movie gourmet

DVD of the Week: The Artist

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If you still haven’t seen the Best Picture Oscar-winning The Artist, you don’t have any excuse because it’s now available on DVD.  It’s a magical romance that writer-director Michel Hazanavicius gives us through the highly original choice of an almost silent film.  Set in Hollywood from 1927 through 1929, it is the story of a silent film star who is left behind by the startlingly immediate transition to talking pictures.

The French actor Jean Dujardin won the Best Actor Oscar as the silent star, a charismatic and ever-playful guy whose career is trapped by the shackles of his own vanity.  While on top, he treats an ambitious movie extra (Berenice Bejo) with kindness; she remembers when she becomes a star of the talkies.

Dujardin’s star, whose films resemble those of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.,  is a joker with a knack for the grand gesture.  He also has an adorable Jack Russell terrier that serves as his companion and co-star.

Hazanavicius is so skillful that audiences that have never seen a silent film soon become enraptured by the story and invested in the fates of the characters.  It’s a visually and emotionally satisfying film.

John Goodman and James Cromwell are excellent in supporting roles. 

(BTW, in real life, Berenice Bejo has two children with Michel Hazanavicius.)

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvifS2QOun4]

And, courtesy of photographica in the Movie Gourmet’s LA bureau, here is co-star Uggie the Jack Russell terrier celebrating Uggie Day in Los Angeles.

Brave: girl power and Pixar quality

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Brave is Pixar’s much anticipated fable of a Scottish princess.  Pixar is a brand name that represents excellence in animated movies, and Brave continues the tradition.

As we have come to expect, the animation is magnificent.  The heroine is a girl with an exuberant tangle of unruly red curls, and it’s difficult not to enjoy her wild head of hair in every scene.

The other Pixar trademark is depth of story.  Other studios can make a girl power story with mother-daughter conflict, but Pixar brings more to the table here, with themes of making immature mistakes and then growing up and taking responsibility.

Brave‘s story isn’t as deep – and Brave isn’t as good – as those of Toy Story, WALL-E and Up, but even mid-level Pixar is better than movies from Disney, DreamWorks or other animation studios.   Adults will enjoy Brave, and it’s a must see for kids.

3D or not to 3D?  I was satisfied with the 2D and would definitely recommend against paying the premium for 3D.

 

Movies to See Right Now

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ELENA

My top pick this week is still the wistfully sweet and visually singular Moonrise Kingdom.

One of the best films of the year is Elena, a vividly dark and brilliantly acted Russian drama that simmers throughout.

The Intouchables is a crowd pleasing odd couple comedy from France.  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.  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).

Prometheus is a striking and well-acted sci fi adventure with a horror film tinge; I recommend it for sci fi fans.  Rock of Ages is a lighthearted and funny musical that makes the most of a self-mocking Tom Cruise and the hair bands of the 80s.

Oslo August 31 is the utterly authentic portrait of a suicidal Norwegian junkie that doesn’t pay off enough to justify the the grim inevitability.  Your Sister’s Sister wastes a promising premise and a superb performance.

I haven’t seen Pixar’s Brave or the totally just wrong Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Killer, both of which open this weekend. You can read descriptions and view trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD pick this week is a film that I KNOW you haven’t seen, the working class comedy The Locksmith.

Elena: a vividly dark peek into contemporary Russia

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Elena is a superbly crafted film that vividly peeks into a dark, very dark contemporary Russia.  Directed and co-written by Andre Zvyagintsev (The Return), Elena is the triumph of drama over melodrama.  There is an absolute minimum of on-screen action and no histrionics at all, yet the story simmers throughout.

Zvyagintsev builds the story upon his characters.  It is set in a toney apartment in a quiet upscale Moscow neighborhood, home of Vladimir and Elena.  Vladimir is pushing 70 and rich.  I doubt that any softies got rich in post-Soviet Russia, and Vladimir is a hard man, devoid of sentimentality except for his estranged daughter.   Late in life, he has married the working class Elena, his one-time nurse, now in her 50s.  They have a comfortable, frank, affectionate and practical relationship.

Both have adult children from previous marriages.  Vladimir’s daughter Katerina has no use for her father, but he subsidizes her lifestyle of perpetual partying.  Vladimir and Katerina finally share a moment, bonding over their shared cynicism.

