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

Trucker (USA 2008, 90 min, dir: James Motten, cast: Michelle Monaghan, Benjamin Bratt, Nathan Fillion)

Michelle Monaghan is Diane, a tough trucker who lives on the road and fucks handsome drivers without leaving her phone number. But somewhere out there beyond the darkness she’s got a kid who she’s left with her ex-husband Len (Benjamin Bratt).

This is a riff on the white line fever picture that has a been a Hollywood staple since They Drive by Night (1940). As soon as I see a kid in a movie with a tough guy or babe, my sentimentality buzzer goes off. You know where it is going the moment Daddy says Mommy has to take the tyke. I reviewed Mostly Martha and No Reservations on MovieWithMe. In those make and remake movies, the woman is a top chef and the kid is the precocious niece whose parents have been conveniently killed in an auto accident.

Trucker at least gives us a tough kid to match his mother’s lifestyle. Though I wish he smoked cigarettes like she does-that would be a cinematic breakthrough. But Tucker is something a little more than its predictable story: it is a road movie about nights and highways and dank motels. This is a genre in itself; always supported by an ample catalogue of country and western songs that reveal emotions big rig drivers never can.

In most countries, guys drive trucks and drink beer. Only in American do they also live in a mythic dimension. (One exception: The Wages of Fear, but that is really an American style movie made by the French). These movies are more than C&W music and lost characters: they are an extension of our western cowboy themes. You can be lonely watching the fire burn down with your horse tethered on the lonely desert: or you can be lonely in the cab of your Kenworth lighting the white line bend around the earth ahead.

Title: Waterland

Year: 1992

Director: Stephen Gyllenhaal

Writer: Peter Prince, based on the novel by Graham Swift

Stars: Jeremy Irons, Ethan Hawke, Sinead Cusack, Cara Buono, Lena Headey

The Story: One day in 1973, a high school history teacher in Pittsburgh gets tired of lecturing about the French Revolution and instead starts telling his students about his own coming of age amongst the eel fishermen of the English Fens: a painful tale of sex, murder, and buried secrets.

Why It’s Great: The flashbacks that overwhelm Irons are elegantly constructed, compressing a sprawling family saga into a few powerful scenes. The trouble all begins with a swimming contest, and it shows that a contest is a great way to begin a story: It defines everybody very quickly– It gives each character a chance to show what they want and ranks them according as to how badly they want it. David Morrissey is great as the older brother in the flashbacks. There had been a plague of movies at the time about mentally challenged people that treated them like sagacious advocates of a simpler existence, rather than complex adults who, like everybody, want more things out of life than they’re ever likely to get, which is nothing to be ashamed of. Understanding that is the beginning of real respect.

Two more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan…

Walk on Water (Israel 2004, 103 min, dir: Eytan Fox, cast: Loir Ashkenazi, Knut Berger, Caroline Peters).

This Israeli film asks whether there is really a purpose anymore in the Israeli final solution of killing old Nazis. Museums are being built everywhere to chronicle the Nazi’s “Final Solution” to exterminate the Jews, but what about the Israeli’s state sanctioned retribution?

Trained as a hit man whose life is measured in assassinations, Israeli agent Eyal (Loir Ashkenazi, also in Late Marriage on MovieWithMe.com) is ordered to kill an elderly ex Nazi mass murderer “before God does.”

The way to flush this old Black Shirt out of hiding is to get close to his granddaughter and grandson. Pia (Caroline Peters) lives in Israel as a kibbutz worker and maintains close contact with her gay brother, Axel (Knut Berger). Eyal manages to befriend them both. Although his purpose is information, he finds himself drawn into their picnics on the sand and running barefoot.

For I guy who doesn’t even take his socks off between killings, this is a major life change. Little by little, he learns their view of humanity. It offers a reboot of history by seeing a bigger picture than Jews versus Germans.

A song by Esther Ofarim that Axel plays on the car radio while driving Eyal to the family home in Wansee, outside Berlin (coincidentally, the town where the Final Solution was hatched back in 1942), underscores the point of the movie. Ofarim is an Israeli who sings in German. She’s built up a huge following in Germany where her music symbolizes the improbable bond between the two cultures.

He doesn’t know they’re driving to attend Axel’s grandfather’s birthday party, where Eyal will get the chance to give the old man a final present from the Mossad: death.

The strength of this movie (mainly in English, with some subtitles for the Hebrew and the German) is two cultures pushed to confrontation: the diabolic Nazi killer and the new assassin under the same roof. The former is a feeble old man. The latter has to confront the question of why he is doing what he is about to do.

