movie gourmet

THE BIG SHORT: we laugh and then we get mad

December 24, 2015 by movie gourmet

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.

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.

LIFE: James Dean without the charisma

December 23, 2015 by movie gourmet

Dane DeHaan and Rovert Pattinson in LIFE — Dane DeHaan and Robert Pattinson in LIFE

In 1955, James Dean wasn’t yet an icon. East of Eden was in the can but hadn’t been released, and Dean was trying to get cast in Rebel Without a Cause. To the extent he was known in popular culture, it was as Pier Angeli’s red carpet date at movie premieres. The free-lance photographer Dennis Stock was convinced that Dean was fascinating, and Stock followed Dean around New York and to Dean’s Indiana home town. The resulting photos in LIFE magazine (one is below) were indeed iconic, and the film LIFE follows the two men in this episode.

LIFE is moderately interesting because Dean was such a character. And it’s an interesting time in cinema and we get glimpses of Angeli (Alessandra Mastronardi), Nicholas Ray, Natalie Wood, Julie Harris, Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg. Ben Kingsley has a fun turn as Jack Warner, a mogul who has dealt with many a temperamental artist and is more than a match for any of them.

The problem with LIFE is that it’s about one of the most charismatic actors in film history. Dane DeHaan captures Dean’s mannerisms very well, and we see Dean as interesting, charming, insecure, infuriating, bratty and striving. But we don’t see him suck all of the oxygen out of the room. We don’t experience Dean’s charisma.

Now I am a big fan of Dane DeHaan, who was absolutely brilliant in Kill Your Darlings. He’s a fine, fearless and promising actor and a real original. It’s not his fault that he’s not James Dean.

Robert Pattinson plays James Stock, and his stoniness sure doesn’t help. I still don’t understand why Twilight fans find him to be so dreamy. Kelly McCreary of Grey’s Anatomy plays Eartha Kitt, the one character whose dazzling persona pierces this otherwise bland movie.

LIFE is available to stream from Amazon Video, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

YOUTH: a glorious cinematic meditation on life

December 22, 2015 by movie gourmet

Youth is filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino’s glorious cinematic meditation on life. A resolutely retired composer (Michael Caine) is staying once again at a luxurious spa resort in the Swiss Alps – the kind of place where towels are folded into the figures of swans. Also at the resort are his adult daughter and assistant (Rachel Weisz), an old friend who is a film director (Harvey Keitel), a movie star (Paul Dano) and a host of other characters.

The composer meanders through his daily massages and medical check-ups, and there really isn’t what most of us would think of as a plot. But stuff happens to each of the characters, and the composer and others reflect on their lives – the accomplishments, the disappointments, the betrayals, the intense experiences of love. They contemplate what they remember and what they can’t remember. Ultimately, they consider both life’s deepest meanings and life’s pointlessness. All of this builds and kinda sneaks up on the audience.

Some stories may be best told in the form of novels or short stories or photography or ballet. Sorrentino knows that his story – as was the one in his exquisite The Great Beauty – is best suited for cinema. And Sorrentino takes full advantage of his medium. Youth is a beautiful film to watch – with the spectacular alpine landscapes and the artsy interior shots (some very Felliniesque). The music (as fitting a story about a composer) is entrancing, too; no one left my screening until the music for closing credits had ended and the house lights came back up. There are several dream (and daydream) sequences which are close to genius.

There’s a lot of wry humor in Youth – a silent couple (who have some surprises ready for the audience), an obese South American (Roly Serrano) who resembles Diego Maradona, a forlorn young escort, the pop star Paloma Faith as a vulgar version of herself and a punctiliously insistent emissary from the Queen. And then there’s Jane Fonda as an aging movie queen in grotesque makeup.

Caine, Keitel, Weisz and Dano each have wonderfully moving monologues. I also very much enjoyed the mountaineering instructor (Robert Seethaler) and the braces-wearing masseuse (Luna Mijovic).

Those who need their movies linear and tightly resolved might look elsewhere. But Youth looks great, sounds great and is superbly acted. If you settle in and let it envelop you, you won’t regret it. I’m still thinking about Youth several days after seeing it.

