Guru

Reviewer: Steve Dollar
Rating (out of 5): ****

If Kathryn Bigelow succeeds in winning an Oscar for best director next Sunday, which many pundits (including this one) anticipate, it will strike a revolutionary blow in the Hollywood Gender Wars: The 57-year-old action specialist will become the first woman ever to take home a Miniature Gold Bald Man for a job that's as male-dominated as the U.S. military once was.

It's not a complete novelty to have been nominated. Lina Wertmüller (Seven Beauties) in 1976, Jane Campion (The Piano) in 1993, and Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation) in 2003, managed it. And she's hardly a shoo-in, what with ex-hubby James Cameron (the 27-D, future-of-all-media, aggro-mythic Avatar) and Lee Daniels (left-field ridiculous phenom Precious), who could score a coup of his own as the first black (though hardly the first gay) man to win as best director. Anything could happen, and it probably will. But with its truckload of preliminary awards and eight additional Academy Award nominations (from best picture to sound editing), there's little doubt that The Hurt Locker had made its impact, and (no pun intended) blown up Bigelow's career at the very stage it might have begun a premature fade-out.

Perhaps as significantly, in zeitgest-y terms, this is the movie that finally makes a compelling and credible narrative feature of the nearly decade-long Iraqi War. The debacle has been a boon for documentarians, who rushed in where network news outfits feared to tread, telling stories the mainstream American media was too compromised to risk telling (No End in Sight, Taxi to the Dark Side, hell even Heavy Metal in Baghdad, among many notable efforts). Yet, attempts at fictionalizing such recent history for the screen have usually been hobbled by knee-jerk politics and tear-jerk dynamics.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****

Up to now, I've not been an enormous fan of the animation technique known as claymation. Of course I've loved the Wallace & Gromit stuff, but beyond that, not a whole lot has appealed. Now that I've seen $9.99, the relatively new (2008) animated film from director/co-adapter Tatia Rosenthal and Israeli writer Etgar Keret, all that has changed. This 78-minute, Australian/Israeli co-production seems a perfect fit for the claymation process. With its rough edges and let-the-seams-show animation, the look compliments Keret's characters -- slightly weird, off-kilter, and other-worldly -- to a "t." (The characters' voices belong to some of Australia's finest actors: Geoffrey Rush, Anthony LaPaglia, Claudia Karvan and Barry Otto.)

Reviewer: James van Maanen

Two of the three movies considered here have already been made available on DVD some years back, though in lesser manifestations than the excellent new Criterion Collection transfers in the three-disc Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy. Made in the mid-1940s within three years of each other, each film has its own separate time frame, plot(s) and characters. You can watch them individually with no problem, but seeing them one after another provides a different context that, I think, strengthens the entire experience.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ****

Wild Rumpus

There seems to be some question as to exactly who this film is intended for. Based on Maurice Sendak's classic 1963 children's book, Where the Wild Things Are [Blu-ray] isn't exactly for children (except for the most mature children). It's also not quite mature enough for adults (except for the most arrested adults). But what I love about the film is that director Spike Jonze and co-writer Dave Eggers, as well as producer Sendak, have made a film for themselves. It's something that they themselves would perhaps like to see, and that is an all-too-rare quality in the ever-increasing business of making movies. The filmmakers are not concerned with selling "wild things" toys at fast-food restaurants; they merely have an interesting idea that they would like to try out, just to see how it looks.

Greenberg (Ben Stiller) is at a crossroads in his life. Out of a job and none too interested in finding one, he agrees to housesit for his younger and more successful brother, thereby getting a free place to stay in LA. Once settled in, Greenberg sets out to reconnect with his old friend and former bandmate Ivan (Rhys Ifans). But times have changed, and old friends aren't necessarily still best friends, so Greenberg finds
himself spending more and more time instead with his brother's personal assistant Florence (Greta Gerwig), an aspiring singer and herself something of a lost soul. Greenberg is the new film by Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale), and it opens March 19 in NYC and LA/March 26 nationally.  And now, thanks to GreenCine and Focus Features, you can win our new Greenberg contest.

Three (3) very lucky winners will receive a copy of the Greenberg soundtrack sampler, which includes six new songs by James Murphy (whose band LCD Soundsystem scores the film).

