The Cremator

Spalovač mrtvol; horror / black comedy, Czech Republic, 1969; D: Juraj Herz, S: Rudolf Hrušínský, Vlasta Chramostová, Miloš Vognič, Jana Stehnová, Zora Božinová

Czech Republic on the eve of World War II. The Nazi soldiers are preparing for the annexation of the area. Karel Kopfrkingl is a manager of a local crematorium, which needs 75 minutes to incinerate a corpse in a coffin. He is obssesed with the Dalai Lama and believes that by cremating people, their souls are helped into leaving the world of suffering and reincarnating someplace else. With the Nazi takeover, he slowly starts accepting their ideology. His wife Lakme is a Jew, so he hangs her. He thinks his son Mili is secretly gay, so he kills him with a bat in the morgue. When he brings his daughter Zina to assail her, she escapes, while he is lost in the sea of halucinations, as he is taken away in a car.

Filmed in classic Czech style, "The Cremator" is a subtly dark allegory on the Holocaust, so strange that it is difficult to categorize it. The director Juraj Herz crafted a meticulously framed film, assembling unusual shot compositions (wide-angle lens, frog perspective, double exposition, telephoto lens, geometrical symmetry) to make even conventional scenes look extraordinary thanks to his visual style. At its core, the story's theme is the slow descend from rationalism into fundamentalism without the main anti-hero Karel (a great Rudolf Hrusinsky) noticing it, a cremator obssessed with death, who thinks that killing someone "imperfect" is liberating that person from suffering, only to in the end reach a point where he "whitewashes" every crime as something normal and ineviateble. You get chills watching this: one can rarely see such a tranquilly horrifying film. However, Karel's overlong monologues tend to get a little ponderous in the first half, since it takes almost an hour into the film until the plot starts to set in, whereas the abrupt end leaves something to be desired. One great cinematically playful sequence involves Karel making a list of people who are pontentially dangerous at a party, and each time he mentions a name ("Zajic, Fenek, Beran, Podzimkova...") a quick clip is inserted in which the said person turns around and looks into the camera, as if angry that his or her name is mentioned. Another one has Karel imagining talking to himself dressed up as a Dalai Lama, and there is a scary moment in which he is chasing after his daughter among the coffins in the morgue, filmmed in a wide lens. "The Cremator" is a disturbing and morbid depiction of how people can become madmen when they lose any kind of review process or critical thinking.

Grade:+++

Man Up

Man Up; romantic comedy, UK / France, 2015; D: Ben Palmer, S: Lake Bell, Simon Pegg, Rory Kinnear, Ken Stott, Harriet Walter, Olivia Williams, Sharon Horgan

Nancy (34) is a rather unseemly looking woman who is fed up with her four years of being single. She tries to break out of this cicyle by accepting a blind date at an engagement party, but it leads nowhere. Later, at a train station, she picks up a book a certain Jessica left behind, and is approached by Jack (40), who thinks Nancy is Jessica, his blind date. Nancy accepts and keeps up the lie since she likes Jack and enjoys their date. However, when he finds out, they argue and he goes on to meet the real Jessica on a date. Realizing he has nothing in common with Jessica, he wildly searches for Nancy's address. Jack finds Nancy at her home, where she was celebrating her parents' 40th anniversary, and the two fall in love.

A rather messy, uneven and chaotic, "Man Up" is still an overall sympathetic little rom-com thanks exclusively to the two main performances by Lake Bell and Simon Pegg, who share a certain chemistry even during the film's "low punches". A wacky spoof on the 'blind date' situation, "Man Up" was turned into a comedy of mistaken identity (in one delicious moment, Jack assumes that Nancy (34) is Jessica, a 24-year old girl, and Nancy does not flinch to correct him on the age mistake), but it has too many 'rough edges' and forced moments (the quasi-villain Sean), which make it not that well thought out. As a light piece of entertainment, it is overall fun, and poses some questions about the modern era of singles who are lost, whereas at least one moment is highly amusing, the one where Jack explains his paradox that if a man claims that he does not want to have sex and only wants to take it easy, the woman will then converesly want to have sex with him.

