Movies

Cinequest: IN THE COMPANY OF WOMEN

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IN THE COMPANY OF WOMEN
IN THE COMPANY OF WOMEN

In the Company of Women begins with a sixty-something guy hiring a male gigolo – not for sexual favors – but to be his wing man for a night on the town. The older guy’s long marriage has ended, and he thinks he needs some tips about prowling for women. This is a classic Boys Behaving Badly set-up, but In the Company of Women morphs into an unexpectedly sweet tribute to enduring love.

Along the way, there are plenty of War of the Sexes and Odd Couple laughs. There’s a very funny set of dating “rules”, and lines like “How do you expect to be yourself around women without alcohol?”.

Writer Shoji Silver stars as the cocksure and incredibly glib younger man. He is exceedingly handsome and perhaps even more cynical. As the younger man verbally jousts, the older man’s (Paul Eenhoorn) sincerity and depth come through. Eenhoorn is perfect as a guy who is earnest, but also very perceptive (he recognizes how the younger man’s emotions are sparked by the mere mention of his father). If you don’t remember Eenhoorn from the geezer road trip comedy Land Ho!, make sure you see that delight.

Director Khalil Silver (Shoji’s brother) masterfully changes the tome of the movie without a bump. The young guy starts out giving the advice on dating, but then he receives the advice from the older man on life. I saw In the Company of Women at its Cinequest 2015 world premiere, and women audience members, in particular, seemed to love it.

WILD TALES: the first Must See of 2015

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WILD TALES
WILD TALES

Okay, here’s the first Must See of 2015 – the hilariously dark Argentine comedy Wild Tales. Writer-director Damián Szifron presents a series of individual stories about revenge.

We all feel aggrieved, and Wild Tales explores what happens when rage overcomes the restraints of social order. Think about how instantly angry you can become when some driver cuts you off on the highway – and then how you might fantasize avenging the slight. Indeed, there is story that has the most severe case road rage since Spielberg’s Duel in 1971.  Now Wild Tales is dark, and you gotta go with it. The humor comes from the EXTREMES that someone’s resentment can lead to.

One key to the success of Wild Tales is that it is an anthology.  In a very wise move,  Szifron resisted any impulse to stretch one of the stories into a feature-length movie.  Each of the stories is just the right length to extract every laugh and pack a punch.  The funniest stories are the opening one set on an airplane and the final one about a wedding.

The acting is uniformly superb. In one story, Oscar Martínez plays a wealthy man in a desperate jam, who buys the help of his shady lawyer fixer (Osmar Núñez) and his longtime household retainer (Germán de Silva) – until their prices get just a little too high. The three actors take what looks like it’s going to a thriller and morph into a (very funny) psychological comedy with a very cynical view of human nature.

One of the middle episodes stars one of my favorite film actors, Ricardo Darín, who I see as the Argentine Joe Mantegna. I suggest that you watch Darín in the brilliant police procedural The Secrets in Their Eyes (on my top ten for 2010), the steamy and seamy Carancho and the wonderful con artist movie Nine Queens.

Wild Tales has been a festival hit (Cannes, Telluride, Toronto and Sundance) around the world and was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar. I saw Wild Tales at Cinequest 2015.

QUEEN AND COUNTRY – a fine director reminisces

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QUEEN AND COUNTRY
QUEEN AND COUNTRY

Queen and Country is director John Boorman’s autobiographical look back at his own young manhood. In 1987, Boorman’s Hope and Glory revisited his London childhood during WW II, and now we see Boorman’s experience as a very young man drafted into the Korean War-era British army. The protagonist goes through basic training and is posted in the home nation as a military typing teacher.  Along the way, he learns what happens when 1) a petty tyrant subjects you to ridiculously stupid requirements and 2) when you become infatuated with someone crazier than you are.

Boorman (Deliverance, Excalibur, The General) is an excellent filmmaker, and Queen and Country is well-crafted.  The story isn’t compelling enough to make this a Must See, but it’s wry and warm-hearted, and moderately entertaining.

I saw Queen and Country at Cinequest 2015 at a screening with John Boorman present. Boorman was more memorable than was Queen and Country, especially when he reflected on his eccentric cult sci-fi film Zardoz: “It went from failure to classic without passing through success”.

Cinequest: CORN ISLAND

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CORN ISLAND
CORN ISLAND

Cinephiles must see the exquisite and lyrical Georgian drama Corn Island.  If it doesn’t turn out to be the best contemporary art movie at Cinequest 2015, I’ll be shocked.  Corn Island has won nineteen film festival awards and was shortlisted for this year’s Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar.

Director George Ovashvili has created a near-masterpiece of filmmaking with this unhurried yet compelling story.  We learn that each spring, Georgia’s Irguri River creates temporary islands of topsoil that local farmers squat on to grow enough corn to get them through the next winter (when the island will be washed away).  We see an old man choose one particular island of maybe an acre.  He brings his 12- or 13-year-old orphan granddaughter to help him, and they build a shack and plant and cultivate a tiny field of corn.  The audience isn’t really watching corn grow, but we are observing how the man and the granddaughter react to what happens.

The storytelling is remarkably spare.  There’s not even any dialogue during the first 25 minutes – and there are probably only about 30 spoken lines in the entire movie.

The old man is played by veteran Turkish actor Ilyas Salman is a superb performance.  Georgian newcomer Mariam Buturishvili plays the granddaughter.  Her eyes are very expressive, so she doesn’t need to say much.  We watch her show up at the island clutching her doll – and then outgrowing it.

Here’s what you need to know before seeing Corn Island:  the Irguri River separates Georgia from the separatist region of Abkhazia.  The main characters speak Abkhaz. The soldiers patrolling the river are variously Georgian soldiers, Abkhaz militia and Russian peacekeepers.

