S.K.o.S.

Saw it back in the spring when it came out. I'm typing on some kind of suboptimal tablet thing here so I don't want to make this real long, but I saw it as being about scientists playing God or trying to copy what nature does, along with the idea that what we see as love, even what we feel for a person we see as our soulmate, is really just chemical reactions and pheromones and whatever. That "those are just words, they don't mean anything" scene still stays with me months later. Shane Carruth was relatively open about discussing it, I think, and there are interviews with him out there if you want to go looking for them.

Tell me more. http://ca.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405188006.html It sorta looks like a film school textbook.

It's pretty fun. Seems like everyone's a bit uncomfortable with the whole improvised dialogue thing early on, but they settle down and get into it. Never thought I'd see Ti West and Olivia Wilde sharing a scene, but it's in there. And watch for the Swanberg cameo. On topic, my family doesn't exchange gifts, but my girlfriend got me a dvd of A Late Quartet and a book on Michael Haneke.

Eenteresting stuff on Grantland about the NBA considering a fixed draft cycle. http://www.grantland.com/blog/the-triangle/post/_/id/86940/the-nbas-possible-solution-for-tanking-good-bye-to-the-lottery-hello-to-the-wheel

As a person experiencing Red Zone for the first time today, I'm having the "it's really difficult to make myself step away for bathroom breaks" moment.

Steelers block a GB field goal attempt. After one Steeler player laterals the ball backwards (which should mean he had possession), another Steeler player knocks it out of bounds, and it's ruled that he batted the ball forwards, which gives GB the ball back and a first down. Tomlin tries to challenge the ruling but it's not a challengeable play. GB scores a td on the next play.

Can't be challenged. Laugh away

This batted ball thing in Pitt-GB seems like it could be pivotal.

GERMANY VS. SOUTH KOREA In Mother, a female high school student is found dead on a rooftop. Evidence points to a young man named Do-joon, who is somewhat mentally disabled, and he's arrested for murder. But an early incident involving a hit-and-run shows that Do-joon's memory is unreliable and he'll admit to things he didn't actually do. His mother (who is nameless - she's just listed as "Mother" in the credits) takes up his cause, trying to find the real killer on his behalf. This was directed by the same guy who did The Host and Memories of Murder, and it's actually expanding on one part of Memories for Murder - while the actors are different, there's a scene in that movie where cops consider pinning a killing on a mentally disabled man but run into problems with his mother. While I'm on the subject of police, by the way - after the whole deal with me finding the cops in The Chaser way too incompetent, I did notice that policemen in other Korean movies (like 4-Iron) aren't the greatest either. The ones in this movie, while far from perfect, are actually pretty darn good in comparison. There are very few characters, so there can't be too many possibilities for the culprit, yet there are still surprises. The movie's good at fake-outs; there are subtle touches, not for the purposes of symbolism, but to advance the plot and characterization, and also to mislead. And while I was misled, I also felt like I was picking up on everything I was supposed to, and being suckered in exactly like the movie wanted me to be. Everything made sense to me; for instance, the first person the mother suspects is exactly who I would have first suspected. There is actually one detail that I didn't understand, but I'm willing to believe that it was just something I missed and I'd catch