Slow West, which I saw at Cinequest, opens theatrically tomorrow. I suggest that you skip it.
I love Westerns, but Slow West just didn’t work for me. It’s a film of some ambition, and it won an award at Sundance, but the movie kept sliding in and out of self-consciousness, and I could never settle in to the story.
Kodi Smitt-McGee plays a sixteen-year-old Scot completely unsuited for survival in the Old West. Nonetheless, he is devoted to a young woman and he launches a determined quest to track her down. He soon picks up a veteran Westerner (Michael Fassbender) who can guide and guard him. The two, of course, have a series of adventures along the way.
There’s some appealingly dark and droll humor in Slow West (quite a few good laughs, actually). The problem is that Slow West can’t figure out whether it should have the tone of a straight Western (Unforgiven, The Homesman) or wink at the audience (Little Big Man). Accordingly, some of the period details are so wrong that they distracted me from the story. For example, in an otherwise very funny scene with arrows and a clothesline, the Indians look like tiny, skinny Asians. Smitt-McGee employs a Scots accent in every fifth line. And Fassbender sounds like he just stepped out of a time machine from 2015.
Slow West was filmed in New Zealand, so there are grand vistas that kind of look like the American West, but then kinda don’t. This DID work for me, because it contributed an almost subconscious edge to heighten some scenes.
The great character actor Richard Jenkins has the role of his career in The Visitor– a man who deals with loss by isolating himself. He becomes intrigued with an illegal Middle Eastern immigrant, then develops a bond and then reclaims passion into his life.
The Visitor is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play ad Xbox Video.
Sam Elliiott and Blythe Danner in I’LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS
The gentle, thoughtful and altogether fresh dramedy I’ll See You in My Dreams is centered on 72-year-old Carol (Blythe Danner), a widow of 21 years living a life of benign routine. Every day, she rises at 6 AM in her modest but nicely appointed LA house, reads by the pool, hosts her gal pals from the nearby retirement community for cards and is in bed by 11 PM to watch TV with her elderly canine companion. It’s not a bad life, but it’s an unadventuresome one.
Then some things happen that give her an opportunity to choose to take some chances. In short order, she has to put down her dog and deal with an unwelcome rodent. Her friends (Rhea Perlman, June Squibb and Mary Kay Place) suggest that she try speed dating. She opens her social life, developing a friendship with a much younger man (Martin Starr – Gilfoyle in Silicon Valley) and being courted by a dashing man of her own age (Sam Elliott).
What happens is sometimes funny, sometimes sad and always authentic. This is NOT a formulaic geezer comedy, but a story about venturing outside one’s comfort zone – with all the attendant vulnerability – to seek some life rewards. Carol may be 72, but she is still at a place in her life where she can grow and be challenged. I’ll See You in My Dreams proves that coming of age films are not just for the young.
I saw I’ll See You in My Dreams at the Camera Cinema Club, at which director, editor and co-writer Brett Haley was interviewed. Haley said that he and co-writer Marc Basch wanted to “avoid the obvious joke of older people doing what younger people do”. Instead, they intended to make a movie “about love, loss and that you can’t get through life unscathed – and that’s okay”. Haley and Basch certainly succeeded in creating a film about “living life without the fear of loss”.
Danner sparkles in the role (and gets to nail a karaoke rendition of Cry Me a River). Always special when playing solid-valued but rascally guys, Elliott still retains his magnetism.
We don’t often get to see realistic movies about people in their early 70s, but I’ll See You in My Dreams respects its protagonist Carol by putting her in plausible situations. Neither farcical nor mawkish, I’ll See You in My Dreams is a surefire audience pleaser. Now playing in New York and Los Angeles, I’ll See You in My Dreams opens this coming weekend in San Francisco and May 29 in San Jose.
The intensely thought-provoking Ex Machinais a Must See and one of the year’s best films. Set in the present or the very near future, we meet the genius Nathan (played with predatory menace by Oscar Isaac) who developed the worlds top search engine when he was 13 and is now fantastically wealthy. Nathan lives in an extremely remote wilderness with his apparently mute housekeeper Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), and brings up one of his smartest software engineers under the pretext of winning a contest for a week with the boss. But Nathan really has brought in the young coder Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) to test his latest invention – a machine equipped with artificial intelligence.
