In the appealing comedy St. Vincent, Bill Murray plays the LAST guy – a hard-drinking, reckless gambling, whoring grump – that you’d ever leave your nine-year-old son with. Of course, circumstances force a desperate single mom (Melissa McCarthy) to do just that.
There’s plenty of comic potential in Murray’s talent and that set-up, but St. Vincent rises above the average comedy. The key is that – just like real life – these characters are complicated. Murray’s character isn’t just a hedonistic boor, McCarthy’s isn’t a saintly victim and her ex isn’t just a cartoonish meanie. Take all that authenticity, and toss in Chris O’Dowd as a priest with 21st Century irony and Naomi Watts as a pregnant Russian stripper, and the result is delightful. And the kid actor, Jaeden Lieberher, is very, very good.
Hey, St. Vincent is what it is – a sentimental but not too sentimental audience-pleaser, pure and simple.
One of the absolute gems in the Bay Area’s cinema scene is the San Francisco Film Society’s French Cinema Now series. Every year at French Cinema Now, SFFS presents the best and most interesting movies contemporary French movies.
This year’s offerings include early looks at two Big Movies – as in potential Oscar bait or, at least, art house hits.
Two Days, One Night: The latest urgent drama from the Dardennes brothers (The Kid with a Bike, The Son). Their movies always make my annual top ten list – and this one features Marion Cotillard.
Clouds of Sils Maria: Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart in an All About Eve-type rivalry, directed by Olivier Assayas (Carlos). Stewart has gotten great reviews.
Other tempting treats include:
Paris Follies: the always compelling actors Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Pierre Darroussin as old marrieds.
Love Is the Perfect Crime: a great cast (Mathieu Amalric, Karen Viard, Maïwenn, Sara Forestier) in a sly story of crime and sex.
The brilliant indie comedy about personal identity, Dear White People; and
The best Hollywood movie of 2014, the thriller Gone Girl, with a career-topping performance by Rosamund Pike.
I saw Dear White People at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and have been telling folks about it for months – it’s on my list of Best Movies of 2014 – So Far. I’m gonna add Gone Girl to the list as well.
I haven’t seen it, but the universally praised Birdman, with Michael Keaton and Edward Norton, opens more widely today.
Other recommendations:
J.K. Simmons is brilliant in the intense indie drama Whiplash, a study of motivation and abuse, ambition and obsession.
The dark little French psychological drama The Blue Room packs a cleverly constructed story in its brisk 75 minutes.
The successful period thriller The Two Faces of January sets a dark-hearted and shadowy story in sunny Greece. The Two Faces of January is in theaters and is also available streaming on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
The exceptionally well-acted dramedy The Skeleton Twinscontains several inspired moments.
I liked the meditatively paced nature documentary Pelican Dreams.
If you’re in the mood for a brutal, brutal World War II tank movie, there’s Fury.
I’m a fan of writer-director Greg Araki and actress Shailene Woodley, but I didn’t find enough in White Bird in a Blizzard to recommend it.
My DVD/Stream of the week is ONCE AGAIN the exquisite Polish drama Ida – the best foreign film of 2014. Ida is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
Don’t miss the campy Vincent Price horror classic The Tingler; it’s on Turner Classic Movies tonight, and it’s perfect for Halloween.
Next week, TCM is bringing us some of my faves:
Brute Force(1947): This Jules Dassin noir is by far the best of the Hollywood prison dramas of the 30s and 40s. A convict (Burt Lancaster) is taunted by a sadistic guard (Hume Cronyn) and plans an escape. It’s a pretty violent film for the 1940s, and was inspired by the 1946 Battle of Alcatraz in which three cons and two guards were killed. Charles Bickford, Whit Bissell and Sam Levene are excellent as fellow cons. On my list of Best Prison Movies.
