Film

Summer officially ended during my soggy bike ride into work yesterday. All the more reason to watch a film that warms the heart and makes you forget about fifty degree weather.

The 2009 British film Looking for Eric, currently playing at the Northwest Film Forum, does just that. The story follows postal worker Eric Bishop, whose life is in shambles until he receives help from the man he looks up to most: soccer player (or, footballer) Eric Cantona of the Manchester United team.

The film was well-received at Cannes and by critics, denoted as a "crowd-pleaser." It's showing tonight at 7:00pm and 9:00pm, with two final showings tomorrow night as well.

Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave.

Theodore Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, was not always a beloved children's author. During the first half of his career, Geisel wrote for humor magazines and for the US Army, making propaganda films and advertisements to help motivate and instruct soldiers fighting in WWII.

Curator Dennis Nyback brings together nine of Geisel's WWII short films from this period (including one directed by Frank Capra) introducing Private Snafu, who can't help but make mistakes, but teaches everyone lessons about spies, malingering, malaria and booby traps (including one in a woman's bra). 

Runs tonight through September 2 at the Grand Illusion Cinema at 9:00pm.

Grand Illusion Cinema, 1403 NE 50th St.

Last week, I was surprised to find considerable overlap between Edgar Wright’s recent Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and Jules Dassin’s 1959 film The Law (which, sadly, was not rereleased under its original English title Where the Hot Wind Blows!).

The premise of Scott Pilgrim is well known to fans of comic books: Scott (Michael Cera, trying to be slightly less lovable than usual), after unceremoniously dumping his enthusiastic teenage girlfriend Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), must defeat, in the full, arcade-game sense of the word, the seven exes of his new beau Ramona Flowers (May Elizabeth Winstead). As Scott plows through evil ex after evil ex, I got the feeling he enjoys the fight more than Ramona herself, with whom he exchanges flat, if witty, dialogue.

In The Law, Gina Lollobrigida stars as Mariette (in a role I imagine Sophia Loren would have filled were she not busy acting and sleeping with Cary Grant in Hollywood at the time). Lollobrigida is matched with the bizarrely affectless Enrico Tosso (Marcello Mastroianni), an agronomist who made his money by breeding an amphibious sheep-goat. Or something.

Read the full review after the jump.

Clever comment imbued with self-reverential humor and bored blogger cynicism (all in a ploy to disguise my disappointment that I didn't come up with the idea I'm linking to myself... ). Soft chuckling as I peruse menu of outrageous emoticons to top off this award-winning journalism.

It’s tough to recommend a film that filled me with resignation and unease but that’s what I’m going to do. Restrepo is a documentary about an Army outpost in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan, a position that has since been abandoned, making me, and I imagine everyone else in the audience, wonder what was the point?

Filmmakers Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger spent over a year with 173^rd Airborne Brigade’s Battle Company as they raised and defended O.P. Restrepo (named after Pfc. Juan “Doc” Restrepo, who had been killed at the beginning of their 15 month deployment). Life on the outpost is wildly unpleasant—the soldiers take enemy fire an average of six times a day, eat only MREs, shower irregularly, talk with truculent locals and burn their own excrement. 

The digital cameras used by Hetherington and Junger give crisp pictures of the squalid intimacy of Restrepo but blur when zoomed into the distance. The visuals in the film are a good metaphor: the soldiers see each other clearly, but the enemy is fuzzier.

While using no more than two cameras at any one time hamstrings the directors, they combine to produce an effective portrait of chaos. A fictional film would use elaborate setups to recreate (and make sense of) the crossfire at Operation Rock Avalanche, the deadly skirmish at the heart of the film. But Restrepo is more powerful for the incompleteness of its battle scenes—the enemy is always out of frame, unseen but for bullet and RPG tracers. I think the filmmakers try to be as nonpolitical as possible, but when a soldier completely breaks down in the aftermath of Rock Avalanche I had to look away, damning the forces that put those men in Afghanistan.

More review and photos after the jump.

Writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck sought to make a film that echoed the constant, chilling paranoia of East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He succeeded brilliantly. 

The Lives of Others is a tense film executed with quiet power. Set in 1984 East Berlin, it focuses on Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muehe), one of the best in the German Secret Police. Right away, you can tell that he’s a man whose life is his job and vice versa.

