Category: Miguel’s Reviews

IDA (2013, Poland)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Pawel Pawlikowski
Cast: Agata Kulesza, Agata Trzebuchowska, Dawid Ogrodnik
My Rating: 8/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 96% Certified Fresh

PLOT: In 1962, Anna is about to take vows as a nun when she learns a family secret from her only living relative. Both women embark on a journey to discover their family story and where they belong.


There are countless movies I’ve seen that remind me why I love the movies.  Ida is the first one I’ve seen in a very long time that reminds me why I love Ansel Adams.  Shot in stunning black-and-white and in the old “Academy” format with black bars on both sides – basically a square screen space instead of a rectangle – Ida is composed almost completely of static shots that have been framed in such a way that you could select almost any shot from any scene, frame it, and hang it in a museum.  Frankly, the beauty of the film is breathtaking.  If the story is a tad shallow or cryptic, I can live with it because it was such a pleasure just to drink in the visuals.

Anna is an orphaned novice nun in a convent in Poland in 1962.  She is on the verge of taking her vows when she gets a letter from an aunt she never met or knew existed, but who suddenly wants to meet her.  Anna travels to the city to meet the aunt, Wanda, who rather coldly informs Anna that the parents she never met were Jews who were killed during the war.  Anna is not Anna, but Ida.  Wanda confirms this by noticing Anna/Ida’s red hair and commenting that her parents had red hair.  Ida wants to find her parents’ bodies, so she and Wanda begin a search that will reveal a lot more than just final resting places and familial closure.

At one point, Wanda and Ida have a conversation about the vows Ida is about to take.  Prior to this conversation, Ida has observed that Wanda drinks, smokes, and appears to bring various men home to bed with her on a somewhat regular basis.  Wanda simmers under Ida’s blank but judgmental stare.

Wanda asks her, “Do you have sinful thoughts sometimes?”

“Yes.”
“About carnal love?”
“No.”
“That’s a shame.  You should try.  Otherwise, what sort of sacrifice are these vows of yours?”

My knee-jerk reaction was that Wanda is clearly trying to get a rise out of Ida, but I admire the sentiment and the logic behind that statement.  How does one know what they’re giving up if they’ve never experienced it to begin with?  It’s like a truism: how can you appreciate light if you’ve never been in the dark?  But it’s not that simple.  I do not smoke because I want to be healthy, or at least a little healthier.  You could say that I’ve “given up” smoking, but I’ve never experienced it.  Does it count as giving something up if you never took it up in the first place?  It’s an interesting conundrum, one that Ida has no real response to.

But I want to get back to the imagery.  That is the real draw of this film for me.  The only other film I’ve seen that really captures this same vibe is Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma.  There is one shot that captures Ida and a young musician she and Wanda meet during their journey.  Ida and the young man are having a conversation outside of a small ballroom, sitting in front of doors and windows with some ironwork.  The two of them are framed so they are very small at the bottom center, while the rest of the frame is filled with these black silhouettes, backlit by the ballroom fluorescents.  When they speak, the English subtitles are displayed, not at the bottom of the screen, but near the top across a black bar formed by the dividing line between the window and the transom window above it:

The unexpected placement of the subtitle took me out of the movie, but only momentarily because, again, what a shot.  They are so small in the frame, especially Ida, and the world around her is so huge.  This visual theme is repeated over and over again, and not just with Ida.  When they are driving down a country road, the static shot is not just of the road, but of the trees towering on either side, and the road itself receding into the distance towards the bottom right corner of the screen.  It’s magnificent, and my words are not doing it justice.  You’ll have to see for yourself.

When it comes to the story…to say the dialogue is minimal is, appropriately, an understatement.  The viewer is asked to do some heavy lifting because Ida says very little.  I guess it’s a bit like a Rorschach test.  We observe Ida in a situation, something happens, she says nothing, but proceeds to do something, and we are left to wonder why she does it.

Take that scene with the musician.  Earlier, Ida had been in an argument with Wanda about Wanda’s loose morals.  Wanda asserts that even Jesus loved Mary Magdalene and tries to look up the story in Ida’s Bible, but Ida grabs it from her and storms out of the room.  Later we see she has gone downstairs to the club to meet with the musician in front of those windows.  Why?  It’s up to us to answer the question.  Maybe she’s lived her life believing one thing, and now suddenly her entire belief system is being shaken up, and perhaps this is the only way she can be a rebel before taking her vows.  And she’s just talking to the guy.

The movie is full of moments like that.  An unexpected death occurs.  Ida’s response is to get dressed up and go dancing.  Say what?  When you watch the movie, we’ll discuss what was going in Ida’s head during those moments.  I’m not a hundred percent sure.

By the time the movie’s over, we’ve seen two graves, a suicide, a nun bathing herself, and some of the best cinematography I’ve seen outside of a Kubrick film.  Director Pawel Pawlikowski is virtually unknown to me, although he was up for Best Director in 2019 (losing to, how about that, Alfonso Cuarón for Roma).  His narrative method is a little oblique for my tastes, but his visual style is superb in every way.  I’m glad it’s in my collection.  Whenever I’m in the mood for a visual feast, Ida will do the trick.

CITIZENFOUR (2014)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Laura Poitras
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 96% Certified Fresh

PLOT: Documentarian Laura Poitras captures the first week or so of Edward Snowden’s leaks to the press and the ensuing aftermath.


Over the last month or two, I have watched two stirring documentaries (Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Nostalgia for the Light) that redefined my idea of what a “good” documentary should be.  Instead of being passive observers, those filmmakers documented what they saw and then commented on it with definite viewpoints and biases.  Narration was used heavily.  That’s not normally my favorite kind of documentary, but they were clear exceptions to my rule.

Tonight, I finished watching Citizenfour, a documentary about the first week or so of the Edward Snowden whistleblowing controversy.  In direct opposition to the other documentaries I’ve seen recently, this film steadfastly avoids narration and simply presents the facts as they happen.  As I was watching, I was simply absorbed in the storytelling, and after it was over, it occurred to me that this documentary captured something incredibly rare: the first few days of a national scandal, behind the scenes with the actual person blowing the whistle, BEFORE the story breaks.  It was captivating.

But that sense of being a fly on the wall is nothing compared to the revelations Snowden made.  If you’re politically-minded, Citizenfour is not just revelatory; it’s chilling.  If one-tenth of what he discusses just in this film is true, the ramifications are vast.  I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but the secret surveillance programs Snowden describes are exactly the kind of tools needed to create a dictatorship.  When a government is using a program/algorithm/whatever that can follow your movements via phone calls, emails, e-payments, cell phones, laptops, etcetera…that’s a police state, empirically.

