A SPECIAL DAY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Italian Kitchen-Sink Love Story now on Criterion

A gay dissident. An overworked housewife.
Can happiness, no matter how brief, be far behind?

A Special Day (1977)
Dir. Ettore Scola
Starring: Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni, John Vernon, Françoise Berd

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Writing about A Special Day is a somewhat bittersweet experience for me. Until watching the gorgeously transferred Criterion Collection Blu-Ray, I hadn't laid eyes upon the picture since 1977 when I saw it first-run on a big screen.

I saw it with my late mother. She loved Sophia Loren and was really looking forward to the movie. It didn't disappoint. It became one of her favourite movies. From time to time she'd mention it agreeably, almost wistfully. I offered, on several occasions, to get it on home video for her, but she always declined. She wasn't one to see movies more than once, even if she loved them. (Her exception to this rule was Gone With The Wind.)

For me, I recall enjoying it well enough in 1977, but I was eventually swayed by Pauline Kael's hilarious pan in The New Yorker. She referred to it as "a strenuous exercise in sensitivity" and described director Ettore Scola's style as "genteel shamelessness". In spite of my Kael-influenced position on the picture, I always maintained a positive stance whenever my mother brought it up. I tried not being a pretentious smart-ass with her.

Seeing it again, I marvelled at what an exquisitely crafted love story it really is. Yes, the picture wears its emotions on its sleeve and the political backdrop now seems somewhat obvious in how it front loads the love story which transpires twixt Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni. But, on this viewing, none of these almost-machine-tooled elements mattered to me. I appreciated Scola's genuine artistry and the film's obvious merits as a first-rate weepy.

All through this screening, though, I couldn't help but think about my Mom.

I think this is a valid critical response to the film. Good movies almost always hit one on a personal level and what I admired, beyond reflecting upon my late Mother's love for it, is what a superb star vehicle it was for its leads and how the film must have resonated with audiences all over the world - especially all those Moms who related to the character Loren played so exquisitely.

The kitchen sink, laundry and Hitler
are powerless against two lonely people
finding happiness, no matter how brief.

Sophia is cast against type as Antonietta, a traditional housewife living in poverty with her brutish husband (John Vernon) and slaving over her six kids (of all ages) whilst living a life of drudgery and servitude - cooking and cleaning ad infinitum. Of course, like star vehicles the world over, Sophia's not really cast against type in the sense that she's the most gorgeous drudge in the history of movies - even without makeup. Why should it be any other way? I imagine my own Mother seeing aspects of herself in the film, but being able to do so with Sophia Loren standing up on the silver screen in her stead.

As the title tells us, the film is set during that very special day in 1938 when Adolph Hitler came to Rome in order to celebrate Totalitarian collaboration with Benito Mussolini. Loudspeakers have been set up in every nook and cranny of the city to broadcast the events of the day, even though virtually every home and business has been drained of humanity to fill the streets for Hitler.

Antonietta is home alone. There's plenty of wifely duties for her to perform - Hitler or no Hitler. When her mynah bird escapes its cage and flies across the courtyard, it lands at the window of Gabriele (Marcello Mastroianni). With his help, the bird is rescued. Alas, all this activity has interrupted Gabriele's plans to commit suicide.

I'd assert that this might be the ultimate meet-cute.

In any event, we discover Gabriele is a former household name - a radio commentator who has been fired for his liberal views and who will, no doubt, be carried off by the Black Shirt Police to rot in prison. Antonietta is charmed off her feet by the dapper intellectual. He treats her with respect and encourages her to find time to exercise her mind with reading books. He's also a homosexual. This doesn't phase Antonietta. She's bound and determined to seduce him.

This is a special day in more ways than one. Two sad, lonely people make a connection. Come what may, for several hours they discover some glimmer of happiness in their momentary closeness. Though director Scola has visually etched a borderline neorealist world, he eventually builds to a fifty-hanky tear gusher. There's no mistaking that A Special Day is anything other than what it is; a touching, sentimental, gorgeously-wrought melodrama.

And yeah, I did shed more than a few tears on this go-round. I acknowledge many of them were probably in memory of my late Mom, but I'd be a liar if I didn't admit that the skillful manner in which the film wrenches emotion also worked its magic upon me. It's the same magic that worked on my Mom, sitting in a movie theatre on a Sunday afternoon with her teenage son some thirty eight years ago.

I suspect the picture will move whole new generations of movie lovers, thanks to the painstaking restoration efforts of Criterion. Like any well crafted love story, Scola did indeed create a picture of lasting value.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

A Special Day is available on the Criterion Collection with to-die-for supplements including: a new, restored 4K digital transfer, supervised by director Ettore Scola, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray; Human Voice, a 2014 short film starring Sophia Loren and directed by Edoardo Ponti; new interviews with Scola and Loren; two 1977 episodes of The Dick Cavett Show featuring Loren and actor Marcello Mastroianni (a mega-treat); the trailer; a new English subtitle translation; and an essay by critic Deborah Young.

THE NIGHT PORTER - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Classic NAZI S&M on Criterion BD&DVD

The Criterion Collection's
BluRay Special Edition
is quite the treat!!!

The Night Porter (1974)
Dir. Liliana Cavani
Starring: Dirk Bogarde, Charlotte Rampling

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Liliana Cavani's 1974 depiction of the post-war resumption of a violent sadomasochistic relationship between a former S.S. officer (the prim, grim, perversely dashing Dirk Bogarde) and a concentration camp survivor (an icily sensual, waif-like Charlotte Rampling, alternating twixt childlike pleading and a grinning, thin-lipped malevolence), is one of a mere handful of pictures to inspire genuine revulsion amongst critics and audiences (both upon its initial release and even to this day).

THE NOTEBOOK (aka "A nagy füzet") - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Harrowing Hungarian Boys-during-WWII Drama

The Notebook (AKA "A nagy füzet")
Dir. János Szász (2013)
Starring: László Gyémánt, András Gyémánt, Piroska Molnár, Ulrich Thomsen, Ulrich Matthes, Gyöngyvér Bognár, Orsolya Tóth, János Derzsi, Diána Kiss

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Films depicting the horrors of war take on added resonance when they focus upon the innocence of childhood and, like Rene Clement's Forbidden Games or Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun, they're especially horrific when they focus upon the sort of insanity which grips children within the fevered backdrop of combat.

