movie gourmet

Stream of the Week: PRODIGY

November 12, 2018June 12, 2018 by movie gourmet

The psychological thriller Prodigy begins with a psychologist (Richard Neil) being brought to a secret government “black site” to interview a dangerous prisoner. When he receives an orientation, he and we expect to see a superhuman sociopath like Hannibal Lector. But he enters the secure room to face a freckled-face nine-year-old girl (Savannah Liles). Her arms are pinned to her chair with restraints. We learn that there is an understandable reason for this.

She is abnormal in every way – in her super intelligence, in her telekinetic powers and in her capacity for performing monstrous and lethal acts. The two embark on a game of wits with very high stakes. There’s a deadline (literally) so the game is also a race against the clock.

It’s the first feature for writer-directors Alex Haughey and Brian Vidal. Haughey and Vidal have bet their movie, in large part, on the performance of a nine-year-old actor. Savannah Liles is exceptional as she ranges between a very smart little girl and a monstrous psychopath and between a vulnerable child and a person who has made herself invulnerable. It’s a very promising performance.

In the Cinequest program notes, Pia Chamberlain described Prodigy as “reminiscent of a cerebral episode of the Twilight Zone“, which is pretty apt. Just like the best of Rod Serling, Prodigy’s compact story-telling takes us to an environment that we can recognize, but which has different natural laws than the ones under which we operate.

Filmmakers have shocked us before with the juxtaposition of innocent looking children and their heinous deeds Sometimes those children have been created fundamentally evil (The Bad Seed, Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen) and sometimes possessed by evil (The Exorcist). Prodigy takes a different tack – exploring how a trauma can produce monstrous behavior and whether evil behavior is reversible.

Prodigy is a thinking person’s edge-of-the-seat thrill ride. I’m looking forward to the next work from Haughey and Vidal. Note that this trailer is in color, but the version of the movie that I screened at its world premiere at Cinequest was in black and white. You can now stream Prodigy on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Movies to See Right Now

June 8, 2018 by movie gourmet

Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn in BEAST

This week, I’m featuring two psychological thrillers with powerful endings and a comic heist documentary.

OUT NOW

Beast: Jessie Buckley is a force of nature in this psychological thriller.
First Reformed: Ethan Hawke stars in this bleak, bleak psychological thriller with an intense ending.
American Animals is funny documentary/reenactment of a preposterous heist.
RBG is the affectionate and humanizing biodoc about that great stoneface, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
A Quiet Place is as satisfyingly scary as any movie I’ve seen in a good long time. Very little gore and splatter, but plenty of thrills. I’m not a big fan of horror movies, but I enjoyed and admired this one.

ON VIDEO
My Stream of the Week is the very funny and sentimental The Last Movie Star with 82-year-old Burt Reynolds and Ariel Winter (Alex Dunphy in Modern Family). You can stream it on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

ON TV

Faithful readers know that I revere the Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood/Ennio Morricone spaghetti westerns. On June 13, Turner Classic Movies will be broadcasting the three great Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. All star Clint Eastwood and feature wonderfully idiosyncratic scores by Ennio Morricone.

Eastwood’s character in the trilogy is referred to in film literature as “the man with no name”. But actually, the character is named Joe, Monco and Blondie in the three movies, respectively.

Here’s Morricone’s theme for A Fistful of Dollars.

FIRST REFORMED: how bleak can we go?

June 6, 2018 by movie gourmet

In the emotionally bleak psychological drama First Reformed, Ethan Hawke plays Toller, the clergyman in charge of a historic church with about ten parishioners. The church survives as the museum-and-gift-shop arm of a modern megachurch helmed by Reverend Jeffers (Cedric the Entertainer billed as Cedric Kyles). Toller is a very troubled guy, who is consumed by a journalling project, which he says brings him no peace, but only self-pity. Toller is content to perform a weekly service and guide the odd tourist through the church. That is all about to be disrupted by the church’s upcoming 250-year anniversary celebration, which Toller dreads.

