Actually, there’s no MUST SEE in theaters right now, but here are three pretty good movies, plus a recent hit and an overlooked classic.
Jake Gyllenhaal is brilliant in two roles in the psychological thriller Enemy. Like all Wes Anderson movies, The Grand Budapest Hotel is wry and imaginative, but not one of his most engaging. Just out today, Dom Hemingway is a fun and profane romp.
My DVD/Stream of the Week is the gloriously entertaining American Hustle. Amid an all-star cast, I think that Jeremy Renner, Jennifer Lawrence and Louis C.K. steal the show. American Hustle is now available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Reportedly, James Garner and Julie Andrews have each tagged the biting anti-war satire The Americanization of Emily as their favorite movie, and Turner Classic Movies will be playing it on April 6.
The title character in Dom Hemingway is always in a determined hurry, one of those guys whose brow is always 12 inches in front of his feet. He is played by Jude Law as a force of nature who takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’. Dom Hemingway is a none-too-smart professional safe-cracker who has taken the rap for his partners and is just getting out after twelve years in the slammer. He’s been fantasizing about what he wants to do when he gets out, and he intends to do it all in as compressed a time period as possible. Unfortunately, as he tells a small boy, “Dom is English for unlucky sonofabitch”. His headlong onslaught into misadventure is ribald, profane and pretty funny.
This movie is not a masterpiece. Think of Dom Hemingway as The Wolf of Wall Street Lite. Still, Jude Law is very watchable and very funny, as is Richard E. Grant as his almost-as-unlucky and almost-as-dim buddy. Director Richard Shepard made a much better movie in 2005, The Matador with Pierce Brosnan and Greg Kinnear. Still, Dom Hemingway works as a pedal-to-the-metal romp.
I saw Dom Hemingway three weeks ago at Cinequest 2014.
Like all of writer-director Wes Anderson’s films, The Grand Budapest Hotel is wry and imaginative, but it’s not one of his near-masterpieces (Rushmore, Moonrise Kingdom). Ray Fiennes plays one of Anderson’s unique creations, the imperious and shady concierge of an Eastern European hotel between the world wars. His sidekick is the rookie lobby boy (Tony Revolori). Together, they navigate a Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride involving the concierge’s additional vocations of gigolo and lovable scoundrel.
The cast is superb and absurdly deep. I counted THIRTEEN Academy Award nominees (mostly for acting, but Jeff Goldblum won an Oscar for a Live Short and Bob Balaban was one of the producers for Best Picture nominee Gosford Park). It’s overkill, because fine actors like Edward Norton, Tom Wilkinson, Lea Seydoux and Larry Pine don’t really have much to do. F. Murray Abraham, as the lobby boy turned old man, does stand out.
And that points out the weak spot in The Grand Budapest Hotel. I kept saying to myself things like, “Look at the makeup on Tilda Swinton”, “Is that Jeff Goldblum behind that beard?” and “Awwright! Bill Murray!”. That tells me that I wasn’t fully engaged in the story. Some critics have pointed out the historical sweep from the post-imperial 1930s through the crucible of WWII to the boring industrial totalitarianism of the 1950s. For me, that’s still not enough to make a great movie. But The Grand Budapest Hotel is fun to watch, and that’s not bad.
Why is American Hustle so gloriously entertaining? It’s certainly successful as a con man movie, as a 70s period piece and as a fast-paced (sometimes almost screwball) comedy. But I think the key is that writer-director David O. Russell develops such compelling characters – lots of them – and they’re so endearingly wacky, we just need to see what happens next. That’s the recipe he used in last year’s triumph Silver Linings Playbook (and in his under-appreciated 1996 Flirting with Disaster).
American Hustle opens with the wonderfully sly disclaimer “Some of this actually happened”, and then we see Christian Bale assembling the worst comb-over in cinematic history – and we’re hooked. The story follows the arc of the real-life Abscam scandal with the FBI forcing con artists to sting elected officials in an outlandish bribery-by-phony-sheik scheme. Bale plays an unattractive yet magnetic con man. Amy Adams is his tough and sexy partner. Bradley Cooper is their hyper-ambitious FBI handler.
As we would expect, Bale, Adams and Cooper are all fun to watch with this material. But Russell ‘s cast is very deep – the secondary and tertiary characters are just as fun. Jennifer Lawrence is a force of nature as Bale’s estranged wife, who takes passive aggressiveness to an entirely unforeseen level. Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) almost steals the picture as an extremely sympathetic and good-hearted local pol who doesn’t see what’s coming. And Louis C.K. is hilarious as Cooper’s put-upon boss; as he did so successfully in Blue Jasmine, C.K. plays the character completely straight and lets the material generate the laughs; many comedians make the mistake of trying to act funny in movie comedies, but C.K. has a real gift for the lethal dead pan.
American Hustle plants us firmly in the late 1970s with an especially evocative score and very fun costumes and hair. Besides Bale’s comb-over, we enjoy the tightly permed curls of Adams and Cooper, along with Lawrence’s Jersey updo. And Adams and Lawrence sport an unceasing series of dresses with severely plunging necklines.
