The Lunch Movie

From Friday, April 11, 2008
Directed by Roland Joffe, written by Robert Bolt, starring Jeremy Irons, Robert DeNiro, Aidan Quinn and Liam Neeson,and featuring an epic score by Ennio Morricone.

In the 18th century Spain and Portugal vied for land in South America. Father Gabriel (Irons) a Jesuit missionary from Spain, ventures deep into the Amazon rainforest to convert Indians and protect them from Portuguese slave traders. One of those traders, Rodrigo Mendoza (DeNiro) is an outlaw unable to return to Portugal. Mendoza is offered asylum and salvation by Father Gabriel if he will lay down his sword and help build a Mission in the jungle. When Spain loses the Mission’s land to Portugal, Gabriel and Mendoza defy the Church and both their nations over the fate of the Indians.

Never mind Christopher Menges’ Oscar winning cinematography. Never mind Morricone’s BAFTA and Golden Globe winning score. Never mind the litany of other nominations or that THE MISSION won the Golden Palm at Cannes. 41 minutes into this film DeNiro captures, without a line of dialogue, a true spiritual epiphany. It’s exhausting and beautiful and I promise you will never see anything like it in any other movie. Even if the rest of the movie sucked, this moment would justify its existence … but the rest of it is pretty impressive too!

It’ll finish Wednesday,
Love, Jim
TRAILER

AFTER THOUGHT FROM 7.27.10
I am not a Christian. I am a hopeful agnostic who’s faith has long been shaken more by men who claim to speak for God than by anything I read in The Bible. The story of THE MISSION is an experience that strengthens my faith by helping me define it in a more positive and less judgmental way. There is a sparseness to the filmmaking that aids the audience’s focus on the story. Joffe refrains from elaborate camera set-ups, allowing the beauty of the Brazilian and Argentine rivers and forests to appear as they would to anyone entering them for their first time. Though Morricone’s score occasionally soars with a full choir, it is rendered most often with an oboe and a pan flute. The presence of those two simple instruments is so natural that one could be forgiven for thinking “yes, of course, this must be what the wind sounds like there!” It is through having all these elements in such perfect concert that moments like Mendoza’s personal enlightenment can become a transcendental experience for the entire audience.

Saturday April 24, 2010 at the Somerville Theater, Somerville, MA.

SOUL KITCHEN Directed & Co-Written by Fatih Akin, starring Adam Bousdoukos, Mortiz Bleibtreu, Anna Bederke, Pheline Roggan & Birol Unel.

Within the past year or so, I don’t recall if he was on a talk show or a stand-up special, Robin Williams recounted a conversation with a German interviewer. When asked his thoughts on why Germany does not have the comedic culture of some other nations, Williams answered “Maybe it’s because you killed all the funny people.” After I stopped laughing it occurred to me that I have not seen many German comedies. I hope this is due more to their thin distribution in the U.S. than a lack of any good German comedies. Fatih Akin, the writer/director of SOUL KITCHEN, was born in Hamburg to parents who had emigrated from Turkey in the 1960′s. If this film is any evidence, Germany has a joyful mine of multigenerational and multiethnic culture waiting to be explored.

SOUL KITCHEN follows the comical daily grind endured by a young Greek immigrant named Zinos. Soul Kitchen is a broken down cafe Zinos runs out of a freight warehouse on the wrong side of the train tracks from Hamburg. If it weren’t for a small group of regulars (including one friendly drunk living as a squatter in the warehouse’s loading dock) Zinos would barely be able to keep his doors open. Zinos’ girlfriend suddenly decides to move to China, his recently paroled brother shows up on his doorstep looking for a zero-responsibility job to satisfy a parole work requirement, and a chance encounter with an old friend has him pondering selling his property to satisfy his debts. A lesser man might give up his dream of running a great restaurant, but Zinos makes a last ditch effort at that dream when he hires an enigmatic knife-throwing chef with a questionable past.

