“I didn’t want to run – I was afraid of sweating.  I walked with big, long strides, controlling the sweat.”

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    It’s apparent right away that Marie and Bruce was adapted from a stage play.  It was a play by Wallace Shawn that was made into a film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004, then finally made it’s way onto DVD April 21st of 2009, from Alliance Films.  You can tell it was a stage play instantly, partly because of the quasi-absurdist artsy dialogue, and partly because the two stars, Marie and Bruce (Julianne Moore and Matthew Broderick) spend more time talking to the camera, or in voiceovers, or in asides and soliloquies, than they do talking to each other.

   Marie and Bruce are both pretty awful people.  They are married to each other, and they both appear to delight in tormenting each other in a passive-agressive manner.  They talk to each other a lot, but usually it’s more for our benefit than it is for theirs.  More often, we are hearing snippets of the inane conversations of strangers.  Then there are some strange dream sequences (at least, I think they’re dream sequences) involving a dog and an ocean.  As the movie goes along, Marie and Bruce move toward a big angry showdown where they finally say what they really think of each other.

   Marie and Bruce is funny, but I was never really sure what was going on.  Maybe that was the point.  The dialogue is strange, the transitions from one scene to another are strange, and I was never really sure what was actually happening and what was being imagined.  I liked Matthew Broderick in the film, but I was never really sure what he was doing.  I really liked Julianne Moore, but again, I’m not sure exactly what it was I was liking.  Really, I didn’t get this movie at all.  But somehow I laughed anyway, and I enjoyed it nonetheless.

“When you can’t control your life, control your death.”

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    The appeal of The Caller rests almost entirely on the performances of Frank Langella and Elliott Gould, both of whom are terrific.  The film has an interesting premise, but clunky structure and some silly moments threaten to derail the whole thing.  It’s Gould and Langella that keep the thing on track.  The “thing” being the movie.  And thanks to the two stars, the movie is good.  Langella gives a performance as good as the one he gave in Frost/Nixon as Jimmy, an executive with a high-power energy company who is aware of corporate wrongdoing within the organization.  He decides to blow the whistle, knowing full well that the company will attempt to kill him in order to silence him.

   As soon as he has done so, he hires Frank (Elliott Gould), a private investigator, to follow him around.  He alters his voice on the phone, so Gould won’t know that the man who is paying him is the very man he is following.  Although we initially have no idea why Jimmy is doing this, it becomes (reasonably) clear by the end of the movie.  Sort of.  By that I mean that at the end of the film I knew why Jimmy had been seeking out Frank, but I couldn’t quite understand why he was so secretive and clandestine about the whole thing.

   The Caller is really two movies in one.  The first movie is a subtle sort of Michael Clayton or The Firm or The Insider, where a whistle blower exposes murder and corruption in a major international corporation, and then that corporation comes after him to silence him.  The second movie is a surprisingly sweey story about childhood trauma and bonds that last a lifetime and that sort of thing.  Both would have been interesting movies on their own, but meshed together as they are during The Caller both stories lose a lot of their impact.

   Gould is fantastic as the likeable, friendly, but obviously confused private investigator.  Langella is wonderful as the old man who is fully aware that his own death is imminent, who has decided at this late stage in his life to do the right thing, making amends as best he can for some never-disclosed sins.  But the movie is choppy and uneven, and I never really got a sense that any of the characters every knew exactly what he or she was doing, or why.  And they were supposed to know.  Especially Jimmy.  It’s good, but these actors would have been better served with a better script.  The Caller comes out April 21st from Alliance Films.

“That piecemeal approach [to the building of the New Orleans levees by the Army Corps of Engineers] came home to roost during Katrina.”

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    The phrase “came home to roost” is an odd one to use in this film, considering the fact that the movie was made during the 2008 presidential election and there was so much controversy over the reverend Jeremiah Wright (Barack Obama’s pastor) and the comments he made about 9/11 being “America’s chickens…coming home to roost”.  In fact, the documentary is very obviously influenced a great deal by the presidential election.  Although I’m sure there were many senators in congress railing against the shoddy work done by the Army Corps of Engineers and the rampant corruption and ignorance that led to the destruction of Katrina, there is a lot of attention paid to speeches made by Obama and John McCain.  There is even a rather innocuous Hillary Clinton clip thrown in for good measure.

   Frankly, after watching the documentary, I’m surprised that this wasn’t a bigger issue during that campaign itself.  Hurricane Katrina had just wrought a mind-boggling devastation on New Orleans, and three years later there had still been little cleanup done.  Government policy and an absolutely stupid system of infrastucture had not only led to the breach of the levees but had also held up the reconstruction effort in a big way.  There weren’t a lot of people clamoring for a solution to this problem during the election, and the issues that ended up being talked about most were…Jeremiah Wright, and so forth.

   America Betrayed, narrated by Richard Dreyfuss, takes a searing and deep look into the practices of the Army Corps of Engineers, the group entrusted with building the New Orleans levees after Hurricane Betsy in 1965.  As of 2005 – this is of course forty years later, the levees still had not been completed.  Not only had they been shoddily constructed, poorly inspected, and basically ignored entirely, the Army Corps of Engineers had also managed to force through another project, the Mississipi River Gulf Outlet, which was essentially a canal, that exacerbated the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in a major way.

   There is a lot of information in America Betrayed.  The movie talks about the $8 billion that has gone missing in Iraq recovery money.  And the $2 billion missing from the Katrina recovery effort.  It deals with flood insurance, shady business practices, the department of Homeland Security, disaster capitalism (which is like war profiteering, except that it occurs after a natural disaster), the protection of wetlands, and the dangerous condition of various other levees, dams and bridges around the United States.  But mostly (almost entirely, in fact), the film is an excoriation of the Army Corps of Engineers, specifically in relation to the before and after of Katrina.