it on a rewatch, because everything else was handled so well. I didn't go back to fully confirm this, but I believe a certain group of shots is used twice in the movie, right at the beginning with the mother watching her son across the street, and then again near the end when she has an unexpected visitor. They didn't exactly do anything revolutionary with it here, but the idea of using the same shots to represent two different moments in two different contexts in the same movie is just really appealing to me for some reason. For that matter, there's a scene at the very beginning over the opening credits of the mother dancing, and when you realize where that actually fits into the story, it's pretty great too. In Requiem, a girl named Michaela leaves her parents' home to go to college. It's pretty much the typical college experience, pulling all-nighters to finish essays, finding new and unusual ways to dress, and hitting dark, dingy clubs. But Michaela's also taking medication for some sort of condition, and there's talk of her missing a year of high school for health reasons. We eventually find out that she's epileptic, but this may be more than epilepsy, since she seems to have an extreme aversion to religious items. Or is this just her way of acting out against her strict religious parents? So yeah, the suggestion here is that Michaela's been possessed, but this isn't a horror movie; though it had its intense moments, I didn't find it frightening at all, and there are no special effects. It's sort of shot in documentary style, with the camera bobbing around enough to suggest it's handheld, and shots not always staying in focus. Immediately before particularly violent seizures (or possessions) the camera seems to sort of gather itself and move at a weird angle, letting you know that something isn't right. Obviously there's the question of whether Michaela is really possessed or not. They do a good job of keeping things ambiguous. Everything that Michaela does in the movie has a simple explanation, and a lot of what happens just seems like a teenager throwing a tantrum, so you'll probably lean towards her faking it... but her body contorts violently enough, and her unwillingness to touch religious symbols is just weird enough, that you wonder a little. Everyone around her suggests that she see a doctor or a psychiatrist at first, which makes sense, and I'm glad no one went straight to the possession theory. Part of Michaela's college experience is the beginning of a relationship with a young man named Stefan. One of the best parts in the movie is when Michaela is showing signs of being in poor health, Stefan brings her to her parents' house, her parents call in the priests, and they start straight in on an exorcism. The great part is that Stefan's sitting in the next room listening to Michaela shriek and howl, and you can tell he's thinking "I really need to do a better job of choosing my girlfriends." The ending, however, leaves a lot to be desired. After what feels like the setup to the ending, we just fade to black, and a written message tells us what happened. I would've much preferred to actually see the end of the story rather than being told about it. It has a very "we ran out of money, sorry" feel. And this might be nothing, but the dvd case says the movie is 93 minutes long, and by the time the credits finish rolling we're at 88 minutes. So, I don't know, maybe a closing scene got edited out. That's certainly what it feels like. South Korea's the easy winner here - Requiem wasn't bad, but not even close to being as good as Mother. SK got a little lucky with the ordering by having their last three movies be their three best, but I'm just glad that at least one of the movies in the finals turned out to be good. WINNER: SOUTH KOREA

