movie gourmet

CALVARY: dark, tense and mesmerizing

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Brendan Glesson in CALVARY
Brendan Gleeson in CALVARY

The superbly written drama Calvary opens with a startling line, which kicks off the unsettling premise.  Brendan Gleeson (In Bruges, The Guard, The Grand Seduction) plays a very good man who is an Irish priest, Father James.  In the confessional, a man tells him that – in one week – he will kill Father James.  Having been molested by a priest (now dead), the man will make his statement against the Church:  “There’s no point in killing a bad priest. I’m going to kill you because you’re innocent.”

Who is the man?  (Father James figures it out before the audience does.)  Will the execution really happen?  Will Father James take steps to protect himself?  Tension builds as the days count down.

The character of Father James is wonderfully crafted.  Having come to the priesthood in midlife, after being married and having a secular career, he is seasoned and unburdened by high expectations of human nature – and has a wicked sense of humor.  Yet he is moral in the best sense and profoundly compassionate.  And Gleeson – always excellent – nails the role.  It’s one of the finest leading performances of the year.

We know that the killer comes from a very limited pool of villagers and would-be parishioners, played by Chris O’Dowd, Dylan Moran, Aidan Gillen, M. Emmet Walsh, Isaach de Bankole and Orla O’Rourke.  Their feelings for Father James range from fondness to indifference.  Their attitudes toward the Church, on the other hand, range from indifference to hostility.  (Moran is the best – playing a man grappling with his unhappiness, despite enjoying a fortune built by exploiting others. )

None of these characters is a stereotype.  It’s a quirky bunch – but not CUTE quirky.   There’s a lot of buried rage in this village – and dry humor, too.  Referring to his wife, one casually says, “I think she’s bipolar, or lactose intolerant, one of the two”.

But it’s not the the villagers that Father James must deal with.  He gets a visit from his occasionally suicidal adult daughter (Kelly Reilly, who is ALWAYS good); he loves and welcomes her, but she often contributes more stress. He doesn’t love his roommate, an idiotically shallow priest David Wilmot (the thug in The Guard who hilariously couldn’t figure out if he was a psychopath or a sociopath).  Then there’s a seriously twisted imprisoned killer (the star’s son Domnhall Gleeson), a foreign tourist numbed by a sudden tragedy (Marie-Josee Croze) and a scheming bishop (David McSavage).

Writer-director John Michael McDonagh (The Guard) gets the credit for populating his screenplay with enough unique and original characters for an entire film festival, let alone one movie.  After The Guard and Calvary, I can’t wait to see his next movie.

As one should ascertain from its title, Calvary ain’t a feel-good movie.  It plumbs some pretty dark territory.  But as we follow Brendan Gleeson’s extraordinary performance as a good man navigating a grimly urgent situation, it is mesmerizing.

Dylan Moran in CALVARY
Dylan Moran in CALVARY

ALIVE INSIDE: people astonishingly transformed by music

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Alive InsideAlive Inside is one of the most emotionally powerful documentaries that I’ve EVER seen.  Seemingly miraculously, Alzheimer’s patients are transformed by music.  The music doesn’t cure Alzheimer’s, but it pulls the patients out of isolation, helps them relate to other people and brings them joy.

Alive Inside tells the story of a solitary guy, Dan Cohen, and his tiny non-profit Music & Memory, which distributes iPods to Alzheimer’s patients.  Michael Rossato-Bennett filmed Cohen’s work to prepare a video for Music & Memory.  That original six-and-a-half minute video went viral.  Rossato-Bennett realized that he had the beginnings of a movie, and, several years later, Alive Inside is the result.

Alive Inside won an  Audience Award at Sundance, and I think that Alive Inside will be one of the two favorites for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.  It’s already on my list of Best Movies of 2014 – So Far.

All that aside, it’s a riveting film – and an example of the power of cinema.   It’s impossible not to be moved when people essentially recover their humanity.  And when you leave the theater, you’ll likely be thinking about making sure that your kids have your playlist.

MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT: yes, there CAN be too much witty repartee

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Emma Stone and Colin Firth in MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT
Emma Stone and Colin Firth in MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT

Woody Allen’s annual movie is the disappointing romantic comedy of manners Magic in the Moonlight. Set in the late 1920s, a master magician (Colin Firth) goes to the South of France to unmask a phony psychic (Emma Stone). Things do not go as he had been expecting.

