In the madcap Korean comedy Curtain Call, a talent-challenged theater troupe is about to go under. The company specializes in soft porn, and they are so bad that – even though they are simulating sex on stage – they still can’t sell enough tickets. In desperation, they enter a competition to put on Korea’s best version of Hamlet.
It’s a motley crew. There’s the Bieber-coiffed millennial who thinks that he’s a method actor. One veteran suffers from being public recognized for his trademark “Shag Shag Shake It”. They add an aged career Shakespearean who can’t always remember which play he’s in right now. For personal reasons, the theater company owner foists upon them an inexperienced ingenue who refuses to speak anything except her lines. In a seemingly hopeless quest to master the elevated source material, these bottom feeders become scrappy underdogs.
Curtain Call is a pleasant enough diversion, with some happily ribald moments. Audience members who know their Shakespeare will find the Hamlet scenes even funnier. The trailer is in Korean, but you’ll get the idea.
Anishoara is an art movie of breathtaking visual quality. It also has a remarkable sense of time and place and . That place is the rural back country of Moldovia, a small, impoverished country wedged between Romania and Ukraine. That time is now, although it could just as easily be in a past century.
The visual artistry comes from writer-director Ana Felicia Scutelnicu, a Moldovan director who studied in Germany. I saw her first 61-minute feature Panihide, at the 2013 Cinequest. In both Panihida and Anishoara, Scutelnicu demonstrates a fine eye both for landscape and human observation. However, her pace is sloooooow. Scutelnicu is so gifted as a visual director, I’d really like to see a movie that she directs from someone else’s screenplay.
Anishoara begins with an Icarus-like folk parable about a girl’s unsuccessful quest to love the sun deity. We then see that tale reflected in a girl’s daily life over a year, as she sequentially deflects three suitors. Anishoara’s star is the non-professional actress Anishoara Morari, who was about 12-years-old in Panihide and about 16 in Anishoara. Morari is beautiful, with an unusual directness of gaze, and exudes striking alertnesss.
Not everyone is going to be able to stay with a movie this (ahem) unhurried, but the whole thing is great to look at. I’m thinking of a nighttime scene where we see Anishoara sitting on the ground in her cobalt dress before the camera pans to the landscape across a valley and the dramatic sky above. Every so often there’s a shot like that makes you gasp.
The title character of the Swiss drama Aloys is a solitary and harshly anti-social guy who repulses all gestures of human kindness and interest by others. He is a private detective who specializes in documenting infidelity through undercover surveillance. Using hidden microphones and cameras, he is steadfast in always avoiding contacting with his subjects. Then, in a moment of recklessness, he allows someone to rock his life, which results in the riveting story of Aloys.
An unknown woman steals his surveillance tapes and taunts him over the phone. In a completely original twist, she teases him with what she calls “phone walking”, daring him to use aural clues to visualize himself in places and situations and, ultimately find her. At first, his desperation to find her creates an obsession worthy of The Conversation. But then his imagination is unleashed, and he creates fantasies at once both more real and more outlandish. This is not a movie that you’ve seen before.
Aloys is on a thrill ride that he can’t get off. What is real, and what is fantasy? Can we be what we imagine? Can someone trade in his own life for a more appealing fantasy life? Can the fantasy be sustained? Aloys delivers surprise after surprise for the audience.
Denzel Washington directs and stars in the movie version of the August Wilson play Fences, which manifests as an actor’s showcase. Set in post-World War II America, Fences is entirely character-driven, and revolves around its two main characters, the fiftyish sanitary worker Troy (Denzel) and his stalwart wife Rose (Viola Davis).
A prototypical alpha male, Troy is an entertaining motormouth, which is fun to watch and also initially masks the exceeding complexity of his character. He’s a proud man – fiercely proud of his paycheck and home ownership, but not above skimming from someone vulnerable to secure it. He is bitter that racism denied him a professional sports career, but when improved race relations give his son more opportunity, Troy’s impulse is to sabotage it. His chief identity is as the head of his family, but he can betray other family members. Living in a racist society has helped mold Troy, but so have his own gifts and flaws.
