It’s time to sample the prestige films dominating theaters (or, at least, art house theaters):
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 Belgian drama Two Days, One Night with Marion Cotillard, which explores the limits of emotional endurance.
The cinematically important and very funny Birdman. You can still find Birdman, but you may have to look around a bit. It has justifiably garnered several Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture.
Reese Witherspoon is superb in the Fight Your Demons drama Wild, and Laura Dern may be even better.
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.
I was underwhelmed by the brooding drama A Most Violent Year – well-acted and a superb sense of time and place (NYC in 1981) but not gripping enough to thrill.
My DVD/Stream of the Week is a first feature with a GREAT title for a contemporary noir thriller: Bad Turn Worse. Bad Turn Worse is available streaming from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
On January 31, Turner Classic Movies is airing one of the all time funniest showbiz comedies, Twentieth Century. Another good choice is the WW II spy thriller The Fallen Sparrow with John Garfield and a 22-year-old Maureen O’Hara (and she doesn’t look 22 – does she?).
John Garfield and Maureen O’Hara in FALLEN SPARROW
It’s time to get ready for the 2015 version of the San Jose film festival Cinequest, coming up on February 28 through March 8. At the media launch, Cinequest CEO and co-founder Halfdan Hussey pronounced himself “totally stoked”. We all should be stoked because Cinequest 2015 will host artists from 50 countries and present 91 world, North American or US premieres.
This is the 25th anniversary of the festival, but Hussey described Cinequest 2015 as “about today and tomorrow”, referencing both cutting edge cinema and the film technology of the future.
One of the surefire festival hits will be Clouds of Sils Maria, where the ever-radiant Juliette Binoche plays an actress now relegated to the older role in her breakthrough play, with the younger role going to Kristen Stewart (All About Eve, anyone?). The Twilight series has obscured what a good actress Stewart can be (Into the Wild, Adventureland, The Runaways), and her performance in The Clouds of Sils Maria has been getting raves.
Ann Thompson (Thompson on Film) will be receiving a Media Legacy Award and screening the Argentine revenge drama Wild Tales, which has been a festival hit at Cannes, Telluride, Toronto and Sundance.
Other highlights:
Rosario Dawson will appear to receive a Maverick Spirit Award.
That award will also go to Deliverance director John Boorman, who will be screening his newest work Queen and Country.
Richard von Busack, the highly respected film critic for Metro, will receive a Media Legacy Award and screen L’Atalante, the 1934 masterpiece of French writer-director Jean Vigo, who died at age 29 soon after its completion.
But the real treasure at Cinequest 2015 is likely to be found among the hitherto less well-known films – like last year’s Cinequest jewel Ida, which is high on my list of Best Movies of 2014.
Take a look at the program and the passes and tickets. (If you want to support Silicon Valley’s most important cinema event while skipping the lines, the $100 donation for Express Line Access is an awesome deal.) You can download the Festival Guide from this page.
As usual, I’ll be covering Cinequest rigorously with features and movie recommendations. Follow me on Twitter for the latest.
My DVD/Stream of the Weeks is a fine first feature with a GREAT title for a contemporary noir thriller: Bad Turn Worse. It’s set in a nowheresville Texas cotton gin town. Three childhood friends have just graduated from high school, and two are looking to escape to college – Bobby (Jeremy Allen White) and Sue (MacKenzie Davis). Not sharing a speck of Bobby’s and Sue’s intellectual curiosity, Sue’s longtime boyfriend B.J. (Logan Huffman) doesn’t want them to go; B.J. is dreamy and testosterone-filled, but bone-headed and weak-willed, with a gift for making impulsive, destructive choices. Bobby is sweet on Sue, and she is starting to be repelled by B.J.’s immaturity and selfishness. Sure enough, B.J. does something which entangles them all in a lethal jam.
Pretty soon there’s a double cross within a double cross, with a love triangle overlay. Nobody can trust anybody else, and somebody is gonna have to die…
The young leads are good, but two veteran TV actors sparkle in supporting turns. Mark Pellegrino plays a ruthless and crazy-scary villain that no one should cross. Jon Gries (Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite) is hilariously deadpan as the corrupt Sheriff who tries to connect the dots for Bobby with metaphors – and Bobby’s dots just aren’t connecting.
