By Joe Bendel. Was it possible to thrive under Communism? Yes, for a short while, if you happened to be a rabbit in East Berlin. But their salad days did not last forever. In a story too strange not to be true, a population of rabbits temporarily flourished in the green belt running down the center of the despised Berlin Wall. Part nature documentary and part parable, directors Bartek Konopka and Piotr Rosolowski offer a truly original perspective on the Communist experience through the eyes of those East German bunnies in Rabbit à la Berlin (trailer above), a 2009 Academy Award nominee for best documentary short, which opens today in New York as part of a double bill of short docs examining Twentieth Century German history.
During the immediate post-war years, a hearty band of rabbits survived by raiding the garden patches on Potsdamer Platz. Much to their supposed surprise, sheltering walls were suddenly erected around them in 1961. With a nice grassy run, plenty of shade, and precious little human contact the whiskered critters made like rabbits and multiplied. The East German guards even began adopting them to help pass the time.
However, for many West Berliners, especially artists, the rabbits’ ability to burrow beneath the walls made them symbols of something greater—coyote tricksters for their divided age. Then, as escape attempts became more frequent and daring, the rabbits’ peaceful lives were upturned. Their lush grass was destroyed so that fugitive footsteps would be easier to track in the dirt beneath. Formerly their protectors, the guards declared open season on the rabbits, like a red army of Elmer Fudds.
One of Rabbit’s many surprises is the extent and quality of archival film capturing Berlin rabbits in their former environment. Credible simply as a wildlife film (even featuring the smoothly placid narration of Krystyna Czubówna, a well-known Polish voice-over artist for nature docs), it also has a slyly subversive sensibility, particularly when it incorporates news footage of the likes of Fidel Castro and Yassir Arafat come to gawk approvingly at the Wall. Wistful without being nostalgic, it is one of the more inventive and entertaining documentaries to reach theaters this year.
A meditation on the Holocaust.
While the fate of the Berlin Wall rabbit warren is not widely known outside of Germany, the Holocaust and its implications are certainly well established terrain for documentarians. Yet, French-Israeli filmmaker Nurith Aviv finds fresh insights in Loss. Returning to her father’s ancestral home of Berlin, Aviv explores the cultural and scientific losses Germany imposed on itself through the Holocaust.
While relatively conventional in her approach, Aviv superimposes interviews with four prominent Berliners and a vintage television appearance by Hannah Arrendt over sights seen from the S-Bahn train as it makes its way through the city. It makes the talking heads more visually dynamic, and also gives viewers a good feeling for the still-grim looking city.
Frankly, the fifty minute Rabbit was robbed at last year’s Oscars. Highly recommended, it is unquestionably the main event of Film Forum’s Berlin documentary double feature. That said, the thirty minute Loss is also a thoughtful film worth seeing in tandem with Rabbit. Both screen together at New York’s Film Forum, beginning today (12/8).
Former "Baywatch" star Donna Derrico, targeted by the TSA.
By Jason Apuzzo. Former Baywatch babe Donna Derrico, who once posed for Playboy, is apparently angry that she was subjected to a full body scan at LAX airport.
Libertas readers should free to conduct their own ‘full body scan’ of Ms. Derrico above (an extra service we provide here at Libertas). She certainly looks dangerous, doesn’t she?
Well, she’s also hopping mad. According to Fox News:
After being subjected to the scan by TSA agents at Los Angeles International Airport, “I noticed that the male TSA agent who had pulled me out of line was smiling and whispering with two other TSA agents and glancing at me,” D’Errico told AOL News. “I was outraged.”
D’Errico also fumed over the fact that the TSA agent, who did not give her the option of getting a pat-down search instead, had said that the reason she was selected was ” ‘Because you caught my eye, and they’ — pointing to the other passengers — ‘didn’t,’ ” she said.
Leo would be wise to keep an eye on his girlfriend (not a strenuous task), who – given the TSA’s current threat assessments – may be wanting to give Ms. Refaeli a very thorough examination. After all, she certainly seems to fit the TSA’s current ‘threat profile’!
By David Ross. Is Disney finally laying the ghost of its lost decades? To some extent it is. Its last, The Princess and the Frog (2009), laudably reprised the look and feel of the Disney Golden Age (see my comments here), while its latest, Tangled, builds on the example of Bolt (2008) and does its best to mime Pixar. Disney has not mastered what it takes to be the Pixar formula (which it never will because Pixar’s only formula is the rejection of formula), but even so Disney was wise to place itself under the supervision of Pixar chief John Lasseter, who is now chief creative officer of both companies. Disney’s recent films may not be the deepest or most poignant, but they are at least energetic and entertaining.
Tangled is the story of Rapunzel with a revamped plot for an age of campy glitter. In Disney’s telling, Rapunzel is not a peasant but a princess (inevitably), and her hair, which seems to be about fifty feet long, is both magical (cures wounds, reverses aging, etc.) and handy (recollect Indiana Jones with his whip). The old crone Gothel pilfers the golden-haired infant from the castle of her parents and sets her up in a tower as an all-purpose Botox substitute. She is eventually rescued, not by a prince, but by Flynn Rider, a charming rogue supposedly in the Errol Flynn vein but actually in the mugging mode of Brendan Fraser.
