The Soloist

I had not looked forward to seeing The Soloist, precisely because a) the The Soloist's damn misleading trailers, playing since October (an almost guaranteed indicator of a turkey) sold it as feel-good sappy white journalist helps deranged black guy buddy- flick b) I dread Hollywood buddy-illness redemption weepers. However, like Sunshine Cleaning, The Soloist is not what its trailers represent itself to be: it's a story of friendship, Steve Lopez, a Los Angeles newspaper columnist, writing about and then befriending Nathaniel Ayers, a mentally disturbed homeless guy.

Walking as I do about Montreal, homeless people now seem everywhere. Watching The Soloist, I kept being reminded of cynical Bill Murray in Groundhog Day - unable to save a homeless guy - forced to accept things as they are. And like Bill Murray, I think there must be answers to this scourge yet I have no idea what is those answers should be, and fear that whatever is done, will never be enough. If you can't convince most of them they're sick, let alone steer them into public housing, then what?

Yet, I'm unwilling to let go, each time confronted by my own massive confused disarray. Freezing, rotting, they don't seem romantic nor creative to me. They seem scary, provoking my fear of random psychotic violence. And I'm afraid to take responsibility for my own thoughts. I fear their great unknown, so I arc around or away from them on my way into Second Cup. I cross Sherbrooke to avoid them on my way to McGill.

I'll be fascinated to hear your responses to this movie. After watching The Soloist, we'll have lots to talk about.

***

The Soloist has had several fascinating incarnations; first it was a Los Angeles Times column, then a series of columns; then a book. Before it came out as a movie, it was also an item on CBS' 60 Minutes.

....Here are links to all of them: a Hansel and Gretel Reese's Pieces trail of provenance back to the movie's creative genesis. Each present a different perspective on this extraordinary friendship, and are all worth sampling before screening the movie:

• Steve Lopez's original LA Times columns. (http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lopez28-2008dec28,0,2059096.column): [Mr. Ayers] once told me he preferred experiencing life to seeing it reflected in a mirror. ... After reading the book, though, he thanked me. He said it wasn't easy to read, but he felt that he needed to. As for the movie, he said he had no desire to see it, in part because the very thought of two-dimensional images on a screen is spooky to him. Lopez controled the contents of both his column and his book. With the movie, Lopez lost control over the portrayal of both Nathaniel Ayers and himself.

• A David Carr NYT article (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/movies/19carr.html?emc=eta1) is a basic backgrounder, introducing us to Lopez, the journalist, the actors and the filmmakers charged with mutating Lopez' collection of non-fiction newspaper articles into a coherent movie.

• Then, there's a quite remarkable 60 Minutes documentary item on the Lopez-Ayers friendship that evolved between these two men. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/03/22/60minutes/main4882450.shtml. You'll meet the real Steve Lopez and the real Nathaniel Ayres on whom the movie is based: both much older than their dopplegangers, Rob't Downey and Jamie Foxx. So what!

• Stephanie Zacherek, movie critic for Salon (http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2009/04/24/soloist/index.html,) makes a telling accusatory point: how the movie's craftily edited trailers utterly and deliberately misled the audience into believing:

  ...the movie is one of those uplifting friendship stories guaranteed to elicit one or two obligatory tears before sending everybody home feeling good. That's what the guys who edited that trailer want you to think: Movie advertising is never about nuance, but movies often are. She got that right.

Creative Liberties

We've discussed movie makers creative liberties in the past: how movies vary from perceived reality.The movie version of The Soloist has many variances, which clearly irritate several in-the-know cognoscenti, especially movie reviewers. For example, the movie Steve Lopez is not divorced in real life, his former wife is not his editor

Cinephiles know my view on carping over creative liberties: It's a movie. Get over it!!!!

60 - 90,000 Destitute Angelenos

More distressing however....in the back of almost every Soloist skidrow shot (and often in the foreground) is this community of real homeless - 60 - 90,000 destitute, desolate souls loitering just behind the Disney/Frank Gehry splendid concert hall. In the 60 Minutes piece, Casey Horan, who runs an agency providing shelter for the mentally ill, notes more homeless reside in LA than San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, New York and Seattle combined. Whew!

