybe) be a star. Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico are to ball players what Iowa is to corn. Iowa exports corn and the D.R. and P.R. export young ball players headed for the farm teams for the major league American teams. Playing big league ball is the dream exit from poverty.

Sugar’s landing in Iowa is a little different from Dorothy’s in Oz. She arrives in a house. He steps off a plane and into a station wagon for the drive to his new home. Mom and Pop’s contact with internationalism is hosting a succession of young Dominican and Puerto Rican ballplayers who’ve come to join the local Bridgeport, Iowa team.

Baseball and going to church are about all there is to do here. Sugar can’t speak English. He is black. He is expected to say prayers and take dinner with the family. He’s also expected to keep his eyes off their redheaded daughter. There is no game that will play him out of his loneliness.

So is this a baseball movie? Not really. That is why it is so good. Like Dorothy’s saga, the yellow brick road for Sugar also leads to the Emerald City. But “The City” looks a lot likened York. Miguel gives up baseball for Spanish Harlem and the street life where he feels at home. He won’t be a star, but he’ll join the millions who have made the journey here from his homeland and found some small happiness. If he could speak enough English, he would smile and say, “Not in Kansas anymore.”

Title: Artists and Models
Year: 1955
Director: Frank Tashlin
Writers: Frank Tashlin, Hal Kanter, Herbert Baker and Don McGuire, based by the play by Michael Davidson and Norman Lessing. Whew!
Stars: Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Shirley MacLaine, Dorothy Malone

The Story: Jerry’s brain has been addled by too many “Bat Lady” comic books and now he babbles wild stories in his sleep. Dino uses those stories to take over as the new writer-artist of the comic-book, but this leads to mix-ups with Malone and MacLaine, the original artist and her model.

Why It’s Great: If this is first movie you’ve seen from Lewis’s heyday, you may fear that he’ll be a little over the top. And you’d be right. At times, he can be broader than the broadest Jerry Lewis imitation, but Martin has enough preternatural cool for both of them. They’re not attempting to play human beings at all—Martin is the ultimate dream of who we want to be and Lewis personifies our worst fears about how the world perceives us. This satire of the 1950s comic industry is wickedly sharp. Malone’s publisher craves sensation: “62 pages of drawings and no blood? Not even an itsy-bitsy nose bleed? Suffering catfish, do you call this a book for kiddies? With no stranglings? No decapitations?” There’s even a psychologist character who’s clearly based on Frederick Wertham, author of the infamous comic-book expose “Seduction of the Innocent.” This is a lot of the same material that has shown up recently in acclaimed books like “The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” and “The Ten Cent Plague” but here they are satirizing both sides in real time, as it all happened!

Two more reasons over at Cockeyed Caravan.

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.

The Syrian Bride (Israel 2004, 97 min, dir: Eran Riklis, cast: Clara Khoury, Hiyam Abbass, Makram J. Khoury)

Marrying within your faith means finding your husband-to-be on a TV news show. Your parents can’t come to your wedding and you can never come back. Ethnic Chinese? Hutus? No, Israelis. The Druze is an ancient Arab tribe of warriors and religious independents that got caught between the lines of Syria and Israel in the1967 war.

Since then, they’ve lived in a no-man’s land between the two countries. They are recognized as citizens of Israel (they trace their lineage and religion to Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses). Because they are recognized by Israel, the Syrians won’t let them in unless they renounce their Israeli citizenship. But they must marry within their religion and the Druze singles scene is in Syria (actually, there are so few Druze they have their own world-wide dating site, Druze Cafe. Take a look at some Druze cuties).

Director Eran Riklis builds his story on the Catch-22 that plagues the Golan Druze. She lives the Golan. He lives in Damascus where he hosts a Syrian TV show she watches. They’ve only met by phone and mail. To marry, she must renounce her Israeli citizenship, and walk into the no man’s land between the borders. Her only witness will be a UN inspector. Once married,  she will enter Syria and never be able to come back home. It would be funny if it were not so sad.

Leaving everything you know for an unknown life with a stranger is the dramatic conflict on which Riklis builds his story. In Lemon Tree, also reviewed on MovieWithMe.com, the conflict is: the price of security is walling out humanity. Both films star the amazing Hiyam Abbass, who seems to have carved out a career as the long-suffering Arab who wears the weariness of generations on her face.

The Syrian Bride, Lemon Tree, Laila’s Taxi (different director) are all political films that explore society, not sociology. As director Riklis said to Tikkun magazine, “I see myself as a relevant director. I believe in movies that relate to political and social circumstances. I think it’s impossible, particularly in Israel, to say that what happens around you is of no interest to you, that you are an artist and that you make movies like the Americans do. In Israel, you have to acknowledge that you live in a very complex and problematic region.” If there is hope for a peace plan in Israeli, bet on the filmmakers.

Title: The Fireman’s Ball
Year: 1967
Director: Milos Forman
Writers: Milos Forman, Jaroslav Papousek, Ivan Passer, Vaclav Sasek
Stars: Jan Vostrcil, Josef Sebanek, Josef Valnoha, Josef Kolb, Jan Stokl, Stanislav Holubec

The Story: The petty and venal old men of a small-town fire department hold a retirement ball for a dying comrade, then use the opportunity to round up all the pretty girls in town for an impromptu beauty contest. A circus of bumbling, thievery and corruption turns the event into an ever-escalating farce.

Why It’s Great: You might think that nothing could be more unpleasant than a visit to an official gathering in a backward town in a dark time, but the movie is actually a lot of fun. Forman has that magical ability, shared with a few other great ’60s European directors, to invest unhappy situations with a sweetly buoyant charm. They remind us that such situations are rooted in all-too-human folly, and folly is always fun to watch. Throughout their history, the Czech people had never been free for very long. How do you develop an artistic tradition when you’re not free to say what you feel? You stick your tongue firmly in your cheek. Satire and allegory have always been their stock in trade, even when flourishing under the relative freedom of the “Prague Spring”, as they were in 1967. It’s ironic that this bitterly funny protest was made during that brief window of happiness, but Forman knew enough not to get too happy too quickly. The tanks were already on their way…

Two more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan…

Conversations with Mother (Argentina 2004, 94 min, dir: Santiago Carlos Oves, cast: China Zorilla, Eduardo Blanco, Ulises Dumont)

If you watch enough Argentinean movies you realize they use a small group of players. That’s not surprising. But they are all so good! If there was a Walk of Fame in Buenos Aires, China Zorilla’s star would be outside the top tango club. She started as a dancer, became a comedienne, and then a very accomplished actress.

Elsa & Fred is reviewed on MovieWithMe.com. In Conversaciones con Mama (look it up on Netflix under this Spanish title or you won’t find it), she plays a widowed 82-year-old woman whose 50-year-old son loses his job and wants to move himself and his wife into her apartment.

Not a lot to ask of mama. But in his conversation with her he finds out she is not alone. She has a 69-year-old lover whom she caught eating the food she leaves outside her door for stray cats. One thing led to another and she invited him in.

What is wonderful about China is that she exudes energy at any age. In Elsa & Fred she bounds out of a fancy restaurant leaving the check. In Conversaciones she has no qualms about taking in a homeless lover. He may be coming for the food but, she hints with her smile, the real feast is in the bedroom.

There are people in the world who worry their way through life, and people who live moment to moment. The latter have a gift to give us all…even if it is only acting.