Bad Turn Worse’s noir sensibility comes from 1) the amoral attitude that sometimes you gotta break the law and 2) the expectation that there can’t be a happy ending with all this treachery in play.
Bad Turn Worse is written by Dutch Southern and is the directorial debut of Simon and Zeke Hawkins. These guys have definitely proven that they can pull off a solid thriller. Bad Turn Worse is available streaming from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr. (center back) in SELMA
It’s been a while since I’ve seen as stirring a movie as Selma, Director Ava DuVernay’s retelling of the Selma, Alabama, Civil Rights marches in 1965 – one of the most heroic episodes in a saga known for heroism.
It’s an important story. Although the marches came on the heels of a racist atrocity, instead of just vomiting rage, Martin Luther King (David Oyelowo) and his fellow civil rights leaders had a specific strategic goal in mind. Their planned civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery was designed to trigger the passage of yet-to-be-drafted legislation, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. They knew that there would be risks to all and sacrifices by many – both martyrs to the cause and victims of terrorism. Those sacrifices were real and are depicted in the movie. As the civil rights leaders navigate the reefs of local Jim Crow rule and murderous racist terrorism, Selma’s story is compelling minute-to-minute.
King himself must bear the burden of responsibility of a leader sending his charges out to possibly sacrifice their lives. All the time, he is receiving threats to his safety and that of his family, dealing with blackmail and character assassination and going through a rough patch in his marriage to Coretta Scott King (Carmen Ejogo).
But Selma, like history, is not a One Man Show. King doesn’t just dictate the path for his Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC). He has to work with his colleagues in the SCLC and reach out to build a coalition with the local African-American community and other national organizations, chiefly the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). King is not just another noble face. He’s got to show a canny craftiness as a study in negotiating, a guy who knows when to hold ’em and knows when to fold ’em.
Here’s something else that Selma does extraordinarily well. I’m a history buff who understands that – to relate a historical narrative in 90-120 minutes – filmmakers must compress historical events and compound characters. However, Selma allows us to glimpse the broad canvas by seeing other important figures of the Civil Rights movement – Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy, Hosea Williams, John Lewis, James Forman, Diane Nash, James Bevel, James Orange and even Malcom X and Bayard Rustin. There are also the white martyrs James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo. And New York Times reporter Roy Reed is there, representing the handful of national newsmen who brought the civil rights struggle into the homes of non-Southern America. As villains, we have not just George Wallace (Tim Roth) but Al Mingo and Sheriff Jim Clark.
And what about the controversial depiction of President Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson)? The short answer is that Selma’s treatment of LBJ is sometimes factually inaccurate and definitely wrong in tone. I am going to discuss this more fully in another post, probably on Wednesday. But the bottom line is this – see the movie anyway. At its core, the movie is about what happened in Selma and within the leadership of the Civil Rights movement – it generally gets that right.
After seeing Selma, I reflected on the media landscape in 1965 – where every home in America watched the TV news from either CBS, NBC or ABC. The repugnant spectacle of the white mob beating the peaceful demonstrators came into every American living room, including mine. We Americans all saw the same thing. But in today’s media environment, a huge fraction of the country gets it news from Fox News, which would likely twist and minimize the very facts that mobilized a nation in 1965 – and another huge fraction would be watching non-news content and miss the controversy all together.
But my most sobering reflection upon leaving the theater was this – right now the Republican Congress and the majority of the US Supreme Court are trying their hardest to emasculate the very Voting Rights Act that was the culmination of the campaign in the movie Selma.
In a uniformly well-acted movie, David Oyelowo deserves special praise for his portrayal of MLK. Oprah Winfrey and veteran character actor Henry G. Sanders are the best of the rest. On a personal note, I relished seeing one of my faves Wendell Pierce (Treme and The Wire) and also up-and-comer Tessa Thompson of Dear White People.
Selma is inspirational, kids should see it and families should discuss it. It’s just outside the Top Ten of my Best Movies of 2014.
