Today the Movie Gourmet brings you an entire short film. Here’s the six minute French film On S’Embrasse? (Can We Kiss?). I think you’ll like it.
movie gourmet
DVD of the Week: Rampart
In a sizzling performance, Woody Harrelson plays a corrupt and brutal LA cop trying to stay alive and out of jail. Woody’s Dave Brown is always seeking control. He manipulates his superiors. From behind his badge, he unleashes sadistic brute force on every other unfortunate within his sight. Yet he is a man out of control, whose impulses to bully, to drink and to seduce increasingly endanger his job security, his finances and what is left of his relationship with his family. He is already skating on the edge of self-destruction when one brutal incident is caught on video and goes viral a la Rodney King.
Rampart benefits from the one of the best large supporting casts – less an ensemble than a series of great single performances as individual characters tangle with Dave Brown. Ben Foster (The Messenger) is brilliant as a homeless man with too many drugs and not enough meds. Robin Wright is also superb as an emotionally damaged lawyer who sleeps with Dave until his paranoia takes over. Sigourney Weaver and Ice Cube are two LA officials who see Dave as a walking, talking threat to public order and the City treasury. Ned Beatty is the retired cop who has kept his finger in the police corruption racket. The Broadway star Audra McDonald plays a cop groupie that Dave meets in a bar. As one would expect, Anne Heche and Cynthia Nixon are excellent as Dave’s two amiable but bullshit-proof ex-wives. Brie Larson and Sammy Boyarsky are especially effective as the daughters, who figure in Rampart‘s most breathtaking scenes.
Rampart is a singularly visual film – we always know that we are in the sunwashed, diverse, sometimes explosive anarchy that is LA. The movie is structured and shot to heighten the experience of both the chaos that Dave causes and that the chaos that he feels. This is Oren Moverman’s second effort as writer-director, the first being the searing The Messenger, also starring Harrelson and Foster. Moverman keeps Rampart spinning along wildly as we wonder what will happen next to unravel Dave Brown’s life.
If you need some redemption to leaven a very dark story, this is not the movie for you. Rampart reminds us that not everyone finds redemption. It made my list of the Best Movies of 2012 – So Far.
June at the movies
June 2012 looks pretty promising at the movies. June 15 is the opening for the always quirky Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, which premiered in Cannes.
We’ll also get Elena, a Russian contemporary noir about a rich guy who marries his nurse and then tells her that he is leaving his fortune to someone else. Plotting ensues.
That weekend, I’m also looking forward to the opening of the Kristin Scott-Thomas thriller The Woman in the Fifth, the screen version of Broadway’s Rock of Ages and an indie dramedy with Emily Blunt, Your Sister’s Sister.
The next weekend, June 22, brings the opening of Woody Allen’s latest, To Rome With Love. We’ll also get to see two blockbusters – Brave, Pixar’s much anticipated fable of a Scottish princess and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, the movie from Seth Grahame-Smith’s bestselling novel
Finally, Take This Waltz with Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen opens on June 29. 33-year-old Canadian actress Sarah Polley wrote and directed; Polley’s debut feature was Away From Her, my pick for best movie of 2006. I’ve seen Take This Waltz and it’s a very special movie.
You can read descriptions and watch the trailers on my Movies I’m Looking Forward To page. Here’s the trailer for The Woman in the Fifth.
Let There Be Light: groundbreaking look at those who have endured too much
Let There Be Light is an extraordinary documentary about WW II soldiers being treated for psychological war wounds. Made in 1946 by fabled director John Huston, Let There Be Light was suppressed by the US military until 1980 and had since been available only in a grainy, almost unintelligible version. Thankfully, it was restored by the National Film Preservation Foundation in 2011, and now can be viewed for free on its website.
Huston followed a group of soldiers as they entered a hospital and engaged in treatment until their release from the service eight weeks later. Huston shot 70 hours of film, which he winnowed down to this one-hour documentary. We see the doctors use individual talk therapy, group therapy, hypnosis and sodium pentathol. We know the condition as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). At the time, it was popularly known as “shell-shock” or “combat fatigue” and termed “psychoneurosis” or “neuropsychosis” by the doctors.
Modern therapists will find the treatment primitive and the movie too optimistic (there’s a sense that everybody is OK after eight weeks in the hospital), but that shouldn’t obscure the compassion of the doctors and the heartbreaking stories of the men. This was a moment in medical history when the public still needed to learn that this was a psychiatric condition, not cowardice or weakness – and that the condition was treatable. The narrator (Huston’s father Walter) repeatedly emphasizes that these men have endured more than any human could be expected to bear.
Watch Let There Be Light HERE.
Movies to See This Week
I’m still plugging Polisse, the riveting story of the police child protection unit in Paris. Bernie, a very funny dark comedy by Richard Linklater, shows off Jack Black’s talents in a whole new light. The story of aged Brits seeking a low-budget retirement in India, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, is much more than a fish-out-of-water comedy. Another entertaining movie is the Norwegian dark comedy Headhunters, with Aksel Hennie as a smug corporate headhunter/art thief who panics when a high tech commando hunts him down.
Men In Black 3 is delightfully entertaining, as Will Smith time travels back to 1969 and meets the young Tommy Lee Jones (nailed by Josh Brolin). Hysteria is a breezy, feminist lark. HBO is still broadcasting its new epic Hemingway & Gellhorn, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman. Where Do We Go Now? is a Lebanese comedy about village women who go to extreme lengths to extinguish the sparks of sectarian violence.