If it sounds scattered, it isn’t really. This is the same motley crew banding together to save a place they love story that has been the subject of good movies (THE BLUES BROTHERS) and not so good movies (HARLEY DAVIDSON & THE MARLOBORO MAN). Put this one in the same column with Jake & Elwood. Avoiding stereotypes of Germans, Greeks or any other nationality, Fatih Akin and co-writer Adam Bousdoukos (who also plays Zinos) populate their movie with an eccentric crowd of thugs and foodies, clubbers and rockers, land schemers and unqualified providers of holistic medicine. A movie with such diversity in its characters often becomes about the forces that divide them. Bousdoukos heads a pitch perfect cast from across eastern Europe, playing characters united by the same thing everybody in the global economic crisis wants: the ability to earn a living by your own work and ingenuity.

I’ve read some IMDB comments written by Europeans who suspect that some jokes may get lost in translation. If that is true, then I would probably have a heart attack from laughing if I got every single joke. I laughed more in SOUL KITCHEN than I did in any movie in recent memory, and even when I wasn’t laughing, I had a big dopey smile on my face. This is a film made by people who love their city, their countries, food, rock-n-roll, and the intrinsic joy of surviving another day against a sea of troubles. It seems ripe for an American remake, but I hope this does not happen; rather than straining and pouring it into a weaker concoction, this sort of lightening in a bottle is best passed around and shared at full strength.

From Tuesday March 29, 2007
CoWritten-n-Directed by Albert Magnoli, starring Prince & The Revolution, Apollonia6, Morris Day & The Time, Jerome Benton, Billy Sparks, Olga Karlatos and Clarence Williams III.

Yeah, the acting is laughable (hence Apollionia Kotero’s Razzie nomination).
Yeah, the story is thin … and also pretty laughable (brooding boy meets pretty girl meets funnier boy!).
Yeah, it’s loaded with rock cliches (a battle of the bands? Who’da thunk?! And your parents just don’t understand?! No way!)
Who cares?!
In all the years of the Lunch Movie, we finally have a TV big enough, clear enough and loud enough to do justice to the Oscar winning soundtrack and explosive club performances. Since those make up more than 1/2 the movie, I can promise most of your time will be well-spent.

I’ll finish 2morro
Love, Jim

AFTER THOUGHT from 6.30.10

From Sunday May 30, 2010 at Cinespia at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery

Cinespia, the organizers of summer screenings at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, send out an email each Spring to solicit fans requests for the coming season. Since 2005, PURPLE RAIN has been on my list. Each year I request fewer titles, hoping to give greater emphasis to the ones I hope to see. When I left Los Angeles in 2009, I promised my friends I would return if ever Cinespia played PURPLE RAIN. This Spring I requested a single title. A few weeks later, my friend Sahara told me that it’s put-up-or-shut-up time. Yes, I flew over 6,000 miles round-trip to see a movie I’ve already seen, and already own. And it was worth it.

I have always been a sucker for stories of redemption. PURPLE RAIN is unusual among these sorts of movies in that, if you simply take your cues from dialogue and events, you won’t get much of a sense of epiphany. The script has its shortcomings in revealing the stages of The Kid’s transformation. If you are paying attention to the total experience though, moments that would have been shortchanged by the script are made up for both in Magnoli’s direction and Prince’s songs.

During it’s initial release, PURPLE RAIN did not escape controversy for what some saw as glorifying violence against women. This concern was echoed by a few friends of mine who saw the movie for their first time at Cinespia. Why, isn’t this after all a movie about musicians!?! Aren’t they all supposed to be junkies, especially in the 80′s?! Their vice is booze, weed, blow, horse, whatever else they’ve been getting their hands on between Preminger’s THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM, through Eastwood’s BIRD and Stone’s THE DOORS, and as recently as CRAZY HEART.

By rejecting the stereotypical movie-musician’s deadliest sins of Greed or Gluttony and imbuing The Kid (Prince) with a mix of Wrath and Pride, screenwriter William Blinn and co-writer/director Albert Magnoli have also changed the journey The Kid’s transformation takes. Rather than confronting demons within him, he needs to confront his inability to face anyone else. I suspect that scenes of men hitting women would have drawn less scorn had they been in a standard drama about a seemingly regular, i.e. white or non-interracial, Main Street family coping with some terrible secret. Co-writer Blinn created STARSKY & HUTCH, raising television violence to unprecedented levels in 1975. He had earned a pass dealing with domestic abuse before by setting it in police or crime-focused dramas.

