Movies – Page 102 – The Movie Gourmet

’71: keeping the thrill in thriller

March 30, 2015March 30, 2015 by movie gourmet

The title of the harrowing thriller ’71 refers to the tumultuous year 1971 in Northern Ireland’s Troubles. An ill-prepared unit of British soldiers gets their first taste of action in Belfast, and the rookie Private Gary Hook (Jack O’Connell) gets inadvertently left behind in hostile territory. Private Hook races around an unfamiliar and dangerous city at night. He is being hunted by his own regular troops, a shadowy and sketchy military intelligence unit, the regular IRA, the hotheaded Provisional IRA and Ulster paramilitaries – all with their own conflicting agendas. Any civilian who helps him will be at direct and lethal risk from the partisans.

In their feature debuts, director Jann Demange and cinematographer Tat Ratcliffe take us on a Wild Ride, with just a couple of chances for the audience to catch its collective breath. Importantly, the way Private Hook gets left behind amid the escalating chaos is very believable. Then there’s an exhilarating footrace through the alleys and over brick walls. Every encounter with another person is fraught with tension. Finally, there’s a long and thrilling climactic set piece in a Belfast apartment block.

O’Connell is in 90% of the shots and carries it off very well. All of the acting in ’71 is excellent. Corey McKinley is special as the toughest and most confident ten-year-old you’ll ever meet. Barry Keoghan takes the impassive stone face to a new level. And I always enjoy David Wilmot (so hilarious in The Guard).

I thank the casting and the direction for making it easy for us to tell all of these pale, ginger characters apart. To the credit of writer Gregory Burke, the beginning of the film economically sets up Private Hook as having the fitness and stamina to survive what befalls him throughout the night.

With all the different sides playing each other, the action (and the action is compelling) is set in an especially treacherous version of three-dimensional chess. Some of the double- and triple-crossing at the end is breathtaking. But what ’71 does best is putting the thrill in a thriller – keeping the audience on the edge of our seats for all 99 minutes.

THE WRECKING CREW: the soundtrack of the 60s

March 29, 2015 by movie gourmet

You have heard these guys play without knowing their names – The Wrecking Crew profiles the legendary Hollywood studio band that played on (perhaps literally half of) the pop music of the 60s. These musicians were extremely skilled and creative – and they were fast, too, which put their services at a premium among music producers with limited studio time. As a result they played on the recordings of Frank Sinatra (and Dino and Sammy), the Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Sonny and Cher, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, ad infinitum. Plus the Hawaii Five-O theme.

You already know about The Monkees not playing their own instruments, but The Association didn’t play on a single track of their first two albums – those were all played by the Wrecking Crew. And Roger McGuinn was the only Bird to play on Mr. Tambourine Man, with the Wrecking Crew knocking out two tracks in three hours; the Birds themselves played on Turn, Turn, Turn, but it took them 77 takes.

Filmmaker Danny Tedesco, made this film to salute his dad, Wrecking Crew guitarist Tommy Tedesco. Glen Campbell and Leon Russell were members of the band (and we get to see a rare photo of the early 1960s Leon without long hair, beard, hat and tinted glasses). Surprisingly, the electric bass player was female – Carol Kaye. In The Wrecking Crew we get to hear the backstories of the standup bass intro in These Boots Were Made for Walking, the El Paso guitar lick in Something Stupid, the bass drum intro for The taste of Honey and the sax part in the Pink Panther Theme.

The Wrecking Crew isn’t a Must See, but I recommend it for those with an interest in the music of the 1960. The Wrecking Crew is now in theaters and is also streaming on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video. If you like The Wrecking Crew, I’d also recommend these recent films about other unknown musicians:

Twenty Feet from Stardom (Netflix DVD, Redbox, Netflix Streaming, Amazon, YouTube and Google Play);
Muscle Shoals (Netflix DVD, Netflix Streaming, Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, YouTube, Google Play, Xbox Video); and
Standing in the Shadows of Motown Netflix DVD, Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, YouTube, Google Play, Xbox Video).

