This past Monday, francophiles and French citizens celebrated Bastille Day. And since gossiping about President Sarkozy and his wife is no way to celebrate the holiday -- and Film Forum is no longer featuring its wonderful series on Godard -- here are a few suggestions for some French films worth renting.

The Rules of the Game (1939):
Directed by Jean Renoir, the son of the Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste and a man regarded as one of the greatest directors of all time, the film is an incendiary satire of the self-absorption within France's bourgeoisie on the eve of World War II. The film only slowly reaches the point at which the viewer sees that the nation's elite are feuding with each other over sex while their country faces imminent war. The movie was so powerful that a man set fire to a newspaper at its premiere in an attempt to burn down the theater, while the French government (and later the occupying Nazi regime) banned the film. The Rules of the Game survived and remains both a cinematic achievement ad well as a relevant social critique.

Tipster Frances Jeffrey-Coker slyly informed Bwog about a film she directed that took home a Best Picture prize last night:

"The nationwide Campus Moviefest competition took place on campus 2 weeks ago, where groups of Columbia students had a week to make a 5-minute movie. The top 16 from Columbia were shown at the AMC theatre [last night] on 84th street, and awards and ipods were given to the best comedy, best drama, and best picture. The link to the video that won best picture, called The Face of Poverty, is here.

The credits at the end mention all the people involved, and I'm not sure what the names were of the best comedy and best drama but I'm sure that someone who sees the posting on bwog if you put it will know.

It will possibly go up against videos in a nationwide competition/viewing being held in the Hudson theatre downtown in Times Square, where the top 20 movies from around the US will be showcased."

No need to be coy, Frances! We're proud of you.

Bwog did manage to track down the winner of the Best Comedy prize: Bwog's own Tony Gong. His ringing endorsement of his film: "Winners of Best Comedy were my friends Evan Omi and Nathan McAlone and I for our surprisingly unfunny movie "'Boyfriend Material.'" Anyone know who won best drama?

Hey, remember the Oscars? They happened last year? They might get cancelled? Sometimes women win them by pretending to be ugly, even if they aren't ugly, and sometimes if they are? Well, the nominations came out today (surprise! No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood led the tally) and Bwog awards show correspondent Daniel D'Addario puts on his best Mary Hart to tell you that there will indeed be blood - and Oscars! First up: the acting categories.

Best Actor
George Clooney, Michael Clayton
Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
Johnny Depp, Sweeney Todd
Tommy Lee Jones, In the Valley of Elah
Viggo Mortensen, Eastern Promises

Will Win: While I'm glad that Oscar voters looked past the general hackiness of Paul Haggis's film to see Jones's great and dignified performance, this is Daniel Day-Lewis's to lose. His delivery of the line "I drink your milkshake!" alone would have earned him a SAG Award.

Should Win: I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!

Robbed: This category seems pretty solid - although I haven't seen, and will not likely see, Sweeney Todd, and think that George Clooney has gone from being an affable, good-looking guy to an awards-season threat that must be contained (fuddy-dud Michael Clayton for seven nominations - really?!). If I had to toss another nominee on the pile, I'd take out Clooney and nominate Emile Hirsch for his nature-obsessed, Thoreau-spouting man-child whose glaring immaturity provides Into the Wild with a welcome dose of moral ambiguity (seemingly against the director's will, making Hirsch's performance a masterful act of subversion). Or perhaps Javier Bardem, who was nominated for supporting but played the lead role as a superhuman killer in No Country for Old Men. Especially on the men's side, 2007 was nothing if not a year of obsessions.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays from all of us at Bwog! Were your presents not intellectually-stimulating enough? No worries! As our gift to you, we give you Bwog film connoisseur Christian Kamongi's cinematic picks of 2007, just a little something something to casually reference in 2008.

10. The Wayward Cloud
Tsai-Ming Liang's visceral sing-along porno was not just a moralistic polemic against a sex-ravaged culture, but also a lustrously beautiful collage of post-modern romance.