While we’ve seen this kind of character time and time again in American cinema, Muehe excels in bringing subtleties that transform the character from a stereotype to a complex individual. Despite a quiet demeanor and apparent lack of emotion, it’s clear that his passion is serving the GDR.

Minister Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme) orders Wiesler to set up surveillance of a famous playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch). Though Wiesler has his own suspicions initially (artists were dangerous free-thinkers, after all), he soon discovers the true purpose of the operation is to get dirt on Dreyman so the Minister can take Dreyman’s girlfriend, a celebrated actress. Thieme plays a grimy politician with disturbing accuracy.

The seed of doubt planted, Wiesler begins to question what it means to serve the GDR, what it means to be a Stasi officer, and what it means to be loveless and unloved.

Each time Wiesler returns to his huddle of machines and microphones in the attic above Dreyman’s apartment, you’re as riveted as he is. He becomes a third occupant of the apartment. Muehe’s subtle performance leaves a strong impact, and it breaks your heart to watch this hardened policeman learn to feel.

Muehe’s performance is doubly fascinating considering that he himself was the target of Stasi operations while growing up in East Berlin.

While Muehe is the focus of this film, it’s not for lack of quality elsewhere. The script is beautifully written -- which you can’t help but notice when you’re reading subtitles -- and every actor delivers a stellar performance.

Why did this movie win the 2007 Best Foreign Film Oscar and multitudes of other awards? Because it has a haunting timelessness despite its very specific period setting, and manages to leave you both heartbroken and hopeful.

You don’t want to miss this one.

Check out the website to learn more about the film: it's almost as well-done as the movie.

Prelude: Dog Star Man, 1961

If you're bored with the blockbusters, consider heading to the Northwest Film Forum for a taste of something a bit out of the ordinary.

As a part of the Third Eye Cinema program, the Northwest Film Forum is showing the film Dog Star Man, a silent abstract film by the legendary Stan Brakhage. The Third Eye Cinema Program is dedicated to featuring experimental film, and who better to include than the man who made more than 350 films in 50 years, each exploring the abstract artistry of film like no else ever has.

Presented in its original 16mm format, Dog Star Man, the breakout film for experimental cinema, takes you on a quest that's more of a mind-trip than Inception could ever give.

Tickets are on sale for the 8 p.m. showing tonight. Worried you won't understand it? Check out what Brakhage had to say.

Jean-Paul Belmondo is an icon of cool.

Though, to really appreciate the mid-twentieth century French actor, you have to be familiar with a few French films.

While he has done major films throughout his career, he solidified his status as Michel, the smooth, eager-to-be-loved and sometimes violent con-artist in Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 film, Breathless.

In Léon Morin, Priest, or The Forgiven Sinner, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, however, Belmondo stars as a priest, serving his small community under Nazi occupation in WWII. While seemingly a film about the struggles of wartime, Leon (Belmondo) is experiencing serious temptation: the women of his town, bereft of men thanks to the war, are turning their romantic interests towards the humble, yet surprisingly cool, priest.

Here's the trailer:

So if you want to be cool (and you do want that right?), and see a film that embodies the French psyche during WWII, check out this film at the Northwest Film Forum now through Thursday.

Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave.

Critics blew hot and cold on the latest movie from Swedish bad-boy auteur Lucas Moodysson, the 2009 Babel imitation Mammoth, with indie queen Michelle Williams and Gael García Bernal (new at Scarecrow). But this guy needs to be on your screen.

Try his hilarious, heartwarming 2001 satire of a 1975 Stockholm commune, Together, which deserves its 96 percent Rottentomatoes score. A battered wife flees her drunken hubby to her brother's anarchosyndicalist experimental microcosm of the future, but nothing is Hollywood formulaic. Sure, the drunk stalks her, but he's not all bad — we see things from everybody's point of view. The communards are painfully sincere. One washes dishes without pants for ideologically pragmatic reasons. Another progressively asks her boyfriend's pro forma permission to have wild, loud sex with a cuter guy at the commune — but the cute guy doesn't want sex, he just wants someone, anyone to listen to his boring Trotskyite rants.

Read more after the jump.