Not your average Saturday night

No Man’s Land, 3/16/13, Best Foreign Language Film, 2001No Man’s Land is set during the Bosnian war, and focuses on two soldiers, one a Bosnian and the other a Bosnian-Serb, who find themselves stuck together in a trench between the two fighting sides. At first I was watching it as a film about the war, but as other pieces started to fall into place, it started to seem like some kind of wicked satire on war and the international politics surrounding it. As long as the two men are stuck in the trench together, both sides have a temporary cease fire, if one kills the other, it’s over; complicating the issue is there is also a Bosnian soldier, who when he was thought dead, was moved onto a booby-trapped bouncing grenade, and if he moved at all, it would explode, spraying deadly shrapnel all around, killing all in the trench. The UN forces monitoring the situation want to try and help, instead of just ‘observe’ which was their brief. This is where the absurdity begins, with the bureaucratic paralysis that has come to symbolize UN intervention. The French UN team on the ground wants to help; the UN leadership (in this case, commanded by a British officer) wants them to do nothing. And the ending left me wanting to know how the event ended (not how I would have thought). The events that follow are infuriating and represent the frustration that actually happened during the Bosnian war, with the whole world just watching as the region imploded. It’s an interesting movie, and worth a watch.

The Apartment, 3/16/13, Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Art Direction, B&W, Best Film Editing, 1960Billy Wilder directed this romantic comedy starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine set in a New York City insurance company. Jack Lemmon was one of the cinema’s great actors, in comedy or drama. C.C. Baxter (Lemmon) has an apartment that he lets a few of the managers from his insurance company use for extra-marital relations, seemingly to help him climb the corporate ladder. And it works, perhaps a little too well, because the personnel director promotes Baxter so he can also use the apartment. The tenants in the apartment think all the hanky-panky is because of Baxter, and cast the expected disapproving glances. Shirley MacLaine plays Fran Kubelik, an elevator operator (which will seem so archaic in this day and age) in the building where Baxter works. The movie is full of sexist stereotypes and would probably be frowned upon today. That being said, there are a lot of movies that would be done in differently today or not all, so I don’t mark it down for that; it was made over fifty years ago and has some of the biggest talent of the time (or any time, really). I enjoyed it, and I think if movie directors and writers are so lazy that they keep digging up old movies to re-do (and they usually pick the crap movies), perhaps they could try re-making The Apartment, maybe with Amy Adams as Fran Kubelik and Steve Carrell as Baxter, and to mix it up, maybe have some of the executives using the apartment be women. If you are looking for a change of pace from the typical movie fare, get this from the library or Netflix and enjoy.