The Movie Gourmet

Cinequest: CORN ISLAND

March 1, 2015 by movie gourmet

Cinephiles must see the exquisite and lyrical Georgian drama Corn Island. If it doesn’t turn out to be the best contemporary art movie at Cinequest 2015, I’ll be shocked. Corn Island has won nineteen film festival awards and was shortlisted for this year’s Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar.

Director George Ovashvili has created a near-masterpiece of filmmaking with this unhurried yet compelling story. We learn that each spring, Georgia’s Irguri River creates temporary islands of topsoil that local farmers squat on to grow enough corn to get them through the next winter (when the island will be washed away). We see an old man choose one particular island of maybe an acre. He brings his 12- or 13-year-old orphan granddaughter to help him, and they build a shack and plant and cultivate a tiny field of corn. The audience isn’t really watching corn grow, but we are observing how the man and the granddaughter react to what happens.

The storytelling is remarkably spare. There’s not even any dialogue during the first 25 minutes – and there are probably only about 30 spoken lines in the entire movie.

The old man is played by veteran Turkish actor Ilyas Salman is a superb performance. Georgian newcomer Mariam Buturishvili plays the granddaughter. Her eyes are very expressive, so she doesn’t need to say much. We watch her show up at the island clutching her doll – and then outgrowing it.

Here’s what you need to know before seeing Corn Island: the Irguri River separates Georgia from the separatist region of Abkhazia. The main characters speak Abkhaz. The soldiers patrolling the river are variously Georgian soldiers, Abkhaz militia and Russian peacekeepers.

So settle in for a contemplative experience and just watch this story unfold through Ovashvili’s masterful lens. Corn Island plays Cinequest again today, March 1 and March 4 at Camera 12.

[MILD SPOILER ALERT: The filmmakers built their own island in a manmade lake so they could control the water. And that is the only way that they could have filmed the spectacular climax.]

Cinequest: GUARD DOG

March 1, 2015 by movie gourmet

The dark and violent Peruvian Guard Dog is set in 2001, five years after a controversial amnesty for the government-sponsored death squads active in the previous decades. Our protagonist is the vestige of those death squads, an ascetic hit man who still performs some residual executions. He is a Man On A Mission, and one serious dude. After his opening hit, he takes out the photo of his victim and burns out the image’s eyes with his cigarette.

Guard Dog is ultimately more of a mood piece than a thriller. The theme of personal corruption keeps re-emerging, with a grossly rotting apartment ceiling and even a moment of pus-draining. The most interesting aspect of the story is our anti-hero’s encounters with an unjaded young girl who is, in contrast to him, bubbling and full of life.

I saw Guard Dog’s US Premiere at Cinequest, and it plays the fest again March 4 at the California Theatre and March 6 at Camera 12.

Cinequest: THREE WINDOWS AND A HANGING

March 1, 2015 by movie gourmet

Made in Kosovo, the powerful drama Three Windows and a Hanging explores each gender’s differing reaction to a wartime atrocity in a traditional culture. This film is artfully shot, and it’s one of the highlights of Cinequest 2015. Three Windows and a Hanging was Kosovo’s submission for this year’s Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar.

It’s set in a village where some of the women had been raped while the men were away fighting in the post-Yugoslavia civil wars. The women haven’t told the men because, in this culture, being raped stigmatizes a woman and brings shame on her family. When the atrocity surfaces in a newspaper report, the men exclaim, “Who has done this to us?”. They’re not talking about the rapists. They’re talking about the rape victim who has disclosed an event that embarrasses them. Of course, this victim-blaming only serves to re-traumatize the already devastated and lead to additionally tragic consequences. It’s a tough subject, but not a tough movie to watch.

Throughout the movie, director Isa Qosja makes superb choices. He loves shots of loooong duration and they are very effective; the first five minutes of the movie are in just two shots. There’s an opening interview, filmed by focusing on the interviewer and her translator, and not even glimpsing the back of the interviewee’s head until the end of the shot. Before the topic of the interview is revealed, we know that it’s painful because of the nervousness of the interviewer.

There are many brilliantly shot scenes, especially one where a boy offers condolences to a man he passes on a road. There’s an interaction between three characters, first shot through one character’s armpit, and then from above and finally in a long shot from behind a window – all telling the audience EXACTLY what’s going on with each character irrespective of whether we can hear what they are saying. And when one character gets some devastating news, he’s in the shower, so we can only see his body stiffen behind the blur of the shower curtain. It’s really remarkable filmmaking.

Three Windows and a Hanging plays Cinequest again on March 2 and March 7 at Camera 12.

Cinequest: MILWAUKEE

March 1, 2015 by movie gourmet

In the contemporary American dramedy Milwaukee, a bunch of thirty-something friends get together for a weekend at a vacation home. They drink some wine, resolve to have an Anything Goes night, get high and, before you know it, some partners are swapped. What could possibly go wrong?

Milwaukee is well-made, even a little slick, and very well-acted. But there’s really not much to think about after it’s over.

I saw Milwaukee at its world premiere at Cinequest, and it plays again March 1 at Camera 12 and March 4 at the California Theatre.

