“The interesting thing about Flesh+Blood is that when Paul was looking for music, he went to Luc Van de Ven, who has a record company, Prometheus Records, and he said, ‘What do you think, what kind of music should I use?’ and Luc played him Conan. That’s the score that took me to Paul. I think he had shown the film to James Horner and Horner said, ‘I can’t do that, it’s a terrible movie.’ And I just was, ‘I got to do it! This is the best movie I’ve ever seen in my life!’ and frankly, it really was. I loved it because I thought it was honest, and it was ruthless, and terrifyingly brutal, but what else would it be like? The whole marriage of politics and religion was brilliant.” — Basil Poledouris interviewed by Olivier Desbrosses in Ubeda, Spain, July 2006

Flesh + Blood (1985)
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
Screenplay by Gerard Soeteman & Paul Verhoeven, story by Gerard Soeteman
Produced by Gys Versluys
126 minutes

The Dutch filmmaker and cultural lightning rod’s first experience in Hollywood was not 1987′s critical and commercial sensation RoboCop. Paul Verhoeven actually made his English language directing debut two summers previous with Flesh + Blood, his first occasion to spar with the MPAA over censorship, American style. A quick release capsule of medieval death and eroticism, the film was bum rushed out of the U.S. box office, failing to launch action figures or sequels of any sort for its primary investor, Orion Pictures. Yet this relatively low budget pill holds up surprisingly well in a designer age of digital entertainment, delivering a potent kick of complex characterization, historical detail and brass balls, revving its sex and violence past legal limits in the United States.

Set in the way back of 1501 A.D., Flesh + Blood introduces a band of mercenaries receiving communion before they lay siege to a fortified city. The rabble includes an archer (Brion James), the very pregnant harlot he adores (Susan Tyrrell), a defrocked cardinal (Ronald Lacey) and various cutthroats and jezebels led by a charismatic soldier of fortune named Martin (Rutger Hauer). Promised 24 hours to ransack the homes of the rich if they can retake the city for its ousted lord Arnolfini (Fernando Hilbeck) and his captain of the guard Hawkwood (Jack Thompson), the rogues are observed by Arnolfini’s teenaged son Steven (Tom Burlinson), a cocksure engineer who aspires to the heights of Leonardo da Vinci. Victorious in battle, Martin and his band are double-crossed by Arnolfini Sr. and expelled from the city.

While Hawkwood retires to the countryside with a mute nun (Blanca Marsillach) he maimed during the invasion, Steven’s war booty arrives in the form of Agnes (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a daughter of aristocracy who enters marriage to Steven pure as the driven snow. The college boy announces he has career plans, but plans change when Martin and his marauders make off with his bride to be. More cunning than she appears, Agnes weighs her chastity against her odds of survival and throws herself at Martin sexually. This shifts the balance of power in the band, which storms a castle they fail to realize sits in a valley beset by the Black Plague. Steven coerces Hawkwood out of retirement to save Agnes, who may not be in as desperate need of rescuing as her prince believes.

Verhoeven and writing partner Gerard Soeteman had amassed medieval research dating back to their 1969 Dutch television series Floris starring Rutger Hauer. Their full throttled script for Flesh + Blood is woven with subject matter as fascinating as it is disparate: the Black Plague, piracy, 16th century mechanical engineering, Catholicism. An onslaught of debauchery that proved too flagrant for the MPAA to award an R rating without cuts, the irony of Flesh + Blood is that amid the impaled chests and bare bottoms, its characters (particularly the ladies played by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Susan Tyrrell) possess far greater humanity than the caricatures of generic Hollywood action films. The outstanding international cast is mirrored on the other side of the camera by Dutch cinematographer Jan de Bont and American composer Basil Poledouris.

This month’s theme was hatched after yet another person with better taste than me recommended that I add the 2005 romantic drama Shopgirl to my queue. Looking for nine more films with similar themes, “Gloves”, “Art Gallery” and “Pilates” were all considered and rejected before I settled on “May December Romance”. So in the month of December, I’ll take a look at love separated by much more than just six months on the calendar.

The Good Girl (2002)
Directed by Miguel Arteta
Written by Mike White
Produced by Matthew Greenfield
93 minutes

Saying that The Good Girl is the best movie Jennifer Aniston has appeared in doesn’t give it nearly the credit it deserves. Pasadena native Mike White had pictured a career as a playwright in New York, but returning home, wrote two dark comedies — Chuck & Buck and The Good Girl — which helped land him a job on the writing staff of Dawson’s Creek in 1998. White showed his work to a college buddy named Miguel Arteta, who’d grown up in Puerto Rico and flunked out of the documentary program at Harvard before meeting White at Wesleyan University. A graduate of the AFI, Arteta was interested in The Good Girl, but White refused, hoping he could direct it himself. The pair tackled the controversial Chuck & Buck first and after several actresses got cold feet about playing Justine Fast, White suggested Jennifer Aniston for the part.