Snowden’s revelations are so mindblowing and voluminous that paranoia is the rule of the day.  He contacted Poitras and a reporter from The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald, via encrypted emails and air-gapped laptops and arranges to meet them in a Hong Kong hotel.  He makes a quick call to room service, then disconnects the phone.  Why?  Because, according to Snowden, the NSA has technology to listen in on conversations via a telephone handset, even when it’s hung up.  Later, the hotel’s fire alarm starts going off sporadically.  Snowden reconnects the phone and asks the front desk what’s going on, and he’s told it’s a scheduled test.  “Nice of them to let us know,” Snowden says.  Random event?  Who knows?  It’s a mark of how well the movie is constructed that seemingly innocuous events are transformed into, “They’re listening…”

The film follows the story, including the publication of the reports that eventually resulted in Snowden being forced to live in Russia for the better part of a year after his passport was revoked.  We meet Julian Assange as he organizes Snowden’s legal strategy along with a squad of ACLU attorneys, all working pro bono.

The genius of the film is how it simply presents the facts and allows the viewer to draw their own conclusions.  Is Snowden an attention-seeking charlatan?  Or was the US government actively spying – spying – on American citizens without their knowledge?  After a while, without really trying to, the movie takes on the air of one of those classic paranoid thrillers from the 1970s like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor.  At one point, Snowden logs into a laptop while covering his upper body with a blanket like a tent, presumably to make sure no one would be able to tell where he was by using the camera on his laptop.  Or something.

(Admittedly, we only hear snippets of opposing viewpoints, one from then-President Obama where he agrees that Snowden created a much-needed discussion but declines to call him a patriot because of his methods.)

But surely some of this stuff is a little too sensational, right?  The cynic in me wants to believe that’s the case.  But consider: The material in Citizenfour was so sensitive at the time that the director, Laura Poitras, had to move to Berlin because she kept getting detained by border authorities when trying to re-enter the US.  All the film footage was kept on encrypted drives to prevent access from…whomever.  In fact, she edited the movie completely in Berlin so the FBI couldn’t serve a search warrant for the drives.  Just in case.

At one point, Snowden and reporter Greenbaum carry on a conversation about another whistleblower, apparently inspired by Snowden, who seems about to release information about drone strikes and watch lists under Obama.  They are careful to censor themselves by not saying certain words and phrases out loud.  Instead, they write key phrases on pieces of paper and hand them back and forth.  And then the paper is torn to pieces.  Normally, this kind of thing would reek of paranoia, but considering what has come before, it seems perfectly reasonable, in light of what they’re discussing.

I gotta say…in all honesty, I may not be the best person to review this movie.  I think it’s well-made and eye-opening and informative, but is it going to make me change my online or cell phone habits?  Probably not.  I’m in my 50s, and I enjoy the convenience of Amazon Prime and paying my bills online and using my phone to pay for things when shopping.  Am I worried I’m being spied upon?  I suppose I should be.  But I’m not.  I guess I’m willfully ignoring facts, at least the ones based on this documentary.  I’m not saying I like it.  I’m definitely against it.  But is it enough to make me change my behavior?  If I’m being honest, no.  (And if I can’t be honest in an online review, where CAN I be honest?)  But, bottom line, Citizenfour is one of the finest documentaries I’ve seen in recent years. If you’re running short of things to be outraged about, look no further.

BLANCANIEVES (2012, Spain)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Pablo Berger
Cast: Daniel Giménez Cacho, Maribel Verdú, Macarena García
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 95% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A re-telling of the classic Snow White, Blancanieves is a beautiful homage to the black-and-white Golden Age of European silent cinema, set in a romanticized 1920s Seville.


If you are one of the 3 or 4 people in the world who have ever wondered what would happen if Terry Gilliam and Guillermo del Toro collaborated on a black-and-white silent film, your prayers have been answered.  Blancanieves is a beautiful anachronism, a black-and-white silent film created as a tribute to the silent films of nearly 100 years ago that gave birth to the motion picture industry as we know it.  The filmmakers have remixed the classic Snow White fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm into a movie that puts all the recent Disney remakes to shame.  THIS is how you pay tribute to your predecessors.

The updated story takes place in Seville during the 1910s through the 1920s.  Antonio, a famous bullfighter, is gored in the ring and paralyzed.  Traumatized by her husband’s injuries, his pregnant wife goes into premature labor and dies after giving birth to a daughter, Carmencita.  Antonio remarries to a scheming nurse, Encarna (Maribel Verdú, whom you may recognize from Y tu mama tambien or Pan’s Labyrinth).  Encarna, who gives gold diggers a bad name, manages to keep Antonio from ever seeing his daughter, who is raised by her grandmother.  But true to Brothers Grimm fashion, Carmencita (and her pet rooster, Pepe) eventually must come to live with her father and her evil stepmother, whose idea of caring for her paralyzed husband is to leave his chair in a sunny spot of the house while she indulges in a little S&M with the chauffeur.  Why didn’t we see THAT in the Disney version?!

If you know the story of Snow White, you know what happens next.  The insane jealousy, the trip into the forest, the attempted murder, her discovery by a group of little men (only six this time, and they’re bullfighter/clowns).  But everything is turned on its head slightly.  For example, she loses her memory, even forgetting her own name.  She remembers the steps to bullfighting, but she doesn’t know why.

We even get a scene with the infamous apple and the “Sleeping Death,” although the resolution to Blancanieves’s predicament is not quite what I was expecting.  It will take you by surprise, too.  I guarantee it.

This was such a charming movie to watch.  It was full of the kind of shots and edits that are typical of silent films of the ‘20s.  I won’t catalog them all here, but their usage really put me into the “vibe” of that bygone era.  I especially liked the liberal use of double-exposure shots to reinforce a state of mind, or to remind the audience of a piece of “dialogue.”  Or, most effectively, when Antonio reminisces about his dead wife.

And the actress who plays the adult Carmencita, aka Blancanieves, is one of the most beautiful actresses I’ve seen in a while.  For the record.  Films are heavily reliant on faces, silent films even more so.  They found the perfect face for this character.  A true beauty.

There were some nice quirks, too, that reminded me of Terry Gilliam more than anything or anyone else.  Among the six dwarves is one named Josefa.  Josefa is either a really ugly woman or a really bad drag queen.  In miniature.  Her name is mentioned, and that’s it.  No explanation given for her appearance.  We move on.

A word of warning: you know those stories you hear about how the Grimm fairy tales have been “cleaned up” or edited over the years either to remove the more gruesome elements or to tack on happy endings for kids?  Yeah.  Keep that in mind.  That’s all I’ll say.

I used to tell people that, if they’ve never seen a silent film before, The Artist (2011) is the place to start.  Having seen Blancanieves, I think I have to update my statement.  The Artist is a great deconstruction of the art of silent films, but it would be even better to start with a great example of the medium itself.  Sure, there’s always Chaplin and Lloyd and Keaton, but for someone who has historically shunned silent films, Blancanieves is an even better entry point.  It’s a little harder to find, but it’s worth the effort.

AMOUR (2012, Austria)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Michael Haneke
Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, Isabelle Huppert
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 93% Certified Fresh

PLOT: Georges and Anne have known a lifetime of love within their intimate marriage. Though their bond has survived the test of time, it’s about to meet its greatest challenge.


