After a week off for the annual Oscar Showcase tour, This Weekend’s Film Festival is back with a great lineup of some of the best documentaries from 2008. We have the Oscar winner and fellow nominees. If you saw the Oscar ceremony and saw, Philippe Petit balance the statuette on his chin, you know a bit of what you have in store. The films this week take us to great heights to Antarctica and around the globe to debate religion. Other films look at real lives — one about a famous movie director and the other about a baby boy whose mother murdered his father. The cliché is right — life is stranger than fiction. Find out why.
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Early on in comedian Bill Maher’s documentary on religion, he debates the existence of God with a group of truckers at a makeshift chapel at a truckstop, and one of truckers gets angry at Maher for denying his God and storms out. If you’re that guy, stop reading this review. If you’re like the other truckers who stay to debate Maher, or are like Maher and doubt the existence of God then keep reading and better yet see this film.

Maher, the host of the HBO talk show, REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER, is not shy about his agnostic beliefs, or more so, his fear that religion can’t predict the end of the world, but might just lead us there. His film talks to many people of many faiths about their beliefs, throwing out insightful counters to their dogmatic way of seeing things. He talks equal pokes at most religions from Christians to Jews to Muslims to Mormons to Scientologists. Eastern religions get a pass this time, but it leaves room for the sequel, I guess. However, Maher isn’t afraid to give praise when someone makes a good argument. A Jesus re-enactor at a Florida Bible amusement park describes the Holy Trinity as God is in three forms just like water can be a liquid, a solid and a gas. The argument doesn’t persuade Maher, but he admits it’s a great analogy.

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Clint Eastwood’s Oscar winner took the sheen off the Wild West, at least how the Wild West was depicted on screen. That being said, the film holds to many of the traditions of classic Westerns. Eastwood seems to be balancing between classic Western mythology and the revisionist work he did in the ’70s. Based on David Webb Peoples’ script, the film challenges the noble legends of the Western genre, showing cowboys and outlaws as savage killers. The West was a rough and lawless place. Even the law was rough and lawless. As the aging assassin, Bill Munny, Eastwood shines in the role he seemed destined to play.

Munny was a notorious killer. But he met a woman and settled down, started pig farming. When his wife died, he was left to raise his two children alone. Then one day, the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett, ROSEWOOD) rides in. The kid has heard all the tales about Munny and wants his help with an assassination job. A couple of cowboys cut up a prostitute and her friends have pooled their money to pay for revenge. Their town sheriff Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman, HOOSIERS) let the cowboys go in exchange for seven ponies to be given to the brothel owner Skinny Dubois (Anthony James, IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT), who paid good money for Delilah (Anna Thomson, BIRD), who cut up won’t earn a cent. Munny isn’t interested at first, but the money seems better than he can fetch for his sick hogs. He recruits his partner Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman, MILLION DOLLAR BABY) to help.

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The Academy missed the Best Film of 2008 this time.

In its third year, this is the first year that my top five films of the year are also the five picture picks at the RFP Overlooked Awards. The Academy and I really didn’t see eye to eye on it this year. However, that doesn’t mean the nominees for Best Picture are bad. MILK and SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE both made my top ten. I gave FROST/NIXON four stars and THE READER and THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON three and a half stars. Indie films, which so often get overlooked, were just more alive and innovative this year than the solid Hollywood films. So without further ado, here are the winners and honorable mentioned.
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Slumdog is going to be the big winner Oscar night.

The day the Academy Award nominations came out I made some early predictions on the major awards to be handed out Feb. 22, 2009. This week I run down my picks for all the categories. None of my picks have changed since nomination day, but some of my certainty might have faded. So here are my thoughts, use them as you will, and at your own risk.
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If someone simply watches the trailer for LAKEVIEW TERRACE, one would think its just another “from hell” thriller retread, only this time it’s a cop from hell and neighbor from hell combined. Because the film follows the subgenre’s structure closely, I believe many critics walked in looking for reasons to disregard it and found them there. However, what I believe has been overlooked is what director Neil LaBute and writers David Loughery and Howard Korder filled the structure with. There are some deep race relations issues that are touched on that are rarely addressed honestly. While the film looks like a cliché from a distance, it’s not when you look inside.

Chris and Lisa Mattson (Patrick Wilson, LITTLE CHILDREN, & Kerry Washington, THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND) are a young successful interracial couple who have just bought their first house in the affluent Lakeview Terrace neighborhood of Los Angeles. Their next-door neighbor is Abel Turner (Samuel L. Jackson, PULP FICTION), a cop and single father of two. Abel doesn’t like them from the start, but he tries to give them a chance. However, any annoyance quickly make him support his hate for them. Their disagreements will turn into petty revenges and eventually lead to an all-out war.