With Aniston on board, another Wesleyan alum named Matthew Greenfield secured roughly $7 million in financing from Myriad Pictures. To accommodate Aniston’s schedule taping Friends in Burbank, The Good Girl was filmed in Simi Valley, with the actress clocking seven-day work weeks for a chance to break out of rom-com jail. Screened for the first time at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, The Good Girl posted strong reviews and turned a profit in limited release. With humor so dry it could keep paint from sticking, Mike White’s writing isn’t for everybody, injecting brutal honesty into the hijinks. But the quality of the material is evident by the talent of the cast assembled around Aniston, with John C. Reilly & Tim Blake Nelson shining in particular. Miguel Arteta captures the langour of Texas without making jokes out of the characters or their lives.

While not extraordinarily intelligent, 30-year-old Justine Last (Jennifer Aniston) realizes she’s wasting away as a clerk at the Retail Rodeo somewhere in Texas. Her co-workers pass the tedium of their day in a variety of ways. Gwen (Deborah Rush) keeps herself busy with work. Cheryl (Zooey Deschanel) slings subtle insults at customers over the p.a. system. Security guard Corny (Mike White) invites Justine to his Bible study group, which she declines by stating she prefers evenings to herself. Justine’s husband Phil (John C. Reilly) and his best friend Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson) are stoners who make a living as house painters. Justine is drawn to the new clerk, 22-year-old Holden Worther (Jake Gyllenhaal). Holden claims to be named after J.D. Salinger’s anti-hero and bonds with Justine over their shared hatred of the world.

Justine spurns Holden’s advances by reminding him that she’s married. He responds by quitting Retail Rodeo and writing Justine a lovesick note imploring her to meet him after work. When Gwen gets ill eating a batch of bad blackberries, Justine has to choose between accompanying her friend to the emergency room or meeting Holden at his designated rendezvous outside Chuck E. Cheese. Their intense affair is put on ice when Justine suspects that Bubba is onto them. Holden does not react well to the hiatus. Justine attempts to strengthen her marriage by taking Phil to Bible study, but changes her mind when she spots the motel manager among the saved. While Holden continues to fall apart and Bubba blackmails Justine with sex, the good girl clings to the hope that the baby she’s carrying will give her life some purpose.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 11,043 users: 54% for The Good Girl

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 71 for The Good Girl

What do you say?

Logging in to Netflix Instant for a movie to watch is like being hungry and shown to a food replicator. It doesn’t solve my problem — it introduces one thousand new ones. Luckily, I can see which genres are rated higher in nutritional content, in this case, 4 or 4 ½ star ratings out of 5 stars. “Documentary” had a lot of those. So did “Anime & Animation”. In the month of November, I take another trip around the globe to sample recent animated feature films. Next stop: Tokyo, Japan.

Paprika (2006)
Directed by Satoshi Kon
Screenplay by Seishi Minakami & Satoshi Kon, based on the novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui
Produced by Jungo Maruta, Masao Takiyama
90 minutes

While Christopher Nolan took nine years to crack his script for Inception, a detective thriller unshackled by the limitations of live action explored the dream world with far less gravity and much more verve. Written by Yasutaka Tsutsui, Paprika was first published as a serial in the Japanese edition of women’s magazine Marie Claire in 1991. With interest from several filmmakers over the years, it was animator Satoshi Kon who impressed the author most. Kon was already a fan of the novel and counting Tsutsui as an influence, had considered adapting Paprika as a follow-up to his critically acclaimed 1998 debut feature Perfect Blue. Kon was finishing his commitment to Madhouse Ltd for the 13-episode TV series Paranoia Agent in 2004 when he learned that the Tokyo based animation studio was searching for its next project. He pitched them Paprika.

