movie gourmet

Roger Corman: what a legacy!

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The prolific low-budget producer Roger Corman has died at 98, leaving behind a legacy far greater than the 491 titles that he produced. Corman’s great gift to us all is his mentorship of young and talented filmmakers.  Filmmakers who got their first assignment from Corman (called “the Corman Film School”) include Oscar winning directors James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Curtis Hanson, Ron Howard and Martin Scorsese.  Not to mention cult directors Paul Bartels and Monte Hellman. And Chinatown screenwriter Robert Townsend.

Jack Nicholson first got some attention playing the masochistic dental patient in Corman’s 1960 Little Shop of Horrors.  Nicholson showed up again in Corman’s 1967 The Wild Angels (biker gangs), 1967 The Shooting (trippy Western) and 1967’s LSD flick The Trip (psychedelics), all before Easy Rider sparked his stardom in 1969..

Corman’s formula was to make lots of cheap exploitation films for the teenage audience. Low cost meant low risk, and low risk attracted financing.. In one four-year period, he produced The Student Nurses, Private Duty Nurses, Night Call Nurses and Candy Stripe Nurses – and 21 other movies! The signatures of Corman’s mostly shameless and delicious exploitation movies are that 1) they don’t have fancy production values; 2) they are fast-paced and not too long; and 3) they’re a kick.

As a teen myself, I remember seeing Corman’s Boxcar Bertha, a tale of a Depression Era labor organizer, at a drive-in, chiefly motivated by the urge to see Barbara Hershey’s breasts (nudity was then unusual in American movies). With Boxcar Bertha as his calling card, its young director (Martin Scorsese) had the cred to make his breakthrough film Mean Streets and to follow it with Taxi Driver, New York, New York, The Last Waltz and Raging Bull.

Probably the best movie that Corman has produced was Saint Jack (1976), directed by Peter Bogdanovich.  Corman had given Bogdanovich his start, and in the intervening twelve years Bogdanovich’s star had risen (The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon) and fallen (Daisy Miller).   Ben Gazzara and Denholm Elliott delivered great performances in this story of a hustling American expat running a GI brothel in Singapore during the Vietnam War.

In the 70s, Corman combined making lowbrow American movies with distributing highbrow foreign films, including  Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, Fellini’s Amarcord, Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzawa and Schlondorff’s The Tin Drum.  In one decade, he distributed more Best Foreign Film Oscar winners than all the Hollywood studios combined.

We’ll miss you, Roger!

RELATIVE: a loving, but insistent investigation

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Photo caption: A scene from Tracey Arcabasso Smith’s RELATIVE. Courtesy of Gravitas.

Relative is filmmaker Tracey Arcabasso Smith’s reflective exploration of intergenerational sexual abuse in her own family.   As Smith lovingly, but insistently, interviews her family members, she uncovers an epidemic of abuse in generation after generation.  Relative becomes ever more powerful as Smith refuses to sensationalize, but stays centered on the strength and humanity of the women on camera.  Finally, Relative takes us to how the cycle of abuse can be broken. 

This is a brilliantly edited film (by Jeremy Stulberg, Ian Olds and Natasha Livia Motola) – first person testimonies are inter-cut with the home movies of a lively family – a family we now understand was stained with corrosive secrets. 

Relative is the first feature for director Arcabasso Smith. (BTW the unadorned word Relative is a great title for this story.)

I screened Relative for the 2022 Nashville Film Festival. It’s now available to stream on Amazon (included with prime), AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube. 

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Zendaya in CHALLENGERS. Courtesy of MGM.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – new reviews of Challengers, Civil War and Ennio. It’s May, and we finally have two movies in theaters that will rank with 2024’s best: Challengers and La Chimera.

CURRENT MOVIES

WATCH AT HOME

 Itsaso Arana in THE AUGUST VIRGIN. Photo courtesy of Outsider Pictures.

The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:

ON TV

Lizabeth Scott, Dick Powell and Raymond Burr in PITFALL

On May 16, Turner Classic Movies features one of my Overlooked Noir, Pitfall (1948), a noir thriller without either a conventional sap or a conventional femme fatale. Dick Powell plays a WW II vet who is bored with the post-war suburban humdrum, and Lizabeth Scott plays a gal with terrible taste in boyfriends. Neither deserves to be dragged into a thriller, but they are. Raymond Burr, again, makes for a menacing sicko stalker.

