In The Company of Men At Work

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
(Le Scaphandre et Le Papillon)
Blink 182… Million Times
Trailers & Mo

It’s that time of year again folks, when the shitty movies go away and the good ones that inspire, both the heart AND Oscar talk, are here to stay. And no movie this fall (well, thus far) is more inspiring (and should be Oscarlicious) than The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. As we always preach here, true life stories always make for the best in film, and if you swooned to such inspirational films like My Left Foot or The Sea Inside (our top pick for the ‘004) then Butterfly is right up yer alley… and yer a$$ (Ok, we’ll stop using different forms of the word ‘inspiration’, but only if someone buys us a new Dell Inspiron)! Butterfly tells the incredible story of Jean-Dominique Bauby (played by that French dude in Munich), the editor of France’s Elle, who after a stroke is paralyzed from head to toe. Luckily he’s surrounded by a lot of totally hot women (including Anne Consigny, aka what Emma Watson will look like when she’s all growns up), who want nothing more than for him to live as normal a life as he possibly can. With their help, he eventually learns how to communicate, by blinking while someone speaks the letters of the alphabet. Amazingly enuff, he had the patience and courage to pen a memoir this way, which became a best seller and now a muss c movie. We dunno what it is, but no one can seem to capture the spirit of an artist and display it on film quite like the painter come director Julian Schnabel (with great lens work by the grape Janusz Kaminski). He did it with Basquiat and Before Night Falls and he does it here again. Remembering kids, you can’t spell ‘fart’ w/o ‘art’!

All In The Family Part I: Schnabel’s wife, Olatz Lopez Garmendia, has appeared in all three of his films

John Grisham’s Jizzum (aka Verdict): Breast In Show

Protagonist
The Fanatical Four
Trailers & Mo

A kung-fu junkie, a bank robber, a radical terrorist and a gay-curing missionary (starting clockwise from the top left). No, these aren’t our BFFs, but four men who set out to change their lives, and in the process were so enveloped in their own extreme odysseys that they ended up becoming the exact opposite type of person they set out to be. While terrorist Hans-Joachim Klein’s incredible story could stand alone on its own (and it did, in the Dutch doc My Life As A Terrorist), it helps to put perspective on his and the other gentlemen’s lives when all their tales are told simultaneously. Director Jessica Yu (who made one of our mos flavorite docs of this new century, In The Realms of The Unreal) lets her protagonists tell their stories without the interference of other’s opinions. Instead, she finds parallels between them with the help of Euripides and a bunch of wooden rod puppets. Protagonist reminded me a lot of Fast Cheap and Out of Control, which also chronicled the lives of four seemingly unrelated men, and if she keeps on creating fascinating people docs like this, she may end up in more sentences comparing her work with the director of that film, the great Errol Morris

All In The Family Part II: the kung-fu kid, Mark Salzman, also happens to be director Yu’s hubbie

John Grisham’s Jizzum (aka Verdict): Jeepers Worth A Peepers

both films open in select theaters today
and elsewhere elsewhen

until next thyme the balcony is clothed…