S.K.o.S.

1Up in Denver is the same concept, FWIW. Actually, wait a sec... http://barcadiabars.com/ has locations in Dallas and Fort Worth. I meant to check out the New Orleans one when I was in the city earlier this year, but never made it.

Will be out of town again this weekend, and on the road Friday afternoon. Expect the next update on Sunday night.

Amazing!

Oh, I went to a bar on Monday in Toronto after the Jays game, and he was doing a show at the place right across the street. Hadn't ever heard of him, but we looked up who was playing just because it seemed like there were a ton of people outside.

Here's another piece in the Chikara puzzle. http://theashesof.com/

Will try not to do a million posts about this, but here's some more stuff they'll be showing: All Is By My Side - Jimi Hendrix biopic, with Andre 3000 in the lead role Under The Skin - This sounds exactly like Species. Starring Scarlett Johansson, and directed by the guy who did Sexy Beast. Enough Said - One of Gandolfini's last movies, a comedy with Toni Collette. Felony - Joel Edgerton wrote this & stars in it. About a cop who's partially responsible for a fatal traffic accident and tries to cover it up. The Square was awesome so I'll try to see this. Prisoners - There was a trailer for this on the old board. About the disappearance of 2 young girls, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Hugh Jackman, by the director of Incendies. REAL - Japanese movie, by the guy who directed Tokyo Sonata, about a man who uses an advanced neurological technology to enter the mind of his comatose lover. There's a lot more. If nothing else, all those foreign movies I've been watching for the world cup project have made a whole lot of names more familiar to me.

The first press conference for the 2013 Toronto Film Festival is ongoing. They've got 12 Years A Slave, The Fifth Estate, Gravity, and Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom. The first two will be world premieres. As for stuff that hasn't been mentioned in this thread yet: August Osage County, Labor Day, Devil's Knot, Bad Words, Third Person, Can A Song Save Your Life?, and Dallas Buyers Club. I'm going through IMDB checking those out. Some look more interesting than others. And the closing night film is something called Life of Crime, starring John Hawkes, Mos Def, and Jennifer Aniston. Looks like this is on IMDB as "Untitled Elmore Leonard Project".

My understanding (which might be totally off) is that it's some kind of family reunion and there are a lot of people in the house. And there are quite a few invaders too. The family fights back, and both sides get kills, with a lot of gruesome/hilarious violence. So it's not like two or three people trying to hide in a closet for the whole movie.

Smashed was on the list too. I can't remember what the third Criterion movie was, but let's make it the Criterion edition of Following.

The slasher flick YOU'RE NEXT, which opens the same day as World's End. It screened at one of the midnight shows at the Toronto Film Festival in 2011, people loved it, and then Lionsgate bought it and sat on it for two years. I've been waiting all that time to see it. KICK-ASS 2 could be worth a look too.

Fuck you to the insect kingdom for sapping me of my delicious blood. At a conservative estimate, I have at least 40 bug bites on me right now. Wouldn't be surprised if the actual number was over 50. Apparently you need more than just bug spray to deal with bugs when camping.