Cinequest: SONGS SHE WROTE ABOUT PEOPLE SHE KNOWS

March 1, 2015 by movie gourmet

Here’s the premise of Songs She Wrote About People She Knows – a dissatisfied but very contained woman adopts the therapeutic device of SINGING her true feelings. So she expresses her resentments by leaving excoriating singing voicemails. When she melodically rips her ubercaffeinated boss, there is an unintended consequence. Her harangue sparks both his personal interest in her (unwelcome) and a sudden decision to swing his life 180 degrees. He gloms on to her as he seeks to his artistic dream. It becomes an odd couple movie, where he spends the rest of the movie annoying her (and, believe me, this is not very entertaining).

Cinequest: WAX: WE ARE THE X

March 1, 2015 by movie gourmet

In the lighthearted Italian Wax: We Are the X, a notoriously shady producer sends two guy filmmakers to Monaco to scout locations for a commercial and meet a gal French casting director. They are all hired because they work cheap. What follows is a little whodunit, a little relationship drama, a little comedy and, as one might expect, a ménage à trois illustrating the open-mindedness of French women (in the movies, anyway).

The best five minutes of the movie is right at the beginning, when the producer demonstrates his mastery of getting someone else to pick up a tab.

There is a superfluous but welcome cameo by 70-year-old Rutger Hauer (it’s been over thirty years since Nighthawks and Blade Runner!). And there’s a Gen X hook, an attempt to make Wax: We Are themore than it is, which is basically an entertaining piece of Euro-fluff.

Cinequest Picks for Saturday, February 28

February 28, 2015 by movie gourmet

Here are my picks for Saturday at Cinequest:

ANTOINE ET MARIE: A brilliantly constructed French-Canadian drama with two unforgettable characters. US PREMIERE.
DIRTY BEAUTIFUL: An American indie comedy that is decidedly NOT a by-the-numbers battle of the sexes. WORLD PREMIERE.
FEVER: A French thrill killer thriller (say that quickly three times) strengthened by Julie-Marie Parmentier’s performance as a witness to the crime.

Cinequest Picks for Friday, February 27

February 27, 2015 by movie gourmet

Here are my picks for Friday at Cinequest, starting with three of my favorites:

THE CENTER: An absorbing and topical American indie drama about the seductiveness of a cult. WORLD PREMIERE.
LOS HAMSTERS: A biting darkly hilarious Mexican social satire. NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE.
ASPIE SEEKS LOVE: A surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a guy looking for love like anyone else, but whose social skills are handicapped by Asberger’s. WORLD PREMIERE.

I also like SWEDEN’S COOLEST NATIONAL TEAM (a character-driven take on the sports movie takes us into a Nerd Olympics) and the innovative and good-hearted Hungarian comedy FOR SOME INEXPLICABLE REASON and I’ve heard great things about these following films:

GUARD DOG: dark and violent Peruvian thriller. US PREMIERE.
MILWAUKEE: US indie sex and relationship comedy. WORLD PREMIERE.

See you around the fest!

Movies to See Right Now

December 30, 2018February 27, 2015 by movie gourmet

If you can make it to Cinequest, there are some great movie choices, including Sunday night’s Clouds of Sils Maria with Kristin Stewart (who won the Supporting Actress Cesar – the French Oscar) and Juliette Binoche. Here is my extensive Cinequest coverage.

The Oscars have come and gone, leaving these choices in theaters and elsewhere:

Clint Eastwood’s thoughtful and compelling American Sniper, with harrowing action and a career-best performance from Bradley Cooper.
The inspiring Selma, well-crafted and gripping throughout (but with an unfortunate historical depiction of LBJ).
The cinematically important and very funny (and, of course. Oscar-winning) Birdman.
The Theory of Everything is a successful, audience-friendly biopic of both Mr. AND Mrs. Genius.
Julianne Moore’s superb performance is the only reason to see Still Alice;
The Imitation Game – the riveting true story about the guy who invented the computer and defeated the Nazis and was then hounded for his homosexuality.
And the movie that is better than all of these: Boyhood. It’s available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

Here are some great choices for movies coming up on TV this week – all on Turner Classic Movies:

The Narrow Margin (February 28): This overlooked film noir masterpiece is a taut 71 minutes of tension. Growly cop Charles McGraw plays hide-and-seek with a team of hit men on a claustrophobic train. Marie Windsor is unforgettable as the assassins’ target.
Charles McGraw and Marie Windsor in THE NARROW MARGIN
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (March 3): This romantic French musical is notable for three things: 1) the actors sing all of the dialogue; 2) the breakout performance by then 20-year-old Catherine Deneuve; and 3) an epilogue scene at a gas station – one of the great weepers in cinema history.
Spider Baby (March 4): This campy horror flick ain’t good, but it’s entertaining. Lon Chaney, Jr., passes the horror torch to Sid Haig. Also on March 4, TCM is bringing us one of the silliest of mutant monster movies, Night of the Lepus (thundering herds of giant killer rabbits) along with Bucket of Blood, a serial killer movie that is a time capsule of beatnik culture.

Cinequest: THE LIFE AFTER

February 27, 2015 by movie gourmet

In the Mexican drama The Life After, two brothers are raised by a very unreliable single mom. When she disappears and leaves them on their own, they go on a road trip where the emotional damage she has wreaked on them is exposed. It’s well-acted and well-photographed, but grim and slow-paced. Ultimately, I’m just not convinced that this story needed to be told.