Movies – Page 111 – The Movie Gourmet

THE LOBSTER: the movie disappointment of the year

June 1, 2016 by movie gourmet

The Lobster, which is supposed to be a dark comedy, won the Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, along with acclaim at the Toronto and Sundance fests, so I had been eagerly awaiting it for just over twelve months. I had liked Director Yorgos Lanthimos’ Greek absurdist film Dogtooth. Unfortunately, The Lobster is a disagreeable misfire, which makes it the biggest movie disappointment of the year.

The Lobster takes place in an imagined world that looks like ours, but where being single is the worst status possible. Single people go to a woodsy resort hotel, where they are under a time limit to find a partner or be turned into the animal of their choice. After all, in the city, they are challenged by law enforcement to produce their most important form of identification – the certificate that proves they are in a couple. Guests at the resort go on daily hunts in the forest, where they shoot escaped single people – the Loners – with tranquilizer darts. (The Loners have their own monstrous leader (Lea Seydoux) and harsh rules.)

If a guest finds a partner, they enjoy a double room for two weeks and then a holiday on a yacht. The hotel manager (Olivia Colman) drily announces, that if the new relationship becomes troubled, “We will assign you children. That always helps.”

It’s all very deadpan. As the cast earnestly complies with ever more absurd rules at the hotel, The Lobster is darkly funny.

But then, The Lobster runs off its rails. We lose the drollery and find our way in a survivalist love story with Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz, and then, into a what is essentially a horror ending. Inside all this mess is an allegory about society putting obstacles in the way of our reaching happiness through a love match. But it stops being funny, and starts becoming tedious and uncomfortable.

Colin Farrell leads a fine cast with Weisz, Colman, Seydoux and James C. Reilly. The failings of The Lobster are not their fault.

The first third of the The Lobster is amusing, and I hung hopefully with the second third. The final third is dark, without much, if any, leavening humor, and the last fifteen minutes is almost unwatchable. Stay away.

Stream of the Week: MAN UP – our dating insecurities revealed

May 31, 2016 by movie gourmet

Here’s a delightful movie that you haven’t seen – the grievously overlooked romantic comedy Man Up. The British Man Up had a very brief US theatrical run last November that did not even reach the Bay Area. I suspect that’s because it doesn’t have any big name American stars. But it’s better than any other romantic comedy from 2015.

Nancy (Lake Bell) is on a four-year dating drought and has given up all hope when she inadvertently stumbles into a blind date meant for another woman. She’s intrigued with what she sees in Jack (Simon Pegg from Shaun of the Dead) and decides to impersonate his real date. As they get more and more into each other, the elephant in the room is when she will be exposed.

Like many of the best recent romantic comedies, Man Up was written by a woman, the British television writer Tess Morris. Again and again in Man Up, Morris authentically captures dating behaviors and female and male insecurities. Nervous at meeting Nancy, Jack just can’t stop talking; in a later date with someone who he’s not so much into, he checks off the same conversation points in a fraction of the time. Everyone who has dated will recognize himself or herself at some moment in this film.

The very talented Lake Bell wrote/directed/starred in the American indie comedy In the World…, which I really, really liked. Simon Pegg is a comedy star, and he’s very appealing here, but Bell has seriously good comedic chops.

Rory Kinnear, who you might remember as persistent but sensitive detective in The Imitation Game and as Tanner in the James Bond movies, plays an outrageously inappropriate admirer from Nancy’s youth.

Man Up is available to stream from Netflix Instant, Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Flixster.

THE NICE GUYS: good dirty fun in the dirty air of 1970s LA

May 30, 2016 by movie gourmet

Ryan Gosling and Angourie Rice in THE NICE GUYS

Director Shane Black created the Lethal Weapon franchise, so he is pretty much the Jedi Master of the mismatched cop buddy genre. His latest action comedy, The Nice Guys, is an entertaining romp through 1970s LA. Russell Crowe plays LA’s toughest goon – but a goon who is a man-of-his-word stand up guy. Ryan Gosling plays LA’s seediest private eye, a morally ambiguous drunk and and an epically unreliable single dad. Circumstances force them to work a mystery together, and the fun begins.

