New In The USA: LIVE AND LET DIE
It's 007 vs. Harlem pimps, Voodoo sorcerers, psychic virgins, and good ol' boy sheriffs down South. It's the one where Bond escapes a sticky situation by running on the heads of crocodiles. Yet there is something earthy about this one that sets is apart from the rest of the Roger Moore era, it being jolly old Roger's first kick at the can.
Live and Let Die is silly, vaguely racist, and unabashedly sexist (welcome to the early 1970s, or most 007 adventures for that matter) but the centerpiece boat chase sequence is some of the best action the series has ever offered and that McCartney song still sizzles.
New In Canada: BABEL
Alejandro González Iñárritu's 'butterfly effect' ensemble piece split critics and audiences alike upon its 2006 release. It got nominated for a bunch of awards, but won very few. (This oddly enough could be a litmus test for a film worth watching.)
A Japanese man (Kōji Yakusho) gives a rifle to his tour-guide while on vacation hunting in Morocco. The guide sells the gun to a goatfarmer whose sons play around with it and accidentally shoot an American woman (Cate Blanchett) on a tour-bus. This prevents her and her husband (Brad Pitt) from returning home in time to relieve her Mexican nanny (Adriana Barraza) who needs to go across the border for her son's (Gael Garcia Bernal) wedding.
Lots of bad things continue to happen from the fall out. The movie is (obviously) about communication across culture, but just as important it is about communication within family in the context of culture.
Babel is also a very richly cinematic film (consider Rinko Kikuchi as a deaf girl getting a sensory high off alcohol and vibration in a bass-pounding nightclub) that deals with emotion and empathy without ever being maudlin. It is one of the best films of 2006, and one decidedly of the new millennium.
New In The UK: CITY OF GOD
OK, this title is hardly underrated. It played in the cinemas for over a year, scooped a boatload of awards, blew audiences away, launched the career of Fernando Meirelles, and hasn't aged a day since it's 2002 release. Many of those are good reasons to revisit the movie, so we'll make an exception.
City of God charts the lives of several generations living in the favela's outside of Rio de Janeiro as the violence increases, and the gang members get younger and younger. The film pops with energy, humour, violence and runaway chickens.
New In Ireland: THE NINTH GATE
Roman Polanski's glossy occult thriller stars Johnny Depp as an oily rare book broker who gets involved in a legendary old tome that might just open the gate to hell.
I know people who hate this film, but how can you hate a thing this sumptuous, icky, and yes, kooky. Leather and parchment and dust ooze from this films cinematic pores. Depp puts in a rare restrained performance as the unlikable and unlikely central character in a book chase around Europe.
The only pity is a couple late shots of shitty matting around a howlingly campy (vampy?) Emmanuelle Seigner. Nevertheless, I visit this film often for its myriad, inscrutable pleasures.
New In Brazil: CODE 46
Welcome to a world with borders, very difficult to permeate borders. Cloning has become de riguer in Michael Winterbottom’s near-future to the point where you do not necessarily know who you are genetically related to anymore without a government check-up.
The title of the film refers to a sexual act, a pregnancy resulting between two people with too-similar DNA. But the film has much more to offer in its vision of the world. It spends a good deal of screen-time on how communication has evolved – an extreme example of this is how learning (and empathy) can be achieved by the injection of a virus – and how the gap between the poor and rich has widened immensely.
Code 46 is a slightly more subdued but no less stylized version of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, in which Tim Robbins, Samantha Morton and every other human being are all replicants living in a brave new world.
New In Mexico: BOSS - Season 1
With some gorgeous on-location photography of Chicago, a pilot directed by Gus Van Sant, and three central performances played by Kelsey Grammer, Connie Neilsen and Martin Donovan, Farhad Safinia's political drama has the personal hubris of Breaking Bad, and the political machinations of House of Cards. Pity it only went two seasons and got very little press.
Kelsey Grammer, an actor who is always great, plays the Mayor of Chicago, Tom Kane. In the opening long-take scene of the pilot, the camera unflinchingly scrutinizes his weathered visage, while he is flatly diagnosed with the onset of a serious degenerative neurological disorder. With the goal of hiding this fact, he does not plan on giving up his job and his influence in a city famous for its 'down and dirty' politics.
Its low ratings may have gotten the show cancelled after two seasons, but they are available in all their glory here.
New In Scandinavia/Denmark: MR. NOBODY
This Canada/Belgium/Germany/France co-production got very little fanfare upon its low-key release. Now that Jared Leto is "Oscar Winner Jared Leto" people might discover this convoluted and glossy (but still great) sci-fi romance.
Has quantum physics and romantic fantasy ever been successfully combined in a large-scale science fiction epic? It has now. The arrow of time points supposedly forward, but it is thorny and messy and vague (with more choice and tangent universes than Donnie Darko).
The resulting film is delightfully confusing, sublime and above all else visually impressive. Writer director Jaco Van Dormael is clearly a fan of Vonnegut, but he manages to drop in a whimsy and lovey-dovey warmth as well. Following the death-bed recollections of Nemo. the last mortal man on earth, we soon learn that the brain is a mysterious beast.
Nemo seems to recall several significant decisions in his life he may or may not have actually made, yet he remembers all the outcomes. Which one is real? Which one is a dream? Does it matter? The perception is in the pudding, and the final climax of Mr. Nobody proves there is always one more divinely perverse trick up the universes sleeve.
New In The Netherlands: BRAVE
This is interesting if only because there is a Disney movie on Netflix somewhere in the world. (But it is also kind of underrated by the Pixar standards.)
Brave is not exactly the film I wanted. I would have preferred things if Pixar shot its arrows not after Disney targets but rather after its leader John Lasseter’s hero and idol, Hayao Miyazaki. At times Brave seems to be aiming for the area that studio showed mastery with in its girl-hero epics Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Mononoke Hime.
America being America, it has to be about how the individual learns from making large blunders instead of an initially well rounded girl finding her way in the world with strong consideration of family and responsibility.
But I should not fault cultural differences or storytelling as Pixar goes its own way on these things. That the film is entirely in service of the royal-smack down between mom and daughter, over checking off boxes on a cultural list, is a minor gripe. There is empathy and spirit here (far more than bafflingly boffo box office Frozen), and that is to be cherished.