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

Title: Trading Places
Year: 1983
Director: John Landis
Writers: Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod
Stars: Dan Ackroyd, Eddie Murphy, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ralph Bellamy, Don Ameche, Paul Gleeson, Denholm Elliott, Senator Franken

The Story: Two wealthy brothers decide to reverse the fortunes of a preppie commodities broker and a homeless man, just to settle a bet about nature vs. nurture. After the bet is over, the targets of their manipulation team up to get revenge.

Why It’s Great: Anyone expecting a goofball farce will immediately have their expectations upset by the beautiful opening montage showing the different social strata of Philadelphia waking up in the morning. This was a movie that actually had a lot to say about rich and poor in America, at a time when the former were quietly declaring war on the latter. I’m glad to see somebody noticed. Puncturing the idea that traders are super-talented geniuses deserving of exorbitant salaries, Murphy is plucked off the streets but he quickly gets the hang of it. “Basically you guys are just a bunch of bookies!” But it’s sadly sweet that it takes both him and Ackroyd so long to realize that the firm is really just a criminal enterprise, even after everything that’s been done to them. Only when it’s almost too late do they finally put two and two together: bookies only make real money when the fix is in.

Read More At Cockeyed Caravan.

Title: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Year: 1962
Director: Tony Richardson
Writers: Alan Sillitoe, based on his short story.
Stars: Tom Courtenay, Michael Redgrave

The Story: Courtenay’s angry young man gets sent to a youth prison, where a cheerful warden tries to mold him into a long-distance runner, hoping that they can beat the boys from a nearby boarding school in an upcoming meet. As the young man prepares, he thinks about how he got there and what victory means to him.

Why It’s Great: The great British “angry young man” films of the early ’60s have become the forgotten missing link between the French New Wave and the American renaissance that flowered in the late ’60s. Richardson, Lester, Reisz, Anderson, et al. deserve to remain household names. This one only recently appeared on DVD, so it’s ripe for rediscovery. This has always been a favorite of mine (I took Betsy to see it at a revival house on one of our first dates) but seeing it again I can see how nicely it fits into my latest motto: “Anybody can be a hero, but nobody can become a hero by doing what anybody would do.” A hero’s triumph must stem from his unique personality. The ending of this movie may be the ultimate example of that.

Read more at Cockeyed Caravan.

US citizens finally have a way to rebel against outrageous cable TV bills. “Cord cutting” is a popular subject for the business section of newspapers and the pages of tech blogs. Journalists are among the outraged consumers so they gleefully write about it. The questions rarely examined are who are the cord cutters and what does Internet need to do to increase their numbers? Could it be something as old-fashioned as original programming?

MovieWithMe follows the saga of cable’s slow demise with a particular interest since we believe the value proposition of cable, at least for movies, is not very valuable anymore. Within this decade we’ll probably see a massive defection of customers from cable TV. Netflix movie streaming is only the beginning.

Don’t expect the cable giants to retreat graciously. They’ll use every trick but one to retain exclusivity. The one trick they won’t use is changing the value proposition. Cable service is the US is a monopoly framed by local municipal franchises. Every town had to grant one company the right to strong cable and dig ditches on rights of way. Every town depends on the revenue from cable and so has no interest in ending the monopoly. Knowing this, the cable companies feel secure in continuing the pricing plans that have made them rich.

The heart of the pricing structure is “tiering.” The companies bundle channels into different levels of service. If you want Comedy Central, you’ve got to take a package with 25 other channels you never heard of and will never watch. And you pay for all of them. There are many alternatives to tiering that would disrupt the comfortable profit margins that have made cable family dynasties of the Dolans (Cablevision) and the Roberts (Comcast). They range from the iTunes model to the Netflix model to the Hulu premium model. We’re not likely to see much movement in any of these directions.

What we will see is a lot of bravado and denial. This year (2010), 300,000 subscribers cut the cord. When you compare that to 90 million total subscribers, no one is going to get excited. Cable believes most of these few disconnects were for either among the economically downtrodden, or elite early adopters who always chase what is new. For those who can remember the 1980′s, this is reminiscent of the argument broadcast networks used to discount the importance of new cable competitors.

