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

Title: Million Dollar Legs
Year: 1932
Director: Edward F. Cline
Writers: Joseph L. Mankiewicz (!) and Henry Myers
Stars: W. C. Fields, Jack Oakie, Susan Fleming, Andy Clyde

The Story: Fields has retained the presidency of a treacherous little country called Klopstockia thanks to his arm-wrestling prowess, but now his enemies are going to take it all away. Luckily, an American brush salesman who wants to marry his daughter has a plan to save the country: win all the medals in the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics!

Why It’s Great: W. C. Fields’s movies, most of which are from the early sound era, have been in terrible shape for a while, which hurts his chances of finding new audiences. Even worse, this one has never been on available an American DVD. The tagline on the poster says it all: “It’s insane — It’s joyous!” and the storyline couldn’t be crazier, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hold together, in its own odd way. There’s actually a lot of “set-up and pay-off”. Each one of the special skills that they wind up needing in the Olympics has been established beforehand in a fairly organic way, as far as anything can be said to organic is utterly absurd movie.

Three more reasons over at Cockeyed Caravan…

Storytelling (USA 2001, 87 min, dir: Todd Solondz cast: Selma Blair, Robert Wisdom, Paul Giamatti, Mark Webber, John Goodman, Noah Fleiss).

Explaining Tood Solondz’s humor is like trying to parse a sick joke that everyone laughs at so hard they pee in their pants; at least if they are stoned. Storytelling should be up there with The Big Lebowski as one of the all time, never-get-tired-of-it stoner comedies.

Where else can you take gleeful satisfaction in the white suburban high school girl hanging with her black lit professor as he commands her to strip naked in his apartment and fucks her from behind while making her scream “fuck me hard nigger.” (I watched the R-rated version from Netflix). When she writes an essay about the fucking in her lit class, the other girls criticize it mercilessly until it becomes obvious they have all done the same deed with Mr. Teacher.

At the family dinner table, her slacker brother Scooby announces that if Hitler hadn’t ordered the Holocaust, the Jews wouldn’t have fled to American, and neither he, his sister, nor his parent would have been born. So, he reasons, they should all thank Adolph Hitler for their good fortune. Stuff like this doesn’t come out of a normal mind. It comes out of Todd Solodnz’s inspired mental process. No psychiatrist on the planet is up to explaining it. But any one of us who has suffered through American high school will have no comprehension problem.

Todd Solodnz has only given us too few films. Some are easy to see, some are tougher to fathom (like Palindromes). The big money in Hollywood abandoned him as he got more weird and kinky. But if he lived in Austin, Texas, he would be a national hero. Alas, there is no place for slacker heroism in Newark, NJ (his home town). It is not the place where a yearly Todd Solodnz film orgy will every be held. It will more likely play some college town theater with broken seats. Maybe Madison, WI, during exams, so all those students who find studying to be personally repressive can have an alternative. I’d fly there and bring my own beer.

Take an affluent couple with little regard for anything but themselves, pit them against each other, and you get The Awful Truth (1937), a genuinely great screwball comedy. Late in the movie, Lucy Warriner (Irene Dunne) quotes back to her husband Jerry (Cary Grant) his own words:

“Lend me an ear, I implore you, this comes from my heart:
I’ll always adore you, till death do us part.”

While it may not be great poetry, it succinctly states the theme of the film. The Warriners are social gadflies, each apparently going his or her own way with little regard for anything else around them, including each other. (However, this may be more true of Grant’s character than Dunne’s.)

As the movie begins, it turns out Grant’s character has been deceiving his wife. He’s a bit of a cad; a bit of a philanderer. He was supposed to be in Florida but wasn’t – he was off having fun elsewhere. He takes pains to keep this from her.

As it turns out, when he returns home he finds she is not there. He’s disappointed by this and a little put out. It’s okay for him to deceive his wife, but for her to deceive him? He’s outraged.

When she arrives, he only hears part of her story. He jumps to conclusions; he assumes she’s having an affair with her music teacher. An argument ensues and it leads (rather quickly, I might add) to divorce proceedings. Now the fight is on. Through the rest of the movie, they battle back and forth trying to get one another jealous, each trying to best the other.

They get so caught up in their fight, they don’t imagine what the actual consequences will be. It’s only when each starts to realize the end result, the other’s removal from their life, that they start getting doubts.

The above sounds much more serious than it plays. The film is supremely funny. The lines are quick and witty and Grant’s pratfalls are perfect.

The supporting cast, including Ralph Bellamy (who again gets to play the dull nice guy, as he would later in 1940?s His Girl Friday), are tremendous and truly add to the film. (They always do in films of that period.)