I still think Germany was lucky to get by Belgium. (No question that I liked The Tunnel better than Pauline & Paulette, but if I'd drawn a different Belgian movie, who knows.) Yep, I've seen The Lives of Others. It's excellent, of course.

And of course I'm hearing this in the "Vince McMahon announces the Royal Rumble participants" voice.

LOOK OUT IT'S THE FINALS GERMANY: Requiem [schmid, 2006] vs. SOUTH KOREA: Mother [bong, 2009]

INDIA VS. GERMANY In Fanaa, a blind woman named Zooni is on a trip with her friends, and falls in love with a tour guide named Rehan (played by the now very familiar Aamir Khan). This is nearly a three-hour movie, and there's a lot more to it than that one sentence, but to tell you too much more about the story would be close to spoiling it. Let's just say that the two are separated for seven years and then reunite. Zooni's very attractive... except that she has a unibrow. Unfortunate, but about an hour into the movie I had mostly gotten over it. Pretty much all the other stuff in the movie looks really great, though. The lighting on exterior shots, the vivid colors, it's all good. There's some comic relief, which would be fine, except that from what I've seen of Indian movies this year, the comic relief has a habit of not being funny. Here, we've got a police officer whose name is Jolly Good Singh and says "Jolly good" a lot. That didn't really do it for me. Some of the problems I had with this movie are the same as my issues with Rang De Basanti. This is a light-hearted musical with lots of songs, and it's a love story, but near the end it gets deadly serious. We have to sympathize with people that are very difficult to sympathize with, it's very morally complex, and it just doesn't fit the tone. Outside of that, there are parts that feel like they were dropped in from another movie. Beyond even that, there are some truly ludicrous moments that will strain your suspension of disbelief, approaching "so bad it's good" territory. Some of it was weirdly kind of predictable, in the sense that I was thinking "No, they wouldn't do that, would they?" and then they did it. Also, it turns out that Zooni and Rehan had a child, which we only discover once they reunite after seven years. There's been a tendency not to show physical love in Indian movies - a kiss will typically be the most we get - but this is taking things to a new level, as they show nothing of the encounter that led to the child, making it completely unexpected when he showed up. Anyway, he's named after his father, Rehan, and he refers to himself in the third person, and has a tendency to make statements about himself that could apply to his father. This isn't as clever as the movie thinks it is. And they also do that thing where they have voiceovers of dialogue from earlier in the movie in case you hadn't been paying attention. I think this could still be enjoyable if you know in advance that there's going to be a few things that come totally out of left field. Good Bye Lenin is another Berlin Wall-centric movie, which is still a nice break from World War II movies. We've got a family living in East Germany, Christiane and Robert, with one son, Alex, and one daughter, Ariane. We're told that Robert runs off with a woman in West Germany, when the children are just old enough to understand what's going on. The mother, Christiane, who is (or becomes) fervently socialist, pretty much shuts down, going into a catatonic state for several years. Later on, when the children are older, Alex is participating in a march protesting the Berlin Wall; Christiane sees him, has a heart attack, and goes into a coma for eight months. When she comes to, the Berlin Wall has fallen, but her heart can't take any sudden shocks. The collapse of her socialist country would qualify as a shock, so Alex tries to prevent her from finding out what's going on in the world. She's confined to her bed, but she can see changes just by looking out her window (ads for Coca-Cola popping up on buildings, for example - and this is a great way of showing just what a huge effect the fall of the Wall had), so this is a lot more difficult than it might sound. It's a very contrived scenario, but the idea that not absolutely everyone sees this huge historical event as a positive thing is interesting, and probably true. That summary makes Christiane sound pretty useless, but that's not exactly the case; she can be effectual when it's called for, and comes off as a good person who just happens to be on the wrong side of history. Alex isn't trying to trick his mother, just trying to keep her alive. He has to take things pretty far, to the point of developing his own fake news broadcasts to explain some of the things Christiane sees (there's certainly a message in there about how media can influence people), and telling her that people are coming from West Germany to East Germany when the opposite is true. That's not the right way to handle this, but he feels he has no choice. This all goes along fairly well, but the movie doesn't get to above average until late in the proceedings, with some very heartwarming moments. I thought it was a little sad how Christiane is being lied to, and if she's happy, it's something of a false happiness - but then they dealt with that in a simple but satisfying way, showing that regardless of what happens to her country, she can be happy about other things, like having children who care about her. So I ended up feeling pretty good about this movie. Fanaa is easily the more audacious and exciting of the two movies, but there were just so many problems with it that it really shouldn't get the win here. India has kind of used up all my patience with flawed but beautiful movies. Good Bye Lenin was good enough to send Germany to the finals. WINNER: GERMANY

Kobald from Chikara posted this on his facebook about an hour ago.

No. Do a board search on "Freight Train". This has come up more than once in the last few months, I think.

For whatever it's worth, I got the impression Cena was supposed to go through that table on the finish. The ladder sort of slipped underneath him when he was going off it.

