Week Of April 24, 2006 - Overlooked Week - Mon / Wed / Fri

April 24, 2006

In honor of roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival - which starts on Wednesday night with an appearance by the aggressively-overlooked Marni Nixon, who will dance all night after the opening night screening of My Fair Lady - the column theme this week will be the overlooked, whether films or other ideas.

Today, we'll start with an array of films that I have overlooked commenting on in the last couple of months. Time to catch up.

LA MUJER DE MI HERMANO (MY BROTHER'S WOMAN)
Only eleven Spanish-language films have cracked the $5 million barrier at North America's domestic box office. Four were from Almodovar and six others were in the Oscar race in various ways. Only Like Water For Chocolate, still the highest grossing Spanish-language film to date in the US, is an outlier. And that was considered one of the major Oscar snubs of all time.

So I guess it's no great shock that Lionsgate didn't try too hard to wrestle the nation into box office submission for this first-time feature from Ricardo de Montreuil. 206 screens… not much advertising… $4945 per screen… third highest per-screen for films with more than 50 screens that weekend, behind Scary Movie 4 and Ice Age 2.

But this is really an interesting little, mainstream, sexy, non-PC, oddly commercial feeling movie. The female lead, Barbara Mori, is a sex bomb and is unafraid to show it. The male leads, Christian Meier and Manolo Cardona, ably represent two of the pretty-boy archetypes. And without giving away too much plot, there is something here for boys and girls and those firmly straddling the fence. It's almost arch enough to be in telenovela territory, but its slicker than that… more Adrian Lyne than horny Hispanic housewives.

I really enjoyed the movie. It is a bit of a goof, but if you are looking for sheer entertainment, this is a great way to spend a Saturday night… especially if you are looking to follow up the movie with a good bottle of wine and a candlelit room… could be bed, could be bath, could be the pool, if you use the movie as an instruction manual.

KING OF THE CORNER
I spent some time with Peter Reigert at the Bermuda International Film Festival, where his film, King of The Corner, was not playing. But Peter, whose name you know from films like Local Hero and Animal House, among many others (including the very overlooked, very beloved by me, The Object of Beauty, starring John Malkovich, who is going to be at the Overlooked), was just getting off the road after spending much of the previous year traveling with his film from town to town, city to city, screen by screen.

The film is a comic, dramatic, adult-thinking film about a guy whose life is going through all kinds of changes, with his father dying, his career flailing, his marriage under siege, and his daughter coming of age. As the man in the center, Reigert gives one of his terrific, now expected, performances. He also enlisted Eli Wallach, Isabella Rossellini, Eric Bogosian, Rita Moreno, Dominic Chianese, Beverly D'Angelo and Harris Yulin amongst others.

It's one of those My Big Fat Greek Wedding kind of movies that audiences of adults really love and that no one wants to distribute aka Trying To Sell It to Teenagers And Have A Big Opening Weekend. Roger Ebert gave it 3.5 stars and it played Chicago for weeks. But still, no pick-up.

The film is imperfect, but the point is that audiences that saw it - and Reigert sat through the movie at hundreds of screenings with thousands of people - had a great time in the movie theater, having a personal and a communal experience that is being overlooked by a lot of bean counters these days.

THE GROUND TRUTH
Nancy Willen practically had to pull my teeth to get me to watch this documentary, which was around during the awards season and played at Sundance. Unfortunately, by the time I finally got around to seeing it, Nancy had moved on to other movies. Still… she as right and I was wrong for not making this a higher priority.

The film, by Patricia Foulkrod, which is full titled, The Ground Truth: After The Killing Ends, turns out to be one of my favorite war documentaries of all time. It opens with the James Hillman quote, "The return from the killing fields is more than a debriefing… it is a slow ascent from hell" and brings that truth into focus. This is not the story about bad policy or abusive political tactics, though you can tell where the filmmaker stands on those issues. This is about the emotional torture of being a part of a shooting war. There may be glamour for some, but for these men, there is only the damage of being in service of otherwise unthinkable acts.

The film deals with both the expectations going into the armed forces as well as the experience of war itself and then the trauma of coming home, even when you are not as vilified for being a soldier as you might have been at, say, the end of Vietnam. What it doesn't do is to picture these people as pure victims. Most of them made a choice that they are given responsibility for by the film. When recruits describe the "soft pedaling" of the recruiting process, they sound both taken advantage of and terribly naïve. Foulkrod clearly feels that these men are being tricked into joining. But she doesn't push any harder than the subjects do.

This is how the military works, by its nature. And for the most part, I don't think reasonable military men would be consider the film unfair, even as the dehumanization of boot camp plays out on screen.

But ultimately, the movie is really about the denial about the fact that being in the military while the nation is at war has a lot to do with death and killing. We all know that when we discuss the military rationally. But the emotion of actual killing… it's a whole different world when death is real. And it is clear, as the film goes along, that as well trained as the American military is in killing, it is sorely lacking in dealing with the short-term and long-term emotional damage of having killed and having watched so many die. And the ambiguity of the moral purpose of the current war in Iraq, only makes it that much worse. (No, I don't feel ambiguous about this war… but many, many people do and for me, as a journalist, not willing to acknowledge that, than I am no longer looking rationally at the world.)

The movie gets more interesting every minute, as conversations and ideas that may seem familiar turn into ideas and conversations you have probably not had to consider very deeply before. Really excellent work.

The film recently was picked up by Focus Features for release, so hopefully, it will be overlooked no more.

FINALLY - Two filmmakers who have been a bit overlooked are premiering films at Tribeca in the next week. First, Eric Eason, who broke out overnight with his digitally shot drama, Manito, is showing his follow-up, Journey To The End Of The Night. It stars Brendan Fraser, going way against type, Mos Def, Catalina Sandino Moreno and Scott Glenn in a heavy thriller with sex, drugs, and death in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Manito won an award at Sundance and is available via Film Movement, but let's hope that this film is worthy of as much attention and gets more than Eric's first film.

Also hitting Tribeca is the Miami-based team of Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman, who infamously brought the world the nearly-impossible-to-release, but life-changing doc Raw Deal: A Question of Consent, now take on the Cocaine Cowboys of their hometown of Miami, F.L.A. You even get to hear a score from Miami Vice master Jan Hammer.

Hopefully, this one will have no clearance problem and you'll see it in a theater near you before you know it.

READER OF THE DAY: I am trying to get a buzz going for the 9/11 documentary "Loose Change - Edition 2" (82 minutes). I would like to have every film reviewer you know who hasn't seen this documentary to view it. It can be viewed FREE online. In my opinion the film shows that Bush was deeply involved in the planning and execution of the terrorist attacks on 9/11, and gives creditable evidence to prove it.

Exposing what really happened on 9/11 is important because Bush murdered Americans citizens. Of all the tragic 9/11 events, why focus on the Pentagon attack? There is evidence - surveillance videos - showing that what struck the Pentagon was NOT a passenger jet. The CIA, FBI, and DOD have videos taken from three separate locations near the Pentagon - and won't release them. Take a look at an online documentary if you want to be absolutely convinced.

If people could learn about what really happened on 9/11 - especially the attack on the Pentagon - there would be millions of Americans marching in DC, and protesters worldwide demanding that Bush and Cheney be arrested and tried for war crimes. (I see Americans marching on Congress and the Whitehouse with flaming torches and pitchforks like in the old horror movies.)

Thanks, Harold S Kramer
Marblehead, MA USA"

E Me: You tell me... overlooked or overcooked?

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