   The shots in this movie of sections of New Orleans, still completely destroyed three years after Katrina are just as devastating as the shots of the bodies in the water during the flood itself.  Over and over again, residents, politicians, engineers and journalists hammer home the point that Katrina was a MAN-MADE disaster.  That the levees, had they been properly constructed and maintained reasonably, would have been more than enough to hold back the flood waters and save the city.  But of course, as we all know now, this was not done, and the tragedy was played out on the news for us all to see.

   America Betrayed is not a terrifically structured movie.  It relies a little too much on unnecessary footage of the presidential candidates, footage which would have played very well and been far more timely and interesting during the election.  Now that the election is over, and Obama is president, it would make sense to use the footage of his comments only if you were trying to make a specific point to his government.  And I don’t get the sense that this is what America Betrayed is trying to do.  I feel like it’s a documentary more interested in mobilizing people and in educating Americans about the dangers that face them all over the country because of mismanagement and corruption.  (California especially.)

   That being said, it is a terrifically interesting and powerful statement about America and politics and corporate greed and most of all the dangers of the Army Corps of Engineers holding what is basically an engineering monopoly across the U.S. with virtually no oversight whatsoever.  Now that oversight is such a big buzzword in the halls of congress, I certainly hope that Obama will act on the statements he is seen making in this movie.  Something clearly needs to be done, and fast.  I’m frightened about it – and I’m not even an American!  America Betrayed is a strong, important documentary, and it comes out April 21st from First Run Features.

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“Protect us from committing acts you won’t forgive.”

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    This seems like an unlikely prayer to offer one’s God.  In fact, to me, it seems counter-intuitive.  That’s kind of saying to your best friend “I know you would never forgive me for sleeping with your wife, so if you could just keep her far away from me at all times we could avoid that, and I would appreciate it”.  It really doesn’t make any sense.  Simply the thought itself would likely anger your best friend.  Or, at least, it would anger mine.  I know this because when I said that previous sentence to him, he was very angry.  But wouldn’t your God be angry as well?  Wouldn’t it just be easier to renounce your God and move on without that religion?

   Well, for me it would.  And maybe for you.  But A Jihad For Love is about people for whom that decision is simply not an option.  Maybe because they live in an area where not being a Muslim is as dangerous as being gay.  But mostly because their faith is as strong and as binding as their homosexuality.  Like For The Bible Tells Me So, a terrific documentary released last year, A Jihad For Love deals with homosexuality and religion.  In this case, it is the Muslim religion rather than Christianity.  Both religions offer very interesting perspectives on the gay community.  In both cases, it appears to be extremists in those religions that want to condemn homosexuality completely.

   Most importantly, however, in both cases a religious case can be made for homosexuality as easily as it can be made against it.  This is the reason the Muslims in the film have not turned their backs on their religion.  They are fervent believers, and that belief tells them that they are the way they are because Allah made them that way.  Almost all of them are aware that homosexuality isn’t something they have chosen to do, or someone they have chosen to be, but rather that they were born that way.  And therefore it was Allah who ensured that they would be born that way.  And just like the Christian bible, a careful reading of the Qur’an leads to multiple interpretations of the text – either homosexuality is immoral and evil, or it is normal and shouldn’t be punished.

   A Jihad For Love doesn’t take a long look at the religion itself.  It doesn’t question the religion.  It’s just a fascinating look at the people who are caught in the precarious position of being both gay and Muslim.  We meet many of these people, gay men and lesbian women, some of whom are willing to come out and speak about their sexual orientation in the context of Islam (one of them, an Imam in South Africa, is a very inspirational figure).  Others are willing to speak about their lives, but only under condition of anonymity.  Their faces are blurred, and they can’t be identified. 

   This is the biggest difference between gay Muslims and gay Christians.  Gay Christians may be marginalized, and ostracized, and excommunicated and possibly even threatened.  But they will likely not die because of their sexual orientation.  Gay Muslims face this very real possibility in many countries around the world.  Several of the men and women depicted in the movie are seeking asylum on humanitarian grounds, and they are heading for Canada and other safe havens around the world.  They don’t want to show their faces because they still have family back in Iran or Egypt or other countries, and they fear that there could be retribution against their families shoudl they be outed.

   The point is made in the film that “jihad” doesn’t only mean “holy war”, it means “struggle” as well.  And theirs is, truly, a “jihad” for love.  For the freedom and understanding to live their lives according to their nature and not according to the extremist elements of their religious affiliation.  It’s a painful process, and you can see the struggle in each person as they try to reconcile the two.  I like the fact that A Jihad For Love doesn’t talk to a lot of religious scholars, or religious figureheads, but rather lets these people tell their stories in their own words.  The whole thing is subtitled – some of it is in French, some of it in Arabic, but the powerful words come through loud and clear.

   There are some emotional scenes, like one of a young man on the phone with his mother, unable to see her and not knowing if he will ever see his family again.  But the movie doesn’t rely too heavily on emotion either.  It doesn’t delve too deeply into the punishments homosexuals face in Islamic nations, and it doesn’t hammer home the negatives.  Instead, it shows us a group of people we’ve never seen before, in a heartbreaking situation, and we get a terrific character study that provides great insight into both the gay community and the Muslim community.  A Jihad For Love comes out April 21st from First Run Features.

www.firstrunfeatures.com

“I was full of despair for the miserable bit of life in front of me.”

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   Despair is a very prominent theme in House of the Sleeping Beauties.  Despair, and old age, and youth, and ugliness and beauty and all sorts of other things.  This film is clearly meant to be an allegory.  Of what, I’m not certain.  But it certainly contains many contrasting themesthat are quite clearly supposed to create a greater metaphor when combined.  I couldn’t quite understand, mostly because I had completely stopped caring about halfway through.  Initially, I was creeped out by the concept, and when I finally got over that I was just bored by the despair.  Endless, painful, old-man talk of despair.  Of dreams unfulfilled and a life almost over and the memories of childhood and of course…despair and lots of it.