Toller is asked by one of his tiny flock (Amanda Seyfried) to counsel her very depressed husband (Phillip Ettinger). Few understand depression as well as Toller, who, we learn, has joined the church because of a grievous family loss. He is also obsessively thinking and over-thinking a crisis, not so much of faith, but of purpose. And, it is revealed that Toller is in physical pain from a very menacing medical condition.

Toller tells the young husband that balancing hope and despair is life itself. Indeed, most of First Reformed focuses on the despair. As First Reformed gets darker and darker, it become more and more intense, all the way up to a ticking bomb of a thriller ending. The ending is such a squirm-in-your-seat nail-biter that it’s hard to watch, but the payoff is worth it.

Writer-director Paul Schrader, has created a serious work of art in First Reformed. It is a very still movie with a very spare soundtrack. The aspect of the frame is squarish and sometimes square. Everything about First Reformed is distilled down to its concentrated core. Schrader wrote Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ, and directed Affliction and Auto Focus. So he is no stranger to plumbing the depths of human internal crises.

Ethan Hawke is excellent as Toller. Hawke’s performances are usually fidgety. Not here. Hawke is notable for his stillness as he plays a man who flings himself into reflection and away from social entanglements.

The supporting performances are superb: Amanda Seyfried, Cedric the Entertainer, Bill Hoag as Toller’s lay assistant and Victoria Hill as the woman who wants to rekindle a connection that Toller doesn’t have the emotional capacity for. All are suitably understated; this movie is so stripped-down to concentrate on the profound, there’s just no room for a Big Performance.

Phillip Ettinger is wonderful as the depressed young husband. This is a smart, committed and sensitive character who isn’t at all wrong – he’s just obsessing and going off the rails.

Who can be saved from despairing at the human condition? And what does it take? First Reformed provides an answer in its exceptionally powerful ending.

THE LAST MOVIE STAR: reflections on a famous life

June 5, 2018 by movie gourmet

Burt Reynolds and Ariel Winter in THE LAST MOVIE STAR

In The Last Movie Star, an aged action movie star (Burt Reynolds playing someone very similar to Burt Reynolds) examines his life choices. It’s very funny and sentimental (in a good way).

Burt plays a thinly disguised version of himself – a retired movie star named Vic Edwards, who had played halfback at Tennessee instead of Burt’s Florida State. The movie opens with opens with a clip of the 70s Burt from the Smokey and the Bandit era. But then there’s a stark cut to Burt today, looking every one of his eighty-two years. Vic is in a depressing veterinary waiting room, about to get bad news about his pet. We see that Vic lives a lonely existence, padding about his Beverly Hills home devoid of human recognition or contact.

Vic finds himself invited to be honored at a Nashville film festival. Flattered and excited, he flies off to find that, instead of a ego-boosting tribute, the festival unleashes one indignity after another. Humiliated and enraged, he goes on a rogue road trip to his hometown of Knoxville, where he gets the chance to reflect on his life and make an important amend.

His road trip partner is his film festival driver, a nightmare of Millennial self-absorption, drama and bad attitude played by Ariel Winter (Alex Dunphy in Modern Family). Winters’ character adds an Odd Couple thread to the comedy, and Winter brings down the house with a monologue on her history with psychotropic medication.

Director Adam Rifkin cleverly inserts the 82-year-old Burt into his own movies to interact with the 36-year-old Burt. We see Burt as one of the greatest guests ever on Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. And we see him in Deliverance, brandishing a bow-and-arrow and clad in a sleeveless neoprene vest – there has never been a more studly image in the history of cinema.

The key to Burt Reynolds’ appeal is that unique combination of virility, and charm, his stunning physicality leavened by his not taking himself too seriously. I’m ridiculously handsome, and isn’t that just ridiculous?

If you’re going to be sentimental, then be unashamedly sentimental. Rifkin takes this to heart, which makes The Last Movie Star so emotionally satisfying as well as so damn funny.