UPDATE 11 OF 19 - through July 18 Standings 1 [- 1] Ligerbusa - 22 points (10/12, tiebreak n/a) 2 [↑ 3] Hobo Joe - 24 points (16/8, tiebreak 0.323) 3 [↑ 8] JRGoldman - 28 points (6/22, tiebreak 0.235) 4 [↑ 11] Yeti - 28 points (10/18, tiebreak 0.268) 5 [↑ 6] Gonzalez - 28 points (10/18, tiebreak n/a) 6 [↑ 14] Cameron Swift - 30 points (12/18, tiebreak n/a) 7 [↓ 2] Mushroomjones - 32 points (18/14, tiebreak n/a) 8 [↓ 7] Paco - 34 points (18/16, tiebreak 0.124) 9 [↓ 5] The Erotic Terrorist - 34 points (14/20, tiebreak 0.127) 10 [↑ 12] DreamBroken - 34 points (14/20, tiebreak n/a) 11 [↑ 15] Death From Above - 34 points (20/14, tiebreak n/a) 12 [↑ 13] Televiper - 36 points (24/12, tiebreak 0.004) 13 [↓ 10] Suicide King of Spades - 36 points (16/20, tiebreak 0.24) 14 [↑ 17] -MJ- - 36 points (8/28, tiebreak 0.29) 15 [↑ 18] blitzkrieg - 36 points (12/24, tiebreak 0.6) 16 [↓ 9] Genesis - 38 points (20/18, tiebreak 0.251) 17 [↑ 25] jaedmc - 38 points (18/20, tiebreak n/a) 18 [↓ 16] Pavel6969 - 42 points (22/20, tiebreak 0.003) 19 [↓ 4] Super Ape - 42 points (20/22, tiebreak 0.116) 20 [↑ 23] RossWB - 44 points (24/20, tiebreak 0.237) 21 [↑ 26] TheZ - 44 points (22/22, tiebreak 0.255) 22 [↓ 21] Rippa - 44 points (30/14, tiebreak n/a) 23 [↓ 20] IVPvideos - 44 points (16/28, tiebreak n/a) 24 [↓ 22] The Natural - 46 points (22/24, tiebreak 0.115) 25 [↓ 19] Trocar Slush Weasel - 46 points (16/30, tiebreak 1.086) 26 [↓ 24] Stennick - 48 points (22/26, tiebreak 0.547) 27 [↑ 28] Raziel403 - 50 points (14/36, tiebreak 0.261) 28 [↓ 27] SorceressKnight - 54 points (32/22, tiebreak 0.687) 29 [↑ 30] Lacelle - 58 points (28/30, tiebreak n/a) 30 [↑ 33] shoogbear63 - 60 points (22/38, tiebreak n/a) 31 [- 31] Control - 62 points (26/36, tiebreak 0.006) 32 [- 32] gregjr - 66 points (18/48, tiebreak 0.057) 33 [↓ 29] Phantom Lord - 66 points (34/32, tiebreak 0.141) Box office 1 [- 1] Iron Man 3 - $376,745,285 (28 days) 2 [- 2] Man Of Steel - $276,169,878 (28 days) 3 [↑ 6] Despicable Me 2 - $251,100,035 (16 days) 4 [- 4] Monsters University - $239,128,654 (28 days) 5 [↓ 3] Fast & Furious 6 - $224,008,865 (28 days) 6 [↓ 5] Star Trek Into Darkness - $203,716,697 (28 days) 7 [- 7] World War Z - $181,741,067 (28 days) 8 [- 8] The Great Gatsby - $131,945,118 (28 days) 9 [- 9] Hangover 3 - $109,060,272 (28 days) 10 [- 10] This Is The End - $87,437,228 (28 days) 11 [- 11] The Lone Ranger - $76,911,243 (16 days) 12 [- 12] After Earth - $57,924,070 (28 days) 13 [NEW] Pacific Rim - $52,280,292 (7 days) Rotten Tomatoes 1 [- 1] Star Trek Into Darkness - 206/236 = 87% (28 days) 2 [- 2] This Is The End - 155/185 = 84% (28 days) 3 [- 3] Monsters University - 135/173 = 78% (28 days) 4 [- 4] Iron Man 3 - 205/264 = 78% (28 days) 5 [- 5] Despicable Me 2 - 120/160 = 75% (16 days) 6 [NEW] Pacific Rim - 166/232 = 72% (7 days) 7 [↓ 6] Fast & Furious 6 - 122/173 = 71% (28 days) 8 [↓ 7] World War Z - 157/234 = 67% (28 days) 9 [↓ 8] Man Of Steel - 150/268 = 56% (28 days) 10 [↓ 9] The Great Gatsby - 117/232 = 50% (28 days) 11 [↓ 10] The Lone Ranger - 49/183 = 27% (16 days) 12 [↓ 11] Hangover 3 - 36/181 = 20% (28 days) 13 [↓ 12] After Earth - 18/172 = 10% (28 days)

Even lower. $32.1 million.

It's crazy how many of them there are. Every time I look at the latest user to register, it's some new variation on "Geiotkjasdgn".