POLAND VS. SOUTH KOREA Poetry has quite the attention-grabbing opening. It begins with a quiet scene of children playing by a river; one of them looks over at the water and sees a dead body floating by. Mija is a cheerful woman in her mid-sixties. She lives with, and raises, her grandson, Wook; she makes a living by working as a caregiver for an older, disabled man. We're going to find out later how she's connected to that dead body, but for now, she visits a doctor's office, complaining of pain and numbness in her arm, and oh, she's been forgetting words too. That last bit is going to lead to a diagnosis of Alzheimer's. She's only in the early stages, though, so she's mostly okay. It's just the occasional bout of disorientation. Mija also signs up for a one-month poetry class, where everyone is expected to write one poem by the end of the class. The instructor talks about having to look at things like you're seeing them for the first time. That obviously ties in to the whole Alzheimer's thing, but the class has more to offer than just that. Mija goes through some extremely difficult and sad things, beyond just the Alzheimer's diagnosis, and we as the audience certainly feel the emotional effect. Other than a couple of scenes, though (and those scenes are right next to one another) there isn't a lot of strong emotion shown by her, or really any character. It's more like she's suffering in silence. She seems to avoid confrontation wherever possible, to the point where she backs out of a difficult conversation and we're not sure if she was intentionally doing it or if she just forgot she was supposed to. She should be having those sorts of conversations with Wook, too (who is bizarrely emotionless himself), but never does, preferring to nag him about cleaning up instead. Many great movies give us only part of the story and let us fill in the blanks. For the most part, Poetry isn't like that, but late in the movie it starts playing with us a little. We end up not getting a few details, but it feels like we're being told "Don't complain, because we could've taken out some really important stuff." For instance, there's one particular shot where everyone important is up at the top of the screen, cut off at the waist so we only see legs. We're straining to figure out what's happening - and then they go ahead and show us. It's probably not spoiling anything to say that the movie ends with the poem that Mija writes. By the end, considering all that Mija goes through, I really wanted to hear how that poem was going to go (and they tease not giving us the poem at all, which got an audible reaction out of me). But it turns out that the images we're shown to accompany the poem are much more poignant than the poem itself. There is no region 1 dvd of Retrieval, which meant it was tough to track down a copy, but it was worth the effort. Wojtek is in his early twenties and lives with his grandfather; he has a girlfriend, Katia, who's a little older than him (but still looks to be in her twenties) and has a young son. Wojtek has trouble finding a job that he likes. His grandfather offers him work on his pig farm, which he takes, but that's not ideal for him. When a man named Gazda sees Wojtek in a fight and offers him a job working security at a club, Wojtek jumps at the chance. One of his friends, Andrij, gets himself hired as well. But it becomes clear pretty quickly that this isn't just a security job. Gazda's a loan shark, and both Wojtek and Andrij are going to have to work as the enforcement to collect Gazda's debts. There are some strong themes here: the importance of having a father, and what it means to be a man. Neither Wojtek nor Katia's son were raised by their fathers. Gazda's not a good person, but he does seem to be a good father; he's married with two young children, and that's the only biological father-child relationship that we see in the movie. So, Wojtek is interested in this job for more than just the money. He sees Gazda as a mentor, someone who could replace his own absentee father. Gazda's also someone who could teach Wojtek how to be a father, because although Wojtek has the best of intentions, he's not doing a great job with parenting Katia's son, teaching him that fighting is what solves problems. Gazda says Wojtek needs him, and that may be even more true than he realizes. Casting Wojtek can't have been easy. He has to be physically intimidating enough to beat people up, but still able to be threatened by other people. They went with an actor who's tall, but not overly muscular, and has a baby face. He can work the overwhelmed or frightened look well enough that we believe it. Neither Wojtek nor Andrij are suited to this kind of work, and there are times when they both literally have trouble pulling the trigger. The ending is really great - eight or nine minutes without dialogue that doesn't feel gimmicky despite the absence of talking. It's not pretty, but it's still beautiful. Andrij has his first difficult acting job of the movie here, and he hits it out of the park. And with a callback to an earlier moment in the movie that seemed unimportant at the time, Wojtek shows that he's never going to give up on himself, come hell or high water. These are two very good movies, both at about the same level, where I like them a lot but don't quite feel compelled to own a copy. I think Poetry is operating at a slightly higher level, though. The fact that we get to see a lot of schmucks get beaten to a pulp in Retrieval is certainly fun, but the violence makes it more inelegant. WINNER: SOUTH KOREA

Into the semi-finals. INDIA: Fanaa [Kohli, 2006] vs. GERMANY: Good Bye Lenin! [becker, 2002] POLAND: Retrieval [Fabicki, 2006] vs. SOUTH KOREA: Poetry [Lee, 2010]