I’ve only seen three films by famed German director Michael Haneke.  The first was Caché (2005), which some may consider maddening, but which I think is a masterpiece of open-ended storytelling designed specifically to provoke arguments at the nearest Starbucks after the movie is over.  The second was The White Ribbon (2009), a pre-World War I fable about what happens when children give in to their tribal appetites.  I thought it was well made but a little too sedate, but it also won an unheard-of FOUR awards at Cannes that year, so what do I know.  (One day I’ll watch Funny Games [1997], but today is not that day.  Tomorrow is not looking good, either.)

Last night, I finished watching Amour, Haneke’s 2012 film that won Best Foreign Film at the Oscars that year, and the Golden Palm at Cannes.  After seeing three of his films, the one thing I can say about Haneke as a director is that he is apparently a perfectionist, who edits and composes shots as well as Kubrick, and that his subject matter is all over the place…also like Kubrick.  He also does not shy away from shocking the audience by lulling them into a kind of complacency before presenting them with a moment of violence or revelation.  Like Hitchcock, he plays the audience like a grand piano.

Amour tells the story of an octogenarian couple, Georges and Anne, still very much in love with each other.  They are retired music teachers living a quiet life of piano concerts, meals at the kitchen table, and reading the newspaper.  Georges might be a little more straightforward or curt than Anne, but they clearly know each other’s rhythms.  The style of the film clearly indicates their routines with a brilliant economy of editing and camerawork, not to mention the subtle performances from the two main actors.

One day, something happens at the breakfast table.  Anne and Georges are having a conversation over a boiled egg when Anne simply stops and stares into space.  Unable to get a response, even after dabbing a wet towel on her face, Georges prepares to fetch the doctor.  Suddenly Anne snaps out of her trance and wonders where Georges is going.  When he tries to explain what’s happened, she gets confused and angry with him for torturing her.  But when she tries to pour herself a cup of coffee, the coffee goes everywhere except in the cup, and suddenly her right hand seems to be trembling…

At this point, in years past, I would have probably turned this movie off, or returned it to Blockbuster without finishing it.  I can hear my inner monologue now: “Why do I need to watch an ultra-depressing movie about someone who’s dying?  I mean, I can hope that it has a life-affirming message at the end like Philadelphia or Angels in America, but this is a foreign film that won awards at the Oscars AND at Cannes, so chances are it’s going to end on a down note.  Who needs it, am I right?”

Well, Amour may not have the kind of crowd-pleasing finale one might hope for, but it is nevertheless engrossing, quietly devastating, and even a little terrifying.

…you can’t see it, but I’m very frustrated right now.  I’m trying to figure out how to write the rest of this column and it’s eluding me.

With a movie like this, an analysis of its technical prowess seems irrelevant.  I learn from the extras on the Blu ray that the couple’s apartment was constructed entirely on a set with a big green-screen backdrop.  Haneke wrote the script with his parents’ apartment in mind, so it seemed appropriate to just recreate it on a soundstage.  How does this contribute to the story?  I honestly don’t know.  I would imagine it enabled the filmmakers to control every aspect of lighting so that anything involving scenery through the windows felt as if it was real.  So I guess there’s that.

My problem is that this movie is intended very specifically to make you empathize with the characters.  It does this job very well.  It was a pleasure to watch a great film with great characters in the hands of a great director.  But if I’m going to talk about how the movie made me feel…I guess I must be honest and say it didn’t exactly make me feel good.  It didn’t make me feel bad, exactly, just really, really sad.

There is a kind of sadness I can feel at certain kinds of films (The Remains of the Day and Requiem for a Dream come to mind) where the endings are so mind-blowingly sad, and so unexpected, there is a kind of emotional exhilaration that accompanies the sadness.  I am so wrapped up in the story I have left real life behind, but after the movie is over, I am back in the real world, and I am stoked to tell someone about how great the movie is, despite its dark material.

With Amour, though, when the end of the film arrives, and I’m back in the real world…I still felt like I was in the movie.  Because, in a way, the movie is about me.  About all of us.  One day, I will (finally) grow old and eventually die.  Watching the scenes where Georges stares into Anne’s eyes as her body functions waste away and he reluctantly hires a nurse who is stronger than he is because Anne has lost the use of her right side and must be carried out of the wheelchair to be bathed?  Listening to the conversation when Anne says point blank that she sees no point in going on living if she’s going to be such a burden?  Watching Anne’s face when the nurse turns her in her bed to demonstrate to Georges how to put on her diaper?

Watching these scenes, I wondered how I would feel myself if I were to succumb to something similar.  I tell myself I would want to live.  There’s a line in Full Metal Jacket: “The dead know only one thing.  It is better to be alive.”  But what if I got as sick as Anne does?  What if I lost the power of speech?  What if I lost the ability to type with both hands, as I’m doing right now?

I’m not even sure that is the point of the movie, to make me reflect on my own mortality.  It’s said that Haneke made this movie to honor his aunt who suffered a degenerative disease as Anne does.  The title of the movie is Amour, so maybe I should be writing about the great love between Georges and Anne.  But whenever I think about that aspect of the film, I fall back into thinking about myself again.  It’s a vicious cycle, and I’m not sure how to break it.

I’m making this movie sound depressing to the nth degree.  I suppose it is, by default, but it is still definitely worth your while to watch.  It is so well made and so thought-provoking.  It deserves to be seen and discussed, ideally with someone you love.  I don’t agree with every decision made by the characters in this film.  But I understand why they were made, so I do not judge them.  One day, I will get old, and I will think back to this movie and say to myself, “Now I really know how they feel.”


P.S.  The only reason I don’t rate this movie 10/10 is because there’s a brief prologue involving an empty apartment and a bedroom with a single occupant that, to me, telegraphed a key moment that I saw coming a mile away as the scene unfolded.  But that’s just me.

A SEPARATION (2011, Iran)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Asghar Farhadi
Cast: Payman Maadi, Leila Hatami, Sareh Bayat, Shahab Hosseini
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 99% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A married couple in Tehran are faced with a difficult decision – to improve their daughter’s life by moving to another country or to stay in Iran and look after a deteriorating parent who has Alzheimer’s disease.


The above plot description, paraphrased from IMDb, is rather brilliant because it is misleading in all the right ways.  When I read it, I assumed I would be in for a depressing domestic drama, a la Marriage Story or Kramer vs. Kramer.  It won Best Foreign Film at the Oscars that year, so that only strengthened my belief that it would be a fine film, but also a bit of a slog.

Boy, was I wrong.  That plot description covers just the opening four or five minutes of the movie, an incredibly nuanced, brilliantly acted, uncut take of the two spouses, Nader (husband) and Simin (wife) arguing in front of a judge.  Simin wants to move out of the country so their daughter, Termeh, can have a better quality of life.  Nader has no problem with them leaving, per se, but he cannot go because he must stay and take care of his elderly father who suffers from Alzheimer’s.  If Simin wants to go so bad, let her go, he says, but he won’t give permission for Termeh to go with her.  And Simin won’t leave without Termeh.  It’s a pickle.  (For her part, Termeh wishes to stay with her father, but Simin says that’s only because she doesn’t know any better…how depressingly typical of parents going through a separation.)