THREE HEARTS: a man with a weak heart

March 26, 2015 by movie gourmet

Benoît Poelvoorde and Chiara Mastroianni in THREE HEARTS

The Belgian romantic drama Three Hearts centers on the singular character of Marc, a Parisian tax auditor who has a fondness for the ladies – and they for him. He also is very conflict-averse and handles stress very badly, which has contributed to a sometimes disabling heart condition. On a business trip to a provincial town, Marc misses his train, and becomes romantically involved with a local woman. Because of circumstance, that relationship doesn’t move forward, which clears him to begin a relationship with a second woman in that town. Once he is irrevocably entangled, he learns that the two women are intimates.

In what I think is a really compelling performance, Marc is played by Benoît Poelvoorde. Marc finds himself trapped in an excruciating situation, and the only way out requires courage that he just doesn’t have. Poelvoorde is completely believable as a guy who chats up women, settles into domesticity and then is paralyzed by terror and dread. Plus, Poelvoorde has a gangly walk and often slips into outright goofiness, which effectively lightens the dramatic tension.

Now, some critics do not agree with me. Poelvoorde is not a conventionally good-looking guy. Ordinarily, you wouldn’t expect a guy like this to be able to attract a woman who looks like Chiara Mastroianni or Charlotte Gainsbourg. If you can’t jump this, you’re not gonna buy into the movie, but it worked for me. Marc does seem to one of those rugged guys who has a knack with the ladies, and the two woman characters are in windows of extreme vulnerability and are ripe to experiment outside their own relationships.

Charlotte Gainsbourg and Chiara Mastroianni are excellent as the two women. Their personalities are starkly different but they each have an immediate need that they hope Marc can fill. With the regal serenity that she can muster, Catherine Deneuve plays the character who intuits what is going on long before the others.

Three Hearts is directed and co-written by Benoit Jaquot, who recently gave us the lavishly staged and absorbing costume drama Farewell, My Queen.

One more thing – the potential for upcoming confrontation is signaled by Big Music – ominous cello notes that sound like the theme from Jaws played backwards. I saw this as wry self-mocking of the drama, and I found this device to be amusing. It’s just a little part of the movie, but people that I saw Three Hearts with found it to be off-putting.

The bottom line is that Three Hearts worked for me, and I recommend it with the caveat that some willing suspension of disbelief is required.

LEVIATHAN: the overwhelming crush of corruption

March 14, 2015 by movie gourmet

The extraordinary Russian drama Leviathan is a searing indictment of society in post-Soviet Russia – and it’s one of the best movies of the year. A Job-like Everyman struggles to protect his home from the clutches of the town’s corrupt mayor – and he has to battle the corruption that has permeated the political and justice systems. The very struggle takes its toll in his relationships, too, and the audience begins to wonder just how much he’s going to be left with at the end of the story.

Despite being deliberately paced and darkly themed, Leviathan is very watchable. The characters are superbly crafted and the story is filled with “what’s going to happen next?” moments. Writer-director Andrei Zvyagintsev and co-writer Oleg Negin are keen observers of human nature and season Leviathan with plenty of wry humor (e.g., the mayor runs his criminal Sopranos-like enterprise from a desk under a portrait of Putin). And there’s a surprise at the end.

Our Everyman is Kolya (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), who is hotheaded and drinks too much. He fixes cars out of his seafront home in a bleak village on the Barents Sea. His younger second wife Elena Lyadova is cipher. His teenage son (Sergey Pokhodaev) is a good kid, but troubled by the death of his mother. The performances are exceptional, along with that of Roman Madyanov as the corrupt-to-his-marrow mayor. The mayor wants to take Kolya’s property, and their battle plays out in the courts – and in extra-judicial arenas.

And then there’s the vodka abuse. The amount of vodka consumption by virtually every character is astounding. Expect (along with your fellow audience members) to gasp and giggle at the size of the pours.

