PBS is now broadcasting the excellent documentary The Central Park Five, about the media-driven rush to wrongly convict five young men of the rape attack upon the Central Park Jogger. The film is co-directed and co-written by famed documentarian Ken Burns (The Civil War, Baseball) , his daughter Sarah Burns and her husband David McMahon from Sarah’s book of the same name. The Central Park Five is just as credibly researched as Ken Burns’ previous work but has more of a bite, more of a sense of outrage.
The Central Park Five begins with the actual perpetrator of the crime, so we immediately are reminded that the Central Park Five teens are innocent, which helps us absorb their experience through their eyes. That’s critical for us to understand how they could have been browbeaten into confessing to crimes that they did not commit.
We see their video confessions and hear from the Five and their families today. We also hear from lawyers, politicians and journalists, but not from the police or prosecutors.
The story of The Central Park Five is remarkably compelling. It’s also an important film. Viewers will never assess confessions induced by police interrogations in the same way again.
In this indie drama, a couple navigates life while drunk. Can they stay together and flourish when she sobers up? Smashed is a remarkably realistic portrayal of the drinking life and the challenges of recovery and relapse, informed by the personal experience of co-writer Susan Burke.
The best thing about Smashed is the performance of Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the wife. Winstead realistically takes her character through the carelessness, denial, humiliation and self-degradation of drinking and the fears and determination that co-exist in her recovery. It’s a stellar performance, and I’ll be looking for Winstead in bigger roles.
Also very good are Nick Offerman as the wife’s colleague, Megan Mullally, unrecognizable as the wife’s boss, and the always delightful Octavia Spencer.
As The Wife pointed out, the amount of time that director and co-writer James Ponsoldt spent on the drinking part of the story means that lots of plot points whiz by in the final ten minutes. Still, Smashed is very watchable and benefits from the breakthrough performance by Winstead. It’s available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon, iTunes and other VOD providers.
Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes in THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES
According to the Old Testament, “the iniquity of the fathers shall be visited upon the sons”. Indeed, the successes and flaws of fathers, and the choices they make, impact their sons. And sons are often driven to be like or unlike their fathers, to match them or to surpass them. That is the territory explored in writer-director Derek Cianfrance’s intelligent drama The Place Beyond the Pines. (The story is set in Schenectady, New York, and the title refers to the Mohawk origin of the town’s name.)
At first, the story follows a familiar path for a crime drama – a motorcycle trick rider (Ryan Gosling) turns to bank robbery and has an encounter with a cop on patrol (Bradley Cooper). But the screenplay embeds nuggets about how both men feel about their fathers and how those feelings drive their actions. Both men have infant sons, and the father-son theme becomes more apparent as the story resumes fifteen years later with a focus on their own sons as teenagers.
I can’t remember a recent performance by Ryan Gosling that hasn’t been compelling, and he’s outstanding here, too. But the unexpected gem is Bradley Cooper, who shows us acting depth and range that we haven’t seen in his earlier work. Especially in scenes with a police psychiatrist and when forced to ask his father for advice, Cooper exposes the naked vulnerability of his character.
The Place Beyond the Pines is replete with excellent performances. Eva Mendes plays the mother of Gosling’s baby, and her performance stands up to Gosling’s – no small feat. Harris Yulin is superb as Cooper’s canny father. The wonderful Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn (Animal Kingdom,Killing Them Softly) plays Gosling’s crime partner. Ray Liotta, who often plays shady characters, has never been so menacing.
I found the character of Cooper’s son to be very unsympathetic; he is supposed to be a kid messed up by his parents’ divorce and father’s inattention, and I think that the story would have worked better if it were easier to look past his obnoxiousness to appreciate his damaged nature. Still, it’s a film that I’m still pondering a day later. Cianfrance made Blue Valentine, the hard-to-watch but starkly authentic story of an unraveled relationship, an acting showcase for Gosling and Michele Williams. The Place Beyond the Pines is just as thoughtful and more accessible than Blue Valentine. Pines is an ambitious and mostly successful film.
I’m still recommending the absolutely winning The Sapphires, a charmer about Australian Aboriginal teens forming a girl group to entertain troops in the Vietnam War. The other side of the coin is the bleak, but masterful Romanian drama Beyond the Hills.
And I still love two indies on Video on Demand:
Letters from the Big Man: a beautifully looking and sounding fable about a prickly woman with a guy and a Bigfoot competing for her affections.
