The Films of 2012

[Brian C]

Thanks for posting that, dom. I saw the trailer for the film last week, and I thought it made the movie look rather cynical. I don't really have much of an opinion about bullying in general - I had a rough year myself in junior high - but instinctively, this movie doesn't feel like a step in the right direction to me.

[matrixschmatrix]

The rash of teenage suicides that actually started the whole anti-bullying crusade were (as I recall) almost all gay kids, often in districts or states that had ragingly anti-gay cultures such that attacking gay kids would be inevitable- and the anti-bullying legislation that was eventually passed left a gaping hole to allow gay bashing based on religion to continue. Anti-gay bullying's a specific and addressable issue in a way that 'bullying' as an entire phenomenon is not, and I think by trying to include every form all at once the whole thing just seems insoluble and inevitable.

It sounds as though the movie addresses that somewhat with Kelby, whose ostracizing was horrifically reinforced by the school- she was placed in a separate category from 'girls' and 'boys' for roll call purposes, and forced off the basketball team- and going after that thread seems like a strong way to do things. But of course, then all the homophobes would be angry, and we can't have that.

[flyonthewall2983]

Anti-gay bullying's a specific and addressable issue in a way that 'bullying' as an entire phenomenon is not, and I think by trying to include every form all at once the whole thing just seems insoluble and inevitable.

I agree, insofar as that the medium of a documentary film doesn't give ample enough time to address all sides of the issue properly. Maybe if something like this was done for television, or even online, it could show all sides equally.

[warren oates]

Caught Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's Intruders when it opened this week in only two theaters in Los Angeles. The distributor is obviously dumping this title for a number of reasons, not the least of which is probably because even though it is set mainly in London and stars Clive Owen, at least a third of the screentime is spent in a parallel storyline that takes place in Spain in Spanish. So it's kind of a secret foreign film as far as the U.S. market is concerned. It's also an incredibly difficult film to pitch in a high concept sort of way and much of the effect depends on a central mystery that isn't really resolved until the end.

I'm a pretty big fan of Fresnadillo's Intacto and 28 Weeks Later, so I had fairly high expectations going in. It's best not too say too much about it because doing so in detail would require too many spoiler tags, but if you enjoy well-made supernatural thrillers and if you've seen and liked any of his other films, you'll want to check this one out. It displays the same talent for mood and genre-mashing you seen in his other work, but with what's in many ways a much simpler story. I was a little put off by the way the ending wraps things up, and I would have gone in a less tidy less literal direction myself, but the whole thing managed to hold my attention in a way that most films just don't and Fresnadillo can direct the shizzle out of a scene. The film is full of compelling images and genuine creepiness. An underrated director right on the cusp of making a really great horror film or thriller. Definitely interested to see what he does next.

[domino harvey]

If any NYC boarders (or those willing to travel) would be interested in attending a screening / Q+A for the new Brit Marling movie Sound of My Voice Monday night, shoot me a PM

[Michael Kerpan]

I find it hard to know what is a 2012 film and what is not -- but I have finally seen a bona fide 2012 one -- Johnnie To's Romancing In Thin Air. A very entertaining, very good looking, very well performed romance (with plenty of comedy and melodrama mixed in). I guess it's a potboiler more or less -- but that's okay -- I've not gotten tired of To's "lighter" films (all of which seem to have some rather heavy moments).

[roujin]

That Johnnie To is my most anticipated film of the year. Maybe that or James Gray's Low Life.

[puxzkkx]

I saw Polisse a couple weeks ago and felt compelled to write about it. It isn't a fantastic film (and it ends on a particularly ludicrous note) but it is rewarding viewing - immensely entertaining, full to the brim of engaging and compelling performances and, although episodic, written tightly enough to sustain a throughline of interest that makes seeing it comparable to watching a great tv show.

Maiwenn is a magnificent actors' director - she gives her leads perhaps a bit too much room to indulge, but her strength is in the way she allows the actors (especially children) in bit roles to imply backstory with very little writerly 'material'. The script's focus on successive 'big scenes' could definitely be tiresome (although I enjoyed it despite myself) but among the misses Maiwenn creates a few little masterpieces - a scene involving the separation of a child from his homeless mother and a scene detailing a teenage rape victim's partial-birth abortion of a miscarried fetus (the victim is absolutely stunningly played by Alice de Lencquesaing, whose father also acts in the film as an upper-class pedophile) both reach very different but very intense peaks of emotion.

