In Fever, we meet two teen thrill killers (a la Rope and Compulsion). What makes Fever unique is the introduction of a third character – a woman who may have witnessed their getaway. She doesn’t immediately grasp the connection, but we then watch the story threads (hers and the boys’) get nearer and finally intersect. In another twist from the Leopold and Loeb set-up, the two boys are classmates who come from very different socioeconomic backgrounds.
Even with two killers in the story, the most compelling character is the woman, played with immediacy by Julie-Marie Parmentier. At first blush, she’s just a workaday optician who is gradually becoming less satisfied with her boyfriend. But, watching Parmentier’s sharply observant eyes, we soon become aware that there’s much more going on inside her.
Fever is the first time feature from writer-director Raphael Neale, and it shows that Neale is capable of inventing an unusual take on a familiar story and effectively pacing the tension in a thriller.
Fever gets its title from the Little Willie John song popularized by Peggy Lee, and there some very cool renditions of it in the movie. (And Fever is another of those French movies that make me so impressed with the intellectual content of some French public high schools.)
Cinequest will host Fever’s US premiere on February 26 at Camera 12, and it plays at Camera 12 again on February 28 and at the California Theatre on March 2.
The animated Heart String Marionette allows us to see what would happen if the Wallace and Gromit filmmakers remade Metropolis as Noh theater. Highly stylized, with the animated characters are often masked as in Noh, Heart String Marionette is an epic that addresses themes of independence and authority. Auteur M Dot Strange effectively uses color, with much of the film in cold blue hues that evoke a brooding menace; splashes of red bring up the action scenes. The music by Endika is essential to the film.
Watch the trailer and ask yourself if you would enjoy this for another 119 minutes. I didn’t, but I’m not the audience for this film.
OK – so down-on-his-luck guy meets a potty-mouthed vixen when she LITERALLY jumps into his car. But Dirty Beautiful is NOT your run-of-the-mill mumblecore romantic comedy!
What elevates Dirty Beautiful is that writer-director Tim Bartell has invented two characters that we’re not used to seeing. The guy and the gal each has a unique neediness that drives this offbeat battle of the sexes.
The guy is really a talented storyboard artist, but he THINKS that he is a screenwriter, which means that he spends his days not actually screenwriting, but shuffling and reshuffling his notecards. He’s drawing just enough storyboards to afford food, an apartment next to the garbage, a couple of unwashed t-shirts and a car that can’t even “make it to the 405”. And he’s oddly yearning to HAVE a girlfriend (but not prowling for sex with a woman who could turn into a girlfriend). Instead he aches to have a girlfriend primarily for the status of having a girlfriend.
She has been homeless, would mainline tequila if she could, and is, well, a HANDFUL. She’s been damaged by experiences in her past, and brings extreme volatility into his all too predictable lifestyle. And she exposes the fantasy that is trapping him in professional and personal limbo.
All in all, Dirty Beautiful is a hoot. Plus there’s the occasional memorable dialogue, like “Hey, girls that give hand jobs can be great moms. God!”
Cinequest is hosting Dirty Beautiful’s world premiere on Saturday night February 28 at 9:30 in Camera 12 with additional screenings on March 1 and March 3.
[MILD SPOILER: When the relationship becomes belligerent, each tries to hunker down and try to outlast the other. That’s not just for the plot, it’s because there’s something about each character ’s neediness that makes them dig in.]
The Hamsters (Los Hamsters) is a delightfully dark social satire about a riotously dysfunctional Tijuana family. The dad, mom and two teenagers are going to such lengths to hide secrets from each other that they are completely oblivious to the drama in the others lives. In his first narrative feature, writer-director Gil Gonzalez has crafted a comedy that is completely character-driven, compressed into a very fun 71 minutes.
This family is in the upper middle class and the dad is desperately trying to stay there, the mom is denying any signs to the contrary and the kids are too spoiled and self-absorbed to notice any odd behavior by the parents. The acting is strong, especially by Angel Norzagaray, who plays the weary but driven, hangdog dad.
And here’s a bonus – Los Hamsters was filmed in Tijuana, and it’s great for a US audience to see this city as it is seen by its residents, not by its visitors.