Time to start watching the Oscar nominees. Here are the best choices now in theaters:
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 Belgian drama Two Days, One Night with Marion Cotillard, which explores the limits of emotional endurance.
The cinematically important and very funny Birdman. You can still find Birdman, but you may have to look around a bit. It has justifiably garnered several Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture.
Reese Witherspoon is superb in the Fight Your Demons drama Wild, and Laura Dern may be even better.
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.
My DVD/Stream of the week is the wry German comedy A Coffee in Berlin. A Coffee in Berlin is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
On January 27, Turner Classic Movies is airing my favorite movie on American politics, The Candidate – I’ve worked in several dozen political campaigns and this movie still resonates with my experiences.
And on January 26, TCM will broadcast The Earrings of Madame de… (1953). This is one of the great movies that you have NOT seen, having just been released on DVD in 2009. Max Ophuls directed what is perhaps the most visually evocative romance ever in black and white. It’s worth seeing for the ballroom scene alone. The shallow and privileged wife of a stick-in-the-mud general takes a lover, but the earrings she pawned reveal the affair and consequences ensue. Great Italian director Vittorio De Sica plays the impossibly handsome lover.
In the Belgian drama Two Days, One Night, a factory worker (Oscar winner Marion Cotillard) finds out on Friday afternoon that she will be laid off unless she can convince nine of her sixteen co-workers to sacrifice their bonuses. She must make her case to each of them before a vote on Monday morning. It’s a substantial bonus, and every one of her colleagues really needs it; their spouses are expecting it, too, and many have decided how they are going to spend it. The vote is going to be close, the stakes for each family is high and the tension builds.
Our protagonist is anything but plucky. She needs to be coaxed and prodded by her husband and a militant co-worker. She is buoyed enough by an early victory to keep going, but she’s constantly on the verge of giving up.
She hasn’t been been well, which also complicates things. Because the filmmakers wait until midway to explicitly reveal her illness, I’m being careful not to spoil it here. But the precise illness is important because it affects both her own stamina and the confidence of her co-workers about how well she would contribute to the workplace.
Two Days, One Night is the latest from two of my favorites writer-director filmmakers, the brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes. They specialize in contemporary dramas of the Belgian working class. Their The Kid with a Bike was #1 on my Best Movies of 2012. And I think that their 2002 The Son (Le Fils) was pretty much a masterpiece, too. The Dardennes’ hand held (but NOT shaky) cameras intrude right on top of the characters, bringing an urgency and immediacy to every scene. Hyper realism contributes to the verisimilitude and thereby builds more power into the stories; here, a tense conversation in the doorway to an apartment building get interrupted by someone walking in – just as it would be in real life.
At its core, Two Days, One Night explores the limits of emotional endurance. What does she need to rebound form her malaise – the adrelin surge of battle? Or the power from getting to make her own choice?
[Anyone who has visited France or Belgium will recognize the remarkable politeness of the characters – observing all the formalities of greeting, shaking hands and saying thanks and goodbye even in the most awkward and emotionally charged encounters.]
Two Days, One Night is a fine film, just outside the Top Ten on my Best Movies of 2014. Unsurprisingly, Cotillard’s glammed-down performance is brilliant. It’s a compelling story as we walk her tightrope of desperation, heading toward redemption. Two Days, One Night opens widely in the San Francisco Bay Area tomorrow.
In Clint Eastwood’s real-life story American Sniper, Bradley Cooper plays Chris Kyle, the most effective sniper in US military history. A Navy Seal in the Iraq War, Kyle signed up for a soul-sucking four tours. American Sniper is about how he survived those searing war experiences and how he did/did not cope with the emotional legacy of those experiences back in the USA.
Nobody should have to see and endure what Kyle (and tens of thousands of his comrades) did. Kyle was that recognizable American male who refused to admit that his experience could be taking an emotional toll. As a result, he’s constantly on the verge of being blown up in the war scenes and on the verge of imploding in the scenes back home. Sometimes there’s more danger in the domestic scenes than in the war action scenes.