A more obvious film would have made a conversational point of the degrees of separation The Kid uses to distance himself from any real emotional or spiritual connection. Magnoli instead illustrates this with repeated use of masks and obscured faces. Look at how often The Kid hides behind one mask or another: the moment he meets Apollonia, on go his over-sized mirrored Lennon-specs. Sure, he thinks he’s being cool and mysterious, but with the shot placing you in Apollonia’s shoes, it’s just friggin’ creepy. The same shades reappear when Jill, a cocktail waitress smitten with The Kid, tries to hand him a cassette of a song written by two women in The Kid’s band The Revolution.

In a sequence as psychologically abusive as any of the physical moments, during his performance of the songs “Computer Blue” and “Darling Nikki,” The Kid taunts Apollonia from stage with his eyes hidden behind a black lace mask. If that is not enough evidence, then I refer you to the epic cast of clowns, harlequins and painted eyes adorning the basement where The Kid lives. Seeing the movie on a large screen for the first time in 25 years showed me two mask-related details that do not play as well on video: Jill’s trembling reflection in The Kid’s shades when she hands him the cassette, and three portraits of beautiful tragic and lonely Marilyn Monroe among the faces in The Kid’s basement lair.

Magnoli keeps more than masks up his sleeve. He manages to exemplify an epic warrior’s journey in a single shot during the montage accompanying “When Doves Cry.” On video you would easily enough spot The Kid riding his purple Honda bike through a concrete underpass tunnel. It takes a massive screen image to spot the details on the sides of the tunnel: graffiti on one side bears the circle/cross female symbol, and the other the circle/arrow male symbol. On one side is spray-painted “Love,” the other “God,” and The Kid needs to ride through all of it to reach his destination. It doesn’t get any more pronounced than that without someone breaking down in a tearful monologue.

We are told by several characters that The Kid’s music only makes sense to him. If you can separate the background songs on the soundtrack from the songs The Revolution performs on stage, you will see what those other voices were saying, and you will also see Prince’s illumination of The Kid’s journey. The Revolution’s opening song “Let’s Go Crazy” is an ode to fun and an anthem of irresponsibility. The next time we see The Revolution, “The Beautiful Ones,” is loaded with wounded suffering and mocking jealousy. If you have any doubt that The Kid has hit a personal rock bottom and lost all sight of himself, I refer you to the aforementioned “Computer Blue”/”Darling Nikki” sequence. It follows a dreary moment where The Kid tries to confront his father for abusing his mother, and instead finds his father drunkenly playing a piano in the basement. “Never get married,” his father admonishes him as we segue into “Computer Blue,” wherein The Kid’s guitar solo — listen carefully y’all — is exactly the same tune his father had been playing on the piano. Coincidence, or learned behavior from an abusive father to a growingly abusive son?

Stories of redemption only resonate when the character being redeemed hits rock bottom, realizes it, and then tries to change. I’ve already said too much about the first two acts. I don’t want to ruin the transcendental lyrics of the final set for the uninitiated, but I urge you to listen most closely to “I Would Die 4 U.” Balance that brief song against the opening “Let’s Go Crazy,” and then chart the course Prince, Magnoli and Blinn have taken you on. PURPLE RAIN is less than perfect, but I respect the hell out of it for trying to tell a more introspective story than often emerges from a Hollywood summer popcorn movie. I leave you with the thought that the photo above does not do justice to the amount of lighters, cellphones, sparklers and souls alight during the finale at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, and I wish you could have seen it

Friday, April 23 and Sunday, April 25, 2010 at the Somerville Theater, Somerville, MA.

WINTER’S BONE Directed & Co-Written by Debra Granik, starring Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Dale Dickey & William White.

When last we met, I noted that Film Noir was alive and kicking in Australia. After having a great time at the Independent Film Festival of Boston, I can happily report that it also looks pretty lively in the U.S. Whether as a period piece on a modest budget as THE KILLER INSIDE ME, or a low budget contemporary thriller like WINTER’S BONE, the desperate and dirty heart of Film Noir was beating in Somerville, Mass.

