Movie Recommendations, Rants and Ruminations
movie gourmet 
On April 18, you can watch Wasp Woman (1960) on Turner Classic Movies. This is notable because Wasp Woman, a slender, attractive woman wearing an insect mask, has made my list of Least Convincing Movie Monsters. The owner of a cosmetics manufacturer became worried that she was aging out of her looks and injected some wasp material from her R&D lab. She wreaked havoc until carbolic acid was thrown in her face, allowing her to be pushed to death from a skyscraper.
Here’s a guilty pleasure that has earned it way into my Bad Movie Festival and you can watch it on Turner Classic Movies on April 17. In Hot Rods from Hell, Dana Andrews’ (!) innocent family is terrorized by two teen punks and a punkette in the Mojave. This 1967 movie has the odd feel of a 1962 or even 1957 film.
Watch Dana Andrews asking himself why he is in this movie, 23 years after starring in Laura and The Ox-Bow Incident.
The Kid with the Bike is an extraordinary film that tells a riveting story of unconditional love. It is emotionally powerful without being sentimental and is gripping without stunts and explosions. It’s now topping my list of Best Movies of 2012 – So Far. It may be out in theaters for only another week or to, so see it now.
The Hunger Games is a well-paced, well-acted and intelligent sci-fi adventure fable with excellent performances by Jennifer Lawrence and Stanley Tucci.
The Deep Blue Sea is well-crafted and deeply, deeply sad tragedy of a woman (Rachel Weisz) who loves too much.
The Salt of the Earth is a gently funny and insightful Italian comedy about men of a certain age.
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.
The searing and brilliantly constructed Iranian drama A Separation won the Best Foreign Language Oscar. The Best Picture Oscar-winning The Artist is still playing in theaters.
I haven’t yet seen Monsieur Lazhar, which opens 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 The Descendants, a family drama with superb performances by George Clooney and Shailene Woodley.
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.
Two films on my Movies I’m Looking Forward To are coming to the San Francisco International Film Festival in late April.
Polisse is a reputedly riveting French police procedural about the child protective services unit. It was a hit at Cannes and stars an ensemble cast led by Karin Viard (Paris, Potiche, Time Out).
In Oslo August 3, the Danish director Joachim Trier (Reprise made my list of the 2007’s best) returns to Norway with a slice-of-life about a recovering addict.
Find out how to see these films and others at the SFIFF here.
Here’s the trailer for Oslo August 3.
In director Alexander Payne’s first film since Sideways, George Clooney seeks to care for his daughters in Hawaii after his wife is hospitalized, but then learns that she has been cheating on him. That news sends him on a quest that he defines along the way. To complicate things, his daughters are cooperative to various degrees. The heat is turned up even higher by a potential land deal that could make Clooney and his many entitled slacker cousins wildly rich, but the deal’s deadline looms and he is pressured by his VERY interested relations.
The situation is promising enough, but Payne takes the story in unanticipated directions. And, as you would expect from Sideways, there are many funny moments in The Descendants.
Clooney’s performance is brilliant. Here, he does not play The Coolest Man on the Planet. Instead, Clooney is a grinding workaholic who is so clueless about his kids that he doesn’t realize how clueless he is. He is stunned by news of the affair that he never suspected. Perhaps for the first time in his life, he must work through his situation figuring it out as he goes along.
Shailene Woodley’s performance as the older daughter is even more essential to the success of The Descendants. It’s not just that she perfectly plays a bratty teenager, but that we can see that some of her brattiness is hormonal and some of it is entirely voluntary and manipulative. Woodley had to convincingly play a character who is at times self-centered and shallow, but who can rally and reach within herself to serve as the family glue and support her dad and little sister.
The Descendants approaches being a perfect movie but for two things: 1) the daughter’s stoner boyfriend is just too oblivious to be credible among the other colorful yet completely authentic characters; and 2) the audience can never believe that there’s any chance that George Clooney is going to allow bulldozers on thousands of pristine Hawaiian acres. Still, almost perfect is pretty good.
