the counterfeiters Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Stefan Ruzowitzky's The Counterfeiters tells the true story of a Nazi plot to flood the US and UK with forged currency, using concentration camp prisoners to do the dirty deeds. Christopher Campbell thought it was "not quite a great film," while Kim Voynar wrote: "At its core, this is a film about courage and morality." Critical consensus overall was 94% positive, according to Rotten Tomatoes. The DVD includes an audio commentary by the director, deleted scenes, a "making of," interviews, and more. The film is also available on Blu-ray.

Set some two decades after the events in The Counterfeiters, the much lighter, sentimental My Brother is an Only Child "follows two brothers through years of Italian history," wrote James Rocchi. Though comparisons to the more ambitious and effective period family drama The Best of Youth might be inevitable, James said My Brother is still "a handsomely made, brightly charming pleasure in its own right." The DVD appears to be a bare-bones edition without any extras.

First broadcast on network television in November 1982, The Executioner's Song left a very strong impression on me. Career criminal Gary Gilmore (Tommy Lee Jones in a powerful performance) tries to go straight, taking up with young Nicole Baker (Rosanna Arquette in a startling, sexy, star-making role) before returning to crime and eventually killing two people in brutal fashion. Sentenced to die, Gilmore insisted on paying the ultimate penalty as speedily as possible.

(ed. note: This post was accidentally published at 1AM, instead of 1PM, so we're re-publishing it at the correct time.)

I've been thinking about the largely negative response to Wong Kar-wai's My Blueberry Nights (6 screens), a film I quite liked. As of today it's at 43% on Rotten Tomatoes, though it opens wider this weekend (including here in the Bay Area) and more reviews are surely coming in. Most critics I've spoken with around here likewise didn't think much of it. What are the reasons for all this disappointment? The main reason has to do with its weight. It's a lightweight movie, a trifle, flimsy, vapid, thin, etc. Wong is considered one of the world's greatest filmmakers, a maker of "weighty" works of art, and so this "lighter" film is beneath him. It's a letdown, a step backward.

Well, I say that's nonsense. Many great filmmakers dallied in lightweight, lesser trifles during their careers, and it didn't make them any less great. Martin Scorsese has made lots of them. After Hours (1985) and The Color of Money (1986) may not pack the punch of Raging Bull, but they are quite enjoyable, and pure Scorsese. (His current Shine a Light, 277 screens, feels like a trifle.) Fritz Lang came to the United States from a position of great power and unlimited resources in Germany and found himself assigned cheap crime pictures. Yet few critics today would complain about the "lightness" of The Big Heat or Scarlet Street. Max Ophuls also made crime films in Hollywood (Caught and The Reckless Moment), and his reputation remains intact. Some consider John Ford the greatest American director of all time, and even though his goofball Donovan's Reef (1963) isn't counted among his classics, I love it just as much. It has moments of great beauty that reflect its maker's personality. My Blueberry Nights may not stand up to In the Mood for Love, but it's unquestionably a Wong Kar-wai film.

Not many people care to admit it, but Hollywood is run by fear. Fear is an emotion generated by things that are not known or understood, and in the movie business, no one ever knows what's going to happen. (William Goldman was right when he said, "Nobody Knows Anything.") All those accountants, producers, publicists, entertainment TV shows, ad campaigns, etc. are all an attempt to get a handle on the unknown, an attempt to control the uncontrollable. Anything can happen. The world's biggest movie star can jump up and down on a couch and suddenly become a weirdo outcast. Or the star of a dismal turkey like Showgirls can turn around and find herself cast in a Woody Allen film. This fear, in essence, is why so many movies are so bad. The more investors and business people try to control their investment, the more they clamp down on it, and the more it gets smothered.

See, movies can live and breathe like an organic life form, but they have to have a chance. If brave producers step back and let the movie come to life in the hands of a genuine artist, they could wind up with something extraordinary like Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men (229 screens), a film that somehow pleased critics both highbrow and middlebrow, won a handful of Oscars and has nearly grossed $75 million. This film has already entered the cultural canon as a classic of cinema. More or less the same can be said of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (224 screens), which, having lost the Oscar for Best Picture, is now in a position of being an underrated underdog. But those are exceptions to the rule. No one is immune to the fear: a few years back the Coen Brothers teamed up with sleazy producer Brian Grazer, of all people, and came up with their first dud, Intolerable Cruelty.