Dick Powell and Lizabeth Scott in PITFALL

CIVIL WAR: a most cautionary message

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Photo caption: Kirsten Dunst in CIVIL WAR. Courtesy of A24.

Alex Garland’s unsettling thriller Civil War is a different movie than anyone expects.

An America in the near future is embroiled in a civil war, but it’s NOT sectarian violence along the Red State/Blue State axis that divides America today. Writer-director Garland never explicitly explains the cause of the war, but he leaves enough clues, especially when a blowhard, propagandist President (Nick Offerman) refers to his “third term”, which he must have seized unconstitutionally. A band of journalists are dispassionate about what the two sides are fighting about, but forecast that the President is about to be deposed like despots Nicolae Ceausescu and Muammar Ghaddafi.

We see the civil war through the eyes of the journalists, led by two veterans from Reuters, war photographer Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and her writing partner Joel (Wagner Moura). They are joined by an old school New York Times political reporter, Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and a young free-lance photographer, Jessie (Cailee Spaenee of Priscilla), who idolizes Lee and is covering her very first conflict.

The four are on a quest for a journalistic holy grail, to secure what they will believe will be the very last interview with the President. They drive to DC from New York on a circuitous route, navigating through battle-torn upstate New York, western Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Virginia. Essentially, the plot of Civil War is their harrowing road trip through the war zone, moving from vignette to vignette, which range from terrifying to surreal.

Civil War‘s substantial impact comes from the depiction of the familiar in an unfamiliar setting. We are used to seeing the atrocities of insurgency wars, both in news reports and fictional stories. Accordingly, we may be inured to the horror of a mass grave of executed civilians – if it is in, say, Serbia or Sudan. The same is true of an encounter with a fighter with an assault weapon-bearing fighter who can kill you on a whim. Indeed, Civil War has much the same feel as movies like The Killing Fields, Salvador or Hotel Rwanda.

The shocking difference is these horrors are taking place in the old U S of A. (There’s a brief, jarring shot of a red, white and blue flag with only two stars.) At one point, Lee says that she has been sending home photos of other people’s civil conflicts as a warning to Americans – avoid this at all costs. Civil War is a message picture, and this is the message. Lee is used to witnessing nightmarish things and compartmentalizing them so she can go about her job amid the horrors. But seeing them in her home nation brings her anguish, which she is less and less able to contain.

The most surreal scene is when the journalists drive into a hamlet where life goes on as if there is no civil war, and an apathetic store clerk will only observe “from what we see on TV, it’s all for the best.”

Kirsten Dunst’s performance as Lee carries Civil War; she’s our moral center, a bad ass whose soul is crushed before our eyes.

Stephen McKinley Henderson, as usual, projects warmth, canniness and lived experience; he’s really a treasure. Cailee Spaenee is 26, but looks much younger (young enough to play a 14-year-old in Priscilla); unlike in Priscilla, her character in Civil War has a lot of agency, and she’s very good. Jesse Plemons (Dunst’s real life husband) is brilliant in a cameo as the random judge-and-jury soldier with an assault weapon.

Like many who had seen the trailer, I was expecting a much different movie – one I really didn’t want to experience. When I found that it was the creation of Alex Garland and had gotten some rave reviews, I decided to see it. But I put it off until I could go to the theater with my buddy Keith, who shares many of my sensibilities, for support.

As it turned out, Keith didn’t like Civil War, primarily because the source of the conflict is not explicitly explained, and the idea of a California-Texas alliance is so absurd. And, as a photographer himself, he was distracted by Jessie shooting with a film camera that she never reloads. Those criticisms, while reasonable, weren’t a problem for me.

This is only Garland’s fifth feature as a director, but he directed Ex Machina, my pick as the top film of 2014. Before that, Garland wrote 28 Days Later, which I would rate as the best and most thoughtful zombie movie of all time.

We’re used to rooting for one side or the other in a war movie, but Civil War is not about why a war is fought, it’s about the experience of civil war itself, and why it should be unthinkable.

ENNIO: the good, the bad and the transcendent

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Photo caption: Ennio Morricone in ENNIO. Courtesy of Music Box Films.

Ennio Morricone is one of the greatest composers of movie music and certainly the most original, and the thorough and well-sourced documentary Ennio traces his life and body of work. We hear from Morricone himself and plenty of talking heads – many film directors, composers and musicians, from Clint Eastwood to Bruce Springsteen.

