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

A Prairie Home Companion (USA 2006, 105 min, dir: Robert Altman, cast: Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Lindsay Lohan, Kevin Kline, John C. Reilly, Woody Harrelson, Virginia Madsen, Garrison Keillor)

At the end of the movie, the Angel of Death enters an all-night cafe where the cast is having coffee and reminiscing. The implication is she will take them all. But Garrison Keillor and his troupe survived. Director Robert Altman is dead.

The radio show on which this film is based has been broadcast every week since 1974 (with a five year hiatus when Keillor moved to Europe) It is a living American phenomenon. Yet Garrison Keillor wrote this script about death. The Angel of Death is one of the stars (Virginia Madsen).

The movie hasn’t been liked by many. My enthusiasm is a minority view. It’s tough to make a movie about a legend when the legend lives in weekly installments that are more interesting than any movie. To view A Prairie Home Companion objectively you would need to be from Mars (or maybe Cambodia). Then the question is: why would you give a shit about a lot of old farts singing folk songs and dying?

Keillor’s audience is not Cambodians; it is American Baby Boomers (born between 1946-1964). The America in which these citizens came of age included The Atom Bomb Scare, the Communist Menace, Civil Rights, the Vietnam War, Women’s lib and The Pill. A Prairie Home Companion is their connection to the mythical America of their parents where everything was supposedly the way it should have been.

Garrison Keillor is a gifted storyteller and a clever borrower. Don McNeill’s Breakfast Club was on the air from 1933 to 1968. If you really want to know the roots of A Prairie Home Companion get the book Don McNeill and his Breakfast Club and listen to the enclosed CD of some old shows.

But Don McNeill was just doing a breakfast show. Garrison Keillor is our pastor and his sermon is about death. Yes, death is the theme of the radio show and also the movie. Did you know the title comes from the Prairie Home Cemetery in Moorhead, Minnesota? Garrison’s soothing voice is a reassurance that even though we missed the great years, we can still relive them on the radio and carry eternity like a backpack. He conjures up the same mystical hypnotism that makes us endlessly watch new productions of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and leave teary-eyed.

In the movie, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Lindsay Lohman, and John C. Riley top the cast that circles Garrison and tries to lift him out of his melancholia. He gives himself a pivotal role but lets them carry the spotlight. A lot of people are disappointed he didn’t just stick with the radio show and make himself the big star. But this is a MOVIE. It has a point of view. It is drama, not a daily breakfast show or weekly Saturday night variety show.

The writer is telling us that the America of the radio show, the America in our heads: is no longer. It is a childhood myth we need to get past. Maybe that is why Lindsay Lohman, the only character in the entire movie who is too young to be a Baby Boomer, makes her mother, Meryl Streep, sign power-of-attorney papers in the ending scene. She’s telling her Mom it’s okay to go on believing in her lovely boomer fairytales about American as long as her daughter is practical enough to decide when to cut off life support.

Looking at the film as a sunset ode to the Boomer Generation makes it more than informational. Keillor and Altman are Boomers both. They are writing their own epitaph. For Altman it was (his last film). I wish Keillor many more years. When he ended the radio show back in 1987 (and resumed it five years later), he closed with a remembrance from his boyhood when he imagined floating around the bend in the river to a world he could only imagine.

For those who heard that last broadcast the image has never faded, and the hope of what is to come has not dimmed. His is the lulling voice calming our fears about what is to come. If you are a certain age, see the movie and understand what Keillor and Altman are trying to say. If you are Cambodian, see Ghost Banana Tree instead.

Title: The Big Easy
Year: 1987
Director: Jim McBride
Writer: Daniel Petrie, Jr.
Stars: Dennis Quaid, Ellen Barkin, Ned Beatty, John Goodman

The Story: He’s an easy-going detective on the take. She’s an uptight investigator for the district attorney. Her hair is in a bun. When they meet, things get intense.

One Reason Why It’s Great: This works as a slick little thriller and a sizzling romance and an anti-corruption drama. Most movies about corruption don’t work. Too often, coming into these stories from an outside perspective, the corrupt seem totally despicable, and taking a stand seems like an easy decision. Or you get movies that tries so hard to justify the rule-benders that the investigators seem like snotty do-gooders. This movie has a good give and take. Petrie has a great ear for the language of casual graft. He eases us into a believable and unalarming culture of corruption, then snaps our sympathies back to the side of the angels when we realize who’s really being hurt.

Two more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan.

New Jersey has a special call to its young, even when they get older. If Bruce Springsteen had been born in Ohio, would he sing about it? Zach Braff walks in the footsteps of John Sayles (Return of the Secaucus Seven), shuffling back to his boyhood haunts and old conflicts in his native New Jersey.