The chemistry between Grant and Dunne is wonderful. She meets and plays off of his quickness and facial expressions with great skill and ease. She often gets the best of him in a scene. They seem made for each other.

If there is any flaw in The Awful Truth it may be the ending, which may be a tad too sentimental. It works, but it nudges at that fine line.

If, like me, you love screwball comedies this movie is a must. It’s definitely one of the better ones. Highly recommended.

The Contender (USA 2000, 126 min, dir: Rod Lurie, cast: Joan Allen, Jeff Bridges, Gary Oldman, Sam Elliott, William Petersen, Christian Slater, Muriel Hemingway)

It would be fun to re-write The Contender with present and future nuances. In fact, it would be fun to re-write it every ten years.

It’s hard to remember there was a time when we were so curious about the President we made movies and TV shows about him. That was while we had guys in the White House who philandered and lied. Now we’ve got a guy who seems more honest and nobody cares.

Rod Lurie is a West Pointer who is best at making political movies about the secret world of Washington. The Contender has a Hillary premise: what if the vice president died and the president had a chance to name a woman to the job.  Not any woman; a woman senator with great creds except for two: pictures of her giving a blow job to two guys in a college frat house; and her seduction of, and marriage to, her best friend’s husband.

Lurie has given us Bill in Hillary’s body! This would truly be a hot concept if Joan Allen had any heat. Actually, I think I blow job from Hillary would be more interesting. Joan/Hillary is surrounded by guys who are brilliant at tactics and politics. Everyone in this movie is so smart you marvel that we once thought Washington was like this. Even the president is a cool guy who smokes a cigar at night with Joan/Hillary out on the White House lawn.

While we had a succession of opportunistic assholes running the country, we yearned for smarts, truth, and leadership. Obama brought a measure of those qualities but nobody rushed to make a movie about him. What happened?

I think the deceit of George Bush (credit to Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rove) followed by the Crash Of ’08 removed any shred of respect for Washington. Americans’ approval of government has always been low, but now it is what Nielsen calls BLM (below measurable standards).

When The Contender was made, the Internet only mattered because it could spread nasty rumors (probably a reference to the Drudge Report, which now seems tame). No bloggers, no YouTube, no Digg, No Gawker. Not even the phrase “social networking.”

Joan/Hillary gave a blow job in college? What’s the web address for it? Let’s see it in slow motion. What do color commentators on cable news think? Fox interviews a woman who specializes in blow job therapy. She says the photos show a gagging reaction (very common) that is probably a manifestation of childhood EDDS (Emotional Denial Distraction Syndrome). Lord, how can we have a Vice President with EDDS?

Yes, it would be fun to re-write The Contender. Today it would be a crowdsourcing project on Facebook with enraged contributors accusing Mark Zuckerberg of rewriting them. What will it be tomorrow? That is why The Contender is far more interesting today than when it was made and why it deserves to be seen to show how far we have come and to be amazed we once believed in moral rectitude. Disqualified by a blow job in college: no way. Give that lady her own political talk show!

Title: The White Sheik
Year: 1952
Director: Federico Fellini
Writers: Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, and Ennio Flaiano. Story by Fellini, Pinelli and Michaelangelo Antonioni (!)
Stars: Alberto Sordi, Brunella Bovo, Leopoldo Trieste, Giuletta Masina

The Story: A young couple from the sticks comes into Rome for their honeymoon. The husband has everything planned to the second, culminating in a meeting with the Pope, but his shy young wife disappears at the first chance she gets–it turns out that she is secretly in love with the title character, who is the hero of her favorite comic book.

Why It’s Great: Fellini is beloved for his oddly uplifting movies about existential ennui, but this, his first movie as a solo director, was one of his few straight-up comedies, causing American critics to mostly ignore it. That’s a shame, since it’s a masterful and touching farce. Woody Allen named it as his favorite comedy of all time! It’s a romp, but also very ambitious, in that it manages to be wholly sympathetic to two totally conflicting points of view. We appreciate both the thrill of her liberation and the exquisiteness agony of his suffering, even though one is causing the other. It was this big-hearted munificence that would come to define Fellini’s world-view.

Three more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan…

The Baader Meinhof Complex (Germany 2008, 150 min, dir Uli Edel, cast: Martina Gedeck, Moritz Bleibtreu, Johanna Wokalek).

Well-educated twenty-something Americans suddenly become Al Qaeda and Pakistani terrorists. Go back to 1967, substitute German names, and you have Baader-Meinhof. The pressure to preserve wealth and power always creates outliers.

Ulrike Meinhof was a journalist. She was married with two children. Her generation grew up in the shadow of Hitler and could not understand how Germany would consort with dictators and support the United States in Vietnam. If the Nazi era was supposed to never be forgotten, what was the lesson?

