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

This year’s Academy Award track is running frisky ponies. The Social Network and The King’s Speech were fast out of the gate and looked like winners. But here comes a big-hoofed galloper with Jeff Bridges urging him on like the Big Lebowski in spurs. True Grit came from nowhere to ten nominations.

How did this happen? Even the Coen Brothers, who directed it, said they were surprised. The Oscar season is supposed to be handicapped on the Golden Globes racing form; where True Grit was a 20 to one shot. The winner-picking ability of these hundred straggling journalists who can’t afford admission to the clubhouse at Hollywood Park Raceway has always been so good they usually do the scratch sheet for the 5000 elite members of the motion picture academy.

But this upset should surprise no one. True Grit is great filmmaking. That’s what the scribes of HFPA (Hollywood Foreign Press Association) can’t understand because they are not moviemakers. It is what the members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences do understand perfectly.

Filmmaking is not just putting a good story together. The Social Network and The King’s Speech (along with several other films this year) do that quite well. But the True Grit kind of movie is the soul of Hollywood. Old timers used to call films like True Grit “Movie movies.”

Movie movies are not stories on film, they’re windows into another world where we are abruptly set down, must quickly learn the rules, and then participate in an evolving drama so full of big characters they take our breath away. That’s a movie movie. It can be called Lawrence of Arabia or Gone with the Wind or The Wizard of Oz or Chinatown or ET.

The people who make movies in Hollywood know how to make movie movies. They know it better than anyone else in the world. Many of them came to Hollywood because they saw one of these films as a child and decided they wanted to be there, in the movies.

When they see a film like True Grit it reawakens all those reasons for what they do, all the craft they feel proud of, and all the reasons they put up with the assholes they suffer day after day to work in the movies.

To the stringers who write star interviews for papers like the Zagreb Post and the Latvia Times, True Grit is another Western. To the people who toil in Hollywood, it is a reason to believe movie movies are still possible. And giving True Grit ten nominations is an affirmation of the true grit of American moviemaking, and an affirmation of the value of all the Hollywood people as bit players on a big screen.

Revanche (Austria 2008, 121 min dir: Gotz Spielmann, cast: Johannes Krisch, Irina Potapenko, Andreas Lust, Ursula Strauss.

Alex (Johannes Krisch) changes sheets in a brothel where he falls in love with a hooker named Tamara and plots their escape from the pimp who owns her. He robs a bank to get enough money but Tamara is shot and killed by a cop during the getaway. If someone pitched this idea you’d suggest jumping off a bridge just to end depression.

That is, until you understood the shooting is only a preamble to the real story. The man who killed the prostitute, Robert (Andreas Lust), is a cop. His wife Susanne (Ursula Strauss), is trying to get pregnant but knows her problem is his impotence. Meanwhile she’s taking care of an old farmer who is the grandfather of bank robber Alex. And Alex, mourning his girl friend Tamara’s (Irina Potapenko’s) death and needing a place to escape, comes to the farm. Are you with me?

What starts out as ordinary tale (except for Irina Potapenko’s body, which nobody can describe as ordinary) becomes a tale of revenge (revanche in French) that skims over the predictable and always finds an original direction.

Robert (Andreas Lust) is the cop overcome with guilt at what he has done, even through it was an honest mistake in the line of duty. His wife is so faithful to him she is unfaithful when she meets Alex chopping wood at the farm because sees him as the sperm stud who can be the answer to her pregnancy problem.

It may all sound complicated and a bit contrived, but the result is captivating because of the players. Much in the style of another Austrian, Michael Haneke (Funny Games, The Piano Teacher, The White Ribbon), Gotz Spielmann is wonderful at implied relationships and penetrating character studies. See his masterful film of three urban character studies, Antares, also on MovieWithMe. See especially part one of that movie which is one of the most erotic chapters to come out of staid old Austria.

Title: Alice’s Restaurant
Year: 1969
Director: Arthur Penn
Writers: Venable Herndon and Arthur Penn, based on a song by Arlo Guthrie
Stars: Arlo Guthrie, Pat Quinn, James Broderick, Geoff Outlaw, Micheal McClanathan, and Officer Obie as himself

The Story: Arlo Guthrie plays himself: bouncing around the country, trying to stay out of the army, getting picked on for his long hair, occasionally visiting his dying father, and eventually coming together with his hippie brethren to form a makeshift commune in a deconsecrated church in Stockbridge, Mass. There we get a complex portrait of the ups and downs of the countercultural life. Happier incidents like the one you may know of as the “Alice’s Restaurant Thanksgiving Massacree” are interwoven with sadder tales of those that don’t survive the journey.