János Szász's The Notebook (AKA "A nagy füzet"), based upon the late Agota Kristof's award-winning 1986 novel, is replete with Eastern European rural repression as well as the inevitability that "freedom" from Nazism will lead to yet another form of Totalitarian rule. As such, it's a film that delivers several added layers of pain which represents a reality that all children have and will continue to experience so long as war is as much a part of human existence as breathing is.

The Notebook takes place during the final years of WWII in Hungary and focuses upon a seemingly inevitable decision a family must make that affects their children forever. With war still raging, a mother (Gyöngyvér Bognár) and father (Ulrich Matthes) decide it might be best to remove their sons (László Gyémánt, András Gyémánt) from the city.

Dad is a soldier and is especially adamant the boys be separated as they're twins and stick out more than most siblings. The mother will hear none of that since the boys are inseparable and instead transports them deep into the countryside to stay with her long-estranged and widowed mother (Piroska Molnár) who is placed in the position of being their reluctant Grandmother.

The boys are devastated to be left behind with this abusive, nasty-spirited old woman (referred by the those living in the nearby village as "The Witch"). She makes it clear to the lads that they will be forced to work her farm and earn their food and lodgings. In addition to beating them on a regular basis, referring to them only as "bastards", she tops off her cruelty towards the boys by leaving them locked outside in the cold.

Soon, the twins realize they will have to learn to survive at all costs.

They perform their chores with the same rapt attention they pay to their studies (from an encyclopaedia and Holy Bible) as well as the detailed writings of their experiences in a notebook supplied by their father who previously asked them to recount their lives in his absence. Survival, though, means learning to steal, withstand physical pain and eventually, to kill.

Especially moving, though in a odd and unexpected way, is the mutual love and respect that develops between the twins and their grandmother. They admire her tenacious survival mode and she, in turn, their steely resolve (and inherent nastiness), which she comes to grudgingly recognize in terms of their blood ties (and in spite of hating her daughter for abandoning the village so long ago).

The boys befriend a variety of locals, all of whom contribute in some way to their knowledge, survival and/or experience. An S.S. commandant (Ulrich Thomsen) from a nearby concentration camp takes a liking to them and becomes their unlikeliest protector, a facially disfigured teenage girl the boys cruelly call Hairlip (Orsolya Tóth) teaches them how to steal, a Jewish shoemaker (János Derzsi) who takes pity on them outfits the boys with winter boots and finally a maid (Diána Kiss) bathes the filthy, lice-ridden lads and even considers the possibly of introducing them to the pleasures of the flesh - these are but a few of the primary individuals whose paths the boys cross.

Amidst this strange world, the twins face adulthood through the skewed perspective of war and gain maturity long before they should. Sadly, it's a demented maturity, influenced by the horrors around them. They discover love of family where they least expect it, they reject another aspect of family love they'd never have imagined doing before the war and indeed, they kill and kill willingly - not because they especially want to, but because the circumstances demand it. (They do, however, want to kill one person and succeed in facially disfiguring this person in retaliation for giving up the Jewish shoemaker to the Nazis.)

The Notebook is an extraordinary experience. Screenwriter-Director János Szász elicits a series of performances that sear themselves into one's memory and he delivers a stark, haunting and devastating film by presenting some of the most horrendous acts of inhumanity in an oddly straightforward way, adorned only by the straight, unemotional narration through the boys' voiceover as written in their notebook.

Horror in this world, seen through the eyes of children, is presented as a simple matter of fact and this might be the most moving and disturbing thing of all. It's about children forcing themselves to not feel pain, to suppress all emotion and to never, ever cry. It's a film that might well be set in World War II, but it's as vital to the horrific world we now live in as if the events recounted were happening now. Most shocking and telling is the portrayal of Russian soldiers as the "liberators" of Hungary - marching in after the Nazis flee, but then, as Russians are won't to do, achieving little but stealing from the Hungarian farmers, hunting down anti-communist Hungarians as if they were war criminals and at one point, gang raping a young woman and murdering her for pleasure.

Not only do the boys learn there's no room for tears, but "liberator" is just another word for "oppressor".

The Notebook is a Mongrel Media release currently unspooling at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

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MYNARSKI DEATH PLUMMET, THE WEATHERMAN AND THE SHADOWBOXER, THE UNDERGROUND: 3 SHORT CANADIAN FILMS at TIFF 2014 (TIFF Short Cuts Canada) - Review By Greg Klymkiw

Canada's Great War Hero,
Andrew Mynarski VC,
Shooting Star of
Selfless Sacrifice,
a man of Bronze.

Mynarski Death Plummet aka Mynarski chute mortelle (2014)
Dir. Matthew Rankin
Starring: Alek Rzeszowski, Annie St-Pierre, Robert Vilar, Louis Negin

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The true promise, the very future of the great Dominion of Canada and La Belle Province lies beneath the soil of France and Belgium. Between World Wars I and II, Canada lost close to 2% of its population, the vast majority of whom were the country's youngest and brightest from the ages of 16 to 30. Canadian lads bravely served on the front lines, well ahead of the glory-grabbing Americans, the Yankee Doodle mop-up crew that dandily sauntered overseas after all the hard work was paid for by the blood spilled upon European soil by the very heart and soul of Canada's future and that of so many other countries not bearing the Red, White and Blue emblem of puffery. As a matter of fact, any of the best and bravest in Canada came from Winnipeg and if you had to pick only one hero of the Great Wars from anywhere in the country, Andrew Mynarski, a gunner in the famed Moose Squadron, would be the one, the only. He is the subject of Matthew Rankin's perfect gem of a film, the one, the only genuine cinematic work of art to detail the valiant sacrifice, the one, the only, the unforgettable Mynarski Death Plummet.

