Centurion (UK 2010, 97 min. dir: Neil Marshall, cast: Michael Fassbender, Olga Kurylenko, Imogen Poots).

Running movies never run out of breath. The curious question with Michael Fassbdender is: after revealing the super size of his penis in Shame, how he can run at all?

Centurion takes us to Britain in about 100 AD where the Romans have met their Afghanistan. Their idea was to bring civilization to the wild country up north; but it has pretty much failed. Picts and Brigantes roam the Highlands picking off the Romans with what will, a few thousand years later, be called guerilla warfare.

All of this really doesn’t matter much in a Neil Marshall movie (Descent, Dog Soldiers). The important concept in any running movie is to get them running. The best stripped down example is Cornel Wilde’s The Naked Prey.

Cornel (Kornel Lajos Weisz: nobody is born with a name like Cornel Wilde) is leading a hunting party into darkest Africa when they violate some tribal rules of hospitality. All the white men are captured and roasted alive or worse.

But they’ve got another game for Cornel. They strip him naked, set him running, and send the warriors after him to kill him. That’s the whole move, and it’s actually excellent.

In Centurion, the Roman 9^th legion is destroyed in a battle with the Picts when their Brigantian scout, lovely Etain (former James Bond girl Olga Kurylenko), turns out to be working for the Picts. The Roman general is captured while a handful of dazed soldiers surreptitiously crawl out from under the dead.

They go to the Pict camp to save the general, but end up killing the chieftain’s little son. He’s so upset that he has Etain duel it out with the general and kill him. Next he sends his warriors out to slash down Quintas Dias (Michael Fassbender) and his gang. They keep running until they meet Arianne (Imogen Poots) who is so beautiful it is worth staying a while. She’s an outcast accused of witchcraft and takes a liking to Quintas (although it may be she likes the part of him he’ll reveal in Shame).

He leaves her to run into Hadrian’s Wall (under construction at the time). He’s a liability to the Romans because he knows they are losing. General Hadrian has his daughter try to kill him (women are the master assassins in this movie). Quintas runs away and joins Arianne in her clay and wattle hovel. He’s going to hang up his Nikes and stay put for a while.

Don’tt expect to learn much about Roman history in Centurion, or to understand why all the Roman’s speak good British English and all the Picts use subtitles. Just enjoy the jog.

The Misfortunates (Belgium 2009, 108 min, dir: Felix Van Groeningen, cast: Kenneth Vanbaeden, Valentijn Dhaenens, Koen De Graeve, Wouter Hendrickx, Johan Heldenbergh, Bert Haelvoet, Gilda De Bal).

All Belgium is divided into two parts: both equally disgusting. Wallonia is the French speaking south and Flanders is the Dutch speaking north. Memorable moments in the south include the man made tourist hill that desecrates the battlefield of Waterloo. The north features stinky rail stations, diesel fumes, and one excellent national dish: French fries.

It is no wonder Belgium filmmakers produce mainly comedies. The whole country is a bad joke. In Paris they don’t tell Polish jokes, they tell Belgium jokes.

In this maze of train tracks, unpronounceable town names, and badly poured concrete; director Felix Van Groeningen introduces us to the Strobbes. Four grown brothers, their mother, and a thirteen-year-old son of one of the brothers make up this household.

Activates include beer drinking, swearing, dressing up as women, drinking, naked bike races, drinking, and trying to get that final gulp before the shakes hit you so bad you can’t hold your glass. Finding humor in all this is Van Groeningen’s art and he does it very well. At first you want young Gunther (Kenneth Vanbaeden) to escape. Later you think, escape to what? The adult version of Gunther (Valentijn Dhaenens) still lives by the railroad tracks and is poor, but now he is an author writing about this brilliant time in his life that we see in flashbacks.

How can you hate guys who make fun of the prim social worker sent to check on young Gunther when her name is Miss Fockaday? The film is like a Sunday afternoon in a roadhouse bar where you might as well join the party because they’re having such a good time.

The Chaser (Korea, 2008, 125 min, dir: Hong-jin Na, cast: Yun-seok Kim, Yoo-jeong Kim, Jung-woo Ha).

Along with apple pie, the US culture can take credit for police procedural and gangster films. Competition is heating up in Korea, France, Denmark, Brazil and a handful of other countries where directors have learned the art of the car chase, the interrogation, the cynical rogue cop and the clever psychopath.

In The Chaser, Joon-ho Eom ( Yun-seok Kim) is the rogue cop turned pimp who sends his girls out to the grittier districts of Seoul. When one of them sends panicked cell phone calls back to him he frantically tries to find her and save her. She’s disappeared but the killer is in plain site.