Rose is utterly steadfast, a woman devoted to making things operate smoothly – despite Troy – in their home and family. Deep waters run silent, and – at first – we don’t see that Rose has a mind and identity and pride of her own.
Viola Davis’s performance is brilliant and powerful. As an actor, Denzel is at the top of his game. Mykelti Williamson is especially good as Troy’s brother, a brain-damaged veteran of the Pacific war. Stephen Henderson also delivers a nomination-worthy turn as Troy’s neighbor and co-worker Bono.
Thoughtful and well-acted as it is, Fences is a filmed play, and it’s very stagey. Every so often, it’s time for a monologue and one really fine actor stands and declaims while the others watch and regard him/her. It’s really not cinematic in any sense.
The Wife was profoundly disappointed that I did not share her admiration for Fences. She thinks that Viola Davis’ performance and the growth of the character of Rose make this an excellent movie. She even directed me NOT to write about Fences, lest I “desecrate Viola Davis’ performance”.
ES MUY COMPLICADO. In the Uruguayan dramedy The Moderns, Fausto (Mauro Sarser) is a free-lance film editor. Clara (Noelia Campo) is the producer of Uruguay’s most intellectually pretentious public TV talk show. They are working together on a documentary project – and dating each other. Fausto claims that Clara is pressuring him and dumps her. Fausto spots a New Shiny Thing in the form of the Argentine actress Fernanda (Marie Hélène Wyaux). Clara starts dating the beautiful lesbian Ana (Stefania Tortorella), which re-fascinates Fausto. Is Fausto confused, weak-willed or a selfish scoundrel? Who is going to end up with whom?
The Moderns is plenty funny. The fantasy scenes are uniformly LOL. And there’s a humorously unlikely impregnation. After watching the somewhat misleading trailer, I thought that I’d be starting this post with “Two Uruguayans walk into a studio and make a Woody Allen movie…” Indeed the white-on-black credits, the 1930s/1940s music in the score, the repertory cast and the black-and-white photography evoke Woody. But The Moderns is not an homage, but an original, character-based exploration
The Moderns is the first feature for co-writers and co-directors Marcila Matta and Mauro Sarser, and they show a lot of promise.
There’s an unexpectedly satisfying ending, and we are left with “We live our lives – and it’s complicated.”
The documentary I Am Not Your Negrocenters on the American public intellectual James Baldwin. It’s a searing examination of race in America through Baldwin’s eyes and through his elegant words.
Those words are voiced by Samuel L. Jackson, and there is no third-party “narration”. The spoken words are Baldwin’s, either voiced by Jackson or spoken by Baldwin himself in file footage. Baldwin’s associates Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr. are heard in file footage, but that’s it – the rest is all Baldwin.
The content of those words is about the African-American experience in America and Baldwin’s insistence on understanding and acknowledging the grievance and the moral imperative for remedy. The very last thing that Baldwin cared about was the comfort of his readers and listeners.
I Am Not Your Negro is an important film because Baldwin’s words today, stripped of their relation to temporal events, are stirring as we hear them again, naked and with urgency. Lest we fail to connect the dots to our current situation, snippets of current day events (Obama, Black Lives Matter, etc.) make it clear how relevant Baldwin’s thinking still is today.
The choice to present Baldwin’s thinking through only his own words, unadorned by talking heads is very successful. Director/co-writer Raoul Peck gets the credit for that, and the film that he has constructed with editor Alexandra Strauss is compelling.
It occurred tome that we really don’t have “public intellectuals” (thought leaders who were authors and columnists) as we did before cable television and Internet. Today we must make do with Talking (or Yelling) Heads on cable TV and bloggers (hey, I’m one of those); the current focus is more temporal and focused on instant reaction instead of presenting a coherent body of thought.
But, in the Good Old Days, book and newspaper publishers and network television producers were the gatekeepers of public discourse. Those gatekeepers in Baldwin’s time were older white heterosexual men, and even the well-meaning could not have shared his experiences. Given that, it’s surprising and fortunate that Baldwin’s words were able to become accessible to a wide audience.