The Third Man (1949): Shot amid the ruins of post-war Vienna, this film noir classic sets an American pulp novelist (Joseph Cotten) to find out what happened to his pre-ward buddy, who turns out to have become a notorious black marketeer (Orson Welles) with a set of associates each shadier than the last. This has it all, a fated relationship with a European beauty (Alida Valli), stunningly effective black-and-white photography, an enchanting musical theme and one of cinema’s most sharply surprising reveals of a new character. There are two unforgettable set pieces – a nervous interview in a Ferris Wheel and a climactic chase through the sewers.
Bullitt (1968) features Steve McQueen and one of cinema’s most iconic and influential chase scenes. McQueen’s 1968 Ford Mustang Fastback and the bad guy’s 1968 Dodge Charger careen through San Francisco, taking almost 11 minutes to race from Fisherman’s Wharf to Brisbane. Classic.
Hot Rods to Hell(1967): Not a good movie, but amusing as an unintentionally funny guilty pleasure.
Orson Welles in THE THIRD MAN – the most iconic smirk in cinema
Because I often fish along the Central California coast, I enjoy watching pelicans cruise majestically along the top of the bluffs and dive for fish in surgical strikes. The California Brown Pelican is the subject of Judy Irving’s meditative documentary Pelican Dreams. You may remember Irving’s surprise 2004 hit The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, a documentary so captivating that it played 28 weeks in San Jose.
Wild Parrots had two things going for it – the oddity of birds from tropical rainforests living wild in a cold and grimy city, along with a compellingly unusual human star. Pelican Dreams doesn’t have those OMG features, but it has the very interesting stories of two individual birds, along with the riches to rags to kinda riches story of the species. The California Brown Pelican was named as an endangered species in 1970, but the ban of DDT has allowed the population to rebound, so they are no longer listed as endangered, but still face threats from oil spills, fishing tackle and climate change.
Irving had been looking to do a pelican documentary and met with the director of a pelican rescue facility, but she didn’t know how to begin the movie. Then, two weeks later, a pelican landed in the middle of traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge. Irving takes us through the life of that pelican, known to biologists as Pink 193 and named Gigi by Irving (for Golden Gate). Irving has a decidedly non-clinical view of the birds: “I would like a pelican in MY back yard”.
Pelican Dreams has a dreamy and meandering pace; like listening to Wyndham Hill New Age music for 80 minutes, it’s not a bad thing, you just need to be ready to settle in.
One more thing – the movie’s final shot (through a Panorama camera) is spectacular and unforgettable – a pelican diving at sunset – against a pink sky and purple coastline.
White Bird in a Blizzard is by no means a bad movie, but there just isn’t enough story to sustain its brief but leisurely 91 minutes. Shailene Woodley plays a 17-year-old whose neurotic mother (Eva Green!) suddenly disappears without a trace. She’s now living alone with her stolid dad (Christopher Meloni), hanging with her offbeat high school buddies and exploring her sexuality with the investigating police detective. The crux of the movie is that she’s trying to imagine why and how her mother left, all the while ignoring one of the most likely scenarios.
It’s all a mild disappointment from writer-director Gregg Araki. I loved Araki’s 2004 masterpiece Mysterious Skin (with Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and enjoyed his sci-fi sex romp Kaboom. White Bird in a Blizzard is weird at times, but not as “Araki weird” as it perhaps needed to be. He pretty much wastes Woodley, one of our very finest screen actresses. She’s very good, as is Thomas Jane as the detective.
White Bird in a Blizzard opens tomorrow in theaters and is available streaming on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
On Halloween, Turner Classic Movies is bringing us a campy Vincent Price horror classic from 1959, The Tingler. It has a scary premise – a parasite embedding itself in people’s spine and feeding on them – unaware until they feel a tingle AND THEN IT MAY BE TOO LATE! When finally revealed, the grown parasite is VERY scary-looking. Conveniently, the infested can weaken the parasite by screaming. Horror schlockmeister William Castle reportedly installed buzzers in the backs of some theater seats, so some audience members would get an actual tingle in the spine at the scariest moments. In the trailer below, Castle preps his audiences to scream if they feel a tingle. It’s a cult classic.
