The Screengrab : lumumba

Screengrab Salutes: The Top Biopics Of All Time! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

GANDHI (1982)

After watching this 188-minute biographical epic (possibly the only first-run film I ever saw in a theater that featured an intermission), it was years before I was able to see Ben Kingsley without thinking of his most iconic role. Now, almost three decades later, I’m so familiar with Kingsley’s onscreen persona (thanks to films like Bugsy, Sexy Beast and The Wackness) that it’s amazing to look back on Gandhi and consider how deeply the British-Indian actor submerged himself into the role of this lawyer-turned-freedom fighter, spiritual leader and all-around Great Soul. Richard Attenborough’s production was an old school event, featuring 300,000 extras (a Guiness World Record!) and racking up eight Academy Awards (including the trifecta of Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director) for its depiction of the life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi from 1893 to 1948, through his early days as an activist for Indian rights in South Africa and his leadership in the struggle for Indian independence from England to his ultimate martyrdom at the hands of a radical Hindu assassin. This kind of large canvas storytelling frequently collapses under the weight of pretension, slack pacing and scattered focus (see: Australia), but Attenborough pulled off this cinematic monument with a clear-eyed discipline worthy of his extraordinary subject.

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY VIII (1933) & REMBRANDT (1936)

Here's why Charles Laughton was a movie star. (You could be excused for not always being clear on that.) With Henry VIII, a real warhorse of a classic early talkie, Laughton did as much as anyone to create the modern image of that much-married royal as a tantrummy spoiled child who did nothing but indulge his whims and send his clothes back to the tailor to be let out again, and he did it at such a generous comic pitch that he made the fellow seem lovable, even cuddly, like an Ewok with a weakness for having his ex-girlfriends beheaded. For a full taste of the big boy's range, it ought to be sampled alongside the much quieter Rembrandt, a surprisingly sensitive and engaging portrait of the Dutch master. For that cozy family feeling, both films feature charming appearances by the off-screen Mrs. Laughton, Elsa Lanchester, who was also the on-screen Bride of Frankenstein.

SWEET DREAMS (1985)

Patsy Cline died too young, but nobody can say that the movies haven't done all right by her. Beverly D'Angelo walked off with the second act of Coal Miner's Daughter as the pampered, saucy Patsy who taught poor little country girl Loretta Lynn how to be a star, and this full-length treatment, centering on the married-folks love story between Jessica Lange's Patsy and Ed Harris as Charlie Dick (one of those guys who was born to bathe in the light of a more exciting personality generous enough to decree him worthy), is like great country music in motion. For girl talk, Lange has Ann Wedgeworth, supporting actress extraordinaire, as her mama.

LUMUMBA (2001)

Raoul Peck's film stars Eriq Ebouaney, in one of the most towering unheralded great performances of the past decade, as Patrice Lumumba, first Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Lumumba was driven from office and assassinated two months into his term; when the movie was made, some forty years after the events it documents, the region was still such a political powder keg that locations had to be scouted far afield, and even after the film was released to theaters, a former American government advisor who felt that he'd been accused of being implicated in Lumumba's death got HBO to bleep the mention of his name from the soundtrack before the movie was broadcast on cable TV.

LUST FOR LIFE (1956) & VINCENT & THEO (1990)

In his tragically short life, Vincent Van Gogh was underappreciated, starved, mistreated, thought mad, and forced to go without his share of love and satisfaction, but he did get two pretty good movies made about him, and one of them inspired the title of an Iggy Pop song that somehow found its way into the ad campaign of Carnival Cruise Lines, so I guess it evens out. Directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring Kirk Douglas, with James Donald as Brother Theo and Anthony Quinn as Gauguin, Lust For Life is in the dramatic MGM style and played to the hilt; a huge success in its day, it is clearly enough a product of its time that it may be a bit underrated today, but it remains a very moving experience crafted by intelligent, talented people at the height of their game. The latter film, which stars Tim Roth as a Van Gogh so ferociously in love with life and so passionately aware of how much of it he's missing out on that he can seem open-hearted and embittered at the same moment, was directed by Robert Altman, and is very clearly the product of his sensibility alone. It is barely rated at all, because so few people have seen it.

Click Here For Part One, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five & Part Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Take Five: Belgium!

