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The Series:

While North American audiences are probably familiar with Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital, not everyone knows that it was a loose remake of a Danish television series called simply The Kingdom (or, in Denmark, Riget), that was broadcast in four parts, directed by none other than Lars von Trier (he of Dancer In The Dark fame).

The first run of The Kingdom is split up into four episodes as follows: Part One - The Unheavenly Host, Part Two - Thy Kingdom Come, Part Three - A Foreign Body, and it all wraps up in Part 4 - The Living Dead Rather than give a specific breakdown of what happens in each and every one of those four episodes, let’s instead take a look at a more general overview of the whole shebang, to avoid spoilers that might unintentionally ruin it for anyone who hasn’t been lucky enough to see this masterpiece yet, via either one of the import DVD releases or the old Image laserdiscs..

Set in modern day Denmark, The Kingdom is a new hospital that is essentially the best of the best – the best equipment, the best doctors, everything is as modern as it can be and this facility is really on the cutting edge of technology. Unfortunately for the patients and for the employees who roam the halls of this massive structure, The Kingdom also appears to be very, very haunted.

Things first take a turn towards weirdsville when the ghost of a small girl makes herself known to one of the patients there, an older woman named Mrs. Drusse, who happens to be able to communicate with the dead and as such is a bit of a spiritualist. Mrs. Drusse isn’t really all that ill, but she continues to find new and unique ways to get herself admitted to The Kingdom so that she can investigate the ghosts she knows call the building home. When Mrs. Drusse begins communicating with the ghost of the girl, the senses a very strong sadness about her and as such, she takes it upon herself to help the spirit find the eternal peace that she so obviously craves.

As Mrs. Drusse goes about trying to unravel the mystery of who this girl is, she finds out that over one hundred years ago she was killed on the very same land that the hospital now stands on. Things start to get stranger and stranger as her snooping around uncovers more and more about the restless spirit and soon she enlists the help of her son, Bulder, who is employed as an intern at The Kingdom, to help her with her work.

While the Drusse’s are poking around trying to help the ghost, a neurosurgeon named Dr. Helmer who has arrived from Sweden to take over practicing at The Kingdom is having issues with two of his co-workers, Dr. Hook and Administrator Moesgaard. Helmer doesn’t even try to hide the fact that he feels that he is above his Danish counterparts, and he treats them like the inferiors he believes them to be. The only person in the hospital he has anything other than hatred for is Dr. Rigmor, and there’s obviously a mutual attraction between the two – though Helmer maintains that they keep their affair a secret.

As if the soap operatics of the Swedish neurosurgeon and the ghost of a little girl weren’t enough, there are also shorter plot lines thrown in here revolving around a pathologist who is obsessed with obtaining a live tumor to study, a medical student who finds himself involved in a strange case of what could only be cannibalism, and a severed head that shows up in strange spots and at very awkward moments. And then there’s the bizarre pregnancy of Dr. Peterson… there’s no way that’s going to end well.

A perfect blend of horror, mystery and quirky humor, The Kingdom is a completely engrossing series that starts off as a medical drama very much in the vein of something like E.R. but soon proves to be very much its own unique animal. The influence of filmmakers like David Lynch and David Cronenberg seems to permeate von Trier’s episodic tale, but it never seems to feel derivative of their work, even if sometimes it does feel very much like Twin Peaks.

Performances are generally solid across the board, with Ernst Hugo Jåregård stealing the show as the diabolical Dr. Helmer, the man you love to hate. His role is pretty slimy and he really puts himself into it, but every once in a while the story reminds that he too is human, so it’s not impossible to feel for him despite his ugly nature. Kirsten Rolffes as Mrs. Drusse is also very good, she’s a completely likeable old coot and even if she might be a little off her rocker, you can’t help but want to know what happens to the poor old thing.

Shot partially in his Dogme style (thought not entirely), von Trier manages to give The Kingdom a gritty atmosphere (it was all shot on 16mm and then blown up to 35mm to give it that intentionally grainy look that is often times inherent in that procedure) that serves the storyline well. The colors of the hospital are rather sickly looking at times, creating a strange sense of unease in certain scenes. Some of the imagery, as off the wall as it as at certain points throughout, is pretty creepy stuff and while it never goes so far as to be gross out material (this is hardly a slasher or a gore film we’re watching), some of it is pretty disturbing. This makes for an interesting contrast against the very human drama that unfolds in the series, as well as the lighter, more humorous moments that the four episodes are peppered with.

While Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital had its moments, it wasn’t nearly as strong as this original Danish version. The humor isn’t as prevalent but the scares are scarier, the atmosphere is much thicker and much more tense, and the story definitely flows in this tighter, better paced telling of the story.

The DVD

Chicago solicitor John Clark (Richard Gere), is bored with his person. On the train home one night, he catches sight of a maiden at the window of Oversight Mitzi’s ballroom dance school - and looks for her again. Finally he takes the tread to get on holiday the edify and go up to the dance class, enrolling with the beautiful Paulina (Jennifer Lopez), who works there. He tries keeping his dancing lessons a secret from his bride Beverly (Susan Sarandon) and daughter Jenna (Tamara Hope), as does his balding colleague Link (Stanley Tucci), who reinvents himself by night as a excitable Latin dancer. John’s changed behaviour arouses suspicions at home and Beverly hires a private eye (Richard Jenkins), who reveals the truly. Meanwhile, John’s fascination with Paulina is unresolved and her rebuff of a dinner invitation energises him to need the dancing no joking. Miss Mitzi (Anite Gillette) signs him up because the Chicago Crystal Ball Dance Game - and his wife and daughter sneak in to be careful of. With dramatic results.

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HBO has nevertheless another winner with its latest original movie, based on the critically acclaimed book by Ernest J. Gaines about a fetters awaiting his execution in 1948 Louisiana. “A Punishment In the past Dying” which made both the New York Times bestseller list and Oprah’s work nightspot picks, is a complex but expertly told fable about salvation and strength of spirit. Contrasting “Dead Man Walking,” this death row play-acting is not about a guilty man coming to terms with his zest, but rather an incorrupt man coming to terms with his death.

Mekhi Phifer stars as Jefferson, a young field hand who one fateful day accepts a ride from a pair of locals only to see his life ruined in an instant. The only surviving witness to a triple homicide, Jefferson is subsequently accused and convicted of the crime.

His lawyer, in a desperate plea to spare his life, begs the all-white jury not to send Jefferson to the chair, comparing the idea to sending a hog to its death. Of all of the injustices Jefferson has recently suffered, this is the ultimate humiliation. It doesn’t sway the jury anyway, and Jefferson is sentenced to die.

His godmother Miss Emma (Irma P. Hall), a commanding matriarch, realizes she is powerless in stopping his death but is determined that Jefferson win back his self-respect before his execution. She and friend Tante Lou (Cicely Tyson) enlist Grant Wiggins (Don Cheadle), the local teacher, to take Jefferson on as his pupil.

As Grant sees it, when a white man is killed, a black man has to die for it. That’s just the way of the South.

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Grant originally left town to escape this kind of oppression, only to return after college to find that little had changed. On the verge of leaving again, Tante Lou reminds him of his sense of duty, to her, to the community, and to Jefferson.

To Grant, the experience is an insult to his education and his intelligence; to Jefferson, it’s basically a waste of time. But the two have a common link in their anger, and this alienation slowly gives way to a poignant dialogue.

The visits to the jail become cathartic for both men. Not only does Grant learn to respect Jefferson, he earns newfound respect for the women in his life.

Miss Emma, Tante Lou and even Grant’s girlfriend Vivian (Lisa Arrindell Anderson) represent another kind of courage needed to survive this environment. Their weapon is endurance, something that at first, Grant sees as a weakness. He tells Vivian that her notion of change through persistence is “the battle cry of the defeated.” But each of these women has a massive reserve of strength, exerting fierce power when needed. They have all been waiting to find a man who can match their determination, or as Vivian says, “stay in the South and not be broken.” In the end, Grant is transformed just as much as Jefferson.

The movie features a true ensemble cast in the sense that all thesps shine in their respective roles. Nearly every scene is intense and significant but never melodramatic — a difficult feat for such a varied group of actors to pull off. In fact, come awards time, it will be a difficult task to distinguish between lead and supporting roles, although Cheadle and Phifer deserve special recognition for their equally powerful performances.