The war scenes are convincing, brutal and adrenalin-packed. The final battle scene is one of the most harrowing I’ve ever seen in a movie. While Kyle’s unit is under siege, we can see what his headquarters is seeing on the high tech satellite view – and it looks increasingly hopeless. When the situation is at it most desperate, a sand storm hits, and suddenly we’re immersed into the fog (sand?) of war, trying to tell who is who and what is happening.
And here’s an observation on violence in Eastwood movies. Clint used to trade in good old fashioned movie violence as he shot ’em up in westerns, war action films and the Dirty Harry series. But beginning with Unforgiven, all of Eastwood’s films have featured only the most realistic violence. With Unforgiven, a toggle switched inside Clint, and he must have determined to use violence only for STORYTELLING and never for ENTERTAINMENT. This is the case with American Sniper.
This may be Bradley Cooper’s finest performance. He is perfect as the Everyman hero surviving battle, but clinging on by his fingernails in peacetime. It’s a finely modulated performance without a shred of PTSD cliche. The other actors (including Sienna Miller as the wife) are just fine, but their roles are relatively underwritten.
American Sniper is a very strong movie, compelling and thoughtful. It just makes the Top Ten on my Best Movies of 2014.
Ranging from wry to hilarious, the German dark comedy A Coffee in Berlin hits every note perfectly. It’s the debut feature for writer-director Jan Ole Gerster, a talented filmmaker we’ll be hearing from again.
Jan Ole Gerster
We see a slacker moving from encounter to encounter in a series of vignettes. Gerster has created a warm-hearted but lost character who needs to connect with others – but sabotages his every opportunity. He has no apparent long term goals, and even his short term goal of getting some coffee is frustrated.
As the main character (Tom Schilling) wanders through contemporary Berlin, A Coffee in Berlin demonstrates an outstanding sense of place, especially in a dawn montage near the end of the film. The soundtrack is also excellent – the understated music complements each scene remarkably well.
I saw A Coffee in Berlin (then titled Oh Boy) at Cinequest 2013 and singled it out as one of the three most wholly original films in the festival and as one of my favorite movie-going experiences of the year. A Coffee in Berlin was snagged for the festival by Cinequest’s film scout extraordinaire Charlie Cockey. A Coffee in Berlin is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
After today, all of the prestige movies of 2014 will be in wide release except for A Most Violent Year and Two Days, One Night, which open more widely next weekend. Of the ones that I’ve seen, here are your best bets:
The cinematically important and very funny Birdman. You can still find Birdman, but you may have to look around a bit. It has justifiably garnered several Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture.
Reese Witherspoon is superb in the Fight Your Demons drama Wild, and Laura Dern may be even better.
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.
Set in the macho world of Olympic wrestling, Foxcatcher is really a relationship movie with a stunning dramatic performance by Steve Carell.
Mr. Turner is visually remarkable and features a stuning performance by Timothy Spall, but it’s toooo loooong.
My DVD/Stream of the week is Boyhood, an important film – a milestone in the history of cinema. It may turn out to be the best film of the decade. It’s a Must See. Boyhood is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
On January 20, Turner Classic Movies is airing A Face in the Crowd. During every year of the 1960s, Andy Griffith entered the living rooms of most Baby Boomers as Sheriff Andy Taylor on The Andy Griffith Show and in guest appearances on Mayberry R.F.D. Younger folks knew him from another ten seasons on television starring as Matlock.
But, in his very first feature film, Griffith shed the likeability and decency that made him a TV megastar and became a searingly unforgettable villain. In the 1957 Elia Kazan classic A Face in the Crowd, Griffith plays Lonesome Rhodes, a failed country guitar picker who is hauled out of an Arkansas drunk tank by talent scout Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal). It turns out that he has a folksy charm that is dynamite in the new medium of television. He quickly rises in the infotainment universe until he is an A List celeb and a political power broker. To Jeffries’ horror, Rhodes reveals himself to be an evil, power hungry megalomaniac. Jeffries made him – can she break him? The seduction of a gullible public by a good timin’ charmer predicts the careers of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, although Lonesome Rhodes is meaner than Reagan and less ideological than Bush.