9. Zodiac
Harris Savides' camerawork and David Fincher's showmanship combine to illustrate an era and provide a narrative that perfectly mirrors the film's incapacitation of traditional filmic indexicality in favor of digital analog. Unarguably the most important and influential film of the year.

8. The Boss of It All
On the outside Lars von Trier produces an office comedy filled with peculiar and off-putting Scandinavian humor. However, a closer analysis reveals a stunning testament to subjectivity even in the unfriendly realms of genre, predatory capitalism, and automatic digital editing.

Margot at the Wedding
Directed by Noah Baumbach
93 minutes
Now playing

It's hard to miss the academic snobbery of Noah Baumbach's characters in Margot at the Wedding. In his follow-up to The Squid and the Whale, a group of forty-something writers, whose clique centers around the talented and loathsome Margot (Nicole Kidman), drop their intellectual credentials shamelessly. To wit: Margot's husband and lover studied together at Stanford, and her husband teaches at NYU. Her flaky sister spent time at Bennington. And the neighborhood temptress is headed to Harvard, prompting Margot to muse that plenty of "stupid people" get accepted there. And where did Margot study? She issues an answer in two clipped syllables:

"Barnard."

At the screening on the Upper West Side, this line earned gratified chuckles. For the subset of moviegoers who know Columbia, the revelation that Margot went to Barnard grants a new insight into her character. For a moment, we understand Margot's blithe meanness because we—the sophisticated Manhattan intellectuals that we are—see her traits in ourselves, or at least in some of the English majors who walk among us. She is simultaneously overeducated and ill-equipped for human interaction — it makes perfect sense that she is a creature of an insular school on a small island.

Looking for an intellectually rigorous way to procrastinate during reading week? Scrabulous isn't doing it for you? Bwog film expert Christian Kamongi shares his picks for the Pasolini, Ophuls, and Sembene retrospectives.

Heretical Epiphanies: The Cinematic Pilgrimages of Pier Paolo Pasolini

Marxist, poet, homosexual, pious Catholic, and renowned intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini is one of the landmark figures of postwar European cinema. Whether it's his adaptations of classical texts (Canterbury Tales, Decameron, Arabian Nights), an extraordinarily orthodox depiction of Jesus, or neo-realist influenced explorations of the Roman underworld his films share spontaneity and intellectual virtuosity. Lincoln Center will be presenting a retrospective which will include Salo, one of the most controversial works in cinematic history as well as one of the most difficult to retain (don't bother trying for the Criterion version of it, it's literally out of print).

Must See: The Gospel According to St. Matthew

November 28th-December 4th, Walter Reade Theater, 65th St. and Lincoln Center (Above Alice Tully Hall)

Sure it's been out for a while, but Anton Corbijn's Ian Curtis biopic Control is still screening. Bwog correspondent Jamies Johns reviews the film and philosophizes on the nature of the rockumentary.

Most of us know the story by now: Ian Curtis, lead singer of post-punk outfit Joy Division, hung himself at the age of 23, leaving behind a wife, a young daughter and a handful of impeccable recordings. Curtis' mystique and tragic death have almost begun to overshadow the music of his band and Control, a film about Curtis made by famed video director Anton Corbijn, will probably only serve to further the cult of Ian Curtis.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing though, because Corbijn's portrait of Curtis is the only one I have seen that looks fairly at Curtis' life with a true appreciation for him and the music he produced without reverting to idol worship. The film is one of the best rock bios I have seen; it is not only beautiful, thanks to Corbijn's use of black and white photography, but it also feels, for lack of a better word, real. Although Curtis would later become an icon, for most of his life he was an average guy. The characters in Control are not distant figures that lived in the 1970s and with whom we can feel no connection. Instead, the deft performances by Sam Riley as Curtis and Samantha Morton as Deborah Curtis, his wife, make Control emotionally devastating. We feel the tender moments between Curtis and his wife and his mistress, Annik Honore, and we also equally feel the suffocation Curtis felt towards the end of his life.

