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

Box 507 (Spain 2002, 112 min. dir: Enrique Urbizu, cast: Antonio Resines, Jose Coronado, Goya Toledo, Felix Alvarez, Dafne Fernandez)

Can you believe a bank manager as the hero of an action crime film? Remember this was 2002 and bankers hadn’t yet become villains. His daughter has been burned to death in a suspicious forest fire in primo tourist area of the Spanish coast.

An unrelated bank robbery at his branch turns up a mysterious map of the same forest area when one of the safe deposit boxes is rifled. The only problem with this otherwise gripping, original, and character filled thriller is the confusion between two safe deposit boxes that both seem to contain clues. Kind of The Wrong Box though this has nothing to do with that comedy and is not even a comedy.

If you can get buy this plot confusion that took me two fast-backwards of the DVD to understand ( that is, to understand that I would never understand); the rest of the film is gripping. The banker wants to find the truth about the death of his daughter. An ex-cop on the take wants to blackmail those who can deliver enough money to send him and his alcoholic wife out of the country for a better life.

The two plots and the two guys are going to meet somewhere (see the clip) and nobody is going to be happy with the outcome. The film is fascinating: full of great characters played by great character actors. They always pulling you forward to the next scene. Americans don’t get to see many European action films. They don’t come to art theaters where the crowds wants picture postcard views of Europe, and they never come to multiplexes where the audience can’t even read the subtitles

So this is a rare opportunity to see a really good European action movie (if you can forgive the story sloppiness about the two safe deposit boxes). It is also a deliciously violent film, assuming you like guys getting shot in the back of the head. I do.

Title: Salesman
Year: 1968
Writer-Directors: Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin
Stars: Paul “The Badger” Brennan, Charles “The Gipper” McDevitt, James “The Rabbit” Baker, Raymond “The Bull” Martos

The Story: Four increasingly desperate door-to-door bible salesmen bluff their way into working-class homes, trying to get wary housewives to buy a deluxe $50 bible on the installment plan.

How it Came to be Underrated: This is one of the most influential documentaries ever made, but most DVD renters wouldn’t know anything about that. You can still get people to watch ’60s verite classics like Don’t Look Back or Monterey Pop today, but the non-musical verites don’t get watched enough. This was an amazing new way to make documentaries, not based around a subject but around characters, just like a real movie. Though the “verite” movement stressed reality, eschewing voiceover or interviews, the Maysles and Zwerin unashamedly shape their footage into a traditional narrative, with winners and losers and villains and narrative arcs. We aren’t sure that we approve of these guys, but they become very sympathetic in comparison to their cold-blooded, glad-handing boss, who rides them hard and doesn’t want to hear any excuses. In my favorite scene, the boss blithely leads them through a role-play to show how easy it is. As soon as the salesmen get to role-play the reluctant customer, they revel in the chance to humiliate their boss with every baffling refusal they’ve ever heard. He doesn’t appreciate it.

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Today Google announced the purchase of CBS affiliate WKRC in Cincinnati, Ohio. The company is rumored to be in advanced negotiations for key network affiliates in Denver, New Orleans, Tampa, San Diego and Atlanta. Incredible? Can’t be true? Maybe not in 2010, but come back in a year and see how the game has advanced. Google has more cash than many foreign countries, so nothing is beyond its reach.

The media story of the next decade is going to be about the painful transfer of power from old media to new media. It promises to be a fight to the death between giant hairy mammoths lunging and trumpeting. There’s no doubt who is going to win but the clever moves, the bravado, the hubris will make spectacular business drama. That is, unless you own cable company stock.

Why is this important to MovieWithMe users? Because our sole purpose is to be your filter for an every larger list of foreign and independent films available from the two giants of new media distribution: Amazon and Netflix. Wherever Google TV or Apple TV or anyone else who is an app and hardware supplier clears a path, Amazon and Netflix will be there faster than a herd stampeding caribou.

The recent debut of Google TV and upgraded Apple TV has been underwhelming. The reason: the program suppliers like CBS, NBC, ABC and FOX have announced reluctance to grant them rights to their shows. Why? Because they have very lucrative deals with the cable companies and they don’t want to cannibalize their market.

So here’s the hypothetical: Google makes their own work around. They know that many of the network affiliates in major cities are owned by newspaper companies. These companies are in hard times. Not only are the newspapers doing badly but the over-the-air TV stations aren’t doing particularly well either. If a good offer came along, they’d sell.

So let’s say Google picks up half a dozen CBS affiliate stations in major markets and announces its intention to stream the network programming from local servers. Suddenly Cincinnati viewers could get CBS on broadband. Wow. It would take about three nanoseconds for CBS to cut off WKRC.

