4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

Anamaria Marinca and Laura Vasiliu in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (IFC Films)

When the Cannes Film Festival handed out its highest award last May, no one expected the Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (opening February 22 at Landmark’s Ken Cinema) to win. That’s because Romania has a small film industry that hasn't exported many movies. But the movies they have been exporting of late have been setting a high standard. In addition to 4 Months, there have been The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and 12:08 East of Bucharest. Maybe not enough to constitute a full on new wave of Romanian cinema but it's definitely building a swell.

The title 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days refers to how far along Otilia's friend is in the pregnancy she wants to terminate. But it's 1987 and the two women are living in Communist Romania where abortion is illegal. Otilia's friend Gabita is so anxious about her situation that she seems almost incapacitated. So she asks Otilia to finalize the terms of a black market abortion. This includes extensive negotiations for a hotel room.

Taxi to the Dark Side

Alex Gibney's documentary Taxi to the Dark Side (THINKFilm)

You have to wait until the very end of Taxi to the Dark Side (opening February 8 for one week only at Landmark's Ken Cinema) to discover a very personal reason why Alex Gibney was so driven to make this documentary exploration of how far the Bush Administration has been willing to go in its prosecution of the “War on Terror.” Gibney’s father Frank was a journalist, author, and a former Naval interrogator in World War II. Just weeks before Frank Gibney died, he asked his son to videotape him so he could comment on the subject of American soldiers accused of torturing prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo and elsewhere.  Frank Gibney’s anger was directed at the top officials in the Bush Administration, starting with George W. and including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Alberto Gonzales (who rationalized the new policy of “coercive interrogation techniques” as the only way to combat the threat posed by terrorist enemies so evil that they could turn commercial airliners into suicide planes). The outrage Frank Gibney expresses fuels his son’s documentary.

Screen Actors Guild Awards

The Bourne Ultimatum won the first ever Best Stunt Ensemble at the SAG Awards. (Universal)

Over the weekend, many industry guilds gave out their top awards. The Directors Guild of America honored the Coens for No Country for Old Men, and the American Society of Cinematographers bestowed its top prize on Robert Elswit for There Will Be Blood. With a waiver from the still striking Writers Guild, the Screen Actors Guild got to have an awards ceremony with a red carpet and celebrities. No real surprises as Daniel Day Lewis and Julie Christie racked up awards yet again for their respective work in There Will Be Blood and Away From Her. This looks like a preview of the upcoming Oscars. No Country for Old Men nabbed the best ensemble, which bodes well for it to grab the Best Picture Award come Oscar time. You can see the complete list of winners at the SAG website.

But there was one surprise at the otherwise predictable SAG awards, a new category for Best Performance by a Stunt Ensemble in a Motion Picture. The nominees were 300, The Bourne Ultimatum, I am Legend, The Kingdom, and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. And the winner was The Bourne Ultimatum. Are you kidding me? I don't want to belittle the hard work that went into those films but what about Zoe Bell's phenomenal stunts in Grindhouse's Deathproof? Grindhouse deserved a nomination just for paying tribute to all the stuntmen of the industry's "all or nothing" days" as Kurt Russell's Stuntman Mike put it.

And what about the insanely over the top stunts in Shoot 'Em Up? And were all Asian films excluded? They must have been or there is no excuse for overlooking work from Hong Kong (Exiled and Flashpoint just to name two), South Korea (City of Violence had breathtaking stunts), Japan and even Thailand. Heck even Live Free or Die Hard had more impressive stunt work than Bourne. Only 300 brought anything new or fresh to the action genre among those films nominated. As an action film junkie, I just had to get that off my chest. On the plus side, it's cool that SAG created this award. In Hong Kong, they have a category for Action Choreography. So it's nice to see the U.S. begin to pay respect to this particular cinematic craft.

More awards to come. The Oscars -- if the writers' strike ends or they get a waiver from the WGA -- is scheduled for February 24.  You can get a printable ballot for your own Oscar event, or join Scott Marks and I at the Museum of Photographic Arts' Oscar Party. And the winner is...

Foreign Film Short List

The Counterfeiters (Austria), directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky

The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (Brazil), directed by Cao Hamburger

Days of Darkness (Canada), directed by Denys Arcand

Beaufort (Israel), directed by Joseph Cedar

The Unknown (Italy), directed by Giuseppe Tornatore

Mongol (Kazakhstan), directed by Sergei Bodrov

Katyn (Poland), directed by Andrzej Wajda

12 (Russia), directed by Nikita Mikhalkov

The Trap (Serbia), directed by Srdan Golubovic

The list is a mix of veterans and newcomers. Denys Arcand was nominated for an Oscar for writing The Barbarian Invasions, and the film won the Foreign Film Oscar in 2004. Giuseppe Tornatore nabbed a Directors Guild of America nomination for Cinema Paradiso, and the film went on to win the Foreign Film Award in 1988. And Poland's Andrzej Wajda picked up an honorary Oscar in 2000.

The Assassination of Jesse James

Brad Pitt as Jesse James in The Assassination of... (Warner Bros.)

The full name of this film didn't fit in the headline: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Now that's not quite up to the word count of The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, but assassination does figure prominently in each. And in the case of The Assassination of Jesse James (opened Oct. 12 throughout San Diego), the lengthiness of the title foreshadows the excesses of the film.

Here's a simple rule: If the audience knows a film's final destination in this case Robert Ford shooting outlaw Jesse James the filmmaker darn well better better make the journey interesting because there are no surprises lurking ahead. The life and death of outlaw Jesse James has been told many times before, sometimes romanticizing him (as with Tyrone Power in the 1939 film) and sometimes presenting him as a dangerous psychopath (Robert Duvall in The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid). James has secured himself a place in American folklore since his death in 1882 at the hands of one of his own gang, Robert Ford. James had fought with the ruthless Confederate guerrilla fighters, Quantrill's Raiders during the Civil War and then turned to robbing banks, trains and the occasional stage coach. Some newspapers portrayed him as a kind of Robin Hood and small farmers probably derived some satisfaction from the way the James Gang stuck it to the big businesses of the time -- the banks and trains. What all this means is that James has long been a subject of fascination for a variety of media.

Cast Your Oscar Votes

Clint vs. Marty again

It's Oscar time. And like the car wreck on the side of the road that you can't help but look it, the Oscars always manage to draw attention. Check out this year's nominations, make your predictions or just gripe about what great film got overlooked. The award ceremony is Sunday February 25 at 5 pm.

I've always had conflicted feelings about the Oscars. As a kid I thought the Oscars were bestowed on the best Hollywood had to offer. But the more movies I saw, the more I realized that the best were overlooked. I now have to live with such Oscar facts as Alfred Hitchcock never won one, but Sally Field, Hilary Swank and Tom Hanks have two each. And actors that I love have won the award for the wrong film. A prime example is Al Pacino winning for A Scent of a Woman. Geez, what about Dog Day Afternoon, The Godfather, Serpico? I think the last time I was happy with the awards was when Silence of the Lambs swept. This year, Martin Scorsese will yet again face off against Clint Eastwood for best director. The current score between the two: Scorsese 0; Eastwood 2. I pray the Academy will finally bestow on Oscar on Marty so the poor man can go back to making great personal films rather than big Hollywood films that seem to beg for an Oscar. Peter O'Toole, another oft-nominated and overlooked talent has yet another (and possibly last) chance at the gold this year with his performance in Venus.