Here, movie-making and reality get skewed, overlapping, wierder than any reinvented columns mutated into scripts. As in Che, Gomorra and Sin Nombre, Soloist on camera mean streets are populated with real marginalized homeless. So, in front of the camera is an actor , Jamie Foxx playing a character whose fragile hold on reality is never a sure thing. Filling in the background are the genuine articles. We the audience, sitting in air-conditioned comfort, are witnessing chaos; we are able to determine that Robert Downey Jr. is certainly not Steve Lopez. But we're utterly incapable of determining whether that weird guy, twirling in front of the Jamie Foxx, is nuts or just acting.

April 27 Cinebulletin

Fora and Hollywood Visionaries

Here's a website that cinephiles should bookmark. This week marks the opening of the San Francisco Film Festival (an event I've never heard of), and to honour the occasion, Fora is posting eleven up-close pieces on eleven so-anointed Hollywood visionary filmmakers (http://fora.tv/series/hollywood_visionaries): Spike Lee, John Turturro, Tommy Lee Jones etc. The only ones I've sampled so far are Mike Leigh (Happy-Go-Lucky, Secrets and Lies) and Shari Lansing, former head of 20th Century Fox & Paramount, who talks of why reviewers are so often off the mark, how people now use the Internet for reviews. Read the following squib, then watch the Lansing piece.

Hollywood, More Powerful than Ever

In Sunday's NYT, a piece in the business section (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/business/media/26scene.html? ref=business), argues that Hollywood Studios are more profitable and tyrannical than ever:

... an invisible web-work of unwritten rules and invisible understandings ... keep the big studios on message and in sync with one another. Over time, such professional courtesies help the big guys stay big. They also feed a self-fulfilling myth that says Hollywood really belongs to six giants, all of whom live behind studio walls. Their companies may change hands occasionally — bouncing from Matsushita to Vivendi to General Electric or whatever. But the studios, and their power, remain as eternal as the hills around which those gated lots are built. “We are a mini-monopoly,” summed up Robert Evans. (His coming project, an HBO miniseries about Sidney Korshak, the Hollywood kingpin lawyer, will have its own take on the myth.)

And will it ever change?

“Never,” he said.

Sin Nombre (Without a Name)

Sin Nombre is but one of five disturbing films I've screened over the past two weeks: The Hunger, Gomorra, The Soloist and Sugar being the four others. (I will be blogging The Soloist, our projected movie for next week tomorrow.) In the meantime, some words on Sin Nombre, yet another Redford Sundance-developed movie - no stars, great story.Sin Nombre is set within the shadow migratory world of risk, violence, a little romance, even fleeting moments of humor, Central Americans, making their perilous migration north through an Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica to get across the American border. It's a profoundly disturbing film, and if you're up for it, well worth your trouble.

In May, 2003, Texas State troopers discovered an abandoned tractor trailer. Inside were 81 illegal Mexican immigrants, 17 of them of dead. That incident — the worst of its kind in U.S. history — served as the inspiration for Cary Fukunaga’s terrifying, masterful short, completed as his second-year project at NYU’s grad film program.. “At first I wanted to put the audience inside the truck for 10 minutes, to give them the idea of what it would be like to be in there with these people who were just trying to make a better life for themselves,” says Fukunaga. “But then I realized there was a lot more there — I wanted to show what happened before they got in the truck and what was going outside as it was happening. So it became a bigger film.” With only $5,000 for production, Fukunaga managed to get the film in the can. It has since gone on to win numerous prizes on the festival circuit and recently took home the silver medal at the Student Academy Awards.

The 27-year-old Fukunaga — of Japanese and Swedish heritage — grew up in California’s East Bay and attended U.C. Santa Cruz, before NYU grad school. Because Sin Nombre touches on so many thematics we've discussed with Gomorra, macho street-terrorizing gangs, children baptized in blood, criminality, grinding poverty, because Sin Nombre is so violent, we will probably not schedule Sin Nombre into my-pov.ca.

Which is not to say that my-pov.ca cinephiles should not see this remarkable movie and make up their own mind for themselves.



