movie gourmet

Cinequest around the corner

February 23, 2016February 23, 2016 by movie gourmet

Make your plans now to attend the 26th edition of Cinequest, Silicon Valley’s own major film festival. By some metrics the largest film festival in North America, Cinequest was recently voted the nation’s best by USA Today readers. The 2016 Cinequest is scheduled for March 1 through March 13 and will over 100 feature films from the US and over twenty other countries. And, at Cinequest, it’s easy to meet the filmmakers.

This year’s headline events include:

The Helen Mirren thriller Eye in the Sky on Opening Night.
A pre-release screening of the major studio The Little Prince, already spoken of as a contender for the 2017 Animated Feature Oscar.
James Franco’s appearance to present his film The Adderall Diaries.
Rita Moreno’s attendance at the world premiere of her movie Remember Me.
The Australian drama The Daughter on Closing Night (I’ve seen it – and it packs a punch!).

This year, Cinequest presents the world or US premieres of sixty features and sixty-nine shorts. And of these 129 debut films, 64 were directed by women!

I’m going to be strongly recommending at least two of these first features, the psychological thriller Lost Solace and the character-driven drama Heaven’s Floor. I’ve already screened over a dozen Cinequest 2016 movies, and I’ve already also found an excellent period romance, some thought-provoking documentaries and even a satisfying low brow comedy.

Indeed, the real treasure at Cinequest 2016 is likely to be found among the hitherto less well-known films. In the past three years, the Cinequest gems Wild Tales, ’71, Ida and The Hunt all made my Best of the Year lists.

Cinequest is on my list of Silicon Valley’s Best Movie Deals. You can get a pass for as little as $155, and you can get individual tickets as well. The express pass for an additional tax-deductible $100 is a fantastic deal – you get to skip to the front of the lines!

Take a look at the program, the schedule 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.)

As usual, I’ll be covering Cinequest rigorously with features and movie recommendations. I usually screen (and write about) over thirty films from around the world. I’ll soon have up a Cinequest 2016 page. Follow me on Twitter for the latest.

Stream/VOD of the Week: DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD: THE STORY OF THE NATIONAL LAMPOON

February 23, 2016 by movie gourmet

DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD: The Story of the National Lampoon takes us through an engaging and comprehensive history of the groundbreaking and seminal satirical magazine. For those of you who weren’t there, the National Lampoon – ever irreverent, raunchy and tasteless – was at the vanguard of the counter-culture in the early 1970s. Once reaching the rank of #2 news stand seller among all US magazines, it may be the most popularly accepted subversive art ever in the US (along with the wry Mad magazine during the Cold War).

In a few short years, the Lampoon rose from nowhere (well, actually from the Harvard Lampoon) to a humor empire with the magazine, records, a radio show and a traveling revue. And, yes, the title DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD does encapsulate the arc of the Lampoon’s story.

Documentarian Douglas Tirola tells the story so successfully because he persuaded almost all the surviving key participants to talk. We meet co-founder Henry Beard, publisher Matty Simmons, Art Director Michael Gross and other Lampoon staff including P.J. O’Rourke and Christopher Buckley. You’ll recognize the first editor, Tony Hendra, from his performance as the harried band manager in This Is Spinal Tap. We see clips of two Lampoon originals who haven’t survived, co-founder Doug Kenney and resident iconoclast Michael O’Donoghue.

The National Lampoon’s live performance revue featured John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Brian Doyle Murray, Gilda Radner and Harold Ramis. When Lorne Michaels hired the whole crew for Saturday Night Live, the hit television show instantly surpassed the magazine in cultural penetration. “The Lampoon lost its exceptionalism”, says one observer.

But the Lampoon made its mark on the movies by launching the entire genre of raunchy comedies with Animal House and spawning the careers of filmmakers John Landis and Harold Ramis, as well as the SNL performers. We also see a clip of Christopher Guest in an early Lampoon performance. On the other hand, I hadn’t remembered a less successful Lampoon project from its later era, Disco Beaver from Outer Space.

This is all, of course, major nostalgia for Baby Boomers. Before seeing DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD, I thought, yeah, I’ll enjoy the Blast From The Past, but will younger audience viewers dismiss this humor as quaint? After all, the Lampoon’s success came from puncturing the boundaries of taste, and it’s hard to imagine anything today that would be shockingly raunchy. But, after watching DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD, I have to say that the humor stands up today as very sharp-edged. After all, an image of a baby in a blender with Satan’s finger poised to press the “puree” button is pretty transgressive no matter when it’s published. The sole exception is the Lampoon’s over-fixation on women’s breasts, which comes off today as pathetically sophomoric – or even adolescent.

DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD: The Story of the National Lampoon has also vaulted on to my list of Longest Movie Titles.

I saw DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD at the San Francisco International Film Festival. This is an important cultural story, well-told and it deserves a wide audience. You can stream it from iTunes or the Showtime VOD service (and you can catch it on the Showtime channel).