CAROL: a tale of forbidden love

December 21, 2015 by movie gourmet

Carol is a beautiful and superbly acted romance of forbidden love. It is the Holiday season of 1952-53 and Therese (Rooney Mara) is a Manhattan department store clerk in her early twenties. She is smart and attractive and has come to New York to make her way in the post-war culture. She has male suitors, but it’s a middle-aged, affluent woman from suburbs that stops her in her tracks. Therese has no experience in same-sex relationships, but the older woman Carol (Cate Blanchett) has. But Carol is a wife and mother, and the risks are greater for her.

Filmmaker Todd Haynes loves Douglas Sirk’s women’s melodramas of the 1950s, and he has earned the ability to play in that sandbox with Far from Heaven, the Mildred Pierce miniseries and now Carol. Haynes evokes the period perfectly. Just like Far from Heaven, Carol is beautifully photographed by Edward Lachman. Carol uses music composed by the great Elmer Bernstein, who scored Haynes’ Far from Heaven and who died in 2004.

Both lead actresses have justifiably garnered nominations for acting awards. Rooney brilliantly embodies Therese’s confusion, yearning and excitement, her immaturity and her resolve. Blanchett, of course, nails the role of Carol, with her impulsive wilfulness, masterful charm and then panicked desperation.

Carol’s husband is played by Kyle Chandler, who after Friday Night Lights, just keeps showing up in wonderful movies: Super 8, Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, The Wolf of Wall Street, and in a dazzling performance as the alcoholic dad in The Spectacular Now. Initially, I thought that the role of Carol’s husband was pretty one-dimensional. But, upon reflection, I realized that Chandler is so good that I hadn’t recognized how complex the husband’s character is – so afraid of his mother and of social convention, yet so hopelessly drawn to Carol.

Sarah Paulson, so unforgettable as Mistress Epps in 12 Years a Slave, the mom in Mud and Miss Isringhausen in Deadwood, is striking once again as Carol’s lesbian childhood friend.

Carol may be the most well-acted film of the year. It’s a satisfying romance that most audiences will enjoy.

my obligatory STAR WARS post

December 21, 2015 by movie gourmet

How many of the original cast members of Star Wars can you identify in the photo above? Everybody is going to get Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill. Scroll down for the others.

From left, they are Harrison Ford (Han Solo), David Prowse, (Darth Vader), Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca), Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia), Kenny Baker (R2-D2), Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker). Anthony Daniels played C3PO. All seven are still alive; Kenny Baker, born in 1934, is the oldest.

Why these movies are not on my Top Ten

December 20, 2015 by movie gourmet

My movie taste is pretty much in line with critical consensus, but there are some instances where I think other folks are WRONG. Here are four movies that are getting year-end recognition, but not from me.

Mad Max: Fury Road: Some of my favorite critics, Manohla Dargis and Christy Lemire, have even named Mad Max to the #1 spot on their lists. It’s 120 minutes long, of which at least 105 minutes are chase scenes that are really mobile battles. They are remarkable battles, but they are just battles. Writer-director George Miller has produced an adrenaline-filled thrill ride with some unique elements. But there just really isn’t anything exceptional – characters, dialogue, plot, setting – besides the action. I enjoyed Mad Max, but I don’t rate it as a great movie – I sure wasn’t thinking about it the day after I saw it.

Inside Out: I’m a huge Pixar admirer, and I usually walk out of a Pixar movie THRILLED. That didn’t happen with Inside Out, a smart and entertaining movie, but one that got more attention from my head than my heart.

The Clouds of Sils Maria: Man, what a disappointment! Somehow The Clouds of Sils Maria lets us lose interest in the ever-radiant Juliette Binoche and wastes a performance by Kristen Stewart that made her the first American actress to win a César (the French Oscar). Sometimes confusing as well as boring, it’s just a muddled mess.

Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck: An odd case of too much insight. I liked the talking heads that told the story of Cobain’s life before Nirvana. But Cobain’s own thoughts, feelings and artistic impulses as revealed through his journal and scribblings did not serve to elevate him. In fact, it made him LESS interesting.

My best movies of 2015 – a sneak peek

December 19, 2015 by movie gourmet

Alicia Viksander inEX MACHINA — Alicia Viksander in EX MACHINA

You don’t need to wait until December to see my list of top 2015 films because, beginning in late March, I keep a running list – Best of 2015 – So Far. By the end of the calendar year, I will have a Top Ten plus another 8-18 or so. I’ll publish my official year end list on December 31, but here’s a sneak preview of my Best Movies of 2015 (I’ve removed the “- So Far”).