To enter, email contest@greencine.com and include your name, email address, mailing address, and, if you're a GreenCine member, your username in the email, and "Greenberg" in the subject header. Entries without all this information will not be considered. (You will not be added to a mailing list!). One winner will be selected at random from all valid entries. The deadline to enter is March 29. Winners will be notified by e-mail and announced in future editions of the GreenCine Dispatch newsletter.

See the official trailer here.

Reviewer: Jeremy Hatch
Rating (out of 5): ***

"Gigante" is a good adjective to describe the protagonist of Adrian Biniez's film, a gentle giant named Jara (Horacio Camandulle) who lives with his sister and her pre-adolescent son, listens to heavy metal, and works seven nights a week in Montevideo, Uruguay -- weekends as a bouncer at a clube, weeknights as a security guard at an unidentified supermarket. (There used to also be a supermarket chain in Mexico called Gigante, though that appears to be a coincidence.) Jara has a simple job at the supermarket: monitor the security cameras. But it's the middle of the night, the store is locked up, and there is never any crime apart from shoplifting by employees, which Jara mostly lets go.

Reviewer: James Van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***

Do you have to be an Asian queer to appreciate Asian Queer Shorts? I don't think so. Though this relatively new compilation of five short films from Strand Releasing is a mixed bag by and about Asian homosexual men, nothing in it reaches rock-bottom -- though I do wish the final and longest film were a bit better. Totaling around 85 minutes of "movie," AQS more or less delivers.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ****

There seems to be a movement underway to draw some attention to the forgotten cult director Marco Ferreri (La Grande Bouffe, Tales of Ordinary Madness), and judging by Dillinger Is Dead (1969), which has just been released on Criterion Collection DVD, it's a good impulse. The film is definitely a product of the late 1960s, with all that that implies, but the existential energy behind it is still very much relevant.

The film takes place over the course of one long night and contains very little dialogue. Michel Piccoli stars in a tour-de-force performance as Glauco, whose job alone is filled with fascinating symbolism: he's a maker of designer gas masks. The ramifications of this may seem obvious to us today, but how many people today are performing similar tasks, putting happy faces on ugly truths? At any rate, he goes home and finds his pretty blond wife (Anita Pallenberg) in bed. She pops a few pills and is never seen in an upright position again. Dinner is left out for Glauco, but it doesn't interest him and he begins cooking his own meal. While poking around looking for spices (or whatnot), he finds a package. Inside the package is a gun, wrapped in a newspaper. The newspaper's headline is about the death of gangster John Dillinger. Is this Dillinger's gun?

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): **

The new CG-animated feature film Astro Boy begins with a young boy dying in a blast right in front of his helpless father's eyes. The father (voiced by Nicolas Cage) feverishly rebuilds him as a robot, but then rejects him and banishes him. From there, the boy is viciously attacked by giant spaceships and robots, smacked through the air, and pummeled against buildings amidst a spray of bullets across the skyline (including -- no kidding -- a butt gun). It's all presented with a lack of real emotion and in a hail of noise and explosions, begging the question, who is this movie for?

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): *****

British artist Steve McQueen's directorial debut Hunger focuses on one of the darkest periods in Britain's recent history. When Irish republic activists were arrested en masse and staged a brutal protest campaign to make their imprisonment as costly, exhausting and embarrassing for the British government as humanly possible. The prisoners banged on walls, screamed all day, refused to bathe or use toilets and eventually went on hunger strikes that created a martyr out of a then 27 year old Bobby Sands (played by Inglourious Basterds' Michael Fassbender).

Reviewer: James Van Maanen
Rating(out of 5): ****½

The first time I viewed Séraphine (which made its U.S. debut as part of the FSLC's 2009 Rendez-vous with French Cinema), I knew nothing about this remarkable film, including the fact that the title character had indeed lived as a noted "outsider" artist in early 20th Century France. Yet this in no way impacted my enjoyment and understanding of the film. As bizarre and surprising as any fictional character, Séraphine comes to enormous life via the great talent of its leading actress Yolande Moreau (When the Sea Rises) and the writer/director Martin Provost. The film walked away with seven of the nine French César awards for which it had been nominated (Best Picture, Actress, Screenplay, Costumes, Score, Photography and Décor).