Perhaps the film's secret strength is the way the procedural structure's gallery of abuse moves us, subtly, into a way of thinking shared by policemen in this situation. Late in the film, Maiwenn's character - a documentary photographer - wakes up and casually starts taking photos of passersby from her apartment's balcony. The camera scans from person to person and family to family, and we notice ourselves assuming that every image of each stranger is hiding an abuse case. It is an excellent moment that stands out from this fascinating but inconsistent film.

[hearthesilence]

I saw Your Sister's Sister. Never saw Humpday so this was my first exposure to Lynn Shelton. For the most part, it wasn't bad - frothy and lightweight in the way it handled everything, but usually charming and amusing. But for the last act, it went on automatic pilot, going through the motions to ensure the tidiest happy ending possible. So much that the last moment - which I won't "spoil" - felt useless. A friend of mine didn't like it either and asked me, "how do you feel about those type of endings?" I said it depends and compared this one to A Separation, which also closed in open-ended fashion. With Your Sister's Sister, there were no stakes, no tension, no point. Regardless of the outcome, you knew what was going to happen and everything was going to be juuuuuuuuuuust fine.

Anyway, Tribeca's really got a thing for movies about hipster characters. Nothing wrong with that, but when that's virtually all you see on screen from move-to-movie, it gets old real fast.

[ianthemovie]

I've got tickets to Polisse and Your Sister's Sister at this week's Boston Film Fest, so I'll be checking both out. Nice to get some advance word on them. I chose to see Polisse largely out of a sense of obligation (winner at Cannes, etc.), not out of any special interest in the material, so it's good to hear that it's engrossing.

[hearthesilence]

FWIW, same friend saw Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz based on my own "recommendation." (I basically gave her a list of five or six films that had a measure of good word-of-mouth somewhere.) She HATED it.

Andrew O'Hehir of Salon.com reported that it was possibly the most polarizing film at last year's TIFF, but he liked it a lot, and I heard qualified praise elsewhere that usually singled out Williams and Rogen's performances as being the best things about the film. I also heard that it could be very cloying, and the examples cited by some viewers made me reluctant to check it out myself.

[goalieboy82]

dark shadows looks interesting. will wait to see it on dvd. remember watching reruns of it on the sci fi channel when it was on there (along with my favorite show, mst3k).

[ianthemovie]

I thought I would weigh in on a few of the more memorable films I saw this past weekend at IFF Boston.

Julia Loktev's The Loneliest Planet - probably my favorite of the festival and could very well end up being one of the best of the year for me. Stunning use of long takes and very, very minimal dialogue make this slow going, but as you settle into its rhythm it becomes fascinating. There's a rather sudden dramatic shift at one point, after which the relationships between the three characters (a pair of engaged hikers and their guide) get even more interesting. An exquisitely subtle film. The editor was also in attendance and gave a very chill, entertaining Q&A afterward. Highly recommended.

Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights - had been eagerly anticipating this because I enjoyed Fish Tank and also love the Bronte novel. Arnold's take is a welcome change from the usual tepid costume drama with lots of mannered dialogue, tasteful symphonic score, etc. There's very little dialogue, no music, and the whole thing is shot in handheld--a nice effect, though it gets to be a bit much by the end. The first half, when the characters are children, is very strong. You get the sense that Arnold is trying to make this material as raw, realistic, and visceral as any modern-day story--i.e., to take a very "indie" approach to this literary classic. For the most part she succeeds (I found this much more interesting than last year's film of Jane Eyre).

Bryan Wizemann's Think Of Me - this won the Jury Prize for Best Film, which seemed a bit much to me; it's a good film, well-scripted and very well-acted, but not groundbreaking cinema, per se. The best thing in it is probably Lauren Ambrose, playing against type as a down-on-her-luck single mom living outside of Las Vegas. Dylan Baker is also very good in a key supporting part. Ambrose's performance is great; it's the kind of turn you could see getting an Independent Spirit Award nomination.

V/H/S - very entertaining horror anthology, with five segments by different directors, each made to look like found footage. Genuinely scary in parts, and also very funny--this played really well at a late-night screening. Vastly better, I thought, than The Cabin in the Woods. Lots of fun.