Grade:++

The Secret in Their Eyes

El secreto de sus ojos; crime drama, Argentina, 2009; D: Juan José Campanella, S: Ricardo Darín, Soledad Villamil, Pablo Rago, Javier Godino, Guillermo Francella

Argentina, 1 9 7 4. Lawyer Benjamin Esposito is investigating a case in which a woman, Liliana de Morales, was raped and killed in her home. He promises Liliana's husband Ricardo to catch the criminal. Despite the assistance by partner Pablo and the new department chief Irene, there are no clues, until he spots a lad, Gomez, always looking at Liliana in the old photos. Gomez is nowhere to be found. However, Benjamin and Pablo realize Gomez is a fan of the Racing football club, and thus manage to find him among the crowd at a stadium. The arrested Gomez confesses the murder of Liliana, but is released anyway when he becomes a hitman working for the anti-communist government during the Dirty War. Fearing for his life, Benjamin hides in a province. 25 years later, Benjamin meets Ricardo, now living on an isolated farm. Ricardo claims to have tracked down and killed Gomez, but it turns out he instead locked Gomez in his jail in the house, forcing him to serve the life sentence.

An instant classic, "The Secret in Their Eyes" is a thoroughbred example of filmmaking finesse, and a storyline that works both as a crime flick and a history lesson about Argentina's Dirty War with wider implications in the end. The film takes half an hour until it gets going, since its start is slow, conventional and it takes a lot of time for the set-up, yet there is a vision behind all of this, and it is remarkable how all the pieces and little details complete each other and meticulously unite in the grand ending to form a harmonious whole where everything has its why and because. An hour into the film, there is a virtuoso 6-minute scene done in one take, in which a drone flies over a stadium, over the audience, until it descends among the crowd to the two main protagonists, investigators Benjamin and Pablo, who browse through the fans, until they find the suspect Gomez and chase him through the corridors of the stadium, whereas the twist ending is striking. Some minor flaws are easily forgiven, such as the sequence where Benjamin and Irene trick the suspect Gomez into admitting the rape and murder of Liliana by teasing him ("Due to the depth of her vaginal injuries, we may deduce that the assailant was very well-endowed. Obviously, they're not talking about this microbe. He must have a peanut", until an angry Gomez stands up and unzips his penis to show it to Irene), which is kind of a stretch. The sequence where the now released Gomez, who was "incorporated" into the Peron administration black ops to eliminate communists during the Cold War, enters the elevator with Benjamin and Irene inside, and just loads his pistol, is masterfully chilling and suspenseful. The director Juan Jose Campanella managed to assemble a great little film and shoot above the goal he set out to do, delivering a universally recognizable story that was adequately critically recognized.

Grade:+++

Marketa Lazarova

Marketa Lazarova; drama, Czech Republic, 1967; D: František Vláčil, S: František Velecký, Josef Kemr, Magda Vášáryová, Pavla Polášková, Ivan Palúch, Michal Kožuch, Naďa Hejná, Jaroslav Moučka

Bohemia, the middle ages, winter. The one-armed Adam and his brother Mikolas attack and rob a caravan. Their outlaw father Kozlik raised all his seventeen children to be robbers, as they live in a decrypt  settlement in the wild. However, this time, they robbed the wrong one: the kidnapped victim Kristian has a rich father, a German Bishop, who orders the king’s captain to hunt for Kozlik. Mikolas wanted to kill the rival scavenger Lazar, but spares him when the latter prays to God and displays his beautiful daughter, Marketa. When Mikolas asks Lazar for help, since the captain’s army is coming, Mikolas is beaten by Lazar’s men. In an ambush, Mikolas takes revenge when his henchmen crucify Lazar on a door. Mikolas rapes Marketa, who falls in love with him. In a raid by the captain, many are killed and Kozlik is arrested, but Kristian flees because he fell in love with Alexandra, Kozlik’s daughter. Marketa is brought in front of a wounded Mikolas and marries him before he dies. 