As the French psychological drama The Blue Room opens, a couple is having sex. We quickly learn that they are both married, but not to each other. And next, we see the man being interviewed in a police station. But The Blue Room is not a conventional police procedural, because the audience doesn’t know what crime he is suspected of committing. He knows what the crime is, but he doesn’t know how it happened. In The Blue Room‘s brisk 75 minutes, more and more is revealed to the audience and to our protagonist. He finally understands it all, but it’s too late.
The structure of the story is very inventive, co-written by the movie’s stars, Mathieu Amalric and Stéphanie Cléau, and directed by Amalric. Amalric is very good as a guy who spends the movie wondering “how did I get here, and how bad can this get?” It’s a dark little story that requires the audience to keep pace – and it’s pretty successful.
The big hit at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the drama Whiplashis about the line between motivation and abuse and the line between ambition and obsession. A young jazz drummer (Miles Teller of The Spectacular Nowand Rabbit Hole) attends an elite music academy (think Julliard) and comes under the attention of a drill sergeant-type of instructor (J.K. Simmons). The teacher-tormentor pushes the kid toward perfection through tough love and, ultimately, abuse. To what extent is the teacher trying to get the kid to excel? And how much of the teacher’s behavior is just sadistic bullying? And how will the kid respond? (The movie’s title reflects both a jazz song and the teacher’s instructional technique.)
J.K. Simmons is a guy whose name you may not recognize, but whose face you will. He has 143 screen credits, most memorably as the of the ironic and supportive father in Juno and Vernon Schillinger, the Aryan Brotherhood leader in the prison series Oz. This is Simmons’ movie; it’s an exceptional performance, that will probably land Simmons an Oscar nomination.
How good a movie is Whiplash? It’s a very good one – taut, and intense. The fact that it’s extremely focused on the two characters and the fundamental questions about their characters is a strength, but also limits it from being a great movie. Still, Simmons, Teller and the unrelenting tension makes Whiplash definitely worth seeing.
The brilliant comedy about personal identity Dear White Peopleopens today, along with the Sundance hit Whiplash and the Bill Murray crowd pleaser St. Vincent. I saw Dear White People at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and have been telling folks about it for months – it’s on my list of Best Movies of 2014 – So Far.
Other recommendations:
The thriller Gone Girl – the best Hollywood movie of 2014, with a career-topping performance by Rosamund Pike.
The successful period thriller The Two Faces of January sets a dark-hearted and shadowy story in sunny Greece. The Two Faces of January is in theaters and is also available streaming on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
The exceptionally well-acted dramedy The Skeleton Twinscontains several inspired moments.
If you’re in the mood for a brutal, brutal World War II tank movie, there’s Fury.
My DVD/Stream of the week is the exquisite Polish drama Ida – the best foreign film of 2014. Ida is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
This week, Turner Classic Movies will air the 1962 Ben Gazzara prison movie Convicts 4. TCM will also deliver two film noir masterpieces:
In a Lonely Place(1950): The most unsettlingly sexy film noiress Gloria Grahame falls for the troubled screenwriter Humphrey Bogart, a guy with a MAJOR anger management issue; once she’s hooked, she realizes that he might be a murderer after all…
Touch of Evil(1958): This Orson Welles masterpiece begins with one of cinema’s great opening scenes, as our lead characters walk from a Mexican border town into an American border town in a single tracking shot of well over 3 minutes. Unbeknownst to them, they are being shadowed by a car bomb. There’s a lot to enjoy here in this cesspool of corruption: a repellent sheriff-gone-bad played by Welles himself, one of Joseph Calleia’s finest supporting turns, one of Dennis Weaver’s first roles (written just for him by Welles) and Charlton Heston as a Mexican.