SLAVIC EUROPE VS. BRAZIL Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is the sequel to 2007's Elite Squad. Both these movies were huge deals in Brazil, setting records for the highest-grossing domestic movies. The first movie, which I saw a few years back, won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival. It tells the story of two friends in training to become officers in a military police unit. Only one of them makes it: André Matias. Captain Roberto Nascimento trains Matias and provides voice-over narration. If you didn't like the first Elite Squad, it was probably because of its politics. The first half of that movie was devoted in large part to showing how lazy and corrupt regular Brazilian police are. In the second half, we learn that the military police unit might be even worse, as they're pretty much killing machines. Liberals are portrayed as useless intellectual bleeding hearts, giving criminals sympathy they don't deserve. It's a little strange watching such a blatantly right-wing movie, because you don't get that perspective much from Hollywood. You may have felt like Nascimento turned out to be a fascist robot and Matias was molded into one. At the outset of this sequel, there's a prison riot. The military police are called in, and as you would expect, they solve the problem by killing people. Matias, who is now a Captain himself, pulls the trigger at a key moment. But this time, a good portion of the media turns on them. In the ensuing political fallout, Matias is taken off the unit and demoted to a regular policeman, and Nascimento, who was directing the operation, is promoted into a desk job where he can't do any more damage. From that vantage point, Nascimento is able to go after the police corruption that he always knew about, but he's got to develop a whole different set of skills, because you can't just stamp out that kind of thing by killing people. (Or can you?) Is the sequel just a cash grab after the success of the first movie? Well, maybe, since it did make a ton of money for something coming out of Brazil, but that doesn't mean it's not good. All the important actors are back, as well as the writing team, and the end of the first movie was a good jumping-off point for a new story, as it felt like all the pieces were in place but the game hadn't really begun. The biggest difference is that everyone's a little more relaxed. The first movie was brutal as far as treatment of criminals. This time, Nascimento's become a father, which might have mellowed him out somewhat, and, out of necessity, there's some teamwork between people on opposite ends of the political spectrum. That makes things more palatable, without giving the impression that the writers sold out. Ultimately, this is just a really good combination of intelligent dialogue and action. There's something for everyone. And by the way, I think you could still enjoy this without having seen the first movie. Witnesses is set in the Serbian-Croatian war during the early 1990s. Three Croatian soldiers try to blow up a Serbian man's house. They believe the house is empty, but it's not; the Serbian man unexpectedly comes out to see what's going on, and they gun him down. That's not how they wanted things to happen. Even though this is wartime, the village they're in is not a battleground, and they can still be prosecuted by police. There is one witness to the killing. As police investigate the murder, we learn that the soldiers are staying at the home of one of their mothers, and they're there because they've brought back the body of her husband. It looks like blowing up the house was the soldiers' own idea; they weren't on an assigned mission or anything. The draw here is that scenes are shown over and over, and each time we get a little more of the story. It's kind of like Hero or Rashomon, except that no character is telling the story, and so there can be no lying or embellishment, strictly speaking. It's the movie that's presenting the story to us. Once, on the second time through a scene, I wondered how I could've missed a specific detail on the first time through, and then I realized that it was probably never shown. We see only what the camera sees, which is limited to what the moviemakers want us to see. I would probably get quite a bit out of a rewatch, just to tie off some loose ends. I'm specifically thinking of a scene where a character is being interrogated and seems to leave out certain very important details. The timeline loops back on itself with little warning. That's a plus in that the repetition doesn't get boring (as with something like Run Lola Run, where I fast forwarded the entire last third of the movie), but a minus in that I was often a little fuzzy on certain things. Sometimes we're not supposed to know what's going on just yet, and the questions are answered later; late in the movie, they turn things around, taking our knowledge of what's going to happen next and using it against us. This is another entry in the list of movies where I got so caught up in the plot, or at least in concentrating on which part of the story was being retold and seeing what the next new revelation would be, that I forgot to notice anything about the acting or cinematography. I do remember at the very start, when the three soldiers are driving to the house, there's a neat lighting effect where everything outside the car is green and everything inside is blue. And there were also a couple of standout shots where the mother's face is the only thing visible against a background of pure blackness. These are two very good movies. Elite Squad 2 felt like it had more to say, though. Witnesses is all about its gimmick of how the story is told, and the new revelations that we get throughout the movie often felt like window dressing, while the Brazilian movie is just telling a good story. WINNER: BRAZIL

The vast majority of the good foreign films I've watched for my World Cup thread aren't on Netflix, but two exceptions are Abel and Moscow, Belgium.

Finished reading my book. I'm glad for the extra week, though.

Here's yet another anthology of horror shorts. 4 of them, directed by Nacho Vigalondo, Max Landis (who wrote Chronicle), Ti West and Jason Eisener. This is to promote The Conjuring, I guess. All the shorts center on the time 3:07 am. http://youtu.be/FtyEPAsAxDQ

I've got a camping trip this weekend, which means I'll be on the road Friday afternoon, which means the next update will be late. Expect it on Sunday evening.

SWEDEN VS. IRAN One of the first things we see in As It Is In Heaven is a conductor, Daniel (played by Michael Nyqvist, who went on to star as Mikael Blomkvist in the Swedish Girl With The Dragon Tattoo trilogy) in the middle of directing an orchestra, drenched in sweat and with blood running down his face, since he's gotten a nosebleed in the middle of the piece. It's a really powerful image, but it's bad news for Daniel. He's been taking his work - music - way too seriously, and it's made him pretty famous, but in the interest of his health, he's got to take a break from everything. Daniel decides to move back to the small town he lived in as a boy. It's not all positive memories, since the reason he and his mother moved out in the first place was because he was being bullied, but it'll hopefully get him out of the public eye for a while. Once he's gotten settled in, a few people recognize him, and somewhat against his will, he's coaxed into becoming the director of the church choir. There's a scene where he's listening to them perform for the first time, says they're pretty good, and you're not sure if he really thinks they're good or if he's just saying that because he knows he's not supposed to be stressing out over music. Anyway, it's a given that the choir's going to get better with a world-class conductor in charge, but a lot of the choir members have big problems in their lives. Also, Daniel starts falling in love with Lena, one of the choir members, which a few people strongly disapprove of. There was a lot to like here. I mentioned that it captivated me right from the start. It's never, ever even remotely boring. The characters all have vibrant personalities, and it's very good at making us like and dislike the appropriate people. I found myself wanting things to work out with Daniel and Lena. As it was in Son of the Bride, the idea of being consumed by your work was very relatable to me. And no individual story is handled unrealistically. The bad parts generally have to do with the movie drifting over the line and becoming melodramatic and hokey. A few of the choir members' problems are dropped on us out of nowhere, and it starts to reach a point of diminishing returns. In back-to-back scenes, Daniel has a murder-suicide threat delivered by one character who's waving a shotgun around, and then gets beaten bloody by another over a completely separate issue. That's a pretty bad day by any definition. And it just seems sometimes that characters are having the most dramatic reaction possible (and the script seems more at fault than the actors). The ending, as well, might work for some people more than others. It was a little too over the top for me to be fully on board with it. Baran starts off with a (very helpful!) message explaining that the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in the late 1970s, and many Afghan refugees fled to Iran and are still there today. So, we're on a construction site, with a lot of illegally hired Afghan workers, who have to actually run and hide whenever a building inspector shows up. One of those workers, Najaf, falls out of a second-story window of the building they're working on, and breaks his leg. He's not going to be able to work, but his family still needs money, so he sends one of his children, Rahmat, to fill in for him. It becomes clear pretty quickly that Rahmat isn't cut out for construction work. They end up allowing him to swap jobs with Lateef, a teenage Turkish boy who does lighter work, mostly making tea for everyone. Lateef is bitter that the son of an Afghan refugee took his job, so that's where the conflict arises. But there's a lot more to this story. The movie is fairly low-budget. Like, I have no doubt that they're shooting it on an actual construction site rather than having built a set. They do drop in some unexpected aerial shots, though, and they make the most of what little special effects they've got (like slow motion). Also, I got the impression that a lot of scenes must have been done in, if not one take, then very few takes. Stuff like holes getting punched in walls, or things being dropped on people. If time and money are considerations, then you realistically couldn't do those scenes very many times. Yet, nothing even looks like it needed to be done more than once. The actor playing Lateef isn't the greatest, as the way he delivers dialogue is pretty wooden. There's a scene where he's crying, and there's no way those aren't fake tears. But he throws himself into any physical scene with a huge amount of enthusiasm. There are some brief fight scenes, and he just hurls himself into them. That's fun to watch. Ultimately, I liked this more than the other two Iranian movies I've seen this year. I was on board with the story, and it seemed like I was just going to have to wait around a little and it would eventually get really good. But somewhere around the halfway point, it meandered into a direction that I didn't really enjoy. It seemed to espouse this philosophy that as long as you're a good person, you can feel good about that, regardless of whether you achieve anything else that you want in life. It just felt kind of spineless and unsatisfying to me. It's not where I wanted things to go. This isn't the easiest choice, because there were things I liked and disliked about both. As It Is In Heaven has both the better high points and the worse low points, and that makes it more memorable. There was a temptation to throw Baran a bone here for being the best Iranian movie, but I can't do it. WINNER: SWEDEN