For a guy who is an actor turned director, it is a pretty impressive stroll. As in most “return to” films, the plot doesn’t make a lot of difference. His mother has died and he goes back for the funeral. High school buddy Peter Sarsgaard is now a gravedigger. Langerman (Braff) is a hang loose, hang low, lost sort of guy who is still looking around corners hoping to find himself.

Then he meets Sam (Natalie Portman). She’s so far gone in Jersey she wears a helmet to keep her from bashing her head. Natalie Portman is one of the chameleon actors (Billy Crudup is another; though he isn’t in this movie). Natalie can be the lively center of a film, or so plain looking and featureless that she blends into the background. Either way her performances are always terrific. In Garden State, she’s not only there, she is it. The film comes alive with her: a neat trick in a movie about death.

Zach Braff works by absorbing the characters around him. Whether he can actually act or he is playing a credible version of Zach Braff is hard to tell. But he had the good sense to cast Natalie Portman and Peter Sarsgaard in his movie. They make the toll on the Garden State Parkway worth the price of going beyond the Meadowlands into the hazy unknown.

Late Marriage (Israel 2001, 102 min, dir: Dover Kosashvili, cast: Ronit Elkabetz, Lior Louie Ashkenazi).

Two enormously fat Georgian (Soviet) Jews invade the love nest of their son in Tel Aviv and demand he leave his lover for his wife. He’s not married yet, but they have plans and love shouldn’t get in the way. We normally think of Israelis as shrewd men and tough women. But in an immigrant nation, there’s no such thing as normal.

It’s a melting pot where nothing melts. There’s an old joke about a Jew marooned alone on a deserted island who builds two synagogues. When he is rescued they ask why two? He says, “one to worship in and the other one I wouldn’t set foot in.”

Zaza is 31. He’s in love with a 34 year-old divorcee with a young daughter. He is blissfully happy, especially in the very sensual bedroom scenes with Judith (Ronit Elkabetz). She’s pretty amazing, in bed and out, and has gone on to many more movies, mostly in France. But in Late Marriage she’s content to take off her clothes and jump on Zaza, making him the happiest Georgian in town.

But she’s divorced, and she’s not of his Georgian tribe. When his parents storm her apartment she’s sure he’ll chose love over tradition. Ha! You can accuse director Dover Kosashvili of short-handing a lot in the parents’ characters, but he precisely asks the right questions of conviction versus convenience. Zaza tries to slink back, but you don’t slink with Judith.

Judith’s had enough of him, and Ronit, seems to have had enough of Israel. She moved to France and continued her career with Origine Controlee, an intriguing little movie that was brought to American as Made in France. (This takes the all-time prize as the worse title translation ever).

Meanwhile at home, the Israelis are still battling one another to prove ethnic and moral superiority. Tradition battles commerce, religion battles secularity. It makes one of the most fertile cultures for filmmaking even if it is the worst for peace and politics. I’m reminded of the old Kingston Trio song, They’re Rioting in Africa, that goes:

The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles. The Italians hate Yugoslavs, the South African’s hate the Dutch. And I don’t like anybody very much.

Title: Destry Rides Again
Year: 1939
Director: George Marshall
Writers: Felix Jackson, Gertrude Purcell and Henry Myers from the novel by Max Brand
Stars: Marlene Dietrich, James Stewart, Mischa Auer, Brian Donlevy, Jack Carson

The Story: His famous father died in a gunfight, so the amiable Destry Junior tries to clean up a crooked town without ever using a gun. It’s a tall order, because a ruthless gang is stealing people’s land with the help of certain German saloon singer.

Why It’s Great: There’s a central paradox at the heart of most Westerns: law and order must be upheld –by shooting the bad guys dead in the street. Given the way that movies tend to escalate, it’s very hard to make one that champions pacifism, and all the harder if the story is set out west where the law can’t protect the weak. If a western shows pacifism as an option, as High Noon does, then that option is proven wrong. Not so here. Yes, Stewart ultimately has to put on a gun at the very end, but by that point we don’t want him to. This is amiable comedy, but it’s also a thoughtful movie about moral courage. One of the 1939 movies that auteurists do mention a lot is John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln, starring Stewart’s former roommate Henry Fonda. That movie is fun but very hokey. This movie works better as a parable for Lincoln’s presidency, with Stewart as a tall tale version of the president–Like Lincoln, Destry pretends to be a rube and tells meandering jokes to defuse dangerous situations, all the while quietly accumulating the power he needs to save the town. This is the liveliest and most authentic version of the president we’ve gotten onscreen so far.

