1. The Crime of Father Amaro (Carlos Carrera, 2002): This movie would not have worked if Gael Garcia Bernal was less attractive, as it is totally convincing that every woman in the village falls in love with him. It was really controversial when it came out in Mexico because it is about a corrupt Catholic Church. I like how they combined the very dark “love” story of the priest and the girl with the story about the church’s complicity with criminal drug lords. It’s much more serious and cynical than salacious though; he gets to be increasingly ass-ish as the movie goes on (presumably as he is more and more ensconced in the social and political power of the church he feels less bad about doing fairly awful stuff); it’s interesting because you start out sympathizing with him, and then you slowly have ot pull away.
  2. Airport ‘77 (Jerry Jameson, 1977): Man, this movie has everything. It’s from the height of the all-star disaster movie craze of the ’70s and doesn’t have the hamhanded “political commentary” of something like King Kong (where the film crew of the original turns into an oil company and the final King Kong showdown is at the World Trade Center — of course). It’s pretty fortunate that Jack Lemmon is both a professional pilot and an amateur scuba diver so he can save his passengers when the plane crashes in the ocean and sinks. There’s this weird tendency of the movie to have characters kind of narrate things, so we know how risky it is when, say, the Navy tries to raise the plane with balloons. My favourite in the all-star cast was Lee Grant, the drunken kind of slutty wife of holier-than-thou Christopher Lee; their marriage is a failure, so they totally both die, but she so fabulous and fun with her big hair and her cocktail ring.
  3. The Counterfeiters (Stefan Ruzowitzky, 2007): So let me tell you a story; I was kind of feeling worn out the other day and so I decided I’d take myself to the movies as a break from the like full-time scholarly solitude I have been in for the past 3 weeks. So I looked at what was playing in the nearby theatres, and there was not really a lot of movies that appeared to be worth my time; which is why I wound up seeing a movie about the Holocaust as a nice relaxing break. It wasn’t really a fun time, but it was a pretty good movie. I have mentioned probably a few thousand times on this blog how big a fan I am of melodrama, and I think this movie is a good example of how melodramatic techniques can be used to deal with truly complex moral issues. You have this story of guys in a concentration camp who get special treatment for counterfeiting money for the Germans, which is good because it keeps them alive, but bad because the counterfeit money is what’s keeping the war effort going; so they’re torn between their own lives and comfort and the greater good. The movie does a really good job of not underplaying the difficulty of the choices they make, nor the horror of the Holocaust (mainly by showing very little of it, but keeping the horror of it in the background with occasional sounds of gunshots on the other side of the wall and so forth). I am generally dubious about Best Foreign Language Oscar winners, but this was pretty excellent and dark-edged for a prestige-y historical drama.
  4. Suburbia (Penelope Spheeris, 1984): Punksploitation! I love it. This was a genuinely fantastic movie, making TCM Underground a winner again. It’s basically about these kids with bad home lives who run away and all live in this abandoned punk house at the edge of town; it doesn’t really glamorize the situation, what with the frequent close-ups of cockroaches and emphasis on how dirty the house is, plus all the crimes the kids commit, but it also treats the kids sympathetically, not just as fodder for some kind of sensationalistic “Punks Are Scary” thing. Spheeris used mainly non-actors for the kids (including pre-Chili Peppers Flea), a neorealist technique that really makes the whole thing sing. The movie starts with a little sequence of a kid getting eaten by a wild dog, then it moves to a punk club where some jerks sexually harass this girl (they rip off all her clothes and surround her while she screams, it’s awful); it takes awhile before you find out the wild dogs live in the same abandoned neighbourhood (seized under eminent domain to get turned into a highway) where the punk kids do. It’s never too thuddy with the symbolism, but the dogs are these figures of wildness who were created by and then abandoned by human society. I know you’re going to look Suburbia

I also want to make special note of the badness of Moonraker: I didn’t watch the whole thing, so no write-up, but Alex was watching it on TV and I believe it contains the worst action sequence ever put to film. There’s a gondola that turns into a…hover-gondola for some inexplicable reason and the whole thing is so badly edited, with the going back multiple times, and then a pigeon does a double take. It’s famous enough that a google search turns up 14,700 results, but I couldn’t find video of it, but this recap does it justice.