With a budget and schedule roughly that of Kon’s third film Tokyo Godfathers ($2.7 million USD), Paprika was completed in time for the 2006 Venice Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Golden Lion. In a genre that usually takes either a compass pencil to map out or multiple viewings to get straight, Paprika is drawn with soft focus and a straight arrow, injecting soulful characterization and a narrative economy more congruent to an American cops ‘n robbers thriller than Japanese anime. Its dynamic protagonist — a psychotherapist who leads a double life as a “dream detective” — not only has the ability to leap into paintings or billboards within the dreams of her patients, but duels with her own doppelgänger, each unsure who is directing the other. Its fantasy sequences blow the hinges off anything seen in a live action movie: enigmatic and whimsical, like a dream.

Detective Kogawa Toshimi (Akio Ôtsuka) scans the crowd of a circus for a suspect but soon finds himself being chased through scenes from adventure, espionage and romantic comedy movies. Guiding the cinema loving cop through this territory is enigmatic 18-year-old Paprika (Megumi Hayashibara), a “dream detective” that his college pal Dr. Shima (Katsunosuke Hori) introduced Kogawa to for help with a recurring nightmare in which the cop investigates his own murder. In the waking world, Paprika is known as Dr. Chiba Atsuko (also Megumi Hayashibara), 29-year-old therapist at the Foundation For Psychiatric Research. Chiba’s colleague — an overweight genius named Dr. Tokita Kohsaku (Tôru Furuya) — has invented a device known as the DC Mini, which allows users to share dreams and can treat mental illness by redirecting bioelectric current through the brain.

When three DC Mini devices are stolen and Dr. Shima nearly kills himself when a dream is planted into his subconscious, the dream program is shut down by the Chairman (Toru Emori), who remains wary of technology being used to manipulate the sanctity of the mind. Assisted by able-bodied researcher Osanai Morio (Kôichi Yamadera), Chiba and Tokita track down a lab assistant believed responsible for the theft and attempted murder. The thief has the ability to jump into the dreams of anyone with prolonged exposure to the DC Mini, like Dr. Chiba. Soon, psychiatric patients and the public are endangered by a collective dream in which a fanciful “parade of everything under the sun” pulls dreamers into a malaise in which they are unable to recover. Dr. Chiba/Paprika enters the dream world to find a cure.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 10,055 users: 87% for Paprika

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 81 for Paprika

What do you say?

Logging in to Netflix Instant for a movie to watch is like being hungry and shown to a food replicator. It doesn’t solve my problem — it introduces one thousand new ones. Luckily, I can see which genres are rated higher in nutritional content, in this case, 4 or 4 ½ star ratings out of 5 stars. “Documentary” had a lot of those. So did “Anime & Animation”. In the month of November, I take another trip around the globe to sample recent animated feature films. Next stop: Melbourne, Australia.

Mary and Max (2009)
Directed by Adam Elliot
Written by Adam Elliot
Produced by Melanie Coombs
92 minutes

With its whimsical design and a sonorous screenplay, Mary and Max soars like a Dr. Seuss fable made for grownups. After winning an Academy Award for Best Animated Short with Harvie Krumpet in 2004, Adam Elliot made the rounds at Disney, Pixar and Fox with pitches that fell on deaf ears. Returning to Australia, he began rereading letters by a New York pen pal he’d been corresponding with since the age of 17. Elliot felt that his long distance friend of 20 years — Jewish, atheist, a sufferer of Aspberger’s Syndrome — had all the makings of a character for his next film. Elliot spent six months storyboarding Mary and Max and another year and a half writing a script while producer Melanie Coombs raised financing. Screen Australia, Adirondack Pictures (a New York based film finance company) and Film Victoria ended up bankrolling Elliot’s first feature film at roughly $8 million AUS.

Elliot served as his own art director and designed all the characters for what took 50 crew members 57 weeks to shoot inside a Melbourne warehouse. Mary and Max was screened for the first time when it was selected to open the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, a first for a claymation feature. Elliot’s characteristic clay figures border on the grotesque, but the strength of his writing suggests an award winning graphic novel more than a movie script. Mary and Max is the anti-Shrek, brandishing abundant wit and imagination to do more than entertain kids, exploring characters who struggle to get out the door each morning. The result pushes the boundaries of animation. Barry Humphries (aka Dame Edna) provides the Seussian narration, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s vocal transformation as Max is superlative and even the hilarious product labels in the picture are worth a rental.