   The idea of the film is that there is a brothel where men can pay to spend the night lying next to beautiful naked young women.  Vadim Glowna (also the director) plays Edmond, a rich old man who becomes addicted to the place, but begins to question their practices as he goes more and more.  How do they keep the girls sedated?  Why can’t he talk to them outside the brothel?  Are they willing participants in this night-time ritual, or are they kidnap victims?  How far can he really go with the sleeping beauties?  And where do they all come from?

   These are Edmond’s questions.  My questions were a little different.  Like, isn’t this worse than prostitution?  Isn’t Edmond basically paying to molest young women?  These women have no idea what’s going on around them, they are somehow drugged and just sleeping, and the old men come in and molest them.  There is just something so heinous and powerfully creepy about the concept that I had a hard time getting past it. 

   Once I did get past that (a little bit), and tried to look at the film as an art piece rather than an excuse to show a bunch of unknown young hotties in full frontal and an excuse for Glowna to touch them, I still didn’t like the movie.  Edmond is so morose, and so moribund, that it drags the movie down.  He spends an awful lot of time with these sleeping naked women, so there isn’t much opportunity for dialogue.  So what we get is a series of in-his-head monologues, where he meditates on the moroseness and the despair that permeate his life.  And it’s boring.  And sad and annoying.

   There are two terrific European actors who join Glowna for this movie.  Maximilian Schell (who won an Oscar in the 60s for Judgement At Nuremberg), and Angela Winkler, who was fabulous in 1979′s The Tin Drum.  But they are given little to do.  Schell points Edmond toward the brothel, Winkler runs the brothel, but for the most part we are treated to depressing and boring soliloquies in Glowna’s head.  And the sight of naked women rolling around and sighing.  And it isn’t hot at all, because the idea behind this is so disturbingly creepy.  House of the Sleeping Beauties comes out April 21st from First Run Features.

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“My name is Ryan Sheckler.  I am a normal kid.  I like this girl.  My life is normal.  Except I am a pro skateboarder.”

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    I have no problem with the fact that Ryan Sheckler is inarticulate.  After all, he’s a kid – what sixteen year old kid talks with perfect grammar and the timbre and pace of Morgan Freeman?  None, of course.  So it isn’t his fault that when he narrates his own reality show he sounds like he’s reading a teleprompter full of words that he barely understands.  The biggest problem with Life Of Ryan is that the people who write that stuff for Sheckler to read are terrible.  They write the stuff in the manner of Kevin narrating The Wonder Years, but Sheckler is no Fred Savage.  The writers need to understand his limitations, and play to them.

   Or, better yet, MTV could maybe not have made this show at all.  Wonder Years reject writers half-assedly writing crap down for a sixteen-year-old kid to say does NOT make for compelling television.  After watching the complete series of Life of Ryan, I liked Sheckler.  I thought he was a really nice kid, and he’s pretty good with his two younger brothers.  But he has little charisma.  And his life is not terribly compelling.  The show opens with his parents’ divorce, which is clearly played up by the producers to be more traumatic than it really is in order to make the show more dramatic.  This is a theme (the silly drama stuff) that continues through the show, often in painfully contrived ways.

   I know I’m going to get complaints about this.  No review I have written, in all the time I have been doing Cynical Cinema, has received more complaints than the one I wrote about Rob And Big, which was just as bad as Life of Ryan.  People who love their skateboarders just love their skateboarders, so no one better say anything bad about them.  And I want you all to know, before you fire off those nasty comments – I am not saying anything bad about Sheckler.  I like him.  All I’m saying is that he is not even close to interesting or charismatic enough to merit his own show.

   And this is MTV’s big problem – with Life of Ryan, with Rob & Big, with so many other shows.  Just because Tila Tequila is quasi-famous as a MySpace whore, they give her a show of her own.  Because Paris Hilton is quasi-famous as a tabloid whore, she gets a bunch of MTV shows.  At the very least, Rob Dyrdek and Ryan Sheckler are not actual prostitutes.  But MTV thinks that anyone will watch a show about a Professional Skateboarder regardless of how brainless, or how boring, or how stupid it is.  I have to hand it to MTV though – they specialize in brainless, boring and spectacularly stupid, and people actually do watch this garbage. 

   Now, I must say that Life of Ryan is not stupid.  Wel, Ryan Sheckler is not stupid.  His writers are, but the show rests on him and he is not stupid.  But he’s boring.  And the show is boring.  And it’s brainless enough to make up for the lack of stupidity and still make it garbage.  This show is garbage.  The complete series comes out on a three-disc box set from Paramount Home Entertainment on April 21st.

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   I was pleasantly surprised by iCarly, a Nickelodeon kids’ show that airs on YTV here in Canada.  I expected it to be one of those teen-girl-is-a-celebrity shows that irritates me in the manner of Hannah Montana.  And, in point of fact, it was one of those shows, but it is a pretty good one.  More surprising even than the fact that I liked it was the fact that my nine-year-old stepson, who is adamantly against anything he perceives to be “girly” (including, for some reason, Hardy Boys books), liked it too.  He’s my litmus test when it comes to kids shows, and he tends to like the girly ones rarely.  But when he does, it happens to be the same ones that don’t completely drive me crazy.  Like Mighty B, and iCarly.

   Saying that iCarly doesn’t completely drive me crazy may seem like faint praise, and indeed it is, but that’s about all I’ve got.  I am certainly not the target demo for this show, about a young girl named Carly (Miranda Cosgrove, who is good) who stars in her own web show called (of course) iCarly.  Her co-star on the show is Sam (Jennette McCurdy, who is very good), her best friend.  The show seems to basically consist of them yelling silly things at a camera being held by their nerdy friend Freddie (Nathan Kress, who is good as well).  They do “bits”, silly girly comedy things that really aren’t terribly funny.  In fact, their show seems to be rather terrible and annoying in general.  Thank goodness the TV show doesn’t spend too much time on the web show.