Amazingly, A Face in the Crowd did not garner even a nomination for an Academy Award for Griffith – or for any of its other filmmakers. Today, it is well-regarded, having been added to the library of Congress’ preservation list in the US National Film Registry and rating 91% in the critical reviews tallied by Rotten Tomatoes. It is one of the greatest political films.
Eller Coltrane, Ethan Hawke and Lorelei Linklater in BOYHOOD
Boyhood is a profoundly moving film – and I’m still trying to figure out why. It’s a family drama without a drop of emotional manipulation – there’s no big moment of redemption and no puppies are saved. It’s just about a boy growing up in a family that we all can recognize and going through a series of moments that all of us have gone through. Still, I found myself responding very emotionally and, hardass as I may be, I had a lump in my throat and moist eyes during the last half hour or so.
There’s a sense of fundamental human truth in Boyhood that comes from the amazing, risky and groundbreaking way that writer-director Richard Linklater made this movie. Boyhood traces the story of Mason (Eller Coltrane), his big sister (Lorelei Linklater) and their divorced parents (Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke) from the time when Mason was six-years-old to when he is going off to college at age 18. Linklater and the cast shot the movie in 39 days over a TWELVE YEAR PERIOD. So the cast members actually aged twelve years without the need for creating that effect with makeup or by switching the child actors. Other than Linklater’s own Before Sunrise/Before Sunset/Before Midnight series of romances spaced nine years apart, he only movies that have used this technique of aging-in-real-time have been documentaries, most notably the 7 Up series and Hoop Dreams.
Besides the authenticity that comes from the aging-in-real-time, the key to Boyhood is the reality of each moment. Each scene in the film is universal. Every kid has had to suffer the consequences of the life decisions made by his/her parents. Every kid has felt disrespected by a parental edict or disappointed when a parent has failed to come through. Everybody has been bullied in the school bathroom. Everybody has felt the excitement of connecting with a first love – and then the shock/humiliation/heartbreak of getting dumped. No scene individually moves the plot forward. But each scene helps complete our picture of who Mason is and how he is being shaped by his experiences.
Of course, when parents divorce and when a kid’s family is blended with that of a step-parent’s, those are especially big deals. All those things happen to Mason in Boyhood; he has control over none of them, but they all have a lasting impact on his life and development. And when his mom decides to better herself by working her way through college and grad school to become a college instructor, her self-improvement makes her less available to her kids – and that’s a big deal, too. (This part of Linklater’s story is autobiographical.)
As we trace Mason’s early years, we relate to these universal experiences and, without noticing it, start rooting for him and his sister. By the time he is 15, we are hooked and so seriously invested in him that it’s easy to feel as much pride in his high school graduation as do his fictional parents.
The actors who begin as children and age into young adults – Eller Coltrane and Lorelei Linklater (the director’s daughter) – are very good. Arquette and Hawke are also excellent in playing warts-and-all parents; each parent grows (in different ways) over the twelve years as much as do their kids.
So what’s it all about – as in, what’s life all about? That question is addressed explicitly by four characters in separate scenes in the final 35 minutes of the movie – by Mason as a brash and cynical, bullshitting 17-year-old, by his mom in a self-reflective meltdown, by his dad in a moment of truthful humility and by a potential girlfriend wise beyond her years. Whether any one of them is right and whether any one of them speaks for the filmmaker – that’s up to you.
Linklater has made other films that are exceptional and groundbreaking, most notably the Before series. His indie breakthrough Slacker followed a series of characters, handing off the audience to one conversation to another – a structure seemingly without structure. He followed that his Waking Life, another random series of conversations with his live actors were animated by rotoscope. Even his recent dark comedy Bernie is offbeat – a sympathetic take on a real life murderer (who is now out of prison and living in Linklater’s garage apartment). But Boyhood is Linklater’s least talky movie – and his masterpiece.
Boyhood is an important film – a milestone in the history of cinema. (I sure didn’t expect that I would ever write that sentence.) It may turn out to be the best film of the decade. It’s a Must See. Boyhood is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video. Settle in and turn off all distractions for the next two hours and forty minutes – you’ll be glad that you did.