There’s plenty of witty banter, especially between Stone and Firth. Both do well in their parts, and they both look fabulous in the period dress. There’s also a really wonderful (as in Oscar-worthy) performance by Eileen Atkins as the magician’s life-seasoned aunt.  The superb actress Jacki Weaver isn’t given anything to do except to beam some batty and vacant smiles.  The rest of the cast is not as deep as in other Woody Allen movies.

But the movie never reels you in emotionally, and it’s only about as entertaining as one of those British sitcoms playing on your local PBS station.  Albeit VERY briefly, I dozed off. Two scenes in particular are extended several moments too long, apparently just to accommodate more repartee.  And the empiricism vs spiritualism debate seems shallow, contrived and stale when compared to that in the recent sci-fi romance  I Origins.

It’s not unwatchable Woody like The Curse of the Jade Scorpion.  But it’s not really good Woody, either.  So, if you MUST have a dose of Woody this summer, watch one of Woody’s masterpieces: Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors and Midnight in Paris.  Or better yet, go see Boyhood or A Most Wanted Man or – beginning on Friday – Calvary or Alive Inside.

Movies to See Right Now

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Eller Coltrane in BOYHOOD
Eller Coltrane in BOYHOOD

First things first –  Richard Linklater’s family drama Boyhood tops my list of Best Movies of 2014 – So Far and it may turn out to be the best film of the decade. It’s a Must See.

And there are plenty of other good movie choices.  Here are some more recommendations:

  • Philip Seymour Hoffman’s explosive final performance in the John le Carré espionage thriller A Most Wanted Man.
  • The smart and entertaining I Origins, which works both as a scientific detective story and as a meditation on romance.
  • The quirky comedy Land Ho!, with an uproarious and yet genuine geezer road trip to Iceland.
  • The sci fi thriller Snowpiercer is both thoughtful and exciting, plus it features amazing production design. You can also stream Snowpiercer on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, Xbox Video and DirecTV.
  • Lucy – a Scarlet Johansson action vehicle that rocks.
  • The credible and politically important HBO documentary The Newburgh Sting, which exposes the FBI’s manufacture of a fake terrorist attack to arrest some New York dumbasses. It’s playing on HBO.

There’s also an assortment of recent releases to Video on Demand:

      • I loved the rockin’ Spanish Witching and Bitching – a witty comment on misogyny inside a madcap horror spoof, which you can stream on Amazon instant, iTunes and Xbox Video.
      • Life Itself, the affectionate but not worshipful documentary on movie critic Ebert’s groundbreaking career, courageous battle against disease and uncommonly graceful death Life Itself is streaming on Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu and Xbox Video.
      • The oddly undisturbing documentary A Brony Tale, about grown men with very unusual taste in television shows. Brony Tale is available streaming on iTunes.
      • The Congress: a thoughtful live action fable followed by a less compelling an animated sci fi story. The Congress is available streaming on iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
      • Robert Duvall’s geezer-gone-wild roadtrip in A Night in Old Mexico. A Night in Old Mexico is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and Xbox Video.
      • The art vs. technology documentary Tim’s Vermeer is a yawner.

My Stream of the Week is the satisfying French drama On My Way, with the extraordinary Catherine Deneuve on an escapist road trip. On My Way is available streaming on Amazon Instant and iTunes.

On August 7, Turner Classic Movies will air the classic 1940 romance The Shop Around the Corner with James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. It was remade a half-century later as You’ve Got Mail. The Wife and I watched it recently – I thought it was sweet, but she thought it a little dated and draggy in places. On a different note, TCM will show Juarez and Bordertown on August 6 – two Paul Muni movies that show up on my list of Least Convincing Mexicans.

The groundbreaking James Shigeta

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James Shigeta (Right) in THE CRIMSON KIMONO
James Shigeta (Right) in THE CRIMSON KIMONO

Actor James Shigeta, who along with writer-director Sam Fuller, broke ground in 1959’s  The Crimson Kimono, has died at age 85.  Shigeta was a fixture on mainstream television series, accounting for many of his 88 screen credits.

