Hold the Date

For the start-up of my-pov.ca two treats await us.

Caos Calmo (Quiet Chaos) Unless someone can persuade me to the contrary (and I’m eminently persuadable,) I propose Caos Calmo, an Italian movie, as our my-pov.ca opener. It’s a film that quests after meaning in love and loss, in spontaneous kindness and abiding care; it’s about fundamentally decent beings sorting through lives. Not only that, the Roman Catholic Church denounced its eroticism as ‘vulgar and destructive.’ As a teen, no denouncement was more enticing. Plus, it has cinematic pedigrees scribbled all over it: the great director/producer/actor Nanni Moretti stars. Alessandro Gassman, son of the hunk, Vittorio Gassman, plays a hunk. Roman Polanski makes a cameo. No wonder it was nominated for 18 Italian Oscars. So circle your February 22nd calendar.

And for Sunday March 1st, Entre Les Murs, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes last spring. I’ve read about this one for some time, but just saw it this afternoon. Last year, two striking movies, The Visitor and Edge of Heaven explored lives thrown into turmoil when an illegal immigrant is deported. With Entre Les Murs, pasty-pink Parisian professeurs are thrown into turmoil, schooling frisky African, Asian and Arabic immigrant teens, eternal French values. In the end, they learn more than they teach. Novelist François Bégaudeau plays a fictionalized version of himself from his own autobiographical novel. Skilled future-tech moviemaking abounds as well. While director Laurent Cantet used three HD cameras to conjure a documentary-inflection, this one was well under control.

A bounty of others are playing the AMC as well: Waltz With Bashir, Slumdog Millionaire, Gran Torino (how did this one miss a nomination?), Rachel Getting Married, but I suspect that many of you will have seen these. But hold back on Caos Calmo and Entre Les Murs. With both we’ll have lots to both talk and write about.

A caveat: our scheduling is as always, dependent on AMC’s scheduling. But both of the above movies performed well their first weekends, and so will likely hold. If not, we’ll schedule others.