Based on Daniel Woodrell’s novel, WINTER’S BONE follows a young woman named Ree Dolly through the Ozark Mountains searching for her father, after learning he had put up the family home as collateral on a bail bond. With the county days away from forcing Ree, her younger brother and infant sister and their shut-in mother off their land, Ree is less concerned with whether her father is alive or dead than with simply locating him. We follow her through backroads and woodsheds once used for distilling moonshine but now given over to cooking methamphetamine. As the product has grown more dangerous, so have the producers, with not even blood-ties enough to keep Ree safe in her father’s world. Film noir has taken its fair share of decent hard-working characters across the tracks. This film replaces asphalt and shadows on the wrong side of town with agoraphobic wilderness.

I was unfamiliar with most of the cast of WINTER’S BONE. I wondered if some were not professional actors, so natural was this ensemble that you rarely catch them acting, only being. John Hawkes as Ree’s uncle Teardrop was my first hint that these are in fact seasoned professionals. Hawkes brings to Teardrop the same meticulously observed worn soul that he and another powerhouse ensemble offered on HBO’s DEADWOOD. He and Jennifer Lawrence (Ree Dolly) are both so strong that they could have shown each other up with award-baiting grandiosity. Instead they embrace how unusual their characters’ relationship is, and explore it for all the threats, concerns and defiance that it offers.

Deborah Granik’s script asks an awful lot of her cast. As a director she was impressively able to wrangle all those emotions and themes while making the most out of every location available to her. During the Q&A after the screening, she mentioned that Ree’s home is only seen from the front and left side, so that the back and right sides could double for another character’s home. Even more economical, that house is where one of the cast members actually lives! This sort of resourcefulness not only helps keep the budget down, it also lends a reality that could never have existed if a movie with ten times the budget had cleared away some trees and built the town they needed. When a movie looks, feels, smells and sounds as real as WINTER’S BONE, it is very easy to get lost in its web.

THE KILLER INSIDE ME Directed by Michael Winterbottom, starring Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson, Jessica Alba and Ned Beatty.

Jim Thompson’s 1952 novel THE KILLER INSIDE ME was previously filmed in 1976 with Stacey Keach as the murderous sheriff Lou Ford. Casey Affleck plays Ford in this year’s model, with Kate Hudson as his fiance Amy. Jessica Alba plays a hooker named Joyce with whom Ford falls in love after he is sent to run her out of town. The problem with Lou Ford, and a bigger problem for the women in his life, is that the has a head full of loose screws that will not allow him to accept the comforts of love for very long before he needs to destroy it.

Judging from the reactions I heard after the Somerville screening, and from what I’ve read about the audience response at Sundance earlier this year, THE KILLER INSIDE ME is on track to become the type of movie that people either love or hate. Semi-spoiler — Here is what most people hate about it: two scenes wherein Lou Ford punches, kicks and stomps a woman character, genuinely amusing himself with her suffering. These scenes prompted one of the organizers of IFFBoston to issue a warning before the film, noting that this is the first time in the Festival’s eight year history that they have made such a warning.

Here is what I loved about this movie: two scenes wherein Lou Ford commits unspeakable violence upon women are portrayed with absolutely blunt honesty. There is nothing cool about this, no cute quip delivered at the end of the scene, nothing glamorous or stylized to hint that you should be entertained by this. Let me be clear — I did not enjoy THE KILLER INSIDE ME, but in the same vein as HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER and IRREVERSIBLE, I respect it as well-made film. There is nothing cartoonish or over-the-top about this story. As such the violence, and the rage that precipitates it, are delivered unsparingly. This sort of violence in real life should prompt outrage. The violence of a character like Lou Ford being committed by an actor as generally likable as Casey Affleck could prompt always needed discussion of an uncomfortable issue.

Sadly, the knee-jerk reaction to scream for a bans and boycotts “to protect our children” (whose have no business seeing this movie to begin with!) will probably sidetrack any thoughtful examination. Sociopathic antiheroes have often reared their ugly heads in pulp novels by Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, James M. Cain and most recently James Ellroy. Film adaptations have tended to soften the rage of these characters, or even allow it to happen off screen. THE KILLER INSIDE ME is far from perfect, but it dares to go where most films won’t in allowing the story to be told from the point of view of a man the audience will truly dread.

Tuesday, April 20 at the Kendall Sq. Cinema, Cambridge, MA.

Directed by Nash Edgerton, starring David Roberts, Claire van der Boom, Anthony Hayes and Joel Edgerton.