Are films political? Do they fall into left-wing and right-wing camps? I would imagine that not all films have an agenda. Some films can be considered "great uniters," in that they bring together agreeing audiences from all over, films like the $200 million hits I Am Legend (264 screens) and National Treasure: Book of Secrets (177 screens) or a critical favorite like There Will Be Blood (339 screens) that has pleased nearly everyone who has seen it. Of course, There Will Be Blood is about a snaky, sinister, blustery oil baron willing to sacrifice his family, country and humanity for the allure of black gold, which may or may not have a little something to do with current events. (Not to mention that director Paul Thomas Anderson dropped the word "Oil" from the title of the source novel and replaced it with the word "Blood.")

In recent years it has been determined that film critics are a liberal bunch, educated, well-read men and women of letters, who can see and comprehend the human condition in films from different cultures all over the world. Or, they're sometimes known as pompous, ponderous, pretentious, conceited, snooty know-it-alls, lacking in good old-fashioned horse sense. "Why can't you just enjoy the movie," is a question very often asked of critics. Rambo (201 screens) is a fascinating case. It's impressively violent, but very grim and not much fun. Rambo debuted and reigned during the Reagan era (Rambo: First Blood Part II grossed three times the amount of the new film, even with 1985 ticket prices). Bringing him back in a decidedly different political atmosphere didn't seem to work, though the film was screened for the press and earned a few good reviews. It's now starting a downslide, and it's still shy of breaking even on its $50 million budget.

Faced with the prospect of checking out several new releases or luxuriating in a new print of Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt, audiences overwhelmingly chose Godard's 1963 classic. Playing at a single location (Film Forum in New York City), Contempt earned $13,100 over the weekend, according to estimates compiled by Leonard Klady of Movie City News. Distributor Rialto Pictures has the film booked at Film Forum until March 27, and then perhaps will tour the print, though no details are provided on their site.

Indie holdovers also did better than the newest offerings. David Gordon Green's Snow Angels (Warner Independent) made $8,666 per screen at three theaters in its second week out, per Box Office Mojo, while Oscar winner The Counterfeiters (Sony Pictures Classics) pulled in $6,263 per-screen at 72 locations in its fourth week. Ira Sachs' Married Life (Sony Pictures Classics), Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park (IFC) and Jacques Rivette's The Duchess of Langeais (IFC) also performed well; the first two in their second week of release, and the latter in its fourth week.

Michael Haneke's remake of his own Funny Games (Warner Independent) did very little business, grabbing just $1,800 per screen at 289 engagements, which is disappointing since our own James Rocchi called it "a great film ... it's hard to say which Funny Games stirs up more -- your guts, or your brain." Meanwhile, Bill Maher's Sleepwalking (Overture) was right behind at $1,640 per screen at 30 locations. In the review by Cinematical's Jeffrey M. Anderson, he concluded: "Worst of all is that title, which is exactly the kind of title that filmmakers should stay away from if they want to avoid a fairly obvious one-word film review."

Okay. It's time to get down to brass tacks. I'm going to get up on my soapbox and hope that the right Academy members read the column this week, because it's time to re-do the rules of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar category. Do you know how long it has been since a great film, a truly great film, won in this category? I'm talking about a film made by a genuinely great artist of the cinema, a film for the ages, and not just a perfectly good film, or a film about one of the great world wars. Here's your answer: twenty-five years ago. Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander (1983) was the last great one. That leaves 25 years of pretty good, just OK, forgettable, or flat-out awful winners (mostly forgettable). This year's winner, The Counterfeiters (41 screens) had to be one of the worst movies I saw all year; at it's center is a perfectly good (true) WWII concentration camp story, but it's warped by an entirely inept director, responsible for one of the worst movies I've ever seen, All the Queen's Men (2001). How did it win? How did it get past all the truly great films of 2007?