What was significant is a question not posed by most journalists: where is the real threat from cord cutting and by whom? Back in the eighties it turned out the massive wave of defectors, after the first splash, were not underemployed or early adopters. They were educated, higher income families who wanted more diversity in programming.

Could the same thing happen now? Cable execs argue that they bring unlimited diversity. Viewers respond they are paying too much for too few programs they really want. To stat this wave rolling, Internet must come up with original, exclusive programming that is so compelling viewers/users will chose it over cable. The lower fees will be the sweetener (it’s better and it costs less).

This is a long ways from the current view that Internet channels are only a conduit for crowd sourced video and dumb millennial talk shows. But then, cable took forty years to understand it was the programming that hooked the people, not just better reception than wire hangers on the roof.

Alila (Israel 2003, 123 min, dir: Amos Gitai, cast: Yael Abecassis, Amos Lavie, Uri Ran Klauzner, Ronit Elkabetz, Hana Laszlo.

Put a dozen Jews in an apartment building in Tel Aviv and no one will set foot in it except the tenants. Hezi (Amos Lavie) is the secretive lover who rents an apartment for his mistress, Gabi (Yael Abescassis). Ezra (Uri Ran Klauzner) is the constructions boss building an addition under the instruction of Ronit (Ronit Elkabetz), who turns out to be a policewoman. Mali (Hana Laszlo) is Ezra’s ex-wife Gabi’s friend and confident. She lives downstairs with her new lover and Ezra’s son who is AWOL from the Israel Army. Don’t worry, there won’t be a quiz on who is who.

Add to this stew a few elderly residents bordering on dementia and a dog. The action centers on the lovers, because Gabi is a screamer during sex. Hezi is paranoid about being discovered by his wife, so he tries to silence her with a hand over her mouth. But the dog hears her anyway and starts barking.

When the police come to hunt down Ezra and Mali’s son who has disappeared from his Army unit, they notice Ezra’s work crew is all illegal Chinese immigrants.

So while his son has vanished into the streets where the cop warns, “he could be the victim of terrorists,” Ezra is hauled off to the police station handcuffed to one of his Chinese laborers.

But the police sergeant turns out to be Ronit, his customer in the apartment house who is supervising the renovations. She lets him off with the warning, “Give me a good price.” (also see her in Late Marriage, on Movie With Me. You would hardly recognize her from Late Marriage to Alila).

Many directors have done apartment house or neighborhood street movies. Alex de la Iglesia’s La Comunidad (Movie with Me) and Jorge Fons’ Midaq Alley (aka: El Callejon de los Milagros) are two. One house of assorted crazies and con artists and lovers is a perfect place for intense character relationships. In Israel, as Ezra says, “Everyone is out for themselves.” This is true outside of Israel, but here it exists with the background of terrorism and suicide bombings.

Gitai is a great observer of human vulnerability in all his films. It is his calling card. Don’t come to a Gitai movie for past pacing and action. The rewards, like a leisurely read of a juicy novel, are always pleasurable but you need have the time to savor them.

Lion’s Den (Argentina, 2008, 113 min, dir: Pablo Trapero, cast: Martina Gusman, Elli Medeiros, Laura Garcia, Rodrigo Santoro.

If you have a child in prison you can raise him/her until the age of four. After that guardians take over. But between one and four resides all the anguish of a motherhood that will end.

What starts out as a women in prison movie slowly morphs into a character portrait of a woman who loses all sense of the passage of time. Julia (Martina Gusman), has only one touchstone to the passing of days: the growth of her little son Tomas. Tine passes with him towards the inevitable day when he will be taken away from her. There are two villains in this movie, and one true friend.

The villains are her former lover, Ramiro (Rodrigo Santoro) who survives the bloody night in their apartment where her other lover is murdered. She has been living with the two men (she claims) against her will. Tomas is the child of the murdered man and the only witness is the other defendant, Ramiro. They wait in jail for the outcome of the court case (a peculiarity of Argentine law).

But Ramiro turns against her in his testimony, and she is sentenced to ten years. The other villain is her mother, Sofia (Elli Medeiros) who has been absent living in France for years but comes home supposedly to help. What she really wants is Tomas.

