On your left you see Jeanne, portraying a young woman (or: girl) descending some stairs to take the local train in Paris (or: RER). And that’s why the film is called The Girl on the Train or (in its original title) La Fille du RER. It may be any RER, but Jeanne (as portrayed by Emilie Dequenne) isn’t any other girl. Jeanne’s story shocked France and many other countries in 2004. Yes, La Fille du RER is based on a true story and this time the producers didn’t make that up to make a larger audience flock to the cinema, this truly happened… or did it?

Let’s scroll back to 2004 and the unsettling news that a young woman was attacked on a local train by a group of youngsters who had taken her for a Jewish girl and had assaulted her. They’d cut some of her hair off and had carved in her belly.
Outraged? Well, so was France. But… prepare yourself for more outrage. Not long thereafter, it was revealed that the attack hadn’t taken place at all and the girl had invented this story. Rather than to question why a girl would do such a thing, the media were angry they’d been used and condemned the girl for inventing such a crime.

Fast forward to 2009 and to a film by André Techiné that tries to shed some light on the backgrounds of this story.

 And yes, that’s what we get to see: the full background of the story, though it must be added that sometimes this doesn’t always make for engaging cinema. But as a psychological study it’s a fairly interesting film. Mainly because it shows how things can develop if you’re living a lie, an extreme lie.
The film explicitly shows the involvement of the media in this story, changing Jeanne from the victim of a outrageous crime to a symbol of how today’s rotten society has no respect for other people and victimizes them beyond belief. And then, when the story was revealed to be untrue, rewriting her as another symbol, of a respectless girl with no shame, a lack of knowledge of history and a sick tendency to manipulate the media. (Never mind Jeanne never actively looked up the media to sell her story.)

This is a trap Techiné doesn’t fall for, instead spending from the start of the movie a lot of time portraying the events that led up to the young woman’s fabricated story and developing more insight into this girl’s ‘twisted’ psyche. You get to know Jeanne, feel her despair, see her degree of naievity (i.e. how she was manipulated by her boyfriend) and, despite her errors, you can feel some sort of sympathy for her. Not unlike Rosetta then, Dequenne’s breakthrough role. In fact, you (or at least I did) feel so much for her that by the end of the movie (when Jeanne is jailed for deceiving everyone) you also feel a bit of outrage against the French system, because a jail sentence may not be the right punishment for this girl. (Usually, we don’t tell you how movie end here at DV, but in this case it’s different as a) the film is based on a true story and therefore a bit of googling would’ve given you this information too and b) the film is more of a social study rather than a whodunit thriller.)

If you’re in for a night of engaging cinema, we advise you to seek elsewhere, but if you’d like to find out how people can derail and psychology ticks your right buttons, then you might find this the right movie for the night. 

 Score: 6 to 6.5/10

Here’s the French trailer with Dutch subtitles. If you’d like to watch it with subtitles, go to the film’s site:

News Movie, the international name for The Onion Movie, is a combination of news parodies and sketches made by the team behind The Onion, the satirical e-zine. Part of it is brilliantly funny (e.g. the smoking scene above), the other part is quite lame. The result is a movie that scores 5/10, was shelved for several years before finally being released (straight to dvd in most countries).

We recommend you see it if you happen to come across it and enjoy the good scenes. There’s no special need to seek this out.

Score: 5/10

Anvil! The Story of Anvil is a rockumentary about metal band Anvil. If you catch it unaware (like I did – I saw it at the Pukkelpop festival) you may be inclined to think you’re watching the metal version of Spinal Tap, but make no mistake: Anvil really exists.

That Spinal Tap springs to mind isn’t that peculiar, as director Sacha Gervasi has willingly inserted several nods to the famous mockumentary, with the amplifier going all the way to 11 being the most obvious example.
One wouldn’t guess it, but this film is actually Gervasi’s debut as a director, though he had worked in the movie industry before. Gervasi wrote the screenplay for two movies, the most famous being Spielberg’s The Terminal.

The movie joins the band on their first tour through Eastern Europe in a very long time. Managed by a non-professional manager, the band finds out their tour isn’t exactly the most luxurious in the world. Anvil! The Story of Anvil is both cringe-worthy funny as deeply emotional.

Gervasi made this film because he’d worked as a roadie for Anvil in the 80s, back when at least certain people knew who they were. Gervasi felt close to the band and wanted to save them from obscurity.
This seems to have worked: Anvil may have gotten respect from colleagues (Anvil! The Story of Anvil contains interviews by Lemmy, Lars Ulrich and Slash), but the rockumentary has made sure Anvil is no longer a band dwelling at the back of everybody’s mind.

