So, Judy talked me into going to ALL FIVE foreign films that are up for an Oscar this year and I was happy to go. They were shown through a 3-day package deal at the National Geographic building — $45, including a reception each day.

What a wonderful slog that was — we started on Friday night with “Incendies,” and then, on Saturday, took in a double-feature of “In a Better World” and “Biutiful.” Sunday, we were joined by Mickey and Andrew for “Dogtooth,” and then Judy and I finished the marathon with “Hors-la-Loi” (“Outside the Law”).

By the time we saw all five, I think we resembled two chamois cloths that had just been through the pep club’s annual car-wash fundraiser. Friends, we were wrung out. Emotionally drained. Forever scarred. Four of these movies are each a blow to head and the heart, and one is just dried-out Mediterranean flatbread. At one point, I leaned over to Judy and asked, “Has a foreign rom-com ever been up for an award?” (Do they make stoner comedies in other countries?) But nevermind — we loved the whole grueling experience, we admit it.

You have to be a masochist to do this event anyhow. I dunno where the National Geographic digs up the crowd who turns out for this, but they are old and mean and tweedy as all hell. They are a free tote-bag nightmare. They will cut you if you get in their way. And you should have seen the “reception” hors d’oeuvres table between films. Holy crap!  When the world starts turning zombie, these people will be early adopters. Judy and I managed to get some wine, but never had any hope of getting much more than crumbs to eat. We just watched the carnage. It was a little like this — ff’wd to :35, if you dare!

Anyway, the cinema. “Biutiful,” directed by Mexico’s Alejandro Iñarritu, will win the award, I think. Javier Bardem is really good and really sad as an ex-junkie/shady entrepreneur, trying to make life okay for his kids before he dies of cancer. Yes, it’s all that.

Of the five movies, “Biutiful” gave me the most heavy sighs and feeling of utter grime and filth — exactly the director’s intention, it seems. Only in the last 20 minutes did it become truly amazing. We liked it, but we staggered away.

Our favorite film (I think we agree, right Judy?) was “Incendies,” a Canadian film about … Lebanon, we think? (This seems to be unresolved in online discussions, though it seems obvious to us.) A brother and sister, twins who live in Montreal, must fulfill their mother’s dying wish and return to her homeland in search of their father and their lost brother. Also very hard to watch in parts, but gripping.

The second it was over, a loud, nasty woman behind us announced she could see the plot twist coming all along. I didn’t.

We liked “In a Better World,” which told parallel stories about a doctor who works in Africa and the travails of his picked-on adolescent son back home in Denmark. The son befriends a no-good rich kid who’s new to the school. We had questions. The movie didn’t have answers. This one really ramped up my fear of heights, when the boys keep climbing to the top of a grain silo and walking along its edges. That’s because of foreign film rule no. 7: IF BAD SHIT CAN HAPPEN TO PEOPLE, IT WILL.

Skipping ahead to the last movie, “Hors-La-Loi,” an Algerian biopic (I never even cared to look up whether it is based in fact or not) about three brothers who were central to the fight for that country’s independence after World War II, and the terrorism in France that led to it. Judy and I were mostly just bored out of our minds. The acting was bad and the script was very Wiki in plot and pacing. This was a movie about thugs. I think Judy summed it up for both of us: “I have never cared less about an independence movement.”

Okay, finally – “Dogtooth,” a Greek film.

Now, while I do think “Incendies” is more deserving of the Oscar, let me say this: Four years hence, when Judy says, remember that time we went to all the foreign film nominees in one weekend?, I will have only vague memories of the films we saw, except “Dogtooth,” which I will be able to recall frame for freakin’ frame.

The Nat Geo folks brought in this woman from L.A. who is on the Academy jury that nominates the best foreign films, to give a little spiel before each film. (Her name is Marjorie Somethin’-Somethin’; they kept introducing her as the casting director of “Avatar,” which became a running gag for those of us in the all-five-films crowd; she reminded me of someone who would be a character in Christopher Guest’s “For Your Consideration.”) Anyway, Marjorie gave us all a stern warning before the lights went down for “Dogtooth”: It is very disturbing. It has full-frontal. It has graphic sex (in “dogma” cinema style). It is brutal, it has abuse, it will ROCK YOUR WORLD whether you want it to or not. It is extremely controversial. Lady, just bring it!

Trailer – Dogtooth from Tour de Force on Vimeo.

