Notable Movies Seen in 2005. Commentary by Eva. Order is not significant.

• *Kinsey Directed by Bill Condon, w/ Liam Neeson as Dr. Alfred Kinsey & Laura Linney as his wife Mac. John Lithgow plays Kinsey’s uptight criticizing repressive father. Kinsey’s churchy background, his courtship, family life & research from gall wasps to sex, as well as American sexual attitudes in the ’40’s and ’50’s, are explored as well as possible in under 2.5 hours. This was the nominee for Best Picture that I thought should have won. (Million Dollar Baby won)
• Mad Hot Ballroom (2005), Dir. Marilyn Agrelo. Same genre as Spellbound which I also loved, only this is a NYC 5^th grade dance contest instead of a spelling bee. Part of the pleasure was seeing good teachers at work. I agree with the principal who said dance teaches etiquette and national culture as well as steps and teamwork. Those kids had moves!
• *Hotel Rwanda Docudrama. Dir. Terry George, w/ Don Cheadle as Paul Rusesabagina. Paul bribes, threatens and stands his ground to save 1200+ people in the hotel in Kigali where he’s house manager, after the world abandons them to the genocide. Paul and his family escaped and now live in Belgium. Paul’s a hero manque, though: his wife’s brother and his sister-in-law don’t make it because Paul did not rise to the occasion fast enough. They are Tutsi. Paul is Hutu. It’s 1994.
• *March of the Penguins (France) director Luc Jacquet. Documentary on one breeding season in the life cycle of the Emperor Penguins. Their story is as absorbing as many plotted fictional films. Stunning photography.
• *The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (2003). Documentary by Judy Irving. Mark, an articulate housesitter w/ no visible means of support, takes an active personal interest in the flock of 45 feral parrots in his San Francisco neighborhood.
• Grizzly Man is a documentary about another engaging eccentric animal advocate whose arts career fizzled years ago. The director, Werner Herzog, edited in a lot of footage taken by the subject, Timothy Treadwell, and interviewed his parents, friends, an ex-girlfriend, and professional naturalists. This was a film worth making. Seen with George Keilbach.
• Le Tango des Rashevski. Dir. Sam Garbaski (Belgium/France/Luxembourg, 2003). There’s a little of the eponymous dance, a little piano playing, some witty dialog. The divorces are offscreen, the two courtships and the wedding are onscreen. There are also two seders. The two funerals were of well loved old people. Enjoyable and upbeat. MFA.
• Les Choristes (Fr, 2004) Directed by Christophe Barratier, this film stars Gerard Jugnot (a Mikhail Gorbachev look-alike) as Clement Mathiew, a music teacher at a reform school. The movie is set in 1949. The boys call the new master "baldy" and draw a carricature of him. The master one-ups the cartoonist with a few deft strokes of the chalk which inspires appreciative laughter. Pretty soon he has these ruffians singing in a choir. I like movies about good teachers.
• *Motorcycle Diaries Biopic about a year (1952) in the life of Ernesto Guevara before he became a revolutionary, from Brazilian director Walter Salles. Subtitles. Gael Garcia Bernal as Che, who’s a medical student, and Rodrigo de la Serna as his friend Alberto Grenado. The two 20-somethings from Buenos Aires take a motorcycle trip through South America, culminating in 3 weeks volunteering at a leper colony in the Peruvian Amazon. Grenado lives in Cuba to this day.
• The 9^th Day directed by Volker Schlondorff. The Nyer gave this a great review ("Ulrich Mathew as Henri Kremer could be one of El Greco’s saints.") so I cycled over to the 8:15 screening after work. I was not disappointed, but it could have been a play. The movie is in color but it feels black and white. It’s fictionalized, but based on a true story about a priest released from the priests’ block at Dachau. He returns to his family in wartime Luxembourg. The deal is he is to bring the bishop around to be more accomodating to the Nazis (A few excesses during wartime, but we are putting down godless communism, and the Church will come out of this stronger) or else return on the 9^th day to Dachau. The young Gestapo officer (August Diehl) assigned to turn Fr. Henri Kremer is an ex-seminarian. "I believe in the Church but sometimes I wonder about the Pope," says Henri Kremer to his bishop. My cousin P.G. says, "That’s a contradiction!"
