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

Everlasting Moments (Sweden 2008, 131 min.  dir: Jan Troell, cast: Maria Heiskanen, Mikael Persbrandt, Jesper Christensen, Callin Ohrvall).

The passing of any technology leaves a mystery we do not question. Canals became railroads. Carriages became autos. Sewing machines became lazar stitchers. Photography becames digital imaging. Everlasting Moments is a time capsule for the magic age of film cameras.

Jan Troell creates a time of wonder where a simple black and white photo could release humans from the drudgery of their lives and lets them dream. Maria (Maria Heiskanen) is the working class wife of the drunken, brutish, but charming Sigge (Mikael Persbandt). Continually pregnant, working every waking hour as a seamstress, she finds a long forgotten camera tucked in a drawer. Her first instinct is to sell it.

But Sebastian (Jesper Christensen), the romantic who runs the photography store, suggests that she first try taking some picture. Maria’s fascination starts when Sebastian takes the camera lens and focuses the flutter of a butterfly on her hand. He introduces her the solemnity of the darkroom, and supplies her with film chemicals to try it for herself.

The yearning for passion in these two is redirected to their silent, side-by-side witness of the alchemy of the developer’s potion. The red darkroom light casts a sensual glow over them as they watch images emerge from nowhere.It is these scenes, and the simple, artful pictures from Maria’s camera that explain the mystery of film and photograph.

No historical treatise, no factual documentary can ever get as close as Everlasting Moments to giving us a sense of what it was like to experience technology past. And no modern photographer working with digital cameras and printers can understand the delight of those silent, dark hours alone in a small red-lit room with smelly chemicals and a pair of tongs.

The only sound in the darkroom is the rhythm of the rocking tray as developer sloshes back and forth over a piece of paper. Whiffs of black began to darken into clouds and then become a face, a tree, a cat: a special moment of life memory. These are the Everlasting Moments.

When you have any website with “Movie” in it, you’re fair game for totally irrelevant sites trying to build their Google search standing. “Movie” is so common a search word that all kinds of businesses hope to lead the innocent into their maw. If I search for “cable movies” I might land on CableTVProviders.net. If I search for “college movies” I might land on Bestonlinecolleges.com.

Or at least that is the hope. Galley slaves in obscure countries spend countless hours on computers searching and contacting sites like MovieWithMe.com  and suggesting articles like “10 Most Quotable Movies of All Time” would be “an interesting story for your readers to check out and discuss on your blog.”

What they seek is a link back that will boost their site ranking and give them an edge in search engine optimization. Google is continuelly fine tuning its search algorhythms to avoid this. The bigger question is why site owners pay good money for results that have bounce rate that is sky high (users go away as fast as they can click).

Of the two stories roseK112 and yelin.george thought would be interesting for us to check out, “10 Most Quotable Movies of All Time” is the most interesting, and most comprehensive. The movies are well chosen, even if if the quotes are not. Sample from A Few Good Men, “You can’t handle the truth.”   This is brought to us by CableTVProviders: a site that tells us channels and program line ups in our area.

“The 10 Most Overused Movie Quotes” on Best Online Colleges singles out the same “You can’t handle the truth” from A Few Good Men as one of the most over used. I would think a site that peddles college course info would suggests more than limp alternatives for overused lines. The suggested replacement for Jerry McGuire’s “You had me at hello” is “Stop talking, you won.” Is literature still taught in college?

My real curiosity is, who wrote these lists?” Where were they stolen from? Neither is credited to anybody. My disdain is reserved for the sites themselves. They are content farms with threadbare content. The more they impede our search objectives, the more frustrated and untrusting of search we become. Google is history. Intelligent search is the next big thing. I can’t wait

Title : Yaadein
Year : 1964
Produced, Directed and Acted By Sunil Dutt

Sunil Dutt, a lovable person, is fondly remembered by everyone not only as a film personality, but also as a kind, humble and thoughtful human who had a multi-dimensional career ranging from an actor-producer-director to a social worker-politician. However, it might be news for many that the thinking man was also the first person to make an innovative venture in Bollywood called “Yaadein” in the year 1964.

