Great Movies You Might Not Have Seen, Part 4

This is the fourth in a series.

Part 1 introduced the series, and covered:

1. Tokyo Story

2. Ikiru

3. Kiss Me Deadly

4. The Rules of the Game

5. Man on Wire

Part 2 covered:

1. Shall We Dance?

2. Afghan Star

3. The Station Agent

4. The World's Fastest Indian

5. October Sky

Part 3 covered:

1. Black Orpheus

2. When We Were Kings

3. Lage Raho Munna Bhai

4. Helvetica

5. The Night of the Hunter

And now, five more which almost no one saw, including a few that you’ll have to search hard for.

After Life

This movie is really hard to find! Amazon Prime will only let you buy it. It’s not on Kanopy (at least for my library). I found this, from Spain but with subtitles in English.

So why am I including it here? Because it’s really, really worth it. Buy the DVD and invite all your friends over. They’ll thank you. None of them will have seen it, either.

As always, Roger Ebert says it best. And the New York Times isn’t bad, either:

"After Life" is as much a movie about filmmaking as it is about memory. For what are movies, after all, but larger-than-life dream images projected on celluloid? In its modest attitude about the ability of movies to replicate dreams, "After Life" is the opposite of bombastic Hollywood kitsch like "What Dreams May Come."

In capturing the essence of experience, it suggests, film is as imperfect and quixotic as memory. When we sort through our recollections to dredge bits and pieces of the past, the best we can hope to come up with are the mental equivalents of crude old videotapes.

But if the movies can't fully capture the magical power of dreams, making them is still a valuable, cathartic activity. And when the time comes for the caseworkers and clients to make their movies, "After Life" buzzes with the pleasurable excitement of an artistic workshop.

After Life is also the title of a Ricky Gervais series, and if you mash the two words together into Afterlife, you get the title of a lot of other stuff. Nonetheless, I’m talking about a Japanese movie which almost no one saw, as far as I can tell (worldwide box office less than $1 million).

Usually, when the Google Cinema Club chose a movie, at least one of us had to have seen it. At first our rule was “two people have to have seen it” but that became unwieldy. For this one, none of us had seen it. It just looked interesting, and I guess I persuaded the other members. It turned out to be one of our most successful flicks. People were emailing me, asking how they could buy the DVD (they were misspelling it Afterlife).

The movie is about what happens when you die. In this imagining, you have one week to choose a moment from your life that will be reenacted on film for you, and then you’ll take that into eternity with you. This is not exactly the afterlife that the movies usually picture.

The “reception area” (or whatever they call it) invites you to review your life carefully, since this one moment is going to be with you, well, forever. If you don’t come up with a memory in a week, then you have to stay and help the new arrivals with their choices (one staff member has been doing this for quite awhile). Many people seem to pick their family vacation to Disney World, which the staff finds very boring.

What does your life mean? What would you want to recall for all eternity? The movie invites you to contemplate that. It’s also a meditation on making movies. One scene I recall is when someone had a memory of being on a tram car that was shaking (was it an earthquake? I can’t remember) and the staff rocks the car to simulate it. It isn’t all deep philosophy; it’s also fun.

Exporting Raymond

A documentary. This was not one of our regular Thursday night Google Cinema Club showings; Phil Rosenthal and his producer John Woldenberg actually came to Google for the screening and held a Q&A afterwards (below). We got to hang out with Phil and John, and Phil went down the slide from the second floor to the first, twice! (Not all Google buildings have a slide like that, but this one does.)

Free on Amazon Prime. Rent on YouTube. If you’re offended by anything Russian, this isn’t for you.

Maybe you’ve seen an episode or two of Everybody Loves Raymond. It was a hit sitcom on TV for a long, long time. Phil Rosenthal, who later had his own hit series centered on food, Somebody Feed Phil

created the Raymond show. He received an offer to sell the scripts to a Russian TV network, which would recast the show and reset it in modern-day Russia. Does an American family comedy really translate to Russia? Will the Russian public even find it funny? And what is it like making a TV show in Russia?