If you put a gun to my head and gave me three seconds to tell you what my favorite film genre is, I’d probably say Film Noir. I was raised on some glorious science fiction and horror movies. I’ve given many hours to my affection for westerns and war movies. I’ve even developed an appreciation for a precious few romances and romantic comedies. But film noir, via THE MALTESE FALCON, was the genre that first bonded me with my father. This latest tale of the boulevard of broken dreams comes to us from Syndey, Australia.

The Edgerton Bros story concerns two staples of classic noir: an affair between married partners and a bag of money. Raymond and Carla are both married to other people, and both dream of running away with each other. When Carla spies her husband Greg hiding a small fortune in a duffel, she does not waste any time figuring out where or how he got it, she only sees an opportunity to put hers and Raymond’s dream into action. An effort to cover the adulterers’ tracks so they can blow town with Greg’s cash results in an accidental murder. The murder hatches scams on top of schemes, threats on top of blackmail, and creeping suspicion among the residents of a suburban lakeside community.

Many a noir has been knocked from the classic shelf by characters making completely ridiculous decisions for the sole purpose of pushing the story in a direction it did not want to go. THE SQUARE is all the more compelling because George and Carla, and everyone in their web, avoid those decisions. While your idea of a perfect murder may not include their plan, it is important to remember that murder was never part of their plan, it was an unintended consequence. From there, every move they make is reasonable within the context of desperate people running scared. You don’t notice the great feeling of buying a story hook-line-sinker as much as you’d notice the jarring shake of a movie that jolts you back to reality with an unbelievable twist. The Edgerton’s exemplary cast hits every paranoid note in the their air-tight script.

THE SQUARE has another feature that sets it above the vast majority of suspense thrillers, an element lacking in most movies of any genre, which is the possibility of chance. Suspense is destroyed in lesser movies once you realize that everything happens by someone’s design. Everything. One character or another is always in control. As soon as you know what each character wants, you can guess what will happen next, and the rest of the movie becomes a clock winding down to what you knew would happen from 10 minutes in. THE SQUARE makes use of my personal favorite device for throwing a monkey in this wrench: weather.

Rain is the uncontrollable element that drives THE SQUARE into directions no character could have taken it. Rain is a 100% believable wild card because everyone in the audience can relate to having it ruin their best-laid plans. If it sounds like I am making too much of this, go back and watch BODY HEAT and imagine it without the sweltering humid heat wave. Kenneth Branagh and Clint Eastwood are masters of deploying weather in their films. Other random occurrences push Raymond and Carla together, and pull them apart, but rain is so pervasive that nature itself almost becomes a character. If THE SQUARE is any evidence, Noir remains alive and well to bond future generations of movie nerds.

From Friday April 15, 2008

Directed by Lewis Allen, starring Frank Sinatra, Sterling Hayden, Nancy Gates and James Gleason.

Sinatra is John Baron, a World War 2 veteran and hit man hired to assassinate the President during a train stop in the sleepy desert town of Suddenly, CA. In choosing a vantage point to shoot from, Baron and his goon-squad take Ellen Benson (Gates) and her son hostage in their home. Can Sheriff Tod Shaw (Hayden) contain the violence that Baron threatens to bring to his town?

The elusiveness of the American Dream, even to veterans who fought for it, is a theme that elevates SUDDENLY above many Film Noirs of the era. That said, there’s still plenty of tough guys in hats threatening people, as in Sinatra sneering “The thing about killing you or her or him is that I wouldn’t be getting paid for it and I don’t like giving anything away for free.” Rumor has it Lee Harvey Oswald watched SUDDENLY a few weeks before assassinating President Kennedy. Maybe that’s true, maybe not, but Sinatra had SUDDENLY pulled from distribution along with THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE for many many years after November 1963.

It’ll finish Tuesday,
Love, Jim

AFTER THOUGHT from … 4.23.10
Frank Sinatra’s involvement in SUDDENLY is an example of what is missing from current star-driven movies. Fresh from his Supporting Actor Oscar for FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, he might have sought out a vanity project allowing him to play a cool hero, enhancing his already cool public image. Instead, like Kirk Douglas in DETECTIVE STORY or Lancaster and Curtis in SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, Sinatra plays a man who is at best an anti-hero, and at worst an outright villain. In the days before actors were “brands,” these guys looked for roles that were as different from their public persona as they were from their previous roles. Frank sought out what should have been merely a B-movie because it offered him a chance to show range. Well done, Chairman.

