Movies to See Right Now

THE WAVE
THE WAVE

I really liked the gripping Norwegian disaster movie The Wave, with its ticking clock tension and cool disaster effects. I saw The Wave last week at Cinequest, and it opens in theaters this weekend.  I also liked Cinequest’s Eye in the Sky, with Helen Mirren, and I’ll be writing about that by next week before it opens widely in the Bay Area.

I remain completely absorbed with Silicon Valley’s own film festival, Cinequest. Check out my up-to-the-moment coverage both on my Cinequest page and follow me on Twitter for the latest.  I especially recommend the exquisite Chilean contemplation of grief The Memory of Water, which plays Cinequest tomorrow evening; I’ve seen 25 Cinequest movies so far, and this is the best one. Tomorrow night, I’ll be checking out two movies I haven’t seen yet:  The Adderall Diaries with James Franco, Ed Harris and Amber Heard, Christian Slater and Cynthia Nixon and February, a horror flick with Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka.

Then there are the Oscar winners and contenders, whose theatrical runs are winding down but still out in theaters:

  • Spotlight – a riveting, edge-of-your-seat drama with some especially compelling performances.
  • The Revenant, an awesome and authentic survival tale that must be seen on the BIG SCREEN. I predict that The Revenant will be the biggest winner at the Oscars.
  • The Irish romantic drama Brooklyn, an audience-pleaser with a superb performance by Saoirse Ronan.
  • The deserved Oscar winner for Screenplay, The Big Short – a supremely entertaining thriller – both funny and anger-provoking.

The Italian drama My Mother is a deeply personal film about loss with some comedic highlights from John Turturro. The Coen Brothers’ disappointingly empty comedy Hail, Caesar contains some cool Hollywood parodies.

In honor of Cinequest, my Stream of the Week is the delightful dark comedy Gemma Bovery from last year’s festival.  Gemma Bovery is available to stream from Amazon Video (free with Amazon Prime), iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

This week, watch for two wonderfully fun gender-crossing comedies on Turner Classic Movies on March 13: Victor/Victoria and Tootsie. TCM is playing Blow-up on March 17. Set in the Mod London of the mid-60s, a fashion photographer (David Hemmings) is living a fun but shallow life filled with sports cars, discos and and scoring with supermodels (think Jane Birkin, Sarah Miles and Verushka). Then he discovers that his random photograph of a landscape may contain a clue in a murder and meets a mystery woman (Vanessa Redgrave). After taking us into a vivid depiction of the Mod world, director Michelangelo Antonioni brilliantly turns the story into a suspenseful story of spiraling obsession. His L’Avventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse made Antonioni an icon of cinema, but Blow-up is his most accessible and enjoyable masterwork. There’s also a cameo performance by the Jeff Beck/Jimmy Page version of the Yardbirds and a quick sighting of Michael Palin in a nightclub.

BLOW-UP
BLOW-UP

Movies to See Right Now

Alden Ehrenreich in HAIL, CAESAR
Alden Ehrenreich in HAIL, CAESAR

Get ready for the Oscars by seeing these nominated films and performances, all on my Best Movies of 2015, all with some Oscar nominations:

  • 45 Years with Charlotte Rampling’s enthralling Oscar-nominated performance.
  • The Revenant, an awesome and authentic survival tale that must be seen on the BIG SCREEN. I predict that The Revenant will be the biggest winner at the Oscars.
  • The Irish romantic drama Brooklyn is an audience-pleaser with a superb performance by Saoirse Ronan.
  • Spotlight – a riveting, edge-of-your-seat drama with some especially compelling performances.
  • The Big Short – a supremely entertaining thriller – both funny and anger-provoking.

The Coen Brothers’ disappointingly empty comedy Hail, Caesar contains some cool Hollywood parodies.

My DVD/Stream of the Week is the brilliant psychological drama 99 Homes, which illustrates the life-and-death stakes of our nation’s foreclosure crisis. It’s a topical film, but 99 Homes is emotionally raw and as intense as any thriller.  The DVD is available to rent from Netflix and Redbox, and 99 Homes can be streamed from Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, and Playstation Video.

For just a fun time at the movies, try Richard Lester’s 1974 The Four Musketeers, coming up February 21 on Turner Classic Movies. Watch Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, Michael York and Frank Finlay swashbuckle away against Bad Guys Christopher Lee, Faye Dunaway and Charlton Heston. Geraldine Chaplin and Raquel Welch adorn the action.