Bring back scramble matches!

GERMANY VS. SOUTH KOREA The Oscar-nominated Sophie Scholl: The Final Days continues the streak of Nazis showing up in the German movies. Here, they are front and center. In 1943, with the Nazis just having lost the Battle of Stalingrad, Sophie Scholl is part of the German White Rose student organization, who are printing and distributing anti-Nazi leaflets. Sophie and her brother Hans go to the University of Munich campus early in the morning to distribute the leaflets, but are caught and charged with treason. A huge chunk of time, nearly an hour, is devoted to Sophie's interrogation by Gestapo investigator Robert Mohr. Hans is presumably being interrogated elsewhere, but we never see that. I like both those things in theory. Sophie starts off by denying that she was distributing the leaflets at all, and piles lies on top of lies as Mohr tries to take apart her story. Eventually that peters out, and we end up with sort of a philosophical discussion as Mohr tries to get at Sophie's motivations. All of that, while not bad, isn't especially great either. I'm guessing very few people would really want to see Sophie lie her way out of the situation, and showing a debate with a Nazi sympathizer seems a little pointless since it's so obvious who's right and who's wrong. No one's going to reconsider their opinions on the Holocaust. It doesn't help that Mohr is dressed in a grey suit and red bow tie, reminiscent of Pee-Wee Herman, and goes through a raft of very dour and snide facial expressions. There's value in seeing how Sophie sticks to her beliefs, even when faced with death. It seemed to me that a lot of that courage was coming from faith in God and an afterlife, and that's going to mean more to some people than others. Then in the next scene, a sham trial attended entirely by German soldiers, with the judge basically just lecturing Sophie, Hans, and one other man, we see that it wouldn't even have made a difference whether or not she stood up to anyone. The third man on trial recants all his statements and pleads with the judge to spare him, and he still gets put to death. So it's not like Sophie refused to take the easy way out. There was no easy way out. The title pretty much advertises that Sophie's going to be put to death, and the only suspense lies in the method of execution. The whole thing is just a slow march to the end. Holocaust movies can be more than that (The Counterfeiters is one example); this wasn't. This wasn't as bad as I may be making it sound, but for whatever reason, I'm mostly coming up with negative things to say about it. In The Chaser, Joong-ho is a former cop and current pimp. Business is bad, with several of his girls having gone missing. He starts to notice a pattern, that all the missing girls have been seeing the same guy, and he's just sent one more girl to that same person. It turns out that the women are being murdered. I knew that much going in. From the title, I was expecting the pimp would spend most of the movie pursuing the killer. The chase ends up being pretty brief, though, and the police quickly get involved. So it was different than what I expected, but that's fine. Unpredictable can be good. I was always wondering where they were going next, and that kept me on my toes. The acting and cinematography were good too. You may be thinking there's a "...but" coming here, and here it is. After the first scene where the police show up, I was thinking they handled things pretty poorly, but I could come up with a different scene where the police didn't do such a bad job and still ended up at the same point. So I kind of let that slide, but it just kept getting worse. If you're interrogating a suspected serial killer and trying to antagonize him with questions, wouldn't it be a good idea to have him handcuffed to a solid object? Why should one guy wielding the first thing he was able to pick up even be able to come anywhere near escaping a group of like fifty policemen? How is it possible to waste all kinds of time being idiots when you've got a killer in custody, you're correctly assuming you'll find dead bodies at his house, and you have a rough idea what neighborhood he lives in? I had to check if the South Korean police are really that bad, and apparently they are, as difficult as it is to believe that well-meaning people can perform that poorly. (Not that this makes them bad in and of itself, but apparently they very, very rarely fire their guns when on duty, which somewhat helps explain how one guy could have a chance at escaping many.) That doesn't make it a good movie, though. I'd find it more believable if it was just one bad cop, like in Memories of Murder, but it's everyone. And no one on the police force is really developed all that well as a character, so it just feels like some faceless force that's constantly screwing things up. By the time they got to the pivotal convenience store scene, which requires a pretty big coincidence (the second in the movie) plus multiple people having jello where their brains should be, I wasn't feeling sorry for anyone when things turned out poorly. I was just thinking "It's too bad all these people are so stupid." They had things set up well, I wanted to like it, and then the police showed up and ruined everything. So clearly I had big problems with both movies. The Chaser feels like it was more of a waste, though, in terms of squandered potential. You can at least look at the German movie as being worthwhile for historical purposes. WINNER: GERMANY