I saw The Last Movie Star at Cinequest, where it was warmly received by the festival audience. The Last Movie Star was released theatrically for about a minute-and-a-half (and on only ONE screen in the Bay Area). Fortunately, now you can stream it on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

BEAST: finally unleashed … and untethered

June 4, 2018 by movie gourmet

The psychological thriller Beast is set on the British Channel Island of Jersey, where the young woman Moll lives with her affluent family. Moll (Jessie Buckley). Moll is the disregarded and put-upon step-sister in her own family – ignored except when being assigned the task de jour. Only the local cop is sweet on Moll, which brings her only revulsion. Jessie is dramatically rescued from a bad situation by the scruffy, somewhat feral, dreamy-eyed Pascal (Johnny Flynn). Moll and Pascal fall in love.

It turns out that Moll has within herself confidence, strength and passion – all long and cruelly suppressed by her mother. Pascal pulls Moll from her horrid family and unleashes, for better and for worse, Moll’s true persona. So this is a pretty fair romance to this point, but I did mention that Beast is psychological thriller. A serial killer has been prowling Jersey, raping and murdering young women and girls. The police suspect…Pascal.

Now we experience some unsettling ambiguity. Does Moll protect Pascal because she thinks him innocent? Or because she thinks that he’s the murderer? In his impressive first feature, writer-director Michael Pearce finally reveals something in Pascal’s past that gives us pause. And, even later, we learn something about Moll’s past, too. Holy shit. And we’re off on a roller coaster, wondering what Moll is going to do next and why, all the way to the shocking ending.

The reason that Beast works so well is the stunning performance of Jessie Buckley. As an audience, we’re always drawn to Buckley’s Moll, at first understanding and relating to her defeatedness, inner rage and lust. But then Buckley keeps us from knowing exactly what’s going on inside, although we learn to accept that it sure is unpredictable. Buckley is Irish, and her singing career was launched on an American Idol-type show in Britain. She’s since acted in some British Isles television series. She is an incredible force of nature in this role.

Veteran actress Geraldine James gets the juicy role of the controlling and oppressive mother, her every remark filled with manipulation, shaming and the inducement of guilt. The mom is by FAR the least sympathetic character – and this story also has a serial killer in it. Johnny Flynn is very good as Pascal.

But it’s Jessie Buckley’s performance and Michael Pearce’s story that should bring you to see Beast. It’s a heckuva ride.

AMERICAN ANIMALS: a preposterous heist

June 4, 2018 by movie gourmet

In Bart Layton’s clever documentary/re-enactment mashup American Animals, four college kids plan a major art heist. The film opens with the title words THIS IS NOT BASED ON A TRUE STORY morphing into THIS IS A TRUE STORY. Indeed, in 2003, four college kids really did target $12 million in rare Audubon and Darwin books at the Transylvania University library in Lexington, Kentucky.

The story follows the classic arc of a heist movie -the intricate planning, the assembling of a team and, finally, the Big Day. Because the heist is so preposterous (and because these guys are smoking a lot of weed while planning it), the whole thing is pretty funny.

Layton has his cake and eats it, too. He has actors re-enact the real events. And he has the real participants commenting as talking heads. (With the retrospect of fifteen years, none of the participants now thinks that the heist was a good idea.)

I was especially eager to see American Animals because director Bart Layton also made The Imposter, one of the most jaw-dropping documentaries I have seen. American Animals is not as good as the unforgettable The Imposter, but funnier and more inventive – and damn entertaining.

I saw American Animals at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM). It opens in the Bay Area this weekend.

Movies to See Right Now

June 4, 2018June 1, 2018 by movie gourmet

It’s a disparate set of recommendations this week: a biodoc about an 84-year-old jurist, an indie drama about a cowboy and a family horror movie.