Played dashingly in Rankin's film by a real, live, honest-to-goodness, in-the-flesh, Goralska-Sausage-Slurping Polish-Canadian actor, Alek Rzeszowski, Mynarski himself was a fearless Polish-Canadian kid born and raised in the the North End, the only neighbourhood in Winnipeg (alongside St. Boniface, 'natch) that bears any real historical significance in Canada's keystone to the west, the former "Little Chicago" perched majestically on the forks of the mighty Red and Assiniboine Rivers. In 1944, Mynarski flew an Avro Lancaster bomber into the heavy action of northern France. After taking out his fair share of Nazi Pigs, the plane was aflame. He ordered the other lads aboard to drop the Polski Ogórki from his Mom, grab their chutes and bail. They did so with pride in a job well done.

Mynarski was last to leave. Or so he thought until he realized that Officer Pat Brophy (Robert Vilar) was trapped in the tail gun compartment. Our North End Hero did everything possible to save his friend until Brophy demanded Mynarski save himself. The lads exchanged salutes and the Polish Prince of King Edward and Isaac Newton schools, his chute now sadly in flames, took a fateful plunge from the plummeting Avro. His fire-engulfed body shot itself over the fields of France, mistaken as a bomb by some, including a rural mayor (Louis Negin, Canada's greatest actor - like, ever), but was correctly identified by a ravishing, babe-o-licious, though simple country girl of France as 100% REAL MAN, his body melted to bronze as the woman shot beams of love and gratitude from her heart into the spirit of the eventual posthumous recipient of the Victoria Cross and honoured by Winnipeg's citizenry with a legendary North End Junior High School in his name.

This is such a great film. I could have watched all seven minutes of it if they'd somehow been elongated to a Dreyer-like pace and spread out over 90 minutes. That said, it's perfect as it is. The fact that you don't want it to end is a testament to director Matthew Rankin one of the young torchbearers (along with Astron-6) of the prairie post-modernist movement which hatched out of Winnipeg via the brilliantly demented minds of John Paizs and Guy Maddin. Blending gorgeously arcane techniques from old Hollywood, ancient government propaganda films with dollops of staggeringly, heart-achingly beautiful animation - bursting with colour and blended with superbly art-directed and costumed live action - Mynarski Death Plummet takes its rightful place alongside such classic Canadian short films as John Martins-Manteiga's The Mario Lanza Story, John Paizs's Springtime in Greenland, Guy Maddin's The Dead Father and Deco Dawson's Ne Crâne pas sois modeste / Keep a Modest Head.

In many ways, Rankin's film is history in the making of history. Most Canadians of my generation know Andrew Mynarski's story by heart, but even still, Rankin's film is so compelling, I kept hoping it wouldn't end as tragically as it did. Thankfully, Rankin infuses his tale with the sumptuous, wildly romantic image of the French babe looking longingly into the night sky and her magical explosion of squid-like polyps from within her big heart, allowing them to sail into the black Gallic atmosphere and plunge into Mynarski's very soul before he transforms into the likeness of the bronze memorial statue erected in Ottawa, the capital of our fair Dominion.

The other part of the story that all Canadians of my generation know is that Officer Brophy actually survived the crash. He was not only able to recount Mynarski's bravery and sacrifice, but he was kept alive by the strength and just-plain brick shithouse qualities of the Canadian-invented-and-manufactured Avro Bomber - an incredibly moving moment Rankin recreates in his film. (And sadly, the AVRO corp and its eventual superior aircraft, including "The Arrow", were decimated by the Americans into smithereens when Uncle Sam couldn't hack the fact that Canada had actually created something, uh, better than they could.)

A final important thought about Rankin's astonishing film. There is so much ludicrous, politically correct lip service paid to the new "face" of Canada and the need to represent the histories and stories of the said "new face". I'm all for that, but the problem is that Canadian Cinema has not even properly addressed its own history prior to the "new face of Canada". Until that happens, I think it might not be a bad idea to begin recounting and mythologizing Canada's true heroes as Rankin has done with Mynarski Death Plummet.

I hope this film is shown everywhere - especially in schools, especially to our "new" faces. It's bad enough Canadian History is so poorly taught in our schools, but maybe, just maybe, a super-cool new masterpiece of cinema is a good first-step to begin writing wrongs that the past century has wrought upon our great Dominion. When I say our future was decimated in the World Wars, I'm not exaggerating, but there's more to it than that. Our country has long been besieged by a cultural colonialism that has stifled genuine creativity and placed far too much emphasis on staid approaches to the cultural industries decided mostly by unimaginative bureaucrats who seek either the Status Quo of dull-edged blades or worse, hang pathetically onto their jobs by promoting "diversity" rather than genuinely looking to find ways of dramatically and artistically render a history and stories that have sadly been neglected.

Mynarski Death Plummet is a mere seven minutes long, but its impact and lasting value can be multiplied to the power of the infinite - a fine equation, if you ask me.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars

Mynarski Death Plummet is part of TIFF14's Short Cuts Canada program. Visit TIFF's website HERE for more info.

A maze that begins
in childhood
and never ends.

The Weatherman
and the Shadowboxer (2014)
Dir. Randall Okita

Review By Greg Klymkiw

One of Canada's national filmmaking treasures, Randall Okita (Portrait as a Random Act of Violence), takes the very simple story of two brothers and charts how a tragic event in childhood placed them on very different, yet equally haunted (and haunting) paths.

Mixing live action that ranges from noir-like, shadowy, rain-splattered locales to the strange, colourful (yet antiseptically so) world of busy, high-tech, yet empty reportage, mixing it up with reversal-stock-like home movie footage, blending it altogether in a kind of cinematic mixmaster with eye popping animation and we're offered-up a simple tale that provides a myriad of levels to tantalize, intrigue and finally, catch us totally off-guard and wind us on a staggering emotional level.

Okita's cinematographer Samy Inayeh is more than up to the challenge of attacking a variety of visual styles with superb compositions and gorgeous lighting. Editor Mike Reisacher knocks us on our proverbial love-buns with his thrilling slicing and dicing.

As per Okita's mise-en-scene, Reisacher's challenge is to maintain the film's avant-garde nature with its equally profound narrative and thematic elements. He's more than up to the challenge and cuts a picture that we're unable to ever look away from and follow a trajectory that wends its way like a complex maze between two different characters and lands us to a spot that kicks us in the solar plexus and wrenches our hearts.