• Born into Brothels Documentary by Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski which won an Academy award. It was as good as MaryDan said it was. Those street kids from Calcutta were so resilient! Only about two are going to make it out of the brothel, but not because the filmmaker did not try. She did not just document. She gave the children cameras. She taught them how to take pictures. She took them on field trips. She mounted art shows of their work. She got places for these children in boarding schools. But in the epilogue we learn that most families never accepted the scholarships in the first place, or withdrew their children after a short period. Last but not least—we see the kids’ photos.
• Look at Me /Comme Une Image (France). Starring Mary Lou Berri as Lolita, Jean-Pierre Bacri as her father, and Agnes Jaoui (who looks like Sigourney Weaver) as her singing teacher. David Denby of the Nyer gave this a rave review. There’s no comedy, no clever lines, and not much love in it, but I enjoyed this portrayal of a young adult—a very young adult. The heroine is down for most of the movie, but she’s not out. She keeps trying at her singing and at her personal relationships. She’s able to express her unhappinesss and the reasons for it. Her father puts her and her new boyfriend in the same room at his country house, But Lolita can handle it. She tells the b.f., when he gently touches her on the veranda, that they have not got that kind of relationship, same room notwithstanding. At the very end Lolita siezes hope.
• *Fever Pitch A romantic comedy by the Farrelly brothers based on a Nick Hornby soccer novel morphed to the 2004 Red Sox, starring Drew Barrymore as a "twenty-ten" (30) career girl dating a high school math teacher (Jimmy Fallon) with season’s tickets to the Red Sox. How important are the Sox to Ben? "The Red Sox, sex, and breathing" are his priorities.
• Murderball. Documentary about quadrapalegic rugby by Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro. All the people in this film had individuality and attractiveness. There was a thread about a newly injured young biker’s rehab and introduction to Murderball. The movie was not pie in the sky. That young man was saving up $3000 for his murderball chair. This has all the enjoyment of a sports movie with a lot of extra information and inspiration. It takes on not just sex, but relationships. There’s laughter too. The film shows its subjects really caring and really trying about life and sports.
• Saint Ralph Set in a Catholic High School in Hamilton Ontario in the 1953-54 academic year. 14 year old Ralph throws himself into training for the Boston Marathon, though everybody tells him it would be a miracle for him to even participate. Cambell Scott plays the track coach. As Ebert and Roeper (2 thumbs up) said, it’s a predictable sports movie, but well done and very enjoyable. And it was fun to see it with Ellie Cirignano, 86.
• The Greatest Game Ever Played, about the 1913 U.S. Open in Brookline. Dir Bill Paxton. Mark Frost adapted the screenplay from his book, which tells parallel stories about the dark horse amateur Francis Ouilet and the great British champ Harry Vardon. A crowd pleaser and I’m one of the crowd that was pleased, right from the opening graphics.
• Walk on Water (2004, Israel. In Hebrew & German). Director Eytan Fox (Yossi and Jagger), with Lior Ashkenazi (who starred in Late Marriage) as Eyal, a Mossad assassin. With Knut Berger as Axel. It’s 33 years since I was in Israel, yet I recognize the place. Axel from Berlin is visiting his sister Pia (Caroline Peters) on a kibbutz. I liked the part where the Mossad agent dispatches a gang of gay bashers in the Ubahn even though it blew his cover. I did not like what Axel did to his grandfather near the end of the movie, and the "Two years later" epilogue felt tacked on. But my thumb is up.
• A Love Song for Bobby Long, Dir. Shainee Gabel. Set in a poor neigborhood of New Orleans, a setting I thought back on after Katrina. Single woman moves in with two guys who are none two happy about it, but it’s a housesitting situation and she is as well connected to the landlady as they are. Quirky. I liked the house after Percy (Scarlett Johannson) made it cozy. The Bobby Long character (John Travolta) is old in the movie, yet we find out this character was born in 1955!