It did rock our worlds. In short, “Dogtooth” is about a man and his wife and their three children. The couple have deliberately kept their son and two daughters on a lovely little compound way out in the country. Only dad leaves the compound, to go to his job managing a factory. The children have been raised in total isolation from the rest of the world. Everything they know, they learned from mom and dad — including vocabulary, to the point where they’ve been taught to call objects by other names. (An easy chair is called “the sea,” etc.)

Dad brings home a female security guard once a week, where she is paid to have sex with the son.

I could talk and talk about this movie. The ending is a major mindblower (and/or deeply unsatisfying.) I think it’s GREAT. (Can you tell that this was actually my favorite movie of the weekend and I’m just too weirded out to admit it?) The lights went up and Marjorie Somethin’-Somethin’ took the mike and said “I told you.” She asked the crowd what they thought.

By now, most of us had sat through four movies. A woman in the back stood up and shouted about how terrible it was. In fact, she added, all the movies had been terrible. “No!” the crowd shouted. “No, no, no!”

Marjorie asked the audience: What did we think “Dogtooth” was really about?

“Fascism!” someone shouted. (YES.)

“Abusive families!” said another. (YES.)

I would also add (since I’m not a theater shouter): Families that keep awful secrets; dictatorships; media; people who don’t let their children watch television; homeschooling gone horribly, horribly wrong; the oppressively insular, cocooning effect seen in a lot of families — especially the ones where dad is a quiet tyrant (you surely have seen this before).

Also, “Dogtooth” is beautifully imagined and terribly cruel. It is a unique piece of satire, too. Here is my favorite scene. On their parents’ anniversary, this is how the girls dance while the son plays guitar, because they’ve never seen actual dancing. (Except, as it becomes clear, the eldest daughter has secretly, recently seen “Flashdance.”) I wonder how many people I know could stomach “Dogtooth,” but if you can, then you’re a friend of mine.

For all y’all who’ve spent a lot of this week snowed in …

Washington was spared (this time) but for some reason I was having vague memories about this piece, from February 2003, and I wanted to go back and make sure I wasn’t imagining that I actually wrote it. I remember it was inspired (and suggested) by Frank Ahrens. It’s short. It’s about how guys go all macho when it snows and stomp in to the office unshaven and fleeced out.

Enjoy it all over again, or for the very first time.

BLIZZARD MAN STORMS THE OFFICE, IN BUFFALO PLAID

By Hank Stuever
(c) The Washington Post (originally published Feb. 8, 2003.)

A good five inches of snow falls, and the cubicle landscape is suddenly populated the next day by more manly men, who seem to have hiked in from the backcountry, or driven in on their imaginary snowmobiles.

Gone are the gray suits, the khakis, the software-logo golf shirts and tassled loafers. When it snows, the American office starts to look like Stein Ericksen’s ski lodge, filled with variations on the Brawny man — at least as far as the guys are concerned. This is a good thing, since Office Park Dad spends so much of his life feeling somehow less a man. He is a Shetland wool bonanza — layered, hat-haired, rosy-cheeked. He looks ridiculous and still, remarkably, sexy.

Never mind that the roads were cleared by 8, and that he parked the Jetta in the garage under K Street, barely stepping in a puddle. He’s here, everybody: Eddie Bauer has arrived for his workday.

Nothing completes a winter wonderland downtown like the sight of guys who wear the same thing every day wearing something else. At last you see the too-thick sweaters they got for Christmas, or the outerwear they buy for fun. The Gore-Tex, fleece, and puffy parka factor goes off the chart. All that flannel plaid makes us think of the logging industry or not-so-romantic camping weekends. There’s a certain swagger to cold-weather guys, which may mean: long johns.

Photo: Reuters

They don’t shave (the prep time instead went to shoveling the driveway), and they exude a harmless machismo of self-satisfaction because they made it in, as opposed to those suburban Maryland wussies who decided to stay home with the brats. Lunch tends to run long on a day like this, and it seems like all the guys decide to eat together at pubs and taverns instead of girly-man places like Au Bon Pain or Chicken Out.

After that, it’s time to hit the slopes for the rest of the afternoon, schussing back to the cubicle, ready to chop down the forest. The coat closet by the reception desk smells ripe and woolly. Snow Day Man sits at his desk and waits for the avalanche search-and-rescue distress call that never comes. (He is indifferent to the snickerings over there of Snow Day Woman, wearing that silly pashmina — or worse, tights — and her Incredibly Dumb Hat.) The daylight wanes and he begins to think about his journey home. He can handle whatever Old Man Winter deals him out there on the Beltway frontier, because he’s a lumberjack, and he’s okay.

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