Elena’s nogoodnik son Sergey lives in a hard scrabble suburb and embraces his chronic unemployment with alarming indolence.  His equally lazy and selfish teenage son, having an indifferent high school career, is now facing the dreaded Army unless someone can bribe his way into a college.

Elena is desperate to rescue her grandson from his self-inflicted predicament, but only Vladimir’s money can help, and Vladimir despises Elena’s trashy and shiftless family.  The movie is built on this conflict, and it is Elena’s story.   As Elena, the actress Nadezhda Markina reveals Elena’s affection, desperation and determination with her eyes, face and movements.  Perfectly framing Markina’s outstanding performance by isolating it, Zvyagintsev delivers the film in a series of long shots, with terse dialogue and a spare soundtrack. There is no expository dialogue explaining the plot or swelling music manipulating our reaction.

Elena is a dark movie that asks its audience to invest patience, thought and energy – so it’s not for everybody.  Elena is also one of the year’s best films, and an extraordinary example of a very pure breed of filmmaking.

Susan Tyrrell: celebrating the cheap and tawdry

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Susan Tyrrell in FAT CITY

Last week I recommended Turner Classic Movies’ broadcast of the under appreciated Fat City (1972) .  It’s the story of boxer on the slide who inspires a kid to become a boxer on the rise.  Stacy Keach and Susan Tyrrell give dead-on performances as pathetic sad sack barflies. Tyrrell was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.  Sadly, Susan Tyrell died on Saturday.

In this wonderful 2000 profile in LA Weekly, Tyrell said,  “The last thing my mother said to me was, ‘SuSu, your life is a celebration of everything that is cheap and tawdry.’ I’ve always liked that, and I’ve always tried to live up to it.”

Oslo August 31: authentic, but why?

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The Norwegian drug addict Anders has been clean and sober after ten months in rehab, and has earned a day pass for a job interview in Oslo.  In rehab, he has had plenty of opportunity to take stock of himself and the impact that his drug habit has wreaked upon his disappointing career and upon his family and friends.  Anders concludes that the best response is to take his own life.  First, he takes advantage of his day pass to seek out his best friend and his own family.

Oslo August 31 is well-crafted and utterly authentic.  But, why was this movie made?  What is its contribution to art or entertainment or our knowledge or our experience?  Where is the payoff for the audience that makes the grim inevitability worth ten bucks and 95 minutes?

There’s one particularly spell-binding scene with superb sound design.  As Anders is waiting for someone in a cafe, he eavesdrops on the other patrons.  As he glances from table to table, we hear the conversation of each set of diners.  It’s very cool.

Unusual for a film about drug addiction, Oslo August 31 depicts only one instance of hard drug use – and that injection is not to get high.

The Danish director Joachim Trier previously made Reprise, a wonderful film about sanity and the creative process in which two young novelists send in their manuscripts at the beginning of the film, just before one suffers a psychotic breakdown.   Reprise was #4 on my list of Best Movies of 2008.

Rock of Ages: juke box heroes have some laughs

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The Broadway musical Rock of Ages comes to the screen – a love story of hopeful young performers set on the seamy Sunset Strip in the age of Journey, Styx, Bon Jovi and the ever popular Whitesnake.  It really doesn’t matter that there is only a barest shred of a plot – this is a musical, after all, and we just need an excuse to break into song.

The two young leads are fine, but the laughs come from the impressive crew of supporting actors: Tom Cruise, Alec Baldwin, Russell Brand, Paul Giamatti, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Mary J. Blige and Bryan Cranston.   Cruise self-mockingly plays an Axel Rose type rock star, only more unreliable.

The inspired musical production numbers are staged ironically (there’s no other way to do a Quarterflash song).   You haven’t really heard Foreigner’s I Want to Know What Love Is until you’ve seen Tom Cruise really selling it.  At one point, Brand’s rockers belt out We Built This City in a duel with Zeta-Jones’ pastel clad church ladies singing We’re Not Going To Take It.  All lighthearted and funny; it’ll be a good DVD/stream pick in a few months.

The Intouchables: a crowdpleasing odd couple comedy

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The Intouchables is the second most popular movie of all time in France – and it’s easy to see why.  It’s an odd couple comedy that’s a real crowd pleaser.