In the Mount Waverly suburb of Melbourne in 1976, a Narrator (Barry Humphries) begins “Mary Dinkle’s eyes were the color of muddy puddles. Her birthmark, the color of poo.” A painfully awkward child, 8-year-old Mary Daisy Dinkle (Bethany Whitmore) counts a pet rooster named Ethel as her only friend. Her favorite activities include drinking condensed milk and watching a cartoon called The Noblets, diminutive creatures that appeal to Mary because they never lack friends. Her father Noel works in a factory attaching strings to tea bags. Her mother Vera Lorraine Dinkle consumes liberal amounts of the sherry she uses in her recipes. Meanwhile, in New York, 44-year-old Max Jerry Horovitz (Philip Seymour Hoffman) also watches The Noblets. A chronic overeater who worships chocolate, Max has trouble sleeping and keeping pet goldfish alive.

Mary chooses Max’s name at random from a New York City phone book and writes him, including a Cherry Rite chocolate bar. Max is “confuzzled” by human beings and reacts to Mary’s letter by having an anxiety attack. Calming down, he answers Mary’s questions — like where babies come from in America — with candor. He also details his abhorrence of crowds, bright lights, sudden noises and strong smells, admitting that New York has all of these. Basking in Max’s words, Mary adopts a pen pal. She sends him chocolate. He advises her how to handle being teased at school. Max’s tension is diagnosed as Aspberger’s Syndrome, which adult Mary (Toni Collette) hopes to eradicate by studying disorders of the mind. She falls in love with her neighbor Damien (Eric Bana) and marries, but struggles with self-worth while a continent away Max continues to fight his inner demons.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 4,594 users: 89% for Mary and Max

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

What do you say?

Logging in to Netflix Instant for a movie to watch is like being hungry and shown to a food replicator. It doesn’t solve my problem — it introduces one thousand new ones. Luckily, I can see which genres are rated higher in nutritional content, in this case, 4 or 4 ½ star ratings out of 5 stars. “Documentary” had a lot of those. So did “Anime & Animation”. In the month of November, I take another trip around the globe to sample recent animated feature films. Next stop: Tel Aviv, Israel.

Waltz with Bashir (2008)
Directed by Ari Folman
Written by Ari Folman
Produced by Ari Folman, Gerhard Meixner, Roman Paul, Serge Lalou, Yael Nahlieli
89 minutes

Cutting a harrowing combat documentary with bargain basement Flash animation, Waltz with Bashir transports us across a landscape unlike any other, blending the real with the surreal, atrocity with the vexing nature of memory. Having suppressed his own personal experiences of the Lebanon War, army reservist and screenwriter Ari Folman began the process of directing his first feature film by soliciting interviews with veterans over the Internet. These formed the basis of a script. The next step was videotaping both interviews and scripted segments on a soundstage in Tel Aviv. The Bridget Folman Film Gang — named after the filmmaker’s dog and consisting of eight animators, four illustrators, one After Effects artist and one editor — used the live action footage as a reference to draw storyboards, then animatics, which in turn took four years to animate.

Shown in bits and pieces to financiers, a budget of roughly $1.7 million was raised, namely from Franco-German public TV network Arte. Expecting a furor in his home country, Folman was surprised when Israel embraced Waltz with Bashir and helped it land an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. Unlike something that feels programmed for film festivals or awards, Waltz with Bashir breaks out with striking originality. Dramatizing combat in a war zone that was 20 minutes from the homes of many of the soldiers fighting it would have made for a riveting enough movie, but Folman uses more than one brushstroke here. Dreamlike segments dovetail into the documentary aspects of the film beautifully. Of the 3,500 keyframes that comprise the picture, art director David Polonsky drew at least 75%.

Filmmaker Ari Folman meets his friend Boaz Rein-Buskila for a drink. Rein shares a dream in which the vengeful spirits of twenty-six dogs he shot on patrols during the Lebanon War of 1982 haunt him. Folman carries no memories of the war, despite his proximity to the massacres at Palestinian refugee camps in Sabra and Shatila. His friend Ori Sivian suggests that memory is fluid and can be replaced with images that may or may not be real. To unlock his memories of the massacre, Folman seeks out veterans who might be able to shed some light on his activities during the war. Traveling to Holland, he visits a classmate named “Carmi Cna’an” whose memories include being pulled into the sea by a blue woman before deploying in the city of Sidon. Cna’an has no recollection of the refugee massacres.

Folman is hit with a flood of memories of the Lebanon War. Only 19, he spent the early days of the conflict transporting the bodies of wounded or killed soldiers. Veteran Ronny Dyag recounts his guilt surviving an enemy ambush on his tank by fleeing battle, but has no recollection of seeing Folman. Shmuel Frenkel — a sergeant given to covering himself in patchouli oil so his men wouldn’t lose him during night patrols — recalls Folman being by his side from training on, though Folman is unable to. Post-trauma expert Zahava Solomn explains that he may have dissociated his memories in order to cope with what he experienced in Lebanon. The more stories he hears about the massacre of Palestinian refugee camps by Israeli backed Christian militias, the closer he’s able to put himself to the genocide unleashed twenty five years ago.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 9,517 users: 89% for Waltz with Bashir

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 91 for Waltz with Bashir

What do you say?