The secret of comedy is timing. Maybe you’ve heard that somewhere. I can tell you, Phil has timing, and this is a funny movie. When someone tells him he should get K&R insurance, he asks what that is. They say, “Kidnapping and rescue. But don’t worry, that never happens!” I won’t spoil his response.

His mother and father back in New York, whom he reveres, have a video conference with an older Russian couple. I won’t spoil that one, either.

A Russian at the network says to him (paraphrasing),“So: it’s about an ordinary worker and his ordinary family, and they just sit around and argue. Why would anyone watch this?” She thought TV had to be uplifting and show up-to-date fashions.

Actors in Russia are classically trained, in Chekhov, Shakespeare, Ibsen, and all the greats. American sitcoms are not exactly their métier. Still, Phil has to go visit the esteemed director of the acting school to hire actors. I won’t spoil that joke, either.

Here he is, answering questions from us.

Animal Kingdom

Rent on Amazon Prime or YouTube.

This is an Australian film. There was also an American remake, but it was terrible.

In Animal Kingdom, J., a teenaged son of a heroin-addict mother is sent to live with his aunt Janine after his mother dies of an overdose. Janine’s family is, unfortunately, a criminal gang, and Janine (“Smurf”) is the matriarch. They’re the family next door in a sleepy Melbourne suburb.

J. has to adjust to this sudden life change, where everything and everyone is dangerous and the police are after them. Everyone is afraid but won’t admit it. A policeman, played by Guy Pearce, singles him out as the most vulnerable member of the family. Of course they’re all aware of this.

Smurf is played by Jacki Weaver, a very talented Australian actor, whom you might have seen in Silver Linings Playbook, Yellowstone, or a number of other films. Her dominance of her boys is a little bit suspect, since her kisses take just a half-second too long.

When we showed this at Google, the post-film discussion went on for a half hour. There’s that much to think about here! All the actors give you the impression that there’s actually a person there, not just some lines on a formulaic Hollywood script.

A Late Quartet

Another tough one to find. You can buy it on Amazon. Maybe your public library has it; mine doesn’t. I don’t have Netflix so I can’t check there.

A movie about a string quartet: it’s box office magic! On the other hand, how could any movie with both Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Christopher Walken not be worth watching?

A Late Quartet is about a classical string quartet which has been together for 25 years. Two of them (the Hoffman and Keener characters) are married. One (the Walken character) discovers that he has Parkinson’s, which of course means he can’t play anymore.

After I saw this, the Alexander String Quartet came to Google and did a Q&A afterwards. I asked them if they’d seen this movie. One of them said, well, with the usual caveat about actors pretending to play instruments that they don’t play: a character said something I actually would say at rehearsal: “Our vibratos aren’t lining up!”

If you have any love for classical music at all, then you should see this. If you don’t: well, there are still those great actors.

Temple Grandin

Rent on Amazon Prime. Here’s Claire Danes playing her in the HBO documentary. We were able to show this the night before Ms. Grandin’s visit to Google.

Temple Grandin was autistic before it was cool. She was neurodivergent before anyone even knew what that was.

Her life is an inspiring story: she found that she naturally gravitated towards animals more than people, since she empathized with their non-verbal minds. Fortunately there are careers working with animals, and she found one. She single-handedly changed the entire livestock industry, by identifying with the feelings of the cows. She knows how their stress level varies when going up the chute, either to the slaughter or to a veterinarian, and more than that, she knows why, and how to reduce it.

Ms. Grandin has been really heroic by teaching the public about autism, including having her own brain scanned. In this talk she displays some of the research that she’s been a part of, and explains how an autistic person’s brain differs from a “typical” brain.

I was at this talk. You can see me (out of focus) in the baseball cap at the upper left at 0:08.