The Cat

Le Chat; drama / tragedy, France, 1971; D: Pierre Granier-Deferre, S: Jean Gabin, Simone Signoret, Annie Cordy, Jacques Rispal

Paris. The marriage between the retired Julien and Clemence Bouin has been dead for quite some time now. They go shopping separately, sleep in two beds, eat at separate tables, and don't even speak while in their house. Julien lost his love for her years ago, and only shows affections for his cat. Clemence, a former circus trapeze performer, leaves the cat at a shopping mall and leaves. Julien searches for the cat all day, but it returns to their house eventually. Jealous, Clemence takes a pistol and shoots the cat. Angered, Julien leaves and goes to stay at a friend, Nelly, who is the owner of a hotel. Eventually, Julien returns to Clemence, but informs her that he will not speak a word to her anymore. They communicate only via notes. Clemence dies from a heart attack. When he finds her, Julien takes some pills and commits suicide.

A dark, bitter, astringent and 'rough' minimalistic drama about a disintegration of a marriage at old age, "The Cat" could go in the double bill with Haneke's "Amour" and Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage". Centering only around the retired couple, Julien and Clemence, the film achieved a very concise and precise mood, with small episodes from their daily routine presenting just enough to explain their relationship, their house surrounded by demolition crews that demolish old buildings, to symbolically show how everything around them is slowly collapsing, until they are next. Similarly like "Umberto D", "The Cat" shows the old age as a trap without any perspective, with small transitions leading to scarce flashback of their best days of youth and infatuation (Julien sees water running from the faucet, and this leads to his memory at a lake where they once swam and made love; Clemence is seen holding her stocking, and this leads to Julien's memory of taking her stockings from her legs when she was young). The cat serves as an allegory for the last remaining remains of Julien's emotions towards anything in life, since he feels apathy and indifference at old age, and Clemence tries to "awaken" him from this lethargic state through sometimes provokative means (she slices his newspaper collection in the basement). However, once the cat is gone, Julien has nothing more to live for or feel excited about in life, all leading to a tragic ending and contemplations that sometimes people only realize what they have when they lose it. While not as great as it could have been, since a good deal of the movie is conventional, "The Cat" is an overall very impressive and mature work.

Grade:+++

My New Partner

Les Ripoux; crime comedy, France, 1984; D: Claude Zidi, S: Philippe Noiret, Thierry Lhermitte, Grace de Capitani, Claude Brosset, Régine

Paris. Rene is a corrupt cop who takes bribes, racketeers off street thugs to pretend he doesn't notice their street games, eats free at restaurants and bets on horse races. This naturally shocks his new partner, the idealistic François who aspires to become a police commissioner. François arrests a burglar who stole a purse, but Rene let's the man go in the police office, writting a report that the thug found the lost purse on the street and came to return it. Rene aims to corrupt François by setting him up with prostitute Natasha who scams him by leading him out to dine at a Russian bistro, where François is charged with an impossibly high bill, and is thus broke. Little by little, François accepts corruption, and even demands higher bribes on the street than Rene. They both agree to rob the drug-dealer Camoun and steal away his briefcase with money for themselves. Camoun chases Rene, but his men are blown up in the explosion in Rene's building. Rene is sentenced to two years in prison, while François kept the money. When Rene is released from prison, François awaits him with a horse carriage.

One of the biggest successes in the career of comedy director Claude Zidi, "My New Partner" not only sold 5.8 million tickets at the French box office, but Zidi also took home the César Award for best film and best director, a rare feat for a comedy. "My New Partner" takes the dark subject of police corruption, but unexpectedly presents it as a comedy, creating a refreshingly daft film with several great gags, though a one that gets less funny and less inspired as the time goes by. Philippe Noiret is excellent as the corrupt cop Rene, and the opening sequence is already brilliantly hilarious: Rene and his cop partner Pierrot rob a pimp at a street at night, but then the police vehicle shows up, so they have to flee the scene. They run across the stairs, but another police car shows up on the other end. So Rene gets an idea: he arrests Pierrot, and when the police shows up, he identifies himself as police detective Rene who caught one suspect, and feigns that the "other one" fled in other direction. When returning back to the scene, he spots Pierrot and feigns he is shocked he arrested a cop in the dark. This already establishes what kind of a character Rene is, and naturally he is assigned a new partner, the idealistic François, making the clash inevitable. When François arrests a pickpocket, Rene let's him go, scolding François that the police had over 3000 arrests already in the neighborhood, and that the police is instructed not to arrests "small fish" to not increase this statistic because their area might be declared a crime zone. Unfortunately, Zidi loses his inspiration half-way into the film, since the best jokes and ideas are found only in the first half, but the second half is tiresome, stiff, routine and mechanical, showing the authors exhausted their potentials beyond the 50-minute mark. The subfuse finale leaves something to be desired in the structure of the film, yet it has so many highlights in the first half that it deserves to be seen.