Specifically, Caleb is tasked with the Turing Test (named after Alan Turing, the subject of The Imitation Game) – he is to converse with the machine to determine whether it’s thinking and behavior is indistinguishable from a human’s. Nathan and Caleb reference that a chess-playing computer may be very efficient, but does it know that it’s playing chess and does it know what chess is? Nathan says that – if he has succeeded – he has the greatest advancement in the history of the world; Caleb rejoins that it would be the greatest invention in the history of gods.
That raises the issue of playing god. If a being – even one that is human-created – is self-aware, conscious and has feelings and its own thoughts, then who has the right to end its life or take away its liberty? And can it seek liberty on its own?
We care about these questions because the machine, named Ava, is so, well, human. Ava is played by Alicia Vikander, an actress with an uncommonly sensitive face. Vikander’s performance is top-notch, and like Caleb, we are soon seduced into liking her and then NEEDING to protect her.
Ex Machina makes so much so-called science fiction pale in comparison, because it really challenges the audience with the moral implications of a real scientific concept. Not everything set in the future is really SCIENCE fiction. Gravity, a superb movie, was basically a survival tale, and Star Wars was a Quest Fantasy and Avatar was basically a remake of the Western A Man Called Horse. Most movies set in the future are just dumb excuses to put a lot of explosions on-screen. The few recent examples of truly thoughtful sci-fi include I Origins and Her.
Ex Machina is both a great-looking movie and a stellar example of economic filmmaking. There essentially only four characters and one set. Computer graphics aren’t used for empty action eye candy, just to allow an actress to credibly play a machine. Nathan’s house/laboratory looks amazing, and the overall art direction and production design is stellar. The stark landscape surrounding Nathan’s hideaway was shot in Norway.
This is the first directing feature for writer-director Alex Garland, and it’s a triumph. He wrote the screenplay for Danny Boyles’ brilliant 28 Days Later, one of my Zombie Movies for People Who Don’t Like Zombie Movies.
Matthias Schoenaerts and Carey Mulligan in FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
If you’re looking for cinematic romance with a proto-feminist perspective, you can do worse than Far from the Madding Crowd. Now I’m neither the target audience for a period romance or a fan of Carey Mulligan, but Far from the Madding Crowd is pretty fresh for having been based on a Thomas Hardy novel, and delivers an unusual (for the 19th Century) female character and sweeping, sometimes operatic melodrama.
Mulligan plays a young woman who is smart, attractive, capable and VERY confident but has the wrong taste in men. Because she has lucked into affluence, she has no NEED for a husband. Indeed, under English law of the Victorian period, she would diminish her legal standing and lose her economic freedom if she marries. A character sings the song “Let No Man Steal Your Heart”, and we know that the stakes are high.
Men DO try to steal her heart, sometimes with cringeworthily abrupt proposals of marriage (with pianos proffered to sweeten the deal). She is wooed by the “safety” and comfort from a rich guy (Michael Sheen) vs the loyal hunk (Matthias Schoenaerts) who is below her station. Then a very handsome soldier (Tom Sturridge), who turns out to be shallow and cruel, comes into play with a WOWZA of a first kiss. We know who is the right guy for her, but SHE doesn’t see it that way, which creates all the drama.
I love the work of Danish director Thomas Vinterburg – 1998’s The Celebration (Festen), 2012’s The Hunt (Jagten). Here he does a pretty good job keeping the wild swings and improbable coincidences of Hardy’s plot from becoming laughable. How many ways are there to kill off an entire herd of sheep, anyway?
Far from the Madding Crowd opens tomorrow, and is a good choice for someone looking for a period romance.
DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD: The Story of the National Lampoon takes us through an engaging and comprehensive history of the groundbreaking and seminal satirical magazine. For those of you who weren’t there, the National Lampoon – ever irreverent, raunchy and tasteless – was at the vanguard of the counter-culture in the early 1970s. Once reaching the rank of #2 news stand seller among all US magazines, it may be the most popularly accepted subversive art ever in the US (along with the wry Mad magazine during the Cold War).