Los Hamsters will have its North American premiere on February 27 at the California Theatre and plays again on March 5 and 7 at Camera 12.
In the French-Canadian drama Antoine et Marie, a woman’s life is changed by an event. What happens to her is something that Marie herself must figure out, as must the audience. When we meet her, Marie is a forty-two-year-old clerk at an auto-repair business with a lust for life. She’s living with a guy who adores her, and she enjoys socializing with her with her work buddies. But something makes her unsettled and gradually sucks the spark out of her life. Will she find out the cause and decide what to do about it?
Antoine et Marie is extremely topical, but revealing that topic would be a significant spoiler, so you’re just gonna have to take my word for it.
Martine Francke delivers a superbly modulated performance as Marie. Sebastien Ricard is equally compelling as a repressed and dissatisfied blue collar husband and father.
This is writer-director Jimmy Larouche’s second feature film, and he has delivered a brilliantly constructed story with two unforgettable characters – and performances to match. Antoine et Marie is an unqualified success, tense and riveting all the way through.
Antoine et Marie’s US premiere will be February 28 at Cinequest, and it plays again on March 2 and 4, all at Camera 12.
Julianne Moore will win this year’s Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of a professor faced with the early onset of Alzheimer’s in the otherwise pedestrian disease drama Still Alice. Moore’s character is a brainiac who is by nature a hyper-achiever, so the disease strips away both her memories and the identity that she has striven to mold for herself. Of course, once she receives the diagnosis, she harnesses both her brainpower and drive to prepare herself and her family for the eventualities. It’s a breathtakingly brilliant performance, with never a false note, as we see the professor slipping from the occasional memory lapse to the ravages of dementia.
The movie’s strongest scenes are those when she is floundering with the as yet undiagnosed affliction and when she tells her family about her diagnosis, with a particularly wrenching implication for her kids. Disease movies present a challenge for any filmmaker – how can the grimness of an irreversible and progressive illness be leavened by moments of redemption and humor so it’s not too painful to watch? And here, Still Alice falls short – the redemptive moments, most particularly a corny speech before Alzheimer’s advocates, just seem phony and manipulative. And the story walks right up to the edge of a better ending and then steps away.
The supporting cast, including Kristen Stewart, are all okay (although Alec Baldwin seems a bit checked out). All in all, there’s not much else here. But Julianne Moore might be enough.
Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain in A MOST VIOLENT YEAR
In the brooding drama A Most Violent Year, a businessman (Oscar Isaac) risks everything on a big deal and must fight against time to save it as competitors, criminals and an ambitious prosecutor all try to rip it from his grasp. The guy is principled and a bit of a Boy Scout, and he handicaps himself by refusing to get dirty – even though he trades in a rough-and-tumble (and generally corrupt) industry. Fortunately, his wife and business partner Jessica Chastain is the daughter of a mobster and his in-house lawyer (Albert Brooks) is an unapologetic crook.
Two things work really well in A Most Violent Year. The first is the exceptional evocation of time and place. We are taken back to New York City in 1981, when it had all the trappings of a failed state, including a breakdown in the rule of law. As the movie takes us between weed-overgrown industrial locations, we drift into the dingy and the sinister.
The second triumph is the acting. Of course, Chastain is always wonderful, even if she is a little underused here; her character is delightfully tougher and more realistic than her hubbie. David Oyelowo is very good as the cynical prosecutor who becomes mournfully sympathetic to the naive protagonist. Albert Brooks, Peter Gerety (superb as the bartender in the otherwise dreadful God’s Pocket) and Jerry Adler (Hesh in The Sopranos) bring a spark to their smaller parts. Isaac (Inside Llewyn Davis, The Two Faces of January) adds smoldering intensity, but he’s overshadowed by the ensemble.
The splashiest performance is by Elyes Gabel as an immigrant trying to leverage a truck driving job into the American Dream who finds himself plunged by circumstance into increasingly desperate straits. Gabel perfectly modulates his performance as a guy who starts out modestly hopeful, then becomes traumatized and just hangs on to a semblance of emotional balance, and finally, his future unhinged by rotten luck, implodes.
