movie gourmet

Cinequest – Let the Bullets Fly: can 1.3 billion Chinese be wrong?

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Ever seen a movie where the outlaw rides into town and sticks up for the little guys against the local bully of a crime boss?  Well, maybe so, but you probably haven’t seen a movie like Let the Bullets Fly (Rang Zidan Fei), which is set in southeastern China in the Chinese warlord period around 1919.

For one thing, it’s an unusually exuberant film that’s extremely funny for an action western.

For another, it’s a deeply cynical assessment of government corruption.  It quickly becomes apparent that the professional bandit is more honest and reliable than any of the local institutions.  (That subtext is not lost on the Chinese public.)

And the Chinese movie fans have embraced Let the Bullets Fly.  It’s the highest-grossing Chinese language movie ever, and is the all-time #2 most popular movie in China (behind Avatar).

Writer-director Wen Jiang plays the stalwart bandit hero who substitutes himself for the newly arriving appointed Governor (played by You Ge as a hilariously unabashed sleazeball).  Jiang’s bandit comes up against the local baddie (Chow Yun Fat), who doesn’t want to relinquish any of his power or ill-gotten gains.  As the two match wits, a fast, funny and utterly rambunctious ride ensues.

In this case, 1.3 billion Chinese are correct – this is one fun movie.

Coming up on TV: The Stunt Man

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On March 11, Turner Classic Movies is showing The Stunt Man (1980).  It’s on a list of Overlooked Masterworks that I’m working on.

Steve Railsback plays a fugitive chased on to a movie location shoot.  The director (Peter O’Toole) hides him out on the set as long as he works as a stunt double in increasingly hazardous stunts.  The man on the run is attracted to the leading lady (Barbara Hershey).  It doesn’t take long for him to doubt the director’s good will and to learn that not everything is as it seems.  Shot on location at San Diego’s famed Hotel Del Coronado. Listen to Director Robert Rush describe his movie in this clip.

Cinequest – Percival’s Big Night: screwball comedy for hipsters

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Imagine if Howard Hawks were making a screwball comedy today –  a guy and a girl spar with snappy patter, survive the crazed antics of their goofy friends and fall in love.   If he set the movie in the shambles of a hipster pot dealer’s NYC apartment, you’d have Percival’s Big Night, one of the gems of Cinequest 22.

You’ll recognize the set-up:  Two 24-year-old underachievers have so far made the least of their BFAs.  Percy is infatuated with Chloe, and needs his roommate Sal to introduce her to him.  Chloe arrives with her friend Riku, who is appropriately crazy enough to match up with Sal.   The guys and girls bicker and banter, eavesdrop on each other and pair into couples.

What’s so refreshingly welcome about Percival’s Big Night is how well all of this is executed, due to the frantically paced dialogue from writer-director Jarret Kerr, who also stars as Sal.  It’s briskly paced by director Will Sullivan and very, very funny.

The cast has performed Percival’s Big Night as an off-Broadway play.  They were able to shoot the movie in six 15-minute captures that are blended together to look like one shot.  Because of the madcap pace, the audience isn’t distracted by the single shot; instead, the technique intensifies the story compressed into the small apartment.

Percival’s Big Night is enough of crowd-pleaser to deserve theatrical release; in any case, hopefully, it will be available soon on cable TV, DVD, streaming or some other outlet.

Movies to See This Week

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Writer-director Asghar Farhadi's real life daughter Samina plays the daughter at the center of A SEPARATION

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.

Joshua Marston, writer-director of the brilliant Maria, Full of Grace has made a fine drama set in Albania, The Forgiveness of Blood, which opens this weekend.

Safe House is a fine paranoid action spy thriller with Denzel Washington and the director’s pedal jammed to the floor. Thin Ice is a Fargo Lite diversion.

If you still need to catch up on the Oscar winners, you can see the Best Picture Oscar winning The Artist and the rockem sockem thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,

I have also commented on Steven Spielberg’s War Horse, the sex addiction drama Shame, the biopic The Iron Lady, the feminist action thriller Haywire and Ralph Fiennes’ contemporary adaption of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.

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

My DVD pick of (last) week is the fine political drama The Ides of March with Ryan Gosling, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti and George Clooney.