Grade:++

Shanghai Express

Shanghai Express; adventure drama, USA, 1932; D: Josef von Sternberg, S: Marlene Dietrich, Clive Brook, Anna May Wong, Warner Oland, Lawrence Grant, Eugene Pallette

During the Chinese Civil War, several passangers board a train from Peking to Shanghai. Among them are Shanghai Lily, a prostitute, who meets her ex-boyfriend again, British captain Harvey, who left her angrily years ago when she wanted to test his love for her by coming in contact with someone else. Among the passangers are also Hui Fei, gambler Sam, boarding house owner Mrs. Haggerty, a French officer. The train is stopped by the Communist rebels led by Chang, who takes Harvey as a hostage to exchange him for a captured fellow rebel from the government. Chang wants to blind Harvey, but Lily persuades Chang to let Harvey go and she will be with Chang. Hui Fei stabs and kills Chang, and the train continues its journey. On the bus terminal, Harvey and Lily make up.

The fourth out of seven movie cooperations between director Josef von Sternberg and actress Marlene Dietrich, "Shanghai Express" was a huge success at the US box office, yet is today only intermittently impressive. Set on a cozy journey via train, interrupted by a rebel taking its passengers as hostages, the storyline is meandering itself between several genres, without all those pieces joining together into a cohesive whole. Some neat moments amuse (the train has to pass between two buildings, so hundreds of people and some cows move away from the railroad), and some ideas have charm, such as when the heroine Shanghai Lily translates to French and finds out a French man was dishonorably discharged from the Army, but still keeps wearing the uniform during his intended visit to his sister, since he doesn't want to disappoint her. The dialogues are very often kitschy and conventional, especially in the finale, yet even they have their moments: when Lily finds out rebel Chang wants to mutilate Harvey, there is this exchange between them: "The Chinese government will have your head for it!" - "The Chinese government would have had my head long ago if it hadn't been such a good head". It's never clear why Lily won't tell Harvey she was coerced by Chang to save Harvey's life, which makes the last 20 minutes play out like a soap opera with secrets only for the sake of it, when being honest would have made far more sense, but the movie is still intruiging just enough to be remembered even today.

Grade:++

The Wing or the Thigh

L'aile ou la cuisse; comedy, France, 1976; D: Claude Zidi, S: Louis de Funès, Coluche, Claude Gensac, Julien Guiomar, Martin Lamotte, Ann Zacharias

Charles Duchemin is a food critic who travels anonymously to restraurants and bistros to try out their dishes and write a review in his restraurant guide, which can destroy entire establishments. His enemy is Tricatel, the owner of a mass-produced synthetic food who wants to take over the positively reviewed restraurants to sell his bad food there. One day, Charles is confronted by a former owner whom he destroyed when he wrote a negative review, and who forces Charles at gunpoint to eat bad leftover food. As a consequence, Charles is hospitalized and loses his sense of taste. He is further shocked when he finds out his son Gerard secretly works as a clown in a circus. Charles and Gerard find out Tricatel produces food from plastic in the factory. In a TV show, Gerard announces he is taking over the food critic business, while Tricatel is exposed when he refuses to eat his own food.

Legendary comedian Lous de Funes often appeared in movies that are far less legendary and undersized to fit his talents, as it is the case with the culinary comedy "The Wing of the Thigh" which was much more popular during its release date than it is today. It is overall still a good and easily watchable, fun little film about a food critic who loses his sense of taste (interestingly, a similar idea was used in Lee's film "Eat Drink Man Woman" about a cook who lost his ability to taste), that owes 90% of its charm to de Funes' wild outbursts of temperament, yet the director Claude Zidi sadly didn't put nearly half of much effort into his front, since the story lacks inspiration and better jokes, and even feels slightly tiresome towards the last third. The best gag is when de Funes' character Charles anonymously enters a bistro disguised as an American tourist, and finds terrible conditions there: the manager and the cook sit at the table playing card, and only toss the menu at him; the cook's cigarette falls into the dough he was flattening with the rolling pin, but he just keeps flattening it as if nothing happened; while Charles even has to take a sip of wine in a tube to analyze it later on in the laboratory. More of such ideas would have been welcomed. Another good joke is when Charles and Gerard enter the food factory, and are shocked to find out rubber is glued over skeletons of fish and painted green to pass as real food. The subplot involving Gerard working secretly as a clown in a circus didn't really hit any right notes, and thus felt flat. Much more could have been done out of this story, since the writing was as meagre as some dishes Charles tasted, but de Funes was such an institution whose absence left a vacuum in European cinema that one feels sympathy even for his lesser comedies.

