Film Dictionary

July 7, 2007

20,13 (2007) *

Portuguese film set in Mozambique in 1969 during colonial wars.

New Tokyo Decadence – The Slave (2007) ***

Beautiful Bitch (2007) **

German film about a young Romanian girl forced to steal.

A Day For An Affair (2007) **

South Korean comedy about two housewives cheating on their husbands.

My Dream (2007) *

Chinese musical performed entirely by handicapped artists. Visually quite interesting, but very uneven.

The Russian Triangle (2007) **

Complex Georgian film about Chechen terrorism and Russian racism. An allegory about the rise of putinism in Russia. Directed by Aleko Tsabadze.

Summer Rain (2007) *

Antonio Banderas second feature film as a director (and first one in Spain) is very disappointing.

Fata Morgana (2007) **

German film about a young couple who get lost in the Sahara desert.

Noodle (2007) *

Israeli film about a flight attendant who must take care of a abandoned child, whose mother, an illegal immigrant, has just been deported.

VHS Kaloucha (2007) **

A documentary about Moncef Kaloucha, a Tunisian Ed Wood who makes insanely cheap and insanely bad action movies (such as ''Tarzan Of The Arabs") and distributes them himself.

Sperm (2007) *

An absolutely awful comedy from Thailand.

Dai Nipponjin (2007) *

An absolutely insane Japanese comedy about a human Godzilla. Ridiculous, but in a bad way.

Jellyfish (2007) **

Israeli drama directed by Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen.

Ce que je sais de Lola (2007) *

Boring film about a Spanish girl in France.

Berliner Reigen (2007) *

Disappointing remake of Max Ophuls' ''La Ronde'' (1951). Set in Berlin.

The Pope’s Toilet (2007) *

Depressing film from Uruguay about a poor smuggler trying to make it rich by installing a toilet during Pope's visit in his little town.

Come tu mi vuoi (2007) ***

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Cobrador, In God We Trust (2007) ***

The Edge Of Heaven (2007) **

Complex, multi-layered film by Turkish-German director Fatih Akin, but unfortunately nowhere nearly as good as his previous film, "Head On".

Travelling With Pets (2007) ***

From Brazil comes this uncompromising, challenging and disturbing parable about exploitation and inhumanity in a bucolic rural setting (somewhere between Recife and hell). Directed by Cláudio Assis, ''Baixio das bestas'' (''Bog Of Beasts'') is an orgy of incest, rape and all possible forms of abuse. It is not quite clear whether the film is supposed to denounce a specific reality of Lula's socialist Brazil, or a more generic ''capitalist'' reality of Latin America, but either way, the parallels in exploitation of the prostitutes with that of local sugar-cane workers, are unmistakable. Drunken, violent predators dominate the film, but curiously, they are never identified with the upper classes. As one critic has written, "positive aspects of modern Brazil are thin on ground (...) Explicitly post-industrial: events unfold in shadow of abandoned sugar-mill. Film-makers' attitude to characters and their behaviour is somewhat ambiguous (...) Nocturnal cesspool-digging. Debauchery. A field on fire becomes a vision of hell. Drunken nihilism in control. Human relations are based on exploitation and insult, though the atmosphere is surprisingly party-like". This is the kind of movie where a brutal murder of a crippled old man is probably the most optimistic and morally uplifting scene, in large part because the old man in question is a soul-less monster who beats and sexually abuses his own daughter/granddaughter (incest) and regularly takes her to a gas station to show her naked to paying (and masturbating) customers.

