The Movie Snobs

By Luke Schnepe
Although it’s not a new release, this wonderful film deservers some extra attention.

Chocolat

In the French village Lansquenet things are going just fine. Everybody attends church and the mayor has complete control over his villagers. Nothing happens without his approval.
On a windy and rainy night Vianne Rocher (Juliette Binoche) enters town, accompanied by her young daughter. She rents a small empty shop and within days a beautifull chocolate shop is opened. The mayor has strong feelings against the shop and makes sure the villagers know not to go there. But slowly Vianne earns the trust of the villagers. She lets them taste some of her homemade chocolates and advises everybody on the chocolate that is best for them. And it works!

Everybody melts for Vianne’s chocolate. And long lost feelings are coming back! The mayor is determined to ban this - what he calls - witch from his town. Will he succeed?

The film shows the struggle between the known conventional and the exciting new. A beautiful film that is definitely worth his Oscar nominations. Juliette Binoche is perfect for this role.

An absolute must!

Director: Lasse Hallström
Cast:
Juliette Binoche    …     Vianne Rocher
Alfred Molina    …     Comte Paul de Reynaud
Carrie-Anne Moss    …     Caroline Clairmont
Judi Dench    …     Armande Voizin
Antonio Gil    …     Jean-Marc Drou (as Antonio Gil-Martinez)
Hélène Cardona    …     Francoise Drou
Johnny Depp    …     Roux
Hugh O’Conor    …     Pere Henri
Harrison Pratt    …     Dedou Drou
Gaelan Connell    …     Didi Drou (as Gaelan Alexander Connell)
Lena Olin    …     Josephine Muscat
Elisabeth Commelin    …     Yvette Marceau
Peter Stormare    …     Serge Muscat
Ron Cook    …     Alphonse Marceau
Aurelien Parent Koenig    …     Luc Clairmont (as Aurèlien Parent Koenig)
Official movie site

By Bart Hoevenagel

Wild Strawberries…. came to fruition in the same year Ingmar Berman made The Seventh Seal, and again he returns to the theme of death. But whereas The Seventh Seal is bleak, Wild Strawberries displays optimism. Much like Kurosawa’s Ikiru (and of a more recent time stamp David Lynch’s The Straight Story and About Schmidt), the film deals with a man nearing the end of his life, and who strives to come to terms with it and find redemption.

The protagonist Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström) is a medical doctor and professor who travels with his daughter-in-law Marianne (Ingrid Thulin) from Stockholm to Lund to receive an honorary degree from Lund University On this trip, he meets a variety of people on the road, from Sara, a female hitcher travelling with her fiance and friend, to a bickering married couple who remind Isak of his own life and marriage. Isak Borg is introduced to a rather severe comeuppance in the face of death, Isak Borg, who dreams his own death (a Salvador Dali-esque scene), revisits his youth as a spectator, re-evaluates his life and learns that he had always denied desire and lived an unconnected life, a trait he appeared to have passed on to his son who hates him.

Bergman casted the great silent film director and actor Victor Sjöström as the hoary pedant. According to Bergman, Sjöström “took my text, made it his own, invested it with his own experiences:… loneliness, coldness, warmth, harshness, and ennui. Borrowing my father’s form, he occupied my soul and made it all his own - there wasn’t even a crumb left over for me! He did so with the sovereign power of a gargantuan personality. I had nothing to add, not even a sensible or irrational comment. Wild Strawberries was no longer my film; it was Victor Sjöström’s!”. And Bergman is right on the money, Sjöström plays - or better becomes - the aging man seeking redemption so well. A perfect performance.

Wild Strawberries can be lauded for so many reasons, but chief among them in my view is the manner in which the film so perfectly conveys its themes of self-examination and the contemplation of one’s own mortality.

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Cast:

Victor Sjöström … Dr. Isak Borg
Bibi Andersson … Sara
Ingrid Thulin … Marianne Borg
Gunnar Björnstrand … Dr. Evald Borg
Jullan Kindahl … Agda
Folke Sundquist … Anders
Björn Bjelfvenstam … Viktor
Naima Wifstrand … Mrs. Borg, Isak’s Mother
Gunnel Broström … Mrs. Alman
Gertrud Fridh … Karin Borg, Isak’s wife
Sif Ruud … Aunt Olga
Gunnar Sjöberg … Sten Alman/The Examiner
Max von Sydow … Henrik Åkerman
Åke Fridell … Karin’s lover
Yngve Nordwall … Uncle Aron

Gangs of New York is about the blood and fire of gang warfare, fought over by rivals Daniel Day-Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio.