Movies to See Right Now

February 19, 2016 by movie gourmet

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

DVD/Stream of the Week: 99 HOMES – desperation leads to indecency, then redemption

February 23, 2016February 16, 2016 by movie gourmet

Andrew Garfield and Michael Shannon in 99 HOMES

The opening scene of the brilliant psychological drama 99 Homes 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. Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) is a working class single dad, down on his luck. He loses his home to foreclosure and then must make a Faustian choice about supporting his family. Can he live with his choice, and what are the consequences?

With capitalism, where there are losers, there are also winners who have bet against the losers. Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) has built a prosperous real estate business on legitimate evictions and flips, supplemented with schemes to defraud federal home loan agencies, housing syndicates and individual homeowners. His world view is defined in a monologue about this nation bailing out the winners, not the losers – a cynical, but perceptive, observation.

Director Ramin Bahrani is a great American indie director, with a knack for drilling into the psyches of overlooked subsets of our society – immigrants (Chop Shop, Man Push Cart, Goodbye Solo), industrial farmers (At Any Price) and now the victims and profiteers of the Mortgage Bubble.

As foreclosure inexorably approaches, Garfield’s Nash is absorbed by dread, then desperation and, finally, to panic. His mom (Laura Dern) takes a different tack, settling firmly into denial and then erupting in hysteria. That denial recurs again and again in 99 Homes among those about to be evicted. These are people who have bought homes and can’t believe/grok/internalize that one day they will actually be forced out of them. One of the strongest aspects of 99 Homes is the use of non-actors who have lived through the nightmare. Some of the individual stories, especially one with a confused old man, are so wrenching as to be hard to watch.

This may be Andrew Garfield’ strongest cinema performance. Dennis Nash is a decent man incentivized to do the indecent. Garfield takes this good man through an amazing internal journey. Nash is forced to accept the failure resulting from his attempts to do what is right, juxtaposed with the success from conduct that he finds repulsive. Bahrani’s arty shot of the reflection of a swimming pool shimmering in a sliding glass door makes it look like Garfield is under water – which he metaphorically is at this point in the film.

Michael Shannon, one of my very favorite actors, is superb as a guy completely committed to pursuing his own survival/prosperity strategy – no matter that it is based on ruining the lives of other humans. Unlike Nash, Shannon’s Carver has accepted the incentives to act badly and has overcome any qualms about either moral ambiguity or even stark amorality.

Veteran television actor Tim Guinee is remarkable as homeowner Frank Green. Laura Dern is excellent in a pivotal role. The character actor Clancy Brown proves once again that he can grab the screen, even when he’s only visible for a minute or two.

With its searing performances by Garfield and Shannon, 99 Homes is unsparingly dark and intense until a final moment of redemption. 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.

Movies to See Right Now

February 12, 2016 by movie gourmet

Still in theaters, here are five choices from 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 entirely novel low budget, high quality horror film Unfriended. It’s on both my lists of I Hadn’t Seen This Before and Low Budget, High Quality Horror of 2015. Unfriended is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Flixster.

On February 15, Turner Classic Movies will broadcast the John Huston masterpiece The Treasure of the Sierra Madre with its superb performances by Walter Huston and Humphrey Bogart. And we don’t need no stinkin’ badges.

Walter Huston, Tim Holt and Humphrey Bogart in THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE

Alfonso Bedoya in THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE: Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges. — Alfonso Bedoya in THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE: Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges.

HAIL, CAESAR: cool Hollywood parodies, but ultimately empty

February 11, 2016 by movie gourmet

Here’s the problem with the Coen Brothers’ disappointingly empty comedy Hail, Caesar – there is no real story at its core. The plot ostensibly centers on commies kidnapping a movie star and a studio exec mulling over a job outside the movie industry. But these are contrived as an excuse to parody Old Hollywood and the movie conventions of the studio Golden Age. And that’s not enough by itself to make up a really good movie. At the end of Hail, Caesar, the guy sitting behind me said, “That’s it?”.

The parodies are well-executed, and the more you know about movies, the richer the laughs. The characters are making a ponderously devout sword-and-sandal epic called Hail, Caesar, which is closely modeled on the 1959 Ben-Hur, right down to the subtitle of the source novel, “A Tale of the Christ”. The epic stars a charismatic but shallow leading man, played well by George Clooney. This part is funny.

So is a spectacularly executed Busby Berkeley number with Scarlett Johansson as an Esther Williams type aquatic movie star. And Channing Tatum shines in a Gene Kelly-like song-and-dance set piece. Later in the film, famed cinematographer Roger Eakins brilliantly lights Tatum as an icon of Soviet-era Socialist Realism.

By far the best part of Hail, Caesar is Alden Ehrenreich as a singing cowboy. Where did they find this guy? Ehrenreich is convincing and hilarious as he performs tricks with his pistol, horse and lariat in a formula Western and then is forced to fit into a period costume for a drawing-room romantic drama. It’s an exuberantly singular performance, and something we haven’t seen on-screen since Gene Autrey and Roy Rogers.