So settle in for a contemplative experience and just watch this story unfold through Ovashvili’s masterful lens.  Corn Island plays Cinequest again today, March 1 and March 4 at Camera 12.

[MILD SPOILER ALERT:  The filmmakers built their own island in a manmade lake so they could control the water.  And that is the only way that they could have filmed the spectacular climax.]

Cinequest: GUARD DOG

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GUARD DOG
GUARD DOG

The dark and violent Peruvian Guard Dog is set in 2001, five years after a controversial amnesty for the government-sponsored death squads active in the previous decades.  Our protagonist is the vestige of those death squads, an ascetic hit man who still performs some residual executions.  He is a Man On A Mission, and one serious dude.  After his opening hit, he takes out the photo of his victim and burns out the image’s eyes with his cigarette.

Guard Dog is ultimately more of a mood piece than a thriller.  The theme of personal corruption keeps re-emerging, with a grossly rotting apartment ceiling and even a moment of pus-draining.  The most interesting aspect of the story is our anti-hero’s encounters with an unjaded young girl who is, in contrast to him, bubbling and full of life.

I saw Guard Dog’s US Premiere at Cinequest, and it plays the fest again March 4 at the California Theatre and March 6 at Camera 12.

Cinequest: THREE WINDOWS AND A HANGING

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THREE WINDOWS AND A HANGING
THREE WINDOWS AND A HANGING

Made in Kosovo, the powerful drama Three Windows and a Hanging explores each gender’s differing reaction to a wartime atrocity in a traditional culture.  This film is artfully shot, and it’s one of the highlights of Cinequest 2015.  Three Windows and a Hanging was Kosovo’s submission for this year’s Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar.

It’s set in a village where some of the women had been raped while the men were away fighting in the post-Yugoslavia civil wars.  The women haven’t told the men because, in this culture, being raped stigmatizes a woman and brings shame on her family.  When the atrocity surfaces in a newspaper report, the men exclaim,  “Who has done this to us?”.  They’re not talking about the rapists.  They’re talking about the rape victim who has disclosed an event that embarrasses them.  Of course, this victim-blaming only serves to re-traumatize the already devastated and lead to additionally tragic consequences.  It’s a tough subject, but not a tough movie to watch.

Throughout the movie, director Isa Qosja makes superb choices.  He loves shots of loooong duration and they are very effective;   the first five minutes of the movie are in just two shots.  There’s an opening interview, filmed by focusing on the interviewer and her translator, and not even glimpsing the back of the interviewee’s head until the end of the shot.  Before the topic of the interview is revealed, we know that it’s painful because of the nervousness of the interviewer.

There are many brilliantly shot scenes, especially one where a boy offers condolences to a man he passes on a road.  There’s an interaction between three characters, first shot through one character’s armpit, and then from above and finally in a long shot from behind a window – all telling the audience EXACTLY what’s going on with each character irrespective of whether we can hear what they are saying.  And when one character gets some devastating news, he’s in the shower, so we can only see his body stiffen behind the blur of the shower curtain.  It’s really remarkable filmmaking.

Three Windows and a Hanging plays Cinequest again on March 2 and March 7 at Camera 12.

Cinequest: MILWAUKEE

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MILWAUKEE
MILWAUKEE

In the contemporary American dramedy Milwaukee, a bunch of thirty-something friends get together for a weekend at a vacation home.  They drink some wine, resolve to have an Anything Goes night, get high and, before you know it, some partners are swapped.  What could possibly go wrong?

Milwaukee is well-made, even a little slick, and very well-acted.  But there’s really not much to think about after it’s over.

I saw Milwaukee at its world premiere at Cinequest, and it plays again March 1 at Camera 12 and March 4 at the California Theatre.

Cinequest: SONGS SHE WROTE ABOUT PEOPLE SHE KNOWS

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SONGS SHE WROTE ABOUT PEOPLE SHE KNOWS
SONGS SHE WROTE ABOUT PEOPLE SHE KNOWS

Here’s the premise of Songs She Wrote About People She Knows – a dissatisfied but very contained woman adopts the therapeutic device of SINGING her true feelings.  So she expresses her resentments by leaving excoriating singing voicemails. When she melodically rips her ubercaffeinated boss, there is an unintended consequence. Her harangue sparks both his personal interest in her (unwelcome) and a sudden decision to swing his life 180 degrees.  He gloms on to her as he seeks to his artistic dream. It becomes an odd couple movie, where he spends the rest of the movie annoying her (and, believe me, this is not very entertaining).

Cinequest: WAX: WE ARE THE X

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WAX: WE ARE THE WAX
WAX: WE ARE THE WAX

In the lighthearted Italian Wax: We Are the X, a notoriously shady producer sends two guy filmmakers to Monaco to scout locations for a commercial and meet a gal French casting director.  They are all hired because they work cheap.  What follows is a little whodunit, a little relationship drama, a little comedy and, as one might expect, a ménage à trois illustrating the  open-mindedness of French women (in the movies, anyway).

The best five minutes of the movie is right at the beginning, when the producer demonstrates his mastery of getting someone else to pick up a tab.

There is a superfluous but welcome cameo by 70-year-old Rutger Hauer (it’s been over thirty years since Nighthawks and Blade Runner!).  And there’s a Gen X hook, an attempt to make Wax: We Are themore than it is, which is basically an entertaining piece of Euro-fluff.

Cinequest: THE LIFE AFTER

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THE LIFE AFTER
THE LIFE AFTER

In the Mexican drama The Life After, two brothers are raised by a very unreliable single mom.  When she disappears and leaves them on their own, they go on a road trip where the emotional damage she has wreaked on them is exposed.   It’s well-acted and well-photographed, but grim and slow-paced.  Ultimately, I’m just not convinced that this story needed to be told.