The movie is set in the 1860s in the lower Manhattan district, also known as ‘The Five Points’. A fight is about to start as Priest Vallon (played by Neeson) is shown dry-shaving. He cuts himself and hands the razor to his young boy, who wants to go and wipe it clean. “No”, says the Priest, “The blood stays on the blade.”

Vallon is then seen rousing his gang of Irish immigrants for a final fight with the tribe known as ‘the Natives’ who are led by William Cutting aka ‘The Butcher’ (played by Day-Lewis). Hatchets, knives and clubs are used by the rivals when they line up to each other in the snow. Vallon’s gang loses and dies at the hand of the Butcher, but his son escaping into the underworld and vows revenge.

Gangs Of New York shows us the history of these gangs and the city of New York, the anarchy of crime lords, the mud and straw of poverty and heaped flesh in brothels. The first half hour is very slow so everyone can understand what’s going on but then the story becomes awesomely detailed and a powerful tale, the success of which owes much to the skill of the three stars.

By Luke Schnepe

I had such high hopes for this movie, but in this day and age of lowbrow theatrics I should have known better. Honestly it had a lot of potential and it is better than most movies released these days, but in my opinion it just fell short of that high mark that the original exorcist set. To be perfectly honest I blame the movie being poor on Morgan Creek Productions. This movie was originally filmed and called “Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist” but was not well received, so a new director was signed on and the film was completely reshot. Of course the original was better and ten times more cerebral, while the new version was more like a hint of depression with a light seasoning of low carb crap flakes.

The plot revolves around Father Merrin and how he has lost faith following certain events that he was involved in during WW II. Nothing to dramatic… Merrin being forced by a Nazi captain to select which prisoner gets a bullet in the head… stupid Nazis. Anyway The movie opens with Merrin in Cairo boozing at a local establishment when he is approached by a man who asks him to go to Turkana, Kenya to investigate a byzantine church recently excavated… strangely enough it apparently predates Christianity ever reaching that region of Africa. During the excavation Merrin discovers that the church was buried as soon as it was built. Upon further investigation they find little inconsistencies with the church… like the rather large inverted cross as soon as you enter, the local tribesmen refusing to enter the building, some “epidemic” that wiped out an entire village… that is still there… or did I miss something? Then there is Alan Ford’s character, Jeffries, playing a rather charming racist misogynist, who looks like he is constantly melting through out the movie.

Anyway turns out that the church was built to hold in a very old evil. It was said say that the site of the church covers the place were Lucifer (Satan, Old Scratch, Prince Of Light… you get the picture) fell from heaven when God cast him out. OK I liked that part a lot… very creepy… but in the original it was Pazuzu that was first discovered as the demon possessing Regan. Now with that in mind we go on to learn that Merrin discovers that the church was covering up an older non-Christian temple with a statue of Pazuzu. They never really clarrify which is which, Is it Satan? Is Pazuzu? Is it Captain Howdy? Is it Mr. Belvedere? And try to cover it up with some B-rated CG…. Very disappointing. So it was left as that… Satan was depicted on the first floor of the church and when you go downstairs you got Pazuzu… take your pick, you could have the demon be either. And what was worse about the movie… no projectile vomit, just the same creepy voice. You are never really left with a clear-cut picture of who was doing the possessing.

OK so in the end, the Demon possesses a child named Joseph, and the Priest’s love-interest Dr. Sarah. The end is a cacophony of bad lines, poor CG, and narcoleptic inducing suspense… if you want to call it that. All in all, the story was not bad, but most definitely not there. But just because I liked the potential of the story I give this movie 2 snobbies.

Director: Renny Harlin

Cast:
Stellan Skarsgard - Father Merrin
Izabella Scorupo - Sarah
James D’Arcy - Father Francis
Remy Sweeney - Joseph
Julian Wadham - Major Granville
Andrew Fench - Chuma
Ralph Brown - Sergeant Major
Ben Cross - Semelier
David Bradley - Father Gionetti
Alan Ford - Jeffries
Antonie Kamerling - Lt. Kessel
Eddie Osei - Emekwi
Israel Aduramo - Jomo
Patrick O’Kane - Bession
James Bellamy - James

Official movie site of Exorcist the Beginning

By Mike “Cachibatches” Donohue

Got a recipe for you. If you started with rear Rear Window as your stock, seasoned it with teenagers, added a pinch of Neighbours, The Burbs, and Fright Night, cooked for a bit, and then added a subterranean conclusion straight out of horror maestro Dario Argento’s Phenomenon, you would get a bland goulash called Disturbia.