The film’s only shortcoming is the heavy-handed symbolism employed to hammer home the hopelessness of the protagonist’s struggle, There’s a biblical quote (from Job, of course): “Can you draw out the Leviathan with a fishhook?”, and then shots of whales and of the skeleton of a long-dead beached whale. All this isn’t really necessary, especially with the courtroom scenes, which make the filmmakers’ point exceedingly well.

Andrei Zvyagintsev has solidified his place as one of the masters of world cinema. Leviathan is just his fourth feature, after Elena , which made my Top Ten list for 2012, and The Return, which made my Best Movies of 2004. Elena is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Vudu and Xbox Video. The Return is available on DVD from Netflix.

Leviathan was nominated for this year’s Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar, and has been critically acclaimed, currently scoring 92 on Metacritic.com. ,

Cinequest: GEMMA BOVERY

May 25, 2015March 8, 2015 by movie gourmet

Fabrice Luchini and Gemma Arterton in GEMMA BOVERY

In the delightful dark comedy Gemma Bovery, Fabrice Luchini plays a guy who has left his Type A job in Paris to take over his father’s bakery in a sleepy village in Normandy. He gets new neighbors when a young British couple named Bovery moves in. The young British woman (played by the delectable Gemma Arterton) is named Gemma Bovery, and only the baker notices the similarity to Emma Bovary. But, like the protagonist of Madame Bovary, the young British woman is also married to a Charles, becomes bored and restless and develops a wandering eye. The baker rapidly becomes obsessed with the Flaubert novel being re-enacted before his eyes and soon jumps into the plot himself. Gemma Bovery, which I saw at Cinequest 2015, is a French movie that is mostly in English.

Fabrice Luchini is a treasure of world cinema. No screen actor can deliver a funnier reaction than Luchini, and he’s the master of squeezing laughs out of an awkward moment. For me, his signature role is in the 2004 French Intimate Strangers, in which he plays a tax lawyer with a practice in a Parisian professional office building. A beautiful woman (Sandrine Bonnaire), mistakes Luchini’s office for that of her new shrink, plops herself down and, before he can interrupt, starts unloading her sexual issues. It quickly becomes awkward for him to tell her of the error, and he’s completely entranced with her revelations, so he keeps impersonating her shrink. As they move from appointment to appointment, their relationship takes some unusual twists. It’s a very funny movie, and a great performance.

Gemma Bovery is directed and co-written by Anne Fontaine (The Girl from Monaco, Coco Before Chanel). Fontaine has a taste for offbeat takes on female sexuality, which she aired in the very trashy Adore (Naomi Watts and Robin Wright as Australian cougars who take on each other’s sons as lovers) and the much better Nathalie (wife pays prostitute to seduce her cheating hubby and report back on the details).

Gemma Bovery isn’t as Out There as Nathalie, but it’s just as good. The absurdity of the coincidences in Gemma Bovery makes for a funny situation, which Luchini elevates into a very funny movie.

Cinequest: THE HOUSE ON PINE STREET

March 31, 2015March 8, 2015 by movie gourmet

So here’s the thing with every movie ghost story – either the ghost is real or the protagonist is crazy enough to hallucinate one. The beauty of The House on Pine Street is that the story is right down the middle – ya just don’t know until the end when the story takes us definitively in one direction – and then suddenly lurches right back to the other extreme.

Jennifer (Emily Goss) is a very pregnant urbanist, who reluctantly moves from her dream life in Chicago back to her whitebread hometown in suburban Kansas. Unlike Jennifer, her husband hadn’t been thriving in Chicago and Jennifer’s intrusive and judgmental mother (Cathy Barnett – perfect in the role) has set up an opportunity for him in the hometown. They move to a house that is not her dream home AT ALL, “but it’s a really good deal”.

Jennifer is pretty disgruntled, and, generally for good reason – her mom’s every sentence is loaded with disapproval. But she’s a little too alarmed about some crumbling plaster. Her mom’s housewarming party would be a social nightmare for anyone – but it’s too literally nightmarish for her. One of the guests, an amateur psychic (an excellent Jim Korinke), observes, “the house has interesting energy”.

