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March 2010 February 2010
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November 2009 General archived Hank's pics



HANK'S PICS 03/02/10:
 
THE DAMNED UNITED - Michael Sheen successfully veers from his much lauded roles as Prime Minister Blair (The Queen) and David Frost (Frost/Nixon) to portray a different kind of ambition: the brash and hard scrambling true life story of English soccer coach, Brian Clough. Rising through his rapid successes in the lower divisions, he takes over the reigning and infamously raging championship team of Leeds United. Can he put his own clean-playing moral stamp on a team that owes its success to dirty play, and whose loyalty remains to its former manager, Brian’s longtime competitor and nemesis? Beautifully shot and breezily written by the screenwriter of the two aforementioned films, the natural arc of this compelling story seems to lose the ball in the final few minutes but still winds up well played on your TV.
 
FLAME AND CITRON – In this colorful and suspenseful film, taking place during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, Flame and Citron are close friends but, more importantly, assassins who are part of a dwindling group of resisters. Citron has a wife and young daughter he’s trying to hold onto; Flame is a very young police detective who blithely disregards of any hope of a normal future. Their techniques are brazen, their successes becoming legendary. Acting independently as a team, both believe that trust in others, and in sabotage itself, have their limitations; all you can do is eliminate the occupiers one by one, down to the last one. Yet they are loners who, relying on a network of information, cannot act alone; and there is a traitor in their midst. This beautifully paced film with authentic-feeling locations focuses not just on the derring-do, but on the half truths one must rely on and the necessarily unclear agendas of the people one is forced to work with. What this film makes clear is that war is not only hell, it’s also a mess.
 
BERLIN EXPRESS – As a little boy, I first got into movies through the eerie, under-the skin thrillers of Jacques Tournier: Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, Leopard Man, Curse of the Demon, and the film noir that more than any other defined the genre, Out of the Past. In Tournier’s Berlin Express (one of our recent Warner “Exclusives” of long unavailable worthy films) there are no cat people, zombies, New York City demons or hard-boiled detectives. Instead we have underground Nazis, a stealthy strangler, and an atmospheric train journey, all cast against the rubble and despair of post-World War II Germany. Here in this devastated country, four strangers (American, British, French, Soviet) are drawn into an attempt on the life of an elder statesman who brings the hope of peace and unity to a divided land. This quasi-documentary thriller, while not strictly part of the Tournier “canon,” nonetheless partakes of the concision and atmospheric style of the great director. A couple of interesting documentary-style details: the price of admission to a nightclub visited by two of our sleuthing protagonists in desperate, war torn Frankfurt is three cigarettes; toward the end of the film the train pulls into a small suburban burg named Wannsee, where Hitler and his top generals met to devise the Final Solution.