As days get shorter, nights get longer and All Hallow’s Eve beckons, I can say that I won’t be wandering the streets dressed as Chewbacca begging for candy. What I can’t say is whether or not at my age, horror movies still have any surprises left in them. In the search for originality, it’d be a good idea to start anywhere but Hollywood. For the month of October, I take a trip around the globe to see what’s scaring some of my favorite countries these days.

The Orphanage (2007)
Directed by J.A. Bayona
Written by Sergio G. Sánchez
Produced by Joaquín Padró, Mar Targarona, Álvaro Augustín, Guillermo del Toro
105 minutes

To call The Orphanage a Steven Spielberg ghost story is actually more of a compliment to Mr. Spielberg than to the Spaniards who crafted one of the most thrilling explorations of the afterlife in many years. Sergio G. Sánchez had Peter Pan and The Turn of the Screw in mind when he finished a draft of The Orphanage in 1998. Hoping he might direct it, Sánchez set out to prove himself behind the camera with a 17-minute short, which caught the eye of director J.A. Bayona at a film festival. Asking Sánchez if he had written anything else, the director took The Orphanage to Barcelona based producers Joaquín Padró & Mar Targarona, whose company Rodar y Rodar had employed Bayona in his commercial career. Another call was put in to Guillermo del Toro, who Bayona had met at the 1992 Sitges Fantastic Cinema Festival when del Toro was screening his debut feature Cronos.

With the name “Guillermo del Toro” above the title, Rodar y Rodar was able to raise $4 million in financing, partnering with commercial network Telecinco for Bayona to make his feature film debut. The result became the highest grossing Spanish language film in Spain’s history and was named their entry in the 2008 Academy Awards.  The Orphanage is a jewel among junk in the fantasy and horror genres. Instead of showcasing special effects, the sophistication of old-fashioned storytelling is what shines through here. Sánchez’s intricate puzzle box of a script taps into our mutual fear and our fascination of the unknown, grounded by Belén Rueda playing a modern day Mrs. Darling haunted by the disappearance of children who’ve been taken away to Neverland. In his first feature outing, Bayona juggles magic, fright and melodrama to beautiful and remarkable effect.

7-year-old Simón (Roger Príncep) wakes in the night crying for his mother Laura (Belén Rueda). An only child, Simón both entertains and scares himself with a rich fantasy life that includes a couple of invisible friends. Newly arrived in the 19^th century mansion where she was raised when the house was an orphanage, Laura takes a break preparing an open house for her own orphanage with husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) to accompany her son to the seashore. After exploring a cave, Simón asks permission to invite home a boy he claims he met in there. Laura receives a visit from an old social worker (Montserrat Carulla) inquiring about Simón, who has not yet been told he is adopted and is receiving treatment for HIV. Waken in the night by strange noises in the garage, Laura finds the social worker snooping around and chases her away.

Simón introduces his mother to a game his invisible friends have invented: hiding something of value and replacing it with clues that lead back to the missing object. Pressed by Laura to stop lying, Simón reveals that it’s his parents who have been lying to him; his new friend Tomás told him so. During the open house, a strange child wearing a sack over his head and the name “Tomás” sewn on his shirt locks Laura in a bathroom. By the time she’s rescued, Simón has vanished. The state has no record of the social worker Laura reported in her home and the police have no clues in the disappearance of her son. Convinced Simón still in the house and that his “friends” know where, Laura invites a medium (Geraldine Chaplin) and a team of parapsychologists to help, fracturing her marriage, but revealing a secret about the Good Shepherd Orphanage and the fate of her son.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 38,413 users: 85% for The Orphanage

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 74 for The Orphanage

What do you say?

As days get shorter, nights get longer and All Hallow’s Eve beckons, I can say that I won’t be wandering the streets dressed as Chewbacca begging for candy. What I can’t say is whether or not at my age, horror movies still have any surprises left in them. In the search for originality, it’d be a good idea to start anywhere but Hollywood. For the month of October, I take a trip around the globe to see what’s scaring some of my favorite countries these days.