I also checked out (among some other things) Polisse and Your Sister's Sister, which users have already commented on...I mostly agree with puxzkkz's comments on the former and hearthesilence's comments on the latter. Both are entertaining; neither is a masterpiece. I could see Your Sister's Sister being something of a break-out hit; it's less mumblecore-y and more mainstream than Lynn Shelton's previous film Humpday, and the acting (especially Rosemarie Dewitt) is really good. Audience response seemed very enthusiastic. Meanwhile, the other Rosemarie Dewitt film I checked out, Nobody Walks (co-written by Lena Dunham, FWIW) struck me as straight-to-Sundance-Channel fare, if that makes sense.

[Alan Smithee]

Day Night Day Night is an overlooked gem. I think in the midst of the minimalism of Brown Bunny, Van Sant and the emergence of Serra people unfortunately didn't give this the proper attention. Being a woman might have something to do with it.

[ianthemovie]

Haven't seen Day Night Day Night, so I can't say how this compares.

@ Franco:

Spoiler

I can't say that the last twenty minutes bothered me much. I really hadn't expected that from the guide; he didn't strike me as a sleazy cliche earlier in the film, nor does he seem to become one afterward, so I felt that was a plot choice that came about naturally and didn't feel obvious. I dunno. If they had actually slept together and then there had been further fall-out between the engaged couple or something, it would have bugged me. As it is, I didn't have a problem with it.

[MichaelB]

I've just been taking the temperature of current Polish cinema at this year's Gdynia Film Festival, with the following results. Some of these are 2011 releases, but I believe all were completed after March 2011 - and hardly any have screened outside Poland yet (realistically, most probably won't).

Being Like Deyna (Być jak Kazimierz Deyna, d. Anna Wieczur-Bluszcz)

Kazimierz Deyna is one of the legendary Polish footballers (naturally, I'd never heard of him going in), but this film is about a young man, born in 1977 on the day that Deyna scored his most famous goal (and therefore named Kazimierz after him), who grows up through the late communist and early capitalist years without much idea of what to do with his life, but he's constantly urged by his football-mad father to "be like Deyna". It's a pretty bog-standard coming-of-age tale with enough quirky aspects to keep things ticking over, and even a touch of magical realism as Kazio's father goes into business selling white socks that seem to have aphrodisiac powers (however ludicrous that sounds). I also liked Kazio's grandfather, loudly and defiantly listening to Radio Free Europe before 1989 - but it's a film of nicely observed details rather than a particularly gripping narrative. (For the record, I saw it with a very enthusiastic audience, so may well have missed some of the better jokes). (Not in competition)

80 Million (80 milionów, d. Waldemar Krzystek)

One of the stronger films in the festival, its title refers to the true story about a group of Solidarity leaders pre-emptively withdrawing all the union's funds (10 million 8-zloty membership fees = 80 million złotys) in cash after receiving a tip-off that the government is going to freeze their assets, and then they have to come up with various elaborate ways of both hiding it and converting it into comparatively inflation-proof dollars. But this is merely the central storyline of a fascinating reconstruction of the period from August 1980 to early 1982 when Solidarity activists ran rings round an increasingly unpopular government, which finally sent in the tanks in December '81 to impose martial law (the end credits include an account of the jail sentences handed out to the film's real-life counterparts). The film is particularly pointed when it comes to the various acts of civil disobedience committed by ordinary citizens, from casual passers-by up to the local Archbishop.

Elles (d. Małgorzata Szumowska)

This had already opened in Britain to a distinctly tepid reception, and it's easy to see why. It's not a bad idea in itself: a rather uptight middle-aged journalist (Juliette Binoche) decides to interview two students who pay their way via prostitution, in the process discovering things about her own sexuality that have clearly lain dormant for much of her adult life. But despite a handful of quirky observations that reminded me that director Malgoska Szumowska also made the distinctly superior 33 Scenes from Life a couple of years ago, it's pretty much by the numbers: Binoche struggles with a badly underwritten role, while the two younger women spend much of the time getting their kit off for assorted clients - almost certainly the reason why this got British distribution and the earlier film didn't. (Being in French rather than Polish also helped). Krystyna Janda has a cameo as the Polish student's mother, who accidentally stumbles upon her daughter's fetishistically high heels and double-headed metal dildo when looking for something else, but this is one of many scenes that fizzles out inconclusively.

