Here’s one more plaintive final plea: Do yourself a very, very, very big favor and see the coming of age masterpiece Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.
I really liked Amy, the emotionally affecting and thought provoking documentary on Amy Winehouse. In Mr. Holmes, Ian McKellen is superb as the aged Sherlock Holmes, re-opening his final case.
The coming of age comedy Dopeis a nice little movie that trashes stereotypes. This summer’s animated Pixar blockbuster Inside Out is very smart, but a little preachy, often very sad and underwhelming. The Melissa McCarthy spy spoof Spy is a very funny diversion. Mad Max: Fury Roadis a rock ’em sock ’em action tour de force but ultimately empty-headed and empty-hearted.
My DVD of the Week The compelling and affecting true-life drama Omagh, available on DVD from Netflix.
We’re in the final eight days of Turner Classic Movies’ wonderful Summer of Darkness series of film noir. Tonight, of course, TCM plays the groundbreaking French Elevator to the Gallows.
Set your DVR for next Friday’s (July 31) featured noir on TCM. I particularly like Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and While the City Sleeps, one of my Overlooked Noir. In Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, an anti-death penalty campaigner gets himself framed for a capital crime, but does too good a job – and then there’s a shocker of an ending. In While the City Sleeps, the noir cynicism is so deep that the GOOD GUY uses his girlfriend as bait for a serial killer.
Amy, documentarian Asif Kapadia’s innovative biopic of singer-songwriter is one of the most heart-felt and engaging movies of the year.
In a brilliant directorial choice, Amy opens with a call phone video of a birthday party. It’s a typically rowdy bunch of 14 year-old girls, and, when they sing “Happy Birthday”, the song is taken over and finished spectacularly by one of the girls, who turns out to be the young Amy Winehouse. It shows us a regular girl in a moment of unaffected joy and friendship, but a girl with monstrous talent.
In fact ALL we see in Amy is footage of Amy. Her family and friends were devoted to home movies and cell phone video, resulting in a massive trove of candid video of Amy Winehouse and an especially rich palette for Kapadia.
We have a ringside seat for Amy’s artistic rise and her demise, fueled by bulimia and substance addiction. In a tragically startling sequence, her eyes signal the moment when her abuse of alcohol and pot gave way to crack and heroin.
We also see when she becomes the object of tabloid obsession. It’s hard enough for an addict to get clean, but it’s nigh impossible while being when harassed by the merciless paparazzi.
Amy makes us think about using a celebrity’s disease as a source of amusement – mocking the behaviorally unhealthy for our sport. Some people act like jerks because they are jerks – others because they are sick. Winehouse was cruelly painted as a brat, but she was really suffering through a spiral of despair.
The Amy Winehouse story is a tragic one, but Amy is very watchable because Amy herself was very funny and sharply witty. As maddening as it was for those who shared her journey, it was also fun, from all reports. Everyone who watches Amy will like Amy, making her fate all the more tragic.
Tomorrow night, July 24, Turner Classic Movies presents the groundbreaking French noirElevator to the Gallows. It’s one of my Overlooked Noir.
Elevator to the Gallows (1958) is such a groundbreaking film, you can argue that it’s the first of the neo-noir. It’s the debut of director Louis Malle, shot when he was only 24 years old. It’s difficult now to appreciate the originality of Elevator the Gallows; but in 1958, no one had seen a film with a Miles Davis soundtrack or one where the two romantic leads were never on-screen together.
A thriller that still stands up today, Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l’échafaud) is about the perfect crime that goes awry. The French war hero Julien (Marcel Ronet), is now working as an executive for a military supplier. He’s having an affair with Florence (Jeanne Moreau), whose husband owns the firm. Seeking to possess both his lover and his company, Julien implements an elaborately detailed plan to get away with his boss’ murder. Everything goes perfectly until he makes one oversight; then the dominoes begin to fall, and soon he is trapped in a very vulnerable situation. He is incommunicado, and he remains ignorant of the related events that transpire outside.
Almost every character makes false assumptions about what is going on. Florence mistakenly believes that Julien has run off with a young trollop. A young punk and his peppy girlfriend incorrectly assume that they are on the verge of arrest. The police pin a murder on Julien that he didn’t commit – but his alibi is the murder that he DID commit. And there’s a great scene where Julien is striding confidently into a busy cafe, unaware that he has become the most recognizable fugitive in France.