Left Bank (2008)
Directed by Pieter Van Hees
Written by Pieter Van Hees & Dimitri Karakatsanis
Produced by Bert Hamelinck, Kato Maes, Frank Van Passel
102 minutes

Cut with the same psychological straight razor that splices the great films of Roman Polanski, Left Bank unsettles like only the most powerful thrillers can. After directing several short films in Belgium, Pieter Van Hees was looking to break into features with a project called Dirty Mind, a thriller that had morphed into a social satire. Waiting for financing to fall into place, Van Hees started work on a story “that creeps up in the head of a confused young woman struggling with her relationship.” Having lived briefly on the left bank of Antwerp, Van Hees huddled with writing partner Dimitri Karakatsanis and wrote a script. Brussels-based Caviar Films — producers of commercials, music videos and feature films — had worked previously with Van Hees and raising a budget of €700,000, were prepared to put Left Bank into production ahead of Dirty Mind.

Left Bank is one of those movies that leaves a mark, not with excessive gore or sadism, but overwhelming atmosphere and characters suffering afflictions of modern living that seem almost too real. Its potent blend of sex and mystery gives the film far more weight than what usually plays in American theaters. Left Bank picks up where Rosemary’s Baby and Blue Velvet left off, with an exceptional cast, highly effective sound montage and a disquieting musical score composed by electronic group Eavesdropper and featuring cellist Simon Lenski. While Van Hees and director of photography Nicolas Karakatsanis took visual cues from movies as disparate as The Shining, The Thin Red Line and The Yards, the film swims the same currents as The Ring or Dark Water, driven not by a boogeyman but a spiritual dread that creeps in from every direction.

22-year-old Belgian sprinter Marie (Eline Kuppens) is in training for the European Championships when she meets a car salesman and recreational archer named Bobby (Matthias Schoenaerts). Going out on a date, they return to his apartment on the left bank of the Scheldt River in Antwerp and make impassioned love on the floor. Tearing the cartilage in her knee during a run, Marie moves in with Bobby for some peace and quiet while she recuperates. Her new neighbor Veerle (Sara De Bosschere) notifies Marie that the apartment’s previous tenant Hella Govaerts (Ruth Becquart) mysteriously disappeared. When an envelope arrives for the missing woman with information about the black mud the building was built on, Marie telephones Hella’s boyfriend Dirk (Tom De Wispelaere), who instructs Marie to throw the package away.

During a visit from Marie’s mother (Sien Eggers), Dirk arrives to share research his girlfriend was working on before she disappeared. During The Middle Ages, the left bank was reserved for outcasts: witches, criminal gangs, plague sufferers. The locals believed they lived near a black hole that descended into the underworld. Marie’s mother agrees that she has always felt a negative energy here and urges her daughter to come home. Conducting her own research, Marie discovers a link between a pit in the left bank with the pagan festival of Samhain on All Saint’s Day. As her health deteriorates and her athletic career is jeopardized, Marie confides to Bobby that she wishes she could just start over again. Her mother becomes convinced that an underground stream runs beneath the basement.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 254 users: 46% for Left Bank

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

Kimberly Lindbergs raves about Left Bank on her superlative B-movie blog Cinebeats.

As days get shorter, nights get longer and All Hallow’s Eve beckons, I can say that I won’t be wandering the streets dressed as Chewbacca begging for candy. What I can’t say is whether or not at my age, horror movies still have any surprises left in them. In the search for originality, it’d be a good idea to start anywhere but Hollywood. For the month of October, I take a trip around the globe to see what’s scaring some of my favorite countries these days.

Requiem (2006)
Directed by Hans-Christian Schmid
Written by Bernd Lange
Produced by Hans-Christian Schmid
93 minutes

Grounded with strong performances and anchored in restraint worthy of a parish priest, Requiem is a horror film on a spiritual fast. Hans-Christian Schmid grew up in a small town in Bavaria and had heard of Anneliese Michel, a college student who died in 1976 after the Catholic Church resorted to exorcism rites to treat her demonic visions. Schmid began sketching treatments in 1997 and partnering with screenwriter Bernd Lange, they finished a script in 2004. Their project secured financing from German public television companies BR (Bavarian Broadcasting), SWR (Southwest Broadcasting), WDR (West German Broadcasting) as well as the Franco-German TV network Arte. In her film debut, Sandra Hüller won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 2006 Berlin Film Festival, while critics awarded Requiem the FIPRESCI Prize.