The Fifth Season of the Year (Piąta Pora Roku, d. Jerzy Domaradzki)

A Polish romantic comedy, a wildly popular genre domestically that's normally about as appealing to me as the development of pronounced buboes. But this turned out to be distinctly above average, largely because the two lead characters were in their sixties. She's a very recent widow, determined to dispose of her husband's ashes in a dignified manner, teaches classical piano and singing and regards pigeons as vermin. He's a retired Silesian miner who plays trumpet in a nightclub, has a reputation with the ladies but prefers his racing pigeons. For various reasons, he ends up driving her across Poland to the sea. Will they overcome their seemingly unbridgeable differences? Well, it's that kind of film - but it's a lot subtler and more wistful than the overtly slapstick opening would suggest, and it's the first Polish romantic comedy that I've seen where I haven't wanted to strangle at least one of the leads by the end. The acting helps enormously: Marian Dziędziel has long been one of my favourite elderly Polish reprobates, while Ewa Wiśniewska is a suitably prim foil. (Not in competition)

In a Bedroom (W sypialni, d. Tomasz Wasilewski)

This starts off very promisingly indeed as a quasi-Hitchcockian mystery about a woman who picks up men via sleazy internet ads, persuades them to take her to their homes or a hotel room, then drugs them. But instead of robbing them blind, Edyta luxuriates in the various different environments, slipping out just before dawn without touching a thing - until, inevitably, the drugs don't work on one of her intended 'victims' and things start to get emotionally convoluted. I'd like to give this another look in a less pressurised environment, because while the second half didn't do much for me I'm quite prepared to admit that this may be down to festival ennui (it was something like the fourth film I'd seen that day in very quick succession). Certainly, the central scenario, wherein Edyta tries out different lifestyles in the way that she might try on clothes and shoes, is markedly more original from a psychological standpoint than many of the other films in the festival.

In Darkness (W ciemności, d. Agnieszka Holland)

This has already opened in English-speaking countries (it got to the last five of 2012's Best Foreign Film Oscar nominations), and I've already reviewed it for Sight & Sound here and have little to add to that except to note that it was the Gdynia competition's big winner, picking up Best Film, Director, Actor (Robert Więckiewicz), Actress (Agnieszka Grochowska), Cinematography, Production Design, Costumes, Editing and Make-Up, a tally none of the other films came anywhere near. Deservedly so, I reckon: although I'd have loved it if a low-budget debut by a complete unknown had seriously challenged the film with by far the biggest budget and most experienced director, I can't really pretend that it happened.

Man, Chicks are Just Different (Baby są jakieś inne, d. Marek Koterski)

Well, if you fancy spending an entire feature film mostly trapped in a car with a couple of loudmouthed misogynists who proceed to work their way through just about every anti-feminist talking point in obsessive detail, this is clearly perfect for you. There were several moments when it seemed as though it was going to develop into something more interesting than just an impotent rant (when the car crashes into an elderly pedestrian, she picks up a broomstick, snarls at the drivers and flies off), but Bertrand Blier was making films more or less exactly like this 30-40 years ago with Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere, and usually with rather more brio - though in fairness, I strongly suspect that the dialogue was considerably wittier and richer than the subtitles were letting on (at least going from the belly laughs elsewhere in the auditorium).

Manhunt (Obława, d. Marcin Krzyształowicz)

A low-key but gripping WWII drama, largely set in and around a forest encampment, in which a Polish partisan attempts to find out which of his colleagues has been tipping off the Gestapo with troop movements and other vital details. The flashback structure took a bit of time to get used to, as it's initially used without any warning, but its purpose becomes clear as previously withheld details are gradually laid bare. It's also very strong on the survivalist details: how to prepare soup based purely on natural forest ingredients (toadstools are secreted for more sinister purposes later on), and what to do about toothache when there's no possible way of seeing a legitimate dentist. (This won the Silver Lion, or second prize).

My Father's Bike (Mój rower, d. Piotr Trzaskalski)

After an elderly man's wife walks out on him, his son and grandson team up with him to try to get her back - though this is something of a narrative MacGuffin, as the film is primarily about them getting to know each other again after a long estrangement and burying various hatchets (not in each other's heads, though this wouldn't be surprising at times when things get really heated). Just to make their contrasting personalities really really obvious, grandad is into jazz, dad is a renowned classical pianist and his son is into hip-hop, which alone triggers lots of arguments, as does the combination of grandad's incontinent dog and dad's expensive car. It felt more schematic in retrospect than it came across on screen: in particular, a climax involving a classical orchestra's spontaneous performance of an Acker Bilk tune is notionally corny as hell but it packed a surprisingly powerful punch in practice. (The film won the competition's Best Screenplay prize).