Baseball/Movies Is Life

In anticipation of our screening of this baseball movie, Sugar today, Bob Foster sends along a reminder that all manner of Best Baseball Movie website Lists exist. Which reminded me of my own nutty fixation about movies and baseball:

Certainly, movies have exploited baseball as an allegorical shorthand for abiding charms of all things American, a cultural coding, if you wish: cornball wisdom you can find all though baseball movie dialogs: Baseball's a metaphor for life, a game of inches; life is a game of inches, part of the American fabric. Right! It's a guy thing.

Or: I believe in the soul, the small of a woman's back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.

Of all sports, baseball and movies have the most natural affinity for one another. Their mostly male congregants invoke similar reverent hokum solemnity about themselves; they dawdle along indifferent to the fact they're decades behind their times; they nurture similar self-reverential spiritual religiosities and nostalgic feelings about themselves; they anoint countless saints from their ranks (only a select handful memorable); they abound in relics. And for me, best of all, you can disappear from worshipping both for minutes at a time and return, never having missed much.
.
So here's one guy with a website devoted solely to baseball movies: http://www.baseballmovie.com/best-baseball-movies.php.

Next Monday: The Soloist @ 17:15 (5:15 p.m.)

April 22 Cinebulletin

Cinephiles:

At the beginning, I had every intention of producing a weekly cinebulletin, providing URL references of background material that you might wish to read before screening http://www.my pov.ca/ movies. Time and circumstance have thwarted that somewhat, but this mailing might be a possible template, if there is sufficient positive response.

Movie Reviews

http://www.mrqe.com/ (Movie Review Query Engine) is a site that collects movie reviews and feature articles. I myself avoid reviews before seeing a movie, because many critics are spoilers, revealing plot points or other essential surprises I hate knowing in the movie I'm about to screen. But http://www.mrqe.com gathers bountiful European and Canadian material as well. (56 articles on Sugar, for example). It also makes no attempt to impose some artificial rating on the movies.

So while movie critics may be endangered species in both newspapers and on radio, a cornucopia of intelligent opinion can be found here. http://www.mrqe.com/ also is interactive, encouraging you to write your own reaction.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/ is less successful in my opinion, in that it quantifies the merits of every film, according to critics. (Sugar scored a 95 % among Rotten Tomatoes top critics. Ridiculous!) My point being that if this smart little movie is a 95% (out of 100%), then what rating do you give to Apocalypse or Citizen Kane? 675%? Ratings are ridiculous. These Rotten Tomatoes evaluations show no restraint.

Sundance Festival Influence

Robert Redford is a moviedom saint. Sugar will be our 2nd Sundance Festival movie (Sunshine Cleaning being the first). In 1981, Redford founded The Sundance Institute to actively encourage aspiring filmmakers. By 1991, The Sundance Film Festival developed a rep for championing difficult indie directors to box office success: Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino were but two. Where once a Sundance film implied less than Hollywood standards, all that changed with 2006's Little Miss Sunshine. Now we see Sundance Festival movies everywhere: The Visitor, Frozen River, In Bruges, Man on Wire. This history is interesting. Here are some sites, you might enjoy.

http://www.ugo.com/movies/sundance-survival-guide/?cur=sundance-history
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/25/movies/caution-cools-old-feeding-frenzy-at-sundance.html?pagewanted=all

Half Nelson

You might also want to get out the dvd of Half Nelson, the first movie (shot in 16 mm) of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the young Brooklyn couple who made Sugar. (And also a Sundance success.) Half Nelson is a toughly observed story of a white Brooklyn teacher losing his own battle with drugs ,while mentoring a black kid whose family has been torn apart by drug dealing.

The death of Lino Ortiz

Sugar makes no allusions to drug use, but for the past ten years, sports stories have emerged of Dominican kids being pumped up. Sammy Sosa, the homerun slugger is from the DR. Indeed many of baseball's biggest stars now stand accused of having taken steroids. A lot say they procured them in the DR.

In 2005, Lino Ortiz, a young DR ballplayer, pumped up with steroids, died. His story is here: (http://denison.fdns.net/physedhtml/downloads/baseball.htm) `Nobody knows exactly what percentage of kids are using drugs. But in a country like this, where signing a contract can change your life forever ... imagine what they'll be willing to do, said one guy.

Hunger Follow Up

I understand the strong response against the graphic nature of Hunger (and Gomorra). Here's a piece from today's Salon, suggesting that the Bush administration started thinking like Nazis as early as 2001. I'm no more a fan of graphic movies than the next guy, but all these American torture revelations is profoundly disturbing. And watching Hunger certainly brought home to me that I better damn well understand stuff I have no stomach for watching: my own kind may have a capacity to behave like Nazis. I just don't know how to think about that.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/04/22/benjamin?source=newsletter

Feedback

I need to know whether turning out this kind of cinebulletin interests members. Drop me a note and let me know.


peter

Sugar

Sugar - Monday, April 27th at 4:50 p.m. at the AMC

I got my back to the sun 'cause the light is too intense
I can see what everybody in the world is up against
You can't turn back - you can't come back, sometimes we push too far
One day you'll open up your eyes and you'll see where we are

Bob Dylan

Two weeks ago, when I saw Sugar, I was smitten, the kind of tender smart movie I fall in love with, and dote forever upon. Sugar's one of those rags-to-riches Land of Opportunity movies - America as seen by the outsider, scrambling in. (Think of the great ones - Kite Runner, Avalon, The Visitor, In America, The Namesake and of course the greatest, Godfather II). First of all, Sugar is full of craft - three compact acts, each beautifully delineated, clever dialogue, a gorgeous, lanky hunk of a moviestar-in-waiting, the kind of 1940s Hollywood studio skills we see so seldom these days. Who could resist?

Then again, I've been a baseball nut all my life. So any movie that references Roberto Clemente and Vic Power has suckered me, going in. Indeed, as a kid, I watched Vic Power, play first base for the Syracuse Chiefs. However I never heard this Vic Power anecdote, alluded to in Sugar, Once in a Syracuse restaurant, an embarrassed waiter shuffled over to Power and explained, I’m sorry, sir, we don’t serve colored people.

That’s OK, said Vic. I don’t eat colored people.

I don't want to even hint at the many sympathetic perceptions of this movie. However, here's my take - some subtext for cinephiles whose first love may be neither baseball nor Caribbean politics. In other words matters not dealt with overtly in the movie.

Sugar, the nickname of the movie's central character, may also evoke American sugar plantations that brought baseball with them first to Cuba in the 1860's then spread, plantation by plantation, throughout the Caribbean. By the 1920's indentured Dominican sugar workers were competing, plantation against plantation throughout the Caribbean.

One of the poorest of poor Dominican Republic cities, San Pedro de Macoris (population 200,000) is a centre of American sugar interests - mills, rummeries and plantations. The city also enjoys a second honour - world capital of Dominican baseball and the Cradle of Shortstops (Robinson Cano, Mariano Duncan, José Offerman, Tony Fernandez, Manny Lee). Why? Because San Pedro de Macoris is so dirt poor, baseballs careen in every possible direction off their pebbled infields. Only the most dextrous, make it off the island. From San Pedro de Macoris, young, poor kids dream of liberating their mammas from garment factories, escaping their ramshackle shacks with their bats and balls. Indeed, the movie Sugar opens in a multimillion-dollar player development complex, owned by a fictitious Kansas City team. 30% of all minor league ballplayers are imported from the Dominican Republic - underpinning much of baseball's economic prosperity. Of course, most wannabes never make it to the bigs, fewer still become stars.

President Obama, ardent Chicago White Sox fan, has spent his last couple of weeks, tamping down fractious U.S. relations with the Americas - first in Mexico, then in Trinidad. One of those he met was Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez - socialist and self-proclaimed revolutionary - whose own wannabe dream as a kid was to pitch for the San Francisco Giants. Chavez indeed escaped poverty thanks to his skills as a pitcher (And remember, Fidel, before his revolutionary days, was another wannabe pitcher).

Venezuela, rich in natural resources, outside the Middle East, is the number one supplier of oil to the world. It's also - next to the DR - baseball's 2nd greatest exporter of ballplayers to America (including superstars Johan Santana, Magglio Ordonez and Miguel Cabrera). As with oil, Chavez wants to tax Major League Baseball for exploiting his country's natural resources, arguing that American baseball loves Latinos only because they sign Venezuelan kids for pennies, dispose of them like the trash, and face contact lens-thin regulations for their troubles. Chavez is on record as demanding owners pay for their pillaging, demanding player protections, requiring signing bonuses be paid through the government.

So baseball is now exiting Venezuela. Heaven forfend! We just figured we might as well do it [then] to avoid some of the hassle of having to deal with some of the legislation that [President Hugo] Chávez passes down there in hiring coaches, worrying about severance pay and just getting in and out of the country," said Juan Lara, San Diego's Latin American operations coordinator. Of course there's nothing political about a multibillion-dollar business running roughshod over a nation with no accountability for the dashed dreams of the 99% who don’t make it stateside.

Hugo Chavez may not be the craziest Venezuelan that President Obama ever met. That honour may fall to the manager of President Obama's favorite team - White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen, whose mouth never met a situation for which it didn't have a quip. Guillen once traded away a player, because 'he went into 2nd base as if his wife was turning the double play.

So while baseball lore is central to Sugar's mythos, Sugar - not a baseball movie - explores Sugar Daddy imperialism through the Caribbean and Latin America. And American ambivalence towards its 13.5 million Latinos. New York, for example, is now the 2nd largest Dominican Republic city in the world. Ah baseball! You gotta love it!






peter

The Hunger

Coming out of last night's sneak of Hunger, which 26 of us attended thanks to Equinoxe's Brigitte Tanguay, the overwhelming response of our grim-faced crowd was 'Tough'. Agreed. At least two members couldn't take it and quit early in the first act. Hunger is one grueling film to watch, feces smeared over cell walls, pervasive cudgel-beatings, soulless debasements. I cannot recall a movie more grim. Nor more dazzling.

And so while composing my response to our crowd's response, I dawdled over this morning's NYT. Here's a report from today's paper on interrogation techniques, utilized by the CIA:

In dozens of pages of dispassionate legal prose, the methods approved by the Bush administration for extracting information from senior operatives of Al Qaeda are spelled out in careful detail — like keeping detainees awake for up to 11 straight days, placing them in a dark, cramped box or putting insects into the box to exploit their fears. The interrogation methods were authorized beginning in 2002, and some were used as late as 2005 in the C.I.A.’s secret overseas prisons. The techniques were among the Bush administration’s most closely guarded secrets, and the documents released Thursday afternoon were the most comprehensive public accounting to date of the program.

Which of course raises the question: do we, public-minded citizens need to know what happened in the Lamaze prison to those IRA prisoners in the 1980s? Similarly, can't we just gloss over waterboarding, sleep-deprivation, debasement and degradation those Iraqis suffered in Abu Griab? Do we need to know it in such detail? Do we need to see the video? In Hunger, as in Iraq, the prisoners fight for their dignity.

My initial response to Hunger, which I dared not say aloud last night, was: It's only a movie. Movies are all shot the same - lights, camera, make-up, action. Doesn't matter whether it's the Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Sound of Music. Same cumbersome technology, shot by shot, until the movie is done. Of course hardened veterans of my-pov.ca and MILR all know this. But it the entrancing legerdemain of moviemakers that gets us every time. Hunger director, Steve McQueen is a visual artist. This is his first movie and he beguiles us that those sets, costumes, actors are real bed sores, feces-splattered walls, fetid cells. And yet, McQueen's scenes were for the most part, less grim than any average Hollywood guns-and-fireballs epic. We just believed the bloodied knuckles of Hunger's prison guards more.

We believed those actors were being put through the real thing, because we saw their real naked bodies, with their real naked genitals, we heard the real steely, patronizing voice of Maggie Thatcher (with the same dispassionate patronizing indifference of Dick Cheney), and we thought, hands-slapped to our cheeks, My gawd? Steve McQueen persuaded us, engaged our eyes, our emotions, our heads, our hearts. This is what happened! Brits behaving like Nazis. They stirred deep thoughts within us. But these weren't Nazis. They were our own kind with a capacity for behaving like Nazis. McQueen convinced us this movie was not a movie. It was the real thing.

I had a couple of other idle thoughts about Hunger. First, as in The Reader, we are seeing abundant unairbrushed nakedness in movies these days. No longer the cutesy peek-a-boo angles. In The Reader, moviestar Kate Winslett is onscreen for much of the first act without a stitch on, her nakedness worn as an essential costume. Same as in the Hunger, where IRA prisoner brutalization necessitated unrelieved male nakedness, surely disturbing to some moviegoers.