Eyal faces a moral quandary he can’t answer. So he drives back into Berlin to talk to his boss. The way back form the western suburbs takes him on Hitler’s first autobahn. (You can’ t make a film in Berlin without running on or over a lot of history). His boss, the Mossad chief, is calling the shots form his hotel room. Eyal suggest they capture the old man and smuggle him to Israel for trial (like the Israeli’s did with Adolf Eichmann decades before). He argues that that it makes no sense to kill an old man who is near death anyway.

“Terminate him before God does,” is the boss’s answer. It is the logic of the efficient and practical assassin with no room for the questions of why. Eyal drives back to Wansee. “Why” is the question on his brain, and then “how”? While he is pondering, Axel takes the moral high ground and frees Eyal from his dilemma. Meanwhile sister Pia gives the promise throughout the movie that sex is so much better without moral confusion.

Easy for me to see the lighter side of Eytan Fox’s film very rich and thought provoking film; but this doesn’t take away from it being an extremely intelligent, effective, and watchable movie.

Watching In a Lonely Place, I couldn’t help recalling all those English Lit classes about tragedy and the hero with a tragic flaw. This is a film noir with Humphrey Bogart playing such a character and the result is a great, if heartbreaking, movie. (It’s a little eyebrow raising to find out the set was a replica of a place where director Nicholas Ray lived and the film is called In a Lonely Place.)

This is a movie about loneliness. As with many noirs, the hero (or anti-hero) is an outsider. He’s isolated from everyone around him. Here, however, he has a chance to alleviate that loneliness, finding love with a woman he feels understands him (Gloria Grahame).

Humphrey Bogart plays Dixon Steele, a Hollywood screenwriter with a less than stellar career. He’s cynical about the business he’s in, dislikes its commercialism and goes about with a chip on his shoulder. He also has a volatile temper. The anger he carries around with him is generally repressed but always on the verge of boiling over. Often, it does.

He’s given a novel to read to see what he can do about turning it into a script. But rather than read the novel, he gets a starry-eyed hatcheck girl to come over to his place and tell him the story (since she has read it). Later, after leaving, the girl is found murdered. Steele becomes the lead detective’s prime suspect.

Steele has an alibi, however. It comes by way of Laurel Grey (Grahame), his neighbor across the courtyard. Steele and Grey develop a relationship and are soon in love. This love frees Dixon from his demons, at least for a time, and he starts riding a creative wave, writing the script he’s been asked for but, at the same time, turning it from a trashy novel into something considerably better.

But the investigation of the murder haunts Dixon and Laurel. His temper soon resurfaces and she sees this part of him. Soon she (and we, the audience) start to wonder if Steele is innocent or not. His temper certainly makes it seem possible he committed the crime.

Doubt and distrust begin to eat away at Dixon and Laurel’s relationship and it soon starts to spiral downward.

Bogart is tremendous in this movie and you could make a good case for this being his best performance. While you can empathize with him to an extent, and want the relationship of Dixon and Laurel to work, you can’t help also disliking him because of his anger and suspicions. With a personality such as his, with his emotional problems, it’s easy to see how if the relationship were to work it would soon become characterized by domestic violence.

Gloria Grahame is also perfect. It’s difficult to imagine anyone else in this role. You can see the love and fear battling within her. In noirs, she’s the ideal femme fatale. (See The Big Heat, for example.)

The movie also has a perfect ending. It has something of a twist to it but it doesn’t seem forced or imposed. Rather, it seems inevitable.

While In a Lonely Place begins with the appearance of a potboiler murder story (which I gather the book it came from was), the murder here is just an excuse to tell the the real story — the relationship between Dixon and Laurel, and how Dixon’s flaw affects and determines its end.

Note: There is also some great black and white cinematography here. Roger Deakins has mentioned this as one of the movies that influenced the shooting of Coen brothers The Man Who Wasn’t There.

Title: Jump Tomorrow
Year: 2001
Writer / Director: Joel Hopkins
Stars: Tunde Adebimpe, Natalia Verbeke, Hippolyte Girardot

The Story: A shy, charming Nigerian-American has to travel across upstate New York for an arranged marriage, but a crazed Frenchman encourages him to pursue his crush on a Spanish cutie making the same trip.

