coming of age – Page 4 – The Movie Gourmet

EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!!: busting balls and chasing girls

April 13, 2016 by movie gourmet

Everybody Wants Some!! is director Richard Linklater’s nostalgic romp through his college jock days. He’s described Everybody Wants Some!! as a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused, and it has a similar vibe. We have college baseball players living in a house next to campus, and they drink lots of beer, get high, bust each other’s balls and chase girls. There are lots and lots of ball busting and girl chasing. All in good fun.

Everybody Wants Some!! is a dead-on 1980 time capsule, showcasing the disco, non-Urban Cowboy and punk cultural moments. And the very fun and evocative period soundtrack kicks off with My Sharona.

There is also a bong scene that has possibly the best stoned movie monologue (“language is just a construct”, Mayans, Druids, etc.) since Jack Nicholson’s “Venutians” riff around the campfire in Easy Rider.

The story’s point of view is that of the college guys, and it is not unknown for college-age guys to see women primarily as sexual opportunities. That’s pretty much the role of all the women in this movie, except for that Special Girl who gets our hero’s attention.

Linklater is the master of coming of age (Boyhood) and coming of age in relationships (the Midnight trilogy). Everybody Wants Some!! may be the least insightful of his coming of age films, but sometimes Linklater just has fun (School of Rock, Bernie), and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Everybody Wants Some!! has an appealing cast of actors that I hadn’t remembered seeing before (including the one guy who played Ryder in Glee). Dazed and Confused is known for launching the careers of hitherto unknowns Matthew McConaughey, Parker Posey, Ben Affleck, Milla Jovovich, Adam Goldberg, Joey Lauren Adams and Jason London. How about Everybody Wants Some!!? I don’t see stardom here for anyone (but keep in mind that Ben Affleck didn’t have a very showy or portentous part in Dazed and Confused).

Everybody Wants Some!! may not be Major Linklater, but it’s an amusing frolic – but probably more fun for a heterosexual male audience.

DVD/Stream of the Week: DAZED AND CONFUSED

April 12, 2016 by movie gourmet

Richard Linklater’s newest movie Everybody Wants Some!! is coming out in theaters, which he describes as a “spiritual sequel” to his coming of age classic Dazed and Confused. So let’s all go back to the last day of high school in 1976 and refresh ourselves. All of these high school kids are up for a massive year-end party, and they are either thinking about or avoiding thinking about the next phase in their lives. It all adds up to the defining coming of age film for its generation.

Linklater is the master of coming of age (Boyhood) and coming of age in relationships (the Midnight trilogy). In Dazed and Confused the most unforgettable – and cautionary – character is Wooderson; as played with sheer genius by Mayygew McConaughhey, Wooderson is the one character who aggressively embraces NOT coming of age – kind of a shady, dissolute Peter Pan.

Dazed and Confused is known for launching McConaughey’s career, as well as unleashing indie fave Parker Posey as a Mean Girl of uncommon enthusiasm. This was Ben Affleck’s first main role, although his character is more of a one-dimensional bully, and doesn’t hint at his future success as an Oscar-winning screenwriter or major movie star. The rest of the cast includes then-newcomers Milla Jovovich, Adam Goldberg, Joey Lauren Adams and Jason London. I especially enjoy the turns by Wiley Wiggins and the hilarious Rory Cochrane (Black Mass).

Dazed and Confused is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon Video (free with Amazon Prime), iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Flixster.

Dazed and Confused is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon Video (free with Amazon Prime), iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Flixster.

MY GOLDEN DAYS: the urgency of first love

April 7, 2016 by movie gourmet

The first love depicted in Arnaud Desplechin’s coming of age film My Golden Days is completely evocative. That first love is inevitable even if the young lovers don’t know it yet, and then filled with passion, importance, obsession, angst, conflict, breakups and makeups. And then it runs its course.