Secret (Sekret, d. Przemysław Wojcieszek)

I'd previously been impressed by director Wojcieszek's Made in Poland, but this really didn't grab me at all: it felt overstretched even at 85 minutes, and I get the distinct impression that the abstract chapter headings (based, for some reason, on Madonna song titles) and a recurring sequence of fish being prepared in unnaturally speeded-up motion were added in post-production to pad things out. My Polish viewing companion also pointed out that there's no way a conservative Pole of advanced years would simply accept the fact that his grandson is a transvestite and almost certainly gay dancer without saying something. It's basically a three-hander, the third being a woman who says little and whose function is never really explained (she seems to be a friend of the dancer). The title refers to the fact that the grandfather has a dark wartime secret involving a couple of Jews who disappeared in mysterious circumstances, but this isn't developed to any narratively satisfying extent. Certainly in terms of mise-en-scène, this was one of the more distinctive films I saw in Gdynia, but that's not necessarily a recommendation in itself.

Supermarket (d. Maciej Żak)

The opening scenes are set in a prison, which made me wonder if the title was a metaphor - but no: we then flash back to the scenes that led to the prison visit, and the rest of the film is indeed set in a large supermarket. It's New Year's Eve, a celebrity is visiting, the manager is completely paranoid and orders his security staff to crack down on the smallest infraction, saying that if anything's missing by the end of the day, he won't renew the security firm's contract. So when a jeweller has his car broken into and the battery stolen and goes into the supermarket to buy a new one, absent-mindedly eating the bar of chocolate he was intending to pay for in order to relieve his stress... well, that's when things start to go horribly wrong. Much of it is staged as a suspense thriller, and it also works pretty well as a character study: the most likeable of the security guards is also, inevitably, the least effective - and his fearsome stepfather is in charge of the security team, which doesn't help. It gets a bit implausibly melodramatic towards the end, but the first 80% is very good indeed.

Women's Day (Dzień kobiet, d. Maria Sadowska)

Longstanding supermarket cashier Halina (Katarzyna Kwiatkowska, excellent) is promoted to branch manager, and immediately finds that her loyalties are stretched well past breaking point as head office asks her not only to rationalise the staff (i.e. fire old friends) but also fiddle the timesheets and other evidence of dodgy cost-cutting. Naturally, things go horribly wrong, and Halina finds herself fired - whereupon she takes the presumably fictitious Motylek (Butterfly) chain to court to try to expose the way they exploit their staff, a scenario that would work in almost any developed country but has particular resonance in a post-Communist one: before 1989, the jobs may have been shit, but at least they were secure. All of which is very watchable indeed, but the script over-eggs things by giving Halina an impossible number of problems: a mother with cancer, a daughter who bunks off school, an affair with her superior (whose wife has MS), problems with the bank and bailiffs, etc. - all of which distract attention from a central story that already has more than enough meat on it.

You Are God (Jesteś Bogiem, d. Leszek Dawid)

Essentially, this is the Polish Control, being a biopic of Piotr Luszcz, aka Magik, the lead rapper of Polish hip-hop trio Paktofonika, whose short life followed a similar trajectory to that of Ian Curtis. Unlike the earlier film, though, I didn't know any of this going in, and the first half in particular is a genuinely fascinating study of how a distinctively Polish form of hip-hop developed in the 1990s (the subtitler rose impressively to a very considerable translation challenge). If it gets a bit predictable towards the end, that's partly the fault of the actual events on which the film was based, though one scene in which Magik hugs a fan at her request, observed live by his soon-to-be-estranged wife via CCTV and triggering a divorce, was horribly clunky - it may well have happened like that, but it felt much too pat. Still, excellent performances all round, and a memorably strong soundtrack made this one of the better films in the main festival competition: it duly went on to win Best Debut and the three leads got prizes too (Marcin Kowalczyk won Best Acting Debut for Magik, while Dawid Ogrodnik and Tomasz Schuchardt shared Best Supporting Actor).

