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

The film Katyn, reviewed on MovieWithMe.com by Cristina, offers the best explanation of what could have caused the gruesome air crash and firestorm of April 10, 2010 that killed Poland’s president Leach Kaczynski, his wife, and 86 more top government ministers, generals, and associates.

They were attempting to land at the Smolensk airport to be in time for the 70th anniversary ceremony commemorating the World War II massacre in the nearby Katyn Forest. This occasion was not to be missed since Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin had finally, earlier in the week, taken responsibility for the Stalinist massacre.

Graphically show in Andrzej Wajda’s 2007 film, Stalin’s secret police loaded captured Polish Army offices into vans and drove them into the forest. Their objective was to destroy Poland’s will to resist. As the men exited the vans, each was shot in the back of the head. Shooting over 20,000, even at three seconds a man, takes almost 20 hours of continuous killing. It must have gone on for days or weeks. The bodies were flung into massive pits.

The film tells the story of the capture of the Polish Army by the Russians, and explains the officers choosing to stay together out of loyalty and be deported to an unknown fate. When the German’s captured Poland from the Russians, they publicized the massacre to win favor with the Poles. When the Russians retook Poland after World War II, they said the massacre was the work of the Nazi SS. Putin is the first Russian to officially admit it was the Soviets.

April 10′s planned ceremony, with Poles and Russians standing side by side in the Katyn Forest, was to be an historic and emotional moment that could bring closure to the massacre.The weather was rain and fog (you can see new photos showing the umbrellas careful hooked on every chair reserved for the Polish diplomats who never arrived).

The plane made four missed approaches. Each time the pilot failed to see the runway from the minimum landing altitude. He gunned the throttle and climbed out to try again.No pilot makes four missed approaches to a field so obscured by clouds and fog that he can not see the bright runway lights.

After two attempts, he would normally fly on to his alternative airport: especially if he was the cautious, carefully trained senior pilot to the President. But that would have been too late for the ceremony. Doubtless, this information was passed back to the passenger cabin. The message that came back to the cockpit: can’t you try once more, it is very important that President Kaczynski arrives for the ceremony. Press and TV from around the world will be there.

What do you do when your boss is the President? You try as hard as you can to please him. So there was a third missed approach, and then a fourth. And with each attempt, the pilot probably cheated minimums a little more in hopes he would break out and see the field. If he succeeded, he knew the lights come out of the mist quickly, and you have little time to land before you’ve overshot the runway. So he would normally come in slow, knowing that he would have a few precious seconds to shed speed and land.

The slow speed factor probably caused the crash. Since reports say the plane did not break up on the field, but in the woods, I’m assuming it crashed trying to climb out. Low and slow on the approach means an increased sink rate. If the runway does not appear, that requires massive mounts of power to lift the plane for a climb out. Jet engines do not respond immediately. There is a lag time that can be several seconds.

In those final moments the TU 154 probably could not climb fast enough. When the power surged, it was already too low to clear the trees at the far end of the runway. The wing clipped a tree, the plane dived into the ground at full power. That’s one explanation for the ferocity of the fire. As former President Aleksander Kwasniewski said of the Katyn,”It is a dammed place, it sends shivers down my spine.”

Title: Monkey Business
Year: 1952
Director: Howard Hawks
Writers: Ben Hecht, Charles Lederer, and I.A.L. Diamond, story by Harry Segal
Stars: Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Charles Coburn, Marilyn Monroe

The Story: A scatterbrained chemist invents a rejuvenating formula that makes him and his wife act like fun-seeking kids.

Why It’s Great: Scientific potions, chimp mix-ups, a buxom blonde secretary… This is the movie that you picture in your mind when you think “zany old comedy”, but you didn’t actually think that it existed. It almost feels like it must be an SCTV pastiche of a late night movie. It’s nice to see an older Grant not paired with a much younger girl for once. In fact this movie celebrates the value of growing old together and ridicules the prospect of older men chasing after Monroe. From this point on, however, Grant would be unironically paired with younger and younger ingenues, from Audrey Hepburn to Sophia Loren.

Two more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan.

Laila’s Birthday (Palestine, 2008, 71 min, dir: Rashid Masharawi, cast: Mohammad Bakri, Areen Omari, Nour Zoubi).