In a few short years, the Lampoon rose from nowhere (well, actually from the Harvard Lampoon) to a humor empire with the magazine, records, a radio show and a traveling revue. And, yes, the title DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD does encapsulate the arc of the Lampoon’s story.
Documentarian Douglas Tirola tells the story so successfully because he persuaded almost all the surviving key participants to talk. We meet co-founder Henry Beard, publisher Matty Simmons, Art Director Michael Gross and other Lampoon staff including P.J. O’Rourke and Christopher Buckley. You’ll recognize the first editor, Tony Hendra, from his performance as the harried band manager in This Is Spinal Tap. We see clips of two Lampoon originals who haven’t survived, co-founder Doug Kenney and resident iconoclast Michael O’Donoghue.
The National Lampoon’s live performance revue featured John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Brian Doyle Murray, Gilda Radner and Harold Ramis. When Lorne Michaels hired the whole crew for Saturday Night Live, the hit television show instantly surpassed the magazine in cultural penetration. “The Lampoon lost its exceptionalism”, says one observer.
But the Lampoon made its mark on the movies by launching the entire genre of raunchy comedies with Animal House and spawning the careers of filmmakers John Landis and Harold Ramis, as well as the SNL performers. We also see a clip of Christopher Guest in an early Lampoon performance. On the other hand, I hadn’t remembered a less successful Lampoon project from its later era, Disco Beaver from Outer Space.
This is all, of course, major nostalgia for Baby Boomers. Before seeing DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD, I thought, yeah, I’ll enjoy the Blast From The Past, but will younger audience viewers dismiss this humor as quaint? After all, the Lampoon’s success came from puncturing the boundaries of taste, and it’s hard to imagine anything today that would be shockingly raunchy. But, after watching DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD, I have to say that the humor stands up today as very sharp-edged. After all, an image of a baby in a blender with Satan’s finger poised to press the “puree” button is pretty transgressive no matter when it’s published. The sole exception is the Lampoon’s over-fixation on women’s breasts, which comes off today as pathetically sophomoric – or even adolescent.
DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD: The Story of the National Lampoon has also vaulted on to my list of Longest Movie Titles.
DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD is currently knocking about the film festival circuit, and distribution theatrically or on another platform is unresolved. I saw it at the San Francisco International Film Festival. This is an important cultural story, well-told and it deserves a wide audience.
It’s 1947 and 93-year-old Sherlock Holmes has been self-exiled to the Dover coast in retirement for almost thirty years. He’s still keenly observant, but his memory is deteriorating with age, and he knows it. That’s a problem as he feels an urgent need to summon up the facts of his final case, left unresolved in 1919. In Mr. Holmes, Ian McKellen plays Sherlock in his 1947 frailty and desperation and in the flashbacks to 1919, when he’s at the top of his game.
As Mr. Holmes, opens, Sherlock has just returned home from a trip to Japan. So desperate to refresh his memory, he has sought a Japanese homeopathic cure (“prickly ash”), in the process meeting a Japanese family with an unsolved disappearance of their own. Back home, he lives with his housekeeper (Laura Linney) and her gifted son, Roger (Milo Parker). Holmes recognizes the boy’s exceptionalism and quasi-adopts as a grandchild. The boy has lost his father in World War II, and his relationship with the old man is another central thread in the movie.
Ian McKellen is delightful and endearing as the crusty Holmes. McKellen is an actor of enough stature to pull off this iconic role, and he is able both to project the Holmes genius and to deliver the humor in this very witty screenplay.
Holmes resents how his former roommate Dr. Watson has depicted him in fiction – and doesn’t like fiction at all (until the very last scene). At least, when they lived together, Watson avoided an onslaught of tourists by publishing the wrong address for their rooms (they actually lived across the street from 221B Baker Street). And Holmes goes to a theater to see a very bad 1940s Sherlock Holmes movie.