BELGIUM VS. GERMANY Pauline and Paulette are sisters. Actually, there are four sisters in the family: the two of them, plus Martha and Cecile. All of them are in about their 50s or 60s. Martha and Pauline live together; Pauline is apparently mentally handicapped (I say "apparently" because I was never really sure if it was that or dementia brought on by aging), and Martha has to take care of her. Pauline can do simple errands, like watering the garden or going to the butcher's to get meat, but relies on Martha for a lot of things. It's a pretty decent arrangement, but then Martha dies. Martha's will says that Paulette and Cecile won't get any money unless one of them takes care of Pauline; that's not what Paulette and Cecile want, though. Pauline's favorite sister is clearly Paulette, and that may be because of Paulette's house. Half of it is a fabric shop, and the other half, Paulette's living quarters, are decorated in the most girly fashion possible, with bright reds and pinks and little doll figurines everywhere. Pauline's got a scrapbook full of little bits of fabric and wrapping paper that she keeps getting from Paulette. When she lived with Martha, she'd always find some way to wind up at Paulette's house. Paulette isn't unkind to Pauline, but clearly doesn't want the two of them living together. In some ways, this actually kind of works in Pauline's favor, as Paulette's refusal to wait on her like Martha did leads Pauline to become more self-sufficient. But, at least for me, any progress that Pauline made was tempered by the knowledge that there's going to be a limit on just how self-sufficient she can be. As far as style, this is set up like a 1950s movie - I don't really have the movie know-how to explain exactly where that comes from, but it's just something about the opening credits, which are shown over a wrapping paper pattern, and the music, and just the composition of shots. There's a musical montage of Pauline watering flowers set to the Blue Danube Waltz that's a real standout. It's a short movie, only 78 minutes; Lagaan was nearly three times as long as this. The actress playing Pauline does a really solid job portraying her childlike character, probably making it look much easier than it actually is. But there was something ultimately unsatisfying about the story. The movie certainly doesn't rub your face in it, but the idea of an unwanted disabled relative is really sad and uncomfortable. And although we do get a happy ending, Pauline isn't self-aware enough to appreciate what's happening. She's happy, but she doesn't realize just how happy she should be. The Tunnel is a German movie based on a true story, and, wonder of wonders, it has nothing to do with World War II. We're in the early 1960s, during the construction of the Berlin Wall. If I've got this right, East Germany was a communist state occupied by the Russians, and pretty much everyone wanted to be in West Germany. This included Harry Melchior, a champion East German swimmer, and he wanted to get his married sister over the border too. His plan was to get across the border with a fake ID, which wasn't too difficult, and then to dig a tunnel under the wall back to East Germany, which was extremely difficult, just in terms of the effort required. If you've been watching a lot of World War II movies, like me, you need to forget about what the Nazis were doing a couple of decades earlier. The German soldiers in charge of monitoring the border have considerably more respect for human life. They'll give you all kinds of warnings if you look like you're trying to cross illegally, and eventually start shooting, but, as if in a children's game, as soon as you make it across that invisible borderline, you're out of their jurisdiction, and they give up. You can tell it's not going to be this way for long, though; it's not just that it's going to be different once the wall is fully built, it's also that the soldiers don't like to look ineffectual, so you'd better get across while you can. Apparently several million Germans made it across this way while the Wall was being built, outrunning the soldiers' bullets by various means; digging a tunnel obviously takes a lot more work, but at least you're not getting shot at, and it's worth it to have a more permanent way of getting across. One of the most bizarre parts of the story is how Harry and his collaborators raised money for the project, basically selling their story to Hollywood as it was happening. They actually had a film crew with them as they were digging the tunnel and sneaking people across the border. I was a bit worried that the story was going to become more about the financing and the film crew than the tunnel and the border crossing, but they dealt with that part and then the cameramen pretty much stayed out of the way, which was good. There were quite a few characters, as Harry needs lots of help digging that tunnel, and everyone helping him has people that they want to get to West Germany. I had trouble keeping track of everyone at first, but by about a quarter of the way through, I had everyone figured out. The East German military actually manages to turn a couple of key collaborators and use them as informants, which creates a good deal of intrigue, and the final escape is very tense. I was seeing Belgium as a potential dark horse to win the whole thing, but their run is ending here. The Tunnel was the better movie, no question. WINNER: GERMANY

That Shining poster, oh my goodness. To contribute:

I saw the movie. Didn't think it was an especially difficult role. If it's not just a lifetime achievement thing, someone would have to explain to me why that is.

