Actress Mona Zaki in "Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story."
By Joe Bendel. Hebba Younis wants to be Chris Wallace. Her husband wants her to be Oprah Winfrey. However, when at his behest she temporarily forgoes her hard-hitting newsmaker interviews in favor of women’s interest features, it winds up antagonizing the Egyptian government even more in Yousry Nasrallah’s Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story (trailer below), a recent selection of the Venice Film Festival which has its New York premiere during this year’s African Diaspora International Film Festival.
They should be Cairo’s most fearsome media couple. Younis is the formidable host of a morning talk show. Karim Hassan is an up-and-coming journalist in line to become editor-in-chief of one of Egypt’s state-owned newspapers. Unlike Younis though, Hassan never met a government official he wouldn’t suck up to. Reluctantly, she agrees to lay low during the upcoming editor selection process. Yet, as she invites average Egyptian women on her show to tell their stories, a portrait of a corrupt and misogynist Islamic society emerges that hardly thrills Hassan. When cabinet ministers start to be implicated in her guests’ stories of victimization, we know there will be trouble.
Hebba Younis with her husband, played by Hassan El Raddad.
Essentially, Scheherazade is four films in one, telling three discrete story arcs in flashbacks within the framework of Younis’ show. As the least controversial (and therefore least memorable), her first interview with a late middle-aged volunteer social worker gives Hassan reason for hope. While it runs a bit long, the second woman’s story is a much different matter. Convicted of murdering the man who was playing her and her two spinster sisters, it raises hot button questions about women’s legal rights in Egypt specifically and under Islamic law in general—not exactly territory Hassan and his political masters are eager to explore. When Younis’ third guest Nahed, a dentist from a prominent family, accuses a sitting minister of sexually and financial preying on mature unmarried women, all bets are off.
While cinematographer Samir Bahsan gives Scheherazade a lush, sophisticated look, it is a surprisingly tough film. Though Hassan might appear to be a modern dope-smoking yuppie, it becomes clear he would prefer his wife veiled and cloistered rather than more famous than him. Evidently, Mona Zaki has been the target of some heated disparagement from Egypt’s medieval quarters for her portrayal of the relatively liberated and assertive Younis. While she is a smart and attractive lead, Sanaa Akroud really steals the picture as Nahed, an older but still striking and all too vulnerable woman. Akroud brings out her intelligence and resoluteness, making her not-so uncommon circumstances a particularly effective indictment of Islamist Egypt.
Scheherazade would be bold for any Islamic country and is especially so in an Egypt where most media is wholly owned by the Soviet-sounding State Information Service. A feminist film in the best sense of the term, Scheherazade is a surprisingly forthright look at the status of Egyptian women today. Timely and recommended, it screens as part of the 2010 ADIFF at the Anthology Film Archives on Sunday (12/12) and next Tuesday (12/14, the concluding night of the festival) at Symphony Space’s Thalia Theater.
By Jason Apuzzo. To complement our new Invasion Alert! series, today we are introducing a new series here at Libertas called Cold War Updates!
Have you noticed that the Cold War is back? At the movies at least, the Cold War seems to be returning in a big way. As LFM’s own Govindini Murty reported in her recent Human Events article on “The Cinema’s Surprising New Anti-Communist Films,” both Hollywood and the indie film scene have been producing films large and small about the communist threat in the past year – whether of the Chinese, North Korean, ex-Soviet or even homegrown-American variety. And these trends are not only continuing – they’re actually accelerating.
Angelina Jolie in "The Tourist."
It seems that each week new films, TV shows, documentaries and even video games are being green-lit featuring sexy spies, villainous Russians, jaded CIA operatives, the space race, unguarded uranium stockpiles, communist oppression … all that good stuff we remember from that nobler and altogether sexier period – the Cold War era – with its Bond girls, martinis, microfilm, Whittaker Chambers, Dean Martin, JFK … and Ronald Reagan.
I personally, for example, am currently working on a 7-hour, 3D IMAX film adaptation of the epic Bobby Fischer-Boris Spassky World Chess Championship match of 1972!