BELGIUM VS. FRANCE Fear and Trembling is based on the autobiography of writer Amélie Nothomb, who spent the first five years of her life in Japan and then moved to Belgium. She feels an attachment to Japan, moves back there when "almost an adult" (I'm assuming somewhere in her twenties?), and gets an office job at some global corporation. The movie's about her job - in fact, nearly the entire runtime is spent in the office. Most of the few times we leave are in Amélie's imagination. If she has a life in Japan outside of her job, it's not shown here. Amélie speaks fluent Japanese, but seems to be the only white person working in the building, and also seems to be at the very bottom of the totem pole. It's not easy to get ahead in a job in an unfamiliar culture, and some of Amélie's co-workers are sympathetic to her plight, but the ones that matter are generally not. So there are a lot of angry Japanese people in this movie. Mr. Omochi, the company's vice-president, is like a mountain in human form, and that mountain frequently erupts. Mr. Saito, one level down from Omochi, is a balding office drone, but he certainly knows how to yell. And then there's Miss Mori, Amélie's immediate superior, who Amélie adores, and gets along with her pretty well until things go sour. The easy comparison here is Office Space plus a cultural barrier. You're going to be thinking "How has this person not been fired yet?" in both movies, but it's not a dead-on comparison because Amélie is trying extremely hard at her job, with loyalty to her corporation that's on par with a puppy that's just been rescued from a shelter or something. Also I think Office Space worked for most people because it was so familiar to them, and Fear and Trembling is all about unfamiliarity. Japanese management figures seem to react in very random ways. There were office problems that I've seen in real life, but they were handled in ways I've never seen. How do you occupy an underling who has nothing important to do? Apparently you give them a simple task and keep telling them they're doing it wrong until they've spent an entire day doing it over and over. I guess real life doesn't always arrange itself into a neat little story, but the character arc was pretty lacking here. It seemed like things only got worse and worse for Amélie. The bottom of the totem pole somehow keeps getting lower. If there's a lesson, I suppose it's not to get so focused on one goal that you lose sight of everything else. Or maybe it's just that you shouldn't let your job take over your life. Moscow, Belgium is currently selling on Amazon for the bargain price of five thousand dollars. It's about a mother of three, Matty, separated from her husband, Werner. On her way out of a grocery store parking lot, Matty backs into a truck, which is being driven by a man named Johnny. They get into a fight. Johnny has a receding hairline with a beard, and he's wearing a tank top, and Matty is starting to show her age a bit and has wavy blonde hair... I guess what I'm trying to say is that this looked like half of an ABBA reunion. Eventually Johnny changes his tune and starts trying to talk his way into a date. But there are a few reasons why this wouldn't work out - he's 29 and Matty is 41, and Matty's got the family, and her estranged husband is far from out of the picture, and there's some other stuff too. Of course, if Matty didn't give him a chance, there'd be no movie. Surprisingly, I liked this quite a bit. The plot is nothing special, and the actors aren't especially attractive, so I wouldn't have guessed that I'd enjoy it. But there were enough good scenes. There are three good fight scenes (verbal fights - the first one is in the grocery store parking lot), and there's a karaoke scene that I really liked. And the moment where the movie really started to win me over was the moment where Johnny started to win Matty over, when they're walking around after their first date. I was almost starting to think there was no way anyone couldn't like this movie. Things eventually get a little iffy, though. Matty has to choose between Johnny and getting back together with Werner, and both guys have their bad points. It was starting to get to the point where she just goes back and forth too many times. I had been sympathizing with Matty for quite a while, which says something, because when a girl rejects a guy, I would tend to take the guy's side. It's probably because the movie spends quite a bit of time letting us see inside Matty's head, with scenes where she's checking herself out in a mirror, and reminiscing about how perfect things used to be with her husband. But I think, eventually, any viewer is going to lose a bit of respect for her. This could be another instance where I'd like to get a female viewpoint, just to see if a woman can relate to what Matty is going through and what she does. Oddly, death is something of a minor theme here. It keeps popping up. None of the characters actually die, but there's a minor character whose job is apparently to notify the next-of-kin when someone dies, and another who wants to go into palliative care because people are more "real" when they're dying. Maybe it's meant to show that, even though Matty's only in her early forties, she's becoming aware that she doesn't have forever to find someone, and a man's bad points become a little more tolerable. Fear and Trembling was just okay, and Moscow, Belgium was very good. It may not be worth five thousand dollars, but it's good enough for the win here. And Belgium comes out on top in the Group of Death! WINNER: BELGIUM