Electrick Children: an entirely unique teen coming of age story with fundamentalist Mormon teens in Las Vegas.
The other best choices in theaters:
No: Gael Garcia Bernal stars as the regular guy who brainstormed the guerrilla advertising campaign that dethroned Chilean dictator Pinochet.
Side Effects: Steven Soderbergh’s psychological thriller starring Rooney Mara, Jude Law and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Quartet: a pleasant lark of a geezer comedy with four fine performances.
Music fans will enjoy the bio-documentary Beware of Mr. Baker, available on VOD.
On the Road is the faithful but ultimately unsuccessful adaptation of the seminal Jack Kerouac novel, with surprisingly little energy. The HBO movie Phil Spector is really just a freak show.
You may still be able to catch the fine PBS documentary Philip Roth: Unmasked. Roth himself gets lots of screen time to explain his career and his creative process.
I haven’t yet seen the much anticipated The Place Beyond the Pines with Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper, which opens today. You can read descriptions and view trailers of upcoming films atMovies I’m Looking Forward To.
My DVD of the week is the campy 1994 sci fi westernOblivion, which I’m betting is more entertaining than this week’s Hollywood remake.
On April 15, Turner Classic Movies is showing all four of the Clint Eastwood Man with No Name movies: the Sergio Leone trilogy (For a Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) plus Hang Em High.
The two lead characters in Beyond the Hills grew up together in a Romanian orphanage where they were subjected to privation and worse – and where they became lifelong soulmates. They aged out of the orphanage, and, now 24, Alina has been working menial jobs in Germany while Voichita has joined a local monastery. The monastery is a small rural compound with a rigidly dogmatic provincial priest, a compassionate but simple mother superior and a dozen nuns who run the gamut from devout to superstitious.
Alina craves Voichita’s companionship and viisits the monastery to convince Voichita to leave and join her in Germany. Voichita resists, and tries to get Alina to join the religious order. They’re both emotionally damaged from childhood experiences. There’s a strong bond between the two, and each is unable to let the other go. But each is strong willed and stubborn.
Then Alina suffers a psychotic breakdown. Now, since the worst place to treat such a condition would be a community of religious fanatics that is intentionally devoid of modernity, bad things happen. The priest and nuns are not monsters, but ill-equipped to avoid making a series of monstrous choices. We can only watch as the story moves unrelentingly to its awful conclusion. Sadly, the story is based on actual events at a Moldavian monastery a decade ago.
Beyond the Hills is compelling, in an oft excruciating and uncomfortable way. But those who commit to its 2 1/2 hours will see some remarkable film artistry from its real star – director Christian Mungiu. Munghiu’s thriller 4 Months, Three Weeks, 2 Days won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival (and made #3 on my Best Movies of 2007). Beyond the Hills won Canne’s screenwriting award.
Munghiu fills Beyond the Hills will one dramatic shot after another. Early in the film, we see Voichita and Alina hike up a hillside in the Romanian countryside (see photo at top); when they reach the top, the camera swings behind them, and we see the monastery on the next rise. At the climax, the camera stays fixed on a crowd of characters (see photo below); the action and dialogue is between the two men in the foreground, but our attention is on the reactions of Voichita in the background. The length and patience of the shot allow our attention to settle on Voichita, and her eyes tell us what she has concluded. It’s an absolutely gripping moment.
Beyond the Hills is a tough movie by a major film artist.
There’s a big budget Hollywood movie named Oblivion opening this week. I really enjoyed the original version, the sci fi spoof 1994 Oblivion, now available on DVD. It is set in the year 3030 on the planet Oblivion, which strongly resembles a frontier town from a spaghetti Western, peppered with the occasional cyborg, ray gun and ATM machine.
Oblivion is intentionally campy, has a silly plot and lots of tongue-in-cheek dialogue. The scene where the funeral is interrupted by the weekly bingo game upstairs is especially funny. The cast seems to be having lots of fun with the material. Musetta Vander as the rawhide whip-wielding dominatrix Lash and Carel Struycken as the death-forboding undertaker Gaunt are especially over-the-top good. In addition, Julie Newmar plays a cougarish saloon proprietor, and Star Trek’s George Takei is the Jim Beam-swilling town doc. Amazingly, Oblivion rated a 1996 sequel, Oblivion 2: Backlash, in which most of the cast returned.
“Pearl Harbor is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle.”