Ryan Gosling delivers a comic tour de force performance. His losing battle with the door of a toilet stall rates with the best work of Charlie Chaplin and Peter Sellers. He even delivers a reaction that’s a wonderful homage to Stan Laurel. Crowe turns out to be a very able straight man.

The MacGuffin that the guys are chasing is the print of a porn flick with an activist political message. The conspiratorial villain is Detroit’s US auto industry. The plot is so absurd that it’s actually a pretty fair parody of another genre – the paranoid political thriller. In a nice touch, the super scary evil hit man doesn’t look a bit like you would expect.

And then there’s the private eye’s child rearing habits, which today would prompt calls to Child Protective Services. Just like much of the fun in Mad Men is the interior smoking, day drinking and secretary-chasing, here we get to mock the capital I Inappropriateness of Gosling’s 1970s single dad. He lets his 13-year-old hang out at a vacant lot after dark and then accompany him to a drug-filled bacchanalian orgy.

That daughter is played by Aussie child actor Angourie Rice, who is just about perfect in this role. The last two-thirds of The Nice Guys becomes a three-hander with Crowe, Gosling and Rice.

Black takes us right back to the late seventies with more than just bad clothes, hair and music. We see gas lines, smog alerts, crawling freeways and pre-catylitic converter cars. Characters write checks, and there’s nary a cell phone.

The Nice Guys may not be deep, but it sure is funny. (And it sets up a sequel.)

A BIGGER SPLASH: another exercise in sensuality

May 29, 2016 by movie gourmet

Ralph Fiennes and Tilda Swinton in A BIGGER SPLASH

Harry Hawkes (Ralph Fiennes) is the kind of guy who gives a bad name to joie de vivre. The ultimate disrupter, his gift is to seize all the attention, change any social situation into a party and take everyone else out of their comfort zones. In A Bigger Splash, he inflicts himself on his former rock star lover Marianne (Tilda Swinton), who is trying to enjoy a quiet romantic respite with her current lover Paul (Matthias Shoenaerts) on the secluded Italian island of Pantelleria. Enter Harry, exit solitude.

With only five minutes notice, Harry shows up, expecting to become a houseguest in Marianne and Paul’s borrowed villa. To make matters worse, Harry brings along his newly discovered daughter (Dakota Johnson), a highly sexual nymphet with eyes for Paul. And, and the first day, he invites two of his other friends to join them. Harry repeatedly tears off his clothes, starts everyone dancing (one of his dances is right up there in cinema history with the one in Napoleon Dynamite) and even turns a village cafe into an overflowing karaoke after-party. Because Marianne is recuperating from vocal cord surgery, she can’t talk, which makes Harry’s social intrusions even more unbearable.

Harry’s antics are very entertaining, and we watch with apprehension for the other shoe to drop – when are the others going to explode in reaction? Harry is also trying to insinuate himself back into Marianne’s bed, an intention apparent to the hunky/dreamy Paul, for whom still waters run deep.

This is Guadagnino’s first English language movie. He had a recent US art house hit with I Am Love, (also starring Swinton). I Am Love was notorious for its food porn, and there are tantalizing scenes in A Bigger Splash, too, with homemade fresh ricotta and a spectacular outdoor restaurant set amid hillside ruins.

Guadagnino’s greatest gift may be the sensuality of his films. Whether it’s food, a place or a social situation, he makes the audience feel like we’re experiencing it right along with the character. In A Bigger Splash, we start out as tourists in a hideout for the super rich, and then Guadagnino takes to us through a raucous comedy of manners to, finally, a suspense thriller.

LOVE & FRIENDSHIP: new heights for manipulation and twittery

May 26, 2016 by movie gourmet

Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale in LOVE & FRIENDSHIP

Based on Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, the sharply witty Love & Friendship centers on the unabashedly amoral efforts by Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale) to get exactly what she wants despite lack of resources and position.

