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

Cable everywhere, the new mantra of Time-Warner, Cablevision, and Comcast looks like cable not quite everywhere, and may soon be back to cable nowhere but your TV (where you can have it for about $85 a month).

The cable TV cartel, worried about younger consumers preference for viewing on their iPads, iPhones, Mac Books, Androids, and assorted netbooks; thought they had a solution. Under various snappy names, it is “cable everywhere.” As long as you pay the monthly cable bill, you can watch on any screen you want. That is, any screen in your own home connected to your wi-fi provided by your cable company (who also charges you for broadband).

The cable companies’ lawyers have studied their carriage contracts and concluded that they can deliver your favorite programs over any device in your home. They claim this right is already in their contracts with cable and broadcast channels like Discovery, ABC, and CBS. But Discovery, ABC, CBS plus a football team size group of other channels says “no.” Cable rights mean TV only, not portable platforms powered by an Internet signal.

The referees in this game are not the FCC but the program producers. They’re going to call these plays as illegal on both sides. They licensed TV rights to cable and broadcast channels, excluding Internet rights. In their eyes, the channels are now fighting with cable companies over rights neither has acquired.

Meanwhile Starz is going into retrograde motion by announcing cable nowhere. This is the cable channel that no one wants and everyone gets as part of the premium tier to get HBO. Now Starz is telling Netflix they will hold back new series for three months to stop Netflix subscribers from cutting their cable subscriptions.

And HBO has announced HBO GO that is their version of cable everywhere: as long as you pay for that premium tier you never watch. (At least HBO does own their own programming).

All this is beginning to look at lot like the old movie, The Magnificent Ambersons where the rich family of old money slowly falls apart. Son George, the last of the breed, is reduced to poverty and gets “his comeuppance.”

Someday RG-6 coaxial cable will be ripped off houses and tossed in landfills like old spaghetti. The media historians will remember big cable’s smarmy joy, year after year, in defeating the FCC’s appeals for a la carte programming (letting the subscriber pay for only those channels desired). And yet, that may be the very thing that could have saved them.

Viewers are defecting to portable devices because they are used to getting what they want, when they want it, where they want it, and at the price they want to pay. The idea that you’ve got to buy albums of anything went out with iTunes. That’s the core of the current problem, not how to walk around your house watching your iPad or being denied Starz on Netflix. A cartel that has gotten its way for forty years is left hanging while the audience moves on to better values and flexible choices.

Paris (2008,130 min. dir: Cedric Klapisch, cast: Juliette Binoche, Romain Duris, Fabrice Luchini, Karen Viard, Melanie Laurent, Albert Dupontel).

A dozen films share the name “Paris,” but only this one captures this modern city prancing like a transvestite in Seventeenth Century robes. The genius of Cedric Klapisch in all of his Paris-set movies like When the Cat’s Away and Peut-etre is that you feel he lives in the city every day.

And he does. Somewhere in the Thirteenth or the Twentieth arrondissemont, he probably hunches against the winter wind like everyone else schlepping his or her shopping bags home from Monoprix or making the daily visit to the boulangerie, for his stick of “traditionale” French bread. Living in Paris, one understands the Babel the city has always been plus the sense of chubbiness where all the residents feel like members.

Paris captures it all, and strives to show daily life for fishmongers to fashionistas. You won’t see many French films that set scenes at Rungis: the vast produce market outside of Paris. Nor will you see the cafes that stay open all night to serve the market workers. Rarely will you see films that use the new city built in Ivry (near the Biblioteque Nationale). Here it is the backdrop for the story of a working architect.

Karen Viard, playing the owner of the neighborhood boulangerie (bakery), is a stereotype known to every Parisien. The bread counters are always presided over by a precise, perfectly coiffured, middle-aged matron who greets you with her singsong voice every morning. As nice as she seems, she will instantly fire a shop girl who can’t fold a tissue properly over a financier patisserie, and she will urge you to try the new apricot tart but will never give away a free sample.

If Klapisch has one failing in his city view, it is that there are no poor, there are no ugly; there is no brutality. His Paris is made up of middle class, educated, and lovely people. Even the fruit sellers in the neighborhood outdoor market are cute. The vast underclasses of North Africans that surround Paris in the suburbs never intrude into Klapisch’s district.