SOUTHERN CONE VS. RUSSIA This was interesting. A battle of movies focusing on loners. The central character of Silent Souls, Aist, tells us that he's just over 40 and has no family. He doesn't seem to have many friends, either, and spends most of his time alone, writing. His boss' wife, Tanya, has just died, and the boss, Miron, tells Aist that he wants to cremate Tanya in a traditional fashion rather than sending her to a morgue. He wants to do this where they had their honeymoon, so, road trip! With a corpse in the back seat! There's quite a bit of voice-over narration from Aist at the beginning, and if it had kept up it would have been a very wordy movie, but he's pretty quiet from that point on. Most of the dialogue is from Miron talking about his deceased wife. Aist owns two birds, which he and his boss bring along on their trip (in a cage) since they'll be away for several days, and it's a good thing they were there to chirp away, otherwise there would have been a decent amount of dead silence. The mood is dreary, but not really depressing. No one seems unhappy, exactly. There's a kind of acceptance. Late in the movie, Aist describes it better than I can: "I felt sad and pure. But the sadness didn't press on me. It enveloped me like a mother." There's a lot of mundane nothingness, as things run just about according to plan, but once in a while there'll be something that makes you sit up and take notice. The cremation itself is one of those moments. Up to that point, the color palette has been mostly either very pale colors or very dark colors. But they wrap Tanya in a blanket, douse it with alcohol, and set her ablaze, and of course the fire is brighter than anything we've seen to that point. And the music up until that point has been this quiet New Age chanting, but as the fire burns it too becomes like nothing we've ever heard, these crazy spiralling violins, and Miron walks away from the fire looking like he doesn't understand why any of this had to happen and it's almost too much to handle and then it's OVER. They're cleaning up the ashes. And then there's the women that Aist and Miron run into afterwards. The Wiki article says they're prostitutes, which wasn't exactly spelled out in the movie but it would make a lot of sense. It's a pretty quick scene but it's just presented in such a bizarre, unearthly manner, which might be because pleasure has become so foreign to Aist. There are a couple more notable moments that I won't spoil. Given that the whole movie is just 75 minutes, there were enough of those moments to push me into liking it. The central character of Gigante, Jara, is a gentle giant type who lives alone. His weekday job is a security guard at a supermarket, one of those deals where you sit in a room and watch the security cameras on a monitor. His shift starts at 11 pm, when the supermarket is closed, so the only people he's watching are the employees as they clean up and restock the shelves. Jara develops a fixation (I couldn't bring myself to write "falls in love") with one of the cleaning staff, Julia, but is too shy to actually talk to her. And why bother talking to her when you can just watch her on the monitors? I'd like a woman's perspective on this one, actually. It's difficult to talk about what happens without making Jara sound awful. He happens to see Julia on a weekend, figures out where she lives, and pretty soon he's spending whole weekends just following her around. It's stalking in the most literal sense. But, at least in my opinion, they managed to avoid making him seem creepy. It's a bit of a tightrope to walk, and if it doesn't work for you then the movie's probably not going to work for you, but it worked for me. It probably helps that Jara's portrayed as someone who's helpful and generally does the right thing. Don't get me wrong, though, I definitely wanted him to stop following her and start talking to her. There's no audio on the security camera footage, and Jara has no reason to be talking when he's alone, which he is most of the time. So the story frequently has to be told without words. This is very well done, as we hear Jara's breath quickening at points when he's watching the monitor. There's also a great scene where Jara follows Julia into a movie theatre and clearly (but wordlessly) spends a lot of time debating between the movie he thinks Julia would've gone into and the movie he really wants to see. In spite of the lack of meaningful human interaction, I didn't think it was boring. Although he probably doesn't feel all that powerful, Jara's in a kind of all-seeing, godlike position with all those cameras, and that makes for some interesting goings-on. And he's a metal fan, so a lot of scenes are either accompanied by full-volume metal or muted metal when he's listening through headphones, which is pretty funny. On top of that, there's this western sort of theme they play a couple of times whenever Jara decides to actually man up and do something. The cinematography is worth noting. In the supermarket, there's an electric, fluorescent, humming glow to everything, not so prevalent as to be annoying, but not the kind of thing you'd want going on all the time. But then when Jara's at home, everything feels drab and washed out from the lack of that lighting. It probably symbolizes Jara's dissatisfaction with his life - and notice, when he gets outside, even though it's for stalking purposes, the lighting problem goes away. The cremation scene in Silent Souls is better than anything in Gigante, but if you take out that scene, what remains of Silent Souls is either nothing special or very strange, and Gigante is way ahead. It's telling that, outside of that one scene, I felt less sympathy for Miron, who had lost his spouse, than I did for Jara, whose problem was just that he couldn't get past his own shyness (although it could just be a case of what I find more relatable). I'd be recommending Gigante to other people over Silent Souls, too, so I guess my choice is made. WINNER: SOUTHERN CONE