It’s a page-turner of a plot, and the acting is superb, but Malle’s choices make this film. When Florence thinks that she’s been dumped, she walks through Paris after dark. Jeanne Moreau doesn’t have any lines (although her interior thoughts are spoken in voice-over). Instead, she embodies sadness and shock through her eyes and her carriage – the effect is heartbreaking. Mile Davis’ trumpet reinforces the sadness of her midnight stroll.
The Miles Davis score is brilliant, but Malle often makes effective use of near silence, too. And he reinforces the kids’ shallowness and over-dramatizing with strings. Every audio choice is perfect.
There’s vivid verisimilitude in a Paris police station at 5 am – all grittiness with drunks sobering up, and the holding cage filled with thieves and prostitutes. The contrast in how the police treat the wealthy and influential is stark and realistic.
The young couple is completely believable. The joyride is absolutely what these characters would do. The young guy is sullen and the girl is hooked on his moodiness. And, of course, with the self-absorption of youth, they over-dramatize their own situation.
Every scene in Elevator to the Gallows is strong, but the scenes with Moreau pop off the screen. This was her star-making role, and perhaps the definitive Jeanne Moreau role (yes – even more than Jules et Jim).
Marcel Ronet is also excellent as Julien. Julien is a guy with serious skills, and the confidence and poise to use them. When Julien is trapped in the situation that would cause most of us to freak out, he immediately starts working on an Apollo 13-like solution without any hint of panic. The harrowing scenes of Julien’s entrapment and escape fit alongside the mot suspenseful moments in the great French crime thrillers Rififi (1955) and Le trou (1960). The means of his eventual escape is one of the most ironic moments in cinema.
Marcel Ronet in ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS
Eventually we see the marvelous Lino Ventura as the detective captain. A former European wrestling champion, Ventura had debuted five years earlier in the great Touchez pas au grisbi and had followed that with several gangster/cop supporting roles. Immediately after Elevator to the Gallows, Ventura started getting lead roles. Ventura had an almost unique combination of charm, wit and hulking physicality; he’s one of the few actors I can envision playing Tony Soprano.
The high contrast black and white photography, the voiceovers and the city at night all scream “noir”. So does the amorality of the main characters seeking to get what they want by murder, the ironies of the miscommunications and mistaken assumptions and the profoundly cynical ending.
But the look and sound of Elevator to the Gallows is entirely new. The experience of viewing Elevator to the Gallows seems closer to the American indie triumphs of the early 1970s (The Godfather, Chinatown, The Conversation) than to the likes of The Postman Always Rings Twice or The Big Sleep. Elevator to the Gallows remains a starkly modern film that is still as fresh today as in 1958.
The BBC has surveyed film critics and came up with BBC’s list of 100 Greatest American Films. I’m a sucker for lists, and this is a rare “Best List” that’s focused only on American Cinema. American films only constuitute about 50-65% of the movies on my list of Greatest Movies of All-Time and my yearly “Best”lists, and I relish this chance to delve into the canon of American films.
Naturally, I have opinions, having seen 96 of the 100 (all but The Band Wagon, Love Streams, Letter from an Unknown Woman and the 1959 Imitation of Life). (Confession – I had never heard of the short film Meshes of the Afternoon, but was able to view it on YouTube.) The list has gotten some notoriety because Gone With the Wind is only #97 (which is okay with me).
Bottom line: it’s a really good list. I especially appreciate the inclusion of some films that are truly great but tend not to get recognized on “great” lists: 25th Hour, In a Lonely Place, Deliverance, Groundhog Day, The Right Stuff, The Best Years of Our Lives, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, It’s a Wonderful Life and Pulp Fiction. I also was tickled by the inclusion (at #85) of George Romero’s 1968 seminal zombie classic Night of the Living Dead, which really was a groundbreaking film.
I do have some quibbles. I can’t fathom why anyone would think that Marnie and Johnny Guitar would rise to this list. Michael Cimino’s cinematic disaster Heaven’s Gate was reassessed by critics a couple of years ago; I rewatched it again, too, but I still found it laughably awful today. Just as indefensible as including Heaven’s Gate was the omission of Cimino’s REAL masterpiece The Deer Hunter.
Though I personally loathe Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, a critic can make a plausible argument for them. Still, the list is too reverential to Kubrick, Malick and David Lynch (both Mulholland Drive AND Blue Velvet?).