Love & Friendship is filled with the 19th century version of “snappy dialogue” – old-fashioned wit. Mark Twain would have loved this movie. Much of the comes from Lady Susan’s clueless sense of entitlement and her unashamed and outrageous manipulation of the other characters. An unabashed moocher and deadbeat, she finds that, because her daughter’s school fees are “too high to even consider paying, it is actually an economy”.

It’s a pleasing turn from Kate Beckinsale at age 42, who has so often played ornamental movie roles. She first came to our attention at age 20 as the beauteous Hero in Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing, and broke through at age 23 by dominating the British indie Shooting Fish. After playing a bunch of less interesting roles, it’s great to see get a chance to really act in Love & Friendship.

Love & Friendship’s director is Whit Stillman, who debuted with two delightful indies from the world of old money Northeastern preppies. Metropolitan and Barcelona were talky and perceptive explorations of human nature, set in what usually is a less accessible and less sympathetic social set. (Unfortunately, he most recently made the dreadful Damsels in Distress with the always execrable Greta Gerwig.)

Right from the get-go, Stillman lets us know that he’s not taking this too seriously with self-mocking character introductions. In another nice touch, Stillman clads some of the male characters in noticeably ill-fitting clothes – something you never see in a movie from this period. It’s funny – and authentic, when you think about it.

In the funniest moments of the film, the enthusiastically dim Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett) takes twittery to new heights. Bennett, a British TV actor previously unknown to me, is quite a revelation. It’s always nice to see Chloe Sevigny, too, and she’s here playing Lasy Susan’s equally amoral American friend.

Although I did not see it there, Love & Friendship was the opening night feature of the 59th San Francisco Film Festival, and folks were still praising it in festival lines a week later.

ALL THE WAY: LBJ comes alive

November 12, 2017May 25, 2016 by movie gourmet

Lyndon B. Johnson, one of American history’s larger-than-life characters, finally comes alive on the screen in the HBO movie All the Way. Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad, Trumbo) is the first actor who captures LBJ in all his facets – a man who was boring and square on television but frenetic, forceful and ever-dominating in person. All the Way traces the first year in LBJ’s presidency, when he ended official racial segregation in America with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

LBJ was obsessed with gaining and keeping political power, and he was utterly ruthless and amoral about the means to do that. His tools of persuasion included deceit, flattery, threats, promised benefits and horse-trading. He was equally comfortable in playing to someone’s ideals and better nature as well to one’s vanity or venality. In All the Way, we see one classic moment of what was called “the Johnson treatment”, when LBJ looms over Senator Everett Dirksen, and it becomes inevitable that Dirksen is going to be cajoled, intimidated or bought off and ultimately give LBJ what he wants.

LBJ was so notoriously insincere that one of the joys of All the Way is watching LBJ tell completely inconsistent stories to the both sides of the Civil Right battle. Both the Civil Rights proponents (Hubert Humphrey and Martin Luther King, Jr.) and the opponents (the Southern Senators led by Richard Russell) must determine whether LBJ is lying and to whom. Each of them must make this calculation and then bet his own cause on his perception of LBJ’s real intentions.

But LBJ amassed power for two reasons – he needed to have it and he needed to do something with it. Along with the LBJ’s unattractive personal selfishness and the political sausage-making that some may find distasteful, All the Way shows that Johnson did have two core beliefs that drove his political goals – revulsion in equal parts to discrimination and poverty. We hear references to the childhood poverty that led to the humiliation of his father, to the plight of the Mexican schoolchildren in Cotulla, Texas, that he mentored as a young man, and his outrage at the discriminatory treatment suffered by his African-American cook Zephyr.

Bryan Cranston brilliantly brings us the complete LBJ – crude, conniving, thin-skinned, intimidating and politically masterful. Besides Cranston’s, we also see superb performances by Melissa Leo as Lady Bird, Anthony Mackie as MLK, Bradley Whitford as Hubert Humphrey and Frank Langella as Richard Russell.