"Marketa Lazarova" is one of those hermetic art-films which are objectively very good and ambitious, yet are not very entertaining and you privately never have the urge to see them again. Proclaimed by some local film critics as “the best Czech film of all times”, "Marketa" wasn’t in reality even the best Czech film of 1967 (that honor belongs to Lipsky’s "Happy End"), yet it is a surreal, somber, dark depiction of primitivism of the middle ages, with symbolic themes in which an entire society could have been raised wrong, in this case the outlaw Kozlik who educated his seventeen kids to be robbers, akin to the family of freaks in "The Hills Have Eyes", while he clashes with the captain’s army who represents law and order, and can thus be seen as a clash between paganism and Christianity; wildness and restraint; maybe even the Soviet Union and the Western world. One great moment is undeniably owned by the captain who was hired by the king, and thus has this golden exchange with a skeptic man: "Since when has the king bothered with poor yeomen?" - "Even a king must drive flies from his face."

The title heroine is surprisingly only a supporting character, while the movie meanders between several episodes and other characters. However, at times, the cinematography is exquisite, and elevates certain scenes: for instance, the camera drive over a tree with four hawks standing on branches, up to Marketa turned away from the camera, who then turns facing the camera; or the stylistic shot of Kristian exiting a fence and walking between a dozen wolves that just stand motionlessly there, as if in a trance. If there is one spiritual mentor to the film, it would be Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublev”, while both owe to Dreyer’s dry aesthetics interwoven with religious elements. Several scenes of cruelty and brutality may disturb, such as the flashback in which Adam’s hand was chopped off for punishment because he had an incestuous relationship with his sister, or the “stop motion” tracking shot of an arrow flying into a man’s eye. “Marketa Lazarova” is overrated and overlong (with a running time of almost three hours), yet it contemplates about the fragility of life during dark times, and some of its expressionistic images stay in your head. 

Grade:+++

Pocketful of Miracles

Pocketful of Miracles; comedy, USA, 1961; D: Frank Capra, S: Glenn Ford, Hope Lange, Bette Davis, Peter Falk, Arthur O'Connell, Thomas Mitchell, Edward Everett Horton, Ann-Margret

New York. Dave the "Dude" is a gangster who buys apples from homeless woman Apple Annie, because he thinks the fruit brings him good luck. He meets Queenie, who accepts to pay off her late father's debt by performing as a singer and dancer in Dave's night club. Dave also rejects a business offer by Darcey, a gangster who traveled to meet him. When Annie's daughter Louise announces that she is engaged to Carlos, whose father is aristocrat Alfonso Romero, and that they will arrive from Barcelona via ship to New York, Annie is in panic, since she never told her daughter that she is poor and homeless. Dave and his henchman Joy Boy thus stage a giant show to feign that Annie is a rich lady, and even hires hundreds of guests for a party. Carlos, Alfonso and Louise are impressed and return back to Barcelona. Dave and Queenie decide to get married as well.

The director Frank Capra's final film, "Pocketful of Miracles" is a remake of his own beloved comedy "Lady for a Day" from '33, yet the critics rightfully concluded that the Capra from the 30s was better than the Capra in 1961. Stiff and staged, "Pocketful" feels strangely out of touch with the time it was made, as if Capra deliberately tried to continue a form of style that was not that fresh anymore, yet it still has that spark of humanism that carries the story. Among the problems is that supporting actors Peter Falk as Joy Boy and Sheldon Leonard as gangster Darcey are delicious to watch, stealing every scene, but, unfortunately, the four main protagonists Dave the "Dude", Queenie, Apple Annie and Alfonso Romero are bland, nowhere as interesting as the former two, which speaks volumes about how underwritten they are. The main tangle in which the homeless Annie is supposed to be "disguised" as a rich lady for her upcoming daughter appears very late, halfway into the film, while too many unnecessary subplots introduced early on are irrelevant. A few comedy moments do ignite: in one, the Chicago gangster Darcey arrives lying on a bed in a traveling truck for a meeting with Dave, and complains: "For 48 hours I've been knocking around this chocolate cage all the way from Chicago! I'm seasick! Like being in solitary, only it moves." Falk's Joy Boy is also splendid in his cynical complaining. Upon hearing that he will have to round up all the reporters to keep the arrival of Alfonso Romero a secret, Dave and Joy Boy have this exchange: "What time does the ship get in?" - "...I hope it sinks!" In another sequence, when Carlos asks Dave to be the godfather of his first child, Joy Boy is so shocked, that instead of spitting out his drink — he actually bites off a piece of glass from it. Despite a too naive and "too safe" approach at time, "Pocketful of Mircales" is a worthy farewell to the director, and inspires to seek out his best early work.