After this brilliant scene, I was ready for the movie to settle into a series of one scene after another showing Nader and Simin arguing over custody of Termeh.  Instead, the script ingeniously takes a bit of a left turn and focuses on the woman Nader has hired, Razieh, to be caretaker for his sick father, because Simin, in a move unexpected by me, packs up and moves out.  Razieh wears a traditional chador, and so Nader is unable to tell she is pregnant, which might have affected his decision to hire her.

Razieh does her best with Nader’s father, but the long commute and the difficult work takes its toll.  One day, Nader comes home from work and discovers his father has fallen out of bed, with one hand tied to the bedpost with a piece of cloth, and Razieh is nowhere to be found.  He also discovers some money is missing.  When Razieh returns, she is cagey about why she left, but she insists she stole no money.  Nader is furious and tries to throw her out of his house.  When she insists she be paid for the day’s work and continues to maintain her innocence of the theft of the missing money, Nader loses a little control and pushes her out the front door of their third-floor apartment and onto a staircase.  She walks away, but later winds up in the hospital – she has suffered a miscarriage.

What follows is one of the most engrossing social dramas I’ve ever seen in my life.  I suspect part of my insane interest in the story was the fact that it takes place in a country thousands of miles away, in a culture that is utterly alien to me, and yet the people there are just like any parents and children and husbands and wives we meet every day here in the States.  Razieh’s husband, Hodjat, even has a line: “Why do you think we beat our wives and children like animals?  I swear on this Qur’an, we’re humans just like you!”  He’s talking to his accuser, but he was also talking to me.

The film is shot with mostly handheld cameras, a technique that works extremely well by making everything feel like a documentary.  It makes things feel more real in a story that only works the more you empathize with the characters.  I empathized a great deal, not because I am a husband or a father, but because I recognized their situation, faced with an impossible decision where each person is right and wrong simultaneously.  In the ensuing plot developments, which I will not disclose here, I was so wrapped up in the lives of these people that I found myself reacting the way old school sit-com housewives might respond to watching their favorite soap operas while folding laundry.  “No WAY did he just say that!  …oh my god, lady, you’re just making things WORSE!  …jeez, this guy is CRAZY…!”

This was an unexpected reaction for me.  In years past, I have tended to shy away from foreign dramas after watching one called 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days about women in ‘80s-era Romania forced to seek illegal abortions due to their country’s ban on the practice.  I’m not denying that film’s power, but it was so insanely depressing that I swore off foreign films for a while.  It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve started to come back around to giving films like A Separation a chance.  It hasn’t always paid off, but I’m happy to say it did this time, in spades.

I should note that the story is also extremely revealing in terms of the legal system in Iran.  I can’t vouch for its accuracy, of course, but it all feels very authentic.  In a governmental system so intertwined with religion, it’s easy to see how decisions that are made based on religious statutes may be technically correct without being just.  Just another dimension to the film that makes it even more compelling to watch.

But there is another aspect of A Separation that I believe is even more profound than the engrossing domestic drama.  I’m not even sure if it was intended by the filmmaker.  I’ve read snippets of reviews from other top critics, and none of them seem to have touched on my theory.

[SPOILERS FOLLOW]

In my opinion, A Separation could be interpreted as an allegory of the impossible choices faced by anyone living in such a country or circumstances who yearn for a better (or at least different) life elsewhere, but whose ties to their roots and traditions make such a decision extremely difficult.

Look at the husband in the story, Nader.  He states repeatedly that he has no problem with his wife leaving.  If his father weren’t sick, he would be more than happy to go with her.  But his father needs constant care, and so his familial connection dictates his decision.  There is a telling moment when Nader is bathing his father by hand, while the father sits in a wheelchair, virtually oblivious to his surroundings.  Nader dutifully rinses his father’s body and leans him forward to so he can reach the bottom of his back…and he abruptly stops and starts to weep.  Is he weeping for his father?  Or himself?  It’s one of the film’s many “fill-in-the-blank” moments that we must interpret for ourselves.  For me, I believe it was over the fact that his decision to stay, motivated by love and duty, has resulted in years of caretaking.  He’s committed to it.  But it’s also profoundly sad.

Now look at the wife, Simin.  She believes her daughter, Termeh, will be better off in another country where she doesn’t have to worry that some man might take out his anger on Termeh while at school or walking home from school.  But Termeh insists on staying with her father.  Simin’s choices are to stay and be unhappy, or leave…and be unhappy without her daughter.  She adopts a middle ground by simply moving to her mother’s apartment while she works on convincing Termeh to come with her.  In the grand scheme of things, as a function of the allegory I have in mind, she represents the person who wants to leave and is held back, not by duty, but by the fact she won’t leave her daughter behind.  There’s a piece of her in this place, and she’s free to leave it if she wants, but she’ll never be the same.

How many people in other countries and other circumstances are faced with similar choices?  How many people in our own circles are stuck in marriages or family situations where leaving appears to be the best option on one hand but an impossibility on the other?  I could say that I’ve had similar situations in my own past with such a decision, but it was certainly nothing on the level of leaving my roots behind and moving to another country.  I can’t imagine the struggle and conflict for anyone facing that kind of choice.

A Separation takes that struggle and wraps it up in a movie that, even if it weren’t so perfectly symbolic, could stand on its own with any other film from any other country.  At the end of the film, the daughter is asked, point blank, which parent she would rather live with.  In what would ordinarily be a frustrating moment, we are not shown what she chooses.  It is left to us to imagine her choice.  Or maybe not.  Maybe we are meant to see what it’s like to be faced with an impossible choice, when neither option is better than the other and someone will get hurt either way.

The question isn’t, “What will she choose?”  The question is, “What would you do?”

THE PRINCE OF EGYPT (1998)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Directors: Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner, Simon Wells
Cast: Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sandra Bullock, Jeff Goldblum, Danny Glover, Patrick Stewart, Helen Mirren, Steve Martin, Martin Short (whew!)
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 80% Certified Fresh

PLOT: Egyptian Prince Moses learns of his identity as a Hebrew and, somewhat reluctantly, realizes his destiny to become the chosen deliverer of his people.


I sat down to watch The Prince of Egypt for the umpteenth time today, ostensibly in honor of Passover, but really it’s just an excuse to watch it again.  In the 24 years since its release, it’s become one of my favorite animated films.  I started out thinking it was a gimmicky cash grab.  Then I realized how majestic the score and songs were (by Hans Zimmer and Stephen Schwartz, respectively).  Then I came to appreciate how effectively it humanizes the Exodus story, so it becomes something more than just an excuse for some crazy visual effects.  Then I looked more closely at those visual effects and realized how magnificent they are, too.

So now it’s a treat when I watch it.  But something rare and unexpected happened to me when I watched it today.  Before I get into that, though, for anyone who may still be unfamiliar with this marvelous film…

Moses (Val Kilmer), a prince of Egypt, younger brother to Rameses (Ralph Fiennes) and son to the great Seti (Patrick Stewart), is comfortable with his place in the world.  One day, he comes across Miriam (Sandra Bullock), a Hebrew slave who boldly informs him he is not Egyptian.  He is, in fact, the son of a Hebrew slave woman who set him adrift on the Nile River to spare him from the bloody purges ordered by Seti, the man he calls father.  Disturbed and conflicted, Moses unthinkingly kills an Egyptian slave driver in a heated moment and leaves behind the only family he’s ever known to face his fate in the desert.