(Just kidding.)
Anyway, what do all these new films portend? I’ll leave that for readers to decide (although in days to come I will be advancing certain theories), but I’ve decided to put together this regular Cold War feature to cover these new developments – or as many of them as we can. So grab a martini, plug in your Fender Telecaster and enjoy!
Two brief notes: there will likely be some occasional crossover of this series with Invasion Alerts!, as some of the new sci-fi films coming down the pike appear to have Cold War themes in them.
And of course, it goes without saying that Cold War Updates! will always feature the sexiest women around. Would you expect anything less from Libertas?
“It’s a really interesting challenge and Chris is an amazing actor” explained di Bonaventura. “So I’m confident we found the right guy.”
However, the producer claims the bigger challenge will be attracting a young audience to the film… “Tapping into Ryan’s was always a sophisticated world – it’s slightly adult. How do you bring those adults who expect that kind of sophistication and yet how do you also bring a young audience to it? That’s an interesting business challenge and a creative challenge – how do you weigh what’s in front of you and put it all together”
My take on this, for what it’s worth, is that the younger audience will come – provided you don’t gratuitously pander to them. (The folks doing Tron, incidentally, may be discovering that too late – if we’re to believe how poorly that film is tracking.) In any case, I’m looking forward to what Bonaventura’s cooking up for this reboot – this being one of the few series that actually deserves being brought back. Incidentally, Chris Pine will soon be starring (with Angela Bassett and Reese Witherspoon) as yet another CIA spy in Fox’s McG-directed This Means War.
Poster for the Joel Surnow minseries.
• A poster is already out for producer Joel Surnow’s quasi-controversial new miniseries, The Kennedys. What do you think? It seems to play it straight. The series stars Greg Kinnear is JFK, Katie Holmes as Jackie, Barry Pepper as Bobby Kennedy, and Tom Wilkinson as Joe Kennedy. Chris Diamantopoulos apparently plays Frank Sinatra. I don’t know if anybody plays Dean Martin, but somebody should. In any event, our best wishes to Joel on this 8-part series that airs on the History Channel next year.
• There are new interviews out today with Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp for Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Tourist. (There are also new photos from the film here and here.) I’m liking everything I’m seeing about this film right now, although I’m alarmed that the film is apparently tracking poorly (much like Tron). I do think there’s an audience for an old-school, Hitchcockian thriller like this, but they’ll need to market the film to people who are above the age of 16. Do the studios know how to do that anymore?
• I’m annoyed to report that the obnoxious Eugene Jarecki, director of Why We Fight (definitely not the Capra version), has a documentary about Ronald Reagan in this upcoming Sundance Film Festival. Personal note here: I have three acquaintances who are working on no less than three different Reagan movies right now, and I implore all of you dudes to hurry up! before people like Jarecki are allowed to define The Gipper in perpetuity. They’d love to do it if they could.
• On the DVD front, the famous (and infamous) Red Scare thriller My Son John is finally getting a release, courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection. (It will also be available via Netflix streaming.) I have mixed feelings about that film, largely because its gifted star, Robert Walker, died before he could complete his performance – which seemed to be an interesting expansion on what he’d just done in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (and footage from Strangers was ultimately used to complete My Son John). Had Walker been able to finish the film, I think it might’ve been a lot better than it currently is, even if the film nonetheless has its moments (particularly those between Walker and his mother, played by Helen Hayes).
• AND FINALLY … it somehow seemed fitting that our first Cold War Update! pinup would be an actual Russian spy – the increasingly cheeky (so to speak) Anna Chapman – who’s currently paying her bills by posing for Russian Maxim … which should, incidentally, tell you everything you need to know about how very different the new Cold War is going to be from the old. (There’s a lot of money to be made this time!)
And that’s what’s happening today in the Cold War!