Without evidence, and scorned by the police he once worked with; Joon-ho starts a long slog to bring down the killer (Jung-woo Ha). Along the way he bursts into his former whore/employee’s apartment for evidence and meets her little daughter (Yoo-jeong Kim).

From then on the movie has to follow the inevitable march to a life or death fight with the killer while the hero takes care of, and falls for, the adorable precocious child.

It all sound like we’ve seen it before, but the strength is in the delivery. Pathos, comedy, and great fights. The Casher is writer/director Hong-jin’s first film. The Yellow Sea is his second. He’s worth a look at both films.

Spoken Word (USA 2009, 116 min, dir: Victor Nunez, cast: Kuno Becker, Ruben Blades, Persia White).

No modern film I can remember is about poetry. Not the kind you read in high school English class, but the slam poetry that is a form of rap with rhythm but no melody. Spoken Word attempts to supply the melody.

Cruz (Kuno Becker) is a west coast poet living sensually with girl friend Shea (Persia White) and teaching poetry to high school kids. He gets a phone call from New Mexico saying his father (Ruben Blades) is dying of cancer and he must come home.

The film has all the usually suspected traumas of returning home again; including alcohol and drugs. Somehow it all looks like a lot cleaner when you throw the empty bottles against adobe walls that look out over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

What distinguishes Spoken Word is not story words, but poetry words. Cruz speaks them eloquently to articulate his journey. The words belong to the poet Joe Ray Sandoval, who collaborated on the screenplay. But the movie belongs to director Victor Nunez.

He specializes in small stories supplying much feeling but not much conflict. Ulee’s Gold, Ruby in Paradise, and Gal Young ‘Un are other good examples. It is not easy to be the go to filmmaker for offbeat, sentimental subjects and Nunez is kind of the Sundance pro.

Like many Nunez movies, you keep waiting in Spoken Word for something to happen and then realize, at the end, that it already did.The journey is the objective, the poetry is the force, and this small movie is as gold as the honey that Ulee makes it his backyard honeypot.

Holly Rollers (USA 2010, 89 min, dir: Kevin Asch, cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Bartha (best friend), Ari Graynor (girl), Danny A. Abeckaser, Mark Ivanir).

Poor Jesse Eisenberg, he’ll always be the Jew. If you look through his credits he’s played guys named Eli, Daniel, Benjamin and Mark (twice). In Holy Rollers he is Sam Gold, and orthodox black hat Jew in Williamsburg, Brooklyn who forsakes davening for the drug trade.

Eisenberg is an excellent actor and director Kevin Asch makes the point in his movie (based on a real story) that if you take away the tzitzis and black coats, these guys and their girl (Ari Graynor) are no different than any other punk Ecstasy pushers.

When you look at Jesse dressed up as a Hassid, you can’t help thinking what Mark Zuckerberg might look like if Facebook went kosher. Zuck might be one of the richest men in the word but he has the sex appeal of a gnat.

One scene that also gives some deja vu thoughts in Holy Rollers is when Sam’s (Jesse Eisenberg’s) father sits him down at the dining room table and says the Rabbi told him Sam is not coming to shul anymore. Sam tries to regain his father’s confidence by telling him he is still religious and his goal is still to be among the faithful; but to no avail.

We’ve been here before. Let’s flash back to 1927 and The Jazz Singer (or 1952 or 1980 for the remakes). Al Jolson tells his father he wants to sing jazz, not kol nidre, and is disowned. Holy Rollers gives it new twist. Now it’s ‘Dad, what I really want to do is deal drugs.”

Drive (USA 2011 100 min. dir: Nicolas Winding Refn, cast: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman).

Albert Brooks was born Albert Einstein. He decided it wasn’t a good name for a comedian. Watching him through Real Life, Defending Your Life, and The Muse he might have stayed with the Einstein name. He’s that good. Each film is a slightly flawed gem that still manages to offer pointed satire on American life while shamelessly focusing on its spotlight-hogging star.

The genius he brings to Bernie Rose, the character he plays in Drive, is the embodies the characters he plays in all his earlier films but with a world-weariness that has turned him lethal. There’s the same “wouldn’t you know it” sigh and resignation but now the disappointment is not losing all his money in Las Vegas and ending up a school crossing guard; but seeing his gang fuck up the big one and sadly setting it right by killing everybody.

His scene with Shannon (Byran Cranston) is one of the coldest murders ever on screen. Bernie slashes the artery in his arm and says sympathetically, “that’s it, no pain,” as if he was Shannon’s nice guy father come to administer a little spanking to a child who knows he has it coming.