In a quiet post-Oscar week, Austria's The Counterfeiters (Sony Pictures Classics), winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, kept its position at the top of the charts, earning $10,050 per screen at 18 locations, according to estimates compiled by Leonard Klady at Movie City News. Klady noted that the film "doubled its playdates and box office but appears short of the commercial traction (or social vibrancy) of last year's triumphant The Lives of Others."

Chop Shop (Koch Lorber) performed very nicely at its single-theater engagement in New York City's Film Forum, grossing $8,900. Kim Voynar described it as one of her favorite films from last year's festival circuit; filmmaker Ramin Bahrani (Man Push Cart) follows a 12-year-old orphan struggling to survive on the mean streets of New York. Chop Shop continues its run at Film Forum through March 11.

Other new indie releases struggled to find audiences. Chicago 10 (Roadside Attractions), "appreciable as one of the most creative and entertaining documentary films in years," did the best, pulling in $3,030 per-screen at 14 locations. Playing on 75 screens, City of Men (Miramax), "neither as stylistically fresh nor as powerfully raw as City of God," scratched out $1,570 per engagement, while Bonneville (SenArts), "a road trip movie for spunky older chicks" starring Kathy Bates, Joan Allen and Jessica Lange, and Romulus, My Father (Magnolia Pictures), "an incredibly slow-paced film that relies on the strength of its actors to thrive" starring Eric Bana, trailed behind, earning $1,410 and $1,070 per screen, respectively, in limited engagements.

Oscar night is over, and everyone is basking in the glow of the winners. Or, excuse me, the "recipients" of the Oscars. Not too many years back, the politically-correct police changed the language from "and the winner is" to "and the Oscar goes to" because that made the losers sound less like losers. It's a joke now when someone says, "It's an honor just to be nominated," but I believe that's true. I think it would be unbelievably cool to be nominated, even if you were in the Best Documentary Short category and the bouncers tried to keep you from entering the theater. This week's column is dedicated to the losers that were honored just to be nominated.

My favorite film of the year, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which is gone from theaters and available on DVD, received two nominations and lost both, which I expected. But this is a film that, like Anthony Mann's The Naked Spur and many other Westerns, will grow in stature despite its lack of Oscars. The year's other big Western, 3:10 to Yuma, also lost its twin nominations, but will probably endure as long as there remains a small, dedicated audience for Western adventures. On the other hand, I find that very few films in the "disease of the week" genre have much life after the Oscars. But The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (161 screens) will be different, for two reasons: 1) it was actually really, very good, and 2) it didn't win anything.

Analyzing the weekend box office returns, Leonard Klady of Movie City News saw "no great Oscar box office surge," though No Country for Old Men enjoyed an upward swing; based on his estimates, Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar winner The Counterfeiters (Sony Pictures Classics) topped the indie charts. Hailing from Austria, The Counterfeiters tells "one of the most interesting stories to come out of World War II," wrote Christopher Campbell, though he felt it was "not quite a great film." The Counterfeiters averaged $12,330 per-screen at the seven locations where it played.

French master Jacques Rivette's latest, The Duchess of Langeais (IFC Films) struck Ryan Stewart as similar to La Vie en Rose "in that it works just well enough to support a dynamic performance but contains too many structural oddities, fights too many directorial idiosyncracies and stifles its own momentum too much to succeed on the whole." Rivette's fans came out at both theaters where it opened, averaging $11,250 per screen, according to Box Office Mojo.

One of the most interesting stories to come out of World War II is that of Operation Bernhard. Considered the biggest counterfeiting scheme in history, it involved a secret plot by the Nazis to flood England and the United States with enough forged currency that their respective economies would be significantly weakened. Obviously the plan failed, though by the end of the War the Germans, employing the forced labor of select concentration camp prisoners with applicable skills, had produced more than 130 million in fake notes, a minor amount of which managed to make their way into circulation.

This incredible story provides the backdrop for Stefan Ruzowitzky's The Counterfeiters, an Austrian film nominated for this year's foreign-language Academy Award. Like most movies based on a true story, though, this one is hardly 100% historically accurate and therefore isn't so much about the facts of the Operation as it is about themes of morality and "survivor's guilt" as they relate to the Holocaust. And as usual, some of the names and details have been changed to protect the sanctity of narrative complacency.