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Michael Haneke’s nearly identical remake of his 1997 Austrian film by the same name is very hard to review. It’s not like a typical Americanization of a foreign film because it’s being done by the original director and the story, even shots, remain much the same. It’s not like Gus Van Sant’s remake of PSYCHO, because Haneke isn’t redoing Hitchcock, he’s doing what Hitchcock did when the legendary director remade THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH. I found the original FUNNY GAME thought provoking and provocative. So if this new version is virtually the same thing, why should I like it any differently?

The story is a simple home invasion horror tale. Well it seems that way at first. Ann (Naomi Watts, MULHOLLAND DRIVE), her husband George (Tim Roth, RESERVOIR DOGS) and their young son Georgie (Devon Gearhart, BOBBY JONES: STROKE OF GENIUS) take a summer trip to their lake front cabin. While Ann is preparing dinner, a young man dressed all in white, including white gloves, named Peter (Brady Corbet, MYSTERIOUS SKIN) shows up wanting to borrow some eggs. The family had been introduced to the young man and his friend Paul (Michael Pitt, HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH) by their neighbor earlier in the day, yet something seems strange about this awkward young man, who has a knack for breaking things. When Paul shows up, his pushiness annoys Ann. When George finally asks them to leave, Paul strikes him with a golf club, and so begins the young men’s sick game of mental torture on the family.

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The tagline for this film is “8 strangers. 8 points of view. 1 truth.” The gimmick of this thriller is that we watch the events following a presidential assassination attempt from the vantage points of various characters. Each retelling of the event gives us a bit more information. But one truth, really? Truth is subjective, and the truth is the gimmick wore out its welcome right as the screenplay exploded from being hit with a megaton bomb of stupidity.

Our first point of view is that of a news crew covering the peace conference in Spain where U.S. President Ashton (William Hunt, KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN) will be speaking. Reporter Angie Jones (Zoe Saldana, TERMINAL) and producer Rex Brooks (Sigourney Weaver, ALIEN) argue about what the real story is — the conference or the protestors lined up against Ashton’s visit. Then all hell breaks loose. We’ll see the same events from the points of view of the following characters. Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid, FAR FROM HEAVEN) is a secret service agent on his first mission since taking a bullet for the president. Kent Taylor (Mathew Fox, TV’s LOST) is his right hand man. Howard Lewis (Forest Whitaker, THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND) is a spectator videotaping the festivities. Enrique (Eduardo Noriega, THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE) is a Spanish police officer tasked with protecting the town’s mayor. Suarez (Said Taghmaoui, THREE KINGS) is a terrorist who is marveled by American arrogance.

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Tom Tykwer showed great promise with his breakout thriller RUN, LOLA RUN. With his latest thriller, he shows great ambition. While this ambition gets in the way of perfect pacing at times, I was still riveted to every moment. Even when the film dips into cliché, it finds a way to twist the standard or execute it in a superior way. A lot of good films ride along on the strength of the screenplay and the actors. This film rises above its problems on the energy of its skilled director.

Louis Salinger (Clive Owen, CLOSER) is an Interpol agent investigating the illegal dealings of the international bank IBBC. He and his partner in the New York DA’s office have turned a top exec at the bank. Then his partner is assassinated right in front of him. He calls in Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts, MULHOLLAND DRIVE), the lead DA in NYC, for back up in helping him convince authorities in Germany to change the death from a heart attack to murder. But when they bring up IBBC, their efforts go nowhere. Then the inside man turns up dead. One lead brings them to arms dealer Umberto Calvini (Luca Barbareschi), who is assassinated. Salinger becomes increasingly frazzled when each lead is squashed by the bank’s long reach.

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THE BAND’S VISIT created some press during the 2008 Oscar season when the Academy denied it as Israel’s official entry for Best Foreign Language film. When it comes to how the Academy deals with foreign language films, I’ve written on numerous occasions that it’s greatly flawed, but this time it’s hard to argue against their point of view. The film has less subtitled dialogue than some episodes American TV dramas. This means little to the merits of the film, but does draw attention to its accessibility. The subtitle adverse should not be scared of this charming, lighthearted comedy on relations between Israelis and Arabs. This human story crosses cultural boundaries with ease, and English plays a part in doing so.

An Egyptian police band has traveled to Israel to perform at the opening of a new Arab cultural center. No one shows up at the airport, so they’re on their own. The group of uniformed men ends up on the wrong bus, which drops them off in a very small town in the middle of nowhere. Their leader Lieutenant-colonel Tawfiq Zacharya (Sasson Gabai, RAMBO III) is a stiff, stern, proper man, who at first has trouble accepting the help of Israeli café owner Dina (Ronit Elkabetz, LATE MARRIAGE). Because there are no hotels in the town, she sets it up with her friends to take in a few of the band members each. She wants Tawfiq, and he won’t stay anywhere where he can’t keep his eye on the youngest member of the band and resident ladies man Haled (Saleh Bakri).

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