Szklane usta (2007) ***

Stellet Licht (2007) ***

Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer (2007) ***

Patrick Suskind's 1985 novel ''Perfume'' has always been considered impossible to film. It seems beyond the scope of cinema: conveying the world of scents and smells, rather than sights and sounds. And yet, German director Tom Tykwer (''Run, Lola, Run'') has achieved that impossible feat, and his ''Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer'' is one of the best films of 2007. It's the story of an insane psychopath who has an incredible sense of smell. This gives him an enormous advantage - he can literally sense the presence of human beings (and recognize them) from almost a mile away. It is especially useful if one's goal in life is to capture and kill young women. But ''Perfume'' isn't an ordinary horror movie. Yes, the body count is impressive. Yes, the villain is as merciless and as completely devoid of compassion as Jason Voorhees, Freddy Kruger or Michael Myers. But this film is closer in spirit to ''Tom Jones'' or ''Oliver Twist'' than to ''Friday the 13th'' or ''Halloween''. For once, the social conditions of 18th century France are evoked here with a realism worthy of Charles Dickens and Emile Zola. Also, the sexual content of the film is unbelievably strong. Few writers besides Marquis de Sade have dared to go as far as Patrick Suskind in the exploration of links between carnal desires, insanity and perversion. As Roger Ebert writes in his review, ''Why I love this story, I do not know (...) I cannot explain. There is nothing fun about the story, except the way it ventures so fearlessly down one limited, terrifying, seductive dead end, and finds there a solution both sublime and horrifying. It took imagination to tell it, courage to film it, thought to act it, and from the audience it requires a brave curiosity about the peculiarity of obsession''.

The Counterfeiters (2007) **

Notte prima degli esami - Oggi (2007) ***

Carolina Crescentini is absolutely gorgeous in this film.

881 (2007) *

Truly awful, campy mess from Singapore.

June 6, 2007

Becoming Jane (2007) ***

Exactly like ''Shakespeare In Love'', ''Becoming Jane'' is a fictional film about a famous English writer, whose plot is inspired by her various novels. Both films suggest in turn that those writers might have been inspired by those romantic adventures in their later works. Both William Shakespeare and Jane Austen are perfect subjects for such films, because very little is actually known for certain about their lives. What is known for certain, however, is that Jane Austen is one of the greatest English novelists. It could be argued that her entire oeuvre is composed only of masterpieces. Every single novel of hers is the best in some particular way. ''Sense and Sensibility'' is her most touching work. ''Pride and Prejudice'' – her wittiest and cleverest. ''Emma'' – her most enduringly popular (and modern). ''Persuasion'' – her best written one (and most critically-acclaimed). ''Mansfield Park'' – her most complex and profound. And ''Northanger Abbey'' – her most entertaining. All of those novels have been adapted for the screen, most memorably with ''Pride and Prejudice'' in 1940 (starring Laurence Oliver), ''Sense and Sensibility'' (with Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet), and ''Persuasion'' (both in 1995). ''Emma'' has been adapted twice - a modern version called ''Clueless'' in 1995 with Alicia Silverstone and a more faithful period adaptation from 1996 starring Gwyneth Paltrow. And then, there was Patricia Rozema who literally massacred Austen’s ''Mansfield Park'' in 1999, completely misreading this complex novel, and turning a masterpiece of clever humour into a serious and heavy-handed melodrama. Directed by Julian Jarrold, ''Becoming Jane'' tells a purely fictional tale of young Jane Austen (Anne Hathaway) courted by a handsome Irish aristocrat (James McAvoy). Inspired by her various novels (especially ''Pride and Prejudice''), the dialogue is full of Austen’s witty phrases and clever retorts. The performances are superlative. It is definitely a great and very entertaining film.

Cashback (2007) ***

Originally, ''Cashback'' was a 19-minute short film, nominated for an Academy Award in 2005. It was a story of a grocery-store clerk (Sean Biggerstaff, best known as Oliver Wood in the ''Harry Potter'' movies), who was able to make all other humans froze in place, allowing him to undress the girls and use them as nude models for his sketches. ''Cashback'' was so successful, director Sean Ellis then turned it into a feature, using exactly the same cast and including every scene of his original short. The story mostly revolves around Sean courting another grocery-store clerk (Emilia Fox), but we actually never see much of Emilia. Instead, most of the film's nudity involve actresses in brief cameo roles, like Irene Bagach, Keeley Hazell, Janine-May Tinsley, Hayley-Marie Coppin and many others. In fact, almost all of those nude scenes come from the short film. Surrealistic, whimsical and gently ironic, ''Cashback'' is a perfect date movie, despite its adult content.

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