Two more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan…

Coyote (USA 2007, 94 min, dir: Brian Petersen, cast: Brett Spackman, Brian Petersen, Carley Adams, Marina Valle)

Thousands try to run across the Mexican border every month and pay good money for the chance. Why does all the profit go to smugglers who can’t even pronounce, “Maximize revenue?” This is an opportunity for American businessmen to turn misery into money.

Coyote’s wicked premise is that two erstwhile entrepreneurs do just that. Several veterans of the Napoleon Dynamite team re-assemble for this effort. But the picture belongs to Brett Spackman, who plays J, the half-Mexican smuggler-in-chief.

What is so delicious is typical American business acumen focused on human smuggling across the border. The first step is to study methods and logistics. Next comes a glossy brochure featuring three kinds of service: bronze, silver and gold. The gold promises to get you across, deliver you to a destination of your choice, and even get you a job.

Most clients settle for the bronze. At least until reigning Mexican coyote king, Senior Juarez, senses these gringos are muscling in on his cartel’s business. Then the business plan sees some major faults: death threats. Spackman (playing J.) is the success story of the partnership because he finds true love south of the border.

This is the same Brad Speckman who directed and participated in the short doc, Run to Jays: Tournament of Champions. The premise is an annual foot race risking death against on-coming traffic to win a 20oz bottle of soda. The artistic leap from that film to this one is a mere hop.

The style of Coyote is somewhere between satire and whacky college humor. Not a bad combo. The same team made Think Tank; where they save a small town through their genius at being inept. (see Christopher Null’s review at filmcritic.com. He obviously had not smoked enough when he saw Think Tank).

They are better at thinking up original ideas then sustaining either movie; but both movies are fresh and are the budgets low. What has happened to these guys? Their online profiles are almost blank. Tough to get any respect when you make low budget comedies. Maybe they should make original web movies and charge a buck? I would pay (I think). Certainly they’re better than the endless date comedies Hollywood thinks are funny.

Title: The Falcon and the Snowman
Year: 1985
Director: John Schlesinger
Writer: Steven Zaillian, based on the book by Robert Lindsey
Stars: Timothy Hutton, Sean Penn, David Suchet, Lori Singer

The Story: The true story of an ex-seminary student who gets a job as a data analyst working for a CIA contractor. When he realizes that the CIA is routinely undermining democracy abroad, even in U.S.-allied countries like Australia, he decides to start selling info to the Soviet Union in a misguided attempt to restore global balance. In order to ferry info to the Soviet embassy in Mexico, he recruits a drug dealing buddy, who quickly screws it all up.

Why It’s Great: In many classic spy thrillers like Three Days of the Condor, the whole goal is to expose the conspiracy to the New York Times. But this movie is willing to admit that in real life, that does little good. As Hutton says, “It’s already public. You can’t get any more public than what happened in Chile. People still don’t believe we engineered that.” We’re never remotely sympathetic to Hutton’s solution, but we also see that he had no legitimate outlet for his anger. That said, this movie has a very different vibe than most “nefarious CIA” movies, exemplified by Hutton’s first day on the job monitoring satellites, when his jingoistic boss turns on a jumbo paper shredder and starts pouring tequila into it to mix margaritas. They then proceed to play Risk all day, oblivious to the parallels between what’s happening on the board and what info is passing through their machines. Perversely, the general air of frivolity makes the wickedness of it all that much more believable.

Turn Left at the End of the World (Israel 2004, 130 min, dir: Avi Nesher, cast: Neta Garty, Liraz Charchi, Aure Atika).

When Helen Thomas, the longest running White House journalist ever, told the Israelis that it was time to leave Palestine and go back to Poland:nobody protested they weren’t from Poland. Instead they labeled her an Alzheimered anti-Semite and force her to quit. Too bad. Nothing important ever happens at White House press briefings, and at least the room looked fuller with her in the front row.

But once again the Israelis lost a public relations opportunity. If they were cool they would have sent Helen a DVD of Turn Left at the End of the World. We all know the story of the Holocaust survivors finding refuge in Israel, but who knows about Moroccans and Indians? Nobody every said to the Jews, “Go back to India.” And yet many India Jews are descended form the lost tribe of Manasseh, conquered by the Assyrians back in BC days and not taking any messages for the next 2000 years.

In the 1960s Israel was the refuge and hope for Jews from all over the world. Avi Nesher focuses his film on a tiny outpost at the edge of the Negev desert where the government shunted new arrivals. When we arrive the small kibbutz has already been inhabited by Moroccans and is receiving new families from India. They are all immigrants, all Jews. But as everyone knows, put two Jews in a room and you have an argument.