“Heaven’s Gate is the most scandalous cinematic waste I have ever seen, and remember, I’ve seen Paint Your Wagon.”
“I know full well I’m expected to Suspend My Disbelief. Unfortunately, my disbelief is very heavy, and during Ocean’s Thirteen, the suspension cable snapped.”
“Keanu Reeves is often low-key in his roles, but in this movie, his piano has no keys at all. He is so solemn, detached and uninvolved he makes Mr. Spock look like Hunter S. Thompson at closing time.” — The Day the Earth Stood Still
“She and Daredevil are powerfully attracted to each other, and even share some PG-13 sex, which is a relief, because when superheroes have sex at the R level, I am always afraid someone will get hurt.” — Daredevil
“I am informed that 5,000 cockroaches were used in the filming of Joe’s Apartment. That depresses me, but not as much as the news that none of them were harmed during the production.”
This week’s top recommendation is pretty obvious – the absolutely winning The Sapphires, a charmer about Australian Aboriginal teens forming a girl group to entertain troops in the Vietnam War.
I still love two indies on Video on Demand:
Letters from the Big Man: a beautifully looking and sounding fable about a prickly woman with a guy and a Bigfoot competing for her affections.
Electrick Children: an entirely unique teen coming of age story with fundamentalist Mormon teens in Las Vegas.
The other best choices in theaters:
No: Gael Garcia Bernal stars as the regular guy who brainstormed the guerrilla advertising campaign that dethroned Chilean dictator Pinochet.
Side Effects: Steven Soderbergh’s psychological thriller starring Rooney Mara, Jude Law and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Quartet: a pleasant lark of a geezer comedy with four fine performances.
Music fans will enjoy the bio-documentary Beware of Mr. Baker, available on VOD.
Emperor, with Tommy Lee Jones as Gen. Douglas MacArthur leading the American occupation of Japan, is historical but plodding. On the Road is the faithful but ultimately unsuccessful adaptation of the seminal Jack Kerouac novel, with surprisingly little energy. The HBO movie Phil Spector is really just a freak show.
You may still be able to catch the fine PBS documentary Philip Roth: Unmasked. Roth himself gets lots of screen time to explain his career and his creative process.
I haven’t yet seen the bleak Romanian drama Beyond the Hills. You can read descriptions and view trailers of upcoming films atMovies I’m Looking Forward To.
My DVD of the week is the superbly acted drama A Late Quartet.
On April 7, Turner Classic Movies has the film noir masterpiece Double Indemnity. But, if you like noir, don’t miss the underrated The Set-Up on April 10; for more on The Set-Up, scroll down to #5 on my 10 Best Boxing Movies.
Roger Ebert has died. It’s a particularly somber moment for me because the Siskel & Ebert television show was one of the two essential triggers for my love of movies (along with my college History of Film class).
I first set up my massive 1982 VCR to record his and Siskel’s Sneak Previews. In the early 2000s, Ebert’s was the first blog that I checked every day. The reason that I signed up for Twitter was to follow Roger Ebert.
Roger Ebert was first a great film critic, period. He was also the most effective popularizer of movie criticism. Most importantly, especially for me starting in the late 1970s, he was the leading evangelist for independent and foreign cinema in the US. Without Siskel & Ebert, I wouldn’t have known to seek out a French film like La cage aux folles or the debut features of indie directors John Sayles (Return of the Secaucus Seven) and Spike Lee (She’s Gotta Have It).
In taking a “leave of presence” yesterday, Roger Ebert wrote, “On this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I’ll see you at the movies.”
The Sapphires is a triumph of a Feel Good Movie. Set in the 1960s, a singing group from an Australian Aboriginal family faces racial obstacles at home, but blossoms when the girls learn Motown hits to entertain US troops in Vietnam. Remarkably, Tony Briggs based the screenplay on his mother’s real experience – make sure you stay for the Where Are They Now end credits.
The ever amiable Chris O’Dowd (one of the best things about Bridesmaids) is funny and charming as the girls’ dissolute manager. Jessica Mauboy, who plays the lead singer, has a great voice for soul music. A surprisingly beautiful song by the girls’ mom, played by veteran actress Kylie Belling, is an especially touching moment.
The Sapphires is not a deep movie, but it is a satisfying one. It’s predictable and manipulative, but I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t enjoy it. I saw it at this year’s Cinequest, and predict that it will become a word-of-mouth hit. The Sapphires is a guaranteed good time at the movies.