Writer Ann Peacock does justice to Gaines’ story, and both Peacock and director Joseph Sargent create a lyrical mood with their words and images. A special note should be made to Charles C. Bennett’s historically accurate and detailed sets as well as Ernest Troost’s mood-setting music.

Technical credits meet the highest of standards.

“The Pattern Butterfly,” a 1991 English-dialect coat by Czech overseer Karel Kachyna, has elements in average with “Schindler’s List” beyond merely its Holocaust theme. Primarily, there’s a passion-thrifty list of Jewish names that serves as a colourful fulcrum.

For the sake of comparison, I decided finally to see Steven Spielberg’s saga about the destruction of Polish Jewry. This I did while pondering a recent essay by author and teacher Melvin Jules Bukiet, published in The Washington Post’s Outlook section, in which Bukiet argues that storytelling (excluding works by Holocaust survivors) “cannot communicate this particular history.” That “any narrative reproduction of the machines of murder diminishes evil.” That, by implication, the truth of the Nazi war against Jews, unique somehow in a vast record of human viciousness, is too sacred to be attached to words like “Steven Spielberg’s saga.”

Contrary to Bukiet’s passionately expressed “fear that art itself will overwhelm atrocity,” “The Last Butterfly” demonstrates, as does “Schindler’s List,” the precious power of art to transmit emotional truths about history, if not the factual completeness of history.

It should not be a condemnation of filmmaking to acknowledge that “The Last Butterfly” isn’t as agonizing to watch as the reality of genocide is to imagine. Nor should it diminish the Holocaust to realize that understanding these events requires more than feeling some huge, heavy, black, simple sense of absolute evil. “The Last Butterfly” is virtually a metaphor for the value of the artistic imagination in the face of horror. British actor Tom Courtenay stars as Antoine Moreau, an esteemed French pantomime artist on the skids in Nazi-occupied Paris. Moreau comes under the thumb of the Nazis when he discovers that his girlfriend, killed in capture, was a member of the French Resistance. By this time Moreau has already shown onstage the moral courage for which mimes are renowned. Right under the noses of German officers, his whimsical routine about a jumping dog evolves into a mockery of the stiff-armed Nazi salute. Moreau’s arms and legs take on lives of their own, jutting outward despite his attempts to restrain them. This is director Kachyna’s first modest display of the idea of art as a medium for emotional truths.

With the promise of freeing him afterward, the Nazis send Moreau — a gentile — to the Jewish ghetto of Terezin, Czechoslovakia, for a special performance. The details of this performance are kept vague by the ghetto’s overseers, but Moreau, living among the Jews in their privation, finds out quickly that tragedy and danger are in the air and soil of this place. As in “Schindler’s List,” the “transport” train is a chilling and recurring image in “The Last Butterfly.” Through Vera (Brigitte Fossey), a caretaker of the ghetto’s children, Moreau learns that whichever Jews he selects to be involved in his special performance will be spared — temporarily, at least — from the cattle cars. Thus, Moreau’s list: the many small children, and a few old musicians, who will help him stage his fairy tale.

When Moreau realizes that his performance was designed as a sham to impress visiting Red Cross officials (”We are fine in the City of the Jews,” other youngsters recite in a Nazi-supervised rehearsal), the artist switches the program. Moreau’s elaborate version of “Hansel and Gretel” includes the film’s most striking visual image — rows of children in flame-red costumes, waving their arms to simulate the consuming fire of the witch’s oven. Other children, wearing the compulsory yellow Star of David, are pushed screaming into the flames. Again, the artistic imagination renders an emotional truth in a way no history book could, in a way that transcends the simple, factual declaration: “Children were murdered.”

Throughout “The Last Butterfly” are scenes and images that make us feel the evil of Nazism in unusual ways. Although the Jewish characters all wear the yellow star, there’s something striking about seeing that star on mannequins in a store window. And the sight of two elderly women with toothless smiles, dancing feebly to an ocarina’s tune — celebrating the fact that they weren’t chosen for the latest transport to the death camps — is a haunting definition of the perverse nature of joy in this sorrowful place.

Moreau, as delicately portrayed by Courtenay, is a more clearly heroic figure than Spielberg’s inscrutable Oskar Schindler. And this heightens the impact of Kachyna’s ending, which offers nothing akin to Spielberg’s relieving images of rescue.