OUT NOW

The MUST SEE is The Rider. A young man’s rodeo injury threatens to keep him from his passions. Filmed in South Dakota with non-professional actors, The Rider is emotionally powerful and genuine – and not a bit corny.
RBG is the affectionate and humanizing biodoc about that great stoneface, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
A Quiet Place is as satisfyingly scary as any movie I’ve seen in a good long time. Very little gore and splatter, but plenty of thrills. I’m not a big fan of horror movies, but I enjoyed and admired this one.

ON VIDEO
In my Stream of the Week, the delightfully smart and funny Israeli comedy The Women’s Balcony, a community of women in a traditional culture revolt. The longer you’ve been married, the funnier you’ll find The Women’s Balcony. The Women’s Balcony is available to stream from Netflix Instant, Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

ON TV

On June 3, Turner Classic Movies will present an overlooked masterwork. Set in England just before the D-Day invasion, The Americanization of Emily (1964) is a biting satire and one of the great anti-war movies. James Garner plays an admiral’s staff officer charged with locating luxury goods and willing English women for the brass. Julie Andrews plays an English driver who has lost her husband and other male family members in the War. She resists emotional entanglements with other servicemen whose lives may be put at risk, but falls for Garner’s “practicing coward”, a man who is under no illusions about the glory of war and is determined to stay as far from combat as possible.

Unfortunately, Garner’s boss (Melvyn Douglas) has fits of derangement and becomes obsessed with the hope that the first American killed on the beach at D-Day be from the Navy. Accordingly, he orders Garner to lead a suicide mission to land ahead of the D-Day landing, ostensibly to film it. Fellow officer James Coburn must guarantee Garner’s martyrdom.

It’s a brilliant screenplay from Paddy Chayefsky, who won screenwriting Oscars for Marty, The Hospital and Network.

Today, Americanization holds up as least as well as its contemporary Dr. Strangelove and much better than Failsafe.

Reportedly, both Andrews and Garner have tagged this as their favorite film.

One of the “Three Nameless Broads” bedded by the Coburn character is played by Judy Carne, later of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.

Jule Andrews and James Garner in THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY

RBG: humanizing a stonefaced icon

May 31, 2018 by movie gourmet

RBG is the affectionate and enlightening biodoc about US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The challenge, of course, is in making such a famously stonefaced 84-year-old subject relatable. RBG pulls that off by hearing from Ginsburg’s family and childhood friends, and by showing her reaction to the “Notorious RPG” meme and to her portrayals on SNL.

Most importantly, RBG traces her longtime marriage to her late husband Marty, an affable extrovert with a zany sense of humor. He was a highly accomplished lawyer in his own right but, unusual for his generation, was also a man who embraced his wife’s career goals surpassing his own.

This is an exciting movie for a legal geek (like me). RBG documents Ginsburg’s role as the leading legal strategist for women’s rights, carefully picking the factual bases and the sequence of cases heading to the Supreme Court. It appears that Ginsburg really has only Thurgood Marshall as a peer in orchestrating the progress of a major civil rights movement.

Unfortunately that makes Ginsburg’s dissents in the regressive decisions of Roberts Court (Bush v Gore, Hobby Lobby, Shelby) all the more sobering.

That being said, what is impressive (and reassuring) is that RBG shows Ginsburg working out at the gym – she can hold a plank longer than I can hold mug of beer.

I must note that RBG is outright reverential – but why not? Ginsburg deserves it.

Stream of the Week: THE WOMEN’S BALCONY – a righteous man must keep his woman happy

May 29, 2018 by movie gourmet

A community of women in a traditional culture revolt in the delightfully smart and funny Israeli comedy The Women’s Balcony. The balcony in a small Jerusalem synagogue collapses, and the building is condemned. The old rabbi’s wife is seriously injured, and he suffers a trauma-induced psychotic breakdown. Just when it looks like the leaderless congregation will die, a young and charismatic rabbi (Avraham Aviv Alush) appears, enlivens the congregation and repairs the building. But he rebuilds the synagogue WITHOUT the women’s section. Profoundly disrespected, the synagogue’s women strike in protest.