Grade:++

Instant Family

Instant Family; comedy, USA, 2018; D: Sean Anders, S: Mark Wahlberg, Rose Byrne, Isabela Moner, Tig Notaro, Margo Martindale

Couple Pete and Ellie have reached their 40s and, despite good careers, feel as if they are missing something in their lives. They thus decide to adopt a child. At a fair where abandoned kids can meet their potential foster parents, Pete and Ellie meet the rebellious teenager Lizzy, but she has two younger siblings, Juan (11) and Lita (6). Pete and Ellie thus decide to try to adopt all three. During their probation period, the family is chaotic and often argues. However, after Juan accidentally drops a nail gun which pierces his foot, Pete and Ellie provide a valuble help into bringing him to the hospital, which bonds the family. The siblings' mother, a former drug addict, wants to have her kids back, but when she abandons them again, Pete and Ellie officially adopt Lizzy, Juan and Lita.

For all of its authentic background, considering that the director and screenwriter Sean Anders himself adopted three kids, "Instant Family" seems peculiarly forced and unnatural at many moments (in one sequence during dinner, Juan drops a glass of milk, and then the kids argue, and someone drops or overturns this or that, until the table is suddenly on fire, which is unconvincing), detached from the real world it was allegedly inspired by, yet it is still an overall honest and towards the end touching little film. Overedited and too hasty, the film lacks a real focus and a better pace to slow down and allow the viewers to simply absorb these characters, making the storyline uneven. Yet some of the jokes work and give it spark, whereas Isabela Moner sparkles again in the role of the "broken" teenager Lizzie. One of the funniest moments comes up when the potential foster parents are called to introduce themselves, so one ultra-ambitious woman stands up and says "I would like to be the single mother to an athletically gifted teen boy whom I can help reach his full division 1 scholarship potential. Preferably African-American", upon which Ellie starts laughing, claiming it is the plot from "The Blind Side". Several heavy handed moments wreck the mood (for instance, when Pete and Ellie assault a janitor who allegedly sent a photo of his penis to Lizzie's mobile phone), but the ending is back on the right track in the sequence where Ellie finally lets Lizzie read her letter ("We couldn't give her the anwser at the time. We did it because something was missing from our lives, and didn't know what it was. It was Juan, Lita and Lizzie"), which alleviates some of the flaws.

Grade:++

California Suite

California Suite; comedy / drama, USA, 1978; D: Herbert Ross, S: Maggie Smith, Michael Caine, Jane Fonda, Alan Alda, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, Gloria Gifford, Sheila Frazier, Walter Matthau, Elaine May

Four stories revolving around people who stay at a Beverly Hills hotel: Diana Barrie arrives from London with her bisexual fake husband Sidney to attend the Academy Awards, since she is nominated for best actress in the film "The Left Turn". She loses, which causes a fight with Sidney, since he flirted with another man during the party, but the couple eventually reconciles... Hannah divorced her husband, writer Bill, and now wants to take their teenage daughter Jenny to New York. However, they agree for her to stay in Los Angeles... Due to a misunderstanding, Chicago visitors Dr. Chauncey and his wife Lola have to take a shabby room at the hotel, while their friends, Dr. Willis and Bettina, enjoy a luxury room, which causes friction during their tennis games... Marvin arrives from Philadelphia for a bar mitzvah, but his brother arranges for a prostitute in his room, Bunny. The next day, Marvin tries to hide a sleeping Bunny in his bed when his wife Millie shows up, but to no avail. Millie discovers Bunny, and is angry at Marvin, but still decides to go to the bar mitzvah with him.