Reviewer: Steve Dollar
Rating (out of 5): ****

Would that we all are as lucky to live as long - she'll be 82 at the end of May - and productively as Agnès Varda. And if we do, let's hope to greet the winter with the sheer (pardon my French) joie de vivre that lights up every frame of The Beaches of Agnès. A perfect composite of everything that qualifies her as one of the most vital filmmakers going, this 2009 autobiographical spree travels back and forth through time and memory - common themes among Varda and her 1950s Left Bank cohorts, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker (who appears in the film as a cartoon cat with a computer-modified voice). Images and reflections shuffle like postcards, as the scenery circles back to the seasoned photographer's leap into film: 1955's La Pointe-courte, the intimate story of a collapsing marriage in a Mediterranean village, which Varda says she made having seen barely any films at all.

Subsequent efforts, toggling between fiction and fact, saw Varda evolve as the resonant feminine voice in the new wave boy's club - from Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) to Vagabond (1985), which made a star of teenaged Sandrine Bonnaire. Varda's consuming interest in film as a medium for artistic and sensory inquiry, rather than a mode of entertainment, is, perhaps, a quintessentially French trait.

Reviewer: Dylan De Thomas
Rating (out of 5): ****½

In Götz Spielmann's recently posted interview with Aaron Hillis on GreenCine Daily, the Austrian director notes with delight that one critic called his riveting Revanche a "Buddhist thriller." And it's true, it does have a "middle way" about it - not slow, not fast-paced; its characters neither lovable nor loathable. And, rare among thrillers, it certainly doesn't tell you what to feel or believe in any dogmatic way.

Reviewer: James Van Maanen
Rating (out of 5):***(4 stars for Ray completists/aficianados)

I am a Nicholas Ray aficionado, so why I am giving Bigger Than Life only three stars (and barely that)?  Because, for all the little background beauties the film contains -- from its consistent and fascinating use of milk to the symbolic difference between a home’s upstairs and downstairs (and the DVD extras by Brooklyn writer Jonathan Lethem and Mr. Ray’s widow Susan point many of these out quite well) -- the foreground is non-stop melodrama served up in sledge-hammer style.  This was certainly not always the case in Ray’s work.  Consider In a Lonely Place, for me perhaps the best of his films, in which the fore-, middle- and background, not to mention theme and execution, are consistent and beautifully rendered throughout.
 
Bigger Than Life, however, is something else.  Never less than interesting, despite the very odd casting choice of James Mason in the leading role as a rather untypical American grade-school teacher, the movie tells the tale of a man with a probably fatal illness who is given the (at that time) new wonder drug Cortisone to relieve painful symptoms and save his life.  Trouble is, it’s addictive with crazy-making side-effects.  The film was made in the mid-1950s, when conformity was an art form and the USA has just endured the height and sudden decline of McCarthyism.  A full decade after the end of WWII, times were tougher for the struggling middle-class than was often let on, and so the leading character must moonlight for a taxi cab company (has that trade ever seen a classier dispatcher than James Mason?) without telling his wife.

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ***½

At 35, Serge Bozon has already lived through several incarnations: film critic, actor, DJ, writer, and filmmaker (L'Amitié, Mods). It's that diverse sensibility that gives his WWI-set film La France an oddball charm, a quiet, naturalistic even sensual war drama with musical interludes; it's as if Claire Denis and Jacques Demy had a film together.

The story is a simple one: Camille (Sylvie Testud, Fear and Trembling) receives a mysterious letter from her husband, who's off fighting for France. The letter suggests that he's dead but a hints, too, that he may be alive. As a woman, she's not allowed to leave her village, so she chops her hair short and poses as a young man to go off in search of her missing love. She soon encounters and blends in with a regiment led by a soft-spoken but firmly-in-command lieutenant (the great Pascal Greggory) and becomes their sort of unofficial mascot as they move toward the front lines - but are they really moving toward the war, or away from it? The film is about camaraderie to be sure, and has an oddball pace to it that is not like any other war film. At times poetic and sad, other times joyful and even transcendent, it doesn't really pack many dramatic punches, so when the moments do come they are all the more shocking.