Why It’s Great: Because it was based on a funny song, and the cast mixed actors with amateurs playing themselves, many people falsely assume that this is a mere novelty, rather than the profound and heartbreaking tale of life in the ’60s that it is. It’s a much stronger portrait of that year than Easy Rider or, god forbid, Zabreski Point. Like Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, the theme here is the slippery relationship between warmth and cold as we grow older. Moments of great joy keep sliding down into sadness. As Arlo asks the last time he sees his father: “Now that they’re finally not after me to do what I don’t wanna do, what do I wanna do?” Or, put another way: “Can you get everything you want at Alice’s Restaurant?” Only an existential storyteller like Penn could find so much meaning in such an innocent question.

Read more at Cockeyed Caravan.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Sweden 2009, 152 min, dir: Niels Arden Oplev, cast: Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace)

The Social Network is about an unsociable guy who is out to prove being a runt Jew from Long Island is no handicap to making billions of dollars. Northern Europe is cold to this kind of money hugging. Swedish geekdom is caused by incest, trying to burn your father alive, and giving forced blow jobs to your parole officer. The reward is being a lifelong outcast who can play a computer keyboard like a harpsichord.

Mournful characters who have seen enough depression to jump over a bridge never falter in being fascinating in the three movies in this trilogy (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest). Depression seems to grow wild in Scandinavia. Every wonder why every restaurant has candles burning in the windows, even in summer? They’re trying to let a little light shine in.

Meanwhile the plot of Tattoo skips along with enough holes to swallow an 18-wheel truck. Let’s excuse novelist Stieg Larsson from these excesses: he wrote and died before anyone challenged his logic. The movie makers should take most of the blame because they had a chance to fix it.

A woman drives across a bridge to an island and vanishes. So naturally we think she is either kidnapped or dead. Later we find out she was fleeing someone. Later we learn she is still alive. And finally we are told she actually did drive back across the bridge, but she was hiding in her cousin’s car.

At this point we should throw rotten tomatoes at the screen. But what saves Tattoo from disgrace is the frigid mist that invades the story. It is filled with lost love, loneliness, and existential confusion. Mikael and Lisbeth so isolated in their self-created solitude that the love seen between them, actually more or a rape of Mikael by Lisbeth: is thrilling in its crude intimacy. The both really need it.

Despite the appearance of old Nazis and demented sadists (why do European films keep flogging the Nazis as villains, let’s have some Serbs or Belarusian’s for a change), the story works because Noomi Rapace is magnificent as Lisbeth.

No wonder that on all of the awards shows she made a point of being a glamorous as possible. Every actress who plays a weird character wants to say, “look at me, I’m really beautiful and sexy and quite normal.” Just once I’d like an actress to keep in character as the witch or jezebel she played. We’d like her better; she’d get more work. Look at Bette Davis, who made a whole career out of playing Bette Davis.

Title: Diva
Year: 1981
Director: Jean-Jacques Beineix
Writers: Beieix and Jean Van Hamme, based on the novel by Daniel Odier, writing as “Delacorta”
Stars: Frederic Andrei, Wilhelmenia Fernandez, Richard Bohringer, Thuy An Luu, Jacques Fabbri, Dominique Pinon

The Story: A romantic young Paris postman secretly bootlegs a performance by an African-American opera diva on the same day that a dying woman hides another tape in his bag, implicating the chief of police in a prostitution ring. Different gangs come after him looking for the two tapes, but he is oblivious, blithely pursuing romances with both the singer and a punky young Vietnamese shoplifter. Soon he finds himself caught up in several harrowing chases across Paris.

Why It’s Great: When one talks of movies from the ’80s, the phrase “style over substance” often comes up, and this movie could certainly be accused of leading that revolution– it’s gorgeously shot but it has little of the social critique of the New Wave. But this movie gives style a good name. This is the look that American schlockmeisters like Simpson and Bruckheimer wanted to replicate, but their soulless big screen car-commercials lacked the lyricism that makes this come alive. For one brief moment, this movie actually made it cool to be cool. But while this movie moved away from moral considerations, it was nevertheless a refreshing leap forward in terms of showing the multicultural world that France was becoming. Godard’s characters may have carried around Mao’s little red book, but it rarely occurred to them to actually get to know any persons of color.

Read More at Cockeyed Caravan.

The Triplets of Belleville(France 2003, 78 min, dir: Sylvain Chomet, cast voices only)

Why is it that anything done in animation gets a free ride on story? Words like charming, delight, and inventive are always attached. No one seems to care if it makes sense.

Okay, The Triplets of Belleville is a wonder to look at, and there’s a lot of social commentary in the drawings. The city of Belleville is probably Montreal, and the French bicycle race puffing up the mountains is probably the Tour de France’s annual push up Mount Ventoux in Province. If this is so clear, why is the story so convoluted?

Animators are visual people, but rarely writers. The great success of classic Walt Disney animated films was their stories. The same is true for the best of Pixar. These companies hire top writers. Auteur is not in their language. Sylvain Chomet is an auteur. The credits of his films usually show he did everything but wash the floors.