“The Last Butterfly” may not be real, but it’s true.

“The Last Butterfly” is not rated but contains nudity and adult themes.

Little Box of Sweets

Director:


Meneka Das

2

Time Out rating

Average operator rating

Movie review

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From Time Out London

There’s some leer-catching photography of northern India’s parched plains in Maneka Das’s debut as writer and pilot, but other than that, it’s difficult to see why this wispy and toothless melodrama has been disposed a release in cinemas. The gest comprises a checklist of clichés about autocratic patriarchs, forbidden love and uncertain futures with Das staring as Asha, a servant girl living with grandparents who wants the break to go to university with her best friend Lalli (

Sheenu Das

).

Her relationship with the ostentatious, rebellious Seth (

Joe Anderson

) is confused by the impediment of his arrogant commissioner father and, as they assay desperately to consummate their POSSLQ = ‘Person of the Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters’, it all comes to a predictably teary head. It’s a dull, if competently made, film, which is done no favours by its earnest sound, a soppy orchestral stroke and a slew of made-up performances by actors clinging far too rigorously panty hose to their lines. It would be far wagerer suited to daytime TV.

Toe-hold sequence establishes Jesse as a fearless, gung-ho professional who readily risks his life to safeguard a little girl (and, of headway, her crafty dog) trapped in a bothy surrounded by fire. Wynt (Scott Glenn), Jesse’s mentor, is injured during the let go free effort, prompting his eventual settlement to retire from smokejumping when the story picks up a year later.In a nearby penitentiary, convicted killer Earl Shaye (William Forsythe) hatches an disrespectful plan to break not busy and recover $ 37 million in stashed depredate chop off. With cold-blooded capability, he eliminates a fellow prisoner, then takes the victim’s placein a group of convicts conscripted to help match a forest flames — a fire, it should be famed, that Shaye’s lawyer arranged to be company by hiring wizard plagiarize.Shaye and four fellow prisoners make their escape, posing as visiting Canadian firefighters (Forsythe’s attempt at a Canadian accent indicates that Bob and Doug McKenzie of “SCTV” may have a long-unsalvageable brother). One time away from the give someone his, they whim divide Shaye’s shorten. Naturally, unexpected complications arise.Wynt, who has returned from retirement to better crusade the blaze, discovers that an escape is in going forward. During the interval, Shaye and his confederates come across Jennifer (Suzy Amis), an ornithologist who was photographing birds when the fire broke out, and they step to inspiration her to protection. And then along comes Jesse, parachuting into the forest.But the bad guys aren’t the simply entity to worry about. Sooner or later, the winds whim cause the collision of the original animate and the backfire dispose by firefighters, creating a firestorm that will disconcert anyone unlucky enough to be in the vicinity.Oscar-winning cinematographer Dean Semler makes an unfavourable directorial debut working with Chris Soth’s predictable and colorless screenplay. Pic is markedly lacking in expectancy, and even a chase sequence involving a junk, a motorcycle and a well-aimed chain saw is less than electrifying. Although pared down to 89 minutes, “Firestorm” seems sluggish and unnecessarily protracted.As Jesse, the aptly rugged Long speaks his lines with foursquare conviction, and looks at mollify in firefighting machinery. But he lacks sufficient camera presence to declare his reduce rune very spellbinding. And it doesn’t expropriate that he hasn’t been confirmed any ingenious lines to reveal a sense of humor.Bordering on by default, Forsythe dominates the pic with his persuasive mix of beguiling politeness, soft-vocal daunt and, occasionally, bug-eyed psychosis. Amis brings a welcome touch of feisty resourcefulness to a lines that, thanks to her, is overdo more major than a standard-problem damsel in distress. As Wynt, Glenn has comparatively little to do, but does it well reasonably to give his one-dimensional part at least a shading or two of character.On a tech aim, “Firestorm” is loosely impressive, though sharp-eyed audiences will in a jiffy spot which fire sequences make been “enhanced” by the close effects crew. One clever arouse: When the giant blaze is initially mark off, the ignition is underscored with David Bowie’s reading of the theme from Paul Schrader’s “Cat People.” The payoff comes as Bowie sings: “I’ve been putting extinguished fires with gasoline.”