Bella is about a former soccer player (Eduardo Verástegui) with a tragic past—though I'll try to avoid too much plot description. After his crazy capitalist brother (Manny Perez) fires a pregnant girl (Tammy Blanchard) from his restaurant, the soccer guy takes the girl to his family's house for dinner. If I could end my plot description with this unassuming list of events, Bella would be a high-quality film. More on that later.

In 2006, Bella won the People's Choice Award at Toronto Film Festival. Past winners include successes like Amélie, The Princess Bride, and Crouching Tiger: Hidden Dragon. Intriguingly, Bella also scored big at the Heartland Film Festival, which has previously bestowed honors on films like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, The Princess Diaries, and Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie. (For those of you who don't know about VeggieTales, it's a collection of Bible stories retold with vegetables in all the main roles. The interesting array of Bella's awards continues. According to Wikipedia, the director—Alejandro Gomez Monteverde, an American citizen born in Mexico—received the "American by Choice" (!) award from the United State's Department of Citizenship for Bella's "positive contribution to Latino art and culture in the US."

My point is that Bella has quite an interesting array of messages. On the one hand, it's about grittiness (when we see apples on the screen, they have bruises) and cultural diversity in New York City (by the way, I appreciate every film that has characters learning Spanish—hurrah for slow, measured dialogue). On the other hand, it's about the power of family, with an unabashedly pro-faith/pro-life message (this stance may throw off many Columbia students, although they seem to handle Six Feet Under pretty well).

As the New York Film Festival comes to a close, Bwog contributor Christian Kamongi gives his take on one of the films that may soon hit a theater near you.

The Man From London (Official Selection for Competition at the 60th Annual Cannes Film Festival and the 45th New York Film Festival)

Release Date: The Man From London is currently without a distributor.

Synopsis: A night watchman Maloin discovers a murder take place and retrieves the suitcase of the victim.

As far as Bela Tarr is concerned, no other contemporary filmmaker has drenched his work in such chromatic disparities. He has repeatedly adapted chiaroscuro with a haunting mobility, ultimately creating an effect with black and white as expressive in its strikingly multifarious tones as a Technicolor picture. Unfortunately, his latest project underlies his mastery in the earlier referred to areas but fails on a narrative level to match his previous work. Where is the haunting poignancy of Damnation, the sweeping personal historicity of Satantango, or apocalyptic humanism of The Werckmeister Harmonies ? Luckily for Tarr, this is one of the few substantial criticisms that can be leveled against the feature, and it's more a disappointment than it is a criticism.

For most viewers, even the most hardened adherents to art-house ethos, Tarr is a no go, his takes last as long as Jancsó and Angelopoulos without the splendidly crafted mobility or weighty storylines, the lack of action in his features would put The Brown Bunny to shame. In fact, if you were wondering why Gus van Sant decided to undertake his recent Death Trilogy (Elephant, etc.) it was done as largely a homage to Tarr. I was displeased to be reminded of the popular view of Tarr during the screening of the feature when about one-tenth of the audience walked out. My comrades' first warning was the first scene in which Tarr takes thirty-five minutes to display what most films do in thirty five seconds. The camera epically pans up a ship, with a proximity to its haul that creates a surreal effect that almost leads to the viewer discerning that this is not a ship as much as it is a dance between light and darkness perfectly splintered.

The thrilling conclusion of Bwogger Christian Kamongi's interview with NYFF head and Columbia professor Richard Pena.

Christian Kamongi: Speaking of American independent cinema, I've noticed that two of the three American comedies are in the tradition of Whit Stillman's Mannerist comedies (The Darjeeling Limited and Margot at the Wedding [pictured, right]), and there are two features by Sidney Lumet and Brian de Palma, veterans who have lately been on the fringe of American critical opinion. Do you think the American lineup in any way reflects any positive trends in American cinema?

Richard Peña: It's a little hard for one festival to reflect the whole course of such a large national cinema as ours, but it does display a very strong reality that there are many American filmmakers who are making powerful personal visions. We do have an unusual conjuncture of our most talented filmmakers making films in the same year; we have features from Noah Baumbach, the Coen Brothers, De Palma. It's not like that every day and all of these directors seem to be at the top of their game.