Julia starts to engineer her escape, but like everything else in the chicken cage of prison, she keeps it from everyone but her prison confident, Marta (Laura Garcia). When it happens, we are as surprised as the guards.

Watching a film like Lion’s Den you want to scream “where has this been?” and “why did I not know about it” and “why haven’t the director and his actress been proclaimed king and queen of cinema?” Actually they may not be king and queen but they are husband and wife. And Pablo Trapero has a long history of directing and producing films about social causes and social injustice. Lion’s Den is a great addition to the list.

Cautiva (Captive) (Argentina 2003 115 min, dir: Gaston Biraben, cast: Barbara Lombardo, Susana Campos)

You are 15 (but actually 16), when a judge takes you away from your parents, who are not your parents, and sends you to live with the grandmother you have never met.

There have been many films about ” the disappeared” in Argentina. From 1976 to 1983, the military dictatorship waged a campaign of terror against any suspected dissident. People were taken from their beds in the middle of the night and thrown into secret prisons to be tortured and killed. One of the best films, and earliest, was The Official Story (1985). In The Official Story, a couple adopt a baby and the wife grows suspicious and goes in search of the real mother.

The point of view of Cautiva is the opposite: that of the child. Cristina, or Sophia as her mother called her at birth, is swept up and displaced not in the era of the disappeared, but in the era of the found.

She lives a normal middle-class life with her parents until she is hustled out of school one day and taken to confront a judge who informs her that her parents are not hers, her name is not hers, and the people she must go to live with are relatives of her real parents who disappeared back in 1978.

The focus of Cautiva is unearthing the history of that period through the eyes of an innocent who is both hurt by it and changed by it. Through a girlfriend who has experienced a similar shock, Cristina learns about her mother, about the moment of her birth, and about the way she was taken, as a day old infant, from her mother; who was then killed.

Floating through the story like an evil apparition is Henry Kissinger, the American political front man who not only worked with the dirty regime in Argentina but also showed up for the 1978 world cup soccer match as an invited guest of the dictators. The film seems to imply that America has no cleaner hands than the ruling generals.

And so it may be. But the focus here is on Cristina and the very troubled life of a teenager learning she is not the child of her parents. This is both the dream and the nightmare of every child. Here Cristina’s nightmare finally becomes her salvation as she learns to live with the truth.

Happy End (Korean 1999, 99 min. dir: Ji Woo Chung, cast: Do Yeon Chun, Min-sik Choi, Jin-mo Ju.

Husband kills wife out of concern for their child. Like many of the reverses that make Korean films so delicious, the concept of wife murder for child welfare is kind of endearing. Or at least it is well justified as the ending in Happy End.

Bora (Do Yeon Chun) is having a torrid affair with a young guy, Il-beam (Jin-mo Ju). He lives in the same super giant apartment complex where she lives with her husband Ki Min (Min-sik Choi) and their baby. It’s tough enough to take the train to work with everyone she knows, but sneaking into her neighbor’s apartment for nightly trysts (she says she is working late) gives the affair a flash of daring.

And it is quite an affair. The sex is hot and hotter, and she can never get enough. Her lover wants her so much he gives her a key to his apartment. But Bora wants nothing of him but his penis, it seems. She tosses the key in her purse and forgets it. When he takes the big step of buying her a toothbrush of her own: she says enough. Any sign of permanency freaks her out. Her real life is down the hall and up the elevator with her husband and baby. She’s carefully to take only pictures, leave only footprints.

What she forgets is the Polaroid pictures Il-beam has been snapping of them in just about every position. Her husband finds the key, finds the apartment, finds the pictures.

Husband Ki Min carefully plots his wife’s murder down to the smallest detail of human hair. This crime of passion is accompanied by a sound track swelling with classical music using the sucking sound of steal penetrating flesh as a counter rhythm. (Min-sik Choi is the same actor who channels blood so well in Old Boy and Lady Vengeance (MovieWIthMe).

What is so delicious about Korean cinema is its perfect mixture of art and gore. We’re led down a path festooned with rich characters and images only to find ourselves at the doorstep of depravity. How much more wonderful could movies be than this?