A very, very rich French aristocrat has become a quadriplegic due to a hang gliding accident and hires a Senegalese good-for-nothing street hood as his caregiver.  The plot, really just a series of set pieces, mines familiar territory as the poor guy learns about living in a mansion (see Down and Out in Beverly Hills) and revitalizes the rich guy’s zest for living.  But it’s really well done and very funny.

The rich guy is played by the great Francois Cluzet (Tell No One), who gives a tremendous performance using only his head and neck.  Omar Sy plays the poor guy and actually edged out The Artist‘s Jean Dujardin for France’s top acting award last year; that’s hard to figure, but Sy is very funny in The Intouchables.  Overall, it’s a very satisfying comedy.

 

Prometheus: striking sci fi with a tinge of horror

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Prometheus is a striking and well-acted sci fi adventure with a horror film tinge.  What you want in a sci fi movie is cool alien worlds and cool alien creatures – and, for that, it’s hard to top director Ridley Scott, who made the classic sci fi thrillers Blade Runner and Alien (as well as Gladiator, Thelma & Louise and Black Hawk Down).

In Prometheus, there is a space mission to find out if a species of aliens created us and returned to their world in another solar system.  The mission successfully finds the answer, finds the aliens and finds some terrifyingly lethal space monsters.

Don’t think too much about the premise.  The movie is a little ponderous when it drills down to the existential questions here.  We’re far better off enjoying the cool visuals and just rooting for the good guys to escape the space monsters.  And the space monsters are damn scary.  The final sequence, however,  makes the inevitable sequel all too obvious.

If you’re looking for a girl that can take a licking and keep on ticking, you can’t do any better than to cast Noomi Rapace, the star of the Swedish The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series.  As the lead scientist on the mission, Rapace needs to survive a an impressive series of perils, including an alarming self-surgical procedure.

Michael Fassbinder is even better as an android with punctilious correctness and insincere charm, which some reviewers have compared to the computer Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Idris Elba (The Wire) is also notable because he plays the commander of the spaceship more as a tugboat captain than Captain Kirk.  Guy Pearce plays the elderly mogul who is financing the mission; distractingly, he is apparently wearing the same makeup as Dustin Hoffman did to play 121-year-old Jack Crabb in Little Big Man.

Sci fi is not one of my favorite genres and I won’t recommend it as a “must see” to a general audience, but if you’re a sci fi fan, then by all means, see Prometheus.

3D or not 3D?  If you’re gonna see Prometheus, I’d recommend forking over the premium and seeing it in 3D, especially for some scenes in which Fassbender’s android activates some floating holographic images in the alien HQ.

Your Sister’s Sister: a promising premise and a superb performance wasted

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Your Sister’s Sister wastes a promising premise and the talents of three good actors, one of whom gives a superb performance.

A young man (Mark Duplass) is grieving a loss and his friend (Emily Blunt) suggests that he spend some time at her family’s remote island getaway cabin.  Unbeknownst to them, her sister (Rosemarie Dewitt) is already staying at the cabin.  The guy and the sister get drunk on his first night at the cabin, and the friend shows up unannounced the next morning.  Each of the three does not know a key fact about the other two.  So far so good.

In fact, it’s an excellent dramedy for two-thirds of the movie until the sister bursts out with something like, “I wouldn’t have [spoiler] if I knew that [spoiler]”.  At this point, writer-director Lynne Shelton runs out of creativity and resorts to the dreaded musical interlude, in which each of the characters stomp or bike through the rainy Northwest as the music swells to set up an ending that drew loud derisive hoots from the theater audience.

Too bad, because the actors are very good.  Mark Duplass plays the smart, talented, underachieving, goofy and sweet big lug usually played by Jason Segal or Seth Rogen.  Emily Blunt plays the sarcastic, funny, smart, vulnerable and adorable cutie usually played by Emily Blunt.  But Rosemarie Dewitt creates a wholly original and utterly authentic character that looks like a real person, someone we know in real life.  All of her actions and reactions are completely authentic, whether she’s drinking way too much tequila, pondering her failed relationship or tasting her own vegan pancakes.   Dewitt was also very good as Rachel in Rachel’s Getting Married, and her performance is so good in Your Sister’s Sister that I can’t wait to see her on screen again.