And as promised, here is the second part of that movie dump I promised. This ought to catch me up with my movies and hopefully I can skim a little less when reviewing the next one.  Thank you for your patience!

-Fco.

Couples Retreat

Director: Peter Billingsley
Genre: Comedy/Romance
Year: 2009

OK, so not every movie I watch is the sort that should be up for award consideration, but then again, who does? Every once in a while you gotta indulge those other itches. True, my wife did sort of talk me into seeing this one, but at the same time she did not exactly have to twist my arm. Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau have always been a pleasant combination on the screen for me. Kristen Bell and Malin Akerman are nice on the eyes and Kristin Davis brings with her a bit of that air which she carried in Sex in the City and does come across a bit sexy. So if nothing else, there is a cast to look at. The movie is not bad though. In fact, from a married point of view it is actually rather funny, the way Mr. & Mrs. Smith was funny. Cause things are bound to come up on the screen which make you chuckle at the fact that either you have done that before to your spouse or your spouse has done it to you.

All in all, this is an enjoyable movie set up around a resort that focuses on rebuilding damaged relationships. It is part one of a two part resort. It is the…less fun part of it, where said fun is all pretty much tossed on to the other side of the bay where the singles resort is. When four couples pitch in for what they think is a relaxing vacation turns into a sometimes ridiculous, overextended self examination session, pretty much everybody is ready to throw in the towel. But through falls and stumbles, they cling on and not surprisingly they all find their means in the end, giving everybody something to smile about and a Hollywood packaged feel-good ending.

Formulaic? For the most part. Predictable? Yes. Well acted? Eh…..not the best I have seen from any of these guys. But enjoyable? Sure, for some light chewing, a few laughs, a jolly good time with your partner, this film is not so bad either, it does actually deliver a few good jokes, memorable moments, and has funny little cameos from secondary characters that make it worth it.

Rating:
Comments: Adult themes and languages and tons of skimpy clothing.
Quote: Therapist #2: It’s like a little kid gets a puppy for the first time, just hugs it so much, snaps it’s neck. It’s puppy cradle death syndrome. All that love is gonna snap that puppy.

Protocols of Zion

Director: Marc Levin
Genre: Documentary
Year: 2005

Shortly after the attacks on the twin towers in New York the rumors started, that no Jewish people perished. It was said that the Zionist had gotten word in advance and warned every person of Jewish decent to stay away from the towers that morning, so that the bombings could proceed, to serve their ends, without the needless spilling of Jewish blood. Who started these rumors or why, is a bit unclear, though the motive behind them are pretty damned transparent. Marc Levin uses this stage to question those rumors and the fact that shortly after the book titled the Protocols of Zion, became ever popular again, selling off the shelves like hot cakes.

The Protocols of Zion, for those unaware, are essentially a list of protocols written (or rather, being credited to a handful of Jewish people) by a secret cabal with a single agenda in mind: world domination. It list the various ways to get rid of or control various other races and cultures, how to turn them against each other for their own means and elevation and so forth. That it is a conspiracy theory, there is no doubt, but because it IS a conspiracy theory, there is also the unavoidable interest about it. While this film focuses really a bit less on the Protocols themselves and more on the attitudes of people post 9-11, it is still interesting material to consider and though it provides no absolute answers, it does bring to the surface the bigotry of various people, misguided attitudes and shallow arguments that will leave your head shaking. I would put this in line with Michael Moore documentaries, interesting if only you allow yourself to look past the documentarian himself.

Rating:
Comments: Some language and tense situations along with some questionable comment that would require a mature audience. Brief nudity as well.

The Violin

Director: Francisco Vargas
Genre: Drama
Year: 2005

Because I know this is how it works, I will tell you right now, this film is in black and white, so we can filter out those of you that are already not interested and focus on the ones that are. If you are still reading, then allow me to say this is an absolute gem coming quietly and under the radar out of Mexico. Even I, who like to think keep an eye and an ear in that direction, entirely missed this one until a couple of years later, and then it got bogged down in my ridiculously long (topped out) Netflix list that it seems it took another couple of years to get to it. But what a film!