But his first movie role was in The Crimson Kimono, another sensationalistic and deliciously exploitative cop noir from the great Sam Fuller.  Always looking to add some shock value, Fuller delivered a Japanese-American leading man (Shigeta), an inter-racial romance and a stripper victim.  The groundbreaking aspect of The Crimson Kimono is that Fuller’s writing and Shigeta’s performance normalized the Japanese-American character.  Shigeta’s Detective Joe Kojaku is a regular hardboiled, jaded and troubled film noir protagonist.  Other than his inside knowledge of the Japanese community, there isn’t anything exotic or “foreign” about him – as you can see in the clip below.

Of course, Fuller certainly relished the fact that many 1959 Americans would have been unsettled by a Japanese-American man’s intimate encounter with a white woman – another groundbreaking moment in American cinema.

Interestingly, the American-born Shigeta , a Korean War vet, became a singing sensation in 1950s Japan before launching his US acting career.

The Crimson Kimono is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and Xbox Video; it also plays occasionally on Turner Classic Movies.

A MOST WANTED MAN: a last look at Philip Seymour Hoffman’s brilliance

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Willem Dafoe and Philip Seymour Hoffman in A MOST WANTED MAN
Willem Dafoe and Philip Seymour Hoffman in A MOST WANTED MAN

Espionage thrillers adapted from John le Carré novels, like A Most Wanted Man, are so good because le Carré, himself a former British intelligence operative, understand that intelligence services, riddled with bureaucratic jealousies and careerist rivalries, are not monoliths.  His very human spies spend as much energy fighting each other as they do fighting the enemy.  As a result, le Carré’s stories are more complex and character-driven than a standard “good-guys-hunt-down-a-terrorist” thriller plot.

That’s also the case with A Most Wanted Man, with which le Carré moves from the Cold War to the War of Terror.  Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Günther, the leader of a German anti-terrorism unit in Hamburg.  He must track down a possible Chechen terrorist while parrying off other German security forces, the CIA (Robin Wright), a shady banker (Willem Dafoe) and a do-gooder human rights attorney (Rachel McAdams).  It’s the classic le Carré three-dimensional-chess-against-the-clock, and it works as an engrossing thriller.

But the A Most Wanted Man’s biggest asset is a searing performance by the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Günther is a canny and determined guy who needs to outsmart everyone else and manipulate forces beyond his control – and Hoffman nails it.  His final scene is a spectacular explosion of emotion.  (So soon after Hoffman’s death, it’s impossible to watch him here, with a huge belly and with his character chain-smoking and swilling whiskey, and not think of his final relapse into his ultimately fatal addiction; for this reason, A Most Wanted Man may be even more effective after a few years have passed.)

That being said, Robin Wright’s role as a duplicitous, shark-like CIA officer is under-written and doesn’t let her show her acting chops like House of Cards.  Dafoe and McAdams are good in their roles.  I was distracted by Grigoriy Dobrygin’s performance as the Chechen, which looked like bad Jeremy Davies without the twitches.  The fine German actress Nina Hoss (Barbara) plays Hoffman’s assistant, and I hope we start to see her in more English language roles.

But the bottom line is that A Most Wanted Man is, overall, a satisfying thriller, and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance is reason enough to catch it in the theaters.  (BTW le Carré’s screen masterpiece is the 1979 series Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which is available on DVD from Netflix.)

Stream of the Week: ON MY WAY – two unhappy people can find joy together

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on my wayThe extraordinary Catherine Deneuve goes on an escapist road trip in the satisfying French drama On My Way. She plays a woman chained to the stress of running a failing restaurant and caregiving for her mother. Her marriage was scarred by infidelity (both ways) and her life has been one of relationship carnage. After she suffers a personal betrayal, she needs to get away and abruptly leaves the restaurant mid-service, embarking on a random road trip through the French countryside – made even more random because she is geographically disabled. After a series of misadventures, she ends up taking the 11-year grandson (who doesn’t remember meeting her) to his other grandfather (whom she hasn’t met because she refused to attend her daughter’s wedding). She suffers many an indignity along the way, but rediscovers her happiness in an unexpected niche.

On My Way is directed and insightfully co-written by Emmanuelle Bercot, who acted in Polisse, one of my Best Movies of 2012.

Deneuve, once the world’s most beautiful woman, has a pretty solid claim on being the world’s most beautiful 70-year-old. She’s also a good sport, willing to take a part that explicitly references the passing of her youthful beauty at several story points.