And here's my last thought: in the last two months, we've seen Che and now Hunger, two historical recreations that focussed on the martyrdom deaths of two 20th Century iconic figures: Che Guevara and Bobby Sands. They may not be Roman Catholic Church martyrs, although both were born Roman Catholic. And in both movies, priests play roles in the story. In Hunger is a spectacular 22 minute locked-off wide shot conversation between Bobby Sands and his priest. The camera does not move. Today Che Guevara and Bobby Sands certainly are martyrs for tens of millions, sealing their their commitment to help others with their lives.

Neither however can expect canonization any time soon I suspect. The Catholic Church is otherwise distracted, canonizing Pius the XII, the pope that looked the other way as Jews were deported from Italy, investing yet another silk-swathed Cardinal in New York, and settling tens of thousands of lawsuits, brought by priestly molestations.

Hunger plays every day at the AMC: 12:45, 15:10, 17:35, 20:05, 22:35

Gomorra

We have now three 2009 movie candidates that Hollywood, even with most honourable of intentions, could not embrace: Waltz With Bashir, which by all rights should have won the 2009 Oscar for Best Foreign Language movie; Che, rebuffed by America's most influential critics with condescension and scorn, and now Gomorra, an astonishing eye-opener of a movie, rejected by the Oscars for Best Foreign Film nomination this year, even though Gomorra has been a socko boffo hit in Europe, winning the grand prize at Cannes last May and the European Best Film Award. No matter.

Why? Gomorra is just so much not a Hollywood movie. We discussed the why of this in the Q&A after screening Sunshine Cleaning. Gomorra deals with the wretched of the earth, the downtrodden, pummeled by free-wheeling dog-eat-dog enterprise. Yeah, it’s a gangster movie, but not a Hollywood gangster movie. No ‘un bel di’ opera arias as the tommyguns firecracker the soundtrack. No splatter killings, blood speckling the ceilings. No poignant spaghetti dinners. No James Gondalfini in analysis. No uplifting mamas. No Scorsese conflation of saga and migrants and money and violence and honour and family. No monumentality, in other words. Just the abject poor, and their lives.

Gomorra, then is a gangster movie without gangsters. Just day-laborer slugs, indentured at birth into a Hades of grinding slavery that's existed in Naples since Jesus attended Sunday school: the hapless whose metier just happens to be criminality. Killings of course, abound but not gaudy Hollywood bloodletting. Here every life is disposable. According to a subtitle, over the past 30 years the Naples-based Camorra has murdered 4,000 of its own.

Females as serious people, you’ll be unsurprised to read, play no substantive role in any of Gomorra's five subplots. They are sweathouse extras in an illegal immigrant needle factory, strippers in a sex club.

Like Che, Gomorra is shot for the most part handheld documentary-style, wide-shot masters, weaving together five hardscrabble slums-of-Naples stories. Indeed, the Neapolitan dialect is so impenetrable, it feels like a documentary. Some Italian audiences required subtitles. Although a vast political/economic corruption touches every character, this isn’t some Euro artsy denunciation of capitalism. Despite the Italian economic miracle and red brigades, nothing Italian ever changes. Just relentless spinning hamster cage existences of petty criminality: shakedowns, bloodlettings, hookers, PCB disposal as the uneducated poor do whatever for their own survival. Which means the wretched behave like gangsters. Hundred of kids, tykes, urchins swarm in the squalor as drug mules, as lookouts.

The title, Gomorra is a Biblical pun of sorts, word-playing on the Neapolitan mob being known as the Camorra. In the Bible, an avenging God destroyed Gomorra with fire and brimstone. Here in Camorra, Global Capitalism thrives. The Italian profiteers – according to one subtitle – net 150 Billion Euros a year. Yet, the overlords are not visible in this movie. Nor are the politicos - the Andreottis, the Moros - who forever proclaim the Italian miracle. Nor the middlemen - the bankers - major investors in reconstructing New York’s Twin Towers. And of course, no His Holiness and his Blessed are the poor..

I must own up to my own laissez-faire indifference toward petty criminality. Must be my snooty private school breeding. Even on my most languorous of days, I seldom read Montreal Gazette's Bill Marsden’s crime exposés: some cadaver of a petty crook, found in a dumpster in a Verdun alley; a cocaine bust on the waterfront; toxic PCBs in LaSalle; hookers, on the hoof working the Main; containers of illegal immigrants; drug wars between bike gangs; mobsters controlling the meat trade; contraband cigarettes across the St. Lawrence. Who cares?