A U.S. production titled The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005) starring Laura Linney and Tom Wilkinson was loosely based on the court case surrounding the Anneliese Michel story. While that version beat Requiem into theaters, the German production rejects special effects and the supernatural, focusing on mental illness and religious dogma and what would lead a normal college girl to an exorcism. Whether this approach was taken for prestige or for lack of money — most of the film is shot handheld by Polish cinematographer Bogumil Godfrejow — the tension in this “horror movie without any horror” is palpable. In her film debut, Sandra Hüller won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 2006 Berlin Film Festival for conveying something as raw and intense as any team of makeup effects technicians could.

In a small West German town in the 1970s, a 21-year-old devout Catholic named Michaela Klingler (Sandra Hüller) is elated by news that she’s been accepted into university at Tübingen. Her strict mother (Imogen Kogge) uses Michaela’s epilepsy to argue against her leaving home, but appealing to her sympathetic father (Burghart Klaußner) that the pills she’s been prescribed have enabled her to go six months without a spell, Michaela is moved in to her dorm by her father himself. In pedagogy class, she makes friends with a high school acquaintance, Hanna (Anna Blomeier). Michaela takes a parish pilgrimage with her family to the Italian shrine of St. Katherine, where her mother gives her a rosary. Sitting alone in a cafeteria, Michaela’s rosary falls to the floor. Trying to pick it up, she becomes paralyzed with fright and goes into a seizure.

With Michaela’s father covering for his daughter by keeping the spell a secret, Michaela begins to blossom at school, sporting a new hairstyle, new fashions and even finding a boyfriend in a chemistry major (Nicholas Reinke). But when Hanna finds Michaela collapsed on the floor of her dorm room one morning, she insists that her friend visit a doctor. When X-rays prove inconclusive, Michaela visits her parish priest (Walter Schmidinger) and reveals that whenever she tries to pray, hideous faces and voices torment her. The priest refuses to accept this, but is concerned enough to visit Michaela at school with Father Borchert (Jens Harzer), a young vicar who is more open minded to Michaela’s story. As Michaela’s spells grow more intense, Borchert contends that the best way to rid the girl of her demons is through an exorcism.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 1,578 users: 64% for Requiem

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 82 for Requiem

What do you say?

The Bechdel Test was named for Allison Bechdel, whose comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For in 1985 measured the female presence in movies by employing three criteria: Are there two or more women in it, with names? Do the women talk to each other? About something other than a man? Far too many mainstream movies flunk this test, but in the month of September, I take a look at ten movies that pass.

The Burning Plain (2008)
Directed by Guillermo Arriaga
Written by Guillermo Arriaga
Produced by Walter F. Parkes, Laurie MacDonald
107 minutes

Pouring on the melancholy and infinite sadness, The Burning Plain has major credibility problems as well as a title problem, but nearly erases both with a cast and a visual sheen that would be the envy of just about any first-time director. After writing Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel, screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga ended his collaboration with director Alejandro González Iñárritu after Iñárritu let it be known that Arriaga had taken too much credit for the success of those films. Arriaga submitted his script The Burning Plain to Walter F. Parkes & Laurie MacDonald, the husband-wife team who once presided over film production at DreamWorks Pictures. Proposing that he be the one sitting in the director’s chair this time, Arriaga won financing from Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban, whose 2929 Productions, in association with Costa Films, put up the budget.

Shot over eight weeks in Chihuahuan Desert of New Mexico and in Portland for a budget of under $20 million, The Burning Plain screened September 2008 at the Venice Film Festival. It opened in Italy weeks later and was available in the United States via On-Demand cable in August 2009. In a few years, this film might become known as the screen debut of Jennifer Lawrence, who broke out in Winter’s Bone and gives a haunted performance years beyond her age. The stoic Charlize Theron is equally possessed, while directors of photography Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood) and John Toll (Vanilla Sky, who Elswit recommended shoot the Portland sequences) bend light and shadow with technique that is nothing short of majestic. When it comes to the script, Arriaga has squeezed all the juice out of these solemn, multi-arc, multi-lingual melodramas and leaves fruit pulp.

A trailer parked on a deserted plain is consumed by fire. Sylvia (Charlize Theron) manages a seafood restaurant perched along the Pacific Coast, where she marks time in an emotionless affair with a cook (John Corbett). Shuttled to work by a friend (Robin Tunney), Sylvia notices a stranger watching her. Back in the southwest, teenager Santiago (J.D. Pardo) inspects the remains of the trailer, where his father and mistress were burned alive. Santiago’s mother (Rachel Ticotin) sits out the funeral while the husband (Brett Cullen) of his late father’s mistress shows up to vent at the “wetbacks”. Santiago is much more interested in Mariana (Jennifer Lawrence), the teenage daughter in that family. Meanwhile, crop duster Santiago (Danny Pino), his 10-year-old daughter Maria (Tessa Ia) and partner Carlos (José María Yazpik) fly to a job.