You can read descriptions and view trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.
My DVD pick this week is Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle in the Irish dark comedy The Guard, one of my very favorite films from last year.
Hemingway & Gellhorn: helluva story in a flawed epic
That Martha Gellhorn was Ernest Hemingway’s third wife only begins to tell the story. Gellhorn’s work as a war correspondent eclipsed Hemingway’s. She was also the only one of Hemingway’s wives to kick his butt to the curb. (A year ago, I had a drink at the Key West bar where Gellhorn, according to local lore, had paid the bartender $20 to introduce her to Hemingway.) In HBO’s Hemingway & Gellhorn, Gellhorn is played by Nicole Kidman and Hemingway by Clive Owen.
Gellhorn once said, “We were good in war. When there was no war, we made our own.” She’s a prototype of a liberated woman and he’s an unreconstructed alpha male preoccupied with machismo, so things are not destined to end well. (Thought: maybe if Hemingway hadn’t thought so much about masculinity, his own masculinity would have been less selfish.)
Theirs is a helluva story, and the movie is an epic. As the story sweeps across the Spanish Civil War, the Soviet invasion of Finland, the liberation of China and D-Day, the 2 1/2 hours goes pretty quickly.
Hemingway & Gellhorn is directed by the great Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Unbearable Lightness of Being). He keeps Hemingway & Gellhorn shifting from color to sepia to black and white, seamlessly mixing in actual historical footage and inserting the characters Zelig-like into the documentary stock.
Kaufman lives in the Bay Area and shot Hemingway & Gellhorn’s Key West, Havana, Carnegie Hall, Finland, Germany and Spain scenes in San Francisco, San Rafael, Livermore and Oakland.
I enjoyed seeing it once, but it’s definitely not a “can’t miss”, and I’m having difficulty putting my finger on why that is. My guess is that the screenplay lingers on the Spanish Civil War a little too long and then brings on Hemingway’s dissolute period too abruptly. The acting and the direction are just fine.
DVD of the Week: The Guard
This Irish dark comedy is a showpiece for Brendan Gleeson as a lowbrow cop happening upon an international drug conspiracy. Gleeson is always very good and was especially memorable in director Martin McDonagh’s 2008 In Bruges, which was either the funniest hit man movie ever or the darkest and most violent buddy comedy ever. This time, McDonagh’s brother John Michael McDonagh directs Gleeson as a very canny man who convincingly strives to appear much dumber than he is. The perfect foil for Gleeson’s sloppy local cop is the refined FBI agent played by Don Cheadle. Those familiar with Ireland will recognize the Connemara Coast. Don’t miss The Guard.
Men in Black 3: just as delightful in 1969
Our favorite alien-zapping secret agents return in the delightful Men in Black 3. We still have the yapping Will Smith paired with the Titan of Terseness, Tommy Lee Jones. In this edition of the sci fi comedy franchise, Smith must travel back to 1969 to save his partner and the world from a new odious and scary alien villain, Boris The Animal. We get a Mad Men size dose of 1969, including Andy Warhol’s Factory, the Miracle Mets, the Moon Launch, some hippies and lots of skinny neckties.
The cast is all good, but the most inspired casting has to be Josh Brolin as the young Tommy Lee Jones. Michael Stuhlbarg, last seen as the uptight depressive in A Serious Man, here almost steals the movie as a blissed out but hyper-perceptive alien. Michael Chernus, so good in a serious role in Vera Farmiga’s Higher Ground, is excellent as a shady geek. Bill Hader is very funny as Warhol.
I’m usually not one for franchise movies, but MIB3 is gloriously entertaining. I saw it in 2D – you should, too. As with most movies, the 3D premium isn’t worth it.
In the trailer (but not the movie) we briefly glimpse the torch-wielding Columbia Picture lady wearing MIB shades – very cool.
Hysteria: a feminist lark
Hysteria is a breezy, feminist lark. Victorian doctors are befuddled by all manner of female complaints, which they lump together into the diagnosis of hysteria. One physician becomes popular when he pioneers pelvic massage as treatment. Who knew that rubbing their clitorises (clitorii?) made them happy?
Thankfully, director Tanya Wexler keeps the whole thing light. Maggie Gyllenhaal stars as a proto-feminist and High Dancy plays the doc who invented a proto-vibrator. Rising star Felicity Jone (Like Crazy) pulls off a secondary role.
Where Do We Go Now?: comedy as a matter of life and death
Christians and Muslims live together in a very isolated Lebanese village. The men, none too bright, flare any perceived grievance into testosterone-fueled tribal fury. Knowing that any trivial incident can spark an escalation to sectarian slaughter, the women, aided by the imam and the priest, work tirelessly to extinguish every possible provocation. The women will stop at nothing, including sabotaging the village’s only TV, faking a miracle, medicating the pastries and even hiring a van full of Ukrainian strippers.
This story could have been played broadly like Lysistrata. There are many funny moments, but Where Do We Go Now? is more than farce. To these women, war is not theoretical. We can tell from their language, which references men crouching in the attics and looking under beds, that they have survived past sectarian violence. And we see the village cemetery, filled with the headstones of young men. The women and the clerics have seen war, and they are desperate to avoid it. That desperation adds a sting to the comedy, and makes Where Do We Go Now? a pretty good movie.