On My Way is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Netflix Instant, streaming on Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

[SPOILER ALERT:   Here are examples of the references to the aging of her looks.  Her age-approximate boyfriend dumps her for a 25-year old. The 30ish guy who picks her up tells her that he was imagining her as she was young during sex.  She resists – until forced by circumstance – to attend the reunion of beauty queens. ]

LAND HO! – rowdy geezer roadtrip to Iceland

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Paul Eenhoorn and Earl Lynn Nelson in LAND HO!
Paul Eenhoorn and Earl Lynn Nelson in LAND HO!

Here’s a really fun movie.  Land Ho! features a vibrant and irascible geezer who conscripts an old friend into a rowdy road trip to – of all random places – Iceland.  It’s a showcase for Earl Lynn Nelson, who essentially plays himself in the movie.  Nelson is a 72-year-old Kentucky doctor who is a force of nature and has possibly an even dirtier mind than The Movie Gourmet’s.  He is a friend of the 29-year-old writer director Martha Stephens who was INSPIRED to see the possibilities in sending him off on an adventure and filming the results.  His friend (and ex-brother-in-law) is played by an actor, Paul Eenhoorn.

It all works.  Nelson – an unapologetic hedonist – is funnier than hell, and Eenhorn stays right with him as the more reserved and sometimes aggrieved buddy.  Land Ho! is a string of LOL moments, whether Nelson is providing politically incorrect fashion advice to young women or unsolicited marital advice to a honeymooning couple or pulling out a joint and proclaiming “It’s time for some doobiefication”.

This is a geezer comedy that doesn’t make the geezers cute.  Nelson may be a piece of work, but there’s nothing in Land Ho! that isn’t genuine.

I just have two knocks on the movie.  It’s only 95 minutes long, but it would be crisper at about 87.  And, as The Wife pointed out,  there’s really no need for the huge jarring subtitles to let us know precisely where these guys are in Iceland.

Nevertheless, it’s worth a watch.  The audience at Sundance loved this movie, and I think Land Ho! is a hoot-and-a-half.

BOYHOOD: why is this movie so profoundly moving?

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Eller Coltrane, Ethan Hawke and Lorelei Linklater in BOYHOOD
Eller Coltrane, Ethan Hawke and Lorelei Linklater in BOYHOOD

Boyhood is a profoundly moving film – and I’m still trying to figure out why.  It’s a family drama without a drop of emotional manipulation – there’s no big moment of redemption and no puppies are saved. It’s just about a boy growing up in a family that we all can recognize and going through a series of moments that all of us have gone through.  Still, I found myself responding very emotionally and, hardass as I may be, I  had a lump in my throat and moist eyes during the last half hour or so.

There’s a sense of fundamental human truth in Boyhood that comes from the amazing, risky and groundbreaking way that writer-director Richard Linklater made this movie.  Boyhood traces the story of Mason (Eller Coltrane), his big sister (Lorelei Linklater) and their divorced parents (Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke) from the time when Mason was six-years-old to when he is going off to college at age 18.  Linklater and the cast shot the movie in 39 days over a TWELVE YEAR PERIOD.  So the cast members actually aged twelve years without the need for creating that effect with makeup or by switching the child actors.  Other than Linklater’s own Before Sunrise/Before Sunset/Before Midnight series of romances spaced nine years apart, he only movies that have used this technique of aging-in-real-time have been documentaries, most notably the 7 Up series and Hoop Dreams.

Besides the authenticity that comes from the aging-in-real-time, the key to Boyhood is the reality of each moment.  Each scene in the film is universal.  Every kid has had to suffer the consequences of the life decisions made by his/her parents. Every kid has felt disrespected by a parental edict or disappointed when a parent has failed to come through.  Everybody has been bullied in the school bathroom.  Everybody has felt the excitement of connecting with a first love – and then the shock/humiliation/heartbreak of getting dumped.  No scene individually moves the plot forward.  But each scene helps complete our picture of who Mason is and how he is being shaped by his experiences.

Of course, when parents divorce and when a kid’s family is blended with that of a step-parent’s, those are especially big deals.  All those things happen to Mason in Boyhood; he has control over none of them, but they all have a lasting impact on his life and development.  And when his mom decides to better herself by working her way through college and grad school to become a college instructor, her self-improvement makes her less available to her kids – and that’s a big deal, too.  (This part of Linklater’s story is autobiographical.)

As we trace Mason’s early years, we relate to these universal experiences and, without noticing it,  start rooting for him and his sister.  By the time he is 15, we are hooked and so seriously invested in him that it’s easy to feel as much pride in his high school graduation as do his fictional parents.