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Opening wide this weekend, Martin McDonagh's In Bruges stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as a pair of exiled hitmen stuck in the Belgian city until it's safe for them to return home, and their sojourn is meant to be hellish in every sense of the word. Belgium has long been Europe's punchline — yes, even more so than Poland; its stolidly middle-class character and reputation as "where culture goes to nap" makes it the butt of many a joke. David Rees of Get Your War On calls the sixteenth-century seer Nostradamus "the last interesting Belgian", which insult is all the more cutting considering he was actually French; and in a memorable Monty Python sketch, game show contestants are challenged to come up with a derogatory term for Belgium, and one noteworthy entrant claims that he can't think of anything more derogatory than just "Belgian". But all kidding aside, if you actually were trapped in Bruges for a prolonged period of time, you could do a lot worse as a way to pass the time than to head for the local cinema. Belgium has, er, sprouted one of the more interesting independent film scenes in Europe recently, and as this short list of some of our favorite Belgian movies of recent years should illustrate, there's a lot more to Belgian filmmaking than just Jean-Claude Van Damme.

MAN BITES DOG (1992)

One of the first Belgian films to create a great deal of buzz outside of Europe, Man Bites Dog (the French title translates, creepily, to "It Happened in Your Neighborhood" or "He is Coming to Your House") is a postmodern twist on the serial killer narrative a good five to ten years before such things became trendy. Anticipating the self-aware American horror films of the 2000s, it follows a small documentary camera crew as they tag along with Ben (played with sinister charm by co-writer/director Benoit Poelvoorde), a disconcertingly media-savvy mass murderer. Crammed with supremely disturbing moments, shocking violence, and genuinely clever moments of humor, Man Bites Dog has held up quite well and is still better than most of the films it undoubtedly helped to inspire.

D'EST [FROM THE EAST] (1993)

One of the best things about Belgian cinema is the experimental filmmaker Chantal Akerman. Her complex, meditative, sometimes almost motionless films lull you into a nearly placid state so that you barely realize it when a moment of epiphany arises. D'Est, a far too little-seen documentary from 1993, is perhaps her greatest film: a deceptively simple series of images of people in Eastern Europe, many of them only a few years removed from the burdens of Soviet rule, are shown. The people take vacations, engage in sport and play, have long moments of leisure, and Akerman's brilliantly photographic sensibilities capture long stretches of beautiful simplicity over a period of almost two hours. The effect is not unlike watching a well-crafted painting slowly mutate into something entirely new and different.

LUMUMBA (2000)

Director Raoul Peck is a Haitian; the film takes place in Africa, and the production itself was a joint effort of Belgium, France, Germany, and Haiti. But almost all of the filming was done in Belgium, the majority of the financing came from there, and in a greater sense, the entire film is a legacy of Belgium's blood-soaked imperial past. The radical reformer Patrice Lumumba (brilliantly portrayed here by Eriq Ebouaney), prior to his assassination, was the ruler of the Congo, a huge country in central Africa that suffered more than most during its colonial period thanks to an incredibly brutal occupation and exploitation by Belgium's King Leopold. The film was an independent success, and a testament to the fact that some countries are more willing to examine their colonial legacies than others.

ANY WAY THE WIND BLOWS (2002)

If Tom Barman's sprawling 2002 film, based in and around the port city of Antwerp, isn't one of the best Belgian movies in recent history, it's at least one of the most ambitious, and definitely one of the oddest. Part travelogue, part documentary, part music video (and showcase for the director, who's also a well-known local pop star), and part bizarre remake/interpretation/'homage' to movies like Short Cuts, Magnolia and Pulp Fiction, Any Way the Wind Blows features a diverse group of French and Flemish citizens, all from different backgrounds and with widely different characters, who all wind up, through a rambunctious and chronoligically confusing narrative, at the same party on the same night. It functions almost like a collage of several more convincingly made films, but it's not without its charm.

THE ALZHEIMER CASE(2003)

When you first hear De Zaak Alzheimer described, you think it can't possibly be anything but a tasteless, awful disaster: it's about a pair of detectives attempting to track down and capture a mob hitman on his final assignment — final because he has an advanced case of Alzheimer's Disease. Amazingly enough, though, director Erik Van Looy manages to pull the thing off without recourse to depressingly tasteless jokes or maudlin sentimentality. Instead, he presents us with a surprisingly plausible plot, a tight, chilling narrative with plenty of suspense, and a nicely presented noir sensibility. An American remake of this movie (which played at festivals under the name The Memory of a Killer) is in the works, but if you can hunt down a DVD copy of the original, it's well worth checking out on its own merits.