There he meets Tzipporah (Michelle Pfeiffer), a Midianite girl on whom he showed mercy earlier, and her family.  Embracing his new Hebrew identity, he marries Tzipporah and becomes a shepherd.  Time passes.  One day, Moses is searching for a lost sheep when he is confronted with a strange sight: a bush that appears to be, not burning, but covered in cold white flames, nevertheless.  To his shock, a voice speaks from the bush.  It is the God of his ancestors, and He is displeased with how His people are being treated in Egypt.  He commands Moses to go to Egypt and tell the pharaoh to let His people go…

Need I go on?  The staff, the plagues, the blood, the angel of death, the pillar of fire…it’s all presented here in spectacular fashion.

When DreamWorks first announced plans to make what basically amounts to a musical version of The Ten Commandments, I was skeptical to say the least.  I even remember what theatre I saw it in: the Ybor Centro movie theater in 1998.  I sat through the movie, and I allowed my skepticism to color my entire viewing experience, right up until the sensational Red Sea parting, which even now is one of the great animated sequences of all time.  But aside from that, I felt The Prince of Egypt was all flash and no substance, a way for an upstart movie studio to get people into theaters with an overabundance of star power and little else going for it.  But after watching it on home video repeatedly…I mean, REPEATEDLY…I started to analyze it a little more.

The first thing that really renewed my interest and appreciation for the film was the humanization of the main characters, particularly the relationship between Moses and Rameses.  Moses is no movie idol in this film.  He’s just a man.  Kind of a scrawny man, too, not classically handsome like his brother, Rameses.  Where Moses looks a little spindly and frail, Rameses looks like he lifts weights, or whatever folks did back then on “arm day.”  I also like how the movie allows these two men to behave and relate to each other like real brothers might.  They race chariots down city streets, needle each other, call each other names, play pranks on the high priests, the whole nine yards.  It’s a dynamic the two men surely must have shared as brothers growing up, but it never gets addressed in other interpretations of the story.  Because we get to see how much they love each other, the scene where Moses reluctantly turns his back on Rameses carries so much more weight than we might be accustomed to seeing.

This dynamic comes full circle when Moses returns to demand freedom for the Hebrew slaves.  Rameses is now pharaoh, and laughs at Moses’ demands, wondering what his “angle” is.  And then, when the plagues are visited upon Egypt and the city has nearly crumbled, the two men share a scene of astonishing power.  Rameses sees his city in ruins, but ruefully remembers how Moses used to get him out of trouble when they were younger.  It’s a wonderfully human moment.

The second element of the film that sparked my renewed interest was the music.  At the end of the opening number, which is itself emotionally powerful on several levels, a solo female voice sings out, “Deliver us!” right at the end of the song.  I can no longer remember a time when that moment didn’t give me goosebumps.  The score by Hans Zimmer is magnificent.  There is one particular motif of a choir of voices that we hear whenever we are in the presence of something holy or mystical, and even that gives me goosebumps.  Another moment that deservers recognition is during the big number, “When You Believe,” as the Hebrews are flowing out of Egypt.  At one point, the song is replaced by a Hebrew folk song, “Ashira L’Adonai,” sung by a little girl.  Her voice is joined by several others, and then a few more, and then a whole choir, and then the whole orchestra comes in for a reprise of the chorus, and if you don’t get goosebumps at that moment, you need a vacation.

The third element that keeps me coming back to this movie is the visuals.  True, the CGI visuals are relatively primitive compared to what was going on at Pixar around the same time.  The chariot race between Moses and Rameses features CG chariots which you may notice have wheels that don’t always turn while the chariot is moving.  This was an aspect of the film that led to my early dismissal of it.  But then came the Angel of Death scene, with a hole literally torn in the sky and sinister tendrils pouring out of it and into the village streets.  And then came the eye-popping Red Sea sequence.  More so than any other version I’ve seen, The Prince of Egypt made me feel in my bones that, yes, THIS is what it would have looked like if uncountable tons of water were parted down the middle, clearing a path large enough for the entire Hebrew nation to walk across.  (Depending on who you ask, that number could have been up to two million people, so we’re talking about a WIDE path.)  As they walk between the two massive walls of water on either side, lightning flashes illuminate sea life swimming alongside them, including some really large fish.  Now THERE’S something you don’t see every day.

So, yeah, the movie is amazing.  People may quibble about its historical inaccuracy, or the liberties it may take with certain religious beliefs.  But that does not diminish its power in the slightest bit.

Which brings me back to what I mentioned in the opening paragraph:

I sat down to watch the movie today, and for reasons I can’t explain, the opening scenes were bringing a lump to my throat.  That solo female voice singing “Deliver us!” nearly brought a tear to my eye.  And it nearly happened again after a wedding song.  And again, when Moses is leading the Hebrews out of Egypt to the strains of “When You Believe.”  And when Moses slams his staff into the shallow waters on the banks of the Red Sea, and those waters shot up into the air and kept going and going…my God, man, I nearly lost it.  I was one thread of self-control away from going full-on blubber-fest.  I mean, I grabbed my chest like a Victorian lady reading a Jane Austen novel.  In the middle of my emotional experience, I kept asking myself, “What is WRONG with me?!”

The answer is, of course, nothing is wrong with me.  I was just in exactly the right frame of mind to have a borderline religious experience while watching a movie.  It’s the same when I watch the finale of Fantasia 2000, when the sprite erupts from the ground in a gesture of pure joy.  Or when Riley learns the importance of experiencing sadness at the end of Inside Out.  Or any number of other transcendent films that can put me right in the middle of the story emotionally.  The Prince of Egypt does exactly that through a well-managed mixture of story, visuals, and music.  It may not be perfect from a technical standpoint, but it gets me where it counts, and that’s all that matters.

THE FORTUNE COOKIE (1966)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Billy Wilder
Cast: Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Ron Rich, Judi West
My Rating: 5/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 96%

PLOT: A crooked lawyer persuades his brother-in-law to feign a serious injury.


Billy Wilder’s The Fortune Cookie reminds me of what it might be like to watch Jerry Lee Lewis play “Chopsticks.”  You sense it’s being done as well as it possibly can be done, but you wonder why it’s being done at all.  C’mon, man, let’s hear “Great Balls of Fire!”

Notable for being the first of twelve films Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau starred in together, The Fortune Cookie tells the story of a hapless TV cameraman, Harry Hinkle (Lemmon), who is covering a Cleveland Browns football game from the sidelines.  A burly punt returner accidentally runs him over during a play and knocks Harry out cold.  While he recuperates in a hospital bed, his thoroughly unscrupulous brother-in-lawyer, Willie (Matthau), concocts a very modern-sounding plan: Harry will fake serious injuries in the hospital so Willie can work his magic with the insurance company and get a big payout.  Harry demurs at first but is enticed to go along when he finds out his ex-wife, for whom he still carries a torch, is very interested in assisting with his recuperation from his “serious” injuries.

