I’m not surprised by this, given the audience’s overwhelmingly positive reaction in the screening I attended – but at the same time I’m thrilled to learn that the film won this important award. This will certainly boost the film’s chances for securing a distribution deal here in the U.S.
Best wishes to whole team behind Four Lions, and we’ll keep everyone here at LFM updated on when and where you can see this extraordinary film.
The title of the film is The Wall – A World Divided, and the film recently received a glowing review from The Wall Street Journal’s Michael Judge: “… reminiscent of the brilliant 2006 German drama The Lives of Others, which won the Oscar for best foreign film that year … The Wall—A World Divided takes us where only fine documentary filmmaking can: Into the hearts of everyday people who too often suffer at the hands of despots and their ideologies. Don’t miss it.”
I had the chance to visit the Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie just a few years before the collapse of the East German communist regime. It was an overwhelming, disturbing and eerie experience. It’s difficult to describe what it’s like to see what amounts to being an enormous cage designed to trap people inside. I wish more Americans had somehow had the chance to experience the grim spectacle of The Wall themselves, in order to understand how precious – and even precarious – our freedom is. If documentaries such as this one from PBS can help restore an appreciation of our freedom, then so much the better.
For anybody who read the news two years ago that a nearly complete 16mm negative of METROPOLIS was discovered in Buenos Aires (including 30 minutes of additional footage previously thought lost forever), the anticipation and excitement has been building for when the film would finally be restored and we could all see Fritz Lang’s original cut of his masterpiece for the first time since its Berlin premiere in 1927.
The time has now come. After a premiere in Berlin earlier this year and a North American premiere in Los Angeles this past April, the film is finally being screened in theaters across the U.S. and Canada – all leading up to the DVD release of the Complete METROPOLIS in November 2010.
The tale of METROPOLIS – originally panned by critics and disliked by audiences on its initial release in Germany, and later mutilated by international distributors, who turned the film into a diluted Frankenstein story (a quarter of Lang’s original film was thought lost for decades, one of the ultimate “lost masterpieces” of the silent era) – is a tale well known to classic movie fans and silent cinema enthusiasts. This latest chapter in the film’s life only enhances its mystique and mystery. Almost 40 minutes of this landmark film was lost for nearly a century only to be found hidden away in a Buenos Aires museum in 2008. What was found in Argentina is now the most complete version to date. The print was deemed nearly complete because of the way it matched up to the original Gottfried Huppertz score (the only complete document still in existence from the 1927 premiere). With almost 30 minutes of film time restored, this newest version of METROPOLIS is the closest we might ever come to seeing the film the way Fritz Lang intended.
I was fortunate enough to attend a screening of the Complete METROPOLIS at the Detroit Film Theater earlier this month. It was one of the best movie experiences I’ve had in a long while, thrilling and impressive, making me fall in love with METROPOLIS all over again. Continue reading LFM Review: The Complete Metropolis
[Editor’s Note: those of us here at LFM love the ‘Cold War lifestyle’ – the spies, the bikinis, the shiny orbiting satellites and dry martinis. We return today to an occasional series from LFM contributor Steve Greaves, “Loving the Cold War Lifestyle,” that takes us back to that altogether tastier, less politically-correct era.]
This recurring joke and banter like it would probably win a regular Joe today a new level of intimacy with the old rolling pin – that is, if wives still packed rolling pins. Welcome to the world of 1967’s A Guide for the Married Man (see the trailer here), a sharp-looking, box-office-winning and cleverly-written comedy that hasn’t been on DVD for long and might be easy to overlook. And overlooking it would be a shame.