• Ae Fond Kiss (2004, U.K) Directed by Ken Loach. In Punjabi & Scottish English. There are scenes in a State run Catholic High School in Glasgow. My first day at Cardinal Hinsley 32 year ago I asked a boy what "Packy" meant, and he shouted, "Miss doesn’t know what a ‘Paki’ is!" Now that Ezra’s in Scotland this movie takes on yet another dimension for me. The affair between Cassin, son of Pakistani immigrants, and Roisin (Rosheen) Hanlon, the Irish music teacher at the school, had better dialog than Before Sunset (which got rave reviews for dialog.), though I did not think she had cause to be as angry as she was when he waited until a week into their relationship to tell her he was formally engaged to a cousin he’d never met back in Pakistan. She should take some responsibility for the risk incurred in moving so fast into a relationship. So she did not know some major things about him yet. Duh. I don’t believe in putting someone between a rock and a hard place like Roisin did when she asked Cassin not to go to work because "I need you emotionally today." He had something really important to him going on at work that day. But even if he didn’t…They were two attractive single twenty-somethings making the effort to connect, and that’s a pleasure to watch.
• State of Denial (86 Minutes dir Elaine Epstein) and Ask Me I’m Positive (48 minutes, 2004 dir Teboho Edkins) Two documentaries about AIDS from South Africa. In AMIP, 3 very personable young men visit rural villages to raise awareness. The question and answer sessions were admirably upfront. The other covers the personal and the political.
• Anya In and Out of Focus dir Marian Marzynski, a Jewish-Polish emigré filmmaker who long resided in Chicago. Very personal, like a home movie, this film follows his daughter’s life from birth to age 30. This family let us into their home, and that takes guts, especially for Anya & her father. Imagine having your adolescence and flunking out of the U of I on film. And her father’s the kind of filmmaker who believes in realism, not in showing off Anya’s best moments. Anya, in her mid 20’s, finally graduated from a Teacher’s College and got a job at the American School in Paris. At the end she’s off to teach in China with her husband Dominique and their infant Sebastian. Dominique is from Mautitius by way of London. The first thing Anya tells her family about Dominique is that "He’s 3 inches shorter than I am." And she giggles. Anya drew the line at having their wedding on film, but we see the reception. D. was the Soccer coach at the Paris A.S.
• Good Night & Good Luck. Docudrama about Edward R. Murrow’s (David Strathairn) "See It Now" coverage of the McCarthy hearings in 1953. George Clooney, who directed and plays Fred Friendly, has come a long way since E.R! Patricia Clarkson, another favorite of mine, plays the wife in the secretly married couple (CBS had a rule against co-workers marrying). The office camaradie was well done. Everyone smokes in 1953. 2 colonels try to intimidate CBS.
• Capote Docudrama w/ Philip Seymour Hoffman in a tour de force performance as the title character (PSH acts short), Catherine Keener as Harper Lee, Chris Cooper as the Chief Law Enforcement Officer on the Kansas case, and Clifton Collins as Perry Smith, one of the In Cold Blood murderers. Directed by Bennett Miller, written by Dan Futterman, based on the book by Gerald Clarke. After Truman flaunted his scarf, boasting "Bergdorff’s," a KS detective tipped his fedora, saying "Sears." This movie confronts the fact that a good author’s first loyalty is to his book, to the point of using people. I don’t know that I’ve seen lies of the type everyone has observed or participated in so baldly portrayed before. In Cold Blood was not my cup of tea when I read it in the ’60s, but I’m glad I read it as background for this movie!
• North Country Dir Niki Caro (Whale Rider). Frances McDormand is back in Minnesota, this time as a union rep on the Mesabi range, when the Charlize Theron character, Josie Aimes, initiates a class action sexual harrassment case. It’s at that point in history when Anita Hill is testifying. Josie has a hard time getting the other women miners to join her suit, & no family support. Woody Harrelson plays her lawyer. Loosely based on a true story worth telling. Seen with Polly S.