Anvil won’t give up. Let them rock on!

Score: 7/10

This is too important (and sad) not to use as an update.

Veteran actor Edward Woodward has died aged 79, his agent has confirmed.

Woodward is best known for his roles in The Equalizer and The Wicker Man.

BBC’s obituary

Robin Hardy, who directed The Wicker Man, said of Woodward: “He was one of the greatest actors of his generation, without any question, with a broad career on American television as well as British film.
“He was the absolute star of The Wicker Man. He was an extremely nice human being.”

And our season of Turkish remakes continues today with a Turkish version of Rambo. (That’s right, “a”, there’s more than one.) Özkan from Germany was kind enough to mix the audio of the original movie together with the video of the remake, so you can see for yourself how much the ‘remake’ resembles the original.

Not every older movie that gets a review here deserves it. Some are so bad they become highly amusing and thus worthwhile anyway, but some are reviewed here mainly as a warning. Today’s Satanik review has merely one purpose: make sure you only lose 85 minutes of your life by watching this if you really want to.

In Satanik we follow older ugly scientist Marnie Bannister who happens to be in the right spot at the right time: a colleague discovers a serum that allows certain animals to rejuvenate. Bannister doesn’t think twice, kills the scientist and experiments on herself. And lo and behold, suddenly she’s young and beautiful, proving that scars and ugliness are only signs of old age. Wow, these cult movies sure are educational, aren’t they?
Anyway, Marnie does the right thing and finds her way in the seedy underworld, thereby having to do the occasional killing of the innocent and less innocent. But watch out Marnie, a Scotland Yard inspector is hot on your trail… well, I say ‘hot’, the guy doesn’t really have a clue throughout the movie, but can one say you’re lukewarm on someone’s trail? No.

This groundbreaking masterpiece was made in 1968 by one Piero Vivarelli. He’s mainly remembered for directing Africa Erotica (La Decamerone Nero), despite having made more than a dozen films. The main reason to watch Satanik is the actress who gets to play the lead, Magda Konopka. Magda’s filmography is decidedly more impressive, featuring guest roles in tv shows (e.g. Danger Man, Department S and The Persuaders) and roles in cult movies like When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth and Lucky Luciano. Nothing too spectacular, but at least she deserves her own little footnote in cinema’s history.

Satanik‘s main problem is that it’s boring as hell, despite having every chance in the world to be exciting. There’s a trail of murders, a sexy protagonist who has a seedy side and great locations in Switzerland. Yet it outbores a documentary on two average-sized grey rocks being sent by mail from Essex to Ipswitch in a plastic bag.

And to make things worse the DVD release by Retro Media is fullscreen, so people and objects disappear from your screen from time to time. The DVD release does state that because of the film’s age and condition it couldn’t always be restored to a sparkling format, which we do understand, but sometimes the result looks like a hastily remastered VHS tape. One of the two covers features the poster we’ve also used in this review, but the other cover features a naked lady who looks nothing like the actress with a pentagram that has nothing to do with the film.

Mind you, the other poster doesn’t really give you a good idea of the film either. The mask you see Satanik wear is only used in one scene of the film, the striptease scene. Vivarelli even managed to make a striptease scene boring, so in a way he should get an award for that. The scene starts with a band that were either expensive or good friends of the director, because we have to wait an entire tiresome number before the film continues with Marnie’s striptease. The most positive thing I can say about the scene is that at least it doesn’t feature the irritating zoom shots Vivarelli seemed to have learnt from Jess Franco and that only help in making the film look even more amateurish and cheap. Stay tuned for this scene by the way, you can find it at the end of the article.

Sadly enough, there is a lovely history behind the photo strip that was turned into this borefest. It starts with the Italian photo strip Killing (which led to a.o. the Kilink movies released by Onar Films), which was conceived in Italy in 1965 as an answer to the French comic Kriminal (also turned into a movie by Umberto Lenzi). Killing, which was more violent than Kriminal, also got a French release, but the publishers decided a name change would be good for the character. Only 19 photo-strips were made of Killing/Satanik but because of its gratuitous violence, it found a large share of fans. Max Bunker, who was the man behind Kriminal (the comic Satanik tried to cash in on), reacted by making a comic for the Italian market. It featured an ugly scientist who became young and beautiful again and Bunker named it… Satanik.