But then Google would cut off CBS, Suddenly CBS would be dark in half a dozen cites they count on for Nielsen ratings and advertising sales. There would be a lot of screaming to the FCC about restraint of trade and license revocation. But the precedent for networks cutting off signals already exits with cable, and the precedent of putting a local signal on a dedicated feed like cable or, broadband started with Ted Turner almost forty years ago.

There is not much doubt about would win this future, fictional round, but TV executives and Wall Street analysts should already be sweating.

Leila (Iran 1996, 129 min. dir: Dariush Mehrjui, cast: Leila Hatami, Ali Mosaffa)

You can’t have children but you can give your husband permission to take another wife and you get to pick her. If this was an American remake it would star Adam Sandler and Sarah Silverman (actually, not a bad idea). But this an Iranian original and there is not an ounce of comedy in it.

Leila dearly loves Rez and he loves her. But the pressure of his family to produce a child is too strong for her to weather. She consents to the worst she can imagine: allowing her husband, under Muslim law, to take a second wife while she remains married to him.

The slow destruction, and final resurrection, of the intimate life between them is deadly serious, intense, and heart breaking. We see an Iran behind the headlines; in the interiors of wealthy houses where family ties are a bond as strong as love. Except for the multiple wife custom, it looks surprisingly Western and modern.

The couple try to work out their problems on long drives through the Tehran city nightscape, returning home to make appetizing dinners of kabobs and veggies. If it wasn’t for the women having to throw on chadors every time they stepped out of the house, you might think it was LA. In the family gatherings there is a lot of friction between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, but everyone eats exceedingly well.

Leila Hatami also stars in Low Heights, the airplane hijack movie also on MovieWithMe. There she also plays the long suffering wife, but at least she’s got a gun. Here she’s restricted to a kabob spear. See Leila Hatami for the performance she brings to a beautifully written story about the intensity of young marriage; and also see the film for the food: beautifully prepared and eaten.

The Rebel (Vietnam 2006 103 min. dir: Truc “Charlie” Nquyen, cast: Johnny Nguyen, Thanh Van Ngo, Veronica Ngo, Dustin Nguyen)

Some movies don’t work, but have enough good stuff in them to fry a couch potato for an hour and a half. We’re in Vietnam, 1920′s, during the era of French Colonial rule. Anti-French rebellions are starting to shake the county and the French employ an undercover Vietnamese agent to assassinate the head of the resistance.

No one tells him two important things about the assignment: first, he’s going to see all the terrible consequences of French rule on his own people. Second, he’s going to fall in love with the beautiful daughter of the resistance leader while he’s plotting to assassinate him.

A knockout of a daughter, a tortured journey, continually challenging moral assumptions about the French: this is challenging to any braveheart. But forget romance and politics. There is only one plot stew that can cook in an Asian adventure movie: action.

Get another beer from the fridge, heat some frozen spring rolls in the microwave, and don’t miss the action scenes. The art of The Rebel is in the stunts, and these are tops in imagination and execution. You won’t learn much meaningful history about French rule in Indochina, but you will learn it’s been a fucked up country for a long time. Maybe the current era of tourist beaches and time share condos in Ho Chi Min City is actually the best.

Does anybody see this as an old Hollywood story? Young genius betrays best friend by throwing in with hot agent who promises him fame. So much has been written about The Social Network that it is becomng a social pastime. Even David Brooks of the New York Times used it as a cautionary tale of morality versus meritocracy in one of his columns.

The film certainly is meritorious: and a very good watch. Aaron Sorkin, the writer, is a gifted playwright and screenwriter who has given us A Few Good Men and the TV series The West Wing. He’s as familiar with Hollywood showbiz as Francis Ford Coppola was with big Italian families when he wrote The Godfather.

Here’s how The Social Network translates in Hollywoodese. Mark Zuckerberg is the boy genius who wants to make it. He’s a star in his own mind even if he can’t get the girl.If he could sing he might be Elvis. He can’t sing, but he’s a wiz at computer code. The blue-blood jocks, the Winklevoss twins, have a neat idea for a website (they are played by one actor, Armie Hammer, who manages not to step on his brother’s lines). They want to hire Mark but he keeps putting them off.

Mark’s working on his own idea, inspired by his hurt at being dumped by the girl. If he were Elvis, he’d write the song that becomes a hit that she hears and comes back to him. The Facebook of Harvard becomes a hit but the girl doesn’t like what he says about her in the lyrics and tells him to take a hike. The Winklevoss twins don’t know it was all for the girl and believe he stole their idea.