How it Came to be Underrated: It’s a modern romantic comedy! Hey, where’s everybody going? These days, just hearing those words sets anybody’s teeth on edge, the genre has become synonymous with treachly formulaic crapola. It’s absolutely remarkable that anyone can still breathe life into this tired genre, but Hopkins’ love of life (and filmmaking) is absolutely infectious. Surely he got a bunch of offers to make Sandra Bullock movies after this came out? I saw this randomly at Sundance and I fell in love with it. When it failed to get much of a release, I was afraid to watch it again –had I merely been intoxicated by the mountain air once again? No, I liked it even more the second time, and everybody who I show this movie to goes crazy for it (and curses the pea-brains who failed to market it properly.) As with Funny Bones, I fell in love with both the director and the two leads, then watched them all disappear off the radar, at least for a while. Adebimpe was an NYU animator who got shanghaied into acting by his friend Hopkins, so then he became, what else… a rock star, as the unlikely lead singer of indie darlings “TV on the Radio”. According to imdb, the adorable Verbeke ended up on Spanish TV.

Two more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan…

The Crime of Father Amaro (Mexico 2002, 118 min. dir: Carlos Carrera, cast: Gael Garcia Bernal, Ana Claudia Talancon, Andres Montiel)

What girl could resist Gael Bernal? Especially if he is a priest and she loves Jesus? This was a big hit in Mexico, which seems strange for a movie based a Portuguese novel written in 1880 by Jose Maria Eca de Queiros. He was a cosmopolitan writer who often took on the Church.

The movie moves the action from a sleepy town near Lisbon to a sleepy town near Mexico City. Far enough away so all the intrigue of small town life can play out, but near enough to feel big city sophistication lurking over the hill. Everyone here is having an affair with somebody.

The local priest has been fucking his maid since she was young and good looking (she’s now middle-aged). He’s also available for baptisms at he hacienda of the drug lord. He’s the biggest contributor to the priest’s pet project: a new hospital. The town mayor, known affectionately as “Gordo” (fatty) has a live and let live attitude towards it all.

Into this sleazy backwater comes a new priest, Father Amaro (Gael). His blue eyes immediately set of an estrogen flow in Jesus-loving Amelia. He rents a room claiming he wants to give her instructions for joining an order of nuns. And he proceeds to give her very intense instructions on the bed, nonstop. In the next room a mentally handicapped child listens in. Weird.

There is melodrama for everyone, and at almost two hours, you have to take a head count to see how many have fallen from grace. The neat trick is making an 1880 novel work in contemporary Mexico, and keeping the pot boiling. And there’s the satisfaction of seeing Gael Garcia Bernal play a priest who can’t keep his zipper zipped.

Title: Queen Christina
Year: 1933
Director: Rouben Mamoulian
Writers: H. M. Harwood, Salka Viertel, Margaret P. Levino, and S. N. Behrman
Stars: Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, Ian Keith, Lewis Stone, Elizabeth Young

The Story: The kick-ass 17th century Swedish queen reads books, dresses like a man, and refuses to get married, laughing at those who try to impose gender roles on her. You’d almost think she was a lesbian if she didn’t have so much uninhibited sex with men. She’s allowed to get away with all of it until she tries to shut down the military-industrial complex, resulting in a whisper campaign that brings her regency to a crisis.

Why It’s Great: Mamoulian combined the sensuousness of Ophuls with the brazen good-naturedness of Hawks, but only in recent years have moves like this, Applause and Love Me Tonight been treated like the masterpieces they are. This movie is very much a product of that magical period from 1929-1933, after the arrival of sound but before the strict enforcement of the production code, when Hollywood movies enjoyed a brief flowering of sexual sophistication. Most “pre-code” movies used that freedom to tell tales that were lurid and dark, but this was one of the few that used its frankness to celebrate sexual liberation in a way that was positive, political, and progressive. It’s pretty gobsmacking to watch it today.

Three more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan…

Title: Funny Bones
Year: 1995
Director: Peter Chelsom
Writers: Chelsom and Peter Flannery
Stars: Oliver Platt, Lee Evans, Jerry Lewis, Leslie Caron

The Story: Surreal, funny, heartbreaking magic-realist comedy-drama about a failed American comedian who absconds to the faded resort town of Blackpool, England, where his father performed when he was a child, hoping to steal material from the local comics. Instead, he uncovers his father’s secrets and discovers he has a monstrously funny half-brother.

Why It’s Great: This movie seemed to announce Chelsom as a major writer/director, but his follow-up (The Mighty) was a flop and his next (Town and Country) was a notorious mega-flop, so he was done, and this movie was unfortunately forgotten. This movie also seemed like it would turn Platt and Evans into major stars. They both give intense lead performances. Platt has been too often relegated to “fat friend” roles, which was perhaps inevitable, but the utter disappearance of Evans is stranger. He’s a revelation here, like a strange combination of Sean Penn and Jim Carrey. He’s been rarely seen again, which makes this one of the great one-off performances I’ve seen. This is a funny movie, but it’s more interested in being aboutcomedy, which is an inherently painful subject. The opening sequence, where Platt bombs in Vegas, is as excruciating as a horror film. The whole movie explores the symbiotic relationship between comedy and brutality. As Evans rhetorically asks, “You can’t pull your punches, can you?”