By Joe Bendel. Nothing brings back the terrible memories of 9/11 like the sight of home-made missing person posters. Evidently they were a common sight in London as well during the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings of 2005. One desperate mother hopes against hope that they will help her find her missing daughter in Rachid Bouchareb’s London River, which screens currently as part of the 2010 African Diaspora International Film Festival in New York.
Elisabeth Sommers lives a quiet life tending her farm on the island of Guernsey. Estranged from his family in Africa, Monsieur Ousmane works as a forester in France. She is a Protestant, while he is a Muslim, but they soon discover they are linked by the 7/7 bombing. Neither her daughter Jamie nor his son Ali has been heard from since that tragic day. Much to their surprise, it turns out their missing adult children were involved in a serious relationship. They were even learning Arabic together—a revelation Sommers has difficulty processing.
Eventually, the nervous Sommers and the stoic Ousmane form an uneasy truce that slowly evolves into something like friendship. Yet the nagging uncertainty of their children’s fate looms over their time spent together.
River is a quiet film about every mother and father’s greatest nightmare. Bouchareb largely eschews the political in favor of the starkly intimate. Still, some realities are impossible to avoid. Does it give pause to any of River’s many Muslim characters that their co-religionists just murdered 52 innocent people? Perhaps the ever taciturn Ousmane hints at such misgivings when he confides in Sommers his own failings as a father. It is hardly a transcendent epiphany, but it is an honest, sensitively turned scene.
While River boasts a large cast, it is essentially a two-hander for two vastly different parents. The Oscar-worthy Brenda Blethyn is agonizingly convincing as the distraught Sommers, perfectly counterbalanced by the deliberate Sotigui Kouyaté as Ousmane. Chronically ill during the shoot, Kouyaté passed away earlier this year, but his Silver Bear at the 2009 for River was well-deserved. Though quiet and reserved, he brings Ousmane to life – not merely as a stereotypical symbol of non-western wisdom. Instead, he is a flawed individual, whose character arc is just as heavy as that of Sommers.
Though often a political filmmaker, the French-Algerian Bouchareb’s greater loyalties clearly lie with his story and characters. That is why his most recent film, Outside the Law, is such an interesting take on the Algerian independence movement, in which it is devilishly difficult to differentiate the rebels from the gangsters. With River, he focuses like a laser on the pain and fear of his primary leads. Bouchareb also gets a nice assist from composer Armand Amar, whose jazz-inflected score adds a wistful air to proceedings. A simple, moving film that deftly sidesteps polemics, River is a good way to start the 2010 ADIFF. It screens this Sunday (12/5) at Symphony Space’s Thalia Theater.
By David Ross. I finally saw Paul Haggis’ Crash. I laughed (at it), I cried (out in disgust!). Here is the liberal imagination crazed by its own clichés: a vision of American life in which each of us ceaselessly ricochets between mindless acts of racism and violence with barely enough time to catch our breaths and reload our guns. The question is whether the film is a searing expose (prostrate thyself, Oscar!) or a ludicrous caricature. I can comment only on my own experience. In forty years spent in five states, northern, southern, and mid-western, I have never heard a racist peep much less witnessed a racist tirade of the kind Matt Dillon’s character specializes in, and I have entirely evaded the kind of Wild West crossfire that Crash takes for the norm.
I have a dear lifelong friend who is black (raised on the campus of a small Bible college, now a hedge fund manager living in North Carolina). I once asked him whether he had ever encountered the racism that the media infallibly describes as omnipresent. He said, “Honestly, I haven’t.” “Nobody ever called you a nasty name or demeaned you in some way?” “Nope.” He then asked me whether I had ever encountered anti-Semitism. I said, “Honestly, I haven’t.” Later, in Europe, I did experience the electric shock of authentic Jew hatred, but to this day I have never suffered so much as an American raised eyebrow or skeptical sidelong glance. Americans, as far as I can tell, are the most Judeo-tolerant people in the history of the Western world. Racism and anti-Semitism undoubtedly exist, but they do not dominate every interaction and waking moment, and they are nothing like the essence of our daily or national experience. Crash wants us to see ourselves in its mirror, but I see nothing I recognize.