Documentaries are represented here by Killer of Sheep and Grey Gables, two groundbreaking films from the late 60s/early 70s that have been seen by everyone who’s taken a film course between 1980 and 2000. But I actually prefer Salesman from that period. And there are much better American documentaries that I would include instead: Harlan County USA, Hoop Dreams and the entire work of Errol Morris, especially Gates of Heaven and/or The Thin Blue Line.
Here’s another serious beef. The only animated film on the list is The Lion King, which I think is an excellent movie, but probably not in my top ten of American animated films. The BBC list excludes the Toy Story series and Fantasia (and all of the other Disney movies from Disney’s classic period) – CRIMINAL!
There’s also an “Eat Your Broccoli, It’s Good For You” aspect to the list – as if every movie important to study in film class is “great”. There are some hard slogs on this list. I wouldn’t recommend that most movie fans run out and see, as important as they are, Sunrise, Greed, the Cassavetes films, Killer of Sheep, Meshes of the Afternoon or The Magnificent Ambersons. (By all reports, Orson Welles made a masterpiece in The Magnificent Ambersons – but none of us has seen it because it was mangled by studio editors; frankly, I have really tried to embrace the available version of Ambersons, but it’s never rung my chimes.) Hey, Bonnie and Clyde is a really important movie, too, and it’s not on the BBC list.
There are some missed opportunities, too. Any list of great American cinema MUST include: All About Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, Fargo, Out of the Past, Laura and last year’s masterpiece, Boyhood. The BBC also whiffed on the entire work of Clint Eastwood; I would have included Million Dollar Baby, but Mystic River and Unforgiven are deserving, too.
Woody Allen gets two of his deserving movies on the list, but how about Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters, too? Similarly, Robert Altman’s recognition should also include The Player(and Gosford Park, if it counts as an “American” film).
I could also make a case for: The Producers, High Noon, All the President’s Men, American Graffiti, All That Jazz, Bull Durham, Cool Hand Luke, Five Easy Pieces, My Man Godfrey, Best in Show and Sideways.
Still, I always enjoy haggling over a list, and it’s great to focus once in a while on purely American cinema.
The compelling and affecting true-life drama Omagh(2004) begins with the infamous 1999 car bombing in Omagh, Northern Ireland. But Omagh is more about the aftermath – the pain and grief of the survivors as they strive for justice and accountability.
The bombing, by a nationalist splinter group, killed 29 on the small town’s market street. It had been just four months since the Good Friday Accord, and both mainstream republicans and unionists were getting used to the day-to-day peace of a post-Troubles era. The bombing was a jarring interruption of that peace, and many felt even more betrayed because the “warning” actually worked to draw more victims toward the lethal blast.
Omagh vividly depicts the carnage and chaos after the blast. The desperate search for loved ones amid the confusion is profoundly moving. We experience Omagh through the perspective of Michael Gallagher, father of one of the victims. He takes the helm of the survivors group as they seek answers – and run into a series of stone walls and cover-ups. The soft-spoken Gallagher may be the least histrionic leader in human history, and he is able to lead because the other survivors rely on his decency, good sense and quiet courage. We also see that – as in real life – people grieve at different paces, and the obsession of some in the family doesn’t work for others.
Michael Gallagher is played by the veteran actor Gerard McSorley (In the Name of the Father, Widow’s Peak, Braveheart, The Boxer, Bloody Sunday). It is McSorley’s powerful and profoundly sad performance that elevates Omagh.
Director Pete Travis employs a jiggly camera and a spare soundtrack to focus our attention on the characters with intimacy and immediacy. When we hear the door closed after the last guest leaves a funeral, the sound of the latch communicates more finality than would any dialogue.
The biodoc What Happened, Miss Simone?opens with the middle-aged singer Nina Simone coming on-stage for a come-back concert in the mid-1970s. We see her regarding the audience – and we ask, is she a temperamental artist or is she high or is she unhinged?
Nina Simone led a remarkable life, presented in this documentary by filmmaker Liz Garbus. Growing up as a poor girl in the segregated South, Simone’s talent as a classical pianist led her to Julliard. A racial glass ceiling in classical music, redirected her to earning a living singing blues in nightclubs. Her gifts as a vocalist and as a songwriter earned her a recording deal. Then she became consumed by militant political activism to the expense of her career.