Morricone is the first artist I’ve heard of who aspired to become a doctor, but was forced by his father to play trumpet. During WW II in Italy, the Morricone family business was a small town brass band that entertained occupying German, then American troops, which the young Ennio found humiliating. Nevertheless, he followed his talent into a music conservatory, and evolved into composing.

Circumstances brought him a gig writing movie music and led to his groundbreaking scores for Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Beginning with the whistle in A Fistful of Dollars, this now iconic music is described in Ennio as “cultural shock” “operatic” and a “whole new language”. We learn how Morricone built his score for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly around his interpretation of a coyote howl. Great stuff.

Ennio’s other highlights include:

  • His work with Joan Baez for Sacco & Vanzetti in 1971.
  • His 9/11 symphony.
  • How he was snubbed by the Oscars for The Mission and The Untouchables before wining for The Hateful Eight.

Ennio takes two hours and 36 minutes to comprehensively survey Morricone’s entire career, and I would have preferred a shorter film more focused on the highlights. There is an unnecessarily long exit ramp of accolades at the end.

BTW I recommend listening to Morricone himself conduct an orchestra’s performance of his music from The Mission; search YouTube for “morricone conducts the mission”

Ennio is now available to stream on Amazon, AppleTV and YouTube.

CHALLENGERS: three people and their desire

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Photo caption: Bill Faist, Zendaya and Josh O’Connor in CHALLENGERS. Courtesy of MGM.

Challengers is an absorbing and entertaining set of character studies, wrapped in a love triangle and set in the world of tennis.  Anything but a conventional sports movie, Challengers is remarkably insightful about what it takes to be successful in any competitive endeavor. Director Luca Guadagnino tells his story of three people over 13 years, flashing back and forth between their encounters in the present and roughly 8, 11, 12 and 13 years before.

When we first meet Tashi (Zendaya), she is a juniors champion about to dominate collegiate tennis and already a celebrity; she is clearly headed for Tiger Woods/Michael Jordan territory, where she will be the headliner whenever she competes and her endorsement revenue will dwarf her winnings.  Tashi is highly intelligent, beautiful, driven and confident, and, as a teen, is already an astute and clear eyed observer of human character.

Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and Art (Bill Faist) are, as most teen boys, much simpler.  They are classmates and besties.  Their tennis is not in Tashi’s stratosphere, but they are good enough to contend for the U.S. juniors doubles championship, and to realistically aspire to pro careers.

As tennis players, Patrick and Art are very equally matched.  But, then there is the matter of testosterone – too much (Patrick) and perhaps not enough (Art). 

Patrick has swagger – sometimes that of a charming rogue and sometimes that of a boor or bully.  There’s a saying in sports that is usually applied to baseball pitchers and football quarterbacks – “He has a million dollar arm and a ten cent head“.  That describes Patrick, who is too undisciplined to keep his temper in check and who has too much misplaced pride to accept coaching.

Art, on the other hand, is so  fundamentally decent that we wonder where his ambition comes from.  (Hint: it’s not from within Art himself.)

That’s what we come to learn about the three characters.  One of the keys to Challengers is when each character figures out the other two.  Tashi takes the measure of Patrick and Art with breathtaking rapidity.  Patrick and Art come to understand the others, but much later and at different times.  When the last light switch is toggled on, there’s an explosion.

Guadagnino’s previous three films (I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, Call Me by My Name) form what we calls his Desire Trilogy, and all three abound in sensual desire.  Challengers could have been titled Desire, in the sense that competitive success pivots on who has the most desire, who wants it more than their peers, who has enough drive to fuel the grueling training and who has the killer instinct in competition.

Guadagnino is known for sensual films, set in beautiful places (a palazzo-like house in Milan, a glorious Mediterranean island and the Northern Italian countryside) and with abundant, tantalizing gourmet food. In contrast, Challengers takes place in hotel and motel rooms, tennis courts and locker rooms and the moment closest to food porn involves churros in a Stanford campus cafe. Guadagnino focuses the sensuality on the tennis scenes and the closeups of his actors as they hunger for victory or for sex.

There’s a constant undercurrent of lust, but calling Challengers primarily a love triangle would be too pat. It’s just such a rich depiction of the strengths and weaknesses of the characters, their respective vulnerability to manipulation and their relative levels of ambition.

Zendaya in CHALLENGERS. Courtesy of MGM.