Which brings up another one of his films, The Illusionist. The story of this one is more straight forward, but equally flawed. A fading music hall magician is befriended by the maid who scrubs the floors of the hotel/pub in a small Scottish village where he performs. She follows him to Edinburgh, where his fortunes sink and she blossoms into a beautiful young woman. The story of their moments between his descent and her ascent are wonderfully emotional. But the ending leaves us wondering if we couldn’t know a little more about them and get a clue of what it all meant.

Both films are lovely to look at but unsatisfying. Where are Disney songs like “Someday My Prince Will Come” or moments of horror like Dumbo’s mother burning in a train car or Bambi’s father telling him “your mother isn’t coming back anymore.” Chomet tries to toe the line between sentiment and art like a tightrope walker. He can’t balance. Sappy sentiment wins every time. Denying it only muddies his story. An old saying in Hollywood is: “if you come to the circus, don’t complain that it smells of elephant shit.”

Beautiful pictures are enough of a reason to see Triplets (and catch The Illusionist). But this is no reason for critics and filmies to moon over Chomet like he is a genius wrapped in gossamer. He’s an artist: meaning he draws really well. But telling tales well is not what you learn in art school. If he wants to strut the path that Disney blazed he ought to find a writer partner.

Title: Kansas City
Year: 1996
Director: Robert Altman
Writers: Robert Altman and Frank Barhydt
Stars: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Miranda Richardson, Harry Bellafonte, Steve Buscemi, Dermot Mulroney, Michael Murphy, Brooke Smith, Jane Addams

The Story: Altman does what he does best: a big sprawling portrait of an interconnected city, rich and poor, black and white, crooks and victims and in-between. On Election Day 1934, a gun moll kidnaps the governor’s wife, hoping that the governor will use his influence to get her husband freed from the clutches of a jazz-loving black gangster (with lots of other little storylines snaking in and out, of course)

Why It’s Great: Whenever a veteran filmmaker makes a movie set in the city of their youth, you know that they’ve started thinking about what really matters to them. Altman’s Kansas City is the ultimate American No Man’s Land, straddling the border between two states, between East and West, between North and South, modern and backward. They fought on both sides of the Civil War, except they started fighting early and then kept fighting afterwards. For Leigh’s character, a brunette named “Blondie”, the two competing gods of Kansas City are Jean Harlow and Joan Crawford: One light, one dark, one genuine, one phony… A lady who played tramps and a tramp who played ladies. Both were local girls who had found unfulfilling success in Hollywood. So it’s fitting that this works as both a drama and a comedy. The tragic elements are paired with lots of droll laughs from the laudanum-crazed non-sequiters of Richardson’s society wife to the ultra-cynical musings of Belafonte’s ruthless gangster. You’ll laugh until you choke on it.

Read more at Cockeyed Caravan.

Respiro (Italy 2002, 90 min, dir: Emanuele Crialese, cast: Valeria Golino, Vincenzo Amato, Francesco Casisa.

Lampedusa is an isolated Italian island near Tunisia where the sun beats and the beat of hot sensuality rises above the ancient cliffs. Grazia (Valeria Golino) is a fisherman’s wife who some think mad, some think erotic, and all think is too much to leave alone.

The real life Lampedusa is a place of azure beaches where you are either a fisherman or a tourist. That is, unless you happen to be one of the hapless African immigrants trying to escape to Italy who wash up on its shores and make the international news. But this last aspect of the island culture is another movie yet to be made.

The Lampedusa of the film Respiro is limited to the story of Grazia’s (Valeria Golino) husband Pietro (Vincenzo Amato) and their three sons. The oldest, Pasquelle (Francesco Cassia) is the only one among the family or the village who understands his mother’s need to escape the judgment of a family and a town who sees her only as too free spirited.

When her husband decides to ship her to Milan for psychiatric treatment, she escapes into one of the caves in the cliffs that surround the island. Everyone looks for her and when they find her clothes on the beach, they assume she has drowned herself. Oldest son Pietro (Francesco Casisa) is devastated until he finds her hiding place. The he makes secret daily trips to her cave to supply food.

It could be an Italian opera: an elemental story of love, fear and tragedy where small human creatures play against a fantastic landscape. But director Crialese manages to pump up the sensuality to a point where you feel everything and everybody on this island exudes a basic sexual life force. Grazia always has that freshly fucked look except when she tears off all of her clothes in front of her sons to go skinny-dipping. And the sons rarely wear more than skimpy swimsuits; except when rival gangs attack them, strip off their suits, and send them running home naked.

Lampedusa reminds me of another remote island, Formentera, along the Spanish coast, where another sensual movies was filmed in a land where the sun beats: Sex and Lucia (MovieWithMe).