All of the actors are good here, including Josh Brolin as the lead, and Clooney, Johansson, Tatum, Ralph Fiennes and Tila Swinton. Frances McDormand is wasted in a very brief physical comedy bit. That old scene-stealer Clancy Brown, here growling as the actor playing Gracchus in the Hail, Caesar-in-the-movie-Hail, Caesar shows why he’s one of my favorite character actors

There are always expectations of a Coen Brothers film, because of their masterpieces: Fargo, True Grit, Blood Simple and their seriously underrrated A Serious Man. Plus there’s the critical favorite No Country for Old Men and the cult fave The Big Lebowski. But they’ve also made some more forgettable fare (Inside Llewyn Davis, Burn After Reading) and Hail, Caesar is one of them.

Bottom line: if you want to enjoy a string of first class movie parodies, see Hail, Caesar. If you’re looking for something more, skip it.

DVD/Stream of the Week: UNFRIENDED – run from your webcams!!!

February 9, 2016 by movie gourmet

In the very satisfying horror film Unfriended, it’s the one-year anniversary of a teenage girl’s suicide, and her bullying peers convene via webcams on social media. But their computers are hijacked by an Unknown Force who starts wreaking revenge. The kids become annoyed, then worried and, finally, panicked for their lives.

Here’s something I’ve never seen before: the entire movie is compiled of the characters’ screenshots. The critic Christy Lemire says that “Unfriended is a gimmick with a ridiculous premise, but damned if it doesn’t work”, and she’s right. Writer Nelson Greaves and Director Levan Gabriadze came up with this device, and their originality pays off with a fun and effective movie.

It’s on both my lists of I Hadn’t Seen This Before and Low Budget, High Quality Horror of 2015. Unfriended is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Flixster.

Movies to See Right Now

February 5, 2016 by movie gourmet

Let’s begin with six choices from my Best Movies of 2015:

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.
Creed, the newest and entirely fresh chapter in the Rocky franchise; it’s about the internal struggle of three people, not just The Big Fight.
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.

Plus two more good choices:

The Hateful Eight, a Quentin Tarantino showcase for Samuel L. Jackson, Walton Goggins and Jennifer Jason Leigh, but a movie that’s not for everyone.
Carol – a vividly told tale of forbidden love.

I’m not a fan of Joy or The Danish Girl.

My Stream of the Week is the French drama In the Name of My Daughter, which uses three characters to probe the themes of obsession and betrayal. In the Name of My Daughter is available to stream from iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

It’s a really solid week at Turner Classic Movies. February 7 brings us Days of Wine and Roses, a hard-hitting and authentic exploration of alcoholism with Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon. On February 8, we can watch the Bogie and Bacall noir Key Largo with a career highlight performance by the Queen of the Bs, Claire Trevor. And on February 11, TCM presents TWO versions of the melodrama The Letter, the more famous 1940 version with Bette Davis and the rarely seen 1929 version with Jeanne Eagels, the emotions-on-her-sleeve actress who died from a heroin overdose just after filming The Letter.

a movie for young people about old people

February 4, 2016 by movie gourmet

Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling in 45 YEARS

I know that this is utterly futile, but I wish that young people will watch 45 Years. It’s not gonna happen because young people have little interest in movies about old people. But there’s much in 45 Years for folks in their 20s to consider as they build lifelong relationships.

It’s easy to say, “Be completely truthful and hide nothing from your partner”. And we’ve certainly seen enough examples (even in movies, too) about the corrosiveness of familial secrets and lies. But what about truths that are toxic and destructive?

45 Years also illustrates that you gotta live with your partner’s feelings whether justified, rational or not. Kate herself knows that she shouldn’t blame Geoff for something before he had met her, saying, “I can hardly be cross about something before we existed, could I?….Still…” Then there’s the question, not of what he did, but why he didn’t tell her. And 45 Years probes what happens when the assumptions in a relationship are rocked.

Finally, here’s some rare relationship advice from The Movie Gourmet that would have aided the characters in 45 Years: If you can’t handle the answer, don’t ask the question.

MOONWALKERS: Ron Perlman, but not much else

February 3, 2016 by movie gourmet

Ron Perlman and Rupert Grint in MOONWALKERS — Rupert Grint and in MOONWALKERS

The premise of Moonwalkers is that the US Government conspired to film a simulated moon landing so, just in case something went wrong with the 1969 Moon Landing, they could bamboozle the public with a faux success. (This, of course, is a wry joke on the conspiracy theories claiming that the historical Moon Landing was faked.) In Moonwalkers, a burned-out CIA agent (Ron Perlman) is tapped to get Stanley Kubrick, no less, to shoot the phony movie. Unfortunately, he happens upon precisely the wrong drug addled hustler (Rupert Grint of Harry Potter) to put him in touch with Kubrick, and a mediocre madcap comedy ensues.

Nothing much here, but it’s all in good fun, and Ron Perlman is always a hoot. Moonwalkers is available streaming from Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.