I saw Mr. Homes at the San Francisco Film Festival at a screening in which producer Anne Carey and screenwriter Jeffrey Hatcher spoke. When Carey read the source material – the novel “Slight Trick of the Mind” by Mitch Cullin – she recognized the appeal of the central role, the settings and the theme of “don’t wait too long for things important to your heart”. It took her eight years to get director Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters, Dreamgirls) on board, who brought in McKellen.
Hatcher was attracted by Holmes’ relationship to the boy Roger and by theme of how we rewrite our own stories. He pointed out that the 1919 story in Mr. Holmes has four versions: what really happened, how Watsone added a happy ending in his book, the Hollywood melodrama of the film-within-the-film and, finally, as Holmes himself connects it to the Japanese story thread at the end.
Carey and Hatcher revealed that Condon playfully referenced Hitchcock in Mr. Holmes: Ambrose Chapel from The Man Who Knew Too Much, carrying of tea a la Notorious and a “Vertigo” sequence under the arches.
It’s a good story with a superb performance by McKellen. Mr. Homes is scheduled for a theatrical release on July 17.
In the documentary Listen to Me Marlon, we hear Marlon Brando relate his life story in his own words – and we ONLY hear Brando’s words. Director Stevan Riley received access to hundreds of hours of audio tapes – self-recording made by Brando while he was alone – and never heard until now. These recordings, along with recorded Brando interviews and clips, are artfully assembled by Riley, and, together, amount to a deep and apparently truthful self-portrait.
Brando was playful and mischievous and often self-important, and the content of his interviews with journalists aren’t that reliable. But it’s clear that he isn’t BSing in these solitary recordings. He is open about his character flaws and their origin in his family background – a brute of a father and a sweet but erratic alcoholic mother.
Speaking in the third person, Brando describes himself as “a troubled man alone…confused”. Listen to Me Marlon is filled with nuggets:
On his upbringing: “My father is never going to come near that child (his first son Christian) because of what he did to me”.
On his art: “you want to stop that motion from the popcorn to the mouth. The Truth will do that.”
On the womanizing that broke up his first marriage “The beast aspect of my personality held sway”.
On the execrable Candy: “the worst movie I ever made” (drawing knowing chuckles from the audience).
Some of the tapes even record self-hypnosis as he battles obesity. And there’s a VERY COOL digitized talking Brando head; Brando tried out very early scanning technology, resulting in moving imagery of his head in swirling blue pixels as he expounds.
There are also two outtakes where we SEE Brando’s womanizing in action as he comes on to attractive interviewers. We can recognize the instant that, as he says, he starts “thinking with his penis” and launches his flirtatious charm.
I saw Listen to Me Marlon at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where it will screen again this week. Director Riley spoke at the screening, as did noted film historian David Thomson and Brando’s children, Rebecca Brando and Miko Brando.
Rebecca Brando credits Riley for the film’s “humanity” as it treats Brando’s “childhood pain”. Miko Brando pointed out that the flashing lights in some clips came from the bio-feedback machine that Brando used at night. “He went to work as a movie star and came home – not a movie star – just a father”, said Miko, who had just seen the film for the second time.
David Thomson spoke of Brando’s “momentous” and truthful Method as the birth of “genuinely American approach to acting” and its effect on cinema: “the method is made for the close-up” because “if you are agonizing over what to say”, the audience needs to be close enough to see it.
I expect Listen to Me Marlon to get a theatrical release in the second half of 2015 and then play on Showtime.
In the powerful and chilling The Look of Silence, documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer explores the aftermath of genocide in a society that has never experienced a truth and reconciliation process. This is Oppenheimer’s second masterpiece on the Indonesian genocide of 1965-66 in which regime-sponsored death squads executed over one million suspected political opponents. Today, the victims’ families live among the murderers.
