First, Stop Making Sense (1984) will be playing at the Whitsell Auditorium on Saturday, Feb 6. This is one of the best rock documentaries/performance films ever, period. Directed by Jonathan Demme, and featuring Talking Heads, the music and the visuals will knock you out. Look for the Big White Suit.
Until the Light Takes Us (Norwegian Doc 2008) Clinton Street Theater
Director: Aaron Aites, Audrey Ewell
Doc about the Norwegian Black Metal scene, its history and scandals. This music is concerned with morbid and violent themes, much more so than so-called death metal. It may be a function of the Nordic mind.
Working like a standard rock doc, it suddenly reveals a disturbing undercurrent – suicide, arson and murder by the stars of the scene. The main talking head, Varg Vikernes of the band Burzum, is a deeply-disturbed individual who seeks to justify his actions and absolve himself from blame. And he does this from prison.
There is no attempt to judge by the filmmakers, just you and the facts as related by those involved, highly intelligent, but twisted, participants in the scene and in the crimes. Not the usual thing.
B+
From Paris With Love (Multiple theaters)
Director: Pierre Morel
With: John Travolta, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Kasia Smutniak
This is not a great movie, and not even really a good one, but it is an awful lot of guilty fun. I was prepared to dislike this movie at first, but wound up liking it a bit.
Meyers is James Reece, aide to the American ambassador to France, and a low-level CIA operative, doing mostly grunt work for the Agency. He longs to be given more important work.
He has a gorgeous girl friend Caroline (Smutniak), who is a clothing designer.
Reece is told that he will be apprenticed to a veteran agent, Charlie Wax (Travolta) on his first big assignment. Wax turns out to be a loony and a loose cannon, and Travolta, shaved bald with a goatee and an earring, is having real fun here. He has a lot to make up for (Battlefield Earth, anyone?) and this is a small start.
The action is fast and violent, and influenced by the Hong Kong school of film mayhem. Wax kills dozens of bad guys without breaking a sweat and fills the air with profane patter and gunsmoke. If you think that this sounds like his Pulp Fiction character, the resemblance is shamelessly exploited, helping to put me off.
Reece is the horrified innocent way over his head, and you begin to think that this is all there is. Then, the movie springs a surprise on us and we are into a different story. I won’t say more.
Derivative, often trite, violent, foul-mouthed and proud of it, this flick will not be for everyone, and truthfully I can’t deny that you could wait for the DVD if you want to see it. But, guilty pleasures are pleasures, after all.
B-
Nordwand (Germany 2008) Cinema 21
Director: Phillipp Stolzl
With: Benno Furmann, Florian Lukas, Johanna Wokalek, Ulrich Tukur
Nordwand is the north face of the Eiger Mountain in the Swiss Alps. It was first climbed successfully in 1938. This is the story of an ill-fated 1936 attempt.
The attempt was urged on two German climbers (Furmann and Lukas) to coincide with the Olympics in Berlin, as an example of German superiority. The climbers themselves were not political, and we get the idea that they didn’t like Nazis much.
The editor of a newspaper (Tukur) travels to Switzerland to cover the climb. There are participants from many nations, and no idea whether the two Germans will show up at all. He is accompanied by a young photojournalist (Wokalek) who is a childhood friend of the Germans.
Harrowing, and very beautiful in its depiction of this difficult mountain, whose name means “ogre.” The climb, alas, goes awry when two Austrian climbers join the Germans. They are ill-equipped and careless, and they doom the attempt short of the summit.
The tension is cranked all the way through the climb and the descent, when the group is assaulted by horrible weather and human failings. We don’t know until the very end who will survive.
Well acted and gripping. Worth seeing.
B+