Bernardo Bertolucci, the Italian writer-director, dies recently after making 25 films over 51 years. He is most renowned for The Conformist (1970), Last Tango in Paris (1972) and the 9-Oscar winner The Last Emperor (1987). Bertolucci’s body of work benefitted from his longtime collaboration with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro.
Of course, his most notorious film was Last Tango in Paris. I rewatched Last Tango in Paris in the last few years, and concluded that it just doesn’t stand up. In fact, I found parts of the vaunted Marlon Brando performance risible and, knowing what we know now about how Bertolucci and Brando treated actrees Maria Schneider, the famed butter scene is disturbingly unwatchable.
I actually prefer Bertolucci’s more recent work, beginning with the underrated The Sheltering Sky (1990) with John Malkovich and Debra Winger. I thought that his The Dreamers was the best film of 2003.
I especially like Bertolucci’s final film, Me and Youwhich he made in 2012 at the age of 72. I saw Me and You at the San Francisco International Film Festival, but it has never been widely available, and sadly, can only be streamed with a Realeyz subscription.
Visit my Best Movies of 2013 for my list of the year’s best films, complete with images, trailers and my comments on each movies. My top ten for 2013 is:
Blue Is the Warmest Color
The Hunt
Before Midnight
Stories We Tell
The Spectacular Now
Mud
Short Term 12
Fruitvale Station
The Act of Killing
Captain Phillips.
The other best films of the year are: The Great Beauty, Nebraska, American Hustle, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Rendez-vous in Kiruna, The Gatekeepers, At Any Price, Undefeated, In a World…and Me And You.
I’m saving space for these promising films that I haven’t seen yet: Her, The Wolf of Wall Street andThe Past (Passe).
Note: Undefeated is on this year’s list, even though it won an Oscar a year ago, because it only became available for most of us to see in 2013.
Evangelizing for wonderful movies that are overlooked is the primary mission of The Movie Gourmet. These four movies made my Best Movies of 2013. They are brilliant and everyone should see them.
Also on my list of the year’s best, it’s easy to say that Me and You is overlooked because it hasn’t even gotten a US release in theaters , DVD or VOD.
In the Italian coming of age dramedy Me and You, we meet fourteen-year-old Lorenzo with his pimply face, see through mustache and bad attitude. Lorenzo lives with his mom in a comfortable Rome apartment and yearns for some low-pressure solitude. Telling his mom that he’s off to a weeklong ski holiday with schoolmates, he instead hides out in their apartment’s basement storage unit. He has stocked the basement with his favorite foods, it has a bathroom and he can listen to his tunes on headphones. It’s all looking up for him until his heroin-addicted older half-sister Olivia intrudes, looking for a place to go cold turkey.
Lorenzo resents the intrusion, but Olivia threatens to tell his mom. It turns out that the two don’t really know each other. (Lorenzo’s dad had left Olivia’s mom for his mom – and the two mothers don’t communicate.) The siblings bicker. As any 14-year-old would be, Lorenzo is fascinated by this young woman. Still immature herself, she has already lived a life – and there’s much Lorenzo can learn about the adult world from Olivia. Perhaps they can even bond for the first time as brother and sister…Lorenzo isn’t going to get his solitude, but he may get an unforgettable adventure instead.
There’s a lot of humor in Me and You, primarily stemming from the ski trip ruse and the sibling interactions. Me and You also contains a very realistic and unvarnished depiction of detox and relapse.
This is 72-year-old Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci’s first film since The Dreamers in 2003 (my choice for the best film of that year). Bertolucci, of course, is the writer-director of Last Tango in Paris (which I don’t think holds up well today) and The Conformist, 1900, The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky (which still stand up as excellent films). With The Dreamers and Me and You, Bertolucci seems to be matching his finest work.
I saw Me and You at the San Francisco International Film Festival; it is still waiting for a US theatrical release.
Shailene Woodley and Miles Teller in THE SPECTACULAR NOW
Some promising movies opened this weekend while I was sampling the San Francisco International Film Festival. The result: ten movies for me in seven theaters in three cities over four days.
I started on Friday at the SFIFF with Prince Avalanche and Rent a Family Inc. at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas. Prince Avalanche, a droll comedy with Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch that will open in theaters later his summer, is very funny. Writer-director David Gordon Green (All the Real Girls, Pineapple Express) introduced his film and took questions. Rent a Family Inc., a documentary about an odd Japanese practice of renting fake family members, was less successful. (Note: I missed my monthly poker game for these two flicks.)
On Saturday, I caught up with the new releases: The Reluctant Fundamentalist at Camera 7 in Campbell (okay), At Any Price at San Jose’s Camera 12 (liked it a lot) and the French thriller In the House at San Jose’s Camera 3 (surprisingly clever).
On Sunday, I caught Kon-Tiki at San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center Cinema; (I’m writing about Kon-Tiki tomorrow). Then it was over to SFIFF for Me and You at the Kabuki. Me and You is the latest from Italian cinema legend Bernardo Bertolucci, and I LOVED it. (I had to miss the great director William Friedkin’s appearance at a rare screening of his 1977 Sorcerer at Camera 3; I would have loved it, but I just saw Friedkin last summer at a Killer Joe screening and I already had my SFIFF tickets; to make up for it, I am gonna buy Friedkin’s new book and Netflix his Sorcerer.)
Then I rendezvoused with my nephew Danny and his friend Zeke for a special showing of the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers at the Castro Theatre, preceded by a Q&A with director Philip Kaufman. It was the first time that the guys experienced both a grand movie palace and an appearance by a filmmaker – and they enjoyed the movie, too. Body Snatchers, which I saw in its theatrical release, held up very well – and still has one of the all-time great closing shockers in cinema.
I returned to the SFIFF on Monday with The Wife. First, we saw The Spectacular Now at the Kabuki, a coming of age indie focused on teen alcoholism; one of the best films of the year, it will open widely on August 2. Then we saw Deceptive Practices, the fine documentary about my favorite magician/card shark Ricky Jay, at the New People Cinema.
Whew! That was a whirlwind! It’s lots of fun to go to the movies, but trying to write about so many in a compressed period is tough for me. The highlight was sharing the movie experience with The Wife and the guys. But I also saw some movies that will be on my Best Movies of 2013 – The Spectacular Now, Me and You and (probably) At Any Price – all in one glorious weekend.