   What annoys me about the TV show is that this iCarly web show has somehow made Carly and Sam huge local celebrities.  They are the toast of their school, their principal watches the program, every dentist and artist and architect they run into knows them and treats them like superstars.  I am not sure there is a web show in the world that makes people stars on this level, especially Local Celebrities.  Teaching kids that doing stupid stuff on the web is the path to fame and riches may not be such a good idea.  Perhaps a few cautionary episodes, where dangerous creeps start to stalk them, or someone hacks into their computers and does horrible things, might balance this out.  But that never happens.

   Oh, there is the requisite “stalker” episode.  But it’s just some crazy girl who lives nearby and is their Biggest Fan, and she’s just annoying.  She isn’t a creepy 40-year-old man living in his parents’ basement.  There is also the “best friends have a big fight but make up” episode, and the “shady company offers them an endorsement deal” episode that one would expect from a show such as this one.  It is fairly irritating that these kids treat the show like it’s their job, and school is secondary, and they have to be in “rehearsal” and they have to get the show on the web “in time” and such and such.  It just ought not to be that big a deal.  But they get offered hundreds of thousands to endorse products, so…I guess it’s working.  Somehow.

   Anyway, enough complaining.  The fact is, I did like iCarly.  Mostly because of Sam, the only character on the show who rises well above the cliche she represents.  She is the Bad Kid, the mean-spirited school bully, but deep down she has a heart of gold…blah blah blah.  We’ve all seen this character many times before, on Boy Meets World and every similar show, but Jennette McCurdy is so funny, and has such a great sense of comedic timing, that she transcends the silliness.  And there is a lot of silliness.  Carly’s older brother is a sculptor, see, and he gets to meet a famous sculptor who is his idol, but gets disappointed…Sam gets a new boyfriend, Jonah, but he sucks and she sucks and eventually she must get rid of him…Freddie is in love with Carly, but she thinks of him as a friend…etcetera etcetera.

   So.  iCarly is pretty standard fare for pre-teen girls, but it’s fairly well written and it features some very good young actors who make the show work.  The web show purports to have 355,000 viewers, when I would be surprised if the TV show had that many.  But it IS a show that deserves viewers.  iCarly is pretty good.  Season One, Volume Two comes out April 21st, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

“You know how some guys go out on a tightrope, even though they know how dangerous it is?”
“So, this guy’s some kind of tightrope walker”
“Symbolically, yes.”

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Years:  1973, 1974
Genre:  TV series, Cop, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Jack Lord, James MacArthur, Kam Fong, Al Harrington
Guest stars:  Slim Pickens, Lew Ayres, Don Porter, Ed Flanders, Victor Buono, Andrew Duggan, Peter Strauss, Peter Donat, Anthony Zerbe, William Devane
Creator:  Leonard Freeman
Run time:  20 hours 9 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment
Related reviews:  Hawaii Five-O Season Four, Hawaii Five-O Season Five, Hawaii Five-O Season Seven

    I really can’t help seeing David Caruso every time I look at Jack Lord in Hawaii Five-O.  The similarities are just too glaring.  Only Lord and Caruso could have delivered a line like “symbolically, yes”.  Lord has just finished making a comparison between a thrill-seeking thief who almost lets himself be caught before making his escape, and a tightrope walker who does his act miles in the air for the thrill of it.  It’s terrifically obvious to everyone that he is making a comparison, speaking metaphorically.  Yet he feels the need, after making this statement, to hammer it home.  “Symbolically, yes.”  EVERYONE watching the show, EVERYONE in the room with him, knows he was referring to the tightrope walker “symbolically”, and not to a real tightrope walker.

   But, much like his latter-day counterpart, David Caruso on CSI: Miami, Lord feels the need to spell everything out, assuming that those around him, and those watching the show, would have a hard time wrapping their puny intellects around his fancy talk.  And such is the nature of Hawaii Five-O, which feels incredibly dated thanks to Nash Bridges, the CSI series, and numerous other followers in recent years.  The show still has the greatest theme music of any cop show ever (unless you count the music provided by The Who to the CSI series).  And it still manages to entertain.

   Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing Season Six of Hawaii Five-O on April 21st, and it’s worth the purchase.  Just because something has become very, very dated in recent years does not mean it isn’t fun for an hour at a time.  Like Hawaii Five-O, or Madonna.  It’s fun.  And I don’t mean that “symbolically”.

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   Inside The Third Reich, a four-disc box set of documentaries about Nazi Germany, comes out April 21st from First Run Features.  It’s a fascinating look at four different facets of World War II, all stuff I didn’t already know.  And I am a big World War II history buff.  The four discs are as follows:

Television Under the Swastika (10/10): 

“Good Cheer And Willpower”

   An absolutely riveting documentary about the world’s first television network, one created by the Germans and the Nazi party in the 30s, years before television became a staple in American households.  This German TV was on the air for nine years, and featured an amazingly wide range of programs.  For the purposes of this documentary, some of those programs are shown, although very few examples have survived all the years until today.  Fitness programs, childrens’ gymnastics shows, variety shows with singing and dancing and piano playing, and the 1936 Olympics were all covered on this station.

   Although it seems, initially, like a pretty innocuous television network, closer examination reveals the sinister propaganda behind much of the programming.  Watching the shows is a lot like watching a college-training TV station, in that there is a large amount of inept camera work and some terrible interviews.  After all, it was a brand-new medium.  Some of Hitler’s rallies are covered, with shaky cameras that could capture only one shot at a time.  The fact that the rallies and parades were shot with one, long, take actually reveals some things that would otherwise have remained hidden. 

   A lot of the Nazi propaganda behind the programming, such as cooking shows, is fairly subtle.  Then again, in some cases it is absolutely overt.  But it is always there.  Some of the scenes – like one of a bumbling, stupid Nazi official being interviewed – are actually quite funny, although it’s almost painful to laugh at something like that, knowing the historic context.  One of the most amazing unearthed shows is called “Good Cheer And Willpower”, where a bunch of war amputees with one leg run an obstacle course to show soldiers in the field that losing a limb isn’t such a bad thing – I mean, look how happy these guys are!  Again, it’s almost funny.  But mostly, this documentary is chilling.  Terrific stuff.