Unfortunately, there are particulars to discuss. Specifically, Kale (Shia Labeouf) witnesses his father killed in a car accident (I have seen this premise in several movies in the last year - an odd zeitgeist of sorts) assaults a teacher, and gets one of those house arrest loser bracelets around his ankle. It goes off whenever he leaves his zone, and a mean cop comes and busts him. All he has to do is spy on his hottie neighbor, but when he accidentally discovers that the creepy guy next door is actually a serial killer from Texas and the adults just won’t listen (don’t trust anyone over thirty man) it’ s up to the hottie and the obligatory ethnic buddy (and I am not being racist: why not have made the main character Asian instead?) to help him investigate with cell phones and camera equipment. Conveniently, this movie takes place in a universe in which people do even all of their most private business in front of windows - even serial killing.

I forgot one ingredient: the boredom. Because most of this film centers around teenage angst, teenage romance, teenage parties, everything teenage. I guess that was the point of putting teenagers in it, and whereas it may draw the youth dollar, it hardly builds suspense. Coming of age stories blend with thrillers to make bad soup indeed.

To be fair, beyond the boredom and the vapid teenage characters, there are a few good points. David Morse a veteran, makes a creepy, understated and physically formidable antagonist. Labeouf actually does do a good turn as the hero- even if the writing is a bit uneven in wether it wants his character to be meek, tough, troubled or charming, he walks the tightrope well. The premise- punching out a teacher who mentioned his father, not only sets up the broken leg substitute, but foreshadows the character’s strength and makes a more believable contest between the two.

But there is one jaw droppingly bad scene which I would be remiss if I did not mention. The heroin finds out that the hero has been spying on her. He goes on to describe why he loves her, how he knows what each of her movements mean. There is actually one of those scenes, occasionally parodied on The Simpsons, where her righteous anger becomes smitten appreciation as she realizes the sweetness of his creepiness.

Puke. Bad soup indeed.

Recommendation: The entire world liked it better than I. You have been forewarned.

Director: D.J. Caruso

Cast:

Shia LaBeouf … Kale
Sarah Roemer … Ashley
Carrie-Anne Moss … Julie
David Morse … Mr. Turner
Aaron Yoo … Ronnie
Jose Pablo Cantillo … Officer Gutierrez
Matt Craven … Daniel Brecht
Viola Davis … Detective Parker
Brandon Caruso … Greenwood Boy #1
Luciano Rauso … Greenwood Boy #2
Daniel Caruso … Greenwood Boy #3
Kevin Quinn … Mr. Carlson
Elyse Mirto … Mrs. Carlson
Suzanne Rico … News Anchor #1
Kent Shocknek … News Anchor #2

By Mike “Cachibatches” Donohue

It seems like a simple, cliched story. A rich girl (Rachel McAdams) meets a poor boy (Noah Calhoun), and they develop a love that is innocent, but pure and genuine. The are honest with each other, and each learns from the other. Her parents do not approve, she is taken away. Mother hides the letters that come in the mail unfailingly, every day. Years later, as she is about to marry a rich guy, they find each other again. She faces a choice. You have seen all of these elements before.

But there is nothing ordinary about THE NOTEBOOK, and there is a wrap around story that make it truly unique. James Garner plays an aging gentleman reading this very story to an aging lady (Gena Rowlands) in a nursing home. It helps her remember. Even though the doctors warn him that senile dementia is irreversible, he knows that there is magic in the story that will help her remember…for a time.

THE NOTEBOOK never really makes any attempt to hide the fact that the couple the wrap-around are the couple in the main story–even the title of the film is a hint that he is not reading her a romance novel. Its not going or a big revelation. In the end, this is not a story about young love, it’s a story about eternal love, and makes a proposition devoutly to be wished: despite the failings of the flesh, the spirit remembers. The spirit continues to love. We are all just prisoners in our bodies, and death is not an ending, but a renewal. All right, it makes a few propositions devoutly to be wished.

There are no villains in THE NOTEBOOK, only those who are misguided. The obligatory other love interest never twirls a mustache, ties the heroin to train tracks, or chases his rival with drawn gun on a sinking boat. He is a fine, decent man; and all the more difficult is the choice faced by the heroin. Even the wicked parents are really just, well, parents, in the end. They want the best for their daughter, but don’t always know what the best is.

In short, THE NOTEBOOK is a fine, decent, noble, uplifting, tear jerking, wise, spirited, thematic, brilliant, sentimental and very original film. Enjoy.

Recommendation: You would have to some kind of cynic to not like this one. Its been a long time since I have seen a movie with such overwhelming decency.