Grade:++

The Scarlet Empress

The Scarlet Empress; drama, USA, 1934; D: Josef von Sternberg, S: Marlene Dietrich, John Lodge, Sam Jaffe, Louise Dresser, C. Aubrey Smith, Olive Tell

Stettin, Prussia, 1744. The German Princess Sophia Frederica is informed by her mother that she has arranged a marriage for her to Peter III, the Emperor of Russia. Count Alexei arrives with his carriages, picks up Sophia and her mother, and brings them on a six week journey to Russia. Once there, Empress Elizabeth, Peter's mother, changes Sophia's name to Catherine, while Peter III turns out to be an absent-minded man who doesn't love her. Catherine is disappointed, but accepts her new life. She gives birth to a male heir. When Empress Elizabeth dies, Peter III starts a reign of terror. Seducing Alexei and Captain Orlov, Catherine assures enough of influence in the Army to overthrow Peter III and proclaim herself as the new Empress.

Included in Roger Ebert's List of Great Movies, the sixth and penultimate collaboration between director Josef von Sternberg and actress Marlene Dietrich, "The Scarlet Empress" is an impressive movie which works more as a showcase for its main actress and less as an accurate historical account of Empress Catherine the Great. Von Sternberg has no illusions about Russian imperialism and long history of bloody despots—one title card says: "Russia, a vast empire that had built its foundations on ignorance, violence, fear and oppression"; while recounting tales about Ivan the Terrible to little Sophia Frederica, a montage appears showing all the atrocities during that time, from beheading of three men, rape of women and torture to death—yet even during its darkest moments, the movie is way too romanticized compared to what really happened (among others, the German-speaking Sophia Frederica, later Catherine the Great, had to learn Russian, and her own later war campaigns, here not shown, were criminal and ruthless). Von Sternberg's main observations are feminist, depicting the heroine's transformation from a passive immigrant outsider to a cunning ruler who takes over the patriarchal society and commands them.

"Empress" is either too short—because it ends just before the most interesting events were about to happen, after Catherine the Great became the Empress—or needed a part II, yet if one just accepts that it presents only this confined, restrained episode from her life, and that it is just Dietrich's show, anyway, one can enjoy the movie much more. The opulent set-designs are bizarrely unique and creative at moments: Empress Elizabeth's throne is in the shape of a giant marble two-headed eagle, one head up, one head lowered; during a lavish feast, the camera pans over the dining table revealing a skeleton (!) standing next to a bowl of soup and a cooked deer on a plate; gargoyles can be seen intermittently across the palace. Some of the moments and dialogues are just plain clever. In one example, Catherine holds on to a horizontal rope above her, let's go and falls down in the hay. Count Alexei wants to kiss her, but she keeps putting straws into her mouth. Finally, there is this exchange: "If you come closer, I'll scream." - "You'll scream better without that straw in your mouth", he says, as he takes away the straw and kisses her. When the Archimandrite goes from person to person at the table, to collect charity in the basket, he arrives at the place of Peter III. "Your Imperial Majesty, something for the poor?" Peter just slaps him, but the Archimandrite goes: "That was for me. Now what have you got for the poor?", while Peter III replies: "There are no poor in Russia! Get out!" Von Sternberg certainly knows how to tell a story visually, even with just elegance and symbols, which compensates for the rather limited scope of the narrative, and Dietrich carries the entire film with ease.

Grade:+++

Melvin and Howard

Melvin and Howard; comedy / drama, USA, 1980; D: Jonathan Demme, S: Paul Le Mat, Mary Steenburgen, Elizabeth Cheshire, Pamela Reed, Michael J. Pollard, Rick Lenz, Jason Robards, Dabney Coleman

Nevada desert, 1 9 6 7. While driving his motorcycle wildly, millionaire Howard Hughes crashes and falls on the ground. During the night, he is found and picked up by milkman Melvin Dummar in his truck. Hughes refuses to go to a hospital and insists to be left in Las Vegas. Melvin returns to his home, only to find out his wife Lynda is leaving him, sending their daughter away so she can work in a strip club. Eventually, Lynda returns to Melvin and they reconcile and she gets pregnant again. She wins a large sum of money on a quiz show, they move to a new house, but he spends a lot of money on buying himself a Cadilac and a boat, so she leaves him, angry that he is a loser. Melvin marries Bonnie and they move to Utah to work at a gas station. One day, a man leaves a note and disappers. The note mentions Hughes' last will which left Melvin million of dollars. The media frenzy engulfs Melvin's home, but a court dismisses the authenticity of the will.