From Tuesday, April 17, 2008
Produced & Directed by Clint Eastwood, starring Clint, Freddie Jones, Ronald Lacey and Nigel Hawthorne, featuring a score by Maurice Jarre.

The Soviet Union redesigns their MIG-25 fighter jet into the MIG-31 Firefox. Among the advances: it flies 6 times the speed of sound, it’s invisible to radar, and it has a thought-controlled weapon system. The West grows nervous. What to do? Steal the prototype while it’s still in the testing phase! Now all we need is a pilot who can think in Russian! Someone get Clint on the horn!

FIREFOX not only came out during the Thatcher-n-Reagan vs. Brezhnev pinnacle of the Cold War, it was also released in the summer of 1982. 1982, as any proper nerd will tell you, is The Greatest Year In The History Of Nerd Cinema. FIREFOX holds is own among Clint movies, Cold War thrillers, and all the other fun that came out that year: E.T., Rocky 3, Star Trek 2: The Wrath Of Khan, Blade Runner, John Carpenter’s The Thing, The Dark Crystal, Creepshow, First Blood, Conan The Barbarian and Poltergeist — to name a few.

It’ll finish Friday.
Love, Jim

AFTER THOUGHT from 4.20.10
To miss FIREFOX is to miss the simplicity of The Cold War. Regardless of which side of the Iron Curtain you were on, you knew who “your” good guys were and who “their” bad guys were. We had this snappy little pass-time called “espionage” that was widely accepted as a nasty business in which sometimes a few spies would kill or be killed. To their governments, they were preserving a way of life, but to regular people they prevented far greater destruction via full-scale war.

I have read some comments on IMDB message boards-n-such where viewers were surprised by how quickly Mitchell Gant (Eastwood) signs onto his mission. Note to those folks: FIREFOX pre-dates Syd Field and every other false-hopes-to-starving-artists screenwriting tricks of the trade book you may have read. Once upon a time it was not necessary for a character to spend the entire first act twiddling their thumbs and filling us in on their happy home life until (inciting incident!) SOMETHING happens to wreck it (I’m lookin’ at you, Governator in COMMANDO).

FIREFOX is a cold-war espionage thriller. This type of film has not yet been granted the scholarly benefits that film noir has enjoyed for two generations, nor that grindhouse exploitation fun currently wallows in, but wait — their day will come. When it does, prepare to re-watch FIREFOX alongside THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR, GORKY PARK, TELEFON and a lot of other movies you’re either too young to have heard of or too old to realize were worth remembering back when you saw them. Either way, they will be as cool a gift as rediscovering noir with Richard Widmark or blaxploitation with Pam Grier. Trust me.

Thursday, April 1, 2010 at the Landmark Kendall Sq. Cinema, Cambridge, MA.

IT CAME FROM KUCHAR Directed by Jennifer M. Kroot, featuring George & Mike Kuchar, Atom Egoyan, Buck Henry and John Waters.

Before I saw this film, my only awareness of George and Mike Kuchar came from John Waters’ performance film THIS FILTHY WORLD, wherein he recalls his admiration for their films and their fast-n-loose shooting style. Jennifer M. Kroot’s documentary works both as a study of several different schools of film-making in the past 50 years and as a biography of two relentlessly creative twin brothers. If you are interested in intimate films about family relationships and/or unusual and engaging (read: kooky) personalities, you will be fascinated by these two Bronx-born lads. If you are interested in:
- Madison Ave advertising/industrial filmmaking and illustration
- Beatnik-era experimental short films
- Sirkian melodrama
- countercultural/psychedelic films and comicbooks
- drive-in horror and sci-fi movies
- gay films that made the rest of the U.S. aware of The Castro
- student films from “the film-school generation” to the present –
the Kuchars have tried their hand at all of them and more!

The requisite interviews are informative and enlightening, though the highlight is Buck Henry, whom we see hanging out with George rather than talking about him. The most fun and involving sequences follow George as he teaches film students at the San Francisco Art Institute. Kroot enables you to be a fly on the wall in the sort of chaotic go-for-broke class setting that will either make you yearn to go to film school, or be very glad that you chose to be an accountant.