The women live in a culture where males have all the power and religious authority trumps all. The women all have their individually distinct gifts, personalities and rivalries. But they all appreciate the injustice of the situation, and they are really pissed off. They are very creative in finding way to leverage the power that they do have, and the result is very, very funny.

This could have been a very broad comedy (and a Lysistrata knock-off). Instead, it’s richly textured, with an examination of ethical behavior and loving relationships. It’s also dotted with comments on the relations between Israeli Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox and on the importance of food in this culture. It’s the first – and very promising – feature for both director Emil Ben-Shimon and writer Shlomit Nehana.

There are plenty LOL moments, including a scene where one of the congregants masquerades as the demented old rabbi to secure the needed psychotropic meds.

We soon understand that the young rabbi has a very unattractive side – grossly sexist and power-hungry. But he has seduced the men and then cows them by manipulating his religious authority. He’s tearing apart a closely bound community braided together by decades of deep friendship and inter-reliance. The movie turns on whether the men can recognize when his supposed righteousness veers into what is really unethical and, in one pivotal scene with the old rabbi, indecent.

Two of the male characters, deeply in love with their women, step up and do the right thing. This overt comedy has a very a romantic core.

Most of all, The Women’s Balcony is about mature relationships. Most of these couples have been married for decades, especially the couple at the core of the story, Ettie (Evein Hagoel) and Zion (Igal Naor). Ben-Shimon and Nehana prove themselves to be keen and insightful observers of long-lasting relationships.

A righteous man must keep his woman happy. This may not be written in the Holy Scriptures, but it’s damn useful advice. (It also helps, we learn, if he can make a mean fruit salad.) The longer you’ve been married, the funnier you’ll find The Women’s Balcony. The Women’s Balcony is available to stream from Netflix Instant, Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Movies to See Right Now

June 4, 2018May 25, 2018 by movie gourmet

ICYMI here’s my remembrance of movie poster artist Bill Gold. And here’s my running list of Best Movies of 2018 – So Far. You can already stream some of them.

OUT NOW

- The MUST SEE is The Rider. A young man’s rodeo injury threatens to keep him from his passions. Filmed in South Dakota with non-professional actors, The Rider is emotionally powerful and genuine – and not a bit corny.
- Tully, the insightful and compelling dark comedy from the brilliant and brave team of Diablo Cody, Jason Reitman and Charlize Theron.
- A Quiet Place is as satisfyingly scary as any movie I’ve seen in a good long time. Very little gore and splatter, but plenty of thrills. I’m not a big fan of horror movies, but I enjoyed and admired this one.
- Godard, Mon Amour is, at the same time, a tribute to the genius of Jean-Luc Godard’s early cinema and a satire on the insufferable tedium of the political dilettantism that squandered the rest of Godard’s filmmaking career. This is a very inventive film, written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist). The more Godard films that you’ve seen, the more you will enjoy the wit of Godard, Mon Amour.

ON VIDEO
The recent capture of the Golden State Killer reminded me of Zodiac, from the master of the serial killer genre, David Fincher. video pick Zodiac can be streamed from Amazon (included with Prime), iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

ON TV

On May 28, Turner Classic Movies brings us two particularly authentic war and post-war classics. I always recommend watching The Best Years of Our Lives around Memorial Day. It’s an exceptionally well-crafted, contemporary snapshot of post WW II American society adapting to the challenges of peacetime. Justifiably won seven Oscars. Still a great and moving film.

In Men in War (1957), an infantry lieutenant (Robert Ryan) must lead his platoon out of a desperate situation. He encounters a cynical and insubordinate sergeant (Aldo Ray) loyally driving a jeep with his PTSD-addled colonel (Robert Keith). In conflict with each other, they must navigate through enemy units to safety. Director Anthony Mann is known for exploring the psychology of edgy characters, and that’s the case with Men in War.