movie gourmet

Movies to See this Week

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MONSIEUR LAZHAR

My top pick this week is once again Monsieur Lazhar, the story of French-Canadian fifth graders recovering from a traumatic experience with their replacement teacher, an Algerian immigrant. It’s an emotionally compelling film that was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.

On a lighter note, Goon is a hockey comedy that manages to be violent, raunchy and sweet.

In Footnote, a rising Talmudic scholar sees his career-topping prize accidentally awarded to his grumpy father. This potentially comic situation reveals the characters of the two men.

Then there’s the searing and brilliantly constructed Iranian drama A Separation, which won the Best Foreign Language Oscar, and the Best Picture Oscar-winning The Artist. Both are still still playing in theaters.

You can skip Damsels in Distress, Whit Stillman’s misfire of an absurdist campus comedy.

I have not yet seen Pirates! Band of Misfits, The Five-Year Engagement or The Hunter, all opening this week. You can read descriptions and view trailers of these and other upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD pick this week is Michele Williams’ dazzling performance in My Week with Marilyn.

Coming Up on TV: Lawrence of Arabia

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Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia

It’s time to revisit a spectacle. On April 29, Turner Classic movies is broadcasting Lawrence of Arabia. For decades, many of us watched this epic squeezed into tinny-sounding TVs. In 1989, I was fortunate enough to see the director’s cut in an old movie palace. Now technology has caught up, and modern large screen HD televisions can do this wide screen classic justice. Similarly, modern home sound systems can work with the great Maurice Jarre soundtrack.

Nobody has ever created better epics than director David Lean (Bridge Over the River Kwai, Dr. Zhivago). Peter O’Toole stars at the moment of his greatest physical beauty. The rest of the cast is unsurpassed: Omar Sharif, Jose Ferrer, Anthony Quinn, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains, Arthur Kennedy, thousands of extras and entire herds of camels. The vast and severe Arabian desert is a character unto itself.

Settle in and watch the whole thing – and remember what “epic” really means.

DVD of the Week: My Week with Marilyn

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Not only is Michele Williams one of our finest film actors (Wendy and Lucy, Blue Valentine, Brokeback Mountain),  but she has the courage to play that icon Marilyn Monroe.  And she does so in a dazzling performance.  Williams so inhabits the persona of Marilyn that we suspend recognition of the physical differences between the two.

My Week with Marilyn is about a young man observing the encounter between Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) during the making of the 1957’s The Prince and the Showgirl.  That movie starred and was directed by Olivier, who expected a high level of craft, promptness and professionalism from all actors.  Naturally, Marilyn, with all of her neediness, professional unreliabilty and reliance on The Method, was a bad fit.

Williams perfectly tunes in each frequency of the Marilyn dial, from the terrified, insecure actress to the confident sex symbol.  There’s a great moment – after we’ve already seen her as troubled, flirtatious, needy, mischievous and, above all, lonely  – where she announces that she will become “Her”; she flips an inner switch and becomes the Marilyn sex symbol persona, delighting a crowd of regular folks.

The underrated Zoe Wanamaker has a great turn as Marilyn’s Method acting coach. Judi Dench is perfect as a kind veteran actress.  Emma Watson (so good as Hermione in the Harry Potter films) has an unfortunately tiny role as a non-wizard young adult.  Dougray Scott, Dominic Cooper, Julia Ormand and Toby Jones fill out the great cast.  Wanamaker, Scott and Jones play American characters flawlessly.

Upcoming movies: late April edition

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After a dry spell, we’re starting to get promising movies by the handful.  This weekend will bring a promising Hollywood romantic comedy, The Five-Year Engagement, the animated Pirates! Band of Misfits and the indie thriller The Hunter.

The Five-Year Engagement features Forgetting Sarah Marshall’s writer-star Jason Segal and the director Nicholas Stoller, plus Emily Blunt.

Pirates! Band of Misfits comes from Aardman Studios, the folks that created Wallace and Gromit.

The weekend after will bring The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a story of aged Brits seeking a low-budget retirement in India that looks like fluff, but fun fluff.  Great cast:  Bill Nighy, Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Maggie Smith, Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire), Celia Imrie, Penelope Wilton (Downton Abbey).

You can read descriptions and watch the trailers on my Movies I’m Looking Forward To page.

In The Hunter,  Willem Dafoe stars as a hunter sent to find the Tasmanian Tiger, thought extinct.  He looks for the beast, finds a thriller.  Here’s the trailer.