There’s no denying that the film is fast paced, action packed, and funny, and that Rapunzel’s hair makes a clever and innovative prop. My five-year-old daughter writhed in laughter throughout, especially enjoying the scene in which Rapunzel beats the crap out of Flynn with a frying pan and tries to stuff him in a closet (an axiom of kiddy humor: traumatic brain injury is always good for a giggle). In a just world, the horse Maximilian – a hilarious version of Hugo’s inexorable Javert – would be standing on four legs at the podium in March receiving the Oscar for best actor while Sean Penn restrains the impulse to clutch the throat of whoever happens to be sitting in front of him and to shake until certain silicone parts pop out of alignment.
What’s subtly wrong with the film is what’s wrong with so many post-Shrek kid movies. Filmmakers insist on a winking referentiality, as if fairy tales are dusty old irrelevancies that must be rescued by pop cultural in-jokes and Lettermanesque (now Stewartesque) insouciance. These Generation X artistes are aware enough to recognize clichés but not inventive enough to transcend them. In the end, the clichés appear in horn-rimmed quotation marks, but they are clichés all the same. In Tangled, every last facial expression and turn of idiom has an antecedent in some movie or TV show or music video. It would take a team of hyper-caffeinated Tarantinos to trace them all, but the aura of tedious familiarity is unmistakable. The tune “Mother Knows Best,” a pastiche of the controlling (Jewish? Italian?) mother delivered in belting Broadway style, gives the tenor:
Go ahead, get trampled by a rhino
Go ahead, get mugged and left for dead
Me, I’m just your mother, what do I know?
I only bathed and changed and nursed you
Go ahead and leave me, I deserve it
Let me die alone here, be my guest
When it’s too late
You’ll see, just wait
Mother knows best
Mother knows best
Take it from your mumsy
On your own, you won’t survive
Sloppy, underdressed
Immature, clumsy
Please, they’ll eat you up alive
Gullible, naive
Positively grubby
Ditzy and a bit, well, hmm vague
Plus, I believe
Getting kinda chubby
I’m just saying ’cause I wuv you
Mandy Moore, who plays Rapunzel, is the perfect pawn of this approach. Her medieval princess is a perky cheerleader type: a young Kelly Ripa in medieval drag. I can picture her wielding an iPhone, but not wielding a scepter.
Tangled is less heavy-handed than Shrek in this regard, and its jokes are somewhat less stupid, but its general approach is so unnecessary and evinces so little faith in the enduring power of mythic narratives. Movies like this entertain in the superficial sense, but at the cost of initiating young people in the traditions of Western imagination. The great Disney fairy tales of yore – Snow White and Sleeping Beauty especially – were unforgettable in their vivid realization of dim pasts and mythic destinies. They belong to the worlds of Grimm and Perrault, but also to the neo-medieval fantasy tradition of Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites, with Keats and Malory lurking in the remote recesses. Tangled, by contrast, is like a Steve Madden ad set in motion: encephalitic dolls bounce in a color-saturated wonderland that connects to nothing in our collective unconscious.
These objections, admittedly, are unlikely to be shared by anybody who is not on the lookout for signs of cultural demise. The average moviegoer will have no complaints, and the average little girl will resist her next haircut with tears and threats. By its own standards, Tangled is a success; it delivers the promised ‘fun.’
From "The Secret of Kells" (2009).
Tangled has its precise opposite – its anti-self – in the The Secret of Kells (2009), a masterful Irish cartoon that gives an fanciful account of the creation of the Book of Kells, one of the greatest medieval illuminated manuscripts (now housed at Trinity College, Dublin). Under constant threat from the invading northmen, the monks of Kells labor to complete their great book. Brendan, the young nephew of the abbot, is wonder-stricken by this labor and becomes a secret apprentice. He ventures into the forest to locate the necessary berries and there meets the streaming, gliding, shape-shifting Aisling, at fairy at once unsettlingly inhuman and lovable. Even more terrible, Brendan must venture into the cavernous depths to find a prismatic crystal upon which the monks’ work depends; the crystal turns out to be the eye of the snake-demon Crom Cruach, whom Brendan must defeat. In the end, the northmen ravage and burn the monastery and Brendan flees with the manuscript to continue the monks’ labor on his own, in a hut by the sea.
The Secret of Kells ponders the selflessness of the monks who toiled for decades in fire-lit scriptoriums to create their monuments of faith. In this sense, the film stands at the farthest possible remove from our own ethic of not particularly bothering. Beautifully and intricately rendered in the flat stylized manner of the Book of Kells itself, the film is full of dreamlike beauty and horror, evoking a world that has the fluidity and mystery of living imagination.
Tangled is a mirror held up to our silliness; The Secret of Kells is a looking glass in which we may for a time disappear.
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.
During the immediate post-war years, a hearty band of rabbits survived by raiding the garden patches on Potsdamer Platz. Much to their supposed surprise, sheltering walls were suddenly erected around them in 1961. With a nice grassy run, plenty of shade, and precious little human contact the whiskered critters made like rabbits and multiplied. The East German guards even began adopting them to help pass the time.
