movie gourmet

Movies to See Right Now

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Lauren Ambrose and Mike Birbiglia in SLEEPWALK WITH ME

There are some very promising fall movies coming out this weekend (see below) to add to our our current crop of fine comedies, led by Sleepwalk With Me.  The zany French odd couple comedy The Intouchables is a crowd pleaser – and an attendance record breaker in France.  Frank Langella’s performance in Robot and Frank elevates the film from a pretty good comedy to a revealing study of getting older.   Celeste and Jesse Forever is a smart and authentic comedy of best friends too perfect for each other to fall in love at the same time.   Ruby Sparks is a hilariously inventive romance that probes whether realizing a fantasy can bring happiness.

It’s worth seeking out the compelling documentary Searching for Sugar Man, about the hunt to uncover the secret fate of an artist that didn’t know that he was a rock star.

The brilliantly made Louisiana swamp fable Beasts of the Southern Wild enters the life and imagination of a child and celebrates her indomitability. It’s on my list of Best Movies of 2012 – So Far.

Julie Delpy’s 2 Days in New York is a rollicking light culture clash comedy. The stylishly violent crime drama Lawless is well-made and well-acted but predictable. The bike messenger thriller Premium Rush is nothing more than a chase scene, but it’s a cool chase. The Dark Night Rises is too corny and too long, but Anne Hathaway sparkles. The Words is a corny drama that insults the audience by over-explaining everything.

I haven’t yet seen The Master, Trouble with the Curve and House at the End of the Street.  You can read descriptions and view trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD pick this week is The Salt of Life, a gently funny and insightful Italian comedy about men of a certain age.

DVD of the Week: The Salt of Life

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The Salt of Life (Gianni e le donne) is a gently funny and insightful comedy about a certain time in a man’s life. In the lives of men who are not rich, famous or powerful, there comes a time when attractive young women no longer see them as potential lovers. This is painful for any guy, and our contemporary Roman hero Gianni, with the help of his portly lawyer/wing man, sets out to deny that he has reached this plateau.

In a standard movie fantasy, some adorable young hottie would come to appreciate Gianni’s true appeal and find him irresistible. But in The Salt of Life, the story is more textured, complex and realistic.

The Salt of Life stars and is written and directed by Gianni Di Gregorio, just like the very fun Mid-August Lunch. It is definitively a movie for guys of a certain age and the women who tolerate them, as well as the younger guys who will become them.

Sorry, no subtitles yet on the trailer embedded here. You can watch the English subtitled trailer on IMDb.

Big fall films – the first salvo

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Autumn is here, and so are the first major film releases for this weekend.  You can read descriptions and view trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

One of the most anticipated is The Master, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love).  A charismatic writer spawns a new religion (like L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology, perhaps?).  The Master stars Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams and got good but not great reviews at Toronto.

Stephen Chbosky directs the screen version of his novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower.  A shy high school freshman is adopted by two unapologetically misfit seniors, played by Harry Potter’s Emma Watson and Ezra Miller (very different here than in We Need to Talk About Kevin).

In Trouble with the Curve, Clint Eastwood stars as an aged baseball scout who takes his daughter (Amy Adams) along on one last scouting trip.  The cast also includes Justin Timberlake and John Goodman.

I don’t go to many shockers, but House at the End of the Street, with Jennifer Lawrence and Elizabeth Shue, could be good.

Here’s the trailer for The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

Trailer for Spielberg’s Lincoln

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Here’s the trailer for Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln with Daniel Day-Lewis. It’s based on Doris Kearn Goodwin’s absorbing Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.  The film will be released on November 9.

The brilliant cast also includes Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Jared Harris, Jackie Earle Haley, Hal Holbrook, Sally Field, John Hawkes, James Spader, Bruce McGill, David Straithern, Tim Blake Nelson, Walton Goggins (Justified) and Dakin Mathews (the horse trader in True Grit).

Because Lincoln’s prose is so exquisitely profound and because he is such an icon, he is often played on screen with a deep speaking voice.  In fact, Lincoln’s voice ranged high, and I enjoy hearing Day-Lewis capturing that characteristic in the middle and end of this trailer.

