Movies to See Right Now

Victor Buono in THE STRANGLER
Victor Buono in THE STRANGLER

This week, most of your movie best bets are on TV and video.

In theaters, I liked Ethan Hawke’s gentle documentary Seymour: An Introduction. If you’re looking for a scare, try the inventive and non-gory horror gem It Follows.

Don’t bother with Clouds of Sils Maria – it’s a muddled mess.

Insurgent, from the Divergent franchise is what it is – young adult sci-fi with some cool f/x. The romance 5 to 7 did NOT work for me, but I know smart women who enjoyed it. I found Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter to be droll but tiresome. The biting Hollywood satire of Maps to the Stars wasn’t worth the disturbing story of a cursed family. I also didn’t like the Western Slow West, now out on video.

Documentarian Alex Gibney has TWO excellent films playing now on HBO:

  • Going Clear: The Prison of Belief, a devastating expose of Scientology is playing on HBO; and
  • Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, an especially well-researched and revelatory biopic of Frank Sinatra.

My DVD/Stream of the Week is the hilarious Living in Oblivion, with Steve Buscemi and Peter Dinklage. It’s available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Xbox Video.

Don’t miss the 1964 serial killer movie The Strangler, playing on Turner Classic Movies on April 19. It’s the masterpiece of director Burt Topper, who specialized in low-budget exploitation movies. First, we see that lonely lab tech Otto Kroll (Victor Buono in an especially brilliant and eccentric performance) is twisted enough to murder random women and return to his lair and fondle his doll collection. Then we learn his motivation – he dutifully visits his hateful mother (Ellen Corby – later to play Grandma Walton) in her nursing room; she heaps abuse on him in every interaction. Pretty soon, even the audience wants to kill Mrs. Kroll, but Otto sneaks around taking out his hatred for his mom by strangling other women. Because Otto is outwardly genial to a fault, it takes a loooong time to fall under the suspicion of the cops. The character of Otto and Buono’s performance elevate The Strangler above its budget and launches it into the top rank of serial killer movies. (THE STRANGLER IS NOT AVAILABLE FOR RENT FROM NETFLIX OR STREAMING SERVICES. You can buy the DVD from Amazon or find a VHS tape on eBay.)

TCM will also show Murder, My Sweet (April 20), the 1944 film in which Dick Powell was able to escape his typecasting as boyish crooner in big musicals and immerse himself in a new career in grimy film noir. Powell proves himself right with the studio bosses, and Murder, My Sweet was just his first success in film noir. Powell, an actor from Hollywood’s Golden Age who would translate very well in today’s cinema, is very watchable as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, an LA private dick who is hired by three clients, each seemingly more dangerous than the last. As Marlowe follows the mystery, he is knocked out multiple times, taken hostage, drugged and temporarily blinded. Oh, and Claire Trevor tries to seduce him. Pretty good stuff.

KUMIKO, THE TREASURE HUNTER: droll but tiresome

KUMIKO, THE TREASURE HUNTER
KUMIKO, THE TREASURE HUNTER

The title character in Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter (Rinko Kikuchi – Oscar nominated for Babel)  flies from Japan to Minnesota on a quest to unearth the suitcase of loot that Steve Buscemi hid in the snow in the movie Fargo.  Because she doesn’t speak English or have any money, navigating the frigid 200+ miles from the Minneapolis Airport to Fargo, South Dakota makes for a fish-out-of-water comedy, albeit a tiresome one-joke comedy.

We meet our heroine  living a solitary life of utter dissatisfaction in Tokyo, where she spits in every cup of her boss’ tea.  At night, she watches and re-watches a scratchy VHS tape of Fargo.  As we watch her increasingly bizarre actions, it becomes clear that she is starkers.  The absurdist humor in Kumiko comes from the completely deadpan depiction of the bizarre.  It’s all very droll, with many genuinely funny moments, but it finally becomes tedious.  And I didn’t buy the glimpse of magical realism at the ending.

Here’s something I liked about Kumiko – the director and co-writer David Zellner also plays the role of the rural deputy sheriff – and he’s really great at capturing the essence of a well-meaning man driven to help, but utterly unequipped to do so.

So, how funny, really, is mental illness?  Having seen it up close in my own life, I don’t seek it as necessarily cute or quirky.  This woman is raving mad, but she’s been able to remain (barely) functional with a highly regimented life in her own culture.  When she plunges herself into an alien world, she inevitably decompensates.  I am able to enjoy mental health humor (and I aspire to be the farthest thing from a scold on the subject), but just watching someone flail around within their disability isn’t entertaining for me.