The film was a unique attempt since it was A SOLILOQUY act performed by Sunil Dutt, in the role of a worried loving husband, who is surprised to see his wife and children not at home one day as he returns from the work. Making his own assumptions, he starts imagining about the reason for their absence and in turn begins talking to himself about his own mistakes and regrets.

The attempt was and is still novel because it has only One Actor in the movie, Sunil Dutt, who talks to himself and his imaginary personalities throughout its nearly 2 hours of duration on only One Set. And that is the reason it is termed as A SOLILOQUY. Indeed a path breaking, Black & White experimental piece of art, which was also directed by the legendary Sunil Dutt himself as his directorial debut.

Apart from its solo act, YAADEIN is also a must watch movie for every student and lover of cinema for its brilliant use of imaginary expressions. Just watch out the way Sunil Dutt very intelligently uses the background music, various voices, photographs, cartoons, images and shadows to show the presence of the second person in the narration. In fact the film also introduces you to another form of visual expression -A SILHOUETTE, in which a black shadow is used to depict a distinct personality.

More on http://bobbytalkscinema.com/recentpost.php?postid=postid060411221240

The White Ribbon (Germany 2009, 144 min. dir: Michael Heneke, cast:Christian Friedel, Ernst Jacobi,Lionie Benesch, Susanne Lothar, Urlich Tukur, Ursina Lardi, Detlev Buck).

Director Michael Heneke is not good on conclusions. The Piano Teacher, Funny Games, and Cache are fascinating to watch but frustrating. So it is with The White Ribbon.

A small German town witnesses a horse and riser felled by a cruel trip wire, a woman falling to her death on a rotten plank, a man hanged upside down in the mill. What does it all mean? God’s warning about the war to come that will change life here forever? The scenes are brilliant, the intellectual postulations lofty. I only wish Michael Heneke would bevel his story with a finer corner at the end.

His trademark has become the fade out and credits while his audience is left to puzzle the meaning. You can’t but be caught up in the story, the setting, the characters and fine performances by all. As if to emphasize the small rooms and camped world of the story, Heneke rarely moves the camera. Take a look at the scene where Eva’s father (Detlev Buck) grills the school teacher (Christian Friedel) about his intentions to marry his daughter. We rarely cut between faces and reactions, but the charged emotions fly around the room.

Shooting in black and white adds to the period feel, as does the weary voice of the teacher as an old man (Ernst Jacobi) telling us his recollections of the events we witness.

I’d love to put Heneke in a room with a writer and see who comes out alive. It might be another hanging or garroting by trip wire.

The old screenwriter rule that the size of the heavy is the size of the hero is the measure of any bad guy. As this list of 10 Movie Villains Whose Actions Were Totally Justified states it, “the bad guy actually has pretty good reasons for doing what he’s doing.”

It’s a fair list though I would have added Co. Hans Landa from Inglourius Bastards. Movie writing of villains is an art because we have to believe that someone’s motives are understandable, even if his or her actions are tragic. Col. Landa even takes the time to explain his motives, one of the best scenes in the film. And the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman is equally articulate about his reasons for revenge -something that was lost in the sequels when he became just another boring sadist.

The word villain derives from the latin term villanus. Someone who worked on a villa, or farm. Crude farmhands had no couth. So it is curious that the site , Online Degree, specializing in filtering college degree programs online ,should be interested in villains. Unless they are subtly saying that the way to avoid being a rough farmhand for the rest of your life is to earn a degree and be a hero.

Within the “Computers & IT” selections for “Find My Schools” the site lists just about everything except Search Engine Optimization. Since they are engaging in SEO by trolling for links with unrelated novelties like best movie villains, it seems they should boast about it as a speciality. After all, I’m writing about it, so they have succeeded in getting at least one small link that has nothing to do with  college degrees. But don’t they know the best movie makers all dropped out of school?

Reed Hastings’ email notice (Sept. 19) to all subscribers that Netflix is splitting into two companies has two overlooked components. The first is that Reed Hastings made the email his own. That suggest that either he, or Netflix, consider Reed such a well-known star that the customers follow his words as closely as Brad and Angelina. Maybe so.