Funny and gripping at the same time, with scads of movie stars at their very best, American Hustle is a surefire good time at the movies. American Hustle is now available on DVD frpm Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
In the psychological thriller Enemy, a guy finds out that he has an exact physical double – down to their voices and the scars on their bellies. He can’t resist looking up and meeting his twin, which unleashes some unanticipated consequences.
One guy is a tweedy college professor, kind and introspective. His doppelganger is an actor who doesn’t filter his own venal self-interest. Essentially, the difference between these two is that one guy has a conscience and the other guy doesn’t. They are both played by Jake Gyllenhaal.
The physical similarities even confound their partners (Sarah Gadon and Melanie Laurent). Gadon’s performance is especially compelling in a scene when she first meets an amiable guy who doesn’t know her, but physically seems to be her husband. Yeesh.
The key to Enemy’s surpassing the gimmick of double casting is that Gyllenhaal’s performance is so brilliant. The difference between the two characters is so subtle.
You always know which guy you’re watching, but, other than wardrobe, it’s often hard to figure out how we can tell – it’s just in Gyllenhaal’s carriage, the occasional gesture and the hint of rapaciousness in the one character’s eyes.
Enemy is not completely literal and realistic. Be prepared for some large and startling creatures that you will not expect.
Director Denis Villenueve knows how to deliver suspense and thrills, as he did in my top movie of 2011, Incendies, and in last year’s underrated thriller Prisoners, (also with Gyllenhaal). Enemy isn’t as good as those films, but it’s an entertaining and mildly thought-provoking thriller.
Takeshi Kitano dares a Yakuza to shoot him in OUTRAGE BEYOND
Takeshi Kitano returns to star in the Japanese gangster movie Outrage Beyond. It’s a sequel to writer-director Kitano’s 2011 Outrage, of which I wrote:
If you’re looking for a hardass gangster movie with deliciously bad people doing acts of extreme violence upon each other, Outrage is the film for you. But what makes Outrage stand out is the pace and stylishness of all the nastiness, as if Quentin Tarantino had made Goodfellas (only without all the extra dialogue about foot rubs and the Royale with cheese)…Kitano, much like Charles Bronson, has the worn and rough face of a man who has seen too much disappointment and brutality.
Outrage was more of a tragic noir, because you know that most of the characters probably won’t survive – and they know it, too. There is less foreboding in Outrage Beyond, which is just glorious exploitation – gangster mayhem splattering the streets. Because this is a Yakuza film, Kitano delivers the minimum one full body tattoo and one severed finger. But he also makes ingeniously lethal use of a pitching machine in a batting cage, and “Let’s play baseball” is the cruelest line in the film.
I saw Outrage Beyond at the San Francisco International Film Festival. It’s now available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, Google Play and XBOX Video.
The French drama Blue is the Warmest Color explores first love, capturing the arc of a young woman’s first serious romance with remarkable authenticity and a stunning performance by 19-year-old actress Adèle Exarchopoulos. Exarchopoulos plays a 17-year-old (also named Adèle) who falls in love with an out lesbian five or six years her senior. The film traces the course of their relationship over the next several years as the couple are challenged by jealousies and their different temperaments and class backgrounds, and as Adèle matures.
The acting is excellent, including Léa Seydoux (Farewell My Queen, Midnight in Paris) as the lover. But Adèle Exarchopoulos is a revelation. She is perfect as a teen typically full of curiosity and devoid of confidence, outwardly raunchy but profoundly innocent. And she has an extraordinary gift to seem utterly alone in a crowd. After watching Exarchopoulos, I felt as I did after seeing Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone – I can’t wait to see this emerging major talent again.
This is the first film I’ve seen by Tunisian-born French director Abdelatif Kechiche, who has twice before won the Cesar (the French Oscar). In Blue Is the Warmest Color, Kechiche uses the closeup more than any recent director that I can recall, and he is fortunate to have Exarchopoulos, who can pull it off. It’s an excellent reason to see Blue Is the Warmest Color on the big screen.
Blue Is the Warmest Color is three-hours long, which is an indulgent length, but not too long. I am usually impatient with movies over two hours and quick to find them overlong. But Blue Is the Warmest Color kept my interest and engagement for its duration, and I really couldn’t recommend many cuts.
There is a LOT of explicit simulated sex in this movie. The main characters’ first love scene must sample the entire lesbian Kama Sutra. That scene, reputed by some to last nineteen or twenty minutes, didn’t seem that nearly long. The film proudly earns its NC-17 rating by depicting the (apparently very satisfying) sexual aspect of a romance.
But, in the end, it’s all about Adèle’s romance and Exarchopoulos’ performance. Blue Is the Warmest Color won the top prize at Cannes, and is my pick as 2013’s best film. It’s available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Netflix Instant, Amazon, iTunes, Sundance Now and XBOX Video.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day. Now, tonight you CAN go out and drink green beer with all the amateur drinkers. Nothing wrong with that, if that’s your thing.