So there you go, a movie which may have a more interesting background but which is turned into an unexciting movie that tries to cash in on the success of movies like Lenzi’s Kriminal and Mario Bava‘s Danger Diabolik. Two movies we’d recommend you instead. And now, as promised, the scene the movie tried to build up to (and failed):

Welcome to our discount extravaganza: two mini-reviews of recent movies for the price of one. This may well be your lucky day!

TWO LOVERS
Seen in the cinema: January 2009
Score: 8/10
Why? Two Lovers, the most recent James Gray movie, is a “romantic drama about a bachelor torn between the family friend his parents wish he would marry and his beautiful but volatile new neighbour”. Joaquim Phoenix is quite good as the troubled bachelor, Gwyneth Paltrow is beautiful and volatile enough to be his neighbour.
The film was released in the Belgian cinemas on Christmas Eve 2008 and it’s a perfect time for this sort of movie. It’s heart-warming without getting too sickly sweet. Funnily enough, I’ve forgotten whether the movie has a happy ending or not, but I do remember the more painful episodes of the film. As briefly mentioned before, Phoenix is quite good in his role and Gray is a good director, even if he isn’t the most prolific person in the world: he debuted in 1994 with Little Odessa, took six years to direct another movie and then made his audience wait another seven years for another feature. Suddenly he seems to have gained some speed, there was only one year distance between We Own The Night and Two Lovers. And, lo and behold, his next movie is scheduled for 2010. Gray seems to have caught the Soderbergh virus.

THE READER
Seen in the cinema: March 2009
Score: 7/10
Why? The film may have been overrated, but it’s hard to deny it’s a good movie. Kate Winslet is good and we can almost forgive director Stephen Daldry for adding Ralph Fiennes to the cast. A lot of people have drawn a lot of attention to the film’s subplot (Winslet’s character’s involvement with the Nazis), but there’s a lot more to this film than just that. There’s an illiterate woman who asks a young boy to read her stories. Years later, this relationship (just imagine how it would’ve been if it’d been a girl and an older man… can you imagine the outrage?) will prove to be pivotal when she is jailed for her involvement in World War Two.

The human psyche is a wonderful thing to observe. And that’s exactly what happens in De Ofrivilliga, a Swedish movie by Robin Östlund, released globally as Involuntary (Happy Sweden). The movie exists of a couple of stories which are unconnected but share a similar theme. All the characters are affected, willingly or unwillingly, by peer pressure. An older man insists on being in charge of a fireworks display, but when things go wrong, he’s hit in the eye. Claiming it’s only a superficial wound, he demands the party must go on. Then there’s the tale of two young girls, who re-enact pin-up poses in their bedroom (thanks to the camera in their webcam), dance sexily at a slumber party (mimicking the scantily clad women in rap videos), harass an older man in the tram and end up totally wasted in the park. The third tale is set on a long-distance bus. An actress has taken this bus (it’s unsure whether she does so to save some time or because of money problems), but it’ll take some time before she’ll be home. At one of the stops the bus driver notices the curtain rod in the toilet has been torn off and he refuses to drive any further as long as the culprit doesn’t confess (s)he is the guilty person. The fourth story takes us to a weekend out with some lads. When one of them tries to have oral sex with another friend by way of a prank, the fellated friend doesn’t like the joke and calls his girlfriend. The fifth story features a elementary school teacher. Her first scene is pivotal as it features an experiment in peer pressure (the class has to contradict the choices of a volunteer and observe whether this makes the volunteering girl question her choices). But this scene isn’t why we’re observing this teacher. One day, after class, she notices a colleague slap an obnoxious boy quite hard in the face. The mother complains that her son came home from school with a bleeding ear, but the teachers merely observe how irritating the boy is and the teacher with the loose hands insists nothing has happened. The teacher now faces a dilemma: remaining silent or telling the headmaster who hit the boy, even though this last option may turn her into a social pariah.

The five stories are interwoven and the snippets are separated by a black screen for a couple of seconds. I’m not exactly sure if this was the best way to tell these stories, even if it’s a manner that is very much in fashion these days. Apparently Östlund made his film out of a couple of shorts he’d already made. What is good about this form of cutting is that you don’t need to tell the entire story: you can cut out an essential scene and then move to another story, which enables you to delete all the establishment and filler scenes.

Ironically enough, the story that really tackles peer pressure pleased me least: despite the lads’ weekend being a prolonged version of a dare game this story didn’t have the body some of the others had. The bus story managed to combine two problems: on the one hand there’s the person who damaged the curtain rod and the question whether this person dares face public humiliation,  but on the other hand there’s also the story of the bus driver, whose threat not to continue the ride if the culprit doesn’t confess may bite him in the ass: he may be blown the incident way out of proportion, but it also means he can’t crawl behind the wheel again if he doesn’t want to lose his face (and authority).

