The Theory of Everything is based on the book by the woman who married Stephen Hawking – and this is important. While the story of Stephen Hawking – a generational genius who becomes physically disabled but continues his groundbreaking work – is pretty amazing, the story of the two of them facing this journey together brings more depth and texture to the tale. And, since everybody is somewhat familiar with the arc of Stephen Hawking’s career, the added focus on Jane Hawking brings some unpredictability to the plot.
The role of Stephen is one that many actors would kill for, and Eddie Redmayne delivers an exceptionally good performance. You may remember Redmayne’s solid turn in a good movie, My Week with Marilyn, and that he was one of the few highlights in the otherwise dreadful Les Miserables.
Felicity Jones’s performance as Jane stands up to Redmayne’s. She masks her profound inner strength with adorability. She was very good in Like Crazy, a romance that I really liked, although NONE of my readers did.
It’s worth mentioning that The Theory of Everything was directed by James Marsh, because he’s on a helluva storytelling run: the acclaimed documentaries Man on a Wire and Project Nim and last year’s overlooked thrillerShadow Dancer.
All told, The Theory of Everything has a compelling story with two fine performances, which adds up to a satisfying moviegoing experience.
Technically, the Dutch thriller Borgman is a horror film, but it’s horror for adults, without the gore and with lots of wit. The shock doesn’t come from monsters unexpectedly lurching out of nowhere. The entertainment comes from the OMG moments of the “don’t ask the weird guy into your house!” and “don’t let the sinister guys watch your kids!” variety.
The setting is the architecturally striking and well-tended home of an affluent Dutch family and their Danish nanny. The husband is an aggro corporate schemer who is a real scumbag – selfish, racist and chauvinistic, with the capacity for a violent rage. His wife Marina is repressed and neurotic. But they are highly functional until a homeless guy, Camiel Borgman, happens by and circumstances compel them to put him up. Borgman feels entitled to more and more outrageous impositions – and soon it’s apparent that he’s even more sinister than he is obnoxious.
What if Charles Manson wasn’t a drug addled hoodlum and instead used his deranged charisma with remarkable skill? Borgman leads a crew of normal looking but murderous henchmen, who operate with the ruthless efficiency of Navy Seals. (Watch for the scar near the younger woman’s shoulder-blade.) Vaguely gifted with mind control, he can apparently create dreams by squatting naked gargoyle-like above Marina while she slumbers with her husband. There is violence aplenty, but it tends to come through a bonk on the head or some poison in a glass.
Dark comedy stems from the matter-of-factness of the murders and body disposal (as in tossing corpses into a lake and then diving in for a relaxing swim). Every once in a while, there’s a hilariously sinister moment, like the supremely random appearance of some whippets that seem more like hellhounds.
The acting is uniformly excellent, including the kids, but Jan Bijvoet as Borgman and Hadewych Minis as Marina are stellar.
Some questions are never answered (who are those three guys at the beginning and why are they hunting the homeless guys?). Is this a cult or aliens or what? The audience needs to accept some ambiguity. But the overall story arc is clear – no good is going to come of these people once they meet Camiel Borgman and his friends.
There is a subtext here: is this family so bourgeois that it deserves its fate? Fortunately, this subtext isn’t as in-your-face as in some recent self-loathing Eurocrap like Happy Days or Finsterworld, so it’s not at all off-putting. But Borgman can be enjoyed without going there at all.
Borgman is superbly written and directed by Alex van Warmerdam, a 62-year-old Dutch actor with only a handful of writing and directing credits.
I don’t often recommend a horror movie, but I’m all in on Borgman. Take it from me – you haven’t seen this movie before, and it’s endlessly entertaining. Borgman is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
In the droll Swedish dramedy Force Majeure, a smugly affluent family of four vacations at an upscale ski resort in the French Alps. The wife explains to a friend that they take the vacation because otherwise the husband never sees the family. But, while the wife is blissed out, the kids fidget and complain, and the hubby sneaks peeks at his phone.
Then there’s a sudden moment of apparent life-and-death peril; the husband has a chance to protect the wife and kids, but instead – after first securing his iPhone – runs for his life. How do they all go on from that revealing moment? The extent that one incident can bring relationships into focus is the core of Force Majeure.
Clearly, the family has a serious issue to resolve, but there’s plenty of dry humor. In the most cringe worthy moments, the wife tries to contain her disgust, but can’t keep it bottled up when she’s in the most social situations. The couple repeatedly huddle outside their room in their underwear to talk things out, only to find themselves observed by the same impassive French hotel worker. The most tense moments are interrupted by an insistent cell phone vibration, another guest’s birthday party and a child’s remotely out-of-control flying toy.
Force Majeure is exceptionally well-written by writer-director Ruben Ostland. It’s just his fourth feature and the first widely seen outside Scandinavia. He transitions between scenes by showing the machinery of the ski resort accompanied by
Baroque organ music – a singular and very effective directorial choice.
Force Majeure is Sweden’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Oscar. I think it deserves an Oscar nomination, although I can’t see it beating out Two Days, One Night, Ida or Leviafan.