Christopher Lee and Faye Dunaway in THE FOUR MUSKETEERS
Christopher Lee and Faye Dunaway in THE FOUR MUSKETEERS
Oliver Reed in THE FOUR MUSKETEERS
Oliver Reed in THE FOUR MUSKETEERS

Best Movies of 2015

Domhnall Gleeson in EX MACHINA
Domhnall Gleeson in EX MACHINA

Visit my Best Movies of 2015 for my list of the year’s best films, complete with images, trailers and my comments on each movie – as well as their availability to rent on DVD and to stream. My top ten movies for 2015 are:

  1. Ex Machina
  2. Wild Tales 
  3. Leviathan
  4. Brooklyn
  5. Youth
  6. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl 
  7. Creed
  8. Spotlight
  9. Phoenix
  10. The Martian

The other best films of the year are: The End of the Tour, Love & Mercy,  The Big Short, Corn Island, Mustang, I’ll See You in My Dreams,  ’71, The Look of Silence and  The Grief of Others.

I’m saving space for these promising 2015 films that I haven’t seen yet: The Revenant, Joy, The Hateful Eight and 45 Years.

THE BIG SHORT: we laugh and then we get mad

Steve Carell (right) in THE BIG SHORT
Steve Carell (right) in THE BIG SHORT

It’s history.  Now we all know that the subprime mortgage scam blew up in 2007 and brought global banking to its knees by September 2008.  The supremely entertaining The Big Short takes us back to before the financial collapse, when only a few quirky smarty pants saw it coming.  Director Adam McKay personalizes the crisis into an irreverent character driven drama with both whodunit and ticking bomb elements.  It all adds up to an exciting, funny and anger-provoking experience.

The Big Short follows the parallel stories of the not-so-merry few who discovered the worthlessness of securities comprised of bad subprime loans. There’s a San Jose doctor-turned-fund manager (Christian Bale), a renegade Wall Street hedge fund manager (Steve Carell) and a couple of boy wonder investors in Boulder, Colorado.  It’s a very unlikely bunch of prospective heroes.  Bale’s doctor is so socially impervious that he seems to belong somewhere on the autism spectrum.  Carell’s trader attends anger management group therapy, which is not helping him a damn bit.  And the Boulder kids – well this IS their first rodeo.

The real star here is Adam McKay, whose previous work has been in low-brow comedies, most notably the Ron Burgundy movies.  Remember, this is the story of guys in front of their computers figuring out the current and future values of other people’s home mortgages.  McKay has turned this into an edge-of-your-seat thriller.  That is remarkable.

McKay’s first challenge is helping us understand all the financial gobbledygook.  McKay immediately breaks the Fourth Wall, with an opportunistic Wall Street banker (Ryan Gosling) opening the movie by speaking directly to the camera and explaining how home mortgages are securitized – and it turns out that we can understand it, after all.  Throughout the film, McKay keeps interrupting the action with very funny cameos, so unexpected personalities can explain various financial instruments.  I’m not going to reveal them, because much of the fun is the delightful surprise.  But I will say that no one has ever explained something complicated with more clarity than a pop star, an economist and a crowd in a casino when they combine to illuminate us about the “synthetic CDO”.

As cynical and iconoclastic as they are, none of our heroes can imagine the breadth of the corruption and the scale of the impending financial meltdown.  As Carell’s character digs deeper, he unearths the incentives for the bankers, insurers, rating agencies and mortgage retailers to lie and cheat and defraud – all built into the system.  Carell’s face is filled with a combination of disgust and terror as he connects the dots.  The Big Short opens with the Mark Twain quote: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”  No truer words…

Carell and Bale are brilliant in The Big Short; both performances are awards-worthy.  Gosling, Brad Pitt and Melissa Leo are all also excellent, as is Adepero Oduye (12 Years a Slave). I especially loved Jeremy Strong’s performance as Carell’s hyper intense right hand man. Strong has a particular gift for being memorable in historical dramas: Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty, Selma and as Lee Harvey Oswald in the overlooked Parkland.

Now we know that these guys were right when everyone else – including ALL the figures of authority – were saying that they were wrong.  It’s an amazing story to watch.