This is the filmmaker’s blind spot, and it has been so in film after film. Perhaps you can see the high side of life or the misery, but it is difficult to have an eye for both. Within his view Cedric Klapisch does have a unique vision that is a delight to anyone who can appreciate a worldly modern city as a singular planet. His art is a blend of architecture, personality, whimsy and sound. Inventive music tracks are memorable in Paris, as in the earlier films Peut-etre and l’Auberge Espagnole (also in Movie With Me).

And for a man who loves his city there can be no greater respect than to get the directions right. You never see a character in a Klapisch movie turn a corner and step out a mile away. At the end of Paris, Romain Duris tells the taxi driver to take him to the Hospital in Montrouge. The taxi driver replies that a demonstration on Boulevard Richard Lenoir might impede them so he suggests an alternate route. Not only is the route he picks correct, but the director actually shoots the shots out the window along the way. That’s a Paris movie made for Parisiens. After all, they are the final critics Paris is made to please.

Title: The Landlord
Year: 1970
Director: Hal Ashby
Writers: Bill Gunn, based on a novel by Kristin Hunter
Stars: Beau Bridges, Lee Grant, Diana Sands, Walter Brooke, Lou Gossett, Pearl Bailey

The Story: A directionless young preppie decides on a whim to buy a slum tenement and fix it up nice, as soon as he can get the deadbeat black tenants out. Instead, he gets mixed up in their lives and comes to realize how callous his own life and upbringing has been. It could have been treachly, but the execution is unsentimental, smart, and surreal.

Why It’s Great: After Easy Rider hit big, a fired-up group of anti-establishment moviemakers swept into power convinced that there were no more rules. They succeeded in creating a great American renaissance on the big screen, but they quickly discovered that they could only push a fickle public so far. There was one big rule that remained decidedly unbroken: Don’t Talk About Race! Certainly not in a morally complex, funny, profane, satirical way. Thankfully, Ashby didn’t know that yet. (And it helped immensely that the novelist and screenwriter were black.) I had remembered this movie as being set in Harlem, which would have made the attempts at gentrification somewhat quixotic, but I felt a twinge of pain when I realized that it was actually set in Park Slope, Brooklyn, which means that these residents were bound to lose utterly in the end. Even the white people I know aren’t white enough to stay in Park Slope anymore. Our last two friends who lived there knew the writing was on the wall when a fresh-from-the-oven doggy-treat bakery opened up across the street. The next month their rent was doubled and they, too, were forced out.

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Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call-New Orleans (USA 2009, 122 min. dir: Werner Herzog, cast: Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer, Fairuza Balk).

This film turns its genre upside down and spits on it. It does for police crime stories what Cat Ballou (1965) did for westerns. From singing iguanas to philosophical drug kings to a hero with a bad back and a roaring coke habit; it has it all.

The tone, story, and intentions are all very different from Abel Ferrara’s original Bad Lieutenant movie (1992). All that is preserved is Cage’s interpretation of Harvey Keitel’s famous blowjob scene in his patrol car (now a stand up fuck in a parking lot).

At the center of this amazing maelstrom is Nick Cage in a role he was born to play. Not since Honeymoon in Vegas (1992) has he worn a suit that fits so well. In Vegas it was a flying Elvis suit. In Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans it is a light tan stoop-shouldered business suit that looks bought off the rack at Syms. He’s permanently bent over by a bad back and an equally oppressive cocaine habit. His snort and chase method of getting the bad guys is fascinating to watch.

His girlfriend, Frankie, is Eva Mendes. She has trouble wearing anything that is not sexy. But then, she’s a prostitute and her clothes are her uniform. Steve, (Val Kilmer) is Terence’s (Cage’s) better-looking cop partner who always manages to look cool while Terence looks more and more manic.

The plot makes no difference because writer William Finkelstein has written so many TV crime show episodes he can name the scene by its button line (that wrap-up line when movie and TV cops leave the room or get out of the car or walk away from the cemetery).

Werner Herzog is no stranger to obsessed characters. Fitzcarraldo is his masterpiece, and My Best Fiend is his doc that probes the dark soul of Klaus Kinski. Cage gets the Kinski prize in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans. Kinski is dead but we’ve still got Cage to play splendidly insane characters. Too bad he also keeps doing dumb movies where he is tries to be sensitive.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans failed at the box office. It was mistakenly sold as a crime story and nobody screamed loud enough to viewers that it was a truly original and totally inventive genre-busting black comedy. Hopefully it will become a cult on Netflix streaming. It would make a great evening with The Big Lebowski as a double feature.