Baldwin was living the life of an ex-pat in Paris until he watched the newscast of Charlotte, North Carolina, school integration with a lone African-American girl walking thru agitated and abusive racist mob. That’s what motivated him to return to his country and to try to fix it.
Taraneh Alidoosti and Shahab Hosseini in THE SALESMAN. Photo: Cohen Media Group
The Salesman is another searing and authentic film from Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi. Set in contemporary Iran, a young educated, middle class couple (Shahab Hosseini and Taraneh Alidoosti) has to change apartments in a rush. He’s a literature teacher by day, and the two are starring in a production of Death of a Salesman. The new apartment is sketchy, and something traumatic happens to the wife, something that she says she can’t fully remember. He embarks on a whodunit while doing everything he can to support her – but it turns out that he’s not equipped to keep up with her reactions to events. By the end, the two must determine the fate of a third character, and the stakes are very high.
Farhadi is perhaps the world’s leading master of the family psychological drama. The two Farhadi films that have received wide release in the US are the award-winning A Separation and The Past . Those two films are constructed with astonishing brilliance and originality, and the audience shifts allegiance between the characters as Farhadi reveals each new layers of his stories. The story in The Salesman is more linear than in its sister dramas, but it is compelling nonetheless. Both A Separation and The Past can be rented on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and can be streamed from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Farhadi does not make Feel Good movies; his dramas are challenging. That’s because he makes the audience care so much about his characters that we ache along with them. The payoff is that Farhadi delivers genuine human behavior and authentic human emotion.
Since this is Imogen Poots Week at The Movie Gourmet, this week’s video recommendation is a totally overlooked drama from just last year, A Country Called Home. Somehow A Country Called Home missed out on any significant theatrical release even though it’s a very satisfying Finding Yourself drama.
Poots plays Ellie, a young Los Angeles woman with an underachieving job and a lousy boyfriend who takes her for granted. She hears that her estranged father has become gravely ill, and we learn that she has escaped a Texas childhood with an alcoholic father. Her brother (Shea Whigham) also lives in Los Angeles; he is flourishing and doesn’t care a whit about their father – the brother has moved on from his upbringing. But Ellie is a poster girl for low-self esteem, and she feels obligated to travel to her father’s bedside.
Ryan Bingham in A COUNTRY CALLED HOME
Once in Texas, she finds that her father has just passed, leaving the detritus of his alcoholic life. Everything in her old hometown is trashy, complicated or just plain unsupportive. She meets a misfit wannabe singer-songwriter (Mackenzie Davis, unrecognizable from Bad Turn Worse). And there’s a pressured-out single dad played by the sad-eyed Ryan Bingham (the Oscar-winning songwriter for Crazy Heart).
A Country Called Home is the debut feature for director and co-writer Anna Axster, and it’s a successful and engaging study of a woman finally emerging from a childhood with an alcoholic parent. It turns out that, to move on with her life, she needed another look at where she came from.
A Country Called Home can be streamed from Netflix Instant, Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play. And last week’s Stream of the Week, Frank & Lola, is also available from those same streaming services.
In the enjoyably addictive The Founder, Michael Keaton brings alive Ray Kroc, the man who created the global corporate superpower that is McDonald’s. It’s both a vivid portrait of a particular change-maker and a cold-eyed study of exactly what capitalism really rewards.
Speaking of capitalism, it’s hard to imagine a truer believer than Ray Kroc, not even Willy Loman. When we meet Kroc, he is grinding through small town America selling milkshake mixers none too successfully. Each night he retires to yet another dingy motel for heavy doses and Early Times bourbon and a motivational speaker on his portable record player.
Then Kroc stumbles across the McDonald brothers Dick (Nick Offerman) and Mac (John Carroll Lynch). In their Riverside, California, hamburger stand, the McDonald brothers invented the industrialization of food service, their achievement being “fast food” as we know it today. One the most fascinating sequences in The Founder is a flashback of the McDonald brothers designing the most efficient fast food kitchen possible with chalk on a tennis court. The brothers are passionate about their business, equally devoted to their product and their customers.
