Two new films you won't find in theaters, but you ought to see them

I saw two movies today that won't show up in many American theaters.

It's a shame. Both are fascinating movies, although one leaves me wondering why it was made.

"Ithaca" is an American film, a low-budget remake of a World War II movie. MGM's "The Human Comedy" (1943) was one of the very best home-front films. It starred Mickey Rooney, one of Metro's biggest stars, as a teenage boy whose older brother is in the Army and getting ready to go overseas.

It's difficult for us to realize, 70 years later, how good Rooney was. We know him as the little guy who was in movies in 10 different decades and was married a couple of dozen times. Or at least it looked that way.

But for a time in the 1940s, he was the most popular movie star in the world.

Mickey Rooney in "The Human Comedy"

In a movie based on William Saroyan's novel "The Human Comedy," Rooney plays Homer McCauley, a 14-year-old boy living in fictional Ithaca, California (possibly Fresno).

His father is dead and his older brother Marcus is in the Army getting ready to ship out.

It's a movie that was overly sweet even for its time, but it gives us a reasonably accurate look at what things were like at home when the boys marched off to war.


So much the the drama in the story is specific to the time that an audience unfamiliar with the '40s will have some problems with it.

That's why it's so curious that Meg Ryan decided to remake the story in her film "Ithaca." Part of it may have been the opportunity to direct her son, Jack Quaid, but he doesn't play a large role. He's the brother who went off to war and is primarily seen writing letters home to Homer.

Ryan cut three of the best scenes from the original -- two involving the older brother in the army and third showing Homer at school.

In fact, the entire subtext of America being a place of opportunity for both rich kids and poor kids seems to have disappeared.

The newer story is little more than a coming of age for Homer, and the '40s touches don't mean anything special. So much of both stories centers around the telegraph office, where Homer's after-school job is as a messenger.

The last telegram was delivered in 2006, but most deliveries ended in the '60s and '70s. Audiences watching Ithaca today might see Homer as strangely anachronistic.

The other movie has its own connection to World War II is a different sort, very much a dark comedy.

It's also a foreign language film with subtitles, thankfully in one of the two languages I can almost understand. "Er Ist Wieder Da," which translates as "Look Who's Back," is set in 2014 Berlin. One morning, a man asleep in a park awakens, and is confused by what he finds.

The man has gone to sleep 69 years earlier.

His name is Adolf Hitler.

It's a low budget film, made for about three million Euros, and more than anything, it's a satire on modern mass media.

Hitler does nothing more than be himself, although he is somewhat of an earlier, saner Hitler not driven mad by the last days of the war.

Of course no one believes that a man who died in 1945 has returned and has not aged at all since then. The beauty of the story is that there is no explanation for how or why Hitler shows up in 2014 with no knowledge of the intervening years.

Audiences treat him as a wonderful comic satirist and the greatest Hitler impersonator of all time. He's so good that he gets beaten up by Neo Nazis and one elderly Jewish woman sees him for who he really is.

It made me very happy to see a movie that didn't fit into the cookie-cutter. It didn't have anyone involved with it who was familiar to me, and the production values were nothing special.

But it was fun, and thought-provoking as well.

That's pretty rare these days.