 

Coming Up on TV: Pigskin Parade

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Football fans may be interested in the silly comedy Pigskin Parade because it shows how college football was played in 1936.  It airs on Turner Classic Movies on April 22.

Like many sports movies, Pigskin Parade ends with a climactic game – and there’s footage of real football being played in a snowstorm (in long shot) interspersed with the comic movie football (in medium shot).  You can see the formations, men in motion and punt formation.  I knew about the leather helmets for the players, but I didn’t know that the referees wore unstriped white Knickerbockers and baker boy caps or that the coaches sent in  substitutions by written note.

Jack Haley plays a dim football coach hired at the fictional Texas State.  His spark plug wife (the very funny Patsy Kelly) is the real football brain.  Out in the countryside, they find a hayseed QB who can throw the ball out of the stadium and outrun a deer when he is barefoot; he is played by Stuart Erwin (who garnered a Supporting Actor Oscar nod).

In the final game, Texas State, referred to as “Texas” by the radio broadcaster, is a big underdog to Yale.  Yale was indeed a power at the time.  Yale players won the Heisman in both 1936 and 1937.

Pigskin Parade was the first feature film for Judy Garland and the second acting credit of over 200 for Elisha Cook Jr.  Betty Grable appears before she became a star.  Judy, Betty and Elisha are all billed below the comic quartet The Yacht Club Boys.  (Creepiness alert:  all but one of The Yacht Club Boys were way too old to be hanging around a college campus acting zany and wearing varsity gear.)

Movies to See this Week

by
MONSIEUR LAZHAR

My top pick this week is Monsieur Lazhar, the story of French-Canadian fifth graders recovering from a traumatic experience with their replacement teacher, an Algerian immigrant.  It’s an emotionally compelling film that was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.

On a lighter note, Goon is a hockey comedy that manages to be violent, raunchy and sweet.

In Footnote, a rising Talmudic scholar sees his career-topping prize accidentally awarded to his grumpy father. This potentially comic situation reveals the characters of the two men.

Then there’s the searing and brilliantly constructed Iranian drama A Separation, which won the Best Foreign Language Oscar, and the Best Picture Oscar-winning The Artist.  Both are still still playing in theaters.

You can skip Damsels in Distress, Whit Stillman’s misfire of an absurdist campus comedy.

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

My DVD pick this week is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, director David Fincher’s hold-on-to-your-seat version of Stieg Larsson’s rip snorting stories centered on the damaged and driven Goth hacker Lisbeth Salander.

Levon Helm RIP

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We just lost Levon Helm to throat cancer. Of course, he is best known as the drummer and singer with the influential rock group The Band – it’s Levon’s voice on Up on Cripple Creek, The Weight and The Night They Drove Dixie Down, among others. He appeared with The Band in Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece 1978 concert film The Last Waltz.

Levon also had a rich movie career. His 17 acting credits include some very top shelf stuff. He was Loretta’s father in Coal Miner’s Daughter. In The Right Stuff, he played Ridley, test pilot Chuck Yeager’s aircraft mechanic, the guy who loans him Beeman’s chewing gum before each life-risking test flight. He was also the narrator in The Right Stuff.

Levon Helm in THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA

I particularly loved one of his last roles, Old Man with Radio in Tommy Lee Jones’ overlooked 2005 The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Playing a blind man living alone on the Mexican border, he was absolutely haunting.

Here’s an 8-minute clip from The Right Stuff in which Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier for the first time. The scene is introduced by Levon Helm as the narrator, and then Levon as Ridley helps Yeager (Sam Shepherd) into the test plane and loans him his Beeman’s. What a wonderful voice.

Goon: violence, vulgarity and a nice Jewish boy

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Doug Glatt is not very smart and he knows it.  He struggles to find the right word in every situation.  Because his only talent is the ability to knock others unconscious, he is only in demand as a bar bouncer.  But Doug is not a brute – he is goodhearted and loyal, and yearns to be part of something.  By chance, Doug gets hired by a minor league hockey team to become its thuggish enforcer – despite his inability to ice skate.

We get lots of funny hockey violence a la the Hanson Brothers in Slap Shot.  It’s very funny when Doug mangles his every attempt at cogent conversation.  The comedy also comes from Doug’s innocent fish out of water in the cynical, sleazy and cutthroat world of minor league hockey.  (He’s even reverential about the team logo on the locker room floor.)