The performance of Lou Roy-Lecollinet as the unpredictable object of the young protagonist’s affection really elevates My Golden Days. Roy-Lecollinet has looks which won’t attract every guy, but would be irresistible to some. She’s able to convincingly play a girl with a devastating combination of confidence, forthrightness, charm, wit, impulsivity and a wandering eye.

That story makes up the core of My Golden Days, a flashback bookended by the contemporary, middle-aged version of the protagonist (Mathieu Amalric). The story of young romance is perfect – one that we can all recognize. But, in the epilogue, the Amalric character (who has lived a full and eventful life in the 15-20 years since) is oddly still fervently bitter about what happened years before; with that distance, most of us would look back with nostalgia or, at least, a wistful acknowledgement of lessons learned. I was a bit put off.

And what’s with the lame title My Golden Days, which makes this sound like the story set in a retirement home? The original title is Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse which I think translates into Three Memories of My Youth – that would be better and there’s gotta be plenty of more appealing and descriptive titles.

My Golden Days, which I saw at Cinequest, is a movie that anyone who is decades removed from first love should see.

Cinequest: THE OTHER KIDS

March 12, 2016 by movie gourmet

The entirely fresh coming of age movie The Other Kids traces ten kids who are about to graduate from high school in Sonora, California. The problems that these kids face, how they think about themselves, how they communicate with their parents is remarkably realistic – so much that sometimes it looks like a documentary. The fact that it was shot on a very low budget on location in the decidedly unposh Gold Country town of Sonora contributes to a cinema verite flavor. The young cast is also excellent, and there’s nary a false moment. It’s triumphant debut for writer-director Chris Brown.

Since I saw The Other Kids, I’ve considered this recurring question: Why do I like this movie so much when I don’t even like teenagers? It’s got to be Brown’s masterful story-telling and the authenticity of the characters.

MUSTANG: repression challenged by the human spirit

December 23, 2015 by movie gourmet

Mustang is about five exuberant Turkish teenage girls who challenge the repression of traditional culture. It’s a triumph for writer-director Deniz Gamze Ergüven, and one of the best films of the year.

The five parentless sisters are living with their uncle and aunt on the Turkish coast “a thousand kilometers from Istanbul”. They’re a high-spirited bunch, and their rowdiness – innocent by Western standards – embarrasses their uncle. Overreacting, he tries to protect the family honor by pulling them out of school, taking away their electronics, putting them in traditional dresses (evoking the dress wear of fundamentalist polygamist Mormons) and conniving to marry them off as soon as possible. The uncle turns their home into a metaphorical prison that becomes more and more literal. The girls push back, and the stakes of the struggle get very, very high.

Our viewpoint is that of youngest sister Lale (Günes Sensoy), who is a force of nature, ever watchful (often fiercely). The poster girl for indomitability, Lale is one of the great movie characters of 2015.

Mustang is a film of distilled feminism, without any first world political correctness. These are people who want to marry or not, who they want, when they want and to have some control over their lives. They want protection from abuse. That is not a high bar, but because they are female, the traditional culture keeps these basic rights from them.

Although Mustang is set and filmed in Turkey by a Turkish writer-director, the actors are Turkish and all the dialogue is Turkish, it is technically a French movie. Director Ergüven works in France and the film was financed and produced in France. In fact, it is France’s official entry for the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar (over the Cannes winner Dheepan and the Vincent Lindon drama The Measure of a Man).

I happened to be in Sevilla, Spain for the first weekend of the Sevilla European Film Festival and saw Mustang there. I’ll be rooting for Mustang to win an Oscar.

THE TRIBE: a singular viewing experience, if you can stomach it

December 7, 2015 by movie gourmet

The Wife often mocks my taste in obscure or challenging foreign cinema, like the “Romanian abortion movie” and the “Icelandic penis movie”. So I was looking forward to regaling her about the “Ukrainian deaf movie” The Tribe, which sparked much notice at the Toronto and Sundance film fests. Indeed, The Tribe is a singular cinematic experience – both absorbing and exhausting.