Director: Nick Cassavetes

Cast:
Gena Rowlands- Allie Calhoun
James Garner- Duke
Rachel McAdams- Allie Hamilton
Ryan Gosling- Noah Calhoun
Sam Shepard- Frank Calhoun
David Thorton- John Hamilton
Joan Allen- Anne Hamilton

By Jeremy Ebert

“Dumbfuck”. A couple of years earlier, if Dixie Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines had used that term to describe her feelings about United States president George W. Bush, one can only imagine the backlash they’d have faced. Instead, she saved it for Shut Up and Sing (2006) - a documentary by Barbara Kopple (director of the landmark doc “Harlan County, U.S.A.“) and Cecilia Peck (daughter of screen legend Gregory Peck), about the aftermath of her statements in the weeks leading up to the U.S.’s invasion of Iraq in March of 2003.

“Just so you know we’re on the good side with y’all. We don’t want this war and we don’t want this violence. And we’re ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas”

Spoken to a audience of about a thousand in London, her comment originally garnered little attention until a small blurb about the concert showed up in The Guardian newspaper. In actuality, only the last sentence became widely known to the American public; the actual context of the statement muted somewhat. It didn’t matter, though, since the Dixie Chicks were platinum selling artists with critical and commercial successes galore - the perfect public figures to generate a strict and almost immediately widespread debate of patriotism and free speech for a nation’s audience divided fiercely on America’s impending war with Saddam Hussein.

With Natalie Maines words etched in the popular mindset, the reaction was mixed. Many long time country music fans (the Dixie Chicks musical genre) were immediately put off by the Chicks. When a sincere apology and pleading for forgiveness by Maines went unrecieved, the response was swift. Thousands burnt or destroyed their Chicks CD’s, DVD’s and other merchandise. Hundreds of country radio stations censored their music (temporarily, most of them) and Cumulus Media simply banned them for infinity. The Chicks disappeared from radio, country music television and their albums and singles disintegrated on the charts.

Shut Up and Sing documents the process of the Dixie Chicks coming to grips with death threats, hate mail, ostracization and the possible disintegration of their career; up close, the camera records the three women (Maines and sisters Martie Maguire & Emily Robison) trying to figure out their place in the music business, amongst themselves and their desire to create a new album of music that takes a musical turn.

By mixing and matching archival footage with real time footage, Kopple and Peck do a good job of keeping the couple of years worth of happenings at a good pace; and Natalie Maines (the unwanting maestro of the proceedings) creates a fascinating central character - a woman who’s trying to be

By Mike “Cachibatches” Donohue

Jeffery Beaumont (Kyle Maclachlan) is a nice, square, small town college kid who finds a human ear in the middle of a field. Picking it up leads him down a primrose path to a world filled with danger, excitement, evil, and temptation.

Specifically, it leads him to a an emphysemic, cruel and yet comical drug dealer named Frank (Denis Hopper) who is blackmailing lounge singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) into all kinds of bizarre and kinky sex. As Beaumont gets deeper and deeper into intrigue, he starts to become almost two people: one wants to outwit Frank and help Dorthy - effectively becoming part of her lurid story, and the other who wants nothing more than to drink Heineken beer (specifically) and take Laura Dern out on a date.

Blue Velvet caused quite a divide amongst critics, half of whom believed it to be some sort of a twisted masterpiece about the hypocrisy of the normal, and others who considered it some form of violent and vulgar pornography. To this day, it remains Lynch’s most controversial works, despite the fact that it is entirely linear, contains no metamorphing characters, and has only some hyper-exaggerated colors as a caveat to Lynch’s patented surrealism.

Through an idyllic looking setting that invokes a mythical, Norman Rockwell type America, stilted, goofy dialog, and sappy, off note acting, director David Lynch repeatedly makes his point that the phantom world that Maclachlan finds lies just on the underbelly of normalcy, and his all-too-normal protagonists are deliciously unequipped to deal with the evil found therein. One segment of dialog in particular, between and McLaughlin and Dern (why does there have to be people like Frank…?) will have you howling with laughter. It’s supposed to. It is Lynch’s joke. Throughout, he makes his own characters look foolish and naive to contrast them to the menacing Frank.

On the other hand, this movie does contain plenty of twisted, explicit, disturbing, and yet sometimes still comical sexual violence. It is here that the film goes a little wrong - Lynch has to make everything campy - once the spigot of scorn for his own characters is opened, he never shuts it. Thus, he partially undoes some of the menace he is trying to create by giving the murdering, raping drug dealer that is Frank a sexual fetish that will force you to laugh, and hooking him up to an oxygen machine.