Firestorm (9/10): 

“At 2:25 a.m., a new term, until then unknown, was entered in the records of the German Civil Air Defense Department:  Firestorm”

   Firestorm refers to the British practice, toward the end of World War II, of firebombing.  They would drop flares during their night time raids on German cities, partly to light the way for their bombers and partly to set the cities ablaze.  The film examines this tactic, and asks whether it crossed the line.  Many of these firebombing raids came after the British had already basically defeated the Germans, and they seemed to be more retaliatory than necessary.  Especially since the bombing campaigns claimed the lives of civilians, more so than soldiers.

   35,000 people killed in one attack on Hamburg.  Tragic, disturbing pictures of dead people, children and babies, many of whom would later be buried in paper sacks.  People rendered homeless, historic buildings destroyed, all by incendiary bombs.  After the Battle of Britain, the English targeted civilians with their bombing raids.  While most concede that at first, this was a legitimate war tactic, it soon became questionable.  The best argument for the actions of the British comes from one man who says “these [German civilians] knew why they died.  In Auschwitz and the gas chambers, they didn’t.”  The film is a very interesting one, and seems to come down against the British.  Although, it does end with the line “a consequence of 12 years of the Nazi regime”.

The Reich Underground (8/10): 

   A two-part documentary about the massive network of underground tunnels the Nazis built under German cities during the second world war, mostly toward the end when they needed to protect their factories from bombing raids.  The movie deals with the slave labourers who were forced to work in these areas, digging out the tunnels in inhuman and brutal conditions.  One man in the film estimates the life expectancy for any slave working in the tunnels at 40 days.  The film details the brutality of the SS, the production of the V2 rockets that were supposed to win the war for Hitler, and also talks about the “Dam Busters” squad which dropped “tallboy” bombs into some of the deepest, most impenetrable building sites.  It also shows stock footage of chemical weapons being tested by the Nazis on a monkey and a cat.  That is disturbing to watch, knowing they were hoping to use those weapons on human beings.  It’s too long, with two parts, but it’s very interesting.

The Goebbels Experiment (10/10): 

“National Socialism is a religion.  All we lack is a religious genius.”

   Joseph Goebbels was the Nazi party’s Minister of Propaganda, the man responsible for turning the German people to the side of the Nazis.  He kept extensive diaries, and it’s those diaries that make up The Goebbels Experiment, the best documentary in the box set.  The story is told entirely in the words of Goebbels, as read from his diaries by Kenneth Branagh.  It’s a fascinating look into the brain of a brilliant but evil man. 

   Goebbels was at turns paranoid, petulant, bitter, loyal, petty, treacherous, and euphoric, depending on his mood and what was happening around him.  He complained bitterly about people at one time, then praised them effusively at another.  (In particular Hermann Goering, the commander of the Luftwaffe.)  The one thing that remains constant in Goebbels’ writings is that he was a very insecure man.  He thinks Himmler hates him.  Then he thinks Goering is out to sabotage him.  Then he thinks Hitler doesn’t appreciate his advice enough.  Then he believes that he is under surveillance by the SS (chances are that one was absolutely true).

   “Jews don’t respond to generosity or to a spirit of magnanimity.  You have to show them what you are prepared to do.”

   The documentary features many speeches by both Goering and Hitler.  It’s easy to forget, in hindsight, that “propaganda” wasn’t always a bad word.  That when these speeches were being made, no one saw the horrors that were to come.  And there is no denying that both men had a powerful ability to whip a crowd into a frenzy.  The diaries dissect both his speeches and Hitler’s.  Goebbels critiques them, usually heaping praise on his own speeches as well as those of the Fuhrer.  He has an affair with a mistress, then blames her for being angry.  Goebbels is not a man who is capable of seeing his own faults.

   There isn’t much in the film about the beginning of the war.  Perhaps Goebbels was too busy at that time to write very much.  And since the whole movie is told in his words, only the subtitles in certain locations exist to fill in the gaps.  The one time Goebbels seems to be even a little self-aware is when he discusses, with a grudging respect, the writings of Winston Churchill, and contemplates stealing his phrase “blood toil, tears and sweat” for himself and German propaganda.  This is far and away the most fascinating documentary in the set, and this film alone makes it worthwhile. 

   One more thing – since the movie didn’t cover this, I thought I would make mention.  Goebbels, at one point, writes of the elation he felt when Max Schmelling, a powerful German heavyweight fighter, knocked out Joe Louis, an inferior black man, in a heavyweight title fight in the United States.  He heard about the great Schmelling victory on the radio, and he is thrilled.  Well, I am a boxing buff as well as a World War II buff.  And I was pretty sure that Schmelling never knocked out Joe Louis.  In fact, I was absolutely positive.  I don’t know whether this was because German radio was editing the fight to make it seem as though Schmelling was the victor, or whether Goebbels lied into his diary.

   Either way, I looked it up to be sure.  I was right – Louis fought Schmelling twice.  Once in June of 1936, a knockout in the twelfth round, and once in June of 1938, a first-round KO.  Both fights were won by Louis.

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To hear the review   The first thing that struck me about Arctic Tale, when I first saw it, was what it wasn’t.  It wasn’t March Of The Penguins, in that it failed to capture that magnificently bleak landscape in the same way, and it was not quite up to the task of conveying the wonders of nature in a similar fashion.  It wasn’t Encounters At The End Of The World, in that it didn’t feature the sensational and spectacular camera work that characterized that magnificent film.  I was a little disappointed – after all, Arctic Tale is done by National Geographic Films, the same people who produced March of the Penguins.  They teamed up with the producers of An Inconvenient Truth, the fantastic Al Gore environmental documentary, Paramount Vantage.