All the Way is remarkably historically accurate. It does capsulize some characters and events, but the overall depiction of 1964 in US history is essentially truthful. As did Selma, All the Way drills down to secondary characters like James Eastland and Bob Moses. We also see the would-be scandal involving LBJ’s chief of staff Walter Jenkins, a story that has receded from the popular culture. Vietnam is alluded to with a reference to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which is fitting since Vietnam grew to become LBJ’s nemesis and the national obsession only after the 1964 election.

All the Way was adapted from a Broadway play for which Cranston won a Tony. I saw three movies in theaters last weekend and none of them were as good as All the Way. LBJ’s 1964 makes for a stirring story, and All the Way is a compelling film. Seek it out on HBO.

Stream of the Week: VICTORIA – a thrill ride filmed in one shot

December 15, 2016May 17, 2016 by movie gourmet

Victoria is worth watching as a thriller, but it has become notorious for a pretty important aspect of its filmmaking – the entire movie was filmed in a SINGLE SHOT. Its tagline is One girl. One city. One night. One take. (Actually, the successful take was on the third try.) Rope and Birdman are famously filmed to LOOK like they are one shot. But all of Victoria really IS just one shot.

That would be noteworthy enough if Victoria were a drawing-room story like Rope, but it is amazing for a story that zips between interior and exterior locations, runs from nighttime through daybreak and includes chase scenes through the streets of Berlin. It’s a stunning achievement for director Sebastian Shipper.

After a career disappointment, young Spanish woman (Laia Costa) has moved to Germany – where she knows no one – and has taken a service job while she licks her wounds. Out for a beer after work, she meets a bunch of drunk German guys. Partying with them leads to an entanglement with one of those low-level criminal enterprises that just isn’t going to turn out well. Things get life-or-death serious, and the characters are soon on the run for their lives.

The German characters don’t speak Spanish and the Spanish girl doesn’t speak German, so they speak to each other in broken English; the only English subtitles are when the German guys are talking to each other in German about the girl in her presence.

Costa is on-screen for the entire movie, and she’s very, very good. She nails the character, somebody who is basically good but who can impulsively make the wrong choice, too. Anyone who sees her as a mere adornment underestimates her at his own risk. She is full of moxie and is damn practical.

Frederick Lau is especially good as the guy who connects most personally with the girl. Franz Rogoski is also outstanding as the guy whose troubled past catches up to him and devours his friends, too.

Anyone who has watched a film noir will find Victoria’s ending is disappointingly predictable. Otherwise, this would have been one of the top ten films of 2015.

But Victoria is still a gripping 138-minute thrill ride. Director and co-writer Shipper acted in Run, Lola, Run which had previously set the standard for movie freneticism. Make sure that you watch it in one uninterrupted sitting. Victoria is available to stream from Amazon Video, iTunes, YouTube and Google Play.

HIGH-RISE: the villain is an oligarchy

May 12, 2016 by movie gourmet

Tom Hiddleston in HIGH-RISE. Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

The dystopian sci-fi satire High-Rise, adapted from a J.G. Ballard novel, makes a droll and cynical comment on our species. Taking place in the near future, the very wealthy live on the top floors of a self-contained high-rise, just above the middle class. Human greed and jealousy creates scarcity for the residents – not Third World-type scarcity, but scarcity of amenities like swimming pool access and power brownouts. Class competition erupts and a morbid descent into murderous chaos ensues. We plunge into this complacent, and then hellish, world from the perspective of a young middle class striver (Tom Hiddleston).

The designer of the complex of high-rises (Jeremy Irons) lives in a luxurious penthouse with a staggeringly pastoral garden. The character’s name is Royal, but he’s not the ruler. (We actually come to wish that he were benignly in charge.) And despite his trappings, Royal is not the omnipotent Bond-type villain. The villain turns out instead to be an oligarchy of the One Percent, along with the darkest aspects of every character’s humanness.