Meanwhile, the poor football player who knocked him down, Luther (Ron Rich), is wracked with guilt over the damage he thinks he’s caused.  He pitches in to buy Harry a motorized wheelchair and offers to assist with his rehab back at home.  This gnaws at Harry’s conscience.  Things don’t get any better when he’s brought a lunch of Chinese food at the hospital, and the fortune inside his fortune cookie bears a grim warning…

There’s nothing wrong with The Fortune Cookie that a rewrite or some editing couldn’t have fixed.  That might be considered sacrilege, considering the script was penned by Wilder himself and his legendary writing partner, I.A.L. Diamond, but in watching the film, I was struck by how many scenes involved a semi-static camera just watching people talk, and talk, and talk.  I don’t mind a lot of dialogue in a scene when the characters have something to say, or when the story is being driven forward.  But here, we usually get a five-minute scene when a two-minute scene could have done the job just fine.

Take one scene in particular that almost had me literally nodding off, when Harry’s ex-wife, Sandy (Judi West), has returned home to help with Harry’s rehab.  Harry is still feeling guilty about the sham he’s perpetrating, but he’s so besotted with Sandy that he’s willing to keep up the pretense just to keep her around.  They catch up a little, blah blah blah, he says he never threw away his ring, blah blah blah, she dumps out her purse looking for her ring, blah blah blah, he puts on a little music, he’s happy, she’s happy, and <snoorrrrrrre.>

I could list any number of films, including some of Wilder’s other films, where other characters talked for even longer than Harry and Sandy, but they were so much more interesting!  What happened here?  What went wrong?  Even in the scenes where Willie, the huckster, is rattling off his grand plans and needling the insurance company attorneys, Matthau just comes off as a two-bit hack that no sane person would pay any attention to.

I’m not saying he must be likable, that dreaded word.  There are movies that are very, very good and that contain nothing BUT unlikable characters. (Anyone wanna watch The Godfather?) But here, something is off with the tone.  When I wasn’t bored, I was inflamed with distaste for what Harry was being forced to do, both by Willie and by his own hormones.

The movie does have one saving grace.  The comeuppance, when it, er, comes up, is brought about with the kind of shock comedy scene that Mel Brooks might have loved.  I don’t want to spoil it, but it features the kind of language that would have been right at home in Blazing Saddles.  When I got over the shock of what I had just heard, I sat back in admiration and smiled, and thought to myself, a little ruefully, “Now what would this movie have been like if it had been this nervy all the way through, instead of just here at the end?”

But The Fortune Cookie even mucks up the ending with an “epilogue” scene that’s so gratuitously manipulative, I wouldn’t be surprised if it had been tacked on by the studio who demanded a happy ending, or at least a happier ending.  If the movie had earned it, I’d have been on board, but everything that came before was so humdrum that it felt super-cheesy.

Billy Wilder’s résumé reads like the Pixar catalog: one hit after the other with only a couple of rare misses.  Double Indemnity.  The Lost Weekend.  Sunset Boulevard.  Ace in the Hole.  Stalag 17.  Sabrina.  Witness for the Prosecution.  Some Like It Hot.  The Apartment.  Even One, Two, Three, which may not exactly be his finest moment, but at least it had James Cagney to liven things up.  I ask again: what happened here?  Where is the dynamite chemistry between Lemmon and Matthau that would become legendary in later films?  Where is the zaniness of Some Like It Hot or the earned pathos of The Apartment or the edginess of Ace in the Hole and Stalag 17?

According to the trivia section on IMDb, the opening football game sequences were filmed during an actual Vikings-Browns football game, which the Browns lost, at home, 27-17.  After watching this movie, I felt like those Cleveland fans must have felt: always glad to see my boys play, but man, it would have been WAY cooler if they had won.

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (2022)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Directors: Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert
Cast: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, James Hong, Jamie Lee Curtis
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 96% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A middle-aged Asian woman tries to do her family’s taxes with mind-bending results.


Every once in a while, a movie comes along that is so daring and original that any attempt to accurately describe it feels futile.  Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was one of them.  Being John Malkovich was another.  And now comes Everything Everywhere All at Once, a sci-fi action brainteaser that feels as if it were written by Terry Gilliam and Quentin Tarantino and directed by Stephen Chow (Kung Fu Hustle, Shaolin Soccer…two movies that also meet that “indescribable” criterion).  It feels like an episode of Black Mirror crossed with Jackie Chan and a dash of David Lynch and Terrence Malick.  If you can’t find anything to like in this movie, check your pulse.

Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) opens the film trying to do her family’s taxes.  She and her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan – “Short Round” from Temple of Doom!!), carry stacks and stacks of receipts to their local IRS branch and try to explain to their case worker (a dowdy Jamie Lee Curtis) how a karaoke machine can be deducted as a business expense.  However, before that can happen, after a series of very strange events involving Waymond and a pair of Bluetooth headsets, Evelyn finds herself immersed in a trans-dimensional battle between the forces of good, led by an alternate-universe version of Waymond – the “Alpha Waymond,” if you will – and someone called Jobu Tupaki, a being or person who is hunting for Evelyn in every conceivable parallel universe.  All Evelyn has to do is use these weird headsets to access the infinite multiverse and harness the skills learned by the infinite Evelyns before Jobu Tupaki can track her down and kill her.

To access the multiverse in such a way, one must commit random acts of…randomness, which leads to bizarre scenes of individuals doing some very weird things to access special skills.  What kind of weird things, you ask?  Things involving…sticks of lip balm, putting your shoes on the wrong feet, saying “I love you” to a stranger, or wiping someone else’s nose for them and…well, use your imagination.

That’s seriously just scratching the surface.  I haven’t even mentioned Evelyn and Waymond’s daughter, Joy; their laundromat; Evelyn’s elderly grandfather, Gong Gong (veteran character actor James Hong – 450 film and TV credits and counting); or the divorce papers Waymond has on his person.

This movie is a trippy, joyous, tightrope-walking masterpiece.  There are moments where you can sense it tap-dancing on the line of self-parody, then jumping over it and daring the audience to go along with it.  If there are some people that say they were unable to follow where this movie leads, I can’t really say I’d blame them.  Not many movies would ask you to take it seriously, then include a scene involving two rocks having a conversation via, I guess, ESP.  Or where the two lead characters turn into piñatas.  Or where Jamie Lee Curtis staples a piece of paper to her own head.  Or where the fate of the world might hinge on who gets their hands (in a manner of speaking) on a trophy shaped like…a very specific kind of toy.

HOT DOG FINGERS, people.  HOT.  DOG.  FINGERS.

I’m frankly amazed this movie didn’t collapse on itself.  There are so many ways it could have gone wrong, and so much it wants to say, while trying to be simultaneously massively entertaining and heartbreakingly poignant.