That’s the trailer for a movie I was really looking forward to – Pete Smalls Is Dead. Quirky characters played by Peter Dinklage (The Station Agent) and Mark Boone Junior (Sons of Anarchy) embark on a comic adventure. The rest of the cast is great: Tim Roth, Steve Buscemi, Rosie Perez, Michael Lerner, and Seymour Cassel. Unfortunately, the writing fails the actors, and the movie just isn’t that funny. I fell asleep and had to finish it the next day.
So instead, I recommend that you watch the trailer (much funnier than the movie) and then rent a really funny Peter Dinklage/Steve Buscemi movie – Living in Oblivion. Real life indie director Tom DiCillo (Johnny Suede, Box of Moonlight) wrote Living in Oblivion about skating on the edge of disaster while making a very low-budget indie film. Buscemi plays the indie director, who must deal with a narcissistic leading man (James LeGros), a low self-esteem leading lady (Catherine Keener), a pretentious and self-absorbed cameraman (Dermot Mulroney) and a dwarf actor with an attitude the size of Manitoba (Dinklage). The screenplay is hilarious and the fine actors all nail their roles. Watch and laugh.
Don’t miss The Kid with the Bike, an extraordinary film that tells a riveting story of unconditional love. It is emotionally powerful without being sentimental and is gripping without stunts and explosions – one of the year’s best.
The Hunger Games is a well-paced, well-acted and intelligent sci-fi adventure fable with excellent performances by Jennifer Lawrence and Stanley Tucci.
The Deep Blue Sea is well-crafted and deeply, deeply sad tragedy of a woman (Rachel Weisz) who loves too much.
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.
The drama Detachment features a top-rate performance by Adrien Brody as a teacher in a hellish school system that decays teachers’ souls. In a sizzling performance, Woody Harrelson plays a corrupt and brutal LA cop trying to stay alive and out of jail in Rampart. The searing and brilliantly constructed Iranian drama A Separation won the Best Foreign Language Oscar. The Best Picture Oscar-winning The Artist is still playing in theaters.
I haven’t yet seen The Salt of the Earth, which opens 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 the edgy game changer comedy Young Adult.
In The Deep Blue Sea, an ordinary love triangle becomes a profound tragedy. A woman (Rachel Weisz) leaves her affluent and prestigious older husband (Simon Russell Beale) for a younger man (Tom Hiddleston) who is more vital, but aimless, troubled and unreliable. The younger man cannot match her love for him.
The fling is doomed. The tragedy is that she knows it, but cannot help herself. As with many addictions, her passion for him drives her to do what she knows is self-destructive.
The story is set is grim post-war London and director Terence Davies vividly paints the period and place.
One magically evocative scene takes place in an underground station serving as a bomb shelter during the Blitz. A man sings Molly Malone in a plaintive tenor, with his fellow Londoners joining at the chorus, as the camera slowly pans the train platform filled with people waiting out the raid. In another scene, a pub is filled with singing patrons. Everyone is having fun, sharing a moment of trivial conviviality, but Rachel Weisz is looking at her lover and having a moment of profound feeling.
Weisz is excellent, and all of her scenes with Beale are especially searing. The Deep Blue Sea is well-crafted and deeply, deeply sad.
I was impressed by The Hunger Games, a well-paced, well-acted and intelligent sci-fi adventure fable for tweens – and for the rest of us, too.
Since I apparently live under a rock, I was unaware of the source material, the popular and acclaimed young adult fiction trilogy by Suzanne Collins. The only reason I saw The Hunger Games was to accompany The Wife, who had read the first Hunger Games book. I hadn’t even seen the trailer, so I went in totally blind.
The story is set in the future, where several generations after a rebellion, an authoritarian government plucks teenagers from the formerly rebellious provinces to fight to the death in a forest. It’s all broadcast on reality TV for the entertainment of the masses. Children killing children – it doesn’t get much harsher than that.
Jennifer Lawrence plays the heroine, a poor Appalachian girl who volunteers to compete in place of her little sister. Lawrence starred in Winter’s Bone, my pick for the best movie of 2010. Here she carries the movie with her performance as an incredibly determined and resourceful girl. Her character is completely candid and unfiltered. This creates a moment that is all the more powerful when she has to pull off smarmy inauthenticity for an insipid TV interview.
Stanley Tucci is brilliant as the oleaginous reality TV host – it’s an Oscar-worthy performance.