CZECH REPUBLIC VS. INDIA Autumn Spring is about Frantisek, a fellow in his mid-seventies. Wrinkly and jowly, with a white mustache, his face sort of looks like a cross between Wilford Brimley and a walnut. The title tells us that although Frantisek's in the autumn of his life, he acts like he's much younger. Some of the writeups of this movie call him a "prankster", but that's not exactly true, since no one really ever ends up feeling like they've been pranked. He does things like finding a mansion that's for sale, adopting the persona of a rich man and taking a tour of the place, and pretending to consider buying it even though there's no possible way he can afford it, only to turn it down in the end. There's a lot of lying and pretending involved. Why does Frantisek act this way? The movie suggests that it's because of an underlying fear of death. Frantisek's long-suffering wife Emilie is trying to save money for their funerals, but Frantisek doesn't want to discuss the details, and he even spends money straight out of the savings. Eventually some of Frantisek's lying gets him into trouble, and things get a bit more serious. The focus shifts to whether Frantisek and Emilie can stay together and both be happy. The movie definitely wants to show us how much happier and relaxed Frantisek is than everyone else (such as his son, who has an insanely stressful life), but his refusal to acknowledge death is a flaw, so he's not perfect. Later on, there's also what seems like a desperate attempt to get out of dying altogether. So, the message isn't exactly that there's nothing wrong with living life the way that Frantisek does - he's not even necessarily closer to getting it right than those around him. His wife and son would benefit from making changes, but so would he. I liked that they didn't make him a teflon Ferris Bueller kind of character. He does have to take things seriously and deal with the consequences of his actions. It's tough for me to relate to someone in their seventies and the idea of death being so close, so the movie didn't quite resonate with me like it should have, but it's still interesting and relevant, because ideally I will be in that position someday and I'm going to have to deal with it. I guess at one point in my life, I assumed that everyone eventually comes to accept the idea of their own death. Today, I know that's not exactly true. Lagaan is set in the year 1893, when India was ruled by the British empire. The title refers to a tax that the British impose on Indian villages, taking a certain amount of their harvest each year. This particular year, there has been a drought, and one village, led by a particular villager named Bhuvan, tries to plead their case, saying they can't pay the tax. This evolves into a bet where, if the Indian villages can put together a cricket team that can beat a team of British soldiers, the entire Indian province won't have to pay the tax for three years. If the British team wins, though, the village will have to pay triple the tax. The British team is led by Captain Andrew Russell, master of the haughty sneer; he has a sister named Elizabeth who helps out the villagers, explaining the rules of cricket to them, and eventually she falls in love with Bhuvan. That creates a love triangle situation, because there's also some attraction between Bhuvan and Gauri, another one of the villagers. Bhuvan is played by one of the actors who was in 3 Idiots and Rang De Basanti - and I guess I might as well name him, since he must be pretty famous if he's starred in three highly-regarded movies. His name's Aamir Khan. I definitely liked this more than either of those other two movies, since the goofiness that was present in both of those doesn't show up here. It would've been nice if they'd explained the rules of cricket, since I had no idea what they were, but there's no reason why they should do that. They never explain the rules of the game in any other sports movie. By the end of the movie, though, I felt like I pretty much understood the rules, if not the scoring. So give them credit for dropping in enough rule-related asides along the way. I also felt like it'd be an exhausting game, with the constant batting and running. In any movie where there are a large group of good guys, like the eleven members of the Indian cricket team here, I tend to want all of their characters to be fleshed out; there's obviously going to be focus on each one of them during the game, and I want to know who they all are. They did a pretty good job with that, giving nearly all of them a personality and a reason why they got on the team. I think there were only two or three who weren't familiar to me by the time they got to the game. We don't quite get the same level of detail for the British team, though - other than Captain Russell, the only standout player is Yardley, who has mutton-chop sideburns and will throw a cricket ball directly at your head. There are a few missteps - apparently Elizabeth learns to speak Hindi in like two days, and it was a little silly that Bhuvan turned in an all-time great cricket performance - but I did enjoy this. Both of these were decent movies; Lagaan was more absorbing and immersive. Even though Autumn Spring dealt with slightly deeper issues, I'm giving this to India. WINNER: INDIA

http://www.gigwise.com/news/86772/macaulay-culkin-forms-pizza-themed-velvet-underground-tribute-band I don't understand.