Benno Ohnesorg was killed in 1967 in a Berlin riot protesting the brutality of the Shah of Iran. We know today that the policeman who killed him was actually an agent for the Stasi, the East German secret police. But no one would know that for 40 years, and it still isn’t clear whether Karl-Heinz Kurras pulled the trigger because he was instructed to escalate the demonstration by his Stasi handlers.

But this act, the Kent State of Germany (the Kent State killings were in 1970) was proof that no justice would ever be achieved, and that only terrorism and violence would purify a western society corrupted by capitalism. Sound familiar? If we were not so afraid to actually hear what the current wave of terrorists have to say, maybe it would sound similar.

And let’s not forget that Islam has always been a religion of profound intellectualism. Isn’t it strange we believe all the young Islamic terrorists are being corrupted by deceitful mullahs? Isn’t it odd that some of the best and the brightest of a new generation are planting the bombs? The press remains incurious. To get press attention it helps to have a catchy name with “bad” coupled with a word that sounds like Mein Kampf (Hitler’s best-seller). The exploits of the Baader-Meinhof gang with its Bonnie and Clyde overtones were great for tabloid journalism.

The Baader Meinhof Complex is about how terrorism starts, why it starts, and how it grows in every generation that is summoned to action by the affront of corrupted power. How it ends is another story; that too is covered in this long, detailed, and very important film. Know the past and know the future,or you are doomed to know only what those who own the present think you should know.

Watch for Martina Gedeck as Ulrike Meinhof. She plays Martha in Mostly Martha, also on MovieWithMe.com. Only here you get to see what’s underneath that chef’s uniform.

Everyone has his or her favorite movie and I have mine – My Man Godfrey. It’s from way back in 1938, directed by Gregory La Cava, and is in beautiful black and white (though there are colorized versions out there). Since this is my first post here at Movie With Me, it seemed the best movie to start with.

I love screwball comedy, I love Carole Lombard and I love this movie, perhaps because both, the genre and the star, are at the top of their form. And let’s not forget the pitch perfect William Powell as Godfrey.

From what I gather, the very term “screwball comedy” comes from a performance by Carole Lombard, though there seems to be some confusion about whether it was a reference to her in My Man Godfrey or Nothing Sacred (1937). But someone, at one time, referred to a performance by her as “screwball” and the term stuck.

My Man Godfrey is a template for this kind of comedy.

Anything you could ever want to know about screwball is in this movie, beginning with Lombard’s performance as Irene Bullock, the quintessential ditsy, rich young woman, the heart and soul of this type of film. But perhaps the thing that puts Godfrey a cut above other movies is that they have not only constructed the perfect screwball comedy, they go a little beyond it with a compelling, if frenetic, romance and even social commentary.

The beautiful and the wealthy, dressed in tuxedos and gowns and all a bit “spiffed” (as Jimmy Stewart refers to it in Harvey), are amusing themselves with a scavenger hunt. The crowning achievement in the hunt is to return with a “lost man,” someone who is out-of-work and homeless due to the Depression.

One of the hunt’s parties, led by Irene’s sister Cornelia (Gail Patrick), comes across Godfrey. Unfortunately, Godfrey doesn’t receive her with the gratitude she expects. Rather, Godfrey is offended and angry at how callous and frivolous they are.

Then Irene comes along. She’s thrilled at her sister’s treatment and somewhat apologetic for how Godfrey has been treated. Godfrey sees Irene as not the sharpest knife in the drawer but more or less harmless. He sees how anxious she is to beat her sister in the hunt due and decides, why not? He’ll go with Irene and see just how frivolous and vain these rich people are.

He does, she wins, Godfrey gets to express his opinion of what kind of people the wealthy are and then … Then, Irene gets the idea of hiring Godfrey as the family butler. And he accepts!

From here on in it’s Godfrey, the one sane person in the film, and the wealthy, self-indulgent, and screwy Bullock family.

The movie excels with an extraordinary cast providing marvelous performances, including Eugene Pallette as the financially beset, ineffective patriarch of the house.

The house is like an insane asylum. But Godfrey’s presence has a calming influence, to a small degree, since he is the one voice of reason and understanding. With Godfrey around, everyone begins to become more grounded and, frankly, more human. They begin to lose their self-absorption and see the world, and people, around them.

But it isn’t only Godfrey who as an effect on others, and it isn’t only the family that is affected. Lombard’s Irene has an effect on Godfrey, seducing him with her madcap antics and her way of seeing the world. Reason alone isn’t exciting. Irene’s craziness is also vitality. Godfrey slowly falls in love.

All of this happens with a chaos of fast-paced dialogue and quick moving action. It’s a frenetic world Godfrey has entered and he is a fish out of water.

