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Amsterdam Weekly_28 August-3 September 2008
AGENDA: FILM
ter, a brisk if anonymous talent, directed; Myrna Loy and Melvyn Douglas also star. Scripted by Melvin Frank and Norman Panama from the Eric Hodgins novel of the same name. 94 min. Filmmuseum
Special screenings As It Is in Heaven This Swedish import, directed by Kay Pollak, is a character study about shifting gears. Busy, well-known conductor Daniel Daréus (Michael Nyqvist) suffers a heart attack and decides to return to the slow-paced village where he grew up in northern Sweden. It isn’t long, however, before his quiet is disturbed and he becomes thoroughly immersed in questions of life and love. In Swedish with Dutch subtitles. 132 min. De Uitkijk
Nina’s Heavenly Delights Predictable piffle about Nina (Shelley Conn), a young Scotswoman of Indian descent who returns home for her father’s funeral and winds up in the middle of a flap over the family restaurant. She finds romance, people break into spontaneous song and dance, valuable lessons about tolerance are learned, and the film wallows in just about every cinematic cliché about ethnic food and passion. Directed by Pratibha Parmar; showing in the Gay & Lesbian Summer Tour. (RP) 96 min. Rialto
Before Night Falls Julian Schnabel directed this
2000 biopic about the gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. Though the script answers only a fraction of the questions it raises, this is still an impressive piece of film-making, with lively and suggestive depictions of pre- and postrevolutionary Cuba (shot in Mexico). Javier Bardem is truly exceptional as Arenas, and other actors make their marks as well, including Sean Penn, film director Hector Babenco and Johnny Depp in an impressive double cameo. (JR) 125 min. Pathé De Munt
Charade A terrifically entertaining 1963 comedy-
thriller by Stanley Donen. Audrey Hepburn, freshly and not unhappily widowed, is pursued by a gang of her late husband’s war buddies, who think she now possesses the money they stole in combat. Cary Grant appears to be her only ally, until he starts doing strange things, too—such as taking a shower with his clothes on. There’s a marvellous use of Paris locations, as you’d expect from the director of Funny Face. (DK) 113 min. Filmmuseum
Dutch Cocaine Factory There was a time (let’s
say, the 1920s) when this country took pride in having the best (legal) cocaine factory in the world. What happened? Who decided to ban the commerce of that deliciously hip cocaine wine? (Easy answer: think US of A.) And what happens now, when cocaine addicts are not only victims of acute paranoia, but have a few actual reasons to complain about how their lives are followed too closely by the government? This 2007 documentary by performance artist Jeanette Groenendaal received its world premiere at IDFA last year. In Dutch with English subtitles. 55 min. Het Ketelhuis
Faust In this 1994 version of the story of the man who sold his soul to the devil, Faust gets a hallucinatory treatment courtesy of Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, whose bizarre claymation puppets already populated a similar wild take on Alice in Wonderland. Here, Svankmajer mixes bits of Goethe, Marlowe and 19th-century German writer Christian Dietrich Grabbe with his own unique approach to the matter, which combines live action, animation and puppetry. The final result is eye-popping, to say the least. In Czech with English subtitles. 97 min. De Nieuwe Anita
Die Fälscher Before you say ‘Life Is Beautiful’,
take a look at this gritty Holocaust comedy/drama (bizarrely enough, a genre with many entries), which
Must see:
Dutch Cocaine Factory Het Ketelhuis, Thursday-Sunday, Tuesday
just won best film at the Ghent Film Festival. The amazing Austrian character actor Karl Markovics shines as Salomon Sorowitsch, the leader of a pack of Jewish counterfeiters who get ‘hired’ by the Nazis to run a concentration camp devoted to printing foreign currency. The Germans’ plan is to destroy the world economy; the con men’s is merely to find a way to survive (and maybe get rich, too). Austrian writer/director Stefan Ruzowitzky nails the perfect tone in adapting the book by Adolf Burger, based on real-life events, and gets away with a gem. In German with Dutch subtitles. (MB) 98 min. Pathé Tuschinski Giorni e nuvole Elsa (Margherita Buy) and Michele (Antonio Albanese) are a middle-aged couple with a beautiful house, a 20-year-old daughter and good friends. Elsa gently restores an ancient fresco and long-hidden angels appear. Out of the blue, Michele tells her that he has lost his job, whereupon the couple’s situation rapidly worsens. They have to sell their apartment; they start quarrelling about money. Director Silvio Soldini (Pane e Tulipani) shows us a strong woman again: after the first shock, Elsa makes the best of it while Michele lets himself go. But despite fine performances and a nice rhythm, this sober drama stays flat and unsurprising. In Italian with Dutch subtitles. (GR) 115 min. Pathé ArenA