Jonathan Demme's 6th feature length film is a movie interpretation of the Melvin Dummar case, a man claiming he picked up Howard Hughes, and that he found a last will of the millionaire years later in which he was left with a fortune. The trouble is, this stuff is not very cinematic. It is appropriate for a short film, but more dubious as a feature. "Melvin and Howard" starts off intruiging, since the down-on-his-luck protagonist Melvin accidentally picks up an injured bum in the desert (Jason Robards) who claims he is Hughes. Demme breaks several movie rules here, since their dialogue in the truck lasts for 15 minutes, which is refreshing structure-wise, but sadly, their lines are only lukewarm and rather uninspired. After that, the character of Hughes disappears, and the movie wastes an hour of its running time by just showing Melvin's mundane life routine, while the last will segment appears too late, only some 20 minutes before the end of the film. One wishes for Hughes' return, since Robards is by far the most charismatic actor in the film, but he never does, and is only shown again in the epilogue, which is just an unshown flashback from the opening act, in which Hughes drives the truck while Melvin rests during the drive. Screenwriter Bo Goldman has difficulties deciphering a coherent storyline out of this scarce anecdote. Demme uses the story to contemplate on the working class in America, always in danger of losing their job, not having enough money, or being stuck feeling as if they are living bellow their possibilities. A small scene stealer is the wonderful Mary Steenburgen as Melvin's wife Lynda, who is amusing in the sequence where she does a hilariously cartoonish dance in a TV game show. There are good moments here, but the source material seems like a wild goose chase. One wishes that Hughes had appeared again and contacted Melvin, but this never happened, indicating how sometimes reality is indeed too inhibiting for movie imaginations.

Grade:++

The Firemen's Ball

Hoří, má panenko; comedy, Czech Republic, 1967; D: Miloš Forman, S: Jan Vostrčil, Josef Šebánek, Josef Valnoha, František Debelka, Josef Kolb, Milada Ježková

A volunteer fire department stages a ball in a small town where it itends to award its retired chairman for his 86th birthday. Very soon, everything goes wrong due to their incompetence: the committee members want to be judges of a "Miss Fireman" contest, but all of the women are either ugly or unwilling to participate; many people keep stealing cakes, cognac, chocolate, and other food on the table intended as tombola prizes. The women at the "Miss Fireman" contest refuse to participate, so many guests keep dragging other women to the stage. A fire in a remote house breaks out, interrupting the ball, but the firemen are unable to reach it because their vehicles get stuck in the snow, so the house burns down. The committee forgot about the chairman, so they hastily give him the box with the present, but it is empty.

Included in Roger Ebert's list of Great Movies, Miloš Forman's third and last film in his Czech homeland is a today rather dated and tiresome, albeit good film, proving a rare exemption in which a European director actually made better movies in the US than he did in his own country. "The Firemen's Ball" is a sarcastic comedy of failures, depicting that darn streak of bad luck when everything goes wrong, partly because the protagonists are clumsy, but also partly because bad things just keep happening. Playing out almost exclusively inside a town hall where the party is held, the movie is ironic in its episodes, but not all of them are equally as fun, and none is particularly grand: it is amusing as it observes these people deteriorating into chaos and anarchy, which culminates in the sequence where the party is interrupted by a fire of a house nearby, but the firemen are unable to reach it because their vehicles got stuck in the snow. The people are only able to save chickens and furniture from the house before it burns down. The now homeless man is given tombola prizes, but they are useless since all the food prizes have already been stolen, anyway. Hereby the movie gives a biting jab at an inefficient system in general, a one that is unable to achieve anything since everything is corrupt and based on empty fake fame. However, overall, the movie is not that well made and drags at times, not being able to truly reach all of Forman's potentials.

Grade:++

Navalny

Navalny; documentary, USA, 2022; D: Daniel Roher, S: Alexei Navalny, Yulia Navalnaya, Maria Pevchikh, Christo Grozev, Leonid Volkov, Vladimir Putin

The film follows the notorious incident on 20 August 2020 in which Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny was poisoned while on a flight from Tomsk. Luckily, the plane landed and he was taken to a hospital in Omsk. Various speculations emerged as to what happened, and the Russian doctors at first refused to transport him abroad, but eventually allowed for his treatment in Berlin, where it was confirmed he was poisoned by the Novichok chemical weapon. After months of rehabilitation, Navalny was able to recover, thanks also to the support of his wife Yulia and his team manager Leonid Volkov. Eventually, Navalny decides to retun to Moscow, where he is arrested and sent to a prison under fake charges by Vladimir Putin's Goreshist dictatorship.

"Navalny" is a bitter and dark depiction of the living relict of dictatorships in modern times and individuals trying to make a change to improve this state, here confined to just the incident that made headlines in which the Russian democratic oppostion figure Alexei Navalny was poisoned by Novichok. The director Daniel Roher wastes no time to start building the story, giving a lot of details, archive footage and interviews with people—one of the most touching moments is the interview with Navalny's daughter Daria who confesses that she had the hypothetical thought at the age of 13 that her father might be killed one day, and that she is often in fear. Roher doesn't present his protagonist as perfect—archive clips are shown when Navalny marched in a far-right rally and addressed the crowd a decade ago—but Navalny concedes he has to talk to everyone to try to reach a consensus in the country, and hints he learned his lesson and matured since then. The documentary is a powerful, gripping and tormenting account of the depressive state of affairs in Russia during Vladimir Putin's dictatorship, who makes an appearance in the film only once during a news confference where he is even unable to say Navalny's name, whereby the dictator's deteriorating mental state in need for a psychiatric treatment is revealed. When Navalny was poisoned, the Russian state media used all kinds of gaslighting, ridicule, contempt towards the victim, as well as the obligatory off-topic hate speeches aimed against liberals: Putin's propaganda is pathetically transparent, its distortion being near comical, but the state aparatus uses fear and intimidation to keep the status quo. The most astounding moment is when the team finds out the names of over a dozen agents who poisoned him, so Navalny actually phones one of them himself (!), Konstatin Kudryavtsev, presents himself as a deputy of Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, and asks why the assassination of Navalny failed, to which he gets remarkably honest answers—when Konstatin reveals secret details over the phone, Navalny's and Christo Grozev's faces are shown smiling and giggling silently in disbelief. These kind of moments of humor, hope and humanity give the movie strength in the overall dark setting.