Kroc falls in love. Having driven through every town in the country as a traveling salesman, he can appreciate the untapped market. He persuades the brothers to let him take over franchising McDonald’s restaurants. It turns out that that the 50ish Kroc is well-equipped for the job because he’s driven, absolutely ruthless and always on the verge of desperation. He HAS to succeed. Kroc is hungry, perpetually hungry, and learns to identify potential franchisees who are not complacent investors, but are who are also driven enough to accept his discipline and run each franchise by the numbers. Egotistical as he is, Kroc is also smart enough to adopt a brilliant idea from someone else – the key to making McDonald’s his.
John Carroll Lynch and Nick Offerman in THE FOUNDER
Dick McDonald is a humorless detail freak with brilliant ideas; Mac is the conflict-avoidant, supportive brother, always unruffling Dick’s feathers and keeping their options alive. Both are proud and true to their values. The McDonald brothers are authentic American business geniuses, but are they too principled to fight off a double cross by Kroc?
In much of the movie, Dick is on phone with Mac listening to Dick’s side of the conversations. Both Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch are superb, but Lynch’s performance is Oscar-worthy. There’s a “handshake” scene where WE know and MAC knows that he is going to get screwed, and Lynch’s eyes in those few seconds are heartbreaking.
As far as I can tell, The Founder is very historically accurate. Thanks to screenwriter Robert D. Siegel (The Wrestler) and director John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side), we also meet some other historical characters – Harry Sonneborn, Fred Turner, June Martino and Joan Smith Kroc – and appreciate their contributions to the McDonald’s business.
The Founder’s Ray Kroc is shitty to his wife (Laura Dern), shitty to his partners and, basically, shitty to his core. But we HAVE to keep watching him. Do we root for him because only HE can build this empire? We Americans have a heritage of empire building. And the idea of someone building something so big and so successful with only his smarts, persistence and opportunism is irresistible to us.
This is a good movie. I’ll even watch The Founder again. And I’ll have fries with that.
Sandra Hüller and Peter Simonischek in TONI ERDMANN
Toni Erdmann is a MUST SEE. You might not expect an almost three-hour German comedy to break through, but I’ve seen it, and I think that it should win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Picture. Writer-director Maren Ade gives us a woman’s perspective of a father-daughter relationship, creating a totally original and unforgettable father who takes prankstering into performance art.
Ines (Sandra Hüller) is a hard charging international management consultant. She is somewhat estranged from her dad Winfried (Peter Simonischek), an under achieving music teacher. You get the impression that Winfried wasn’t the most responsible parent. Regretting the state of their relationship and unable to relate to the workaholic that she’s become, he decides to impose himself on her life. He takes an extended vacation and shows up uninvited at her current corporate gig in Romania – and reinvents himself into a corporate alter ego who crashes her business meetings. It’s hilarious.
Winfried is a compulsive jokester of uncommon imagination, relentless and deviousness. The brilliance in Peter Simonischek’s performance is the devilish determination in his eyes (“Yes, I AM really going there”). He gets the most out of a set of gag false teeth than any single prop in cinema history.
Ines must react to Winfried’s onslaught of ever more elaborate, outrageous and high stakes practical jokes by maintaining a straight face and carrying on without giving away her shock, embarrassment and desperation. She’s on the verge of abject mortification for the entire movie. Sandra Hüller is a master of the take and the slow burn. It’s a remarkable performance.
It’s almost worth watching the whole movie for a deadpan rendition of Whitney Houston’s Greatest Love of All“, all the funnier because it contains the lyric “they can’t take away my dignity”. There’s the funniest nude brunch you’ll ever witness. And the most random Romanian folk monster. Yet Toni Erdmann will still leave you choked up at the end.
Now the daughter is obsessively ambitious, and she has embraced cut throat global capitalism. And, if the father were related to you, you’d often want to kill him. If you hate these people, you’re not going to like the movie. But I think that Ade has made their human needs so universal, that you’ll become invested in them. I sure did.
I saw Toni Erdmann at the Mill Valley Film Festival, and I’ve been waiting months to share it with you. It’s #3 on my Best Movies of 2016. Toni Erdmann opens Friday, January 20 in San Francisco and wider throughout the Bay Area on January 27.