There’s a heck of a lot of drinking in this movie. But there’s also a heck of a lot of fun. In fact, The Thin Man is a delight from start to finish.

It begins as a standard, noir-like mystery-thriller of the period (1934). We meet some characters, most not very savory, and we soon realize that something none-too-good will happen. And it does.

There’s a murder but we’re not sure who committed it (though we’re given some possible suspects). And there is yet another mystery which we’re not necessarily aware of yet (the mysterious Wynant) — it will develop as the film goes on.

Only after we’ve been given all this story set up do we finally meet the stars of the film, William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles, the cocktail loving, free-spirited couple who, between drinks, may poke their noses into a mystery or two. (Oh yes, there is their dog, Asta, too.)

Upon meeting Nick and Nora, the tone of the film abruptly changes. The pair party, wisecrack and generally take everything that comes into their lives breezily. Everything is a passing amusement.

From a noirish piece, we’re now into a comedy. (Maybe it’s more accurate to say a comedy has been laid over the thriller — more or less smothering it. And that’s more than okay. It’s a great comedy.)

Nick and Nora are absolutely charming. They’re always witty — which is remarkable since Nick, at least, is almost always tipsy. Powell plays it perfectly, not simply with the intonation of his lines but also to getting a bit of a slur into his voice.

While there is a great supporting cast this movie works primarily because of its stars, Powell and Loy. They work beautifully together. Loy is the perfect foil to Powell since she rarely takes anything he says seriously. She’s as casual as he is.

The movie also works due to its quick pace. Remarkably, with all the amusing nonsense going on, it also manages to be suspenseful. It wraps up with one of the best “gathering of all the suspects” scenes ever as Powell’s Nick tries to determine who the murderer is (he hasn’t a clue, but he doesn’t let anyone other than Nora know that).

This is definitely a movie about dialogue, of which Powell is a master.

Roger Ebert puts it best, I think, when he says, “William Powell is to dialogue as Fred Astaire is to dance.” (For another great Powell performance, see My Man Godfrey.)

The Thin Man is absolutely great entertainment. It still plays well and it’s easy to see why it spawned a number of sequels. Together, William Powell and Myrna Loy are utterly charming.

Departures (Japan 2008, 130 min, dir: Yojiro Takita, cast: Masahiro Motoki, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Rokoyo Hirosue, Kazuko Yoshiyuki, Kimiko Yo).

If you want to know about cultural differences watch Departures after a few episodes of TV’s Dexter. One comes from a thousand year tradition and the other from a twenty-minute idea sketched on a napkin.

That’s not to say either is better, just different. Daigo (Masahiro Motoki) isn’t a righteous serial killer like Dexter; he’s an out of work cello player who falls into an obsession with the dead because of a misprint in a newspaper want ad. His job is giving people a good send off after they are dead. Dexter’s mission is similar except he gives people a good send off by making them dead.

Daigo becomes an assistant funeral preparer, learning from his boss, Ikuei (Tsutomu Yamazaki). The Japanese go through an elaborate ritual of washing and preparing the dead before they are put in a coffin and cremated. It’s apparently the way things are done, even though it seems like a lot of work and waste of materials. Don’t the Japanese get it about green and recycling?

First repulsed, Daigo becomes fascinated with his work; though never admitting his new profession to his wife. He tells her he’s in “ceremonies.” Like Dexter, you can’t make a movie about death without some humor. In fact there is a lot of humor. From the opening scene where they are preparing a body they discover is an hermaphrodite, to later sequences with his boss, Ikuei, who does body prep between endless cigarettes.

The power of the movie is not only making something repulsive into something beautiful, but asking and (finally) answering the question of why a nice kid who plays a good classical cello would want to do this. In each of us there is a core of something never understood, always present, and rarely resolved. With Daigo it is his childhood abandonment by his father.

Returning to his own village, taking a bizarre job that exposes him to other people’s emotions at the moment of final loss, and confronting the death of the man he never knew; is his own way of reaching into his secret place and freeing himself. It is his departure. Two things worth noting here: the rather amazing screenplay by Kundo Koyama (who has written a lot of Japanese TV). How does anyone get an idea like this? And the performance of Tsutomu Yamazaki as the world-weary boss who is a substitute father. Also Tsutomu as the brother in Kurosawa’s Kagemusha (1980). Don’t know that one? Shame on you.