I'm going to pick this back up from the start of the third round of group play. Standings at end of group play: GROUP A Argentina 2-1, +18 Poland 2-1, +9 United Kingdom 1-2, -13 Israel 1-2, -14 GROUP B Hong Kong 2-1, +5 Czech Republic 2-1, -4 Norway 1-2, +12 Italy 1-2, -13 GROUP C Japan 2-1, +36 Asia 121°E 2-1, +8 China 2-1, +2 Eastern Europe 0-3, -46 GROUP D Northern Europe 3-0, +18 India 2-1, +3 Mexico 1-2, -8 Central Europe 0-3, -13 GROUP E Belgium 3-0, +42 France 2-1, -7 Denmark 1-2, -24 Spain 0-3, -11 GROUP F Mediterranean Union 2-1, +28 Slavic Europe 2-1, +5 Africa 1-2, +8 Brazil 1-2, -41 GROUP G Germany 3-0, +10 South Korea 2-1, +34 Southern Cone 1-2, -9 Russia 0-3, -35 GROUP H Sweden 3-0, +21 Canada 2-1, +9 Southeast Asia 1-2, +2 Iran 0-3, -32 First round of group play (winners in bold): Group A UNITED KINGDOM: Millions [boyle, 2004] vs. POLAND: Big Animal [stuhr, 2000] ARGENTINA: Bolivia [Caetano, 2001] vs. ISRAEL: Lemon Tree [Riklis, 2008] Group B ITALY: Le Quattro Volte [Frammartino, 2010] vs. HONG KONG: A Simple Life [Hui, 2011] CZECH REPUBLIC: Beauty In Trouble [Hrebejk, 2006] vs. NORWAY: King Of Devil's Island [Holst, 2011] Group C CHINA: Devils on the Doorstep [Jiang, 2000] vs. JAPAN: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time [Hosoda, 2006] EASTERN EUROPE: The World Is Big & Salvation Lurks Around The Corner [Komandarev, 2008] vs. ASIA 121°E: Service [Mendoza, 2008] Group D CENTRAL EUROPE: Kontroll [Antal, 2003] vs. NORTHERN EUROPE: Omagh [Travis, 2004] MEXICO: Abel [Luna, 2010] vs. INDIA: Eklavya: The Royal Guard [Chopra, 2007] Group E DENMARK: We Shall Overcome [Oplev, 2005] vs. BELGIUM: Gilles' Wife [Fonteyne, 2004] FRANCE: Read My Lips [Audiard, 2001] vs. SPAIN: Take My Eyes [bollaín, 2003] Group F AFRICA: Abouna [Haroun, 2002] vs. SLAVIC EUROPE: Mirage [Ristovski, 2004] BRAZIL: 2 Filhos De Francisco [silveira, 2005] vs. MEDITERRANEAN UNION: Scheherazade, Tell Me A Story [Nasrallah, 2009] Group G GERMANY: Nowhere In Africa [Link, 2001] vs. SOUTHERN CONE: Bonsai [Jiménez, 2011] RUSSIA: The Italian [Kravchuk, 2005] vs. SOUTH KOREA: Woman On The Beach [Hong, 2006] Group H SWEDEN: The Ape [Ganslandt, 2009] vs. SOUTHEAST ASIA: Beautiful Boxer [uekrongtham, 2004] CANADA: Water [Mehta, 2005] vs. IRAN: Ten [Kiarostami, 2002] Second round of group play: Group A UNITED KINGDOM: Last Resort [Pawlikowski, 2000] vs. ARGENTINA: Son of the Bride [Campanella, 2001] POLAND: Tricks [Jakimowski, 2007] vs. ISRAEL: Broken Wings [bergman, 2003] Group B ITALY: The Best Of Youth [Giordana, 2005] vs. CZECH REPUBLIC: Empties [sverak, 2007] HONG KONG: Election [To, 2005] vs. NORWAY: Elling [Naess, 2001] Group C CHINA: Still Life [Jia, 2006] vs. EASTERN EUROPE: Zift [Gardev, 2008] JAPAN: Still Walking [Koreeda, 2008] vs. ASIA 121°E: Crying Ladies [Meily, 2003] Group D CENTRAL EUROPE: Hukkle [Pálfi, 2002] vs. MEXICO: Miss Bala [Naranjo, 2011] NORTHERN EUROPE: Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale [Helander, 2010] vs. INDIA: Three Idiots [Hirani, 2009] Group E DENMARK: Italian For Beginners [scherfig, 2001] vs. FRANCE: La Moustache [Carrere, 2005] BELGIUM: L'Enfant [Dardenne Brothers, 2006] vs. SPAIN: El Bola [Mañas, 2000] Group F AFRICA: Teza [Gerima, 2008] vs. BRAZIL: The Year My Parents Went On Vacation [Hamburger, 2006] SLAVIC EUROPE: The