From a technical standpoint, I think it’s the frontrunner for the Best Film Editing Oscar for 2022.  This movie jumps from one parallel universe to the next and the next and back again so frequently that I got whiplash, BUT it was never confusing or mystifying.  It was always crystal clear what I was watching and why I needed to see it.  I could list any number of films or TV shows that have attempted this kind of thing on a much more modest scale and failed.  This is like the Who Framed Roger Rabbit of film editing.  It has been done so well and on such a grand scale that it seems unlikely anyone will try to tell this kind of story in the same way again.

Some may quibble at the mildly melodramatic resolution of the conflict among Evelyn, the “Alpha” universe, and Jobu Tupaki.  I can understand that viewpoint, but honestly, I just rolled with it when it came around.  And so did the theater audience I was with the night I saw it.  We all laughed uproariously on cue, sometimes for something funny, sometimes in sheer disbelief at what we had just seen.  But when the wrap-up started to come together, we all hushed and waited to see what would happen.  Even when it involved a parallel universe with something called Raccacoonie.  (It’s a long story…)

I hope I’ve conveyed how crazy good this movie is while preserving some of its best surprises.  I haven’t felt this urgent about getting the word out about a great movie since I saw Roma.  To call this an entertaining night at the movies does a serious injustice to the words “entertaining” and “movies.”  It’s more than entertaining and, not to get too hyperbolic, this is more than a mere movie.  It’s a masterwork, a collision of grand ambition and even grander moviemaking.  I plan on seeing it at least once more in theaters, if only just to see what I may have missed the first time around.  (And maybe also to tune more carefully into audience reactions at key moments, like the performance trophies, or those two rocks.  Who knew two rocks could be funny?  Like REALLY funny?)

PETER IBBETSON (1935)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Henry Hathaway
Cast: Gary Cooper, Ann Harding, Ida Lupino
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: No rating

PLOT: A successful architect who longs for the love of his childhood friend is delighted to discover that the Duchess who just hired him is in fact his long-lost beloved.  This being melodrama, there is of course much more to the story.


[SPOILERS FOLLOW]

Peter Ibbetson plays like a long-lost Dickens novel, full of melodramatic flourishes and convenient plot contrivances designed to play the audience like a grand piano.  Is it shameless?  Yes.  Is it maudlin?  Yes.  Do I normally like movies like this?  No.  But there is something about this film and its story that got around my defenses and into my heart and soul.  I’ll try to elaborate on that as much as I can, but I don’t know how well I’m going to do.  Good luck.

The story opens, as the title card helpfully explains, in the middle of the last century, which would make it somewhere around the 1850s.  Somewhere in a well-heeled French countryside, two children from neighboring British families play and quarrel with each other, Mimsey and Gogo.  (I am not making that up, though why parents felt the need to inflict those names on their children is utterly beyond me.)  Gogo, the boy, cruelly teases the girl, Mimsey, who nevertheless gives as good as she gets.  Unfortunately, Gogo’s mother dies after a long illness, and when a distant uncle arrives to take Gogo back to England, he realizes he doesn’t want to leave his precious Mimsey.  Together they try to run away and hide, but it’s no use.  The sight of poor Mimsey weeping in the branches of a tree as Gogo is finally taken away was one of the scenes that started to chip away at my armor of cynicism.

Time passes, and Gogo changes his name to Peter and takes his mother’s last name, Ibbetson.  He becomes a successful architect and a valuable asset for his employer.  (In a very Dickensian touch, Peter’s employer is blind…wholly unnecessary to the plot, but that specificity makes it feel even more realistic amid all the other melodrama.)  Peter is successful, yes, but he is unhappy.  He is a bachelor, and when a very pretty girl more or less hits on him at a museum back in France, he takes her for a drink as a matter of courtesy, not out of any real attraction.  His heart still belongs to the lost love of his childhood, you see.  Mimsey is the touchstone of his past, his Rosebud, his green light at the end of the pier, and she will not be easily eradicated.

Initially, I was unsympathetic to the adult Peter.  How can anyone get on with their life if they’re stuck in the past?  It didn’t work for Kane or Gatsby.  If there’s anything the last thirty or so years of my life has taught me, it’s that the past will only weigh you down if you let it.  I’m not suggesting one should literally forget history, but had I been one of Peter’s associates in the film, I would have been constantly reminding him about being grateful for the present rather than bemoaning the mistakes or regrets of the past.  That way lies madness.

Before I get into more story details, I should mention the style of the film and the acting, which is so mannered and stylized that it feels as if it were a silent film that had a soundtrack added as an afterthought.  Gary Cooper may be a legend, but in this film…let’s be blunt, he is no Cary Grant.  Every sentence feels as if it’s been dragged out of him by way of torture.  His charisma is based solely on his imposing height and his dashing good looks, NOT his speech.  (Sorry, I calls ‘em like I sees ‘em.)  The women are not much better acting-wise, though the Duchess of Towers does have some interesting moments.  However, one of the movie’s highlights are the cinematography and subtle visual effects, especially in the late stages of the film.  Look at that scene involving the peculiar qualities in the bars of the jail cell and explain to me 100% how that was accomplished.  It’s so understated and effective that it took me completely by surprise.  I believe it would raise eyebrows with TODAY’S audiences.

I mention all of this about the style and my mindset because I believe that it all contributes to the reaction I had to the film, at which I’m still perplexed.

One day, Peter is contracted to rebuild the stables of an aristocratic family, the Duke and Duchess of Towers.  When Peter first meets Mary, the Duchess, he experiences an unexplainable connection.  His contract requires him to live in the Towers house for several months.  One day they share a conversation and discover that they shared a dream.  This isn’t a case of two people dreaming about the same thing coincidentally.  They actually shared a dream, Inception style, but without the machinery.  How can this be?

By now, any breathing audience member has already deduced that the Duchess is Mimsey and they are destined for each other.  Alas, Peter and Mary are not as quick on the uptake as we are, and their moment of recognition is delayed until after the peevish Duke confronts them at the dinner table, in a conversation laden with Hays-Code-era double-speak.  “Well, Mr. Ibbetson, are you to be congratulated again?” the Duke asks.  Later, during a second confrontation, the Duke points a gun at Peter and Mary and explains that they will not make love behind his back.  He raises his gun and says, “Get into your lover’s arms.”  Whoa.  Daring stuff for 1935.  It’s during this second confrontation that something goes horribly wrong, and Peter is sent to jail for life.

MORE melodrama?  Hasn’t this movie already had more than its fair share?  Children tearfully separated?  An equally tearful reunion?  Outrageous coincidences?  Shared dreams, for crying out loud?  Oh, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

It’s in the film’s third act, when our hero is in prison, that Peter Ibbetson really started to get to me at some primal level.  Peter and Mary, after being reunited against all odds, are now separated even more cruelly than before.  Peter is so distraught he goes on a hunger strike, chained to his “bed,” which is little more than a wide wooden beam.  (Look at it from a certain angle and he might almost appear to be on a cross, but don’t worry, it’s not that kind of movie.)  When one of his fellow prisoners makes a joke at Mary’s expense, Peter goes a little crazy and starts to throttle him.  Miles away, at the same time, Mary suddenly senses something is wrong.  In the jail, guards use force that’s a tad too excessive to restrain Peter, and at the same exact moment Mary screams.  The two are connected in a mystical way that transcends walls or distance.  They continue to share dreams in which they laugh and walk and talk as if nothing bad had ever happened.  In one dream, he points to a castle in the distance that he has built for his beloved.  I was reminded instantly of the scenes in Inception where Cobb and his wife Mal build entire cities for themselves in their own shared dream.