Involuntary (Happy Sweden) shows its nature in the title. Part of it shows the shortcomings of the human race, the bracketed part is highly ironic. De Ofrivilliga is a social drama but there’s plenty to laugh at, even if it’s not always out loud. This film, made by mostly unprofessional actors (with the odd exception), is 100 minutes of human behaviour and it questions our society and times, without offering advice (thus avoiding becoming too heavy) or pointing the moral finger in the faces of viewer or characters. Thus becoming one of the more worthwhile films of the year. If you fancy a long look into the human mirror.

8/10

This would’ve been the update for 30 October (had I not fallen ill). It would’ve been a lot more topical then, as these events had taken place only one day earlier. Never mind that, it’s still worth a post.

Horror is a frightening thing. Watching a horror movie generally means you’re seeing something happening to a main character that hopefully would never happen to you. Watching a horror movie has an advantage: when things get frightening, you can still close one or two eyes and whisper to yourself “It’s only a movie” (a phrase commonly associated with Wes Craven‘s Last House on the Left, although it was used eight years earlier by William Castle in Strait-Jacket). Real-life horror does not have this advantage. You can squint as much as you like, but it is not a movie.

Some say watching images from wars is real-life horror. It is, but much more than that is someone who’s forced into an extreme situation. Tennis player Caroline Wozniacki is the real-life equivalent of a horror heroine who’s entered the house of a madman. She’s suffering from an injury that has been plaguing her for a couple of weeks now. Her body is so tired it can no longer keep up with a long game of tennis. Last Thursday’s game was long: by the time the video starts we’re already two hours and 43 minutes into the game.

At the next point her body caves in. Wozniacki gets cramps so awful she falls to the floor. She asks if someone can help her up, but that is against the regulations: if she wants to continue the match, she’ll have to get up by herself. Somehow she finds the energy to get up on her feet and play on. Three minutes later she manages to win the match, thanks to an amazing display of will power (and a bit of sheer luck her opponent never thought of playing balls Wozniacki wouldn’t be able to get… not too difficult if your opponent can barely walk).
But look at that face the moment she’s won: there’s no happiness here, this is just pain. She can hardly walk back to her bench but somehow she managed to win this match.

It was as if I was watching The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

This week’s cult gem is El Televisor, directed by Narciso Ibáñez Serrador in 1974. This was two years before the cult classic Quien Puede Matar a un Niño?. El Televisor was made for tv and only lasts 70 minutes. It was made for Historias para no dormir, a 70s version of our Masters of Horror or, maybe more to the point, the Spanish 2006 series Películas para no dormir (which Serrador also made a movie for).

The story’s quite simple: a loving father wishes all the best for his family and buys whatever his wife or children want to have. He also has a dream, owning a television set (in colour, please), but he has shelved this dream until his family is completely satisfied. To his big surprise, this day has come and his wife convinces him to buy a telly.
Yes, he’s happy with his purchase. In fact, he’s so happy he uses his day-off to watch the test card, the olden days announcement programmes would start within the hour. Soon he decides television has an answer to anything: why still go to church if you can follow a church service from the comfort of your own home? Why go to the movies if you can watch a play on tv?

After a while the man starts to alienate from his family and spends more and more time in front of the box. He even invents an excuse to get a couple of days off from work and soon after he can’t even be bothered to go to work any longer. The man has given up his real life to watch the ones on tv.
The film’s climax takes it one step further and completely dissolves the line between real life and tv.

El Televisor suffers from a message that is too much on the forefront, but it does show a society losing social skills in favour of some quality time with the tv set. With our modern eyes, the man’s wife may seem too naive and gullible, but we do tend to forget how much the role of the wife has changed in the last thirty years. In 1974 there were still a lot of housewives who wouldn’t dream of interfering with their husband’s desires, simply because the man had to go and work for the family.

So it may be a bit outdated, but El Televisor is an interesting time capsule from the 70s. It also shows a director getting ready for something bigger (and that would be his cult classic Quien puede matar a un niño?). It’s apparently not out on dvd, but it did get a recent showing on Dutch television, thanks to a theme week on media. It’s a shame it’s so rare I couldn’t even find some stills to go with this article, but then again that’s also part of DV: occasionally talking about movies which are impossible to find.

7.5/10