There are lots of nice comic touches.  For example, when Doug becomes a sensation, one of his fans in the stands holds up a sign reading “Doug 3:69” (Doug wears jersey number 69); we glimpse the sign for only a second, but I appreciate the filmmakers planting such nuggets in the movie.  Doug is also that rarity – a Jewish hockey goon, with parents horrified that he isn’t following his brother to med school.

Although plenty raunchy, Goon is a rung above the normal gross-out guy comedy because Doug is such a fundamentally good and well-meaning person.  As Doug, Seann William Scott (Stifler in American Pie) plays a naive simpleton, but one fiercely committed to his core values.  It’s got to be hard to play that combination, and Scott’s performance is special.

The cast is excellent.  Co-writer Jay Baruchel plays Doug’s sophomoric friend.  Alison Pill (Milk, Midnight in Paris) is the troubled smart girl who can’t figure out why she’s attracted to a word-fumbling hockey goon.  Liev Schreiber, excellent as always,  dons a Fu Manchu and a mullet to play the league’s toughest goon.  Kim Coates, who almost stole A Little Help as the personal injury attorney, plays the coach.

Perhaps because it has just been released, Goon hasn’t yet made Wikipedia’s “Films that most frequently use the word “f**k”, but I am sure that it meets the qualifying threshold of 150 f-bombs.

Damsels in Distress: say it ain’t so, Whit

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What writer-director Whit Stillman does really well is bring us unto the world of old money Eastern preppies with their refined manners and their odd customs like debutante balls.  His well-educated characters have earnest late-night existential conversations in complete sentences.  Nobody else does this, and Stillman’s dialogue has always kept me wholly absorbed.  That’s why I liked his films Metropolitan and Barcelona so much.

What Stillman does not do well is absurdist film, like his current entry, Damsels in Distress, set in a Northeastern liberal arts college that is decidedly non-Ivy.  Indie film darling Greta Gerwig plays the seriously off-kilter leader of some coeds who are intent on rescuing fellow students from depression, fashion mistakes and bad hygiene, whether they want it or not.

While his earlier films were earnestly realistic, Damsels is way over the top.  The girls’ boyfriends are so stupid that one does not yet know his colors.  Gerwig’s character is so obviously disturbed that anyone, even a horny college male, would run the other way.

That means that the patter of Stillman’s dialogue must carry the day, and it fails him.  Gerwig’s two friends are one-note jokes – one profoundly stupid, the other profoundly suspicious – that aren’t that funny the first time.  There are lame body odor jokes.  The fraternity system uses Roman, rather than Greek letters – which is not the sidesplitter that Stillman may imagine.

For sure, there are some funny moments.  At the campus Suicide Prevention Center (the word “Prevention” keeps falling off the sign)  Gerwig offers a fellow student a doughnut, but then snatches it back after one bite when she discovers that he isn’t the suicidal one.  One student has adopted the Cathar religion, which he associates with a certain sexual practice.  But, over all, the movie is not funny.  Worst of all, it’s not engaging.

Analeigh Tipton, who was very good as the smitten babysitter in Crazy Stupid Love, does especially well again as a transfer student who falls under Gerwig’s wing.

My recommendations:  1) Stillman should leave the absurdism to Bunuel and 2) the rest of us can skip Damsels to watch Metropolitan and Barcelona.

Monsieur Lazhar: sometimes a kid needs a hug most of all

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A fifth grade class in Montreal loses its teacher in just about the worst possible way – she hangs herself in their classroom at recess.  Monsieur Lazhar is about how the kids face this trauma with their replacement teacher, an Algerian immigrant.  The school gets a psychologist to lecture to the kids, but bans them from otherwise mentioning the suicide in class – a rule designed to minimize the discomfort of the administrators and parents.  Meanwhile, the school’s zero tolerance rule against touching children means that the kids can’t get a reassuring hug.

The new teacher, Monsieur Lazhar (well-played by Mohammed Fellag), is a traditionalist who demands respect but with humor and compassion.  He also seems oddly ignorant of modern teaching methods.  Although mild-mannered, he is fiercely devoted to protecting the kids.  That devotion keeps him from sharing his own burden with the children, for we learn that he, too, has reason to grieve.

Monsieur Lazhar was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar and won Canada’s equivalent of the Best Picture Oscar.  The child actors are superb.  It’s an uncommonly sweet and powerful film.