Moving back in time, Nick (Joaquim de Almeida) reconnects with his mistress Gina (Kim Basinger). Sneaking away to a trailer Nick’s cousin has loaned them, Gina is still sensitive about her body following the loss of a breast to cancer. Back in what we believe to be the present, teenaged Santiago and Mariana overcome resistance by their families and get to know one another. Meanwhile, the crop duster suffers a crash. Moving back in time again, Mariana follows her mother to the trailer where she rendezvous with her lover. Recovering in the hospital, the crop duster dispatches Carlos to reunite Maria with her mother. In Portland, Carlos locates the woman, who has changed her name from Mariana to Sylvia and wants nothing to do with Maria. Moving back in time again, Mariana attempts to end her mother’s affair by setting fire to the trailer.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 6,129 users: 57% for The Burning Plain

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 45 for The Burning Plain

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The Bechdel Test was named for Allison Bechdel, whose comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For in 1985 measured the female presence in movies by employing three criteria: Are there two or more women in it, with names? Do the women talk to each other? About something other than a man? Far too many mainstream movies flunk this test, but in the month of September, I take a look at ten recent movies that pass.

Up in the Air (2009)
Directed by Jason Reitman
Screenplay by Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner, based on the novel by Walter Kirn
Produced by Jason Reitman, Ivan Reitman, Daniel Dubiecki, Jeffrey Clifford
109 minutes

Written and cast close to perfection, uncanny timing further enshrines Up in the Air as one of the key films of the ‘00s. A conversation in first class with a man who claimed he traveled on business 300 days a year became the genesis for a novel by Walter Kirn. Published in July 2001, screenwriter Sheldon Turner and Intermedia made a pitch for Up in the Air, but Kirn sold the film rights to Fox 2000 with Jay Roach attached to direct. 9/11 put the project on ice, but Turner loved the novel so much he finished an adaptation on spec. DreamWorks bought Turner’s script for Ivan Reitman to direct and Ted Griffin wrote several drafts for the studio. In the tale told by Reitman’s son Jason, an ecstatic blurb by author Christopher Buckley prompted him to pick up the novel at Book Soup in L.A. and he fell in love with it.

Jason Reitman spent six years working on his own draft of Up in the Air, retaining Kirn’s philosophy while altering the story. Co-financed by his father’s Montecito Picture Company and by Paramount at roughly $25 million, the film brilliantly captures the intimate details of a man terrified by standing still, as well as the bigger picture of an economy going down the chutes and what’s important in life when your job becomes transitory. It rolls from one great scene to the next with a precision of wit and intelligence. Without a trace of smugness, Reitman tunes out genre conventions to create a drama/comedy for adults that feels dark, yet invigorating. Nominated for six Academy Awards — Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor and two Best Supporting Actresses — Up in the Air regrettably won none.

Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) travels the country as a personnel consultant whose clients hire him to counsel employees being laid off. Bingham also gives speaking engagements in which he extols the virtues of reducing your life to things that can fit easily into a backpack. In Dallas, Bingham hooks up with Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga), another business traveler whose office consists of airplanes, hotels and rental cars. Having spent only 43 days of the previous year at home, Bingham is called back to Omaha by his boss (Jason Bateman), who introduces 23-year-old Cornell grad Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick). Natalie’s vision to reduce costs by having consultants conduct layoffs by video conferencing not only ruffles the finesse Bingham feels he brings to his job but also threatens to terminate his life on the road.

Demonstrating to Natalie that she has little understanding of his business, Bingham only ends up selling his boss on sending Natalie on the road with him. Bingham schools his protégé on how to pack and how to navigate airports (always pick the line with Asians) and shares his dream of reaching 10 million domestic flyer miles, a proud distinction only six other American Airlines passengers have achieved. Bingham convinces Alex to meet him in Miami and crashing an electronics convention, realizes how much they have in common. Reprimanded by Natalie for refusing to make a connection with anyone, Bingham invites Alex to the wedding of his niece (Melanie Lynskey) and her groom (Danny McBride) in Wisconsin. Realizing he’s matured, Bingham makes a visit to Chicago to tell Alex he’s ready to settle down.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 57,507 users: 76% for Up in the Air

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 83 for Up in the Air

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