AMER Written & Directed by Helene Cattet & Bruno Forzani, starring Marie Bos, Charlotte Eugene-Guibbaud, Delphine Brual, Bianca Maria D’Amato and Cassandra Foret.

Allow me to offer you a variation on the *Spoiler Alert* regarding AMER. I will not ruin the end, or any other surprises, but it is best that I warn you what state of mind you will need to enjoy this film. Had I seen it in the wrong mood, I expect I could have been bored or annoyed with it, or even found it pretentious. However, as this was a film festival, I came to it with as open a mind as I could manage. I made a conscious effort to connect with what these two directors were trying to share with me. In return I asked for something unexpected and unique. I was happily rewarded.

The paper-thin story focuses on three stages in the sexual awakening of a woman named Ana. We meet Ana first as a child of about 12 in a gothic mansion, then an adolescent on the Mediterranean coast, and finally as an adult returning to a dilapidated husk that had been her childhood home. Rather than expository dialogue, AMER focuses on Ana’s sensual memories, like the sound of a pocket watch chain and the stifling heat in a car with the windows up. The saturated sound design often threatens to become tedious; it is thankfully interrupted by a score of Ennio Morricone and other Italian exploitation maestros (lifted mostly from 1970′s films), in case you missed from the color and shadow drenched imagery that AMER is a valentine to Giallo.

AMER plays out as sort of an anthology film directed by a team whose previous films have all been shorts. The story might be more compelling if it were 15-20 minutes shorter, but as an overall experience, AMER is a sumptuously haunting 90 minutes.

Saturday March 27, 2010 at the Landmark Kendall Sq. Cinema, Cambridge, MA.

STUCK! Directed and Co-Written by Steve Balderson, starring Starina Johnson, Karen Black, Mink Stole and Jane Wiedlin.

Assemble all the cliches that spring to mind when you read these four words: Women-In-Prison Flick. What do you think of? Cute girls in torn prison uniforms? Butch cell-mates? Shower scenes? Perverted wardens and billyclub wielding guards casting inmates into solitary after molesting them? That’s all good lecherous fun for tons of drive-in movies from the 1970′s and 80′s. Balderson however was taking his inspiration from earlier noir-tinged movies from the 40′s and 50′s, such as I WANT TO LIVE from 1958, hence the black & white photography and Rob Kleiner’s cool jazzy score. During the post-screening Q&A Balderson admitted to not having seen many of the best and worst films in the women-in-prison genre. His honesty drew breathless gasps from an audience of nerds who fully expected him to have a Tarantino-esque command of every movie ever made in any country that featured incarcerated ladies.

Enough about what STUCK! is not — what is it? It’s an enthusiastic ode to the earlier days of the genre, and while it is far from perfect, it has enough happy surprises to keep it interesting. Daisy (Starina Johnson) is an innocent girl sent to death row after being implicated in her mother’s suicide by a mistaken neighbor (Karen Black). As Daisy’s cellmates help her embrace and challenge her fate, the solitary Neighbor Lady spirals into doubt and regret. An imaginative depiction of the warden is one of many strengths that STUCK! exhibits. Even when cliches appear, ’cause what’s a women-in-prison movie without a blossoming sapphic affair, Balderson and his committed cast handle them in fresh and unusual ways. While STUCK! is no classic, there are rewards to be gleaned from watching a cast and crew sincerely give it their best shot, especially on a reported $300K budget in a climate where a movie can cost $10M and still be regarded as “independent.”

SOMEONE’S KNOCKING AT THE DOOR Directed & Co-Written by Chad Ferrin, starring Noah Segan, Andrea Rueda and Elina Madison.

SPOILER ALERT! — It is very difficult to discuss what is good about SOMEONE’S KNOCKING AT THE DOOR without giving away the ending — stop reading before the 2nd paragraph if you don’t want the end ruined. The story focuses on a group of medical students who spend far more time on pharmaceutical experimentation than attending class. After a group trip to their school’s drug closet, one of the students is murdered, leaving rest of the peanut gallery to figure if their paranoia is a side-effect of their trip or if they are really next. This being a horror movie, of course someone is next, but it is in the depiction of the murders that SOMEONE’S KNOCKING slips off the rails.