   I thought the combination of the two would be an awe-inspiring but educational film about Arctic animals and the impact of human beings on their environment.  But I had set my expectations too high.  It was only on the second viewing of the film that I realized that it was, in fact, an awe-inspiring but educational film about Arctic animals and the impact of human beings on their environment.  At first, it’s easy to dismiss a film like Arctic Tale as one of those movies that relies heavily on cute baby animals to gain an audience, and doesn’t have much substance beyond cute little baby polar bears.  But this is not the case.

   In fact, Arctic Tale is a thoughtful, terrific film featuring some impressive camera work and Arctic landscapes, that just happens to rely a little too heavily on the cuteness of animals.  Except for the baby walrus.  The greatest cinematographers in the world could not possibly make a baby walrus cute.  Or an adult walrus, for that matter.  ALL walruses are hideously ugly.  But that kinda makes them the coolest animal going.  They are so ugly that they are fascinating, like Steve Buscemi.  And although I could do without the Queen Latifah narration, which is mostly good but at moments very intrusive, I really enjoyed Arctic Tale upon the second viewing.

   It still isn’t Encounters At The End Of The World, it still isn’t March of the Penguins, and it still isn’t the Planet Earth series.  But it’s good, it looks magnificent, and on Blu-Ray it is absolutely mesmerizing.  Paramount Home Entertainment releases Arctic Tale on Blu-Ray April 21st, and this is the kind of movie for which Blu-Ray is absolutely essential.  And if you like it, pick up those other three movies on Blu-Ray too!

Today saw the tragic passing, at the age of 56, of iconic actress Marilyn Chambers.  A Cynical Cinema tribute:

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Marilyn Chambers

Pick of the week:  The Reader (8/10).  One of the really good movies of 2008.  Kate Winslett won an Oscar, and she is very good, but the real star is the director, who uses some terrific pacing to paint a vivid and devastating portrait of Post-World War II Germany in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

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 Kids pick of the week:  Yo Gabba Gabba!  New Friends (6/10).  An absolutely bonkers, bizarre TV show with some impressive guest stars like Jack Black.  Best watched on painkillers or other mind-altering substances.  Just not with your kids around.

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 TV series of the week:  Wings Final Season (5/10).  Really, this is a pretty bad TV show.  Or, was.  It ended after its eighth season, and it featured one of the better final moments in a TV show, without featuring one of the better final episodes.

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 Blu-Ray of the week:  Mean Girls (7/10).  The movie written by Tina Fey that started her meteoric rise to stardom.  A very smart, very well done film about high school girls and cliques and boys and drama.  Lindsay Lohan in an early role that was actually good, and Rachel McAdams first starring role is extremely memorable.  It’s funny, but mostly it’s very smart.

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 The Spirit (4/10):  Truly, a dreadful movie.  It’s a little bit of fun, with Samuel L. Jackson giving a totally over-the-top performance as the bad guy, but Gabriel Macht is a waste of space as the hero, and the hot chicks in tight clothes (Scarlett Johansson, Paz Vega, Eva Mendes, and others) are pretty much pointless.

Cassandra’s Dream:  Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell are brothers in London, one of whom has a problem with gambling debts.  If this is even close to Farrell’s last European indie movie, In Bruges, then it will be brilliant.  But it probably isn’t.

The Deal (7/10):  A surprisingly entertaining movie starring William H. Macy and Meg Ryan.  Macy’s character is totally funny, totally tactless, and extremely engaging.  Not all of it makes sense, but it moves too quickly for us to care.

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 Dark Matter:  It’s about the “dark side of cutthroat academics”, according to the description.  That sounds awful.  It stars Meryl Streep.  That sounds good.

Humboldt County:  A young medical student stumbles across the last remaining enclave of hippies in America, and his life is changed.  I doubt this is as hilarious as it sounds.

Phil Mickelson Secrets of the Short Game (7/10):  Phil Mickelson made a hell of a run toward the end of the Masters on Sunday, and I bet his DVD would have sold better had he won.  This is an instructional video on chipping and putting that is very good, but aimed more at the people who are already pretty good at golf.

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 Also out today:

Dog Days of Summer
House of Saddam
American Swing
Splinter
Bakugan:  Battle Brawlers Vol. 3
Bakugan:  Battle Brawlers Vol. 4
Wolverine And The X-Men: Season One, Volume One

Blu-Ray today:

Strange Wilderness (2/10):  A truly dreadful movies where the best of the cast is misused (Justin Long, Jonah Hill) and the rest is just useless.  Terribly written, terribly directed and leading up to a truly idiotic and awful conclusion.

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 The Last Kiss (7/10):  A romantic comedy that starts out comedic and ends up…sort of romantic…it is far better at the beginning, where it is smart and believable and very clever.  Tries to do too much toward the end, and loses any greater impact it might have had, but it remains a smart and well-written film.

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 Also on Blu-Ray this week:

8 Mile
Cranford
Deep Sea / Into The Deep IMAX
Donizetti:  Don Pasquale
Living Landscapes:  Earthscapes – Wild Africa
Mozart-Grieg:  Works For Two Pianos, Vol. 2
Pride And Prejudice
The Spirit
Splinter
The Story of India
The Thirteenth Floor
Universal Soldier: The Return

Out next week:

The Wrestler (10/10)
Frost / Nixon
Notorious
Marie And Bruce
Hearts of War
Into the Blue 2:  The Reef
The Caller
Battlestar Galactica:  Caprica
The Bastards
The Bodyguard
Kicking The Dog
Personal Effects
The Stone Council
The Bodyguard 2
The Burrowers
The Nature of Things
The Poker Club
Toronto Stories
Blade Trinity reissue
Inside the Third Reich
House of Sleeping Beauties
America Betrayed
A Jihad For Love
Ron White Behavioural Problems
Hawaii Five-O Sixth Season
iCarly Season One Volume One
Life of Ryan Complete Series

On Blu-Ray next week:

Arctic Tale
7.1 Music Classical Collection – Acoustic Reality Experience
Music Experience in 3-Dimensional Sound Reality Collection
The Arrival
Action Bundle Vol. 2 (Bulletproof Monk / Commando / Kiss of the Dragon)
Action Bundle Vol. 3 (Broken Arrow / Entrapment / Rising Sun)
Comedy Bundle Vol. 3 (Dodgeball / Dude Where’s My Car? / Super Troopers)
Comedy Bundle Vol. 4 (Office Space / Napoleon Dynamite / Little Miss Sunshine)
Comic Book Hero Bundle (Daredevil / X-Men / League of Extraordinary Gentlemen)
Clut Classic Bundle (Edward Scissorhands / Donnie Darko / The Boondock Saints)
Epic Movie Bundle (Kingdom of Heaven / Cast Away / Master And Commander)
Jason Statham Bundle (The Transporter / The Transporter 2 / In The Name of the King)
Michael Douglas Bundle (Wall Street / Romancing The Stone / Jewel of the Nile)
War Bundle Vol. 4 (Men of Honor / Hart’s War / The Marine)
Frost/Nixon
Gary Moore and Friends: One Night In Dublin – A Tribute To Phil Lynott
Genghis Khan: To the Ends of the Earth and Sea
Hellraiser
Hellraiser Puzzle Box Special Edition
Josh Groban:  Awake Live
The Last Word
Linkin Park: Road to Revolution – Live at Milton Keynes
Michael Buble:  Caught in the Act
Notorious
Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy
The Showdown
Sin City
Styx: One With Everything
The Wages of Fear
The Wrestler
X-Men
X2:  X-Men United
X3:  The Last Stand
X-Men Trilogy

“Toilets are always funny.”

Year:  2008
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Gabriel Macht, Samuel L. Jackson, Louis Lombardi, Brian Lucero, Dan Lauria, Dan Gerrity, Eric Balfour
Eye candy:  Scarlett Johansson, Kimberly Cox, Eva Mendes, Jaime King, Paz Vega, Sarah Paulson, Stana Katic
Director:  Frank Miller
Run time:  102 painful minutes

     I once gave my girlfriend a little green plastic dinosaur piggy bank for her birthday, or Christmas, or International Shingles Awareness Day, or something.  When you put money into it, it makes a noise that sounds like a cross between Tickle Me Elmo and the Pillsbury Doughboy.  For about an hour, the kids were decidedly amused with this new toy, and found a fistful of pennies to insert into the dinosaur in order to make the sound.  After an hour, the dinosaur was full of pennies, the kids were bored, and it was never used again.  To this day, it is somewhere in my house, gathering dust, jammed to the brim with pennies.

     When I watched The Spirit last night, I was reminded of that dinosaur.  In the sense that the film feels more like a novelty item than a movie, and I’m certain that in about six weeks I will have forgotten the movie entirely.  On the plus side, for tonight, I am reasonably entertained.  I am tempted to compare this movie to Sin City.  It is directed by Frank Miller, the man behind Sin City, and it has the same look and the same basic feel.  Anyone who has seen Sin City will be instantly familiar with that look.  The gritty, graphic-novel style that creates the vivid backdrop of a city in turmoil, the cartoon-reality blend of the action and the actual characters.  The two movies are similar.

     That being said, I can’t say that the people who enjoyed Sin City will enjoy The Spirit.  Because there is a good chance they won’t.  I will say this – people (like my girlfriend) who hated Sin City will definitely hate The Spirit.  Because if you hated Sin City, you hated the style of the movie, not the movie itself.  Either way, if you hated that movie, you are wrong.  But you wouldn’t be wrong to hate this one.  I know that was an awkward series of sentences.  I am writing this review right after seeing the film, you see, and it is WAY past my bedtime.

     The thing is, The Spirit appears to be more of a comedy than anything else.  It is a movie that takes place in a vividly imagined movie world, where bad guys and good guys are two sides of the same coin, and immortal superheroes defend nondescript cities against immortal supervillains.  And in this construct, it is very easy to do whatever you want to do as a film maker.  You want to dissolve a cat?  You can do that.  You want to have a good-guy-bad-guy toilet fight?  Go ahead.  The movie is already bonkers, so there is no reason not to throw everything bizarre you have in your head at the screen.  In fact, I think this movie is commendable in that it gives the sense that this is all part of some grand design, and not just a random assortment of crap.  I have no idea if it resembles the graphic novels in any way, but frankly I don’t care.

     The question of “does a movie resemble the graphic novel upon which it was based” is irrelevant.  Only the fans of the graphic novel itself will care, and hopefully your movie will have a larger audience than the comic book does.  So make a good movie.  American Splendor, for example, worked amazingly well, whether it followed that graphic novel closely or not.  I have never bothered to find out whether it did.  I just watched the movie several more times instead.  With this film though, I get the feeling that they were really going for the audience of the books.  And the wider audience, they hoped, would flock to the theatres to see the outstanding cast.

     And the cast is outstanding.  Samuel L. Jackson, as the villain named The Octopus (although we never really find out why), is wonderful.  He is crazy and funny and at times he can be actually scary.  The eye candy is abundant.  Scarlett Johansson makes great use of her fantastic boobs by having them pop out of her shirt at all times, playing Jackson’s right-hand woman.  Jaime King is hot as always, playing Lorelei, who is the symbol of death.  Paz Vega shows up to do a crazy, sword-wielding belly dance, Stana Katic is a gorgeous rookie cop, and Eva Mendes is smoking as always.  In fact, the least-known actor in the movie is likely the star, the Spirit himself, Gabriel Macht, whose best-known role was likely the one he played on Sex And The City.

     Macht is awful as The Spirit, but then he doesn’t have much to do.  The Spirit, you see, is the logical follower of the Lone Ranger.  He wears the same silly, cheesy eye-covering mask, and has similar messages for the kids – “be patient with your parents, and brush every night” and so forth.  The fact that this is done cheesily, with a knowing wink, is fine.  But at a certain point there is no separation between the cheesy and the badass.  And the whole movie becomes total camp.  It’s fun, it’s a novelty, and it’s certainly watchable, but it’s silly.  And it cares more about making jokes and introducing new, sillier characters one after another than it does with the actual crime-fighting and action.  The cloned, dimwitted henchmen of The Octopus are amusing at first, but become decidedly tiresome by the time the movie ends.

