Movie Recommendations, Rants and Ruminations
I’ve always loved the good-hearted and wry Aardman Studio films like Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run. Aardman’s Pirates! Band of Misfits doesn’t quite match up to Aardman’s past work. The claymation is exquisite and the jokes are smart, but the overall effect is merely amusing and guffaw-free. Silly pirate stereotypes should have been much richer fodder for the writers.
I saw this in 3D, but I wouldn’t pay the 3D premium if I were taking a bunch of kids to see it.
In this paranoid thriller, a sinister corporation sends a professional hunter (Willem Dafoe) to Tasmania to find the Tasmanian Tiger, thought extinct. He is given a cover identity as a scientist, which immediately makes him a target of hostile loggers He is renting a room in the primitive cabin of a scientist who searched for the Tasmanian Tiger and has been missing and is presumed dead by everyone except his traumatized family. The scientist’s wife is so heavily sedated that she only briefly wakes into a stupor, the 6-year-old son has become mute and only the 10-year-old daughter is resilient enough to converse. The suspense begins immediately. Will he find the Tasmanian Tiger? What happened to the scientist? Is he being hunted himself?
The weirdly beautiful scenery and breathtaking vistas of Tasmania enhance the dramatic tension. The forests are so primordial that you expect to see a creature from Jurassic park bursting out.
Dafoe’s hunter spends much of the movie alone in the wilderness with no one to talk to and, being on a secret mission, he can’t tell other people what he finds anyway. So his discoveries have to be depicted by the director and their impacts reflected in Dafoe’s expressive eyes.
Overall, it’s a fine genre film, although the paranoia is over the top and some will find the ending too stark. The scenes of Dafoe’s driven hunter, solitary in the wilderness, make up for the flaws.
My top pick this week is once again Monsieur Lazhar, the story of French-Canadian fifth graders recovering from a traumatic experience with their replacement teacher, an Algerian immigrant. It’s an emotionally compelling film that was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.
On a lighter note, Goon is a hockey comedy that manages to be violent, raunchy and sweet.
In Footnote, a rising Talmudic scholar sees his career-topping prize accidentally awarded to his grumpy father. This potentially comic situation reveals the characters of the two men.
Then there’s the searing and brilliantly constructed Iranian drama A Separation, which won the Best Foreign Language Oscar, and the Best Picture Oscar-winning The Artist. Both are still still playing in theaters.
You can skip Damsels in Distress, Whit Stillman’s misfire of an absurdist campus comedy.
I have not yet seen Pirates! Band of Misfits, The Five-Year Engagement or The Hunter, all opening this week. You can read descriptions and view trailers of these and other upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.
My DVD pick this week is Michele Williams’ dazzling performance in My Week with Marilyn.
It’s time to revisit a spectacle. On April 29, Turner Classic movies is broadcasting Lawrence of Arabia. For decades, many of us watched this epic squeezed into tinny-sounding TVs. In 1989, I was fortunate enough to see the director’s cut in an old movie palace. Now technology has caught up, and modern large screen HD televisions can do this wide screen classic justice. Similarly, modern home sound systems can work with the great Maurice Jarre soundtrack.
Nobody has ever created better epics than director David Lean (Bridge Over the River Kwai, Dr. Zhivago). Peter O’Toole stars at the moment of his greatest physical beauty. The rest of the cast is unsurpassed: Omar Sharif, Jose Ferrer, Anthony Quinn, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains, Arthur Kennedy, thousands of extras and entire herds of camels. The vast and severe Arabian desert is a character unto itself.
Settle in and watch the whole thing – and remember what “epic” really means.
Not only is Michele Williams one of our finest film actors (Wendy and Lucy, Blue Valentine, Brokeback Mountain), but she has the courage to play that icon Marilyn Monroe. And she does so in a dazzling performance. Williams so inhabits the persona of Marilyn that we suspend recognition of the physical differences between the two.
My Week with Marilyn is about a young man observing the encounter between Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) during the making of the 1957’s The Prince and the Showgirl. That movie starred and was directed by Olivier, who expected a high level of craft, promptness and professionalism from all actors. Naturally, Marilyn, with all of her neediness, professional unreliabilty and reliance on The Method, was a bad fit.
Williams perfectly tunes in each frequency of the Marilyn dial, from the terrified, insecure actress to the confident sex symbol. There’s a great moment – after we’ve already seen her as troubled, flirtatious, needy, mischievous and, above all, lonely – where she announces that she will become “Her”; she flips an inner switch and becomes the Marilyn sex symbol persona, delighting a crowd of regular folks.
The underrated Zoe Wanamaker has a great turn as Marilyn’s Method acting coach. Judi Dench is perfect as a kind veteran actress. Emma Watson (so good as Hermione in the Harry Potter films) has an unfortunately tiny role as a non-wizard young adult. Dougray Scott, Dominic Cooper, Julia Ormand and Toby Jones fill out the great cast. Wanamaker, Scott and Jones play American characters flawlessly.
After a dry spell, we’re starting to get promising movies by the handful. This weekend will bring a promising Hollywood romantic comedy, The Five-Year Engagement, the animated Pirates! Band of Misfits and the indie thriller The Hunter.
The Five-Year Engagement features Forgetting Sarah Marshall’s writer-star Jason Segal and the director Nicholas Stoller, plus Emily Blunt.
Pirates! Band of Misfits comes from Aardman Studios, the folks that created Wallace and Gromit.
The weekend after will bring The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a story of aged Brits seeking a low-budget retirement in India that looks like fluff, but fun fluff. Great cast: Bill Nighy, Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Maggie Smith, Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire), Celia Imrie, Penelope Wilton (Downton Abbey).