However, I was underwhelmed by the story. Even though there’s a ticking clock element and a whodunit, it’s just not gripping enough to take this drama into psychological thriller territory. And there are some distracting holes in the plot (see Spoiler Alert below if you must). This is a disappointment after writer-director J.C. Chandor’s excellent first two films, Margin Call and All Is Lost.
While not a Must See, A Most Violent Year is still a successful drama, adorned by another flawless turn by Jessica Chastain.
SPOILER ALERT: [If the truck hijackers are really “working for themselves” and not one of Abel’s competitors, then they should only be stealing oil – so who is prowling around Abel’s house with a gun and who is attacking his sales force? And who makes a real estate purchase with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and lets the seller leave with BOTH the money and the only copy of the signed contract – twice?]
My DVD/Stream of the Weeks is a fine first feature with a GREAT title for a contemporary noir thriller: Bad Turn Worse. It’s set in a nowheresville Texas cotton gin town. Three childhood friends have just graduated from high school, and two are looking to escape to college – Bobby (Jeremy Allen White) and Sue (MacKenzie Davis). Not sharing a speck of Bobby’s and Sue’s intellectual curiosity, Sue’s longtime boyfriend B.J. (Logan Huffman) doesn’t want them to go; B.J. is dreamy and testosterone-filled, but bone-headed and weak-willed, with a gift for making impulsive, destructive choices. Bobby is sweet on Sue, and she is starting to be repelled by B.J.’s immaturity and selfishness. Sure enough, B.J. does something which entangles them all in a lethal jam.
Pretty soon there’s a double cross within a double cross, with a love triangle overlay. Nobody can trust anybody else, and somebody is gonna have to die…
The young leads are good, but two veteran TV actors sparkle in supporting turns. Mark Pellegrino plays a ruthless and crazy-scary villain that no one should cross. Jon Gries (Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite) is hilariously deadpan as the corrupt Sheriff who tries to connect the dots for Bobby with metaphors – and Bobby’s dots just aren’t connecting.
Bad Turn Worse’s noir sensibility comes from 1) the amoral attitude that sometimes you gotta break the law and 2) the expectation that there can’t be a happy ending with all this treachery in play.
Bad Turn Worse is written by Dutch Southern and is the directorial debut of Simon and Zeke Hawkins. These guys have definitely proven that they can pull off a solid thriller. Bad Turn Worse is available streaming from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr. (center back) in SELMA
It’s been a while since I’ve seen as stirring a movie as Selma, Director Ava DuVernay’s retelling of the Selma, Alabama, Civil Rights marches in 1965 – one of the most heroic episodes in a saga known for heroism.
It’s an important story. Although the marches came on the heels of a racist atrocity, instead of just vomiting rage, Martin Luther King (David Oyelowo) and his fellow civil rights leaders had a specific strategic goal in mind. Their planned civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery was designed to trigger the passage of yet-to-be-drafted legislation, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. They knew that there would be risks to all and sacrifices by many – both martyrs to the cause and victims of terrorism. Those sacrifices were real and are depicted in the movie. As the civil rights leaders navigate the reefs of local Jim Crow rule and murderous racist terrorism, Selma’s story is compelling minute-to-minute.
King himself must bear the burden of responsibility of a leader sending his charges out to possibly sacrifice their lives. All the time, he is receiving threats to his safety and that of his family, dealing with blackmail and character assassination and going through a rough patch in his marriage to Coretta Scott King (Carmen Ejogo).
But Selma, like history, is not a One Man Show. King doesn’t just dictate the path for his Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC). He has to work with his colleagues in the SCLC and reach out to build a coalition with the local African-American community and other national organizations, chiefly the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). King is not just another noble face. He’s got to show a canny craftiness as a study in negotiating, a guy who knows when to hold ’em and knows when to fold ’em.