Grade:+++

The Client

The Client; thriller, USA, 1994; D: Joel Schumacher, S: Brad Renfro, Susan Sarandon, Tommy Lee Jones, Mary-Louise Parker, Anthony LaPaglia, Anthony Edwards, Ossie Davis

Tennessee. Mark (11) and his younger brother Ricky witness a car stopping near the wild and the driver inside trying to commit suicide. Mark tries to prevent this, but the man, mafia lawyer Clifford, drags him inside the car and tells him where the corpse of missing Senator, killed by mobster Muldano, is hidden. Clifford kills himself, so Mark is harassed by US Attorney Roy and his team who want to know where the corpse is hidden, as well as the reporters. Since he is in danger of being attacked by the mob, Ricky is in a catatonic state, and his mom is jobless, Mark turns to lawyer Reggie Love, who has a weak reputation, but helps him tremendously to find the corpse in New Orleans and get into the witness protection program. Muldano messed up, so his boss Sulari eliminates him.

"The Client" is a film adaptation of John Grisham's eponymous novel, targeted not because of quality, since his previous two adaptations "The Pelican Brief" and "The Firm" were mediocre, but because of the success of his work. Even "The Client" was a commercial success, but it stands out because it is one of the best adaptations of Grisham's novels. It is a work that is easily accessible, effectively made by director Joel Schumacher, suspenseful, with a lot of interesting situations and a good storyline, but overall somehow too conventional, predictable and with several plot holes that stymied its credibility (what are the odds that Mark and Reggie would try to search for the hidden corpse in New Orleans just at the same time as the villains showed up?). The most was achieved out of the three leading actors, veterans Tommy Lee Jones as US Attorney Roy, and especially the excellent Susan Sarandon as the sly lawyer Reggie with a good heart who often clashes with him ("I know where the body is now, but who knows where it will be in three hours?"), yet many often overlook the main star, the 11-year old Brad Renfro in his film debut, who delivered a surprisingly natural and genuine performance as Mark (in one funny scene, he tries to awaken his catatonic brother by taking several ice cubicles in his hand and pretending he is an Eskimo urinating ice). The crystal-clear cinematography by Tony Pierce-Roberts is stunning and makes even the most mundane scenes look aesthetic and pretty to look at. Despite its flaws in logic, only formal style (as opposed to some more broader spectrum invested in story and characters) and an overlong running time, "The Client" feels fresh even today and holds up well.

Grade:++

Mediterraneo

Mediterraneo; comedy, Italy, 1991; D: Gabriele Salvatores, S: Diego Abatantuono, Claudio Bigagli, Giuseppe Cederna, Claudio Bisio, Luigi Alberti, Ugo Conti, Vana Barba

World War II. A dozen Italian soldiers is sent to secure a small Greek island in the Aegean Sea. They find the town empty, until they stumble upon the only people living there: women, children and elderly, since the men were deported due to the war. Since there is no danger on the island, and their radio has been destroyed, Lieutenant Montini decides to spend his day painting murals in the monastery, so Sgt. Nicola Lo Russo takes over the duties in the town. The soldiers spend time with prostitute Vasilissa, who marries one of them, Farina; or play football, drink and enjoy the sea. A British unit informs them Italy lost the war and decides to evacuate them back to their country, but Farina stays with Vasilissa to open a restaurant with her. Some 40 years later, Montini returns to the island to express condolences to Farina since Vasilissa died, and then finds out Nicola is also there, too. 

"Mediterraneo" made accidental headlines when it became part of Roger Ebert's "lost patience" phase since the film critic left the film in the middle of the screening on a whim (he also undeservedly panned some good films like "Police Academy" or "The Devils"), yet it is a perfectly decent and sympathetic little film about people wanting to escape from their obtrusive duties and live an easy life somewhere where it is idyllic. The director Gabriele Salvatores crafts the movie as a simple ode to laziness and carefree attitude, almost as some sort of allegory in which the Greek world, the cradle of democracy, "invisibly" dismantles Italian fascist dictatorship little by little, transforming the Italian protagonists from dutiful soldiers to completely relaxed, liberal 'chill-out' dudes who abandon all the restrictions of fascism (they smoke marijuana; democratically vote to not go to a battle and instead stay on the island; their rifles are removed from them; one soldier even admits to Sgt. Lo Russo he is gay). The main problem is that the story is rather too vague and banal at times, offering only thin episodes from the lives of these soldiers who lose all sense of time (when a man in a small plane lands on their football field and informs them that three years have passed and that Mussolini is dead, they are stunned), but lacking a higher degree of sophistication, inspiration or finesse. This is one of the reasons why "Mediterraneo" is today not that often remembered as one of the key Italian movies of the 90s, since not much happens, while some of the vignettes tend to end up boring and repetitive (swimming in the sea; walking around the island...), yet it gives a nice little hommage to the Mediterranean mentality, and some of the locations on the island really are aesthetic and stunning.