Brooks is not the star of Drive. That honor belongs to Ryan Gosling, who drives the movie extremely well. And the cool-y observed existential LA of nights and freeways is the amazing creation of Nicolas Winding Refn, the director. Every generation creates their LA existential movie. Refn: a Dane from New York and Copenhagen has defined it for the now we live in.

But the movie belongs to Albert Brooks as much as another movie with a great heavy many years ago belonged to another comedian. That film was about a pool shark at the end of his days much like Drive features a petty mobster at the end of his days. Brooks looks at the racer up on a grease rack and says his name could have been on the side. Jack Gleason looked at a pool cue in The Hustler and thought he could come back for one more win. Both movies show us what happens when laugher turns to anger and younger men snatch the dreams. See them both.

Title : Dastak
Year : 1970
Directed by Rajinder Singh Bedi
Starring : Sanjeev Kumar, Rehana Sultan, Manmohan Krishan, Anwar Hussain and more
Music : Madan Mohan, Lyrics : Majrooh Sultanpuri

There was a time when Film-making in Bollywood, used to be solely dependent upon “The Writing” and its story content. An interesting plot depicting the social surroundings of the people was the first requisite of starting a project in those days. And that was the reason why we had so many famous writers from the world of literature working for films as the contributors of its story, dialogues, script and lyrics. Such was the depth in the basic idea behind all those movies that they still are studied as a benchmark in the history of Hindi Cinema after so many decades.

DASTAK (Knock) is one of those rare & bold movies made on an off-beat subject which surprisingly still remains relevant even today after so much development experienced all over by the society and its people. Revealing its outstanding thought provoking plot, just imagine the trauma faced by a newly-wed couple (shifted to their new house), after they are told that the house was earlier owned by a prostitute who was pretty famous in the locality and used to run her business right from there. Taking the viewer into the couple’s extremely tense and uncomfortable days in that house, the movie is a kind of philosophical journey digging into the various kinds of double standard personalities living around us in a society. Besides, it also re-defines the power of Tolerance possessed by a human which empowers him to surpass any unexpected tough condition in life with his precious patience.

Coming to the cream of talented people associated with the film, it is written, produced and directed by Rajinder Singh Bedi, one of the 20th century’s greatest progressive writers of URDU fiction. The name needs no introduction to the readers who are well familiar with Urdu Literature and its prominent writers. But the best thing is that here the original writer has himself directed the film in such a manner that it makes a very similar kind of impact as felt after reading the story in its published form. And that is not an easy task to achieve since there are very few movies which have been equally transformed into an enlightening visual experience taking it all from a book.

Featuring the one & only Sanjeev Kumar along with Rehana Sultana as the innocent couple, DASTAK is also known for its outstanding soul stirring musical score by the unmatchable Madan Mohan including the songs sung by the Queen of Musical Notes,Lata Mangeshkar. In fact the tracks are universally included in the list of The Finest Ever from this famous talented duo and can be found in the Top 10 List of both the magicians, compiled by any music critic or fan living anywhere around the globe.

More on bobbytalkscinema.com

This film available on Amazon.com,http://www.amazon.com/DASTAK-Sanjeev-Kumar/dp/B000I0RVTA/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1332081816&sr=1-1

The Secret in Their Eyes (Argentina 2009, 129 min. dir: Juan Jose Campanella, cast: Ricardo Darin, Soledad Villamil).

If Ricardo Darin were an American actor, he’d be getting all those Liam Neeson roles. Obsessive, frantic, single minded but never quite getting the girl. His films on Movie With Me include Son of the Bride and Nine Queens. The Secret in Their Eyes is another amazing addition to the list. (Both Son of the Bride and The Secret in Their Eyes were directed by Juan Jose Campanella; a master who is always emotionally on target)

Here Darin is a retired justice department investigator writing a book on an old case that went cold. A woman was brutally raped and murdered when he was a young agent working under department head Irene Menendez-Hastings (Soledad Villamil). She was the upper class lovely who got her superior position after returning from her Ivy League education in the US. The last thing she wanted to do at the time was jeapordize her career because of suspicions about this one case. Especially because she was atracted to Benjamin (Ricardo Darin) and he to her. Both resisted their feelings because of the difference in their ages and the class barrier between them.

But now it is many years later. She’d risen to the top of the justice department, and he is grey-haired and ready for his pension. What could have been between them was never was. But the old never-solved case still links them together. And that is enough to light the flame between them once again and bring them to admit two things: they love each other and always did; their passion for justice has never slackened.