One key to the story in Challengers is when the characters figure each other out. One takes the measure of the other two immediately; each of the other two finally get the others, but at different times.

Challengers is superbly acted. Zendaya’s performance is a revelation, both in the way she hides Tashi’s thoughts from the guys and in her remarkable physicality. Guadagnino uses closeups and quick cutting to make Faist and O-Connor look like they’re playing high level tennis. Zendaya, ripping the ball in long shots, looks like she is ready for the U.S. Open.

Josh O’Connor – the feckless marriage-age Prince Charles in The Crown and the surly protagonist of La Chimera  (by another Italian filmmaker, Alice Rohrwacher) – finally gets to play a character with joie de vivre, and he’s excellent.

Bill Faist in CHALLENGERS. Courtesy of MGM.

I hadn’t seen Bill Faist (West Side Story) before, and his performance in Challengers is often the most interesting. Affable, malleable and conflict-avoidant, the young Art knows when unrequited love is causing his unhappiness. But then, he’s also unhappy when he seems to have it all, and he doesn’t understand why.

Challengers is a wonderful two-hours-and-eleven minutes movie, but I think that there’s an even better one-hour-and-fifty-five minute movie inside; Guadagnino invests too much time in the final confrontation, drawing it out with plenty of slow-motion and house music. Still, this is one of the best films of 2024.

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Carol Duarte and Josh O’Connor in LA CHIMERA. Courtesy of Neon.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – Coming up on TV – a great silent actor’s only talkie. Next week – new revies of Challengers and Ennio.

CURRENT MOVIES

WATCH AT HOME

Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie and Ben Foster in a scene from Debra Granik’s LEAVE NO TRACE< playing

The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:

ON TV

THE BLUE GARDENIA
Anne Baxter, sipping a Polynesian Pearl Diver, with Raymond Burr in THE BLUE GARDENIA.

On May 7 on Turner Classic Movies, The Blue Gardenia presents a 1953 view of date rape, with lecherous Raymond Burr getting Anne Baxter likkered up into a blackout drunk with Polynesian Pearl Divers. There’s a very nice twist on the whodunit: when she wakes up, she doesn’t remember killing him, but he sure is dead. There’s even a cameo performance by Nat King Cole.

Coming up on TV – a great silent actor’s only talkie

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I’ve written before about my admiration for actor Lon Chaney, and recommended his The Unknown, even with its wackadoodle plot, and even though I rarely recommend silent film dramas. Chaney, nicknamed “Man of a Thousand Faces”, was an expert with makeup and is well-known for grotesque roles like Quasimodo and the Phantom of the Opera.  But, for all his reliance on changing appearances, Chaney was NOT a gimmick actor.  He was very naturalistic, a relaxed actor whose screen-acting was very modern.   His course features and his charm combine for a unique magnetism.  I think that he would have been very successful in today’s cinema, and he often looks like he is acting in a more modern movie than are the other actors.

Almost all of Chaney’s career was in the silent film era. because he died right after he made his first talkie, The Unholy Three in 1930. So, The Unholy Three is the only movie where we can hear Chaney’s voice, and Turner Classic Movies is airing it on May 3.

To summarize the plot, a ventriloquist, a little person and a circus strongman walk into a bar….Actually the three leave their jobs in a sideshow to set up as a criminal gang, along with the ventriloquist’s pickpocket girlfriend and his pet gorilla. Yeah, it’s farfetched, but its entertaining. Chaney plays the ventriloquist.

The Unholy Three is a remake of a 1925 silent with the same title, also starring Chaney. The original was the first of eight Chaney movies, including The Unknown, directed by Tod Browning (of Dracula fame and Freaks infamy). The 1930 film was directed by Jack Conway.

So, take my advice, DVR The Unholy Three on May 3, and give yourself a rare dose of the speaking Lon Chaney.

Lon Chaney and Lila Lee in THE UNHOLY THREE.

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Josh O’Connor in LA CHIMERA. Courtesy of NEON.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – a new review of La Chimera and continuing coverage of both the SFFILM and the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival, both underway now. Here’s my latest festival coverage:

REMEMBRANCE

Eleanor Coppola was the wife of director Francis Ford Coppola and the mother of director Sophia Coppola. Eleanor Coppola herself directed perhaps the best ever documentary film about the making of a movie, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.

CURRENT MOVIES

WATCH AT HOME

Tom Hardy in LOCKE

The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:

ON TV

Linda Hunt and Mel Gibson in THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY

On April 29, Turner Classic Movies presents Peter Weir’s 1982 political thriller The Year of Living Dangerously, starring Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver. In the exotic setting of Sukarno’s Indonesia, this film has gripping intrigue, romance and a neo-noir ending.

The stars were each coming off their first major feature, Weaver’s Eyewitness with William Hurt and Gibson with the original Mad Max. The Year of Living Dangerously made them both solid A-list movie stars. Linda Hunt won an Oscar for her gender- and race-crossing performance as the local fixer.

Weir had made the fine Australian films Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave and Gallipoli. This major MGM release brought him success in his first Hollywood picture and empowered Weir to follow with Witness, Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show and Master and Commander.

Sigourney Weaver and Mel Gibson in THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY

The best of the 2024 SLO Film Fest

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June Squibb and Fred Hechinger appear in THELMA by Josh Margolin. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by David Bolen.

The 2024 SLO Film Fest has opened. I’ve screened over a dozen of the features, and here are four that you shouldn’t miss:

  • Thelma: The closing night film is a hoot, starring 93-year-old June Squibb (Oscar-nominated for Nebraska) in an action picture. Squibb plays a scammed senior who goes on a quest to recover her money from the scammers. Thelma is a lot more than a broad geezer comedy, and the relationship between Thelma and her foundering, Gen X grandson (Fred Hechinger) is very heartfelt. Squibb and Hechinger are both great, and Thelma also features indie favorite Parker Posey and the sweet final performance of Richard Roundtree (Shaft). It’s a surefire audience-pleaser, and I predict that Thelma will become a word-of-mouth hit when released in late June. See it first at the SLO Film Fest.
  • Chasing Chasing Amy: In this irresistible documentary, filmmaker Sav Rodgers tells his own highly personal story of finding sanctuary in a romantic comedy that ultimately spurs a both a filmmaking career and his transition to trans man. Rodgers weaves in parallel tracks, the origin story of the 1997 movie Chasing Amy, and thoughtful discussion of how that film, after 25 years of cultural evolution, has aged. We learn that Kevin Smith modeled the novelty of a straight man and a lesbian as inseparable soulmates after his real life friends; the core of Chasing Amy is a love affair sabotaged by the guy’s insecurities, mirroring Smith’s own less-than-two-year relationship with Joey Lauren Adams, who plays the titular character. Rodgers meets Smith himself, who becomes a mentor, and we get current on-camera interviews with Smith, Adams and other principals. Along the way, Rodgers matures from a gushing fan girl to a grownup who recognizes the personal flaws that complicate other people’s relationships. Chasing Chasing Amy seamlessly braids together the fictional love story in Chasing Amy with the stories of real life relationships, including his own.
  • Tokyo Cowboy: This charming dramedy centers on a Japanese corporate turnaround artist, Hideki (Arata Iura). Confident that he has the secret sauce to recharge any stagnant brand, he’s got a slick pitch deck (with a snapshot from his own childhood), and he’s engaged to the corporate vice-president he reports to. His company is about to liquidate a money-hemorrhaging cattle ranch in Montana, when he parachutes in for a quick fix. His Japanese beef consultant goes hilariously native, and Hideki, a smart guy, immediately sees that his idea for a quick fix was mistaken. Now unsettled and off the grid in an alien culture, Hideki recalibrates his values and his life goals. It’s the first narrative feature for director Marc Marriott, who, with cinematographer Oscar Ignacio Jiménez, creates a Big Sky setting that could reset any of us in need of self-discovery.
  • Riding Giants: Monday, April 29: The movie at the SLO Film Fest’s very first Surf Nite was this 2004 surf doc. Riding Giants focuses on the obsessive search for the best wave by some of the greatest surfers in history. We see “the biggest wave ever ridden” and then a monster that could be bigger.  The movie traces the discovery of the Half Moon Bay surf spot Mavericks.  And more and more, all wonderfully shot. IMO, Riding Giants ranks with Dana Brown’s Step into Liquid as the greatest surf documentary ever. Riding Giants was directed by Stacy Peralta, a surfer, a pioneer of modern skateboarding, and a founder of the Powell Peralta skateboard product company. Peralta, who also directed Dogtown and Z-boys, will attend the screening. Fittingly, Riding Giants screens at the Bay in Morro Bay – only one mile from the surf lanes at Morro Rock.

Here’s the trailer for Chasing Chasing Amy.