The Look of Silence centers on 44-year-old optometrist Adi as he investigates the murder of Ramli, the older brother he never knew. Earlier, Oppenheimer had filmed Ramli’s killers as they describe and act out Ramli’s savage torture, mutilation and murder. They are unrepentant and even nostalgic about their crimes. Their matter-of-fact recollections are sickening. We see Adi watching this video, trying to contain his rage and disgust. Later, Adi – in the guise of fitting them for new glasses – is able to confront those responsible. He faces the actual machete-wielding killers, the leader of the village death squad, the higher-up who ordered the killings and even one of his own relatives.
What makes this bearable to watch (and even more affecting) is meeting Adi’s family: his earthy 80-something mother, his frail and batty 103-year-old father, his giggly 7-year old daughter and his 10-year-old son. There’s plenty of humor in this warm family. But in one scene, the son receives a ridiculously twisted propaganda version of the genocide in public school.
The “Silence” in The Look of Silence is reinforced by the spare soundtrack. We often hear only “crickets” (frogs, actually).
The Look of Silence is the companion to Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, which made my list of Best Movies of 2013. In The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer got the unapologetic killers to re-enact their atrocities for the camera – even relishing their deeds. The Act of Killing contains some of the most bizarre moments in any documentary EVER, including a cross-dressing mass murderer and a staged Bollywood-like musical number of Born Free, complete with dancing-girls in front of a waterfall, in which the garotted dead reappear to thank the killers for sending them on to the afterlife. The Act of Killing is more of a jaw-dropper. The Look of Silence – because it is more personal – is more powerful.
The Look of Silence stands alone – you can fully appreciate it without having seen The Act of Killing. But what I wrote about The Act of Killing is true for both films: “hypnotically compelling – you can’t believe what’s on the screen, can’t believe that you’re still watching it and can’t stop watching”.
I saw The Look of Silence at the San Francisco International Film Festival before its limited theatrical release slated for July 17. It’s one of the best films of 2015.
Sinatra: All or Nothing At All is a solid and sometimes revelatory biopic of Frank Sinatra now playing on HBO. It’s shown in two two-hour segments. Sinatra fans should watch the whole thing. For everyone else, the middle part is especially strong – focus on the stretch from his affair and marriage to Ava Gardner through the Frank, Jr., kidnapping and the marriage to Mia Farrow.
Documentarian Alex Gibney has an unusual gift for finding the best possible source material, including coaxing interviews from the most intimate witnesses. The strength of Sinatra: All or Nothing At All comes from interviews of Sinatra’s children Tina, Nancy and Frank, Jr., along with audio of Sinatra’s first three wives – Nancy Sinatra, Ava Gardner and Mia Farrow – and girlfriend Lauren Bacall.
Gibney has another strong doc running on HBO right now: Going Clear: The Prison of Belief. He won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, and he made the excellent Casino Jack: The United States of Money, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Elliot Spitzer and Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God.
Sinatra: All or Nothing At All is a pretty comprehensive biodoc, tracing the Italian immigrant parents, the humble (but not destitute) Hoboken upbringing, rocketing to pop stardom, the career fade with the Great Comeback – along with his womanizing and friendships with the Mob, the Rat Pack and JFK. There are also some tidbits that I hadn’t seen before, for example, not being able to get an US government security clearance to entertain troops in Korea because of his political associations, plus an awkward performance with Elvis in the 50s. See “Spoiler Alert” below for the movie’s take on how Sinatra got the role in From Here to Eternity that launched his comeback. And, although I lived through it, I had completely forgotten about the kidnapping of Frank, Jr.
Sinatra: All or Nothing At All is playing on HBO and is available streaming from HBO GO.
[Spoiler Alert: By the early 50s, Sinatra’s career was floundering and he was desperate for the acting role of Maggio in the upcoming From Here to Eternity. For years, there has been a legend that Sinatra called on his buddies in the Mafia to put the arm on Columbia Pictures to cast him. This tale is depicted in The Godfather with the horse’s-head-in-the-bed scene. Sinatra: All or Nothing At All persuasively debunks this story, explaining that, instead, his recent ex Ava Gardner pressured the studio filmmakers to cast Sinatra. Another appeal was that Sinatra was also a big name who worked for very cheap. This is consistent with Director Fred Zinnemann’s version .]