This vintage sex farce finds Walter Matthau playing Paul, a suburban Every Husband of the nuclear era. An investment counselor by day, the man who has it all is nonetheless lacking a certain something come night: namely, variety. Gorgeous Inger Stevens is a dream wife, which makes Matthau’s eventual wanderlust that much more poignant (and inane). Mid 60’s superstar Robert Morse is perfect as Matthau’s lascivious pal Ed, who steps up to coach his new protege on the finer points of straying “the right way,” i.e., so as not to get caught and to otherwise protect the feelings of one’s betrothed. This simple “educational” device sets up a romp that allows for plenty of hilarious sequences between the two, but also for a parade of cameos wherein great comedy stars of the era enact episodes of other chaps’ successes or failures, recounted by Morse for illustrative purposes. I can’t think of another film like this one in terms of the format, though one could make a case that it relates to period English comedies like Bedazzled, or even confessionals like Alfie that share the device of ongoing “how to” tutorials. Continue reading Loving the Cold War Lifestyle: A Guide For The Married Man
[Editor’s Note: On the occasion of the 2010 Glastonbury Festival being held in the UK this weekend – the largest music festival in the world, with an estimated 170,000 attendees and 500 music acts – LFM contributor David Ross looks back at the Anglo-Celtic folk revival.]
By David Ross. From Lady Gregory to Lady Gaga … it’s been a depressing hundred years. Let us turn, for momentary solace, to the folk chanteuses of the British Isles, keepers of a tradition “as cold and passionate as the dawn” (Yeats, “The Fisherman”).
Sandy Denny (of Fairport Convention), “Reynardine” and “Tam Lin”: see here and here.
Tríona Ní Dhomhnail (of Skara Brae and the Bothy Band), “The Maid of Coolmore”: see here.
Jacqui McShee (of Pentangle), “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme”: see here.
Anne Briggs, “She Moved Through the Fair”: see here.
Anne Briggs was the first. A protégé of Bert Jansch during the early sixties, she went from pub to pub playing music that looked back to Queen Elizabeth far more than it looked forward to Sgt. Pepper’s. The old men in tweed drinking their bitter must have been pleasantly surprised. For whatever reason, she did not pursue a recording career in earnest and retired early in life to become a market gardener – which activity, I understand, she pursues to this day. She released three albums, all of which have a stark beauty. She plays an odd syncopated guitar, which at moments heralds Nick Drake. I have no doubt that he listened to her carefully. Continue reading She Moved Through the Fair: British Folk Music
By Joe Bendel. It was the most dangerous duty station on Earth, but for the men of the Second Platoon, B Company, 2nd Battallion, 503rd Infantry Regiment of the 173rd Army Airborne Brigade, Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley was home. For just over a year, the Second Platoon served in harm’s way every day at the isolated Korengal Outpost (KOP) that was unofficially renamed in honor of the Platoon’s fallen medic, PFC. Juan Restrepo. For much of that time journalists (a term used without irony in this case) Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger were embedded with Second Platoon, recording the realities of war without editorial comment for the documentary, Restrepo (trailer above), which opened this past week.
Over the course of ten trips to the Korengal Valley, sometimes together, sometime separately, Hetherington and Junger saw the fifteen men of Restrepo up close and under fire. The mountainous terrain surrounding the outpost could have been tailor-made for guerilla insurgencies. The Platoon built it during the dead of night while simultaneously holding off Taliban attacks. Many soldiers described its mere completion as a turning point in their effort to stem the violence flowing from the Korengal region. However, in early 2009 a decision was made to close Restrepo because its presence was considered provocative.
The audience only meets PFC. Restrepo in crude video shot on a hand-held device just before their deployment to Korengal. In truth, the quality of the footage is hardly distinguishable from that shot by Hetherington and Junger, due to the chaotic combat situations they faced. Certainly it gives viewers a strong impression of Restrepo’s personality and why he was so popular with his comrades. Indeed, despite his brief posthumous appearance, Restrepo emerges as the true protagonist of the film that bears his name.
Despite the greater screen time allotted them, the audience does not come to know the other soldiers particularly well as individuals during the course of Restrepo. However, they do get a keen sense of what day-to-day life was like for the Platoon. Soldiers are indeed wounded and even die in the film, but Hetherington and Junger were sensitive to the men and their families in what they chose to show from these fatal encounters, never letting the proceedings degenerate to the level of “anti-war” snuff films.
More context would probably help some viewers understand how the events documented in Restrepo fit into the overall scheme of the Afghanistan conflict. Yet this was obviously a slippery slope the director-reporters scrupulously sought to avoid, at least for their film. (Based on the first few chapters, Junger’s companion book War seems similarly averse to editorializing, except perhaps with some criticism of the inflexible absurdity of military bureaucracy.) Continue reading LFM Review: With the Second Platoon in Restrepo