POLAND VS. ASIA 121°E Three Times is divided into three stories, at different points throughout history, but each centering on the relationship between a man and a woman, always played by the same actors. So it's a bit like Cloud Atlas, except the stories are separate and self-contained rather than all interspersed throughout the movie. In the first story, set in the 1960s, a man meets a woman who works at a pool hall. He goes off to war and writes her letters; when he returns, she's gone, and he sets out on a journey to find her. The second story is set in 1911. There's a situation where a man has gotten a prostitute pregnant, and is trying to purchase her from her mistress, but there's a disagreement on the price. None of these people are the man and woman from the other two stories; that woman works at the brothel but isn't a prostitute. She seems to be just some sort of hostess. That man seems to be a regular visitor to the brothel, and he offers to settle the matter by making up the difference in price from his own pocket. The last story is in modern times, 2005. This time around, the man and woman have some kind of strange relationship going on. She sings in a band, he takes pictures of her, and one wall of his place is covered with his pictures of her. They sleep together, but both have other relationships going on as well. This is the most dead-eyed shell-like version of the female character, with an anarchy symbol tattooed on her hand and a yen symbol tattooed on her throat. He has "Don't copy me" written on his motorcycle helmet, and there's some imagery with bar codes throughout this story, too. I couldn't tell whether they were convinced of their own uniqueness, or despairing that they were so similar to those that came before them. The biggest problem is that the movie's very slow. It's not the slowest I've seen this year (that would probably be Le Quattro Volte, which coincidentally means Four Times), but it's probably in the top five. Even something simple like opening a letter is done very slowly and takes way more time than it should. The woman is played by Shu Qi (probably best known to Western audiences from her role in The Transporter), and she's really good-looking, but the movie's gaze often seems fixed on her, and it seems content to present her beauty in place of anything actually happening. There are similarities between the three stories, but it was the differences that stood out to me. In 1911 women could be bought and sold as property. In 2005, sexual relationships mean so much less than they used to. The 2005 story feels the "most different" to me, with everything being so much busier, but it's probably just because they can film more exterior shots, because they really are in that era. In Darkness is another in the long line of World War II movies. It was nominated for an Academy Award, and is based on a true story. The denizens of Jewish neighborhoods in Poland are being sent to concentration camps by German soldiers. A Christian sewer worker, Socha, agrees to hide several Jews in the sewers. Socha's not particularly sympathetic to the Jews, though; they're essentially paying him rent to live in the sewers, and he's doing it for the money, but he is legitimately risking his life. To put it simply, he's doing the right things for the wrong reasons. The first thing I noticed was how the Nazi soldiers are portrayed a little differently here. It's really just one scene, so I don't want to make too much of it, but a group of soldiers are shown essentially torturing a group of Jews on the streets, yanking out handfuls of one man's beard and laughing about it. I've certainly seen my share of WWII movies this year, and Nazis were typically shown to be cold, unfeeling monsters - not sadistic, like they are here, taking pleasure in what they were doing. What I was sort of expecting was to see a bunch of Jewish people huddled in a dark corner somewhere while Nazis roamed the sewers with flashlights. But that's not what happens. There were all sort of other problems I didn't foresee. First of all, the movie emphasizes just how bad it is to live in a sewer. It seemed obvious to me before watching this that a sewer is a better place than a concentration camp (I guess I think of a concentration camp as being the worst place in the world), but not everyone agrees, what with the smells, the rats, and the potentially deadly gases in the sewers, along with the psychological effects of not seeing the sun for months on end. More than one character voluntarily enters the concentration camp. Also, just because everyone living in the sewers is Jewish, it doesn't mean they all get along. Being forced into close proximity with strangers, especially with everyone's nerves on edge, causes a bunch of problems. The other problem with that "Nazis searching the sewers" image I had is that no one's going to be searching the sewers unless they have a specific reason. Socha is old friends with a Ukranian Nazi soldier who keeps showing up, though, and there's a risk that he might let something slip. This was long, at two and a half hours, but never dragged. Even though so much of it happens in the sewers, it still felt like it kept putting up new and interesting situations. Socha doesn't go through any really difficult ethical problems - he knows it wouldn't be right to force the Jews back onto the streets - but everyone in the sewers certainly faces tests of endurance. Three Times = slow, In Darkness = interesting, and the win goes to Poland. Poland's in the final four! WINNER: POLAND

Some fellow on the internet is saying that based on average SPI ranking, USA's group is the 334th hardest out of the 650 unique groups they could have gotten. Average SPI B 81.80 D 80.75 G 80.55 F 79.33 E 79.13 C 78.65 A 78.30 H 73.43