Reviews

After seeing this movies, I re-read the book to understand whether my confusion was poor memory, or something else..... it was something else.

First the good news, Oprah is fabulous in all her glory, and so is Storm Reid cast as Meg in all the horrible situations she's forced to endure....and Charles Wallis not bad either. But you can't make up for the fundamental flaws. The movie fails to convey a clear story, and completely misses a key part of the original story in its rush to get Meg and company home.

An example of how this movie could have been made? Look no further than the Wizard of Oz which is an adaptation of a book, involves a young girl on a journey, a fantasy world, with munchkins , talking trees, good and bad witches, a yellow brick road, a mission, several and a yearning to return home. It has strong characters, a clear story, a pivotal crisis, and an ending. Its special effects are limited to a spinning house and a melting witch.

Cut the gimmicks, and back to a simple framework: key characters, key moments, key emotions, and tell the story with the strong voice of a little girl who is a torrent of emotion and who with the help of a classic trio: three wonderful witches, courageously acts in the face of fear.

In the end, a banquet restaurant is a banquet restaurant, whether it's in your working class hometown in the USA, or your working class hometown in China. Sure the food is different, but much is the same: the huge quantities, the hordes of staff, the maze of rooms with so many parties celebrating family events, the loud,corny DJ/MC conducting the rituals of the particular celebration, the backroom management, the sales pitches to prospective clients -- very familiar material if you ever worked in one of these places yourself.

TBCRITW maintains a sense of detachment, and thus come off as a documentary of operations at the most factual level. Add the personal story of the owner, a sharp, pragmatic, tough woman who tolerates no nonsense, and it is a decent portrait of a mammoth, family-owned and grown 'hospitality' business -- for better and for worse.

I felt sorry for the workers who seemed stuck, like any worker in a low-paying mass production facility. I'd love to see the same story, perhaps the 'real' story, inside this restaurant, from the folks who do the most basic functions of cooking and serving. That would be the really interesting, forbidden couterpoint to this story.

The Counterfeiters comes across as Cool Hand Luke meets Bridge on the River Kwai with Nazi concentration camp trappings. The Counterfeiters is the true story of a Berlin artist gone bad, who "makes money by making money", and who is still alive today.

From a post-war Monte Carlo casino, the Bogart-esquire counterfeiter recalls, in sepia flashbacks, his arrest in pre-war Berlin by the local anti-fraud police captain. Later, caught up in the sweep of Jews into Auschwitz, he survives five years by sketching portraits and murals for his captors. Fate plucks him from his painting and drops him along with others into S.hausen, a specialty technical research camp where he re-encounters his old nemesis, now a military man on the rise in the new Nazi regime. The Jews in his specialty unit lead a life of near luxury as they are charged with counterfeiting pound notes intended to destabilize the British economy. Moral ambiguity, self-contradiction, gallows humor, unsentimental kindness create an all-enveloping tense-zone of grimness relieved by flickers of conscience. This is a deeply human movie with body heat and soul fire set in darkness.

Eclectic sound track that includes "nigger music" and silence, camera shots that include fast, shaky zooms, selectively collaged glances, a microsecond of the moon seen through an overhead cage in a prisoner 'recreation' area, 'no rules' editing alongside cinematic discipline, there is nothing gratuitous in this movie, not a single shot that does not contribute to telling the story.

The Counterfeiters is a masterpiece of story telling, exceptionally honest to the craft of communication, a movie that captures emotion so well that any human being can see and feel it for his or her own purposes. It touches that deeply, it's no wonder it won an Academy Award, and among Academy Awards I'd place it well above the average. If Holocauste movies can be considered a genre, this is one of the best made. For cinematography, editing, sound, writing, acting, use of music, a ten by all measures.

Cheesy attempt at a thriller, with hackneyed plot, characters, and storyline. Whether its Basque bad guys speaking Spanish with a gratuitous bit of Basque thrown in, or the stressed out lovers falling in the sand on the beach in San Sebastian, its pretty fake. Shots of the Basque sociedades (communal kitchen/social eating clubs) and food are hunger-inducing,even if ham-handed, but that's about all that seemed genuine in this movie. This movies fails to connect with any universals that touch people who live with terrorism and nationalist sentiments. From whatever point of view whether ETA, anti-ETA, or simple moviegoer trying to appreciate a particular story that touches a human universal, this movie is a failure.