Unbelievably for some, this was produced by the National Film Board of Canada, but it appears to have been seeded and birthed out of the Montreal offices which still manages to consistently escape the often dour safety-zone prevalent in much of the Board's English Canadian output.

As for Okita, he's delivered yet another roundhouse for the ages. This is what cinema should be. Screw ephemeral needs. Immortality is, uh, like, better, eh.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

The Weatherman and the Shadowboxer is in TIFF14's Short Cuts Canada program. Visit TIFF's website HERE for more info.

We're all cockroaches.
Don't forget it.

The Underground (2014)
Dir. Michelle Latimer
Starring: Omar Hady

Review By Greg Klymkiw

What's especially fine in this slice-of-life/slice-of-consciousness dramatic cinematic tone poem is how it presents a contemporary political and social reality that's seemingly the exclusive domain of a very specific segment of our population. Through its careful mise-en-scene, that comes close to overplaying its metaphorical hand, but pulls back in time to maintain the necessary poker face (as it were), The Underground deftly creates feelings that can, indeed, be universal.

Inspired by Rawi Hage's novel "Cockroach", the film feels all of a piece rather than some horrendous calling card for an eventual feature length adaptation. If, God forbid, it's supposed to serve this purpose, it would be a tad disappointing to know, but at least it has a singular integrity that allows it to work as a piece of film art unto itself. Cleverly rooted in simplicity to yield complexity, we follow a young refugee from some Middle Eastern hell hole as he lives out his lonely life in Canada within the isolation of a filthy, cockroach-infested slum apartment.

Part of the reason for the cockroaches could be his fascination with these seemingly vile creatures and his penchant for capturing them and setting up strange domiciles in glass jars. He spends much of his time on the floor of his filthy suite intently examining his "pets", but also experiencing flashbacks to the horror of what must have been his incarceration and torture. When a notice is slipped under his door to prepare for a visit from a pest control company, the film truly takes on the feeling of a living nightmare.

We become immersed in paranoia through a cockroach-eye-view and indeed, the images of hooded pest-control guys take on the same kind of creepy horror so prevalent in David Cronenberg's very early genre features that featured similarly-masked and/or accoutred killers/exterminators. There's a truly sickening and recognizable sense of fear, paranoia and loneliness so acute one wants the protagonist to scream. He won't, though. His is a silent scream.

And though we might all not be or can even fully comprehend what it's like to be a political refugee in a strange land, the film does make us feel and believe that at some point in our lives, if not for always and for ever, we are all little more than cockroaches in a world hell-bent upon weighing us down. We cower, hugging our floors as if we were a fetus in a blood-lined belly of viscous fluids and we wait for the secret police to drag us out of our home, or our cell, to be ripped from the safety of a womb we've made for ourselves.

And then, and only then, are we plunged into sheer horror.

The Film Corner Rating: ***½ Three-and-a-half Stars

The Underground is in TIFF14's Short Cuts Canada program. Visit TIFF's website HERE for more info.

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A similar scene to the one experienced by Jim Jarmusch and others in New York during the 70s and 80s and captured in the documentary BLANK CITY as well as many other works in the "Forgotten Winnipeg" series was happening in Winnipeg. A very cool explosion in indie underground cinema that I and many colleagues and friends were involved with was spawned during these halcyon days. This period, coined by film critic Geoff Pevere as Prairie Post-Modernism included the works of John Paizs, Guy Maddin, Greg Hanec and many others.

A great selection of early Guy Maddin, many of which that I produced and were written by George Toles, can be secured directly through the following links:



Another great film from Winnipeg during this period is Greg Hanec's extraordinary DOWNTIME which has the distinction of being a parallel cinematic universe to Jim Jarmusch's "STRANGER THAN PARADISE". Both films were made at the same time in two completely different cities and scenes and both Hanec and Jarmusch premiered their films at the same time at the Berlin Film Festival. One's famous, the other isn't - but now that the "lost" and "found" DOWNTIME has been remastered from original elements to DVD, it can now be purchased directly online.

Order DOWNTIME directly
from the film's new website
by clicking HERE

Perhaps the greatest Canadian independent underground filmmaker of all-time is Winnipeg's John Paizs. It's virtually impossible to secure copies of his astounding work which, frankly, is responsible for influencing the work of Guy Maddin, David Lynch, Bruce McDonald and an endless number of great indie filmmakers the world over. Paizs' great short film SPRINGTIME IN GREENLAND is available for purchase in a beautiful remastered edition from a fan website, the inimitable Frank Norman. Norman has Paizs' blessing to provide copies of the film, so feel free to directly make your request to Mr. Norman by clicking HERE.

Visit Frank Norman's CRIME WAVE
fan site by clicking HERE

Alas, it's super-impossible to get a copy of Paizs' masterpiece CRIME WAVE (not to be confused with the super-awful Coen Bros/Sam Raimi film of the same name that was released the same year Paizs' film was NOT released properly by its scumbag Canadian distributor Norstar Releasing, which eventually became Alliance Films (where the boneheads sat on the film and turned down several excellent offers from small indie companies to release the film properly on DVD in super-deluxe special editions because they lazily purported to be negotiating a massive package deal on its catalogue titles with some tiny scumbag public domain company that, as far as I can tell, has neither purchased nor released the film). This truly great and highly influential film is, no doubt, languishing in some boneheaded distribution purgatory within the deep anal cavities of the new owner of Alliance Films, a humungous mega-corporation called E-One. Feel free to repeatedly bug their stinking asses and demand a proper release. In the meantime, VHS copies of CRIME WAVE can still be found with the ludicrous title THE BIG CRIME WAVE. Here's a copy available on Amazon:

BLANK CITY and other works in the "Forgotten Winnipeg" Series can be accessed here:

THE PIN - Review By Greg Klymkiw

A young girl (Milda Gecaite) confronts an
ethnic-Russian collaborator in her secret
haven from Nazis searching for Jews.

Once again, I am thrilled to report that a terrific new Canadian film, THE PIN, opens theatrically on June 27, 2014. What I'm not thrilled to report is that this terrific new Canadian film is only playing in Toronto at the Canada Square Cinemas. Given its subject matter, this important film with a tremendous built-in audience needs Canada's largest exhibition chain Cineplex Entertainment to open screens for it in the myriad of ideal northern suburban venues in Vaughn, Thornhill, Richmond Hill, Markham, Newmarket and Aurora.