One of the unjustifiably forgotten films from the 70s, this intellectual drama-comedy still holds up surprisingly well despite its disparate episodic structure—the first two stories are excellent, but the other two, involving Marvin and Dr. Chauncey, are rather thin, corny and underwhelming—yet screenwriter's Neil Simon's sizzling dialogues are so indestructible you simply enjoy crunching them down in your mind. Admittedly, Simon's script adaptations from his own plays were never truly cinematic—but then again, neither were Wilder's nor Lubitsch's films, since they all followed the similar low-key policy of forcing the viewers to focus on characters and what they say, and not on style. The opening of "California Suite" already delivers snappy lines between two people on a plane: "I'm a first-class passenger!" - "You're a first-class lunatic!" The episode with Hannah and Hollywood screenwriter Bill offers a lot of inspired "subtle insults" disguised as dialogues: "Are we bantering again? I'm a little rusty after 9 years." - "I haven't seen your newest film. I've been told it grossed a lot in backward areas."

Many of them are told too fast and thus the viewers might miss some, yet each 10 minute segment works finely for itself. It also presents a melancholic insight into a divorced couple who mourns after good old times, and who contemplates if their child could still rejuvenate their relationship in the future. The episode involving actress Diana and her gay-bisexual companion Sidney works like a charm due to the charismatic performances by Maggie Smith and Michael Caine, culminating in their fight since he does not truly love her ("Nothing personal." - "There is never anything personal between us.") and in their touching reconciliation, where she tells him to make love to her, but not to close his eyes, since she wants him to look at her this time. The other two stories fare less and could have been either improved or cut: the one with Dr. Chauncey works thanks to comedian Richard Pryor, though it feels stale and far-fetched at times (the lame sequence where their car was "crushed" by another car on top, and they are still inside). The weakest episode is the one with Walter Matthau playing Marvin, who is cringeworthy while trying to hide a sleeping prostitute in his bed from his wife, Millie. One funny moment at least partially gives it some value: Marvin tries to prevent Millie from entering the bedroom by telling her he is so excited seeing her he wants to sleep with her in the living room, which leads to a golden exchange ("You missed me? You've only been away one night." - "I know, but there is a 3-hour time difference"). Other than that, that particular story is rather forced and lax. Despite the director's standard approach, Simon's humanism and wit carry the film and give it spirit which works in the long term.

Grade:+++

Two for the Road

Two for the Road; drama / road movie, UK, 1967, D: Stanley Donen, S: Albert Finney, Audrey Hepburn, Eleanor Bron, William Daniels 

While traveling in their car through France, a married couple, Marcus and Joanna, come to terms with their relationship problems. They remember how they first met—a van full of choir girls fell off the road, and Marcus helped them get back on route, yet when one of the girls got chickenpox, he and Joanna went hitchhiking by themselves, slept over at an inn and made love. They met and traveled in the car with Marcus’ ex-girlfriend Kathy, who got married and got a kid. Marcus and Joanna got a child, as well, Caroline, but started losing that passion with time. They both had an affair. However, in the end, they reconcile and stay together.

"Two for the Road" is a bitter and somber contemplation on the difficulty of—not finding—but keeping and rejuvenating happiness in one’s life, to save it from stagnating into routine. Several scenes that depict relationship problems between Marcus and Joanna are contrived and forced, mostly in the first act: for instance, the engine won’t start, so Marcus orders Joanna to exit the car and push it, to help it ignite. Would any man seriously have a lady push his car, instead of doing it himself? Remarkably, no other tourist jumps in to help Joanna, and thus one might ask oneself: how can the viewers ever root for Marcus after that? Marcus is too much of a grouch, too often way to negative, but this is where the movie does not work: for all the great acting performances, how could any man be unhappy being married to Audrey Hepburn? She simply cannot be made annoying, nor boring; Hepburn is simply too enchanting for such a role.