The actors who begin as children and age into young adults – Eller Coltrane and Lorelei Linklater (the director’s daughter) – are very good.  Arquette and Hawke are also excellent in playing warts-and-all parents; each parent grows (in different ways) over the twelve years as much as do their kids.

So what’s it all about – as in, what’s life all about?  That question is addressed explicitly by four characters in separate scenes in the final 35 minutes of the movie – by Mason as a brash and cynical, bullshitting 17-year-old, by his mom in a self-reflective meltdown, by his dad in a moment of truthful humility and by a potential girlfriend wise beyond her years.  Whether any one of them is right and whether any one of them speaks for the filmmaker – that’s up to you.

Linklater has made other films that are exceptional and groundbreaking, most notably the Before series.  His indie breakthrough Slacker followed a series of characters, handing off the audience to one conversation to another – a structure seemingly without structure.  He followed that his Waking Life, another random series of conversations with his live actors were animated by rotoscope.  Even his recent dark comedy Bernie is offbeat –  a sympathetic take on a real life murderer (who is now out of prison and living in Linklater’s garage apartment).  But Boyhood is Linklater’s least talky movie – and his masterpiece.

Boyhood is an important film – a milestone in the history of cinema.  (I sure didn’t expect that I would ever write that sentence.) It tops my list of Best Movies of 2014 – So Far and it may turn out to be the best film of the decade.  It’s a Must See.

Eller Coltrane in BOYHOOD
Eller Coltrane in BOYHOOD

Movies to See Right Now – the really good movies are here

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Patricia Arquette and Eller Coltrane in BOYHOOD
Patricia Arquette and Eller Coltrane in BOYHOOD

Our patience has been rewarded – an onslaught of really good movies is finally out now. I haven’t yet seen two of the highly anticipated movies that are out today:

    • Richard Linklater’s family drama Boyhood – potentially the best movie of the year.
    • Philip Seymour Hoffman’s final performance in the John LeCarre espionage thriller A Most Wanted Man.

I HAVE seen and recommend:

  • The smart and entertaining I Origins , which works both as a scientific detective story and as a meditation on romance.
  • The sci fi thriller  Snowpiercer is both thoughtful and exciting, plus it features amazing production design. You can also stream Snowpiercer on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, Xbox Video and DirecTV.
  • Lucy – a Scarlet Johansson action vehicle that rocks.
  • The credible and politically important HBO documentary The Newburgh Sting, which exposes the FBI’s manufacture of a fake terrorist attack to arrest some New York dumbasses.  It’s playing on HBO.

There’s also an assortment of recent releases to Video on Demand:

    • I loved the rockin’ Spanish Witching and Bitching – a witty comment on misogyny inside a madcap horror spoof, which you can stream on Amazon instant, iTunes and Xbox Video.
    • Life Itself, the affectionate but not worshipful documentary on movie critic Ebert’s groundbreaking career, courageous battle against disease and uncommonly graceful death Life Itself is streaming on Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu and Xbox Video.
    • The oddly undisturbing documentary A Brony Tale, about grown men with very unusual taste in television shows.  Brony Tale is available streaming on iTunes.
    • The Congress: a thoughtful live action fable followed by a less compelling an animated sci fi story.  The Congress is available streaming on iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
    • Robert Duvall’s geezer-gone-wild roadtrip in A Night in Old Mexico.  A Night in Old Mexico is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and Xbox Video.
    • The art vs. technology documentary Tim’s Vermeer is a yawner.

I recommend setting your DVR to record Wild Strawberries on July 28. If you have found the work of Ingmar Bergman just too dreary, this is a great choice. There’s no denying that Bergman is a film genius, and he’s influenced the likes of Woody Allen, Scorsese, Coppola, Altman, Kieślowski and basically much of the last two generations of filmmakers. But I don’t recommend that casual movie fans watch gloomy movies that “are good for you” – I want you to have a good time at the movies. Wild Strawberries is the story of an accomplished but cranky geezer.  His indifferent daughter-in-law is taking him to be honored at his college. On their road trip, they pick up some young hitch-hikers and then a stranded couple. Each encounter reminds the old doctor of an episode in his youth. As he reminisces, he can finally emotionally process the experiences that had troubled him, helping him finally achieve an inner peace. It’s a wonderful film.

WILD STRAWBERRIES
WILD STRAWBERRIES