His Girl Friday Rosalind Russell is a hard-headed
newspaper reporter, Cary Grant her unscrupulous boss in Howard Hawks’ 1939 film. It’s more Russell’s picture than Grant’s, but nothing’s wrong with that. It’s got the classic screwball comedy formula—tough female lead, snappy dialogue—and it’s one of the greats. (JP) 92 min. Filmmuseum
Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten Julien Temple directs this straightforward look at Joe Strummer’s life, from his unusual childhood growing up as the son of a British diplomatic family in Turkey, to his early music interests and later success as leader of seminal punk band The Clash. Celebrity fans lining up to tell their Clash tales in front of Temple’s camera include Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch, Matt Dillon, Johnny Depp, John Cusack and Steve Buscemi. Lots of previously unreleased footage (including some early band rehearsals with quite embarrassing musical results) will make fans happy. 123 min. Melkweg Cinema Let’s Get Lost During roughly the last year of jazz trumpeter and singer Chet Baker’s life, fashion and art photographer Bruce Weber, a passionate fan, followed Baker and his entourage with a film crew, interviewed some of his former wives and lovers, and came up with a black-and-white documentary (1989) that’s much more attentive to Baker as an emblem and icon—from a pretty boy of the early ’50s to a wasted junkie in the ’80s—than to his music, which is almost never heard except as dreamy background. A gripping and affecting film with a striking noirish look (well photographed by Jeff Preiss), but also a rather dumb one that’s both enhanced and limited by Weber’s pie-eyed adoration of his subject. (JR) 119 min. OT301 Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House Cary Grant’s power to redeem the thinnest material is amply demonstrated in this slight situation comedy about a city couple’s determination to build a suburban retreat, against all of the expected rural odds. HC Pot-
Come out, come out, wherever you are! Even Morgan Spurlock can’t find Osama. Or is it Obama?
Once Upon a Honeymoon Leo McCarey’s astonishing attempt to blend screwball comedy and wartime propaganda—even more astonishing because, by and large, it works. Ginger Rogers is an American gold digger who marries Nazi Walter Slezak on the eve of the war; it’s the job of radio correspondent Cary Grant to get her working for our side. Despite some windy passages, the film’s equation of true love and the US democratic ideal (when it still believed in one) is irresistible, quintessential McCarey. 117 min. Filmmuseum Once Upon a Time in the West Sergio Leone, famous for his spaghetti westerns shot in Spain, dared to invade John Ford’s own Monument Valley for this 1969 epic. He brought back a masterpiece, a film that expands his baroque, cartoonish style into genuine grandeur, weaving dozens of thematic variations and narrative arabesques around a classical western foundation myth. With Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson and Claudia Cardinale, and a timeless score by Ennio Morricone. (DK) 165 min. Kriterion Plata quemada (Burnt Money) Three Argentinean killers, two of them lovers (Eduardo Noriega and Leonardo Sbaraglia), hide out in Uruguay after a bank heist with a heavy body count and wait for false passports. Under the strain, things start to come apart. Marcelo Piñeyro’s slick, homoerotic 2000 thriller, set in 1965, aims to be as hot as possible; some might feel it succeeds, while others may be reminded of commercials for cologne. In Spanish with Dutch subtitles. (JR) 125 min. Rialto Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? Morgan Spurlock’s long-awaited follow-up to Super Size Me purports to be a search for Bin Laden, but in fact it’s just a jocular fact-finding tour of the Middle East and Southeast Asia. The director travels around the world, seeks out worthwhile subjects, and puts himself at some risk to pose fairly dim questions, his effort culminating in a Pepsi Generation wrap-up that insists we all want the same things. The narrative emphasizes how much danger Spurlock is in and how noble he is to embark on all this while his wife is back in the US expecting their first child; it’s a little insulting to all the real reporters who’ve died in the field looking for hard information, not weak indie comedy. (JJ) 93 min. De Balie