I’ve already given away too much, far too much than I usually care to.  As much as I want to, I can’t describe the one scene that got me to literally yell, “NO!” at the TV screen.

What fate eventually befalls Peter and Mary, I leave for you to discover.  What remains for me is to try once again to summarize how I felt after the movie was over.  Intellectually, I can see its shortcomings.  The acting is wooden, despite some pretty sharp dialogue.  The music is overwhelmingly romantic and dramatic, commenting on a lot of action unnecessarily, as was the custom back then.  There are one or two odd cuts.  But on an emotional level, the experience of watching Peter Ibbetson was like watching one of Shakespeare’s tragedies.  The only other movies that ever made feel these precise emotions, although not to the exact same degree, are The Remains of the Day and Atonement.  If you know those movies, you know what I’m talking about.

The movie’s final shot is as shamelessly manipulative as these things get.  It’s unabashed romanticism at its best AND its worst.  But you know what?  This movie earns it, and it works.

FOUR LIONS (2010, Great Britain)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Christopher Morris
Cast: Riz Ahmed, Arsher Ali, Nigel Lindsay, Kayvan Novak, and a very special guest star
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 83% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A small group of incompetent British terrorists set out to train for and commit an act of terror.


The world of cinema has a long history of taking subjects traditionally considered taboo and turning them into comedy.  German concentration camps?  Life Is Beautiful mines it for comedy.  P.O.W. camps?  Ever hear of Hogan’s Heroes?  What about Hitler himself?  The Great Dictator and Look Who’s Back lampoon him perfectly.  Race relations?  Look no further than Blazing Saddles.  In recent years, even 9/11 has become a kind of punchline for jokes, with varying degrees of success.  As with all comedy, context is king.

Such is the case with Four Lions, a British film from director Christopher Morris.  In it, the subject and especially the philosophy of suicide bombers are, forgive the pun, exploded with equal doses of logic and ruthless humor.

Omar (Riz Ahmed) is a member of a “cell” of extremists who imagine themselves to be part of a glorious Jihad against Western civilization, but who, as Omar himself puts it, can’t even “stir their tea without smashing a window.”  In the opening scene, Waj (Kayvan Novak) is trying to make one of those videos claiming responsibility for a terrorist act, but the cameraman points out that the gun he’s holding is too small.  It’s actually a replica of an AK-47, but it’s about half scale.  Waj solves the problem by first saying he has big hands, then by simply moving closer to the camera.  Can’t argue with that logic.

Their leader, Barry (Nigel Lindsay), is a Caucasian man who has converted to Islam and become a true believer – “radicalized”, I think is the word.  (Director Christopher Morris says he’s based on a man who was once a member of a far-right, fascist party in the UK; in an attempt to “out-knowledge” the Asian youths he regularly assaulted, this man studied the Qur’an in depth…and as a result “accidentally” converted himself and became a Muslim.  Talk about truth being stranger than fiction.)  Barry is no prize either.  He knows all the proper buzzwords and catchphrases, but he is convinced the best way to defeat government surveillance when walking outside is to constantly shake your head back and forth.  So your face will come out blurry.  Once again, unassailable logic at work.

The fourth member is Faisal (Adeel Akhtar), who buys up large quantities of bleach and liquid peroxide for bomb-making, but to do so he had to make several trips to the same store.  To make sure no one at the shop suspected, he used different voices every trip, including a woman’s voice.  Barry objects: “You’ve got a beard!”  Faisal explains he covered his beard with his hands when he used the woman’s voice.

“So why has she got her hands on her face, Faisal!?”
“…cos she’s got a beard.”

Again…impeccable logic leading to ridiculous actions.  The movie is chock full of these kinds of perfectly logical reasons for doing absurd things.  A movie with only two dimensions would simply use that same lens, point it towards the actions of suicide bombers, and congratulate itself on its cleverness.  But Four Lions, hilarious though it is, goes another level deeper.

Omar has a wife and young son.  They are both totally on board with Omar’s plans for becoming a suicide bomber.  All three are convinced that his act of martyrdom will ensure his place in Paradise where he will eventually be reunited with his family.  When Omar discusses his plans with his wife, Sofia, she is calm, cool, and collected, as if they were discussing when and where to buy their next house.  When Omar tells his son a bedtime story, he makes changes to the story of The Lion King, so it more closely reflects his own beliefs, and the son smiles and eats it up.  Chilling.

But then Omar’s brother, Ahmed, pays a visit.  Ahmed is what I would call an “orthodox” Muslim, wearing the robes and head coverings and the longer beard.  By contrast, Omar is dressed in far more “Western” gear and trainers.  Ahmed has gotten wind of Omar’s plan and wants to try to talk him out of it because the Qur’an teaches non-violence…but his orthodox beliefs also state he can’t be in the same room as Omar’s wife.  Omar makes a point that, according to Ahmed’s beliefs, there are “60,000 opinions saying we can’t fight back!  We must measure our beard with a ruler and lock our wives in a cupboard!”

What you’ve got here is a key lesson in great comedy.  Be funny, but have a point.  What is the point here?  In my opinion, the point of this scene is to single out the vast contradictions possible in any kind of religion where extremists have staked out territory on the fringes.  A man believes in non-violence but can’t be in the same room as a woman.  Another man believes in martyrdom but has water gun fights with his son and wife.  They’re both right and they’re both wrong.  We tend to see one viewpoint as being hand in hand with the other by default, but Four Lions makes the case that great variety is possible.  A man in a robe and a long beard is not automatically a terrorist.  A man with a loving wife and family is not always the “good guy.”  Nothing is black and white.

But I don’t want to make the movie seem like it’s some kind of grand polemic on religious intolerance.  It has its serious moments, yes, but damn, is it funny.  I’m trying hard to think of another movie where a bunch of terrorists wind up running in a fictional “fun-run” marathon dressed as a ninja turtle, a cowboy riding an ostrich, an upside-down clown, and an orange bear.  (Actually, I’m not quite sure that’s a bear…that would be a question for the police.)  Or where one terrorist’s master plan involves strapping a bomb to a crow.  Or where a short discussion is held to determine exactly which parts of a car are Jewish.  As they say in the clickbait ads, the answer to that question may SURPRISE you!

(Also, if you’re a fan of Star Wars, I apologize in advance for any trauma you may experience…you’ll see what I mean.)

Admittedly, the subject matter of this comedy may turn off some viewers.  That is their right.  But if you’re an admirer of sharp-edged comedy that takes no prisoners and follows its own logic to its inexorable conclusions, Four Lions is gold.