     Then there’s the strange morality.  The Spirit is basically the Lone Ranger, if the Lone Ranger had sex with numerous buxom females and fought immortal supervillains in a black-and-white, grimy city.  And, like the Lone Ranger, he uses dubious morals when he decides who he will take down and who gets a reprieve.  Early on in the film, Eva Mendes blackmails a guy, destroying his life to the point where that guy blows his own head off.  In fact, she hands him the gun and suggests that he do just that.  But The Spirit knows she is not a murderer, and protects and defends her throughout the entire movie.  In what world, even the bizarre anything-goes movie world, would these actions not constitute murder?  Well, it’s OK.  He once had a crush on her.

     I think it’s difficult to look objectively at The Spirit when looking at it through the lens of all the stuff that has come before – Sin City, The Lone Ranger, Keenan Ivory Wayans movies.  Especially Sin City, which was so much better than this one.  The Spirit is not truly awful.  It’s good-natured, and it will keep your attention for an hour and forty five minutes.  There is great eye candy, and the bad guy is certainly memorable, even if the hero is a cardboard cutout.  But aside from Samuel L. Jackson, very little about The Spirit is actually memorable.  Which is why I’m writing this review tonight, before going to bed.  I’m afraid the whole film will have escaped my head by morning.  It’s a cute movie, but that’s about it.  And you can’t put pennies in it.

“What we feel isn’t important.  It’s utterly unimportant.  The only question is what we do.”

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To hear the review

    The Reader is long, and slow, and thoughtful and contemplative.  Sometimes that is good, sometimes that is tedious.  But it’s mostly good.  Kate Winslett won the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Hanna Schmitz, a woman with a brutal past who starts an affair with a very young boy and changes his life.  The setting is post-World War II Germany, and young Michael Berg (David Kross) develops an infatuation with a mysterious woman who helps him when he is sick.  Before long, the two are engaged in a passionate affair that lasts just one summer.  (Just one summer, chronologically, but it lasts for just about the first hour of the movie.)

   Michael falls in love with Hanna in the same way any fifteen year old boy experiencing sex for the first time would fall head over heels for an older woman who slept with him this often.  Their relationship involves a little more than just sex, however.  Hanna loves having Michael read to her, so every day after school he reads his books to her before they make love.  Their relationship is an odd one, in that she carries a certain amount of authority because she is the adult, but Michael has a certain amount of power because he is the smarter of the two – he can read, he takes them on trips, and he is more emotionally together.

   When their relationship inevitably ends, Michael moves on with his life, until he chances to run into Hanna again, this time as a young law student.  This time, the encounter is decidedly different, and Hanna’s devastating history is revealed to the young man.  We see him as a grown-up from the beginning of the movie, played by the wonderful Ralph Fiennes, and clearly Hanna’s influence, and the influence of this second encounter specifically, have shaped the rest of his life, even as an adult. 

   The Reader is terrific in that it allows viewers to come to their own conclusions.  Whether you love the characters, hate them, think they are doing the right thing or question their motives, depends entirely on you.  Right through to the end of the movie, director Stephen Daldry allows each character to have moments that are sympathetic and moments that are harsh.  He lets the movie play out at a leisurely pace that gives the viewer a chance to feel whatever it is they might feel for Hanna and Michael, and then turn that feeling on its ear.

   A terrific psychological drama that delves deeply into a relationship between an older woman and a younger man, and also into the difference between legality and morality and the pain and lasting effects of the Holocaust and the Nazi horrors on post-World War II Germany, The Reader is a wonderful film with great performances by Kate Winslett as Hanna and David Kross as Michael.  It can be tedious at times, and it can be clunky in terms of foreshadowing the events that are to come later in the film.  But overall it’s magnificent, and it’s on DVD April 14th from Alliance Films.

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To hear the review   I can understand why The Deal was not exactly a smash hit.  It’s a little too strange, a little too sardonic, and a little too off-beat to do huge box office.  However, it IS a pretty good, pretty funny, pretty clever little movie.  William H. Macy is terrific, starring as a loser in the film business who comes up with a plan to get a movie made and make some money.  What, exactly, that plan is, and how it works, is never fully explained.

   I don’t think I was supposed to understand exactly how Macy’s plan was to work.  The point is simply that he has one, and he is determined to con people, trick people, bully others, and generally bluster his way into a major movie deal.  This is not the loser character Macy played in Fargo, but rather the antithesis of that character.  Charlie Berns is no shrinking violet.  He is full-steam ahead all the time, with absolutely no tact, no worries, and no sense of propriety.  Which makes him very funny.

   The main target of this shyster is Diedre Hearn (Meg Ryan, not looking all freaky and plastic like she has so often recently), an executive with some kind of film production company.  Again, it isn’t clear exactly what she does or how she fits into Charlie’s overall plan, because he is going so fast and pulling so many con jobs at once that the film doesn’t have time to slow down to explain everything.  But that gives the whole thing a breathless, exhilirating feel that is wonderful.

   Ryan and Macy are good, and so is LL Cool J as the actor they have starring in their film.  He’s the biggest Action Star In The World, and he has recently converted to Judaism.  Their plot to get him involved in the movie somehow involves his new rabbi, played by Elliott Gould.  Again, I don’t quite understand how that works.  And again, it really doesn’t matter.

   Macy is the real reason to watch The Deal.  He is just so funny and weird and alternately unpleasant and charming that it’s impossible not to root for him and like him.  And although the humour in the movie is quirky, and offbeat, it really is very funny.  The laughs don’t come from big lines, or big jokes, but rather from situations and the way Macy makes everyone around him feel really awkward.  That’s a brand of comedy that not everyone likes, but it’s one I like.  And I like this movie.  The Deal comes out on DVD April 14th from Alliance Films.