Prison Gangs Collide in Audiard's A Prophet

Jacques Audiard has created a brilliant film (2009) exposing the nature of crime in French prisons.  It was nominated for an Academy Award.  Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) is a French-Arab incarcerated for some menial crime.  He falls under the influence of Corsican kingpin Cesar Luciani (Niels Arestrup) and must carry out the Corsican's kill order on a muslim prison inmate (snitch) to save his own skin.  Corsica, Napoleon's birthplace, has been part of France since 1769 (it was briefly a sovereign island nation at the time).  There is no love lost between Corsicans and mainland French, especially Muslim.

Malik secretly learns Corsican and acts as Luciani's eyes and ears in prison and conducts Luciani's business outside when furloughed.  On the road in Marseille, Malik predicts a collision with a deer, which happens minutes later.  Lattroche, a Muslim in Marseille, calls him a prophet and agrees to do business with him instead of Luciani.

Times reviewer Manohla Dargis notes the following.  Near the end of the film, there’s a scene in which Malik, travels to Paris to kill some men. The scene reverberates with almost unbearable tension but is briefly punctured by a seemingly throwaway image: Seconds before he begins shooting, thereby sealing his fate, you see him catch sight of a pair of men’s shoes showcased like jewels in a boutique window in a rich Parisian quarter. He does a double take, a reaction that might mirror that of the anxious viewer who wonders why he doesn’t just get on with it.  Much of what distinguishes the film is revealed in Malik’s brief appreciation of the shoes, as well as the surprise it elicits. He’s window shopping — doesn’t he have some killing to do? Yet these luxury items are resonant, as is their exclusive setting and the way Malik’s admiring gaze momentarily stops the flow of the action: each adds another element to this portrait of an impoverished young Frenchman of Arab descent who is transformed in prison.

Night Watch pays Homage to Buffy

Night Watch (Ночной дозор) is a 2004 Russian supernatural thriller film directed by Timur Bekmambetov. It is loosely based on the novel The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko, and is the first part of a trilogy. It is a story of the forces of good vs. evil. It was the most widely viewed film in Russia and the CIS in 2004. There is a brief scene where Buffy the Vampire Slayer is on TV.

Taymor's Tempest takes a Cue from Coppola's Antoinette

A conscious decision was made in Julie Taymor's adaptation of Shakespear's The Tempest (2010) to incorporate contemporary accessories into the period costumry. In particular the Milan dress that Prospera (Helen Mirren) wears is laden with modern zippers as are the outfits of her brother King Alonzo (David Strathairn), Stefano (Alfred Molina) and Antonio (Chris Cooper). This recalls the sneakers in Marie Antoinette's closet, albeit a directorial gag.

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"El Cóndor Pasa" Melody Nearly 100 Years Old

I heard the Vienna Boys' Choir recently and was knocked out by a sublimely beautiful Peruvian melody that sounded oh so familiar (it is on the album pictured). El Cóndor Pasa ("The condor goes by," or "flies past") is a song from the zarzuela El Cóndor Pasa by the Peruvian composer Daniel Alomía Robles, written in 1913 and based on traditional Andean folk tunes. It is possibly the best-known Peruvian song worldwide due to a cover version by Simon & Garfunkel in 1970 on their Bridge Over Troubled Water album. This cover version is called "El Condor Pasa (If I Could)". I recognised it right away, but the backstory is most interesting.

Paul Simon heard a version called "Paso Del Condor" by Jorge Milchberg, who was head of the group Urubamba, who told Simon, perhaps through ignorance, that the song was an 18th-century musical composition by an anonymous composer. Simon became interested in the song and composed new lyrics for the melody. In 1970, Alomía Robles' son Armando Robles Godoy filed a copyright lawsuit against Simon and demonstrated that the song had been composed by his father and that his father had copyrighted the song in the United States in 1933.

Old School Trumps New School in The Five Obstructions

The Five Obstructions is a 2003 Danish film by Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth. The film is a documentary, but incorporates lengthy sections of experimental films produced by the filmmakers. The premise is that Lars von Trier has created a challenge for his friend and mentor, Jørgen Leth, another filmmaker. Von Trier's favourite film is Leth's The Perfect Human (1967). Von Trier gives Leth the task of remaking The Perfect Human five times, each time with a different 'obstruction' (or obstacle) given by von Trier.

Lars von Trier, whose own films combine harsh intimacy with jarring theatricality, professes great admiration for The Perfect Human, which may be why he wants to smash it, describing it as ''a little gem we are now going to ruin.'' Arbitrary constraints were conjured up by von Trier. He beckons Leth from his home in Haiti to reshoot the movie in Havana, with the proviso that no shot could last more than 12 frames, which translates into half a second of screen time. Leth turned the stuttering staccato of abrupt jump cuts into elegant syncopation. The next version had to be shot in ''the worst place on earth,'' which turned out to be Mumbai's red light district on Faukland Road. von Trier, disgusted by the results -- ''It's a marvelous film, but you didn't follow the rules'' -- punishes Leth by ordering him to go back and do it again, and then when this order is refused, to make ''a film without rules.'' After that he had to remake The Perfect Human as a cartoon, for which he enlisted the help of Bob Sabiston, the a Texas-based computer genius.

Lars von Trier sees himself as a maniacal psychoanalyst. His goal is clearly to shatter Leth's nearly superhuman composure, to wrench him out of longstanding habits and techniques and to break down his aesthetic and psychological defenses. It is amusing and rather gratifying to watch him fail, since his restless provocations are in the end no match for Leth's implacably passive-aggressive reserve. Their battle of wills climaxes with a fifth obstruction, in which von Trier has already made the fifth version, but it must be credited as Leth's, and Leth must read a voice-over narration from his own perspective but in fact written by von Trier. All of his meddling failed to produce the desired result, which was to force Mr. Leth, a chilly perfectionist, to make an imperfect film. This amounts to an admission of defeat on von Trier's part. At stake are two divergent ideas about what art should be: Leth values control, formal balance and arm's-length irony, while von Trier is interested in making a mess. This is the collision !

At the Berlinale 2010, Lars von Trier, Martin Scorcese and Robert De Niro announced plans to work on a remake of Scorsese's film Taxi Driver. The film will be made with same restrictions as were used in The Five Obstructions.

Bertolucci Takes a Postmodern Cue from Delillo

Bertolucci's 2003 film The Dreamers takes an intimate look at the evolving complex relationship between an American student visiting Paris (Matthew) and the twins Théo and Isabelle. They all fancy themselves as film buffs. Living large in an apartment all to themselves (parents on vacation), they isolate themselves from the growing tumult on the streets in May, 1968. The subplot relates to the ouster of beloved Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinémathèque Française.

Matthew tries to impress upon Théo the importance of the tumult outside their apartment. "There's something going on out there. Something that feels like it could be really important."

There is a brief moment in the film where Matt and Isabelle are walking on the street and notice a television in a storefront broadcasting the student riots. Ironically, they discover the reality of what is going on from the television, rather than through their apartment window. This is immediately reminiscent of the party scene in Delillo's Underworld, where multiple TV screens are playing the Zapruder film of Kennedy's assassination on continuous loop. Seeing it on TV makes it more real in a very postmodern fashion.