At Harvard, ideas are the province of gentlemen. In Hollywood ideas are as free as the wind. It is expected that hot ideas will have many fathers. As Mark goes through marathon programming sessions anyone should assume hundreds of kids in dorm rooms around the country are looking for ways to improve on MySpace and Friendster. The Winkevoss twins don’t see it this way because they are rich WASPS and Mark is a little Jew from Long Island. Remember those 1930′s and 40′s Depression era movies where the rich guy always told Claudette Colbert to keep away from that trashy Clark Gable?

Mark knows he can’t make it alone so he enlists Eduardo, his best and only friend, as his business partner. Like a good agent, Eduardo believes in Mark’s talent and fights to get him parts (money). But Eduardo is sweet, so we know he will get steamrolled. Meanwhile the Winklevoss twins complain to the president of Harvard. He’s the studio boss. He understands “free as the wind” even if they don’t. He throws them out of his office.

Enter Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker, the opportunist. Sean is the coked up high-powered Hollywood agent who whispers to Mark that he’s going to make him the biggest star ever. Mark agonizes for about two seconds before dumping Eduardo.

Like all good Hollywood stories, The Social Network is told in flashbacks from the courtroom scene. We’re compelled to know the tragic, complex skein of events that led Mark to stand before judge and jury. (It’s not really judge and jury, it is a deposition hearing. But it’s a story device familiar from a hundred movies).

Poor Mark has to defend himself against the twins, Eduardo, and a bunch of sharpie lawyers. Everybody is a Sunday moralist except Mark, who remains defiant and dedicated to his creation. The moralists all want money, so we know they’re not really moral. A nice young lady lawyer who should have been Mark’s girlfriend explains that it is cheaper to pay than to play with a jury trial.

Everyone gets their big payout and exists, leaving Mark isolated and alone with his computer, just as he was in his Harvard dorm room. He vainly tries to get the girl who ditched him to accept him as a Facebook friend. This is the “Rosebud” moment (see the ending of Citizen Kane). Fade out.

I don’t mean to belittle an excellent movie, only to show its roots, and to wonder why none of the millions of words written about it have picked up on The Old Hollywood Story.

This is by no means a great movie but, for some reason, I like it. For one thing, I love the song. It’s horribly corny, but … well, I like it. Go figure.

I think I’d call River of No Return (directed by Otto Preminger) a comfort movie. Like another movie I get the same feeling from, Father Goose, it just feels comfortable watching it and I don’t tire of it. At the same time, I can’t help having qualms because I know it’s not a particularly good film. It’s not bad, either. It’s just a middlin’ kind of movie.

And very cornball. Marilyn Monroe is a honky tonk floozy in a town in the Northwest. Robert Mitchum is a guy with some land he’s working out in the wilderness. Because of a bad guy and Indians (yes, Indians) they’re forced to take a raft down river.

Well, there’s a lot more than that. Essentially, this is an old-fashioned adventure movie with a romance thrown in. Robert Mitchum looks a bit more clean-cut than he normally does, and Marilyn is … well, Marilyn in tight jeans, saloon singer corsets and so on.

Despite this wishy-washy review, there are a couple of really nice elements to the film. One is Marilyn’s singing.

She does quite a bit of it (including a nice rendition of that cornball song I love, River of No Return) and it demonstrates what a nice voice she had and her talents as a singer.

The other element of the film that stands out is the second-unit work. The scenery and the shots that incorporate it are wonderful. Shot in British Columbia I believe, the natural backdrop is quite stunning and the cinematography is top-notch.

As part of the Marilyn Monroe: The Diamond Collection II, the film has gone through the restoration process and the image is fabulous. Maybe a little too much so.

The problem with having such a good image is you get to see some major continuity problems, such as the changes from location work to studio. This must have been a rushed, low budget affair as a very poor job has been done matching lighting and other elements, and it’s really quite obvious.

You also get to see some omissions in the restoration process. During dissolves, you see one quality of image then, just as the dissolve ends, the quality of the image, particularly the light element, jumps to a much higher quality.

It’s almost as if once the dissolve ends, someone turns on the lights. I don’t recall noticing this the first time I watched the disc. But I did the second time. And, not being a tech guy, I’m guessing the problem is in the restoration. However, given the poor job in the filmmaking, perhaps its in how the film was originally made.

Either way, there are some technical issues with this movie that stand out.

So … This is a troubling film. I can see so many problems with it. Yet, despite that, I like it.

Title: Scarlet Street
Year: 1945
Director: Fritz Lang
Writer: Dudley Nichols, based on the novel “La Chienne” by Georges De La Fouchardiere and Andre Mouezy-Eon
Stars: Edgar G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Dan Duryea

The Story: Robinson is a meek little bank clerk, unhappily married, who wants to be a painter, but he’s always had a problem with perspective. He falls under the spell of a femme fatale who falsely assumes that his odd little paintings are worth big money. Afraid to disillusion her, he has to support her with embezzled money. Things get complicated when her no-good boyfriend discovers that the paintings are worthless, and tries to get rid of them, but then the work belatedly gets discovered by the art world. In both situations, it is Robinson’s lack of perspective that ironically makes him a valuable commodity, for a short while, but it all comes crashing down.