The Moroccans see themselves as French, and the Indians are more British than the British. They bristle at working on the production line in the bottle plant (the one industry), and form a cricket team. The Moroccans, being French, strike the plant and complain about how they are underpaid. The Moroccans speak French, the Indians speak English, and nobody speaks Hebrew very well.

Avi Nesher makes this small, remote settlement a paradigm for the confusion and vitality of this new country. A big part of the vitality is sex. Aure Atika, the very sexy French actress (Movie with Me: The Beat My Heart Skipped) is the Moroccan widow who starts an affair with the Indian father of her daughter (Nicole’s) new friend. Meanwhile Nicole seduces the local schoolteacher, Asaf. (see the clip).

The movie advances with several stories, like a good novel. The characters slowly learn Hebrew and understand they have left their identities and cultures somewhere beyond the desert. The only thing important now is what they are becoming: Israelis. The future is everything and, if they can only settle the strike at the bottle plant, it is very hopeful.

Maybe the Israelis should see Turn Left at the End of the World along with Helen Thomas. It is about the quilting of a new nation. Today that tapestry seems threadbare.

Title: The Court Jester
Year: 1956
Directors: Norman Panama and Melvin Frank
Writers: Panama and Frank, with songs by Sylvia Fine and Sammy Cahn
Stars: Danny Kaye, Glynis Johns, Basil Rathbone, Angela Lansbury, Cecil Parker

The Story: In a medieval forest, a clown does what he can to help a Robin Hood type outlaw who is trying to restore the true king. He gets his big chance when they replace the usurper king’s jester and infiltrates the castle. Once inside, he has to court a princess, fight off a mesmerizing lady-in-waiting, and duel a duke.

Why It’s Great: Why don’t all critics embrace Kaye today? Partially because he indulged in the sort of puns and linguistic gymnastics that are out of fashion, especially the fast-talking songs written by his brilliant wife Sylvia Fine. (“Those who try to tangle with my derring-do/ Wind up at the same angle as herring do!”) But Kaye could make a tongue-twister as elegant as a Buster Keaton flip. The story becomes very complex but the screenplay is masterpiece of clarity. We know what every character wants and how their goals conflict, and our brain does somersaults in advance whenever we see that two conflicting agendas are about to collide. We know what will go wrong whenever someone snaps their fingers. We know when Kaye’s gotten the rhyme wrong. (Say it with me now: “The pellet with the poison is in the vessel with the pestle. The chalice from the palace has the brew that is true!”) One thing that this movie proves is that comedies are funnier when the hero isn’t completely incompetent (as they tend to be in movies today). Kaye finds himself in a situation over his head, but it’s not one that he is totally unprepared for. We understand his strengths and his weaknesses and we anticipate which situations he might be able to get out of and which ones we know he can’t. A clown who can’t cut it as a revolutionary becomes a jester who has to be a spy. His skills will come in handy, but they will be insufficient until they are pushed to the limit. That’s so much more interesting than a movie about, say, a drunken stable boy who has to pretend to be a jester, and just fakes it all.

Two more reasons over at Cockeyed Caravan…

Title: Prick Up Your Ears
Year: 1987
Director: Stephen Frears
Writer: Alan Bennett, based on the book by John Lahr
Stars: Gary Oldman, Alfred Molina, Vandess Redgrave, Frances Barber, Julie Walters, Wallace Shawn

The Story: Biographer John Lahr reconstructs the story of swinging ’60s London playwright Joe Orton and his long-suffering lover Kenneth Halliwell, who pursue fame, danger and each other over the course of an ill-fated fifteen-year relationship.

Why It’s Great: This story is set at a time when homosexuality was vigorously oppressed in England, but Frears has no interest in presenting his characters as sainted victims: This is a true story about two guys who happened to personify every negative gay stereotypes: they were promiscuous, neurotic, snotty, violent, and on and on. But Frears knows that he doesn’t need to “humanize” anyone. With his usual self-assured swagger, he makes these two more sympathetic and compelling with every flaw they show. In fact, the movie has my all time favorite “fall in love” scene. All too often, someone walks into a room and our hero falls suddenly head over heels and we think– really? Why her? Why now? What is their special connection? It’s not enough to just show her flipping her hair. All the harder then, to write a believable scene in which a heretofore straight young man suddenly falls in love with a fat, balding male classmate! Here’s how they do it: They’re students at RADA, doing improv. They’re told to pass around an imaginary cat. Everybody pretends to merely pet it, until Molina gets it. He acts uncomfortable holding it, then he develops an affection for it– then suddenly it scratches him with its imaginary claw. His eyes go dead and he pitilessly wrings its neck, then hands its limp body to the next classmate. Cut to Oldman: instantly smitten. And so are we.

Two more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan…