movie gourmet

Cinequest – Dorfman: nothing to see here, move along

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Dorfman is a well-intentioned indie about a woman who has been sacrificing her own life to support the self-absorbed men in her life.  Moving from the San Fernando Valley to the newly vibrant downtown LA (colorful and trendy, yet edgy) helps bring her a renaissance of spirit.

Unfortunately,the promising premise is betrayed by a cliche ridden screenplay, and poor direction and editing.  The star, Sara Rue, doesn’t bring much to the party, either.  The film only works as a travelogue for downtown LA.

The wily veteran Elliott Gould and Haaz Sleiman (The Visitor, Nurse Jackie) are both good, but they’ll both see much better material than this.

Cinequest – Happy New Year Grandma!: when Grandma is evil

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Monserrat Carulla in HAPPY NEW YEAR, GRANDMA!

The high stress care of a difficult 88-year-old grandmother is tearing a Basque family apart. They think that she’s addled, until one family member after another come to realize that she actually is lucid and diabolical.  She’s so evil that it becomes either her or them.

Monserrat Carulla makes the most of the delicious role as the conniving grannie.  You may have seen her in the excellent Spanish horror film The Orphanage.  The rest of the cast is excellent, too.

It’s a dark comedy and much, much darker than American audiences are used to.  She does some very bad things to sympathetic human characters and to innocent animals.

This Spanish movie is in the Basque language and is also titled Urte Berri On, Amona!.

Cinequest – Come As You Are: two wheelchairs, a white cane and some condoms

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The road trip comedy Come As You Are is about three disabled young Belgian men who yearn to discard their virginity.  Two are in wheelchairs and one is blind.  After hearing about a brothel that caters to guys with special needs, they plot a road trip to Spain’s Costa del Sol.  They need their parents to send them with a male nurse, but not to come along or know the true destination.  All goes well, until the parents withdraw their permission and our heroes sneak off under the care of a necessary evil, a no-nonsense female nurse.  Their getaway is expedited by a very funny 11 year-old kid sister.

Along the way, their individual personalities are exposed (for better and for worse) and they experience real unsheltered freedom for the first time (with its pluses and minuses).  It’s a little movie with some poignant moments among the laughs.

The film, titled Hasta La Vista in Europe, is mostly in Flemish, with some French and English.

Cinequest – Children of the Green Dragon: competing for a warehouse and the pizza girl

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CHILDREN OF THE GREEN DRAGON

In Children of the Green Dragon, a hangdog Hungarian real estate agent must avoid getting fired by selling a rundown warehouse that is currently rented to a shady Chinese import company.  The Chinese watchman is tasked, for his part, to prevent the sale of the warehouse – or face an additional year of involuntary servitude.  Surprisingly, they bond.

This movie is about the  culture clash between the two guys.  Their relationship blossoms despite that and despite their competing job interests.  Then both become fascinated by an edgy pizza delivery woman.  It’s a funny and sweet little film.

The film is titled A Zold Sarkany Gyermekei in Hungarian.

Cinequest – King Curling: surprising hilarity from the Norse ice

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This Norwegian comedy, set in a sport that even the Norwegians find to be odd and boring, is HILARIOUS.  The star of a curling team suffers a psychotic breakdown and, after years of treatment, is released from an asylum heavily medicated.  To win money for a friend’s lifesaving operation, the curling team must win a tournament and the star needs to go off his meds to regain his game skills.

It’s a broad comedy, but the key is that the actors aren’t trying to be funny, a la Jack Black or Will Ferrell.  Instead, they play it absolutely straight, relying on the characters, situations and dialogue to generate the laughs.  And laughs, they are aplenty.

The curling star tries to maintain despite his recurring hallucinations of floating pink lint.  One of the Norwegian curlers, a womanizer with unusually low standards,  keeps lapsing into American gangsta street talk.  Another has a long-lost father who turns up as, of course, a Rod Stewart impersonator who doesn’t sound remotely like Rod Stewart.  And then there’s the kissing dog.  You gotta see this movie – it’s a top drawer broad comedy.

It’s playing again at Cinequest tonight (March 2) and tomorrow (March 3).

All New Movies to See This Week

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Woody Harrelson in RAMPART

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.

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 Outrage, the hardass Japanese gangster movie with lots of dull body tattoos and severed fingers.

Rampart: a sizzling portrait of a man spinning out of control

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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.

DVD of the Week: Outrage

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Okay, the Oscars are over.  In case you’re done with high-falutin’ cinema, here’s a hardass gangster movie with deliciously bad people doing acts of extreme violence upon each other – Outrage (Autoreiji).  Like any good Yakuza film, there are lots of full body tattoos and severed fingers.

But what makes Outrage stand out is the pace and stylishness of all the nastiness, as if Quentin Tarantino had made Goodfellas (only without all the extra dialogue about foot rubs and the Royale with cheese).

Director Takeshi Kitano also stars, credited as Beat Takeshi.  Takeshi, much like Charles Bronson, has the worn and rough face of a man who has seen too much disappointment and brutality.

Outrage is just filmed too brightly to qualify as a film noir, but the story has all the tragedy of a classic noir.  You’re rooting for the characters to survive, but you know that they probably won’t – and they know it, too.

There is also a crime boss so cynical and duplicitous that he puts the Sopranos to shame.

Outrage is not a great movie, but is plenty entertaining if you’re in the mood.

The 2012 Oscars: meh

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The good news is that there weren’t any huge surprises at the Oscars.  All of the awards were deserved, even Meryl Streep’s (I would have preferred Michele Williams or Viola Davis to win Best Actress).

The bad news was that the show was a bit of a  drudge and instantly forgettable.

The producers made some good choices this year: 1) dropping the full-length renditions of nominated songs; 2) reshuffling the order of awards to mix in the boring ones; 3) limiting the Academy President’s drone to about 30 seconds; 4) subbing in the spectacular Cirque du Soleil for the usual big dance number snorefest; and 5) bringing in the Best of Show/A Mighty Wind cast for a skit on a studio focus group in 1939.  The show was well-paced and ended relatively on-time.

The Academy used the telecast to deliver a message – “Watch our movies in a theater – not on your iPhone!”.  Unfortunately, the delivering was both vague and heavy-handed, using talking heads and a pointless montage of random great film moments.

So the framework was better than in the past, but the Academy still needs to punch up this show.

some random thoughts on tonight’s Oscars

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Oscar deserving Michele Williams (with Dougray Scott as Arthur Miller) in MY WEEK WITH MARILYN

I’m really not too exercised about tonight’s Oscars because I trust that it will a good night for my favorites among the nominated films:  The Artist and The Descendants.  Most of the nominations are relatively deserved, so it’s not like two years ago, when I was gnashing my teeth over the battle between The Hurt Locker (my fave) and Avatar (NOT my fave).

I am really rooting for Michele Williams to win the Best Actress Oscar.  Her performance is deserving, and she warrants recognition as the best of our younger actresses – and one who bravely picks quality scripts (Brokeback Mountain, Wendy and Lucy, Blue Valentine).

If you’re betting, the three biggest locks are Christopher Plummer for Supporting Actor,  Rango for Animated Feature and A Separation for Foreign Language Picture.