Does anyone born in the Gaza strip still have a sense of humor? There’s no shortage of movies about the Israeli point of view, but what about the Palestinians? Rashid Masharawi was born in the strip, but he’s still (at least in2008) able to find dark humor in the situation.

Abu is a taxi driver. Actually he is a judge, but there is no money to pay judges. In fact, no one wants to hear his pitch for new judicial job because his taxi is parked in a driveway blocking a delivery. He put on his best suit, took his briefcase, and rushed to the interview even though today is his daughter’s birthday and he must buy her a cake.

Cakes are more difficult to find than stinger missiles. While having coffee and waiting for his tire to be fixed, an incoming Israeli missile blows up the other end of the street, He runs to claim his taxi but it is on its way to the hospital with the wounded. At the hospital he finds his taxi but one of the survivors who needs to be driven home.

Does this sound like the Passover song, Chad Gadya? (The fire came that burned the goat that beat the dog that bit the cat that ate the goat which my father bought for two zuzim). And on and on through the trials of everyday life in the occupied, (or disputed) territories.

Finally he does get to buy a cake and take it home for the final moment where he sings happy birthday to his daughter along with his wife. When she asks, “How as your day,” he replies, “Nothing special.”

Laila’s Birthday is dark, amusing, and informative. Who relates best to this humor? The Israeli’s, of course. Too bad they can’t all sit down together and laugh at each other’s movies.

Netflix is a pay service, so ads (so far) have not been an issue. Or are they? Even though Netflix is ad free, most of the DVDs it rents are not. They usually contain at least three trailers for other films. These are placed by the distributor, not Netflix. (If you know the secret of the “skip” button on your remote, you can usually get by them). If this is acceptable on DVDs, can streamed movies remain immune, or will streaming ads be too tantalizing to resist?

I doubt if anyone in Hollywood has thought of the question yet. But their counterparts in streaming TV sure have. The battle raging right now is between TV networks and Hulu…that plucky online service, (which they own), that has become #2 to YouTube in streaming content. The networks and their content providers want Hulu to increase its ads per hour from six to nine. That would put them just about even with over-the-air TV. Hulu is resisting. Even though studies show people will sit still for more ads, Hulu doubts it. I think they are right.

There is increasing pressure from legacy media to either cram more commercials onto streaming services, or place the services behind pay walls. Either way the public loses, and ultimately the advertisers or content owners lose too. The future clearly belongs to two concepts: embedded ads targeted for relevance, and freemium pay walls (part free, part pay).

Servicing this new environment takes imagination. As much imagination as creating the shows or movies that draw people to the ads. Actually, it has always been thus. The media business is flaying in an era when it should be thrusting towards new concepts like ads as characters, ads as instruction manuals, ads as value added content.

Some of the cleverest ideas have come from amateur ads on YouTube. Most companies fear this because they can not control the outcome, nor can they measure it.Like it our not, it is part of the future, and the future is out of their control.

Paraiso Travel ( USA 2007 116 min. dir: Simon Brand cast: Aldemar Correa, Angelica Blandon, Margarita Rosa de Francisco, John Leguizamo).

Sometimes a movie is a big screen bore and a small screen gem. A Colombian director and Latin cast shooting an American movie in New York City with subtitles? Reina seduces Marlon into abandoning squalid life in Medellin for the mean streets of NYC. He loses her almost immediately and spends the movie looking for the girl named “Queen” (Reina) is an a place named Queens.

John Leguizamo turns up here and gives an idea for a flat screen double feature: Paraiso Travel followed by Where God Left his Shoes. This 2007 movie traces a homeless family trekking to find shelter in the same hostile outer boroughs. What is it with the outer boroughs? I always thought charity and compassion began there. From these two films you’d think Manhattan was, by contrast, a borough full of innkeepers with warm smiles and open hearts.

Many cross-the-border films have shown the trials of the trip, but few talk about the trails of the destination. Marlon is not only searching for Reina but for himself, and the obsession with the first blinds him in the second. How else could he turn away from a gorgeous thing like Margarita Rosa de Francisco? She’s the heart of the picture and magnificent. Paraiso Travel is a neoyorquino movie that shows life under the Elevated where Roosevelt Boulevard meets Junction Boulevard and the next turn is Tecun Uman on the Mexico Guatemala border.

