Friday Reviews: Pandora's Box and Others

I'm trying to get at least a little better about sketching out a few comments on the films I watch, rather than just posting credits and grades without any substantiating commentary. Here, then, are some short notations on the three films I saw on video this week—Nikita Mikhalkov's 12, a 2007 Oscar nominee that premiered last year in American theaters, and two old dramas from 1944, the Eugene O'Neill adaptation The Hairy Ape and the Greer Garson-Walter Pidgeon vehicle Mrs. Parkington. I meant to write something comparably short about G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box, but with a film that seminal and thrilling, and even more so in 35mm projection with live-organ accompaniment at the Bank of America Cinema, who can hold to just a few words? Not me, surprise, surprise.

A mishmash of titles, to be sure, but hopefully if I can keep up this steady drip instead of the heaving cycles of feast and famine, you'll find things in the mix that interest or appeal to you.

Love in Any Language

Still plowing through my personal awards categories. Wherever you're reading from, I hope you have access to these movies, and I hope you'll file some recommendations for other movies we should all be hunting down from around the world.

Beware of a Holy Blog-a-Thon

Why do I work in such ridiculously erratic cycles? Just a day after that Vicky Cristina Barcelona review, here's another write-up, this one of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Beware of a Holy Whore. I suppose that could have been the title for Allen's film, if he were letting his real feelings about the Penélope Cruz character be known. It turns out that when Fassbinder travels to Spain, his experience of life is rather... different than Allen's. You can pore over Holy Whore and find not one shot that all the reviews will describe as "buttery." You can also, as in long stretches of the Allen picture, fail to realize that you're even in Spain, but for totally different reasons. Enjoy the review, and then wile away some summer hours at the party that inspired it, Goatdog's Movies About Movies Blog-a-Thon.

Best of 2006: Non-English Language Films

To answer the obvious question, which only recently became a question, there are no American movies here... not just on principle, but because I think all five of these movies, as well as L'Enfant, the unnamed first runner-up, beat Letters from Iwo Jima on any day of the week, in any language.

Here, then, are my picks for the five best films I saw last year that weren't in the English language. Incidentally, there's no Almodóvar here, either, but if you were a fan of Law of Desire, I can highly recommend the fifth film on this list. Old Joy fans (oh, you zillions!) will groove on Syndromes, if it's ever actually released in the States, and Requiem is probably the great under-exploited import of the year. There's got to be a bigger American audience for this movie, and hopefully for all of these movies. I hope that audience is readying their Netflix queue even as we speak, but I also hope we'll all keep throwing money at these movies when they're actually in theaters, or soon enough our cinemas won't speak any more languages than our current president does. And we know how many that is.