Obviously, one would want a wider audience than an ethnically-specific market, but for that, it would have benefitted from at least one play date in downtown Toronto (at least the Varsity 7). If The Pin does NOT play the Grant Park Cinema in Winnipeg - the perfect venue for it (if some decent grassroots marketing happens and a few dollars are spent on it) - then something's rotten in the state of Canuckville. Luckily, the Grant Park is NOT a Cineplex screen, but part of the Landmark chain. More on this below, and now……THE PIN

Milda Gecaite & Grisha Pasternak are lovers in a dangerous time.

Milda Gecaite and Grisha Pasternak, hiding from
the Nazis in Naomi Jaye's THE PIN.

The Pin (2013) ****
Dir. Naomi Jaye
Starring: Milda Gecaite, Grisha Pasternak, David Fox
Review By Greg Klymkiw

They're scars that last forever, borne of danger and carved into the right-hand palm belonging to a young Jewish girl (Milda Gecaite). In hiding from the Nazis, she obsessively, fearfully digs her fingernails into soft flesh. Her scars plunge deeper. Beyond layers of tissue, glancing over frayed nerve endings, cascading through marrow, these scars are emblazoned upon her eternal memory.

Ultimately, these pain-infused engravings are chiseled onto the subconscious mind, searing her very soul. She will be forever scarred by the haunting memories of looking down at the street from above, her mother looking up, training her maternal eyes at the rooftop where her daughter is safely hidden while family, friends and neighbours are led by Nazis to awaiting boxcars. Destined to face Hitler's Final Solution, the girl's entire family become part of the "cargo" that will be forcibly unloaded at the extermination camps of Nazi Germany.

It's World War II in Lithuania. German soldiers and ethnic-Russian collaborators are crawling all over the countryside surrounding the old barn the young girl hides in. She's eventually joined by a young Jewish boy (Grisha Pasternak). He too will bear a literal scar from the open flesh wound on his arm and like the girl, his own soul will be defaced by malignant memories. Having been buried alive in a shallow grave next to the bodies of his entire family (executed by a Nazi death squad), he wisely stayed still amongst the corpses. Having escaped a fatal bullet, he waited for a safe moment to crawl out of the dirt, dashed into the forest, soon discovering a momentary safe harbour with the girl in her solitary haven. What they both find is the tie that binds forever and for a time in the lives of these two young people, love blossoms and yields joy.

The Pin, Naomi Jaye's haunting, exquisitely rendered and deeply moving love story is her promising feature debut and signals the arrival of a film artist who approaches her craft with great beauty and emotional force. From her own script, Jaye allows us to be party to the soft, delicate and heartfelt courtship that takes place within the confines of this ramshackle, abandoned barn. Punctuating shifts in narrative, tone and the passing of days, Jaye always reminds us of a dazzling natural world that looks over the turmoils created by man, always reminding us that looking to the Heavens is the constant reminder of how small we are and yet, how significant we are to be a part of it and under its ever-present gaze.

The pace of the film is gorgeously languid, creating a bed from which we can almost participate in the hours and days of solitude - a brief respite for the hero and heroine (expertly played by Gecaite and Pasternak) before the madness around them infringes upon their almost-Eden-like existence. However, when the worst comes, Jaye's approach has lulled us into a state of grace not unlike that of her characters and the sheer horror and tragedy that befall our young lovers, though not unexpected (this is, after all, WWII), still hits us like a ton of bricks.

There's something here, almost tonally, that reminded me of the classic Louis Malle drama Au Revoir Les Enfants. Both films are set against the backdrop of innocents hiding from Nazi tyranny during the war, both offer a pleasingly delicate pace to allow for our sheer pleasure in seeing deep emotional bonds being created and then - WHAMMO! - what we expect, when we least expect it, is a shocker and we're then faced with the horrible truth of how war can instil a kind of madness in children (not unlike Spielberg's astonishing adaptation of J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun).

I'm of course more than happy to include The Pin in the same breath as the two aforementioned Malle and Spielberg pictures. Though both of them were created by masters at the peak of the powers, Jaye's film, while not without the sort of occasional flaws one finds in early works (a too obvious framing device, ever-so tiny dashes of didacticism and a few period slippages), is still so mature and harrowing that one feels she'll someday, if allowed the chance, to grow and blossom and move well into the same territory. What's remarkable about the film for me is its resolve to always maintain a challenging mise-en-scène of long takes in gorgeously composed shots - always allowing the frame of the camera to act as a kind of proscenium into the private lives of these two people against an extraordinary backdrop.

This is a brave and uncompromising work - one that reminds us, as we must always be reminded - of how the world of the recent past went so utterly, horribly and insanely wrong (and, with recent events, continues to do so) and that love, faith and a resolve to accept the natural world that rules and presides over us is what we must accept so IT might never happen again.

The Pin begins its Canadian theatrical release in Toronto at the Canada Square Cinema on Friday, June 27, 2014 via Search Engine Films. AND BONUS: It's the first Canadian Film ever made in the Yiddish Language.

You know, I'm so sick and tired of the Cineplex attitude towards Canadian film. They can well afford a more concerted effort to boost their corporate responsibility to our culture - especially since they have a virtual monopoly of first-run screens. They'll argue the need for commercial films, but the recent WolfCop debacle, a COMMERCIAL Canadian film that was handled so poorly in the GTA, that I was flabbergasted! It was allowed one play date downtown (on the wrong screen, no less). This was completely and utterly useless. That film should have been multiplexed all over the burbs where its audience exists. In (grudging) fairness to Cineplex, nobody bothered to spend money on WolfCop and fight tooth and nail to have it released properly in the right venues.

Well, now we have another potentially commercial independent film that has a decent theatrical marketplace. I can't quarrel with the Canada Square as a good venue for The Pin, but it needs a distributor to spend some dough on solid grass-roots marketing and have something resembling a substantial ad-buy to target additional screens. Most distributors of Canadian films learn on a Monday that Cineplex Entertainment has deigned to free up one screen a few days later on a Friday, usually as filler. This is no way to support, market and exhibit films theatrically. Something's got to change.

RAQUEL: A MARKED WOMAN & FROM HOLLYWOOD TO NUREMBERG: JOHN FORD, SAMUEL FULLER, GEORGE STEVENS Toronto Jewish Film Festival 2014 (TJFF 2014) - Two Docs, Great Material, Mediocre Execution

Raquel Liberman
Forced Into Sex Slavery

Raquel: A Marked Woman (2013) **1/2
Dir. Gabriela Böhm

Review By Greg Klymkiw

There's a great story here. At the turn of the 20th Century, a wave of Jewish immigrants settled in Argentina to begin a new life. Alas, the Old World has a way of following everybody. When Raquel Liberman and her two sons came to join her husband in the South American country, unexpected hard times weakened her husband to a point wherein he fell ill and eventually died of tuberculosis. Duped into accepting a seamstress job, she's coerced into prostitution by the powerful criminal organization Zvi Magdal.

She services so many clients that eventually she can buy her freedom and sets herself up as a successful business woman. The gangsters feel this will send a wrong signal, so they assign one of their own to seduce Raquel then marry her. The wooing is successful and under Argentinian law at the time, all her money and property is transferred to her husband who squanders it and sends her back to work in the brothels. Unwilling to accept that this will be her fate, Raquel does the unthinkable and takes on the mighty Jewish Mafia of Argentina. Her brave efforts smashed the criminal organization and she was single-handedly responsible for saving thousands of women from sexual slavery.

Is this not a great story? Of course it is, and it's a true story as well. Unfortunately, the film leaves a fair bit to be desired. It's a very conventional television-style documentary with a competent assemblage of archival footage and interviews. Dragging things down to even more conventional levels, the filmmaker foists a whack of cheesy dramatic recreations upon us that are also reminiscent of television doc tropes of the most egregious kind.

Perhaps someday, this will be made into a great feature length dramatic film by a director with some style and panache like Steven Spielberg or Darren Aronofsky and then Raquel's haunting, strangely uplifting story will get the royal treatment. In the meantime, we will have to make do with this by-the-numbers work that at least presents the material to make us aware of this tragic tale in the lives of Jewish women in South America and the bravery of one of them to not take it anymore.

Kudos are in order for bringing the tale to light, but that's about all one can recommend here.

Harrowing Footage from WWII

From Hollywood To Nuremberg: John Ford, Samuel Fuller, George Stevens (2012) **1/2
Dir: Christian Delage
Review By Greg Klymkiw

This should have been a great film, but it's far too compact to do little more than skim the surface. The film focuses upon the film unit of the American Armed Forces during World War II and their mission to capture footage of America's war effort. This resulted in several powerful Academy Award winning documentaries and important propaganda films in favour of America's war efforts. We get glimpses into the official work of directors John Ford and George Stevens and the unofficial work of infantryman Samuel Fuller who shot footage with a small movie camera as his unit, The Big Red One (also the title of his 1980 autobiographical war film), made their way from D-Day to the liberation of Nazi concentration camps.

There is an attempt to look at the filmmakers' output before and after the war to display how the carnage they shot changed the way they made movies in later years. This is, sadly, the least successful portion of the movie. A project of this scope and complexity deserved an exhaustive Ken Burns-styled documentary epic crossed with Scorsese's monumental filmmaking documentaries. The approach here, though, is cursory at best and goes so far as to virtually ignore the efforts of Frank Capra during this period when so many filmmakers turned their attention away from what they were doing in order to do this duty for their country.

Still, the film is worth seeing for explaining how and why this motion picture unit existed and most importantly, the haunting footage provided of battle, camp liberation and the aftermath of the war. Until such a time as someone does tackle this important story in a proper manner, this middle of the road effort will have to do.

Raquel: A Marked Woman and From Hollywood To Nuremberg: John Ford, Samuel Fuller, George Stevens are both playing at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival (TJFF 2014). For tickets, visit the festival website HERE.

A PEOPLE UNCOUNTED - Review By Greg Klymkiw - The most vital portrait of genocide since Lanzmann's SHOAH.

A People Uncounted (2011) ****
Dir. Aaron Yeger

Review By Greg Klymkiw

That genocide continues to be perpetrated in the modern world seems almost unfathomable and yet the 20th Century and now, as we move into the new millennium, we still bear witness to the seeds of hatred being sown to continue the wholesale slaughter of people in the millions - based solely upon race, ethnicity, religion and even economics (the latter typified by the aggressive military actions of Western regimes as they pillage the Middle East in the name of a purported "war on terror").

After the Holocaust had been perpetrated against European Jews by Hitler during World War II, we often encountered the phrase: "We must NEVER forget, lest it happen again." Yet we do FORGET and in many cases, "we" do not even know or adequately acknowledge the existence of genocide being perpetrated against so many groups throughout the world - the Turkish genocide of Armenians, Stalin's purges and Holodomor against 10,000,000 Ukrainians, the recent and various "ethnic cleansings" within the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda's decimation of Tutsis by the Hutus - to name but a few.

The most egregious myopia of genocide continues to be the murder of up to 1,500,000 Romani people by the Nazis.

Aaron Yeger's A People Uncounted is an important film - the most vital documentary on the subject of genocide since the groundbreaking Shoah by Claude Lanzmann. Yeger's superbly researched and emotionally wrenching film focuses upon the racism and genocide against the Roma Nation - commonly and disparagingly referred to as "Gypsies." This distinct cultural group originally migrated from Northern India to the rest of the world - primarily Europe - over 1000 long years ago. They are, as the title of this film states, a people who have been "uncounted".

My response to Yeger's film included, I must admit, a deeply personal connection to the material that only managed to strengthen my belief in the film's unquestionable artistic achievements as I was reminded, once again, that the best cinema must always maintain a passionate voice that speaks to viewers emotionally on a variety of personal levels. A People Uncounted has this strength in spades.

I had always been sensitive to a myriad of repressive and racist attitudes to "gypsies", but it really hit home for me - personally - during the mid-1990s. This was when I first became aware of the racist policies towards the Romani people in Romania. They stemmed officially from the dictator/butcher Nicolae Ceausescu, then continued in a vaguely unofficial fashion after his death.