The murders involve the victim being raped to death by a gruesome couple: a woman who looks like a groupie from a Norwegian Black Metal band, and a guy who looks like a coked-up Lance Henriksen. These are not only vile sequences, they actually distract from what could have made this a really good movie. The big trick is that none of these kids ever left the drug closet; the murders are a shared hallucination as each succumbs to an over-dose. That big trick was almost a very cool reveal, but after sitting through 75 minutes of wannabe torture-porn mayhem, I didn’t really care about sorting through who’s nightmare I was in or what the exact effects of the drug were. The sad part is that SOMEONE’S KNOCKING could have been a breakout sleeper on the order of PARANORMAL ACTIVITY if they’d focused on the cool unique idea rather than slumming in a neighborhood that had made so many other films worth forgetting.

Friday March 26, 2010 at the Landmark Kendall Sq. Cinema, Cambridge, MA.

AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE Written & Directed by Elijah Drenner, narrated by Robert Forster, and featuring John Landis, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Larry Cohen, Allison Anders, Joe Dante, Eric Schaefer and the late Don Edmonds.

The two clearest signs of a well made documentary are that they show you something you have never seen before, or place something familiar in a new light, and they make you want to know more. They seem complete but you wish they could be longer. AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE is a well made documentary.

In covering the history of American exploitation films, Elijah Drenner’s documentary covers areas that have been meticulously explored recently: socially conscious horror films of the 1960′s and 70′s (THE AMERICAN NIGHTMARE from 2000), the dawn of cult movies in the 1970′s (MIDNIGHT MOVIES: FROM THE MARGIN TO THEM MAINSTREAM from 2005) and the emergence of porn from stag parties to marquees (INSIDE DEEP THROAT also 2005). Drenner succeeds in plumbing the early days of exploitation movies. He traces as far back as single-reel silents made by Thomas Edison’s film company, and progresses through the Hayes Code of the 1930′s and film noir of the 40′s and 50′s, all in an exhaustive search for the offensive and outrageous roots of American independent films. As with most such documentaries AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE relies on expert talking-head interviews — always a good sign when John Landis shows up! Drenner’s relentless supply of clips and promotional artwork from over 100 movies is what sets his study a notch above others covering similar ground. If only PBS would give him a Ken Burns budget to make a 6 or 8 hour film!

PIECES Directed by Juan Piquer Simon, starring Christopher George, Linda Day, Ian Sera and Edmund Purdom.

PIECES is a piece of junk and I loved it. It was Rated X during its 1982 theatrical release, both for male and female full-frontal nudity, and for gore that was considered excessive at the time. That same summer John Milius had to trim a 3-shot decapitation to a single shot so that CONAN THE BARBARIAN could be Rated R. The following year Brian DePalma lost a protracted battle with the MPAA to get an R-rating for SCARFACE until he agreed to tone down his infamous chainsaw scene. PIECES accepted the X, and was thus enabled to show you a chainsaw bisecting a woman’s torso, plus other nasties that are not that much more splatterrific than todays average C.S.I. episode.

The story begins in 1942 with a young Boston boy who chops up with mother with an ax and a saw after she berates him for playing with a puzzle of a nude woman. This is where the hilarity begins: the puzzle looks more like a 1976 Penthouse Pet, and one of the police officers who responds sports a Ron Jeremy mustache. Jump forward 40 years to follow a series of dismember-murderers of cute young women at an unnamed university in Boston. From there the 80′s cheesiness is boundless. Murder of a girl after we get to watch her in Jazzercise class? Check. Slow motion murder of a woman on a waterbed? Check, and well shot, by the way! Bad actors delivering bad Boston accents? Che– hold the phone — yes, the actors are bad, but not even one makes any attempt at a Cliff Claven accent. PIECES is particularly hard on the Boston Police, who come off like Keystone Cops in polyester, ever ready to Protect & Stand Around.

In fact, for a movie that was actually shot partly in Boston, the only indication of New England are the bare trees in the fall. I’ve seen movies set in Boston but shot in New York, Chicago and even downtown Los Angeles. No Boston movie has less Beantown-credibility than PIECES. I know I’m splitting hairs but this is after all the BOSTON Underground Film Festival! Moments that would have been moderately amusing with any other audience became hilarious with the crowd in Kendall Square. Yup, this was one of those perfect moments for which film festivals exist: to turn scary movies into the funniest comedy you’ll se all year.