Matt Dillon in "Crash."
What I witness from my seat on the city bus is an astonishingly successful experiment in pluralism, in which people are consistently polite and deferential and not infrequently cross racial and religious lines to become friends and more than friends. I am a Jewish-American married to a Taiwanese. Our little girl is a red-headed Chinese-Jewish daughter of the South. Her best friend is half North Dakotan, half Indian. Dr. Apuzzo is an Italian-American married to an Indian-Canadian, our own glamorous Govindini Murty. They are residents of the very city that Crash demonizes as a strip-mall Yugoslavia simmering with civil war, and yet they seem hardly torn apart by its supposedly vicious cross-currents. Is Libertas or Crash the true American microcosm?
The antidote to Crash is The Wire: an urban vision no less dark, but infinitely subtler, truer, and smarter, and far less given to hysterical generalization. Crash is cheap farce camouflaged by a self-important grimace of hate. The Wire is tragedy of the old kind, in which social and economic forces function as ineluctably as the Greek fates.
The contemporary definition of ‘serious’ art: that which confirms and dignifies liberal cliché.
By Jason Apuzzo. We’ve been speculating for some time here at Libertas that Disney’s Tron: Legacy might go political. The early, key indication of this was an interview with Bruce Boxleitner in which he suggested that the big bad villain of Tron might be a wicked defense contractor.
Collider: Watching last night I sort of got some political undertones in the film –
Wilde: Absolutely. There’s a totally anti-fascist message here.
Collider: She really believes she’s doing the right thing, having this war on imperfection. Do you get that now having seen the whole film?
Wilde: Yes, absolutely, and I saw it more than ever in the movie last night. I knew that was there in the script, but I was really excited to see, like, ‘Ooh, good. We have a little bit of a political slant.’ Maybe no one will notice but you and me, but I think the message, again, is that imperfection is beautiful, the idea of accepting flaws. The story is of a dictator who has ethnically cleansed this universe and what’s left is this desperate and miserable world. The message I think of course is that compassion, humanity and humility are important in our own lives as well as in politics. Again, that makes me think about how incredible Jeff’s performance was because to create a character like Clu who was this merciless dictator who really kind of sends chills up your spine as you think of maybe who he resembles in actual history, but I think it does have a message as well, a political message as well as one just about humanity in general.
I would love to know exactly who Wilde thinks Tron‘s “merciless dictator” resembles “in actual history,” wouldn’t you? Why do I think I already know? Hint: I doubt she’s talking about insane Islamic theocrats eager to wipe out Jews, or any actual fascists in today’s world; she’s more likely talking about America’s ‘virtual,’ imaginary fascists that haunt the current liberal imagination. And we all know who those guys are …!
The young, CGI Jeff Bridges as a "merciless dictator."
In any case, I think perhaps we’re starting to get the vibe of what this film will be saying. As we’ve said here on almost a hundred different occasions recently, sci-fi is the new medium through which the big, ideological statements are being made in the cinema. (Although, truth be told, sci-fi has actually being doing this for decades.) If Avatar didn’t make that point clearly enough, the many new sci-fi films coming in its wake will.
By Jennifer Baldwin. Watching old movies has been a spotty pastime for me these last few months. Working full-time as a high school English teacher leaves me with less free time than I’d like to work on my “Classic Cinema Obsession” articles, so that’s why I’ve been pretty much absent from Libertas since Mad Men ended.
I also began writing for a new film website called Fandor, an amazing new site that allows subscribers to watch a wide variety of classic, foreign, and indie films directly on their computers. No downloads, everything is streamed on the site. And first-time subscribers get a one-month free trial, which is a great incentive to join.
Along with the films, Fandor also provides written commentary and informative essays about the films and filmmakers, including articles by yours truly. My first article for Fandor was on Tarkovsky’s haunting dream film The Mirror, while my second article was on the Josef Von Sternberg/Marlene Dietrich classic, The Blue Angel. I’m also a participant in Fandor’s syndication program, which allows me to embed their films directly on my own personal blog, Dereliction Row. You can watch any of the films anytime you want if you’re a subscriber, or you can watch an individual film for a small rental fee. I’d encourage anyone who is interested in great cinema to check out Fandor.