The second component is that running a streaming video company is not the same as running a DVD rental company delivered over the the internet. Once Netflix is freed from DVDs, it is also freed from other people’s content and pricing models set from the rental business (so many per month, time limits, all you can eat).

Look forward a few years to tiered subscriptions offering premium content, special VOD offerings, original programming, advertising, and public affairs. Sounds a lot like a TV or cable network, doesn’t it? In fact the name “Netflix” may be just as anachronistic in five years as “HBO” is now. HBO, Home Box Office, started as a movie service to bring you films over cable. Now most people know it for original series and specials.

Martin Peers writes in the Wall Street Journal, “If anyone should pay attention, it is executives in big media companies that own cable-TV channels. These have become a license to print money, thanks to a business model that charges consumers for a package of channels whether they watch them or not.”

This is the real story. Any executive reading the Netflix announcement should take a new look at Hulu. Hulu is for sale and could become the rival to Netflix in the new world of multiple platforms, instant entertainment, and consumer friendly pricing.

The dowdy aunt is cable TV. Too expensive, two restrictive, too controlled. An industry that celebrates the iPad only as a new TV remote that can do what their set top boxes can’t is missing the bigger picture.

Beating the odds on Google search has become a complex pastime calling for expert help creating questionable content. From time to time MovieWithMe receives an email from some underpaid internet field hand asking for a post or a link to a blog article they feel is relevant to our users. I’m tempted to reply in Hindi (using Google translator, of course) since I suspect many of the names like Tim or Mary are actually nom d’internet chosen by Mugdha or Gupta.

The latest asks for us to post “14 Movies Every French Major Must See.” The choices are what you might expect of anyone who has leafed through an issue of Cahiers du Cinemas. But I was heartened they included Taxi and La Femme Nikita among the classics. They also squeezed in Le Placard; a perfectly mediocre movie.

The site that has this profound interest in the language skills of French majors is called BestCollegesOnline.com. It provides a way to scan through college sand courses. They also offer “14 Movies Every Journalism Major Must See,” ” 8 Acclaimed Screenplays that were born on College Campuses,”  and “Ten Incredibly Beautiful High Schools that put yours to Shame.”

All of this is useful information for someone, though I’m not sure it makes much difference if you are looking for college credit online. My fourteen movies for French majors would probably concentrate not on classic titles but on pronunciation. Most French movies use too much slang and mumbling that students can not understand. Who knows that shpa really means je ne sais quoi or that un bur is and Arab from North Africa. Few contemporary French films use the classic language, but those few are the ones students should see and hear.

Meanwhile I hope Gupta enjoys this post in case he ever plans to learn French.

Palindromes (USA 2004, 100 min. dir: Todd Solondz, cast: Ellen Barkin, Richard Masur. Matthew Fabur).

Locked away in some dusty attic is the small dollhouse in which Todd Solondz played out his childhood fantasies. There are droll dolls, pervert dolls, and dead dolls. No wonder his first film was Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995).

The meaning of Palindromes is frozen among cobwebs in one of the dusty doll rooms; as if it were a single cell in the director’s mind. This is to say you can’t understand a Todd Solondz movie unless you know the inside of that dollhouse, and nobody has been there or ever will be except for Todd.

The best the rest of us can do is sniff at the scent of genius and an order of depravity as we watch movies like Palindromes. But we must always remember that the whole is not the some of its parts, the whole is a hole. The parts are all. Some are delightful, some confounding, some are stupid.

The theme of Palindromes is a pubescent high school girl played by various actresses who wants desperately to get pregnant. You can read the rest of the plot at Wikipedia.

Cousin Mark (Matthew Faber, my favorite character in the film) says that life is like a palindrome where everything is only self-referential. “It doesn’t matter if you gain 50 pounds or lose 50 pounds or you have a sex change: what have you, all these shapes and sizes in the center; is a part of ourselves that is palindromic by nature.”

He alone really understands the dollhouse. The rest of us are tour visitors wandering from room to room in hope we’ll either found the toilet or the exit. Either way, it’s a journey worth making at least once.