Here’s something else that Selma does extraordinarily well. I’m a history buff who understands that – to relate a historical narrative in 90-120 minutes – filmmakers must compress historical events and compound characters. However, Selma allows us to glimpse the broad canvas by seeing other important figures of the Civil Rights movement – Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy, Hosea Williams, John Lewis, James Forman, Diane Nash, James Bevel, James Orange and even Malcom X and Bayard Rustin. There are also the white martyrs James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo. And New York Times reporter Roy Reed is there, representing the handful of national newsmen who brought the civil rights struggle into the homes of non-Southern America. As villains, we have not just George Wallace (Tim Roth) but Al Mingo and Sheriff Jim Clark.
And what about the controversial depiction of President Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson)? The short answer is that Selma’s treatment of LBJ is sometimes factually inaccurate and definitely wrong in tone. I am going to discuss this more fully in another post, probably on Wednesday. But the bottom line is this – see the movie anyway. At its core, the movie is about what happened in Selma and within the leadership of the Civil Rights movement – it generally gets that right.
After seeing Selma, I reflected on the media landscape in 1965 – where every home in America watched the TV news from either CBS, NBC or ABC. The repugnant spectacle of the white mob beating the peaceful demonstrators came into every American living room, including mine. We Americans all saw the same thing. But in today’s media environment, a huge fraction of the country gets it news from Fox News, which would likely twist and minimize the very facts that mobilized a nation in 1965 – and another huge fraction would be watching non-news content and miss the controversy all together.
But my most sobering reflection upon leaving the theater was this – right now the Republican Congress and the majority of the US Supreme Court are trying their hardest to emasculate the very Voting Rights Act that was the culmination of the campaign in the movie Selma.
In a uniformly well-acted movie, David Oyelowo deserves special praise for his portrayal of MLK. Oprah Winfrey and veteran character actor Henry G. Sanders are the best of the rest. On a personal note, I relished seeing one of my faves Wendell Pierce (Treme and The Wire) and also up-and-comer Tessa Thompson of Dear White People.
Selma is inspirational, kids should see it and families should discuss it. It’s just outside the Top Ten of my Best Movies of 2014.
In the Belgian drama Two Days, One Night, a factory worker (Oscar winner Marion Cotillard) finds out on Friday afternoon that she will be laid off unless she can convince nine of her sixteen co-workers to sacrifice their bonuses. She must make her case to each of them before a vote on Monday morning. It’s a substantial bonus, and every one of her colleagues really needs it; their spouses are expecting it, too, and many have decided how they are going to spend it. The vote is going to be close, the stakes for each family is high and the tension builds.
Our protagonist is anything but plucky. She needs to be coaxed and prodded by her husband and a militant co-worker. She is buoyed enough by an early victory to keep going, but she’s constantly on the verge of giving up.
She hasn’t been been well, which also complicates things. Because the filmmakers wait until midway to explicitly reveal her illness, I’m being careful not to spoil it here. But the precise illness is important because it affects both her own stamina and the confidence of her co-workers about how well she would contribute to the workplace.
Two Days, One Night is the latest from two of my favorites writer-director filmmakers, the brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes. They specialize in contemporary dramas of the Belgian working class. Their The Kid with a Bike was #1 on my Best Movies of 2012. And I think that their 2002 The Son (Le Fils) was pretty much a masterpiece, too. The Dardennes’ hand held (but NOT shaky) cameras intrude right on top of the characters, bringing an urgency and immediacy to every scene. Hyper realism contributes to the verisimilitude and thereby builds more power into the stories; here, a tense conversation in the doorway to an apartment building get interrupted by someone walking in – just as it would be in real life.
At its core, Two Days, One Night explores the limits of emotional endurance. What does she need to rebound form her malaise – the adrelin surge of battle? Or the power from getting to make her own choice?
[Anyone who has visited France or Belgium will recognize the remarkable politeness of the characters – observing all the formalities of greeting, shaking hands and saying thanks and goodbye even in the most awkward and emotionally charged encounters.]
Two Days, One Night is a fine film, just outside the Top Ten on my Best Movies of 2014. Unsurprisingly, Cotillard’s glammed-down performance is brilliant. It’s a compelling story as we walk her tightrope of desperation, heading toward redemption. Two Days, One Night opens widely in the San Francisco Bay Area tomorrow.