Four of the movies on the list are in theaters right now: Brooklyn, Spotlight, Creed and The Martian. Eight films on my list are ALREADY available to stream or rent on DVD. Throughout the Holidays, I’ve been featuring these in my weekly Movies to See Right Now posts.

I haven’t yet seen these movies, which I believe will be candidates for my final list: The Big Short, Carol, The Danish Girl, 45 Years, Youth, The Revenant, The Hateful Eight and Room. When I see them, I’ll revise my list accordingly.

Movies to See Right Now

December 21, 2015December 18, 2015 by movie gourmet

If you’ve been waiting all year for excellent cinema, you’re in luck. This week, I have THIRTEEN recommendations, with four of them on my list of Best Movies of 2015:

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 Martian – an entertaining Must See space adventure – even for folks who usually don’t enjoy science fiction; the DVD releases in early January, so it’s going to be hard to still find The Martian in theaters.

Here are nine more choices. There’s something for everyone.

Legend – a true-life story and the best crime drama of 2015. Tom Hardy plays both gangster twin brothers.
Very Semi-Serious – a Must See documentary if you love the cartoons in The New Yorker. It’s showing on HBO.
Macbeth – an excellent new version of Shakespeare’s exploration of ambition. Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard star.
Hitchcock/Truffaut – a Must See for serious movie fans, this insightful documentary probes documentary Alfred Hitchcock’s body of work.
Chi-Raq: Spike Lee’s plea for inner city peace with justice AND a sex comedy.
Bridge of Spies – Steven Spielberg’s Cold War espionage thriller with Tom Hanks, featuring a fantastic performance by Mark Rylance.
Trumbo – the historical drama that reflects on the personal cost of principles.
Don Verdean – a dark satire on the faux scientists embraced by the Christian Right.
Spectre – action and vengeance from a determined James Bond.

Getting Biblical just in time for Christmas, on December 23 Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting the 1959 sand-and-sandal classic Ben-Hur, adapted from the novel Ben-Hur A Tale of the Christ. Its star Charlton Heston was advised by the stunt supervisor, “Don’t worry, Chuck. Just stay in the chariot and I’ll make sure you win the race.”

And for the Holidays, here are movies from my Best Movies of 2015 – So Far that are available to stream or to rent on DVD:

The smartest road trip movie ever, The End of the Tour. It’s available streaming from Amazon Instant, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
The unforgettable coming of age dramedy Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. It’s available streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play and now available to rent on DVD from Netflix and Redbox.
The extraordinary Russian drama Leviathan, a searing indictment of society in post-Soviet Russia. Leviathan is available streaming on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Flixster.
The hilariously dark Argentine comedy Wild Tales. It’s available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu and Xbox Video.
The Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy, the story of an extraordinarily gifted person’s escape from torment. Love & Mercy is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes and Vudu.
The gentle, thoughtful and altogether fresh dramedy I’ll See You In My Dreams with Blythe Danner, available to stream from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

LEGEND: best crime film of the year

December 17, 2015 by movie gourmet

The best crime film of 2015, Legend, tells the true-life story of Reggie and Ron Kray, the gangster twins who ruled 1960s London. Tom Hardy convincingly plays both guys. Occasionally the two twins are on camera at the same time (I counted six set-ups).

Both of these East End twin thugs are tough as nails, merciless and relentless. But besides being brutal, Reggie is crafty. Ron is a raving psychopath, what the Brits call starkers. Ron is also homosexual.

The rise of the Kray gang, spurred on by a combination of initiative, ruthlessness and luck, is fascinating. But, of course, it’s just not sustainable to have someone who is certifiably insane as one of the decision-makers. There’s plenty of humor, mostly deriving from Ron’s antics.

Legend benefits from a strong cast. Emily Browning pulls off a major role as Reggie’s wife. David Thewlis is really good as the brains in the Kray’s enterprise. Even the actors playing various gang members are good, especially Reggie’s massive enforcer and Ron’s two pretty boys. And Chazz Palminteri has a hilarious turn as an American mobster.