Movies to See This Week

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SLEEPWALK WITH ME

Sleepwalk With Me leads our current crop of fine comedies.   The zany French odd couple comedy The Intouchables is a crowd pleaser – and an attendance record breaker in France. Frank Langella’s performance in Robot and Frank elevates the film from a pretty good comedy to a revealing study of getting older.  Celeste and Jesse Forever is a smart and authentic comedy of best friends too perfect for each other to fall in love at the same time.  Ruby Sparks is a hilariously inventive romance that probes whether realizing a fantasy can bring happiness.

It’s worth seeking out the compelling documentary Searching for Sugar Man, about the hunt to uncover the secret fate of an artist that didn’t know that he was a rock star. The same holds for Bill W., the story of the reluctant leader of a movement, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.

The brilliantly made Louisiana swamp fable Beasts of the Southern Wild enters the life and imagination of a child and celebrates her indomitability. It’s on my list of Best Movies of 2012 – So Far.

Julie Delpy’s 2 Days in New York is a rollicking light culture clash comedy. The stylishly violent crime drama Lawless is well-made and well-acted but predictable. The bike messenger thriller Premium Rush is nothing more than a chase scene, but it’s a cool chase. The Dark Night Rises is too corny and too long, but Anne Hathaway sparkles.  The Words is a corny drama that insults the audience by over-explaining everything.

You can read descriptions and view trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD pick this week is the darkly hilarious Norwegian thriller Headhunters.

Google calculates Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

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Kevin Bacon's best performance in THE WOODSMAN

Now Google helps you play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.  Type into the Google search box “Bacon number” and the name of someone from the movies and you get that person’s Bacon number.  I typed in “Bacon number Humphrey Bogart”, and this is what I got:

Humphrey Bogart’s Bacon number is 3

Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre appeared in Casablanca.

Peter Lorre and Jack Nicholson appeared in The Raven.

Jack Nicholson and Kevin Bacon appeared in A Few Good Men.

 

Just about everyone who is working in films today has a Bacon number of 1 or 2, so I tried to confound the system with Fatty Arbuckle, whose movie career was killed by a scandal in 1921, and I got:

Roscoe Arbuckle’s Bacon number is 3

Roscoe Arbuckle and Buster Keaton appeared in Coney Island.

Buster Keaton and Patty McCormack appeared in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Patty McCormack and Kevin Bacon appeared in Frost/Nixon.

 

Next, I tried Warrren William, the King of Pre-Code from the early 1930s.

Warren William’s Bacon number is 3

Warren William and Henry Wilcoxon appeared in Cleopatra.

Henry Wilcoxon and Bill Murray appeared in Caddyshack.

Bill Murray and Kevin Bacon appeared in Wild Things.

 

Amazingly, these people each have a Bacon number of only 2:  Klaus Kinski, Margaret Hamilton (The Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz), John Wayne, Marcello Mastroianni, Mary Badham (Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird), Melina Mercouri, Francois Cluzet, Gloria Grahame, Raymond Burr, Woody Strode, Vivien Leigh and Bob Dylan.  The highest known Bacon number is 7, held by William Rufus Shafter.  This is an AWESOME time-waster!  Love it! Thanks, Google!

 

The Words: the filmmakers think you’re idiots

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The infuriating drama The Words does have a story to tell –  a young man finds success by publishing a found manuscript as his own, and then the old man who really wrote the novel shows up.  But no aspect of this story is left for the audience to figure out.

Take, for example, the initial writing of the novel.  We see, in flashback, that a man’s baby dies and his wife leaves; he then bangs out the novel in a paroxysm of angry grief. Thanks to the actors, we understand that’s what is happening.  But – just in case that we’re really dim – it is explained to us in voice over narration.   In case we don’t know how to feel about this, there is an overbearing score of soap opera music.  But wait – this story is a novel within a novel, so the actors playing the exterior story can explain it to us again.  Just to make sure that we get it.