Grade:++

Sweet Bunch

Glykia Symmoria; comedy / crime, Greece, 1983; D: Nikos Nikolaidis, S: Takis Moschos, Despina Tomazani, Dora Maskalvanou, Takis Spiridakis, Lenia Polycrati, Alkis Panagiotidis

Argyris, Sofia and Marina are three loafers in their 30s who live together in a mansion. They lost any point in living and instead spend their time with stealing in restaurants and stores or grifting from people. They steal a car and use it to pick up their friend Andreas who is released from prison, and who joins them to live in the house. Sofia is the only one who earns something as a prostitute. Andreas earns some money by starring in a porn film, and brings the porn actress Rosa to live with them. Rosa persuades them to rob a safe in a warehouse while she dances topless for the old manager upstairs, but later Andreas and Argyris claim they didn't find any money, so the swindled Rosa leaves them. Their mansion is being broken into and searched by unknown men led by a blond man who sits outside and observes them. When they find Rosa wounded in the mansion, they bring her to the hospital and kill the blond man whom they blame for it. The unknown men start a siege of the mansion, shooting and killing Marina and Sofia. Andreas takes a shotgun and aims it at the dead Argyris, while also places another shutgun into Argyris' hand, and then pulls both triggers.

Included in two polls by the Greek Film Critics Association as one of the 10 best Greek films in history, Nikos Nikolaidis' "Sweet Bunch" (an ironic paraphrasing of Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch") is one of the most unusual, uncapturable and refreshing cult movies of that cinema: daft, cool, energetic, modern, stylish, filled with pop-culture references, which hit the nerve of the time by describing a young generation that lost any hope in their future. The movie already starts off deliciously odd with Marina sleeping in her bed, surrounded by little dolls, while Strauss' musical poem "Also Sprach Zarathustra" plays in the background while Sofia is dressing up before she goes to her work as a prostitute—but then Sofia puts headphones on Marina's head, and the music switches to The Chordettes' song "Mr Sandman". The story is a blend of “Rebel Without a Cause” and “Grifters”, only done as a comedy: the four protagonists are people in their 30s, but they are still stuck acting as teenagers defying the world just out of spite. Some of their swindling is simply clever, almost charming: for instance, Marina puts on an inflated balloon under her giant dress to pretend she is pregnant, goes into a store, and returns back home with dozens of stolens items under her dress. 

In another, Argyris goes to a restaurant and orders a coke, while at the other end, on a different table, Sofia orders a giant meal for three people, and puts some food in her purse. In the toilet, Argyris and Sofia exchange their bills. Sofia goes to the cash desk first and pays a small amount for the coke. Later, Argyris goes to the cash desk and protests that they charged him a fortune for a coke, blaming the waiter for mixing up the bills. Argyris only pays for the coke and leaves the restaurant, and the waiter has no proof to stop him for the "free meal". In a couple of moments, Nikolaidis strays too much into an occasional weird, bizarre or inexplicable scene, and the running time could have been shortened, but he compensates this through a wide range of playful ideas (Andreas bring a porn actress with him in the mansion), symbols (their home is decorated with American movie posters, from “Star Trek” to “The Jazz Singer”, an allegory how Western values are cool, but often feel spiritually empty) and dialogues (Argyris’ great monologue towards Marina, when he says there are three hungry points in a person; a brain, so one feeds it with truth; the stomach, so one feeds it with food; and sex, so one feeds it with love: "In my lifetime, I satisfied all three"). It’s not clear who the people surveilling them are: are they a rival gang? The secret police of the government? A group hired by someone they robbed as revenge? But either way, they become the major catalyst of the story: the four youngsters live their lives in such utter boredom and careless attitude that they are not even nihilists—they are apatheists, people who neither have something to live for nor die for, for whom even talking about the meaning become meaningless. They lost all purpose in life. But as the siege of their house starts, they are awakened from this apathy and finally find something worth living and dying for: their friendship. As short as it was, in the end they find their meaning.