Set in what might be Mexico, though the film maker is careful not to put any actual names to regions and locations and uses generic names instead, we meet three generations of men, a revolutionary, his young boy and his musician father, a humble one-handed violinist. They are men caught between living their life in peace and struggling from the oppression of the government who comes after them with brutal tenacity. When things go wrong at home, the three are forced to flee, and to act, each of them doing what they can, giving insight in a rather heartfelt manner at how the seeds of violence are planted.

Mixing the beauty of music with the ravages of war and violence, this subtle film does a fantastic job stripping the ornamentation off of violence, making it human and giving it very credible faces, while at the same time showing that the world is not black and white (ironic, huh?) but in fact carries a lot of difficult shades of gray. Poignant, interesting, insightful and very well done, this film is a must watch, if you can only get past the introduction which I warn, is quite graphic and disturbing but probably as bad as this film gets.

Rating:
Comments: Quote graphic and violent at points, particularly on the films intro. There is also some language in Spanish and sexual behavior and prostitution portrayed. Spanish with English subtitles.

The Qatsi Trilogy

Director: Godfrey Reggio
Genre: ??
Year: 1982-2002

OK, I am about to attempt to review an unreviewable set of films and I am not even going to bother giving it a star rating. This sort of film is so far out of the conventional film that it really does require a special look, by itself without any real comparisons both because it would be unfair to the nature of the film and because really there is nothing to compare it to.

This trilogy is comprised of three films: Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi. But before discussing what each of this films does individually, I think it is a good idea to describe what they all do as a whole. For starters, these films have no plot, no characters, no storyline and no dialogue. Everything that seems to make a movie has been stripped and done away with. As Reggio himself explains, these films are meant to strip away the foreground and replace it with the background. Secondly — and largely because of the nature of these films — they are meant to be more of an experience, rather than a rational, point by point explanation as an agenda. For that reason, these movie are rather adaptable and in many ways malleable, capable of becoming whatever it is you want them to be. Though there is commentary being made here, it seems a lot of ground has been left for you to take in the good with the bad and make up your own mind (not so much on the third installment but we can talk about that in a minute). Lastly, these films are vast, a collection of professionally captured images and footage, more often than not presented from the angle what you will least typically experience it from, at a pace you will never live it in. Either with slow motion, or fast motion, this film gives us a fresh, new, beautiful and disturbing look at the world we live in and the world we don’t.

Kowaanisqatsi, the first installment, is described by the director as being a film about the Northern Hemisphere. I personally feel that is is more a film about Western culture and first world countries, to be more specific, for it focuses on the differences and similarities between nature in its purest state and the technology that now drives those particular nations. Roughly translated from the Hopi language, it means Life in Turmoil, though the director admits that he would have much rather have given these films no name at all, settling with the obscure word in the Hopi language only in the end because ‘it had no baggage attached to it’ and not because it has anything to do with the Hopi peoples. Without lines of dialogue, scene after scene portrayed, show us a world that is wonderous and terrifying, descructive by its own means and by means we ourselves have created. Beautifully calm and uncomfortably crowded all at once, the director does a great job setting a pace that escalates from the relaxing and tame, to the nauseously absurd. Quite literally, part of me felt ill after the climactic, frenetic editing that works organically with the score to build up the momentum that eventually pushes you off the edge and manages to restore some calm before the film is over. Though many of the images are dated back to the late seventies, a lot of this can be overlooked given the perspective and the new point of view that Reggio and his gifted cinematographer Fricke, give us. The arguments are left for you to make, the film simply shows us our environment as it was and our environment as it is. Both have been beautiful and terrible, there is no dispute there, it is only a matter of looking at how things are progressing and wondering what can be done to better it.