Tom Hiddleston is fine, and the rest of the cast is solid. The two standouts are Jeremy Irons as Royal and Sienna Miller, dressed in Carnaby Street retro, as a deliciously voracious man-hunter. The wonderful Elisabeth Moss is wasted in a role where she just doesn’t have much to do.

I saw High-Rise at the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF). It opens in Bay Area theaters tomorrow.

GREEN ROOM: blood and suspense

December 4, 2016May 11, 2016 by movie gourmet

The bloody thriller Green Room is a fresh and satisfying, well, bloody thriller. A vagabond rock band (Anton Yelchin, Alia Shawkat and a couple of others) finds themselves playing a gig at a remote white nationalist compound in the woodsy Northwest. Inadvertently, they witness a murder and the chief skinhead (Patrick Stewart!) needs to eliminate all the witnesses. The band members and a local girl (Imogen Poots) are trapped in a room with just one way out, as the skinheads send in waves of machete- and shotgun-wielding thugs and vicious pit bulls. Who will survive and how?

Director Jeremy Saulnier proves again that he’s the rising master of the genre movie. Saulnier’s writing and directorial debut was 2014’s Blue Ruin, an entirely fresh take on the revenge thriller. An audience favorite on the festival circuit in 2013, Blue Ruin didn’t get a theatrical release, and I would have missed it entirely but for a suggestion from my friend Jose. In Blue Ruin, Saulnier was responsible for the wholly original lead character and the intense pace of the film, along with the meticulously economical storytelling; the exposition never relies on even one extra word of dialogue. Blue Ruin is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Netflix Instant, Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, Google Play, YouTube and Xbox Video.

In his superb leading performance in Blue Ruin, Macon Blair was believable both as a damaged down-and-outer and as a man-on-a-mission. In Green Room, Blair plays Gabe, the put-upon middle manager of Patrick Stewart’s compound. Blair is just so interesting an actor. Here, he brings an unusual humanity to his role as a henchman.

The actor who drives the story, however, is Imogen Poots. Her character is very practical – realistic enough to see that the situation is hopeless. At first, she is numbed by the murder of her friend. But when she finally decides that she is going to survive – watch out! Since 2012, Poots has becoming a preferred indie leading lady with Greetings from Tim Buckley, A Late Quartet , The Look of Love, A Country Called Home, Green Room and her most complex role so far in the upcoming Frank & Lola. Here in Green Room, she’s a force of nature.

Once again, Saulnier delivers a very fresh and original genre movie. The total effect is very intense and very violent. If you’re okay with some gory violence, then Green Room is a thrill ride worth taking.

Stream of the Week: THE BRAINWASHING OF MY DAD

May 10, 2016 by movie gourmet

Ever notice how people who watch a lot of Fox News or listen to talk radio become bitter, angry and, most telling, fact-resistant? In the documentary The Brainwashing of My Dad, filmmaker Jan Senko as she explores how right-wing media impacts the mood and personality of its consumers as well as their political outlook. Senko uses her own father Frank as a case study.

We see Frank Senko become continually mad and, well, mean. And we hear testimony about many, many others with the identical experience. Experts explain the existence of a biological addiction to anger.

Senko traces the history of right-wing media from the mid-1960s, with the contributions of Lewis Powell, Richard Nixon, Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch. Senko even gets right-wing wordsmith Frank Luntz on camera to explain the power of buzz words. If you don’t know this story (Hillary was right about the “vast, right-wing conspiracy”) , Senko spins the tale very comprehensively. If you do know the material (and my day job is in politics), it is methodical.

This topic is usually explored for its impact on political opinion. Senko’s focus on mood and personality is original and The Brainwashing of My Dad contributes an important addition to the conversation. One last thing about the brainwashing of Senko’s dad – it may not be irreversible…

I first reviewed The Brainwashing of My Dad for its U.S. Premiere at Cinequest 2016. The Brainwashing of My Dad is available streaming on Amazon Video, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.