The ham-handed storytelling and the overwrought music combine to make The Words corny.  The double and triple explanations of the story are just insulting to the audience.

One good thing about The Words –  Jeremy Irons’ performance is superb.

The Norwegians Got Funny This Year

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KING CURLING

This week’s DVD pick, the dark Norwegian comedy thriller Headhunters, has some big laughs. But it’s just one of some very funny Norwegian comedies this year.  I also liked the teen sex comedy Turn Me On, Dammit!.  Who knew that the Norwegians could be so damn funny?

My favorite comedy this year is King Curling, set in a sport that even the Norwegians find to be odd and boring, is HILARIOUS.  The star of a curling team suffers a psychotic breakdown and, after years of treatment, is released from an asylum heavily medicated.  To win money for a friend’s lifesaving operation, the curling team must win a tournament and the star needs to go off his meds to regain his game skills.

It’s a broad comedy, but the key is that the actors aren’t trying to be funny, a la Will Ferrell.  Instead, they play it absolutely straight, relying on the characters, situations and dialogue to generate the laughs.  And laughs, they are aplenty.

The curling star tries to maintain composure despite his recurring hallucinations of floating pink lint.  One of the Norwegian curlers, a womanizer with unusually low standards,  keeps lapsing into American gangsta street talk.  Another has a long-lost father who turns up as, of course, a Rod Stewart impersonator who doesn’t sound remotely like Rod Stewart.  And then there’s the kissing dog.  It’s a top drawer broad comedy.  Here’s the trailer for King Curling.

 

DVD of the Week: Headhunters

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The smug Norwegian corporate headhunter named Roger Brown (don’t ask) explains his motivation at the very beginning of the movie:  at 5 feet, 6 inches, his insecurity about keeping his six foot blond wife leads him to cut some corners.  As ruthlessly successful as he is in business, he feels the need to also burgle the homes of his clients and steal art treasures.  So the dark comedy thriller Headhunters (Hodejegerne) begins like a heist movie.  But soon Roger becomes targeted by a client with serious commando skills, unlimited high tech gizmos,  and a firm intention to make Roger dead.

Roger Brown is played brilliantly by Aksel Hennie, a huge star in Norway who looks like a cross between Christopher Walken and Peter Lorre. The laughs come from Roger’s comeuppance as he undergoes every conceivable humiliation while trying to survive.  As a smoothly confident scoundrel, Roger is at first not that sympathetic, but Hennie turns him into a panicked and terrified Everyman when he becomes a human pinata.

Headhunters is based on a page-turner by the Scandinavian mystery writer Jo Nesbo.   There are reports that Headhunters will be remade soon by Hollywood.  In the mean time, see Headhunters and have a fun time at the movies.

Sleepwalk With Me: engaging and successful comedy

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As Sleepwalk With Me begins, the filmmaker lets the audience figure out three basic things about the main character.  First, he has the perfect girlfriend and, no matter what happens in his life, he will never do any better.  Second, despite her patience after being together eight years, it’s time for him to marry her or not.  Third, he is absolutely unready to make that commitment.

That filmmaker is co-writer/co-director Mike Birbiglia, a standup comic whose screenplay is based on his autobiographical one man show.  His protagonist’s unpromising career as a comedian is feeding his ambivalence to marry a woman whose career has already stabilized.  As he feels more and more relationship and career pressures, he develops REM Behavior Disorder – a rare and particularly dangerous form of sleepwalking.

The sleepwalking, of course, sets up some funny moments, as do the stumbling start to the standup career, the girlfriend angst and the usual maddening set of parents.  In a comic triumph, Birbiglia gently and intelligently milks the laughs out of each situation while never losing focus on the fundamental truth of each situation.

The girlfriend is beautiful, good-hearted, smart, sexy and full of life.  She is played impeccably by Lauren Ambrose (Six Feet Under. Starting Out in the Evening).  Veterans James Rebhorn and Carole Kane are excellent as the protagonist’s bickering parents.  Here’s a nice touch:  the pioneer scientist of sleep disorder science himself, Stanford professor Dr. William C. Dement, provides a funny cameo.