The second film is aptly titled Powaqqatsi, which translated as the director intended from the Hopi language means Life in Transition, but perhaps more obscurely and more accurate a life that consumes another way of life for its benefit. Godfrey Reggio describes this as the story of the southern hemisphere, but once again I think it more accurately could be said to be the life of the third world countries upon the first world countries have made their mark. True enough, every shooting location was in the southern hemisphere and it will bring to those of us unfamiliar with their way of life a collection of shots that are, just as Kowaanisqatsi was, both thrilling, delighful, disturbing and heart-wrenching. It is a humbling experience, one that has perhaps raised voice to the accusation that Reggio was trying to romanticize poverty, something he claims not to have intended to do. His intentions? To show the way of life as it stands in a process of change, as caused by globalization and the influence of first world civilization. Without a doubt I found this to be the most beautiful of the three films, and even in its gritty, dirty scenes, one can find a certain beauty to a much simpler way of life, though undeniable there is a lot of ugliness as well. Credit must go once again to Fricke for managing the subjects so well in the eye of the camera and to Philip Glass who composes a fabulous score — in my opinion the best of the three he did for all these films.

The third film is called Naqoyqatsi and its rough translation would be Life as War and it is what Reggio describes a film that encompasses the gobal conflict, life of the world as a whole in the direction it is headed. Much like the other films, this too uses archival footage and originally shot footage to tell its tale though, remarkably enough, it does a major leap towards the usage of CG and filtering that changes the original pictures. While this film manages to get done what it set out to get done and show us a startlingly prophetic and frightening troublesome way of life, it also falls prey to the very thing it is trying to criticize, because this film uses a lot of technology to make its point about technology. It is an ironic twist that some might call apt and others might call hypocritical, but no matter where you fall it is obviously done with intention, as admitted by Reggio himself in a talk in New York. What I have a hard time determining is whether I like it or not. Time and time again I feel like this film, unlike the other two, brings down a heavy hammer that is nothing close to subtle and that bothered me, while at the same time I realized it also worked incredibly well in some places. Really, the largerst shortfall here is the fact that in the last decade since this film was released, CG has advanced tremendously and the images used here, while perhaps appropriate for the early years of the millenium, no longer hold up. Heavy use of polarizing filters, colorization and other effects also make the entire landscape for this film austere, manipulated and too blunt. And I had to ask myself if perhaps it may not have been better to make it subtle and let the images speak for themselves.

I will be honest in the fact that this films are not going to be for everybody, but those of you that brave it might find yourself enthralled by what Reggio has done, transfixed by his images and the curious way in which they work with the music of Phillip Glass. It can be truly said that here, it is both the video and audio working cohesively as one to create a very interesting sequence for us to admire or recoil at but, running at an average of ninety minutes per movie, this might be too much for some.

Rating this set of films also seems to be a bit moot. What you get of this will be entirely up to you, your insights, your preconceived notions. What might be beautiful for some could be ridiculous to others, what might be alarming to some could be pointless to another. There is no doubt in my mind that there will be people screaming that this is some leftist propaganda, while others will complain it is not leftist enough. It is worth the debate, it is worth the conversation that will undoubtedly be born out of the images from these films which are captured just at the right times, just at the right moment, just under precise circumstances that make it work (Reggio admited to setting up a handful of scenes, simply because the timing had not worked, but 90% of it is said to be just right-time right-place shooting following a very documentary style). Nevertheless, when you see the image of a beautiful little girl, in a pink dress, shiny black shoes, no more than five years of age carrying a red lunch box, walking in slow motion, hair bouncing, stopping at the edge of your screen, turning around, watching you for a long moment, all in front of a background upon which graffiti has been painted stating “long live the war of guerrillas” in Spanish…well, you can not help but get a tight knot on your throat. If you have the patience, please, watch these films, you will not regret it.

Rating: N/A
Comments: Some powerful imagery, some disturbing, some graphic violence (particularly on the third), some brief underage nudity.