Grade:+++

Evdokia

Evdokia; romance / drama, Greece, 1971, D: Alexis Damianos, S: Maria Vassiliou, Giorgos Koutouzis, Koula Agagiotou, Hristos Zorbas  

Maria, an old retired prostitute, visits the home of Evdokia, a current prostitute, and based on coffee remains in a cup prophecies troubles for her. Giorgos, a young Sergeant, spots Evdokia in a bar one evening and dances for her. When Evdokia’s pimp threatens her in her home, Giorgos enters and throws him out. Giorgos proposes Evdokia, but doesn’t show up for the wedding because he was detained in the Army. The couple argues, but still gets married later. Giorgos is jealous of other men looking at Evdokia. After being discharged from the Army, not knowing where to find a job, Giorgos disappears. Evdokia sees other clients for money. When the couple makes up again in the bar, the pimp and his men beat Giorgos and leave him on the street to die, and kidnap Evdokia in a van.  

Included in two polls of the Greek Film Critics Association as one of the ten best Greek films in history, one of only three films directed by Alexis Damianos, “Evdokia” is a raw, coarse, astringent and ‘rough’ cinematic experience in order to present a wild love story between a prostitute and a soldier. Because as wild as their passionate relationship is, it somehow feels remarkably honest and pure in some elementary emotions. Furthermore, they live in a desolate area, often with incomplete houses under construction around them, to emphasize even more their isolation on the margins of society, and their inability to grow into complete personalities. Some scenes are impressive in their shot compositions: Evdokia on the fence watching the twenty shirtless soldiers practicing on the field from afar; or the stylish choreography of the soldiers standing in line, performing a maneuver of putting a hand on each other’s shoulders and then picking up their rifles, one after the other, like a domino. Some symbols also work (Giorgos is despised by many because he is in the Army, hinting at the Greek military junta during that time). 

Yet the intimate relationship between Evdokia and Giorgos stands out the most: they love each other, but also often argue. On the one hand, he is crazy about her, but on the other, he secretly wishes for a normal woman, who is not a prostitute. The biggest insult for him is when someone chastises him for his wife supporting him, while he will be unemployed and broke once he is discharged from the military draft. There is something strangely destructive about their relationship, they always flirt with the extreme or danger, as if that excites them, and thus a tragedy just waits to happen: Evdokia swings on a rope loosely tied to a tree, over a huge cliff; Giorgos jumps heads-up on the ground while chasing her; Giorgos slaps her, but she just takes his hand and puts it gently on her cheek, smiling, as if she yearns for his touch, regardless in what form. Despite some clumsy moments, vague situations and a rather strange ending, "Evdokia" is both emotional and tragic, and influenced several future European films about devastating relationships of outsiders which cause a couple to burn out, such as "Turkish Delight" and "Betty Blue".  

Grade:+++

The Ogre of Athens

O Dracos; drama / comedy, Greece, 1956, D: Nikos Koundouros, S: Dinos Iliopoulos, Margarita Papageorgiou, Giannis Argyris, Thanasis Veggos, Maria Lekaki  

New Year’s Eve. Thomas is a shy, middle-aged bank clerk. In a bus, he spots a newspaper picture of the wanted gangster “Dragon” who resembles him remarkably. When the police start chasing Thomas thinking he is Dragon, Thomas hides in a night club run by underground criminal Spathis who accepts him as their boss. They reveal Thomas their plan to steal artifacts of a pillar to sell them to a rich American. Club dancer Babe falls in love with him. When the police arrests Thomas in the morning, and take him away, they realize he is not Dragon and let him go. Thomas spends some time with Babe. Upon realizing he is not Dragon, a gang member stabs Thomas with a knife in the night club. Thomas walks on the street wounded and dies.  

Even though it was included in two polls by the Greek Film Critics Association as one of the 10 best Greek films of all time, Nikos Koundouros’ “The Ogre of Athens” is in reality at least two steps below such hype. This tragicomic tale of mistaken identity has some interesting existentialist-escapist observations on how people living ordinary lives dream of becoming significant and epic, but it is neither that well written nor that well directed, lingering too much on some ‘empty walks’ on the streets. The hapless, lonely protagonist Thomas carries the entire film: at first, after being mistaken for gangster Dragon, he denies it, then becomes ambiguous, until in the end he just plays along and feigns he is the gangster simply because he enjoys the attention of all the people around him, which give him the feeling that he matters. This is illustrated in two sequences, one in which he laments to Babe how one spends his entire life thinking you are fighting to achieve something, only to in the end realize it was all a waste of time, implying his pointless job; and the other when the club owner asks Thomas why he returned to the crime underground gang, instead of staying home, and Thomas replies: “Because it felt like a tomb there.” There are some traces of film noir imitation and playing with shadows and lights, yet in the end, “Ogre” is too confined by its routine-coventional style, lacking more imagination and ideas stemming from such a stimulating concept, though it gets a kick out of staying true to the legacy of Greek tragedies in the end.  

