Beyond the Multiplex

Feb. 16, 2006 | It's always feast or famine here at Beyond the Multiplex world HQ, and this is one of those feast weeks. (There are often a lot of good little movies in late winter, possibly because the Hollywood pipeline slows to a sludgy trickle while the Oscar picks hog the limelight.) We've got three films all deserving of more attention than I can provide: a wrenching tale of World War II resistance that's probably the leading contender for the foreign-film Oscar, a deliberately daunting work from a young Mexican director who's the toast of the film-snob world, and one of those damaged-family American indies that's flying under the radar and turns out to be full of surprises.

But first, the important stuff: The Bear Tooth Theatrepub (their word, not mine) in Anchorage, Alaska! I've gotten some amazing nominations in my call for the best local theaters doing the movie gods' work in unlikely locations, but based on completely subjective and unscientific criteria I just made up, this one's my favorite.

Yes, Anchoragers (Anchorageites? Anchoragees?), I'm aware that the Bear Tooth makes most of its revenue by showing second-run Hollywood movies ("Chicken Little" and "Aeon Flux" are opening there this week, for the love of Mike). But even that is a noble and much-neglected calling, in my view. Upcoming fare at the B.T. includes Antonioni's "The Passenger," Eli Roth's horror insta-classic "Hostel," Bruno Ganz as Hitler in "Downfall," "The Future of Food," the Alaska Ocean Film Festival and some documentary called "The Outdoorsmen" that I've never heard of but looks right for Anchorage. Plus: It's called the Bear Tooth! It serves beer! And, as reader Sativa Quinn (who clued me in) points out, it's in a metropolis of 300,000 hardy souls in the reddest, and manliest, of all red states.

Keep 'em coming. I've got quite a number of delightful nominations in the hopper, but here's a challenge: Every single entry, so far, has been from a cold-weather city, and in most cases a really cold one. The appeal of moviegoing in a burg where you have to plug your car in overnight to keep the engine block from freezing is fairly obvious, but hey. Don't you people in Pensacola and San Antonio and Tucson and Hilo ever get out of the house to see pretentious films? Or are you all too busy catching some February rays, rebuilding that gnarly Dodge Charger and generally grooving to the beauty of the universe?

"Sophie Scholl: The Final Days": The grandchildren of the Nazis ask their final questions
When I meet Marc Rothemund on a frozen afternoon at the cluttered Manhattan offices of Zeitgeist Films, he's riding an understandable buzz. The rumpled, 38-year-old German director has spent the last year traveling around the world promoting "Sophie Scholl: The Final Days," his film about Germany's most famous anti-Nazi activist, who was arrested and executed in 1943. (If you think I shouldn't give away the ending, sorry. Hey, we all knew how "Titanic" was going to end too.)

As more and more people see "Sophie Scholl," which is anchored by a startling performance from Julia Jentsch in the title role, the stakes keep rising. Rothemund isn't sure how many festival awards he's won, but insists that the pile-up of German Oscars and European Film Awards came as a surprise. Now his film is among the five Oscar nominees in the foreign language film category, and while handicapping Academy voters is a fool's game, let's just say that an inspirational work about the struggle against Nazism is always going to have the inside track.

If the explosive South African film "Tsotsi," which opens next week, is seen as the other major contender, then maybe the Israeli-Palestinian film "Paradise Now" is the longest of all long shots. As reported this week in the Jerusalem Post, an online petition is now circulating asking the Academy to withdraw its nomination from Hany Abu-Assad's film, which portrays the final hours of two would-be suicide bombers from the West Bank. "By ignoring the film's message and the implications of this message," writes Yossi Zur, an Israeli who lost his 17-year-old son to a terrorist bombing, "those that chose to award this film a prize have become part of the evil chain of terror and accomplices to the next suicide murders." (I'll return to this question during Oscar week.)

Let's get back to "Sophie Scholl," which turns out not to be spinach cinema. It's a crisply made, absorbing human drama that frames its moral confrontation between good and evil in universal terms. On one hand, it's a specific episode from the short, unhappy history of Nazi Germany; Rothemund and screenwriter Fred Breinersdorfer have relied on extensive research, interviews with eyewitnesses, and Gestapo records recently recovered from the East German government archives. On the other, Sophie Scholl is an archetypal character, a lonely individual who accepts the dire consequences of standing up for justice in an unjust situation, putting her faith in the future.

Next page: "We will not be silent"