To kick off a week of New York Film Festival coverage, Bwog cinema correspondent Christian Kamongi sits down for a two-part interview with Richard Peña, head of the NYFF and Columbia film professor.

Christian Kamongi: How do you think the lineup for this year's 45th New York Film Festival reflects any particular positive trends in international cinema at the present moment?

Richard Peña: Well, the New York Film Festival was founded in 1963 and this was really the high moment of two movements in film: one was auteurism and the other modernism. In a sense, auteurism has really adhered to a film style to with a lot of personal vision, when you get something like a Sidney Lumet or Bela Tarr, these are filmmakers who are really going for broke, and you really feel that, even if you don't like their passion, you appreciate their ambition. So much stuff we see feels like it just came off the assembly line and is totally uncommitted, so to see a series of strongly engaged films is really invigorating. Obviously I like all of them. Even the individuals who have problems with them won't doubt for a moment that what they're seeing is a highly personal vision.

Sophomores Mike Molina and Rob Stenson (the kids who brought you this hilarity), along with Jeff Schwartz, are launching a crusade for as-yet-largely-nonexistent independent film at Columbia. It's called Project Bluelight, modeled off the real-life Project Greenlight, which makes movies happen from storyboard to screening. Bwog interrogated them last night via e-mail.

Do you have any money? What facilities are you using?

We're applying for money from basically every campus resource there is. CUArts, CCSC, ABC, etc., and will even be looking for money from alumni who are involved in the film industry. We're looking to have a budget between $5,000 and $10,000 for the first project (which will be a short).

We're still looking into what facilities Columbia has to offer, but we already own all of the editing software we would need.

Is there anything like this at other schools?

Not that we know of. Besides students making films for classes, a lot of other schools have programs that are designed to give undergraduates film production experience by working on professional or grad-student films. But the idea of going through this whole major process, start to finish, with all undergraduates is what seems to make this different. A lot of schools have clubs or organizations that make films themselves using the people in the club, rather than looking out to the entire undergraduate community for screenplays, directors, actors, etc. We basically want to get as many undergraduates involved as possible. This is not just about the script or the director or the actor. It's everything. From finding the right script to tinkering with foley in post-production, we hope to see a
lot of people get behind this project.

In which Learned Foote, one of those delightfully over-eager first years (and a legit film reviewer), muses on Nicole Kidman's latest risky venture.

No sarcasm intended whatsoever—Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which weird alien intelligence hits Earth and stealthily creates duplicates of the people we know and love, should definitely be remade every twenty to thirty years. Humans know something's off, but we can never figure out exactly what's wrong until—gasp—we're walking emotionlessly through the crowd, trying to hide our humanity from the alien majority.

I had high hopes for The Invasion. The first two (1956 and 1978) are classics, and the 70s version is one of my personal favorites. Oliver Hirschbiegel. who recently helmed the Hitler biopic Downfall, signed on to direct the 2007 version, although he was fired during production. The movie stars A-listers Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig. What really whet my enthusiasm, however, was the trailer, which nailed the poetic tension these B-movies need. Using a lulling and mournful Sigur Rós song, the film actually seems to be about The Loss of Humanity, not just gross sticky aliens.

But no, The Invasion messes up right from the beginning, when Nicole Kidman freaks out under fluorescent lighting. Actually, that part's rather cool, because you can instantly tell which scene from the original movies is being re-imagined, which is half the fun with the Body Snatchers series. Then, however, the story flashes back to the chronological beginning, and this is how the invasion takes place in 2007: a spaceship falls from the sky, leaving a trail of contagious debris from Texas to Washington DC (so much for the eerily quiet takeover). People scratch themselves with a sharp item from said debris, expose their blood flow to the air, and wake up in the middle of the night with a goo mask. That's right, original Body Snatcher fans, The Invasion features nothing growing to life in the closet next to your bed. There's just a virus or bacteria or whatever, as if this were some goddam zombie movie, rather than the highly-appropriate-for-wanton-subtextualizing process of the olden days: seedpods.