That’s a pretty interesting arc, but the core of What Happened, Miss Simone? is that she was bipolar and long undiagnosed and untreated. The illness made what was already a turbulent life more erratic and self-destructive. Garbus has the benefit of testimony from Simone’s intimates – her daughter, husband, musical director, managers and friends. We even see Simone’s own thoughts through her often heartbreaking journal entries.
What Happened, Miss Simone? is available to stream on Netflix Instant.
Don’t miss Fabrice Luchini in the delightfully dark comedy Gemma Bovery. The coming of age comedy Dopeis a nice little movie that trashes stereotypes. Alicia Vikander’s strong performance carries the anti-war memoir Testament of Youth. This summer’s animated Pixar blockbuster Inside Out is very smart, but a little preachy, often very sad and underwhelming. The Melissa McCarthy spy spoof Spy is a very funny diversion. Mad Max: Fury Roadis a rock ’em sock ’em action tour de force but ultimately empty-headed and empty-hearted.
My DVD/Stream of the Week is the year’s best thriller so far – ’71, a harrowing tale set in the Troubles of Northern Ireland. ’71 is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Amazon Instant Video, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
Don’t forget that Turner Classic Movies is filling each June and July Friday with film noir in its Summer of Darkness series, hosted by Film Noir Foundation president Eddie Muller – the Czar of Noir. The series schedule includes several favorites of my Overlooked Noir. Tonight features next Friday, look out for 99 River Street.
Saturday night, Saturday, July 18, TCM is presenting THREE of the greatest films about politics: The Dark Horse, The Last Hurrah and The Candidate. On the 21st, TCM brings us that classic suspense Western 3:10 to Yuma, along with Peeping Tom – still one of the very best serial killer movies after 50 years.
On July 24, Turner Classic Movies will show the groundbreaking French noirElevator to the Gallows. It’s a groundbreaking film with so many outstanding elements that I’ll be writing about it next week. But set your DVR now.
It’s 1947 and 93-year-old Sherlock Holmes has been self-exiled to the Dover coast in retirement for almost thirty years. He’s still keenly observant, but his memory is deteriorating with age, and he knows it. That’s a problem as he feels an urgent need to summon up the facts of his final case, left unresolved in 1919. In Mr. Holmes, Ian McKellen plays Sherlock in his 1947 frailty and desperation and in the flashbacks to 1919, when he’s at the top of his game.
As Mr. Holmes, opens, Sherlock has just returned home from a trip to Japan. So desperate to refresh his memory, he has sought a Japanese homeopathic cure (“prickly ash”), in the process meeting a Japanese family with an unsolved disappearance of their own. Back home, he lives with his housekeeper (Laura Linney) and her gifted son, Roger (Milo Parker). Holmes recognizes the boy’s exceptionalism and quasi-adopts as a grandchild. The boy has lost his father in World War II, and his relationship with the old man is another central thread in the movie.
Ian McKellen is delightful and endearing as the crusty Holmes. McKellen is an actor of enough stature to pull off this iconic role, and he is able both to project the Holmes genius and to deliver the humor in this very witty screenplay.
Holmes resents how his former roommate Dr. Watson has depicted him in fiction – and doesn’t like fiction at all (until the very last scene). At least, when they lived together, Watson avoided an onslaught of tourists by publishing the wrong address for their rooms (they actually lived across the street from 221B Baker Street). And Holmes goes to a theater to see a very bad 1940s Sherlock Holmes movie.
I saw Mr. Homes at the San Francisco Film Festival at a screening in which producer Anne Carey and screenwriter Jeffrey Hatcher spoke. When Carey read the source material – the novel “Slight Trick of the Mind” by Mitch Cullin – she recognized the appeal of the central role, the settings and the theme of “don’t wait too long for things important to your heart”. It took her eight years to get director Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters, Dreamgirls) on board, who brought in McKellen.
Hatcher was attracted by Holmes’ relationship to the boy Roger and by theme of how we rewrite our own stories. He pointed out that the 1919 story in Mr. Holmes has four versions: what really happened, how Watsone added a happy ending in his book, the Hollywood melodrama of the film-within-the-film and, finally, as Holmes himself connects it to the Japanese story thread at the end.
