another three movie day yesterday. the first two were just okay: the untouchable (imdb) and the kovak box (imdb).
"the untouchable" is about a french woman who discovers her father was an untouchable in india and goes to india to find him. there's an interesting parallel between that "the untouchable" and "the greatest love of all", the film i saw the night before. they have the same basic plot but were very different films. i guess that could be the point of a longer post that i don't feel like doing right now.
"the kovak box" is a fairly conventional non-film festival-type thriller. an american science fiction writer goes to majorca and discovers that someone is getting people to kill themselves just as the novelist described in his first novel twenty years earlier. the film was classified as a spanish film, but it really it looked and felt american. it had an american lead, almost all the dialogue was in english, and featured relatively high production values. it wasn't all that bad, but it also wasn't much to blog home about.
but after two so-so films, the third movie, the killer within (imdb), was really fantastic. "killer" is a fascinating documentary about a senior university professor who reveals that in 1955 he killed a fellow student when he was an undergraduate at swarthmore college. the killer was found to be unfit to stand trial and was committed to a mental institution. five years later, he was released, and then found to be not guilty by reason of insanity. when the film begins, he is a seemingly ordinary guy, living and teaching in arizona, with a wife and two daughters. only his wife had any idea about the homicide in his past.
although he's on screen for about half the film, the killer, bob bechtel, is a complete enigma by the end. he decides to go public with the murder in his past to explain how someone could be driven to murder by intense bullying. but while he recounts the bullying himself on camera, his former classmates don't recall any bullying at all. so what happened? was his treatment as cruel as he claimed it was? or did he interpret the way he was treated differently because of mental illness? or is the whole bullying thing an after-the-fact rationalization? the entire film is driven by questions that are simply never answered. like one of my favorite documentaries, capturing the friedmans, "the killer" presents you with contradictory evidence and leaves you to sort out what happened for yourself.
there's also a local connection to the film. the murder took place at swarthmore, a college just a couple of miles from here, and a sister institution to the place where mrs. noz teaches. during the Q and A with the director after the film, the woman sitting in front of me revealed that her father was in the dorm when bechtel went on his spree. but even without the local connection, i highly recommend "the killer within" if you ever get the chance to see it.
ADDENDUM: dave saw a different showing of the "the killer within" than me, his review is here. his take on "the kovak box" is here.