You can read descriptions and watch the trailers on my Movies I’m Looking Forward To page.
In The Hunter, Willem Dafoe stars as a hunter sent to find the Tasmanian Tiger, thought extinct. He looks for the beast, finds a thriller. Here’s the trailer.
Football fans may be interested in the silly comedy Pigskin Parade because it shows how college football was played in 1936. It airs on Turner Classic Movies on April 22.
Like many sports movies, Pigskin Parade ends with a climactic game – and there’s footage of real football being played in a snowstorm (in long shot) interspersed with the comic movie football (in medium shot). You can see the formations, men in motion and punt formation. I knew about the leather helmets for the players, but I didn’t know that the referees wore unstriped white Knickerbockers and baker boy caps or that the coaches sent in substitutions by written note.
Jack Haley plays a dim football coach hired at the fictional Texas State. His spark plug wife (the very funny Patsy Kelly) is the real football brain. Out in the countryside, they find a hayseed QB who can throw the ball out of the stadium and outrun a deer when he is barefoot; he is played by Stuart Erwin (who garnered a Supporting Actor Oscar nod).
In the final game, Texas State, referred to as “Texas” by the radio broadcaster, is a big underdog to Yale. Yale was indeed a power at the time. Yale players won the Heisman in both 1936 and 1937.
Pigskin Parade was the first feature film for Judy Garland and the second acting credit of over 200 for Elisha Cook Jr. Betty Grable appears before she became a star. Judy, Betty and Elisha are all billed below the comic quartet The Yacht Club Boys. (Creepiness alert: all but one of The Yacht Club Boys were way too old to be hanging around a college campus acting zany and wearing varsity gear.)
My top pick this week is Monsieur Lazhar, the story of French-Canadian fifth graders recovering from a traumatic experience with their replacement teacher, an Algerian immigrant. It’s an emotionally compelling film that was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.
On a lighter note, Goon is a hockey comedy that manages to be violent, raunchy and sweet.
In Footnote, a rising Talmudic scholar sees his career-topping prize accidentally awarded to his grumpy father. This potentially comic situation reveals the characters of the two men.
Then there’s the searing and brilliantly constructed Iranian drama A Separation, which won the Best Foreign Language Oscar, and the Best Picture Oscar-winning The Artist. Both are still still playing in theaters.
You can skip Damsels in Distress, Whit Stillman’s misfire of an absurdist campus comedy.
You can read descriptions and view trailers of these and other upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.
My DVD pick this week is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, director David Fincher’s hold-on-to-your-seat version of Stieg Larsson’s rip snorting stories centered on the damaged and driven Goth hacker Lisbeth Salander.
We just lost Levon Helm to throat cancer. Of course, he is best known as the drummer and singer with the influential rock group The Band – it’s Levon’s voice on Up on Cripple Creek, The Weight and The Night They Drove Dixie Down, among others. He appeared with The Band in Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece 1978 concert film The Last Waltz.
Levon also had a rich movie career. His 17 acting credits include some very top shelf stuff. He was Loretta’s father in Coal Miner’s Daughter. In The Right Stuff, he played Ridley, test pilot Chuck Yeager’s aircraft mechanic, the guy who loans him Beeman’s chewing gum before each life-risking test flight. He was also the narrator in The Right Stuff.
I particularly loved one of his last roles, Old Man with Radio in Tommy Lee Jones’ overlooked 2005 The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Playing a blind man living alone on the Mexican border, he was absolutely haunting.
Here’s an 8-minute clip from The Right Stuff in which Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier for the first time. The scene is introduced by Levon Helm as the narrator, and then Levon as Ridley helps Yeager (Sam Shepherd) into the test plane and loans him his Beeman’s. What a wonderful voice.
Doug Glatt is not very smart and he knows it. He struggles to find the right word in every situation. Because his only talent is the ability to knock others unconscious, he is only in demand as a bar bouncer. But Doug is not a brute – he is goodhearted and loyal, and yearns to be part of something. By chance, Doug gets hired by a minor league hockey team to become its thuggish enforcer – despite his inability to ice skate.
We get lots of funny hockey violence a la the Hanson Brothers in Slap Shot. It’s very funny when Doug mangles his every attempt at cogent conversation. The comedy also comes from Doug’s innocent fish out of water in the cynical, sleazy and cutthroat world of minor league hockey. (He’s even reverential about the team logo on the locker room floor.)
There are lots of nice comic touches. For example, when Doug becomes a sensation, one of his fans in the stands holds up a sign reading “Doug 3:69” (Doug wears jersey number 69); we glimpse the sign for only a second, but I appreciate the filmmakers planting such nuggets in the movie. Doug is also that rarity – a Jewish hockey goon, with parents horrified that he isn’t following his brother to med school.
Although plenty raunchy, Goon is a rung above the normal gross-out guy comedy because Doug is such a fundamentally good and well-meaning person. As Doug, Seann William Scott (Stifler in American Pie) plays a naive simpleton, but one fiercely committed to his core values. It’s got to be hard to play that combination, and Scott’s performance is special.
The cast is excellent. Co-writer Jay Baruchel plays Doug’s sophomoric friend. Alison Pill (Milk, Midnight in Paris) is the troubled smart girl who can’t figure out why she’s attracted to a word-fumbling hockey goon. Liev Schreiber, excellent as always, dons a Fu Manchu and a mullet to play the league’s toughest goon. Kim Coates, who almost stole A Little Help as the personal injury attorney, plays the coach.
Perhaps because it has just been released, Goon hasn’t yet made Wikipedia’s “Films that most frequently use the word “f**k”, but I am sure that it meets the qualifying threshold of 150 f-bombs.