One of the results of Ceausescu's legacy was an almost nationwide hatred of the Roma with vigourous campaigns to drive an already impoverished minority ethnic group (the poverty not their choice, nor, as was commonly assumed, of their own doing) into a position of even greater desperation. A combination of death by starvation (parents sacrificing food to feed their children) and the belief that their children would be better off in the care of orphanages, led to the almost unbelievable situation where 80% of the orphanage populations in Romania were comprised of Romani children.

My wife and I were so appalled by this that we targeted Romania and began the arduous process of international adoption with the hopes we might make a difference in the lives of one or two Romani kids. After a whole year of endless bureaucracy on the Canadian side to receive the official go-ahead on behalf of our own government, we began the process of moving further with the assistance of agencies specializing in Romanian adoptions.

After attending several orientation sessions with a variety of agencies we were shocked to discover that the racist attitudes towards the Romani extended even to Romanian-Canadians who presided over the adoption facilitation. Whenever we expressed our desire to adopt children of Roma background, our requests were met with - at worst, derision and at best, lies. "Oh no," we'd be told, "There are no Romani children in the state orphanages of Romania." The lies seemed almost more despicable than the open hatred when, after considerable research we discovered that orphanages in Romania would go so far as to hide all the Romani children when westerners came to visit the orphanages.

The few who were sympathetic to our desire - those doing mission work as opposed to straight-up adoption agencies - corroborated the research. They would cautiously admit it was not impossible to adopt children of Roma heritage, but that in reality it would be near-impossible. They painted a portrait of endless bureaucratic gymnastics, coupled with forking over insane amounts of bribe money and then - more often than not - still the possibility existing of ending up childless or being offered non-Romani children.

It was even suggested that orphanage officials might falsify medical records in order to offer a non-Romani child that was stricken with some debilitating ailment that would be enough for our own government to reject the child on medical grounds. This, of course, would be done out of spite that someone from the west would dare be compassionate towards children viewed as little more than cockroaches.

That put an end to that and we moved on, but a day doesn't go by that the thought of all those children forced to suffer in state-run orphanages doesn't hang over me - a living death perpetrated on innocents whose only crime was to be hated.

Seeing Yeger's film opened the floodgates of those haunting personal memories and in a way, opened an even deeper wound within me. I had always felt an added affinity to those in Eastern Europe and the Balkans who suffered from racism, oppression and systematic genocide and culturally, as a Ukrainian-Canadian, I felt closer, for example, to the Roma and Jews than Russians, even though the language, cultural traditions and religion of Russia was oddly closer to that of Ukrainians than the others, but those similarities were surface only. The weight of one thousand years of Russian (and occasionally Polish, Mongolian, Turkish and Austro-Hungarian) tyranny almost forces one to inadvertently choose sides with those whose collective suffering match one's own.

And what degrees of suffering Yeger's film exposes!

He introduces us to a variety of Romani Holocaust survivors and children of said survivors amidst commentary from a number of scholars, artists and experts who paint a portrait of a people who were continually hated and on the receiving end of prejudicial acts based upon utterly idiotic sterotyping. The most common is that "gypsies" were liars, cheaters and thieves and that these traits were somehow genetic. This not only led to a history of persecution in every country in which they settled, but often resulted in wholesale slaughter.

The other common stereotype was the itinerant nature of "gypsies". Well, I'd be "itinerant" too if I was forced to either live on the fringes because of my race or worse, forced to ALWAYS be on the move as no town or country was amenable to having me live there - again, because of my race. These stereotypes were often enforced in the literature, art and popular culture of the "dominant" societies/races - mostly in blatant negative terms.

Typically, when artists chose to paint positive portraits of "gypsies", it almost always fell into the "noble savage" stereotypes (similar to those popularized in North American cultures with respect to Aboriginal peoples). In these works (which included even the likes of Victor Hugo) we were presented with a downtrodden people who cavorted about their den of happy thieves in brightly coloured costumes - infused with a "life force" of cheap alcohol, lively dancing, fiddle-playing, sooth-saying and almost childlike superstition. (Michael Ignatieff, Canadian politician, privileged egghead and grandson of a Russian Count once described Ukrainian culture in terms of "embroidered peasant shirts" and "the nasal whine of ethnic instruments.")

In addition to the Nazi atrocities perpetrated against the Roma during World War II, Yeger presents a variety of horrendous actions and violence from ALL European peoples - not just Germans. We are even introduced to contemporary actions of racism - some of which seem all too believable in a kind of almost unbelievable fashion: entire political parties devoted to eradicating and controlling the "scourge" of "gypsies", huge ghettos to keep Romani in their place (not unlike reservations for North American First Nations peoples) and overall hatreds intense enough to inspire those Roma who can, to escape European persecution and emigrate to countries like Canada where they can live free and decent lives.

The core of Yeger's film, however, are the war crimes against the Roma during World War II. Yes, "gypsies" got their own special "final solution". Hitler wanted them to be obliterated as passionately as he wanted to rid the world of Jews and homosexuals.

The witnesses presented to us deliver acts of cruelty so sickening that the film is another vital, important document of the utter inhumanity of these actions. We see an entire people who are stripped of their humanity (where it might even be grudgingly acknowledged as such) and subjected to torture and extermination. Death squads that don't even bother to round people into boxcars, drag them out into the streets and execute them, or force them to dive into huge pits where they're machine-gunned to death and appalingly, in non-German countries, the actions of the Nazis are seen as accepted by local communities - a welcome extermination of little more than pests.

Finally, though, as the title of the film suggests itself, we are presented with the reality of the fact that the suffering of the Roma is unknown and/or unacknowledged. These people were considered so inhuman that proper census records were never even kept to be able to place a remotely accurate count of how many Romani people existed to be fodder for Hitler's final solution. For many years, an image of a young woman looking out from a boxcar had become a symbol specifically of the Shoah until she was eventually identified as a "gypsy".

Not that it ultimately mattered. One Roma survivor describes the mingling of Jewish ashes with those of the "gypsies," suggesting that all who died before, during and after World War II, did so in the name of what must surely be the most heinous human act. Ultimately, genocide, based as it is in both ignorance and hatred, is what surely binds all of us as victims or potential victims.