The pairing of Lombard and Powell is absolutely perfect. His droll, hang-dog look of seriousness against her constantly changing expressions of wild excitement and abject sorrow make a great contrast.

When I think of the age of this movie, I am amazed. It still does everything you could possibly want a film to do. It’s funny, exciting, and moving, and it does all this while remaining essentially simple.

If ever a film warranted the term classic, it’s My Man Godfrey. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen it. And no matter how many times I do, I always find it rewarding.

My favorite movie.

Go For Zucker (Germany 2004, 95 min, dir: Dani Levy, cast: Henry Hubchen, Udo Samel)

Dani Levy has tried many comedies before (and his Hitler one after) but this is so far his funniest. How can you top a man who fakes a heart attack falling into his mother’s grave in order to make his game time at a pool tournament?

Zucker (“sugar,” his real name is Zuckerman), is a German Jewish pool hustler and whorehouse entrepreneur who works the bar rooms of Berlin pretending to be drunk. His con: get the suckers to bet on a game with him. Despite his proficiency as a pool shark, Zucker is steps from foreclosure and divorce when his mother dies in Frankfort.

Her will stipulates that he and his long estranged brother need to sit shiva together (morn for the dead) for seven days to qualify for her inheritance. The brother is an orthodox Jew.

Zucker is an Ostie; cut off by the Wall around East Berlin most of his younger years. When the Wall went down, he quickly moved his con schemes to the West.

The best comedies come from characters with a soul for larceny who gets tripped up by self-deception. Add a Jewish family with all the quirky differences and rivalries that keep it in a perpetual state of resentment, envy, and jealousy; and you have a pretty potent brew.

This comedy would be expected in Israel but is surprising in Germany. A Jewish comedy? But why not? Ernst Lubitch learned about comedy there, and so did Billy Wilder. They brought their laughs to Hollywood while Hitler stayed and made himself into such a self-parody that everyone from Charlie Chaplain to Dani Levy had to take a shot (see Levy’s film, My Fuhrer, but don’t expect it to be Mel Brooks’ The Producers)

Title: 36 Hours
Year: 1965
Director: George Seaton
Writer: Seaton, based on the short story “Beware of the Dog” by Roald Dahl (!)
Stars: James Garner, Eva Marie Saint, Rod Taylor, Werner Peters

The Story: An army intelligence officer who knows the plans for D-Day is kidnapped by the Germans, who try to trick him into spilling the beans by making him think that the he’s on an American base in 1950.

Why It’s Neat: I love elaborate Mission: Impossible style fake-outs, so it’s fun to see one where the hero is staring down the business end of the scam. The mechanics of the whole thing are fascinating. Of course, they can bamboozle our hero for so long, and the second half becomes a retread of Garner’s previous hit, The Great Escape. The hardest thing about writing any thriller or war movie is coming up with believable ways for the advantage to shift back and forth? First the villain gets the jump on the hero, then vice versa, then repeat that about twenty times, but each time it’s going to seem crazier that they underestimated the other again. The easiest way to do these things is to make either the hero or the villain do something dumb, like put the hero in a deathtrap and leave the room, but the audience feels cheated. This movie sets the bar high by establishing that both the hero and villain are very smart, then it comes up with a series of increasingly clever ways for them to trip each other up.

Title: Black Narcissus
Year: 1948
Director: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Writers: Powell and Pressburger, adapted from the novel by Rumer Godden
Stars: Deborah Kerr, Sabu, David Farrar, Flora Robson, Jean Simmons

The Story: An order of nuns takes over a former brothel on a remote mountaintop in the Himalayas and try to civilize the natives. Instead, they are slowly driven mad by the “fresh air”.

Why It’s Great: Most film buffs in my generation discovered this movie through the great documentary Visions of Light, which singled it out for having some of the best cinematography of all time, and indeed Jack Cardiff’s lush, otherworldly color pallatte and unnerving compositions make this a singularly intense experience, unlike anything else ever shot before or since, but it’s not just the look– the total film is a masterpiece, including the script, direction and performances. The story could not be more shockingly irreverent: a bunch of racist nuns are destroyed by erotic madness! (In a big budge movie from 1948??) But it also drives one thing home: If you’re writing an irreverent movie, then you’re writing a movie about reverence. Powell doesn’t approve of these women’s choice, but he performs an extraordinary feat of sympathy anyway. If you want to criticize someone’s world then you must learn to recreate their world, and to recreate their world you must understand them. Sure, they may change at the end, or maybe you just get your point of view across by poking holes in theirs– what the movie “means” is defined by how it ends, but getting there requires that the writers must first totally sympathize with any world they want to criticize.