Right away, the movie tells us that, although the The Tribe comes from Ukraine, we’re not going to hear any Ukrainian. Nor will we see any English subtitles. It’s set in a residential high school for the deaf, and the entire movie is in sign language. It’s novel for the hearing to experience an entire movie in which we hear only the sound of ambient noises – footsteps, creaking doors and the like – and we know that these sounds are NOT heard by the movie characters.

Writer-director Miroslav Slaboshpitsky also employs fixed-camera shots of very, very long duration. which enhance the feeling that we’re watching something that we haven’t seen before.

At first, The Tribe delivers what we might expect in a teen coming of age film: the new kid in school, practical jokes and high jinks, the boring classroom, the class clown and raging teen hormones. The kids sneak off campus at night to prowl and party. But soon we are shocked to realize that we’re not seeing normal teen rowdiness and delinquency – these kids are operating an organized crime ring!

The Tribe is clearly meant to be a comment on the profoundly rooted corruption of post-Soviet society. Unfortunately, Slaboshpitsky piles on so much horrible behavior and brutality that it becomes distracting. There’s even an unsparing clinical depiction of a back alley abortion in real time; at my screening, I could feel the entire audience, at first frozen and then squirming in our seats. It’s a very unpleasant scene – and meant to be. And after the extreme violence at the very end of the movie, the audience exited with nervous laughter at having endured it.

Two final warnings: Women viewers should be prepared for the squat toilets in the the public restroom – not exactly a travelogue high point for Ukraine. And THIS IS NOT A DATE MOVIE – despite lots of explicit sex, no one is going to want to have sex after watching this!

[SPOILER ALERT – The ending is both a cinematic achievement and barely watchable: all in one camera shot, the protagonist climbs five flights of stairs and commits four individual up-close-and-personal and especially brutal murders.]

Stream of the Week: I’LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS

September 8, 2015 by movie gourmet

Sam Elliott and Blythe Danner in I'LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS — 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.

I’ll See You in My Dreams is available to stream from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

I’LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS: gentle, thoughtful and altogether fresh

May 18, 2015 by movie gourmet

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.

Official Trailer – I’LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS from Bleecker Street on Vimeo.

Cinequest: EIGHTYSEVEN

March 6, 2015 by movie gourmet

The Ecuadorian coming of age film Eightyseven traces three teenage buddies through an eventful 1987 and shows us a reunion in 2002. Their families range from inattentive to hostile, so the guys are able to hang out at a hideaway, get up to some nocturnal hellraising and become entangled with a free-spirited girl. And then there’s a pivotal event that changes them forever.

Eightyseven is thoughtfully written and well-crafted by promising co-writers and co-directors Daniel Andrade and Anahí Hoeneisen. It’s a fine little film. I saw it at Cinequest 2015.

QUEEN AND COUNTRY – a fine director reminisces

March 6, 2015 by movie gourmet

Queen and Country is director John Boorman’s autobiographical look back at his own young manhood. In 1987, Boorman’s Hope and Glory revisited his London childhood during WW II, and now we see Boorman’s experience as a very young man drafted into the Korean War-era British army. The protagonist goes through basic training and is posted in the home nation as a military typing teacher. Along the way, he learns what happens when 1) a petty tyrant subjects you to ridiculously stupid requirements and 2) when you become infatuated with someone crazier than you are.

Boorman (Deliverance, Excalibur, The General) is an excellent filmmaker, and Queen and Country is well-crafted. The story isn’t compelling enough to make this a Must See, but it’s wry and warm-hearted, and moderately entertaining.

I saw Queen and Country at Cinequest 2015 at a screening with John Boorman present. Boorman was more memorable than was Queen and Country, especially when he reflected on his eccentric cult sci-fi film Zardoz: “It went from failure to classic without passing through success”.