And yet in Gomorra, Bill Marsden crime stories are the measured pivotal plotlines that drive forward this movie. Gomorra even resembles Montreal's decaying Olympic Village pyramids. A toxic waste specialist fills a stone quarry with PCBs; a 13 year old mule lures his much beloved neighbor to her assassination; a tailor makes dresses for Scarlett Johannson; two cocky wannabes think they own their world. The very banality of it all. Every day grist for the Bill Marsden mill.

Gomorra is one terrifying terrific gangster movie.

Introducing Marie-Hélène Cousineau

Sunday, in the Comedy Nest, we will be honoured by the presence of Marie-Hélène Cousineau, co-director of Before Tomorrow. She has a unique, extraordinary movie-story to tell.

After university, studying Fine Arts in Iowa, in 1990, Marie-Hélène found her way to the Arctic: I was in the North, people were really fun to work with , they were interested, I was curious, we got along and there you go! In 1991, she, Norm Cohn and Zacharias Kunuk established a Video Co-op, which has led to an incredibly fruitful creativity. Norm Cohn and Zacharias Kunuk were the two principal creators of Atarnajuat. Cohn was her cameraman on Before Tomorrow.

Before Tomorrow, Marie-Hélène's first feature, is the third in a trilogy of films from Igloolik-Isuma Productions, partnered with Arnait Video Productions, a women's collective, which Marie-Helene co-founded. 'Before Tomorrow is not a sequel like you have Star Wars one-two-three,but it's the third film telling stories of Inuit before Christianization. In that sense, it's part of a trilogy.

Writer, still photographer, Marie-Hélène also has produced and directed an array of videos for the co-op. Along with Mary Kunuk and Madeline Ivalu, the women all play interchangeable roles in a series of productions. Madeline Ivalu, for example is both co-star and co-director of Before Tomorrow. She also sits on various cultural boards, both in Montreal and the High Arctic. Marie-Helene will talk about this fascinating cultural history.

If you want to read more about Before Tomorrow prior to Sunday's screening, the movie website is http://www.beforetomorrow.ca/en/index.php.

Before Tomorrow

Norman Cohn and Zacharias Kunuk, the two guys responsible for the masterpiece - Atarnajuat – Fast Runner, have done it once again. Before Tomorrow is their third (the second being The Journals of Knud Rasmussen) and so, their rule-breaking cinematic conventions are becoming more familiar: a languid cadence, protracted narrative recitations of long ago events, Innu actors speaking Inuktitut, the vistas of ice and snow and sea and sky across the seasons, Inuit stoicism, a Kurosawa appreciation for long reminiscences, wondrous brutal landscapes. How has anyone ever survived here? This time we’re offered a haunting bleak drama set in the middle of the 19th Century. Director Marie-Helene Cousineau will be our guest, Sunday in the Comedy Nest. Her co-director Madeline Ivalu also star in the lead role as the grandmother. Before Tomorrow tells complex grim grandmother-grandson tales (with her own grandson in the co-starring role) of life and death on the tundra barrens, in the years before tye invasion of Chistianity and the white man, as the two of them struggle for survival.

Because the Cohn - Kunuk cinematic conventions are so arrestingly different from any other movie you’ve every seen, Before Tomorrow in all probability will not find much favour with Montreal’s movie-going public, and as a consequence, not last very long at the AMC. The Journals of Knud Rasmussen was in and out in less than a week. So we gotta see these gems while we have the chance. A pity. We gull ourselves into accepting these movies as gritty ethnographic documentaries, where in fact, they are honest-to-goodness movies, well-written, beautifully directed, cast with professional Inuit actors, performing without guile: sincere, honest, revealing. In Before Tomorrow for example, the McGarrigle sisters, in English and French provide counterpoint ballads.

What sticks is their cinematic daring and originality, the justaposition of strange against familiar, mythic against everyday. A people, so ordinary, so exceptional, surviving millenia on that endless tundra. These are memorable cinematic documents, movies that stick years after the more celebrated ones are long forgotten.