I hope God keeps a credit list where there are special awards of merit for Cage, Herzog, and Finkelstein. Would be nice if Eva Mendes and Fairuza Balk (Heidi here, but amazing since her first appearance in Gas, Food, and Lodging) are included as honorable mentions. In fact, there’s not a single actor in this whole cast who isn’t pretty amazing.

The Proposal (USA 2009, 108 min. dir: Anne Fletcher, cast: Sandra Bullock, Ryan Reynolds, Mary Steenburgen, Craig T. Nelson, Betty White, Oscar Nunez).

Sandra Bullock is the actress equivalent of the guy who sits on the corner with a sign that says, “will work for food.” If you look through her credits she’s done everything accept play a convict on death row. The sheer volume of movies makes her always surprising. You never know where she’ll turn up next and so many are bad it is always a surprise when one works.

Who knew the girl from Speed has a great sense of timing and physical comedy? There are many scenes in The Proposal where the gags are worthy of Lucille Ball (see The Long Long Trailer, 1954). There is heat between her and Ryan Reynolds, even though she overplays the part of the frigid executive.

Story: striving workaholic publishing executive finds she will be deported to her native country (Canada) unless she finds an answer quickly. The answer is to marry her assistant.

The name Billy Wilder is fading fast but his spirit is alive and well in The Proposal. Part screwball comedy, part Taming of the Shrew, this movie is so much better when you look inside it rather than just looking at it as another Sandra Bullock bollocks.

I’m always intrigued by the mechanics of how these films work. Billy Wilder had it down to a formula, and if you deviate too much you are in trouble. The Proposal runs into problems because the first act is too long, the second act (the family’s idea to have them get married that weekend) is too short, and the third act (realizing he actually loves her ) is too predictable.

So these films terrible or brilliant depending on who writes, directs, and stars. If it were (the long departed) team of Billy Wilder and IAL Diamond, it would be called a classic. Anne Fletcher (27 Dresses) is great at timing and manages to stoke some heat between Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. Peter Chiarelli delivers the flawed screenplay but it’s too easy to blame the poor writer.

But what are we going to do now that there is no Billy Wilder around to make these movies? As someone said when the master of screwball, Ernst Lubitsch died, ” no more Lubitsch, and worse, no more Lubitsch movies.”) The Proposal is a worthy addition to the genre and so much better than the quick dismissal given it by critics. Watching these movies is not about knowing the cliches and knowing where it is going: it is about the joy of getting there. Read Conversations with Billy Wilder by Cameron Crowe, and then see The Proposal.

Title: La Ronde
Year: 1950
Director: Max Ophuls
Writers: Jacques Natanson and Max Ophuls from the play by Arthur Schnitzler
Stars: Anton Walbrook, Simone Signoret, Serge Reggiani, Simone Simon, Daniel Gelin, Danielle Darrieux, Fernand Gravey, Odette Joyeux, Jean-Louis Barrault, Isa Miranda, Gerard Philipe

The Story: Ophuls adapts Arthur Schnitzler’s perpetually shocking 1900 play, about a chain of duplicitous sexual encounters, taking us though every level of Vienna’s hierarchy and back again. Along the way he artfully dissects the language of desire without ever chilling its basic naughtiness.

Why It’s Great: It’s shocking how little has changed in the world of seduction in 110 years, despite several sexual revolutions and counter-revolutions. Schinitzler and Ophuls explore the central paradox of civilization: all of the rules seem to be set up to empower men and disempower women, and yet men are always trying to flee from those rules while women are always trying to enforce them, so something must not be as it seems. The encounters are fleeting, and at first they seem as meaningless to us as they are to the lovers, but soon their meaning deepens through sly repetition. We see a lover innocently offer a protestation once, and believe them, then they repeat the line just as innocently in the next encounter, and this time we’re shocked at their audacity. Soon, we hear another lover say a similar line for the first time and we instantly suspect them, too. The film takes us from innocence, to cynicism and back around again to the non-judgmental magnanimity of the worldly-wise. Ophuls is famous for long, sumptuous travelling shots, but these camera moves don’t convey the lyrical freedom that other directors might create, since we often begin and end on baroque compositions, in which characters are claustrophobically enmeshed in a dense collage of objects and shadows. The result enforces the theme: the ways in which liberation itself can be a mousetrap.

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