I also saw:

• Aftermath (Pokłosie, d. Władysław Pasikowski)
• Crulic: The Path to Beyond (Droga na drugą stronę, d. Anca Damian)
• Shameless (Bez wstydu, d. Filip Marczewski)

...but without subtitles so I can't give them an especially fair hearing. That said, I'd like to give the first two another look if an English-friendly version surfaces: in particular, Aftermath deserves points for tackling one of contemporary Polish culture's big taboos (post-war Polish anti-semitism) in the guise of a thriller about two brothers who uncover uncomfortable truths about their home village and the past of its older inhabitants. Interestingly, the competition jury singled out this and Secret for their courage in tackling difficult topics - which I suspect translated as "...albeit not necessarily all that successfully as films", since neither won prizes.

[antnield]

Being Like Deyna (Być jak Kazimierz Deyna, d. Anna Wieczur-Bluszcz)

Kazimierz Deyna is one of the legendary Polish footballers (naturally, I'd never heard of him going in)...

The end credits to John Huston's Escape to Victory (which I'd memorised as a young 'un having watched the film so many times).

[colinr0380]

Thank you for the write ups Michael, and for braving the world of Polish romantic comedies!

That said, I'd like to give the first two another look if an English-friendly version surfaces: in particular, Aftermath deserves points for tackling one of contemporary Polish culture's big taboos (post-war Polish anti-semitism) in the guise of a thriller about two brothers who uncover uncomfortable truths about their home village and the past of its older inhabitants. Interestingly, the competition jury singled out this and Secret for their courage in tackling difficult topics - which I suspect translated as "...albeit not necessarily all that successfully as films", since neither won prizes.

Would these films bear comparison to something like the German film The Nasty Girl? Your write up of Aftermath makes it sound quite similar plot-wise.

[MichaelB]

Thank you for the write ups Michael, and for braving the world of Polish romantic comedies!

Actually, only one was a romantic comedy and it was one of the better films that I saw - though you're right that it's one of the major commercial genres in Polish cinema at the moment.

Would these films bear comparison to something like the German film The Nasty Girl? Your write up of Aftermath makes it sound quite similar plot-wise.

Well, it's over twenty years since I saw The Nasty Girl and of course I saw Aftermath without subtitles, so I'm reluctant to draw too many direct comparisons - but yes, they both seem to be attempting something very similar in that they're about investigations into the past that uncover evidence of long-suppressed collective guilt.

Though Aftermath is in many ways potentially even more interesting because while the Nazi period in Germany was hardly unknown by 1990, the subject of specifically Polish anti-Semitism has been largely kept under wraps until recently - when I met Interrogation director Ryszard Bugajski a few years ago, he told me that he'd been trying to make a film about the Kielce pogrom, one of the most shameful incidents in postwar Polish history, but unsurprisingly he couldn't find anyone in Poland prepared to fund it, and presumably still can't. I remember Bugajski telling me that Polish films preferred to regard Poles as unambiguous heroes or unambiguous victims - anything more complicated becomes much more problematic.

But there are signs that things are changing - In Darkness is one of the most explicit films to date about the often considerable differences between Poles, Ukrainians and Jews during WWII, and within each group in terms of background and social class - Jews in Lwów spoke Polish, Ukrainian, German and Yiddish, not always mutually intelligibly. Although the script was written in English, Agnieszka Holland insisted on people speaking authentic languages and dialects to underscore these differences, and much of the film is subtitled even in Poland. So while we previously had a tendency towards Poles and Jews being lumped together as generic victims, their portrayal is now becoming more nuanced (Leopold Socha, the Polish protagonist of In Darkness, is a borderline anti-Semite despite going on to become a mini-Schindler), and I suspect this will continue.

Incidentally, the one film that everyone was talking about at the festival hasn't been finished yet - but Andrzej Wajda's Wałęsa is likely to be the highest-profile Polish film in ages when it opens, regardless of its artistic merits. There's such huge automatic interest in the notion of Wajda tackling Lech Wałęsa, not least because both men have been close friends and colleagues for over three decades - which may hamper the film, but apparently Wałęsa has deliberately chosen to have nothing to do with it, and when I met its star Robert Więckiewicz a couple of months ago he told me that it's definitely a warts-and-all portrait. Which bodes reasonably well, and although many of my Polish friends are ultra-pessimistic about it I can't help but remind myself that Wajda's last three features (The Revenge, Katyń, Sweet Rush) were all pretty good even if they didn't match up to the really great Wajda masterpieces of the past. So fingers crossed - it's all but guaranteed to play Kinoteka in March next year even if it doesn't get UK/US distribution, but I'd have thought an English-subtitled Blu-ray some time in 2013 was a cast-iron certainty.