Carey and Hatcher revealed that Condon playfully referenced Hitchcock in Mr. Holmes: Ambrose Chapel from The Man Who Knew Too Much, carrying of tea a la Notorious and a “Vertigo” sequence under the arches.
It’s a good story with a superb performance by McKellen. Mr. Homes opens tomorrow.
The title of the harrowing thriller ’71refers to the tumultuous year 1971 in Northern Ireland’s Troubles. An ill-prepared unit of British soldiers gets their first taste of action in Belfast, and the rookie Private Gary Hook (Jack O’Connell) gets inadvertently left behind in hostile territory. Private Hook races around an unfamiliar and dangerous city at night. He is being hunted by his own regular troops, a shadowy and sketchy military intelligence unit, the regular IRA, the hotheaded Provisional IRA and Ulster paramilitaries – all with their own conflicting agendas. Any civilian who helps him will be at direct and lethal risk from the partisans.
In their feature debuts, director Jann Demange and cinematographer Tat Ratcliffe take us on a Wild Ride, with just a couple of chances for the audience to catch its collective breath. Importantly, the way Private Hook gets left behind amid the escalating chaos is very believable. Then there’s an exhilarating footrace through the alleys and over brick walls. Every encounter with another person is fraught with tension. Finally, there’s a long and thrilling climactic set piece in a Belfast apartment block.
O’Connell is in 90% of the shots and carries it off very well. All of the acting in ’71 is excellent. Corey McKinley is special as the toughest and most confident ten-year-old you’ll ever meet. Barry Keoghan takes the impassive stone face to a new level. And I always enjoy David Wilmot (so hilarious in The Guard).
I thank the casting and the direction for making it easy for us to tell all of these pale, ginger characters apart. To the credit of writer Gregory Burke, the beginning of the film economically sets up Private Hook as having the fitness and stamina to survive what befalls him throughout the night.
With all the different sides playing each other, the action (and the action is compelling) is set in an especially treacherous version of three-dimensional chess. Some of the double- and triple-crossing at the end is breathtaking. But what ’71 does best is putting the thrill in a thriller – keeping the audience on the edge of our seats for all 99 minutes.
’71, which I saw at Cinequest, makes my list of the Best Movies of 2015 – So Far. It’s now available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
Don’t miss Fabrice Luchini in the delightfully dark comedy Gemma Bovery. The coming of age comedy Dopeis a nice little movie that trashes stereotypes. Alicia Vikander’s strong performance carries the anti-war memoir Testament of Youth. This summer’s animated Pixar blockbuster Inside Out is very smart, but a little preachy, often very sad and underwhelming. The Melissa McCarthy spy spoof Spy is a very funny diversion. Mad Max: Fury Roadis a rock ’em sock ’em action tour de force but ultimately empty-headed and empty-hearted.
My Stream of the Week is the thriller Nightcrawler, with Jake Gyllenhaal as a highly functioning psychotic. You can stream it from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes and Vudu and rent it on DirecTV PPV.
Don’t forget that Turner Classic Movies is filling each June and July Friday with film noir in its Summer of Darkness series, hosted by Film Noir Foundation president Eddie Muller – the Czar of Noir. The series schedule includes several favorites of my Overlooked Noir. Tonight I recommend D.O.A. and Caged; next Friday, look out for 99 River Street.
On July 15, Turner Classic Movies features the 1948 film noirPitfall. Dick Powell plays a bored middle class married guy who is aching for some excitement. In his humdrum job as an insurance investigator, he investigates an embezzlement and meets the captivating Lizabeth Scott, the girlfriend of the imprisoned embezzler. They fall into a torrid but short-lived affair. Just when Powell thinks that he’s back to his normal family life, both he and Scott are dragged into a thriller by two baddies – the sexually obsessed sickie of a private eye (Raymond Burr) and the nasty and very jealous embezzler (Byron Barr), just released from the hoosegow. Jane Wyatt plays Powell’s wife.
Pitfall is especially interesting because it deviates from two prototypical characterizations. Unlike the usual noir sap, Powell doesn’t fall for Scott “all in”; although he has a brief extramarital fling, he’s never going to leave his family for her. And Scott, although she allures Powell, is not femme fatale. She’s not a Bad Girl, just an unlucky one. She has horrible taste in a boyfriend and the bad luck to attract a menacing stalker (Burr), but she’s fundamentally decent. Will her sexual promiscuity be punished at the end of this 1948 movie?