Dictadura (Spain/Chile 2002, 103 min, dir: Gerardo Herrero, cast: Federico Luppi, Elena Basslesteros, Paulina Galvez, Gaston Pauls)

Bad trailers that feature nothing but nudity and violence, and mindless title translations into English-are no surprise. But you would think someone would have found a better English language title for this very good movie. In Spanish it is called El Lugar Donde Estuvo el Paraiso. Translation: The Place that Was Paradise.

That’s how it is listed in the IMDb database. What moron decided the English language DVD title should be Dictadura? Couldn’t anyone at Venevision come up with an English word for the title? Luckily, the story is a lot less confusing than the title.

The dictator refers to a Consul stationed somewhere in the Amazonian jungle (it is based on a Chilean novel). His daughter, Ana, who he hasn’t seen in many years, flies in for an unexpected visit and gets a taste of the politics, dirty dealing and bribes that keep her father afloat. Then she meets Julia, her father’s young mistress, and watches them make love.

This show is interrupted by Enrico, a bush pilot who has settled in as a houseguest. He’s terribly sexy, and very dangerous. As Julia warns Ana at breakfast the next morning, “stay away from Enrico, believe me, it is a bad idea.” (We later learn he deals drugs). Ana retorts, “Maybe one man in bed isn’t enough for you.”

The women are almost the same age, allowing the story turn on the conflict between them. Julia, whom the Consul picked up in a chorus line, is a survivor protecting her own turf. “Look Ana, I was raised in misery. I’m not educated like you and I’ve never traveled.” Ana is the protected city girl afraid to eat a piranha for breakfast. The film is her coming of age through seeing her father as he is, not as she imagined.

This could easily be a telenovela. But good casting and the humid lushness of the Amazon make it a woman’s adventure into another world, another life. Too bad it’s lost between two titles. IMDb should change its search to show both.

Title: Closer
Year: 2004
Director: Mike Nichols
Writer: Patrick Marber, based on his play
Stars: Natalie Portman, Jude Law, Clive Owen, Julia Roberts

The Story: Two couples in contemporary London engage in escalating games of emotional brutality, crossing and double-crossing each other over the course of several years.

Why It’s (Almost) Great: This was one of those movies that got a huge build-up as an Oscar contender, then got quickly decimated by negative reviews. It’s not perfect, but it’s very powerful and well-worth seeing. Unfortunately, there,s no wiggle room these days: either you blow everybody away or you sink like a stone. I would daresay that this film is the career-best performance for all four of its leads. Of course, that’s not saying much, since Law, Portman and Owen have a serious addiction to underwhelming scripts, and Roberts, is, you know, Roberts.Clearly all four handed themselves and their personas over to Nichols with total abandon, and he relishes the chance to strip these big stars of their defenses, their vanities and even, in the best possible way, their dignity. Roberts famously insisted that her role in Stepmom be made nicer because “people expect Julia Roberts to act a certain way.” But here, in Nichols’s hands, she’s finally willing to be an actor, not a star.

Three more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan.

One of the benefits of Netflix’s streaming service, Watch Instantly, is the size of subtitles. I could kiss the ground, or CEO Reed Hastings, every time I see big yellow subtitles appear on my flat screen TV. Now Netflix Watch Instantly is coming to the new Apple iPad.

Netflix never built and app for the iPhone, so this is a big deal.My reasoning: the iPhone screen is just too small to read subtitles. Because Hollywood cold-shouldered Watch Instantly, a large part of the catalogue is subtitled foreign films. Someone at Netflix understood (at least in my fantasy) that providing an app for the iPhone with a diminished viewing experience would frustrate users. Better to wait than to do something half-ass-ed.

The iPad screen is large enough to accommodate good picture size, different aspect rations (wide screen or normal), and readable subtitles.Netflix will give iTunes some competition. Would you rather have a $10 subscription or pay $5.00 for each film?

The great good will of Netflix is understanding actually movie watching for those of us who like foreign movies. Most subtitles are either too small to see on TV or computer, or the white type blends with backgrounds.

On most films produced in the last two decades, this is easy to fix. The subtitles are usually carried in a separate file on the digital master. That is why you can choose your language from the main menu. Writing a program to automatically reformat the size, color, and font of subtitles is not difficult, yet few DVD distributors have bothered to do it.

With the iPad app, Netflix is announcing more strongly its intention to eventually banish the red envelope and make steaming the company’s main business. Now they should change its clunky name, Watch Instantly, to Instant Watch: since most of the users have already shortened it to that anyway.