So even though I have been overly busy with my day job as a teacher, I haven’t completely neglected my passion for classic films. And that’s what this “Classic Movie Journal” is all about. It’s my way to keep writing about old movies for Libertas, but in a more informal, less time intensive manner. Consider these my unvarnished, rambling, and passionate musings on all things old movies. Emphasis on the unvarnished and rambling, please.
So what’s rattling round in my brain this week? Well, as I mentioned above, I have been watching the new TCM documentary series about the history of Hollywood, and I have to admit, I’m a little disappointed. Normally I fall down at the feet of everything TCM does, but this time I’m not feeling it.
I don’t know if my expectations were too high, but the series has not lived up to them. I just finished watching episode four, “Brother Can You Spare a Dream,” which focused on the years 1929 to 1941, and I’ve found that the show doesn’t seem able to get to the essence of its topic each week. This week’s episode was all about Hollywood during the Depression, and how sound technology revolutionized the industry – and yet it never really delved into the cultural impact of the Talkies or the way the movies affected Depression audiences. It gave a little lip service to these topics, but I never felt the grand sweep, the overall impact that the movies had during these years. Through four episodes so far, there’s been nothing epic about this series.
From "The Great Train Robbery," (1903).
Part of the problem is that the show is divided in its attentions right from the start. It’s “Moguls and Movie Stars,” so the focus must be split between the businessmen and the artists. This is a pretty standard approach as far as an appraisal of Hollywood history goes, but the writing of the show has been muddled because of it. It keeps jumping back and forth between the machinations of the moguls and the rise and fall of various stars, but there’s no “through line” that connects everything to something larger. I was expecting a sort of myth-building history of America, as told through the history of Hollywood (something along the lines of Ken Burns’ Baseball documentary). Instead, it’s just a very rote, very surface documentary that breezes through its topic like a Cliffs Notes version of history.
Maybe each episode isn’t long enough? Maybe it was a mistake to break down each episode by decade? I know I would have liked more than an hour to cover the tumultuous and groundbreaking 1920s. I’m not sure how to fix the problem, but I’ve found that each episode is highly disposable and I haven’t learned anything I didn’t already know from my Film Studies 101 class. What’s even more annoying is that I was expecting these earlier episodes to be the strongest of the series, since they would be dealing with the earliest years of Hollywood in which I know very little in comparison to the more popular decades of the ‘30s, ’40, and ‘50s.
Ginger Rogers in "Gold Diggers of 1933."
In last week’s episode, Shirley Temple was given about three minutes of screen time at most. Fred Astaire got maybe a minute. The few clips that we got were brief and usually did not include much dialogue. I mean, this is the 1930s, when dialogue was everything – and snappy, quintessentially American dialogue was the great innovation of the age. Instead, everything was pretty much thrown at the viewer in a helter skelter manner, the only guiding framework being chronology. This series needs more clever montages and filmmaking chops. As it is, it’s kinda boring.
Maybe I’m being too hard. The series is certainly professionally produced and the interviews with the relatives and descendants of the moguls at least provide some new, unique perspectives. Occasionally the documentary will delve into some little known area, such as the career of female director Alice Guy, or the pioneering work of African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. But overall, it’s familiar stuff. And it’s not even presented in a thrilling or heart-swelling way. If a documentary like this can’t even get a classic movie obsessed gal like me to swoon, then there’s something wrong. A series like this should get me all psyched up to go watch the movies that get mentioned in each episode. Instead, I find myself relieved when the episodes are over and not really in the mood to watch any of the movies discussed.
Maybe the final three episodes will surprise me. I haven’t watched the newest one that just aired on November 29, so there’s still time for redemption. As it stands now, though, this series has been a disappointment. Normally I worship at the altar of TCM, but not this time.