OR you could settle in for some top shelf cinema set in recent Irish history – The Troubles of Northern Ireland. For eight fine films about The Troubles, see my Best Films About the Troubles (Northern Ireland).
A deep selection of comedies, international cinema and spotlight films combined for a very strong program at Cinequest 2014. My pick for the festival’s best film is the Polish drama Ida. Although not all of the films engaged me, the only bad movie this year was the incoherent Chinese thriller Parallel Maze.
COMEDIES
This year, Cinequest programmed 22 comedy features (which seems like an unusually high number), and that paid off with some of the festival’s most popular films. I thought the funniest was the dark, dark Hungarian comedy Heavenly Shift about a rogue ambulance crew. Probably two of the top four most popular movies at Cinequest (along with Ida and the Canadian weeper Down River) were the opening night’s The Grand Seduction and the Israeli caper comedy Hunting Elephants. The American indie satire Friended to Death (which had its world premiere at Cinequest) also broke through – and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it soon in theatrical release.
INTERNATIONAL CINEMA
As I said, my pick for best film at Cinequest was Ida, about a Polish novice nun in 1962 who, just before she takes her vows, learns that she is the child of Jewish Holocaust victims. Also remarkable for its authentic and textured characters was the Slovenian classroom drama Class Enemy. And, of course, Heavenly Shift from Hungary and Hunting Elephants from Israel were festival highlights.
Once again, it’s just impossible to give too much credit to Cinequest’s international programmer Charlie Cockey. Unfortunately, just before the fest, Charlie developed a cough that kept him home in Brno, Czech Republic, so we missed him here in San Jose. Before the fest, I profiled Charlie with Cinequest’s Charlie Cockey: The Man Who Goes to Film Festivals.
SPOTLIGHT FILMS
Cinequest’s program of spotlight films are the bigger movies that are screened just once, usually at the California Theatre. In the past these have included some celebrity-driven events that have been the weakest links in the fest (only Grand Piano fit this profile in 2014). But, over all, in the 2014 Cinequest, the spotlight films sparkled, especially: The Grand Seduction, Mystery Road, Words and Pictures, Teenage, Unforgiven and Dom Hemingway. Cinequest also gets a lot of cred for having LA Times critic Kenneth Turan introduce last year’s Bay Area masterpiece Fruitvale Station. In 2014’s Cinequest, you could do well just by showing up to the California Theatre every night at 7 PM.
For my comments on over 20 of this year’s Cinequest movies, see my CINEQUEST 2014 page.
The Outfit (1974) is a revenge/crime story starring Robert Duvall as a bank robber released from prison who starts a campaign of terror against the crime syndicate that killed his brother. It turns out that Duvall’s gang robbed a bank that, unbeknownst to them, was mob-owned.
The Outfit is well acted by Duvall (of course) and his fellow 70s stars Linda Black, Joe Don Baker and Bill McKinney (Deliverance and Worst Movie Teeth). Black delivers one of her patented 70s lovable floozies, defined by a concoction of shopworn sexiness, bad luck and unreliability. Baker is especially appealing as Duvall’s buddy.
The cast also stands out for its crew of 1950s film noir veterans: Robert Ryan (mob kingpin), Timothy Carey (chief henchman), Jane Greer, Elisha Cook Jr and Marie Windsor. Then there’s the dependable Richard Jaeckel, whose career bridged the decades. Joanna Cassidy plays Ryan’s bimbo du moment.
Duvall pisses off Timothy Carey in THE OUTFIT
I was most pleasantly surprised by the directing of John Flynn, who directed a handful of otherwise pedestrian crime films and action vehicles for Sly Stallone, Jan Michael Vincent and even Steven Seagal. Flynn also did have a knack for working with good actors (James Woods, Tommy Lee Jones, Ned Beatty, Frank Langella, Danny Aiello, Brian Dennehy).
In The Outfit, Flynn shows himself to be a master of the stationary camera, the long shot and off-screen action. The movie opens with a driver stopping at a remote gas station and getting out of the car to approach the attendant. We see what happens in a single shot from roadside, outside the car, looking through the passenger side window and then again through the driver’s side window toward the gas station. We see that there’s another man in the back seat, but we can’t identify him. We only hear the ordinary music on the car radio. Still, we can tell that the driver is asking directions, and we sense that the two men in the car are up to no good.
The two men find their destination, and it turns out that they are hit men. We see them sneaking into position around a home while the dog barks, and then we see them fire shots. We don’t see the victim getting splattered. We just see the dog barking his warning while we are hearing the shots. Then the dog becomes agitated and whines. Finally, in long shot, we see the victim prone. It’s another very effective sequence.
Late in the story, we first sense that something has happened to Linda Black when we see the look in Joe Don Baker’s eyes in his rear view mirror.
The Outfit’s story is a little dated (not as violent as today’s crime films), but Duvall and Baker make for an appealing duo, and Flynn gives the film an interesting look. The Outfit plays this week on Turner Classic Movies and is available streaming from Amazon, iTunes and Vudu.
The trailer slaps together every scene with a gun to make The Outfit look like too much like a shoot ’em up, but it does include a great line reading from Timothy Carey.