Still, the film’s themes are palpable, nonetheless. One of them is that life is riddled with failure and disappointment: after their car literally went out in flames, Marcus and Joanna had to accept to stay at an expensive hotel. Marcus used an elaborate scheme to sneak apples and sardine cans into their room, figuring the restaurant in the hotel is too expensive, only to later find out that breakfast and dinner were included in the price. The movie is also surprisingly grown up in its dialogues (“...when did sex stopped being fun...?” - “When it became official”; "I don't understand sex. Why is it we enjoy it more when it means less?"), has humor (when a loud train passes by their bedroom window in the morning, Joanna looks at Marcus and jokes: "Sexy, isn't it?"), whereas it uses the “back-and-forth” structure reminiscent of the French New Wave to insert several flashbacks and ellipses in the life of the couple: in one of the best, after dozens of cars passed by the couple on the bridge, Marcus wows to God that he will always pick up hitchhikers if he ever gets a car; cut to the next scene, years in the future, of Marcus driving Joanna in a car, as they pass with their car over the same bridge, refusing to pick up two German hitchhikers. Despite everything, the movie is a celebration of the flawed humans who continue attempting to overcome all the disappointments in life, trying to re-invent happiness during dark times—because, what else is there to do? 

Grade:++

Syriana

Syriana; thriller-drama, USA, 2005; D: Stephen Gaghan, S: George Clooney, Jeffrey Wright, Matt Damon, Alexander Siddig, Christopher Plummer, Nicky Henson, David Clennon, Amanda Peet, Chris Cooper, Tim Blake Nelson, Mazhar Munir

Oil company Connex merges with company Killen, which obtained the right for lucrative oil reserves in Kazakhstan, and thus lawyer Bennett gets the assignment to make the deal legal with any means possible... In Tehran, CIA agent Bob Barnes kills an arms smuggler. His new assignment is to kill prince Nasir in Beirut, but after getting beaten up by an Iranian spy, Bob decides to change his ways... In an oil-rich country in the Middle East, Pakistani immigrant Wasim loses his job in Connex. Due to desperation, he decides to become a terrorist and take revenge by blowing up a Connex-Killen tanker... Prince Nasir gives the drilling rights for oil in his country to a Chinese company, which angers the US and Connex. Even though Bob tries to save him, Nasir is killed by the CIA in order for his brother to change Nasir's policy and make a new oil contract with the US.

The episodic and fragmented story in the political essay "Syriana" is one of those that demand a lot of focus and investment from the viewers, and some may find it a hassle, but it rewards in the end appropriately, since everything in the end fits like a giant mosaic that gives a broader, unified picture of the events, and turns out as a good excercise for the brain. "Syriana" has no main protagonist—all the characters are just pawns in a giant geopolitical system of interests which clash with each other, in this case the oil industry which does everything to make a profit (and sustain the superpower status of the West at the same time), even resorting to criminal acts in order to "patch up" certain grey areas necessary to keep up the game. In its essence, the main theme is even simpler: greed and self-interest without limits, and the consequences left on all the people who find themselves in the way of the powerful ones. George Clooney is excellent as the slghtly overweight secret CIA agent Bob, from his first sequence where he kills arm dealers through a carm bomb in Tehran up to the tragic ending. Several lines are also quite somber, grim and sharp ("Corruption? Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations. That's Milton Friedman. He got a goddamn Nobel Prize. We have laws against it precisely so we can get away with it. Corruption is our protection. Corruption keeps us safe and warm. Corruption is why you and I are prancing around in here instead of fighting over scraps of meat out in the streets!"). While raw and dry at times, with a few 'empty walks' here and there, "Syriana" is at times a fascinating holistic view of interconnected events of a system, and its "hypernarration" may have influenced TV shows which also depict several stories and characters as a whole, from "Game of Thrones" up to "McMafia".

Grade:+++