Why It’s Great: Like a lot of movies that have entered the public domain, this was available for years only in truly terrible prints. Only recently did Kino begin to distribute a beautiful restoration. It’s gorgeous and reveals the film to be a masterpiece… I’m just going to say, this may now be my favorite Fritz Lang movie. Better than Metropolis. Better than M. Better than The Big Heat. I’ll go even further: it may be my favorite film noir! I’ve always loved it but the restored version finally reveals how perfect it really is: The script is ingenious. The performances are heartbreaking. The directing is passionate. This movieinterlocks plot and theme and symbolism and character with a microscopic level of clockwork precision. Joan Bennett is certainly my all-time favorite femme fatale. In many ways, she’s the most pitiless and cruel lover to ever be depicted on the screen. (He begs to paint her portrait, but she forces him to get on his knees and paint her toenails instead, sneering “they’ll be masterpieces.”) But Bennett’s astounding performance grants her a deep pool of vulnerability and, against all odds, sympathy. Her love for her secret sleazebag boyfriend Duryea is so naive, so overpowering, that the worse she treats Robinson, the more you pity her.

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James’ Journey to Jerusalem (Israel 2003, 87 min, dir: Ran’anan Alexandrowicz, cast: Siyabonga Melongisi Shibe, Salim Dau, Arieh Elias)

A man who believes in Utopia comes to the Utopian world and finds it is no longer the place of dreams. He is the only prophet left. James speaks Zulu and comes to Israel on a mission to see Jerusalem and report back to his little village about its wonders.

Instead he finds himself enslaved in a cruel economic system set up to exploit illegal foreigners. He learns the people of the Promised Land have lost all connection with The Holy Land.

The premise may be shocking to modern day Israelis who tend to intellectualize the faults of their country. Films like Lemon Tree (MovieWithMe) present aspects of injustice that stems from misunderstanding and political dilemmas. James’ perception is more basic.

He comes as a pilgrim looking for the place God has declared holy because it is where sin stops and truth begins. That may sound Christian but let’s not forget the Jews, “Let he who is without sin ascend this holy place.”

You’re only supposed to grab the Torah with clean hands, but that is not what James finds in his Israeli adventure.

Once he catches on, he quickly learns to make his way among the exploiters. It works for a while; until righteousness overtakes him and he can’t go on playing the game.

Israeli society can’t comprehend James and doesn’t want to try. It’s much easier to deport him. In his last moment, he catches a glimpse of the way to Jerusalem.

This is a movie that drips with anti-Israel sentiments. Jews are fast to pass this off as hate propaganda. But they should look a little deeper. The criticisms here are of a system of underclass exploitation that has distorted the founding vision of the country. The Israelis portrayed are sometimes sympathetic and always complex. Too often they are comfortable in the world they have built on the backs of others.

James is an innocent searching for the wonders of the Holy Land amid the rubble of high rise hotels and low rise schemers. The sadness of the movie is our understanding that his message will be lost, even if it is dead on right.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Romania 2007, 113 min, dir: Cristian Mungiu, cast: Anamaria Marinca, Vlad Ivanov, Laura Vasiliu)

1980′s Romania is still under the veil of the Communist regime. A college student sets out to help roommate have an illegal abortion. The state does not allow legal abortions so there is no alternative to renting a hotel room and hiring an abortionist. Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) is charged with the responsibility of being best friend while Gabita will undergo the dangerous procedure. Otilia is a natural survivor and understands the indifference of the word. Gabita assumes there will always be someone to fight her battles.

The story exposes the end of the stagnant culture of late 80′s Romania where a political aristocracy is balanced against a vindictive petty bureaucracy. They deserve each other. In a few years all of this will be swept away. But for this time, this moment where a young college student needs and abortion: there is no court of values to hear her.

This is not Gabita’s story, even though it is her pregnancy. It is about Otilia. It is her awakening, just like the country will awake a few years later. In the space of the hours leading up to and after the abortion she will understand there is no place for her. Not with her roommate, nor her fiancee, nor in the system that presses down her every effort to help a friend. In the end, we know she will walk away from everyone she has known.

This is also a film that you would have thought the right-to-lifers would have embraced as their own. No one who sees it can argue for abortion, especially with the site of the fetus sitting on the bathroom floor. Strange that it was not raised on the shoulders of these people, since there has never been, to my knowledge, any statement as powerful for their cause then this one.