Together they open up the can of worms that is Argentina’s answer to the Holocaust: the years when the military junta ruled the country (called The Dirty War), and “disappeared” tens of thousands of people to unmarked graves. It was a ten year reign of terror from which the country, or at least the country’s filmmakers, have yet to recover. Like the Germans, everyone knew and didn’t know. Everyone wanted to save themselves even if it meant turning their back onon friends.

The Secret in Their Eyes opens an old wound and new passion. That it what it makes it such an interesting mix of emotions between Darin and Villamil (she’s in Life Accroding to Muriel, also on Movie With Me). Some fires never die, some embers burn forever – is the old saying. An intricate story and a fine range of emotions give heart to an old love made new again in this very excellent movie.

Irina Palm (Belgium, UK, 2007, 103 min. dir: Sam Garbarski  cast: Marianne Faithfull, Miki Manojlovic.

If there was an Academy Award for most bizarre original idea, Irina Palm would win it hands down. The story of a grandmother who takes up a career jerking off men through a hole in the wall at a London sex club in order to raise money for an operation to save her grandson’s life; is one that had to be dreamed up in a cloud of ganja smoke.

Marianne Faithfull, the whiskey-voiced British pop star of the 1970’s, and theme song chanteuse for Alan Rudolph’s film, Trouble in Mind, is now a grandmother. Sadly for those who remember when, she looks the part.

Her cute little grandson needs £6000 so he can be flown to Australia for a complicated operation done only by a doctor there. Not much demand for sixty-plus plump ladies in the sex trade, but handwork is anonymous. All Maggie (Marianne) has to do is sit on a small chair and respond to a buzzer as men put their penises through a hole in the wall. She applies a little lubrication and a lot of creative stroking.

We never see their penises nor witnesses them ejaculating. Too bad because it might have made Irina Palm a must-have sex tape. And without penises we can’t witness what makes her hand jobs so amazing. Why are all these guys willing to wait in line for her? How has she becomes such a profit center for club boss Miki (Miki Manojlovic)?

The trouble in mind with Irina Palm is it never pushes to real porn or flat-out comedy. Think of this story in the hands (bad pun) of David Fincher or Woody Allen. Those would be two fascinating remakes.

Irina Palm is a curiosity worth watching, especially if you want to see what happens to old pop stars. And I can’t help speculating what the pitch meeting must have been like as the writer spun the tale for the producer.  He would start with, “If sex is mostly fantasy then anyone can do it behind a wall.” The producer is hooked. He leans forward listening for more. So do we.

Unstoppable (USA 2010, 98 min. dir: Tony Scott, cast: Denzel Washington, Chris Pine, Rosario Dawson).

For every boy who every wanted a Lionel train set, this movie is the present under the Christmas tree. Tony Scott’s big bicep film is replete with big engines, tough men, and enough train talk to satisfy the most finicky foamer (the name railroad pros give to amateur train lovers).

The story has been told before. In 1962 a locomotive broke away from a rail yard in East Syracuse, NY and got half way to Rochester. Kurosawa announced his plans to shoot the story. He never did, but his script was the basis for Runaway Train with Jon Voight. In 2005 engine 8888 broke away from Toledo, Ohio and made it to Kenton before being subdued. Railroaders called that engine the Crazy Eights. For years after, people in Ohio played the number 8888 in the lottery.

The power unit in Unstoppable is labeled 777 after that Crazy Eights engine. It breaks out of a yard in Pennsylvania and goes on an unstoppable rampage on the main line until Denzel Washington and Chris Pine can figure out how to control it. The unstoppable train is, of course, stoppable. We we know that from the beginning. But the economy of story telling and the power of Tony Scott’s streamlined visuals make the journey worth the predictable ending.

Making Unstoppable is probably as good a story as is on screen. Anyone who shoots a train movie should receive an award for frustration, patience, and persistence. You can’t turn these beasts around for another shot like a car. Every move takes hours. Even though the gags are done at slower speeds and made to look faster by computer re-imaging, every stunt is life threatening. A helicopter pilot was killed filming Runaway Train in Alaska.

Major railroads don’t want film companies on their tracks, so filmmakers need to find a little spur line with its own engines. Then you have to rent your own train of cars (called a ”consist” in railroad lingo). When it’s all over you’ll talk like a railroad man and no matter how accurate you’ve tried to be, the foamers will tear your movie apart on their blogs by noting every inconsistency. Want to see the mistakes in Unstoppable? Go to TrainOrders.com.