Jerzy Skolimowski’s excellent thriller Essential Killing provided Vincent Gallo an opportunity to demonstrate his acting talent in a pure form. After being rendered deaf by an explosion within the first few moments, there was no need for him to, as one reviewer remarked, “whine and complain” throughout the rest of the film. Essential Killing is taking its sweet time getting to a “theater near you” or anywhere else off the festival circuit. One would suspect that this delay is, at least in part, due to the film’s empathetic portrayal of a lone Taliban fighter’s struggle to survive against the military might of the US. The first theatrical release will hit theaters in the UK on April 1st. Will it be released stateside at all?

We had very light turnout for Essential Killing… perhaps because, even though the film is in English, it is officially a Polish film? Polish films are not generally big crowd drawers. No matter. On the plus side of only having a few guests, I was able to make amends to Alex, whose request for a Hot Pretty Lady had been met with a full-house eye-roll a few weeks back!

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MovieNight remained on a roll this week… a roll of modern foreign films. With Another Year, director Mike Leigh once again demonstrated his tremendous power to observe to the idiosyncrasies of everyday life. Of course he’s a fine director, and Another Year was visually beautiful, but his strength as a playwright invites comparison to the bard himself, to my mind. Well… with no rhyming anyway.

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I wish I would have thought to give people more of a heads up that Lourdes was a comedy. It took many of our guests a little too long to realize that, although director Jessica Hausner was not taking cheap shots at Catholicism, she was taking shots at it’s followers, in a sly way. “Sly”… in researching Lourdes, I came upon more than one reviewer who used the word “sly” to describe the movie. Not a word that’s frequently used in movie reviews, the Princeton wordnet dictionary defines sly as: crafty: marked by skill in deception; “cunning men often pass for wise”; “deep political machinations”; “a foxy scheme”; “a slick evasive answer”; “sly as a fox”; “tricky Dick”; “a wily old attorney”. Fair enough. I like “tricky Dick” the best.

Aprez-MN saw the birth of a new cocktail, tentatively named the Bloody Marytini. Details to follow after further testing.

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Mother on Blu-ray was a visual and aural treat. But… as close as it was to being a great movie, it seems that modern Korean sensibility doesn’t translate easily. I remember being excited by the discovery of Ki-duk Kim’s magical Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring, and the subsequent, well-received screening of it at MovieNight. I think it worked because the subject matter was so other-worldly to us: a monk raising an orphan on a raft in the middle of a tranquil lake. I liked a lot of 3-Iron, Kim’s follow-up feature, but ultimately the premise was weak, and left me wanting. Although his next movie, Time, also had some great moments, the plot was fantastically silly. Perhaps a suspension of reality is a prerequisite to appreciation of such a movie (like a Bollywood epic?).

I wonder what our two Korean MovieNight guests thought… ?

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I got pretty close to understanding The Mirror this time. Well, close-ish. I guess when a story is told from the jumbled memories of a dying man, it’s understandable that things just don’t always make sense. In any case, The Mirror is a visually stimulating movie, with just enough brushes with “normal” life to keep the viewer grounded. I look forward to watching it again one day.

In the aftermath of the Moscow airport suicide bombing, we thought it would be good to have a sort of RussianNight… an opportunity for our many Russian guests to hang out and take comfort in some classic Russian cinema. Indeed, one fifth of our house was Russian on the night, and the program started with a Tatu video – in English. (C’mon Richard! Stop trying to second-guess the audience!) I hope to make good the Tatu situation with a genuine Russian video soon. And, by the way… one fifth of ten people is two people. Well, it was cold.

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The Last Seduction drew an unexpectedly large audience on a cold, January Thursday night! Our first guest of the evening was delighted to learn of the MovieNight custom of rewarding punctuality with a free cocktail, and requested “Something with rum, please!”. I delivered a “Treasure Trail” which must have looked quite appealing to the next people to arrive… before long the room was full of happy “Trailers”. It’s funny how that happens. The best news is that we didn’t run out of ingredients! The Treasure Trail is one of my own inventions, as you might have guessed from the innuendo in naming; others include the Hot Pretty Lady, and the venerable Pink Dick (would you like that straight up, Madame?). Had I had just a little more (too much?) time on my hands, I might have come up with a special drink to go with the movie… I imagine it would be called the Icy Bitch! How to make a Treasure Trail.

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After the roller-coaster ride of The Last Seduction, we enjoyed a nice bit of hang time. I was looking for Touch Yello to put on, but I had misplaced it (don’t worry – it’s since been found), and stumbled upon a kind of “home movie” from about many years ago which featured my then five year old daughter, and a full cast of vacationing family members enacting our own version of Cinderella. It was so funny that my now almost twenty-one year old daughter didn’t even cringe at this public showing. That’s saying something!

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