And yes, we MUST remember. As people, the count is what roots genocidal actions in reality and it is thoroughly and utterly unacceptable for any people to remain "uncounted" in the past, present and future histories of mass murder of staggering proportions.

To think any of us is immune from being either the target or perpetrator of genocide is to ignore how much work our species still needs to do in order to ensure it never happens again.

For me, it always comes back to the children. Children are the future and when they are not spared these indignities, we might as well be killing ourselves. One of the survivors in Yeger's film describes the actions of Josef Mengele upon him. Mengele not only conducted medical experiments of the most insane variety, he took special delight in carving up children with no anasthetic. The screams of the children not only gave him pleasure, but he was not immune to torturing a child so high-ranking Nazi colleagues could take his place in the room and rape the children while, as the survivor describes his own torture to us, he presents the soul-draining experience of having a long metal spike inserted into his groin and shoved up deep into his body until it rests precariously near the heart - still beating. And he screams as he feels pain so intense he feels like he will die - as he is raped by a sweating, grunting, pleasure-twitching Nazi.

And the pain, and the shock, and the realization - as a child - what one human will do to another is but one example of one human being's bravery - to survive, to never forget the pain, to relieve it again and again and to tell us, so that we too, will never forget.

"A People Uncounted" is in theatrical release via Kinosmith."

EMPEROR - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Setting a movie in the period just after Japan's surrender in WWII is rife with possibilities. Alas, this dull, by-the-numbers, glorified TV movie discovers none of them.

I'm Popeye the Sailor Man.
I'm reconstructing the Isle of Japan.

Emperor (2012) *
dir. Peter Webber
Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Matthew Fox, Eriko Hatsune

Reviewed by Greg Klymkiw

General Douglas MacArthur (Tommy Lee Jones) and his right ball, General Bonner Fellers (Matthew Fox) show up in Japan after the big ones have dropped and have orders to investigate Emperor Hirohito and a whole whack o' his military advisors as war criminals. They're under s strict deadline to do so and the whole affair seems doomed to failure because of the complexity of the issue and also the reluctance of Japanese higher-ups to participate - in some cases expressed by committing suicide. Fair enough - we're purportedly in for a thinking man's version of events during a period that's seldom been dealt with by the movies.

Alas, what a lifeless, dreary affair it all is. Oh, and not much in the way of "thinking" is on display.

The aesthetic offences of Emperor pile up like so many needlessly filled body bags. All stacked up like some beanstalk to the land of the giants betrays how not to make a movie. Fe-fi-fo-fum, I smells da' blood of an Uh-Mare-y-Kun!!! And it shore don't smell good.

The first (and maybe biggest) mistake is choosing to tell the story of the early days of Japan's reconstruction after Hiroshima and Nagasaki from an American perspective. How are we supposed to give a shit whether MacArthur and his protégé Fellers achieve their goals when the Americans are little more than occupying forces in a nation wherein 200,000 innocent civilians have been decimated by Uncle Sam's atom bombs? That Americans have the nerve to seek redress via war crime prosecution is, frankly, abominable and it's impossible to appreciate the film on that level - especially since America is as guilty of war crimes as anyone else in the many wars of the 20th century and beyond.

The second egregious failing is the film's clumsy attempts to insidiously mask the absurdity of all this by offering a two-sides-to-the-story sense of balance. I suspect we're supposed to believe the film's "sensitive" portrait of the interrogated Japanese officials as much as we're to accept Fellers' expression of shock at the shanty town conditions of the Hiroshima survivors by forcing himself into their bar to drown his sorrows (as an act of commiseration) and, lest I forget, the trite, hackneyed manner in which Fellers and his Japanese translator reach mutual respect and understanding of their common goals and differences.

The most horrendous nod to balance are the endless flashbacks to happier times when Fellers woos a Japanese exchange student. This results in a series of mawkish romance sequences that make The Notebook seem tough-minded and cynical. Imagine syrupy romps amongst bamboo trees swaying in the wind as seemingly digital coloured leaves flitter from the heavens. Ugh!

Oh, and this entire romantic subplot is pure fiction - no doubt to temper the foul reality of this shameful period of American history and deliver a feel-good (albeit tear-jerking) impetus for Fellers to "do the right thing".

An ideal way of presenting two sides of a complex struggle is how Clint Eastwood attacked it with his two, near-epic WWII pictures Letters From Iwo Jima and Flags of Our Fathers. Clint's a real filmmaker, however, unlike the clowns who made Emperor (in particular the dullard director Peter Webber who has never made a good movie).

Emperor's third dive into the latrine are its sub-par technical achievements - everything from the flat lighting and dull compositions to the production design at all levels that seldom gives the impression that the sets and/or costumes have been imbued with a living and/or lived-in quality. Overall, it has the look of something aimed exclusively for TV, DVD and/or VOD consumption. There's sadly little to recommend it as a feature length drama that has some sense of time, place and sweep. The movie looks cheap - aimed ever-so obviously at audiences who've lost all sense of taste and discrimination.

Last, but not least, the performances of the two leads are downright miserable. Tommy Lee Jones does little more than mug and growl his way through the picture with MacArthur's trademark corn cob pipe jammed twixt his lips. It's like watching Japan's reconstruction being presided over by Popeye the Sailor Man. At least Jones looks like he's having fun.

Matthew Fox, however, is a complete washout. Upon seeing the movie, I was shocked that anyone would cast such a dour, lifeless sad sack with absolutely no screen presence. It feels like he occupies 2/3s of the film's shots, but he fades into the frame with less life than the shadows of the Hiroshima victims (who, incidentally, afforded a few de rigueur mentions in the picture. While watching the movie, I had no idea who Fox even was and during the dull bits (close to 100% of the picture), I was wracking my brain to remember what pictures I'd seen him in. A quick glance at Fox's Wikipedia emtry, I realized why I hadn't seen nor even remembered him - aside from a couple of forgettable movies, he's been almost exclusively working in television.

I don't watch TV. Sadly, watching Emperor, I realized I watch more TV than I give myself credit for since far too many movies these days are little more than TV on a big screen.

"Emperor" is in very limited theatrical release via Mongrel Media.