The Forgiveness of Blood: modern teens trapped by ancient idiocy

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The new film by Joshua Marston, writer-director of the brilliant Maria, Full of Grace, is about a bizarre custom that has survived in modern Albania.  When a person is killed, a blood feud begins, and the relatives of the killer cannot leave their homes until released by the family of the victim.  Families can and do spend years – even a decade – in self-imposed house arrest enforced by the wronged family upon pain of death.  This is the way of the ancient Albanian oral tradition, the Kanun.  The most bizarre aspect of the house arrest is that it still exists in an otherwise modern world, among people using cell phones and text messaging.

But it is a mistake to look on The Forgiveness of Blood as “the Albanian blood feud movie” because Marston focuses on the teenagers in the family.  What can it be like for a teen to be isolated in his house indefinitely?  Teens have no greater craving than to be with their peers.  American kids can get bored while surrounded by games, Internet access and 400 TV channels.  You can imagine sitting in rural Albania with four walls and Albanian TV.  Teens are also so dramatic and impulsive, the mere threat of death isn’t always enough to prevent a rash act.  And then there are the hormones…

This is the omnipresent tension in The Forgiveness of Blood – what happens when the kids just can’t stand it any longer?   The adults all accept a cultural logic, but the kids can see that this custom doesn’t make any sense.

The movie, as befits rural Albania, has a leisurely pace, but there is a throbbing tension underneath.  That ever present tension, and the look into a strange aspect of another culture, make me recommend The Forgiveness of Blood.

Here’s the teaser (which I like more) and then the trailer.

 

Cinequest – Salt: the best spaghetti western this year

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I love spaghetti westerns and so does the protagonist of Salt (Sal), a would-be screenwriter who must have the only cat in Spain named Clint.  He has written a movie set in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth, but nobody else thinks it’s any good.  When he decides to visit the Atacama to improve his script, he is mistaken by all the locals for someone else – the guy who had cuckolded the local crime boss.  That first night in Chile, he is plunged into a real life shoot em up and is soon experiencing a story that Sergio Leone himself would have loved to film.

Much of the fun is in the fact that our hero has never shot a gun or been shot at, and he doesn’t take easily to either – he’s no Clint, for sure.   Salt is filmed in the style of a modern-day spaghetti western and comes with its own spaghetti western score with jangly guitar and jarring harmonica.  If you love A Fistful of Dollars, this is the movie for you.  Even if you don’t love the spaghetti western, you’ll find this a satisfyingly funny movie.

I attended the North American premiere of Salt at Cinequest 22.

Cinequest – Faust: a strikingly original slog

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Mephistopheles and Faust in FAUST

Faust is Russian director Aleksander Sokurov‘s take on the famous story of a man who bargains with the devil for knowledge of the profound, with a young hottie thrown in the deal for good measure.

I saw this film primarily because I had admired Sokurov‘s Russian Ark, a 19th century period drama in which an aristocrat wanders through St. Petersburg’s Hermitage and encounters figures from earlier in Russian history.  Sokurov filmed the entire 99-minute movie in a single shot.  That’s a gimmick, but even beyond the singular achievement of the one shot, Russian Ark is a complete and effective film.

The German language Faust is also strikingly original.  Filmed in the Czech Republic, Sokurov vividly creates a grimy and economically depressed German town of the early 1800s.  The alleys, doorways and staircases are all so narrow that people are constantly jammed together. Sokurov’s Faust is not an old man, but a 40-year-old beaten down by poverty and malaise.  Similarly, his Mephistopheles is not a slick charmer, but physically gross and repellent character who is a canny manipulator.

Unfortunately, the originality is for naught, because the film fails to engage the viewer.  You watch Faust with the indifference one feels while observing someone park a car awkwardly.

Faust’s Aspect Ratio is a TV-like 1.37 : 1 (but goes wider for the final scene),  which is odd for a literary epic.  And some of the scenes are filmed through a distorted lens for some reason.  The 140 minute length just contributes to the sense of self-indulgence by Sokurov.   It’s not a pleasant way to spend 140 minutes of your life.