Grade:++

Moneyball

Moneyball; sports drama, USA, 2011, D: Bennett Miller, S: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Stephen Bishop, Chris Pratt, Kerris Dorsey, Reed Diamond, Robin Wright, Philip Seymour Hoffman

Baseball team Oakland Athletics loses another game. Their sports manager Billy Beane is disappointed. His budget is limited, so he is not able to buy the best—and most expensive—professional baseball players. At Cleveland Indians, he meets and teams up with assistant Peter Brand, who uses a new kind of application method, sabermetrics, to evaluate each player, calculating that many “cheaper” players have actually hiden potential. Billy and Brad go on to assemble a new team with little money. At first, the new team loses a game, but after exchanging further players, they are able to get a team that gets 19 consecutive wins. Oakland loses in the final game, but the owner of Boston Red Sox offers Billy a big sum for becoming their general manager because he achieved as many victories as the Yankees, but with a five times less cost.  

“Moneyball” is a surprisingly effective depiction of sports management, probably because the sports were reduced to a minimum, and 90% of its appeal lies in the excellent, fascinating character of Billy Bean, played brilliantly by Brad Pitt: he was rightfully picked as the protagonist since he is always in center stage wherever he goes, due to his snappy attitude and witty remarks—he simply has a personality. The screenplay by Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin has strong, outstanding dialogues, as if the two writers were competing in who will write a better quote. In one example, managers are discussing their baseball team during a meeting, commenting about a certain player (“He has an ugly girlfriend. Ugly girlfriend means no confidence”), until Billy interupts them to cut to the chase (“And now we’ve been gutted. We’re like organ donors for the rich. Boston’s taken our kidneys, Yankees our heart. And you guys just sit around talking the same old good body nonsense like we’re selling jeans!”). In another moment, Billy admits: “I hate losing more than I wanna win!” After his team loses a game, he enters their locking room, just stands there and says: “You think losing is fun?!” While the movie will intrigue more of those viewers interested in baseball and less those who are bored by the sport—which pretty much covers a lot of the world outside of America where baseball isn't that appealing—it has more than enough clever building blocks to impress, while the director Bennett Miller uses the story to even tackle more universal themes, including the nature of competition and the fear of losing your job in capitalism, as well as attempts by the small to try to break the monopoly of the big establishment. Indeed, a small home run for all involved.

Grade:+++

Car Wash

Car Wash; comedy, USA, 1976, D: Michael Schultz, S: Franklyn Ajaye, Ivan Dixon, Sully Boyar, Bill Duke, Leonard Jackson, Antonio Fargas, Melanie Mayron, Lorraine Gary, Richard Pryor, George Carlin  

24 hours in a Los Angeles car wash by hand, owned by Leon Barrow: his son Irwin quotes Mao Zedong and wants to work with the ordinary employees, out of solidarity with the working class... a woman brings her car for cleaning after her son threw up... an African American prostitute with a blond wigg escapes from a cab during a traffic jam without paying, so the taxi driver is after her... Lonnie, an ex-convict father of two and an employee of the car wash, is trying to persuade boss Barrow to reorganize the business to make more money... T.C., an employee with huge hair, wins in a radio call-in contest and gets two tickets for a rock concert... Marsha, the receptionist, gets a date at 6:00 by a customer... Abdullah is fired by Barrow for being absent several days at work. Abdullah wants to take revenge by robbing the cash desk that evening, but Lonnie talks him out of it. In the evening, it’s the end of the shift and every employee goes back home.  

A semi-cult film from the 70s, written by future director Joel Schumacher, “Car Wash” is a peculiar anthology comedy overburdened by too many supporting characters, dated by the archaic Jive slang, and lost in the episodic-chaotic story, but it does get better the longer you stick to watching it, until it becomes surprisingly good in the last third. The jokes are a hit-or-miss affair, and a fair share of them are juvenile or lame: for instance, employee Chuco wants to take revenge on Goody, so he borrows Goody’s hat with pig ears on them, puts it over his entire face, and then climbs over the toilet wall to scare a woman urinating on the toilet bowl. Later, Chuco returns the pig hat to Goody, and naturally, the woman pours a bucket of water over Goody, thinking he mocked her a minute ago. George Carlin is wasted as the taxi driver who just searches for a woman who didn’t pay her cab fee. However, some jokes are way better, including a two minute guest appearance 33 minutes into the film by comedian Richard Pryor, who plays an evangelist preaching the “Church of Divine Economic Spirituality” where he is basically showing off for getting paid to do nothing (“Believe in the Lord! And believe in yourself! And most of all believe in federal green!”). In another memorable moment, after Abdullah mocked and belittled him, gay man Lindy gives a perfect response: “Honey, I’m more man than you’ll ever be, and more woman than you’ll ever get!” Some moments of humanity lift the movie up (Lonnie patiently listening to his little daughter showing her kids’ drawing of him in the car wash) and just like Joyce’s “Ulysses” confines the entire story to only 24 hours in the lives of these characters, thereby forcing the viewers to infer everything else about their lives and future based on just this sample they witnessed. Similarly like “M*A*S*H”, “Car Wash” shows its characters joking in order to forget all the problems around their lives, and their escapism has a certain charm, if one is willing to go along with them.  

Grade:++