Not to mention the prolonged violent rape is just downright unpleasant. Over twenty years after this film noir on an acid hit was made, the essential question is still whether or not it is worth watching; whether or not the uniqueness of the story and the quality craftsmanship of its telling make it worth suffering through. I would say that is entirely up to the viewer, and there really is no wrong answer. This is a masterpiece of sorts, but in this case, I still can’t say its worth watching.

Recommendation: Tread lightly. Unique and sometimes entertaining, but pretty vulgar and despicable.

Director: David Lynch

Cast:

Isabella Rossellini … Dorothy Vallens
Kyle MacLachlan … Jeffrey Beaumont
Dennis Hopper … Frank Booth
Laura Dern … Sandy Williams
Hope Lange … Mrs. Williams
Dean Stockwell … Ben
George Dickerson … Det. John Williams
Priscilla Pointer … Mrs. Beaumont
Frances Bay … Aunt Barbara
Jack Harvey … Mr. Tom Beaumont
Ken Stovitz … Mike
Brad Dourif … Raymond
Jack Nance … Paul
J. Michael Hunter … Hunter
Dick Green … Don Vallens

By Jeremy Ebert

Crack open a bottle of Dramamine, pop a couple of pills and go watch The Bourne Ultimatum. For the third installment of the series, star Matt Damon is back to get wound up by director Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy) and set loose around world trotting locations without mercy. The first episode, The Bourne Identity, was directed by Doug Liman in a conventional effort that was exhilarating and felt like a vaunted attempt to create (something) of a character examination in the middle of a whirling dervish of action.

By Mike “Cachibatches” Dononue

Allow me to admit that I have never been a James Bond fan. I first became a junior movie snob in the campy, Roger Moore, MOONRAKER era, and by the time I got around to watching the Sean Connery classics, they were, and lets be blunt here, dated. The action genre had long passed them by.

CASINO ROYALE updates the character, and, surprise, its truer to Ian Fleming’s original vision of a cold, smooth assassin than any of the past versions. This James Bond is not a likeable guy. He’s no supposed to be. He loves more dispassionately than he kills. Sure, there is a flirtation with humanity towards the end, but Bond as represented by Daniel Craig is a machine with ice water in his veins.

Climbing up then jumping off or a scaffold seems a standard part of the job. When he can’t take his query alive, he thinks nothing of murdering him inside of an embassy. It is obligatory that bullets fly harmlessly around him, and of course there is always a convenient exploding item nearby to shoot if he needs to take out a crowd of guys. He is handsome and strong, with icy, incandescent blue eyes that actually glow in the dark in some scenes. He does not submit to torture. And he asks questions like “do you want a clean kill, or do we send a message?” He knows that everyone has a tell, and he will loose a million dollars on a hand to figure out what it is. He enjoys seducing women that are not only exotic and beautiful, but married- no attachments. During a multi-million dollar card game, he invents a drink and muses over what to call it. When he is poisoned with one, he administers electric shock to himself, and then finishes the game.

All right, he’s a little likable. But he comes close to the sociopathic ideal of was a “double 0″ should be-cruelty and arrogance are in his repertoire. His adversary, an international terrorist profiteer who plays cards with his clients money, is admirably despicable; a heterogeneous eyed asthmatic who bleeds out of tear ducts. The villains are of course all updated to be terrorist rather than cold war villains, M is woman, and as it is still James Bond after all, the love interest is exquisite and interesting in the way that only a Bond girl can be.

Oh, yeah, the plot. Something about a high stakes poker game with the above mentioned bad guy. Its with government money, so if bond losses, he is party to the British government funding terrorism. Is it still interesting after all of these years? Well, lets just say you know you are watching a fun movie when yo see a couple of the best action sequences you have ever seen, and the card game is actually in many ways more interesting. And Bond is the perfect poker player- he wears his poker face at all times. Besides, he doesn’t believe that luck is any part of poker. Its all probability, and reading the man across the table. Damn, this guy is cool.

Can’t tell you much about in jokes- I have never been a fan. I know that it is funny that he doesn’t care how he takes hi martini, and that he doesn’t announce himself until the end of the film. But most of the subtleties are lost because I never cared about the originals, not even George Lazenby. But this is James Bond that I actually care about. For the first time ever, I am eagerly anticipating a sequel. I never have been a James Bond fan, until now.

Recommendation- An admirable re-launching of the series.

Director- Martin Campbell

Cast:
Daniel Craig- James Bond
Eva Green -Vesper Lynd
Mads Mikkelsen- Le Chiffre
Judi Dench- M
Jefferey Wright- Felix Leiter
Giancarlo Giannini- Rene Mathis
Simon Abkarian- Alex Dimitrios
Caterina Murino- Solange Dimitrios