Border Post [Grlic, 2006] vs. MEDITERRANEAN UNION: Times And Winds [Erdem, 2006] Group G GERMANY: North Face [stolzl, 2008] vs. RUSSIA: Russian Ark [sokurov, 2002] SOUTHERN CONE: Machuca [Wood, 2004] vs. SOUTH KOREA: Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood Of War [Kang, 2004] Group H SWEDEN: Faithless [ullmann, 2000] vs. CANADA: Brand Upon The Brain! [Maddin, 2006] SOUTHEAST ASIA: Ong-Bak [Pinkaew, 2003] vs. IRAN: Iron Island [Rasoulof, 2005] Third round of group play: Group A UNITED KINGDOM: Red Road [Arnold, 2006] vs. ISRAEL: Footnote [Cedar, 2011] POLAND: Katyn [Wajda, 2007] vs. ARGENTINA: Intimate Stories [sorin, 2002] Group B ITALY: I'm Not Scared [salvatores, 2003] vs. NORWAY: Happy, Happy [sewitsky, 2011] HONG KONG: 2046 [Wong, 2004] vs. CZECH REPUBLIC: Zelary [Trojan, 2003] Group C CHINA: Blind Shaft [Li, 2003] vs. ASIA 121E: The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros [solito, 2005] JAPAN: Caterpillar [Wakamatsu, 2011] vs. EASTERN EUROPE: 12:08 East of Bucharest [Porumboiu, 2006] Group D CENTRAL EUROPE: Werckmeister Harmonies [Tarr/Hranitzky, 2000] vs. INDIA: Devdas [bhansali, 2002] NORTHERN EUROPE: Bloody Sunday [Greengrass, 2002] vs. MEXICO: Nora's Will [Chenillo, 2009] Group E DENMARK: Applause [Zandvliet, 2009] vs. SPAIN: The Perfect Crime [de la Iglesia, 2004] BELGIUM: Moscow, Belgium [Van Rompaey, 2008] vs. FRANCE: Fear And Trembling [Corneau, 2003] Group F AFRICA: Days Of Glory [bouracheb, 2006] vs. MEDITERRANEAN UNION: 678 [Diab, 2010] SLAVIC EUROPE: Witnesses [bresan, 2003] vs. BRAZIL: Elite Squad: The Enemy Within [Padilha, 2010] Group G GERMANY: Sophie Scholl: The Final Days [Rothemund, 2005] vs. SOUTH KOREA: The Chaser [Na, 2008] SOUTHERN CONE: Gigante [biniez, 2009] vs. RUSSIA: Silent Souls [Fedorchenko, 2011] Group H SWEDEN: As It Is In Heaven [Pollak, 2004] vs. IRAN: Baran [Majidi, 2001] SOUTHEAST ASIA: Buffalo Boy [Nguyen-Vo, 2004] vs. CANADA: The Snow Walker [smith, 2003] Final 2: Round of 16: ARGENTINA: Liverpool [Alonso, 2008] vs. CZECH REPUBLIC: I Served The King of England [Menzel, 2008] JAPAN: Confessions [Nakashima, 2010] vs. INDIA: Rang De Basanti [Mehra, 2005] BELGIUM: Amer [Cattet/Forzani, 2009] vs. SLAVIC EUROPE: Grbavica [Zbanic, 2006] GERMANY: Downfall [Hirschbiegel, 2004] vs. CANADA: The Barbarian Invasions [Arcand, 2003] POLAND: Essential Killing [skolimowski, 2010] vs. HONG KONG: Love In The Buff [Ho-Cheung, 2012] ASIA 121E: Yi Yi: A One And A Two [Yang, 2000] vs. NORTHERN EUROPE: The Seagull's Laughter [Guðmundsson, 2001] FRANCE: Blame It On Fidel [Gavras, 2006] vs. MEDITERRANEAN UNION: Honey [Kaplanoglu, 2010] SOUTH KOREA: I'm A Cyborg, But That's OK [Park, 2008] vs. SWEDEN: Everlasting Moments [Troell, 2008] Round of 8: CZECH REPUBLIC: Autumn Spring [Michalek, 2002] vs. INDIA: Lagaan: Once Upon A Time In India [Gowariker, 2001] BELGIUM: Pauline & Paulette [Debrauwer, 2001] vs. GERMANY: The Tunnel [Richter, 2001] POLAND: In Darkness [Holland, 2011] vs. ASIA 121E: Three Times [Hou, 2005] MEDITERRANEAN UNION: Caramel [Labaki, 2007] vs. SOUTH KOREA: 3-Iron [Kim, 2004] Semi-finals: INDIA: Fanaa [Kohli, 2006] vs. GERMANY: Good Bye Lenin! [becker, 2002] POLAND: Retrieval [Fabicki, 2006] vs. SOUTH KOREA: Poetry [Lee, 2010] Finals: GERMANY: Requiem [schmid, 2006] vs. SOUTH KOREA: Mother [bong, 2009]