Oh, and there's one absolute taboo in current Polish cinema - a Polish friend told me that a project critical of Pope John Paul II has no chance at all of getting Polish funding right now! (There've been a handful of biopics, but by all accounts they're all hagiographies, even the one by Krzysztof Zanussi). In Poland, they've pretty much canonised him already - they regard him (with considerable justification) as the single most important figure in terms of overthrowing Communism, and it's certainly true that if the Vatican cardinals had picked someone else in October 1978, the history of Poland in the 1980s might have been very different: the papal visit in 1979, and the colossal crowds it generated, was one of the things that emboldened the Solidarity activists when their movement became a reality from August 1980. One of the things that 80 Million emphasises is that prior to 1989 the Catholic Church was regarded by the Polish government almost as a subversive organisation (albeit one they were powerless to oppose), so it's little surprise that the Solidarity activists end up turning to the Archbishop for help - and even less surprise that they receive it.

[hearthesilence]

Anyone know how Israel's foreign policy on Iran came up in an interview for Battleship? (Or that Peter Berg was...well, watch the clip.)

[cdnchris]

Like the comments there suggest cocaine seems likely. (Is that making a comeback?)

I must commend him for being alert enough to still fit in a comment about Battleship into the middle of whatever-the-hell that was.

[flyonthewall2983]

Men In Black III is getting surprisingly good reviews. Ebert said it's better than the first.

[cdnchris]

I fear it may become a schtick in the film, but I was won over by Brolin's Tommy Lee Jones impression in the trailers and am tempted to see it.

[LQ]

I got around to seeing Bernie, and had I not already known of the real story behind it, would've probably taken the film at face value as a Christopher Guest-style mocumentary (until the end, I suppose). Although it did feel odd at times laughing at what really is a macabre and tragic story, it does inherently contain some blackly farcical elements! Linklater's penchant for populating his films with a blend of actors and non-actors meshed especially well with the thematic material here; including some of the citizens from the small Texas town in which this all went down in the talking head segments that dotted the film furthered some really thoughtful ideas about performance and perception, and Jack Black's (excellent) portrayal of Bernie serves to cement the 'fictional' version of the man that the actual townsfolk still hold as real. Overall, a pretty impressive film, and a truly strange story.

If you want a compelling read, the NY Times published an article in April on the story, from the perspective of Marjorie Nugent's nephew. How My Aunt Marge Ended Up in Deep Freeze.

[sickofsickness]

Saw THE RAID: REDEMPTION early this morning at Lincoln Cinemas on 68th St. (pretty packed for an 11:30AM showing) and, if you can ignore the so-obviously-telegraphed-they-don't-work last act twists that were meant to shock but don't, it's one of the most satisfying ass-kicking action/martial arts flicks I've seen in a long time. Yayan Ruhian's Mad Dog steals the movie; whenever he's on you cheer even though he's the villain's henchman, but damn if he doesn't live by a 'code' that makes him do things that in any other movie would seem stupid, but here you totally buy what Mad Dog does to get his kicks. Iko Uwais is decent as Rama (if he has a passable-enough English Iko might actually become a direct-to-video action star) but it's his fighting and not his acting you'll walk away from this remembering. There's at least three good-to-excellent fight /action sequences, the premise is ripe for an American remake (please God, no!) and the movie is a model of how to maximize limited locations/sets (it doesn't take a genius to figure out they're fighting/walking through the same corridors/rooms, but the production design is good-enought to disguise the limitations) on a shoestring. I didn't like the rap song during the end credits; feels like something Sony added to the US release, but I guess that's the studio thinking it can hook young black filmgoers to sample the flick. If it's playing near you don't hesitate; "The Raid: Redemption" is worth seeing in a theater for the collective reactions of the crowd as they go 'Oh shit!' simultaneously about a dozen times.

I thought this movie was deliciously wonderful, and I cannot stop telling people about it. I heard in an interview with Edwards that not only is he working on a sequel (he insinuated a true sequel like Terminator 2, not just a carbon copy rehash) but sadly, to probably everyone's dismay, Americans have already bought the rights for a remake, even though it is totally unnecessary...as if people saw it for the story.