DVD of the Week: The Ides of March

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It being Super Tuesday and all, let’s go with a film about electoral politics, The Ides of March.  George Clooney directed, co-wrote and stars in this contemporary political drama. It’s an engrossing story about ambition, loyalty and betrayal.  The story revolves around an up-and-coming political consultant (Ryan Gosling).  He is working under a veteran campaign manager (Philip Seymour Hoffman) in a Democratic Presidential primary.  He is wooed by the campaign manager (Paul Giamatti) for the opposing candidate, and the intrigue begins.

Two performances stand out.  Philip Seymour Hoffman perfectly captures the old school politico, now jaded, but able to access the idealism that first drove him into politics.  Ryan Gosling can soar in any kind of role.  Here he is smart, but is he smart enough?  He is well-intentioned, but can it overcome his ambition? Gosling keeps us on the edge of our seats as he navigates a snake pit of betrayals.

The rest of the cast is good, too:  Giamatti, Evan Rachel Wood as an ambitious intern and Marisa Tomei as a hard-nosed reporter.

It’s a movie that MOSTLY gets the politics right.  The fundamental truth of the movie is that an utterly cynical veteran politico can still fall in love with candidate, as Hoffman’s campaign manager does with Clooney’s candidate.

In another dead on accurate touch, Hoffman and Gosling need a room to privately pass on some bad news to Clooney.  Instead of finding a cramped office, the three men sit on folding chairs knee-to-knee in a room that could accommodate 200.  That stuff really happens.

Unfortunately, Ides gets some things wrong.  Would never happen:  A veteran strategist like Hoffman would never be surprised by the possibility of “mischief voting” in an open primary.  Real life campaign consultants would never discuss policy positions with a candidate in a room full of thirty 20-somethings, all itching to leak what they know.   And no veteran politico worth his salt would tell a reporter about a deal that is not done.

Nonetheless, it’s a movie that I recommend.

Cinequest – The Ghastly Love of Johnny X: gum-chewing greasers bring fun from Outer Space

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You gotta like a movie whose tag line is: “They sing! They dance! They’re juvenile delinquents from outer space!”  I saw The Ghastly Love of Johnny X at its world premiere at Cinequest 22, and writer-director Paul Bunnell said that he was primarily inspired by the teenage delinquent movies of the 50’s.  But it’s also clear that Bunnell has seen more than his share of sci-fi movies from the 50s (and maybe a Russ Meyer film or two).

Bunnell evoked the genre by shooting in a crisply beautiful black and white (on the last of Kodak’s 35mm black and white Plus X film stock).  Ghastly Love is about some space aliens in the form of T-bird driving hard guys.  Having been exiled to our planet,  they grease their hair and snap their gum, and occasionally break into a musical number.

Before I saw it, I was concerned that Ghastly Love might be trying too hard to be the next The Rocky Horror Picture Show cult classic, but, not to  worry, Ghastly Love definitely stands on its own.  The cast and crew evidently had fun making this picture, and the fun carries over to the audience.

This was the last film for the late Kevin McCarthy, who was enough of a good sport to don a Devo hat and play the Grand Inquisitor.  McCarthy, whose Oscar-nominated performance as Biff in Death of a Salesman was 61 years ago, brought some sci-fi cred from the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Cinequest – Forgetting the Girl: ooooof! so this is a horrror movie…

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Forgetting the Girl starts out like a romantic comedy about a quirky but appealing guy with some emotional issues, and then sucker punches the audience by revealing itself in the final 15 minutes to be a horror film.  The abrupt change of pace is both a strength and weakness of the film.

This is the first feature from director Nate Taylor, from a story by Peter Moore Smith.  I understand that the sudden, explosive violence is supposed to rock the viewer, but I think that I would have enjoyed the film more if the early tone had better prepared me for the darkness to follow.  Instead, the early part is too much Guy Meets Girl, etc.  Taylor then lingers too long on the episodes of horror at the end.  Taylor might benefit from screening Michael Powell’s disturbing horror classic Peeping Tom a few times more to improve the pacing.

Taylor does an excellent job with a red herring in the plot, and shows real promise at producing creepiness and tension.

I saw Forgetting the Girl at its world premiere at Cinequest 22, with the audience packed with friends and family of the filmmakers.  This audience responded more enthusiastically than I think most will.