Then some weird shit starts happening: knocks from unoccupied rooms, a crockpot lid that keeps going ajar. And we ask is the house haunted or is she hallucinating? Her sane and sensible and skeptical BFF comes from Chicago to visit as sounding board, and things do not go well.

Co-writers and co-directors Aaron and Austin Keeling keep us on the edges of our seats. Their excellent sound design borrows from The Conversation and The Shining – and that’s a good thing.

The Keelings also benefit from a fine lead – Emily Goss’ eyes are VERY alive. She carries the movie as we watch her shifting between resentfulness, terror and determination.

The total package is very successful. The House on Pine Street deserves a theatrical release.

Cinequest: SLOW WEST

March 31, 2015March 8, 2015 by movie gourmet

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.

Bottom line: Slow West is a mess.

Cinequest: 40 DAYS OF SILENCE

March 8, 2015 by movie gourmet

In the Uzbek drama 40 Days of Silence, a teenage Tajik girl undertakes a ritual vow of silence for forty days. The mystery for a non-Tajik or -Uzbek audience is why she would do this? And, we wonder, what is going to happen?

These questions are not answered definitively in 40 Days of Silence, but we sense that the stakes are life and death. The girl’s progress is related dreamily, and it’s not always clear what is happening – or whether it is really happening.

The most outstanding aspect of 40 Days of Silence is its sound design, a collection of noises not EXACTLY music, but musical in effect.

40 Days of Silence is slow but mesmerizing. It works as an art film, but is not for audience members that are uncomfortable with ambiguity.

Cinequest: THERE WILL BE NO STAY

March 7, 2015 by movie gourmet

In a society with capital punishment, someone must perform the executions. There’s a paradox inherent in the act of killing to punish killing. In Patty Dillon’s powerful documentary There Will Be No Stay, we meet the people who live with that paradox most personally:

a Georgia warden who has given the order to commence executions;
a Texas chaplain assigned to keep the condemned placid on the gurney ;
and two South Carolina correctional officers who have plunged the vials for lethal injections and mashed the buttons for the electric chair.

The effect that capital punishment has had on these men – connected to neither the victims or perpetrators, is profound and thought-provoking.

Filmmaker Dillon (who also narrates) starts with an anti-death penalty point of view, but There Will Be No Stay is anything but a screed. Having the sense to keep the movie focused on these four personal stories makes it stronger stuff.

There Will Be No Stay is filled with chilling statements like “Our eyes would meet…my eyes would be the last he would see on this planet” and “73% of Texas is in favor of execution. I can tell you that 73% of people who have witnessed an execution are NOT in favor”. And there are lots of factoids about the workaday aspects of contemporary American executions. (Alarmingly, South Carolina offers no training in the operation of the electric chair – the guards just have to wing it.)

I saw the deeply affecting There Will Be No Stay at Cinequest 2015.

Cinequest: DERMAPHORIA

March 7, 2015 by movie gourmet

In the paranoid thriller Demaphoria, an amnesiac is trying to re-discover his identity and learns that he has been involved in some pretty shady and dangerous business. It’s a familiar but promising set-up. Unfortunately director Ross Clarke, who adapted the screenplay from the Craig Clevenger novel, drives this movie version right into the ground.

To start with, the beginning of the film looked so slick and superficial that I thought it was a commercial until I saw Ron Perlman, who I knew was in the film (but not for long enough). There is so much quick-cutting in Dermaphoria that I started counting the seconds between them – and I only came up with three shots that lasted over three seconds in the first eight minutes of the film. This is a bad sign – if you’re timing the duration of the cuts, you’re not engaged in the story.

Things brightened up once actor Walton Goggins (Justified) showed up. But then I realized that he was just playing Boyd Crowder while dressed as John Waters (bow tie and pencil thin mustache). And the role of his idiot henchman (Lucius Falick) was the worst screen acting I’ve seen in at least a year.

It takes a lot to keep me from sticking around to see the ending of a thriller set in New Orleans with actors that I enjoy (Perlman, Goggins), but I had to walk out.