[I’ve included the trailer as always, but I recommend that you see the movie WITHOUT watching this trailer – mild spoilers]
Set your DVRs for Turner Classic Movies’ November 21 airing of Duel. In 1971, some Universal exec hired 25-year-old Steven Spielberg to make some TV movies, the first of which was Duel. This low budget suspense thriller foreshadowed Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark and the rest of Spielberg’s masterworks.
In the pre-cell phone era, Dennis Weaver plays a traveling salesman driving through an isolated desert mountain road when he becomes embroiled in road rage to the extreme – the driver of a tanker truck starts relentlessly hunting him down. This imposing 1955 Peterbilt 281 tanker truck becomes every bit the scary monster as the Great White Shark in Jaws.
At the time, Dennis Weaver was one of America’s most familiar faces from his oft comic supporting role in TV’s iconic Gunsmoke, and he had just become a star in his own right with McCloud. He is perfect here as an Everyman – right down to his Plymouth Valiant.
I don’t know whether TCM is airing the original 74-minute (TV) or the 90-minute (theatrical) cut, but both are just about perfect. When I saw this on TV in 1971, I wasn’t thinking about who the director was, I was just riveted to the story, terrified that Dennis Weaver wasn’t going to escape his fiendish nemesis.
Startlingly original, Birdman, is NOTHING like you’ve seen before – in a good way. It’s the latest from filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel, Biutiful) and his biggest departure from the conventions of cinema.
The story is essentially a show biz satire centered on a Broadway staggering toward opening night. The show is a literary four-hander, adapted by, produced by and starring an actor (Michael Keaton) who made it big in a superhero movie franchise; he has bet his nest egg on this show, which he figures to relaunch his career as a serious actor. As one would expect, we have four colorfully neurotic actors and an anxious manager in a very stressful situation and stuff goes comically wrong.
Iñárritu reveals his story by having the camera follow the characters up, down and around the theater’s backstage, its dressing rooms, the stage itself, the roof and even outside on Times Square. Indeed, Iñárritu and Lubezki make New York’s theater district another character in the movie. This is NOT obnoxious Shaky Cam – just very immediate and urgent camera work that enhances the story.
The effect of all this is to create the illusion that the movie was shot in one long, intricately choreographed shot. Which it wasn’t – but we’re too engaged in the story to look for the cuts.
It’s the most brilliant exercise in cinema since Gravity – the film directed by Iñárritu’s pal Alfonso Cuarón and shot by the same cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki. Besides the visually stunning Gravity, Lubezki photographed the astonishing four-minute-plus “car attack” tracking shot in Children of Men AND the last three Terence Malick films, so maybe it’s time that we start looking out for the next Lubezki film.
All of the very best movie comedies are character driven, and Birdman‘s are well-written and uniformly superbly acted. I’m sure that Keaton will grab an Oscar nomination for his actor/producer, a guy who is barely clinging on to his present and future by his fingernails. Edward Norton is brilliant as an actor of spectacular talent, selfishness and unreliability. Naomi Watts and Andrea Riseborough (so compelling in last year’s underrated thriller Shadow Dancer) are excellent as especially needy actresses. But I found Emma Stone’s performance as Keaton’s sulking daughter to be extraordinary; her character has an angry outburst that is jaw dropping.
One more thing – there are episodes of magical realism throughout Birdman; (it opens with Keaton’s actor levitating in his dressing room). That did NOT work for me. I get that Iñárritu is making a point about Keaton’s actor losing control and trying to regain control, etc., but the characters, the acting, the camera work and the comic situations were enough for me, and I found his violating the laws of physics to be distracting.
Still, Birdman is a Must See for anyone looking for an IMPORTANT movie and for anyone looking for a FUNNY one.
In the appealing comedy St. Vincent, Bill Murray plays the LAST guy – a hard-drinking, reckless gambling, whoring grump – that you’d ever leave your nine-year-old son with. Of course, circumstances force a desperate single mom (Melissa McCarthy) to do just that.
There’s plenty of comic potential in Murray’s talent and that set-up, but St. Vincent rises above the average comedy. The key is that – just like real life – these characters are complicated. Murray’s character isn’t just a hedonistic boor, McCarthy’s isn’t a saintly victim and her ex isn’t just a cartoonish meanie. Take all that authenticity, and toss in Chris O’Dowd as a priest with 21st Century irony and Naomi Watts as a pregnant Russian stripper, and the result is delightful. And the kid actor, Jaeden Lieberher, is very, very good.
Hey, St. Vincent is what it is – a sentimental but not too sentimental audience-pleaser, pure and simple.
Because I often fish along the Central California coast, I enjoy watching pelicans cruise majestically along the top of the bluffs and dive for fish in surgical strikes. The California Brown Pelican is the subject of Judy Irving’s meditative documentary Pelican Dreams. You may remember Irving’s surprise 2004 hit The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, a documentary so captivating that it played 28 weeks in San Jose.
Wild Parrots had two things going for it – the oddity of birds from tropical rainforests living wild in a cold and grimy city, along with a compellingly unusual human star. Pelican Dreams doesn’t have those OMG features, but it has the very interesting stories of two individual birds, along with the riches to rags to kinda riches story of the species. The California Brown Pelican was named as an endangered species in 1970, but the ban of DDT has allowed the population to rebound, so they are no longer listed as endangered, but still face threats from oil spills, fishing tackle and climate change.
Irving had been looking to do a pelican documentary and met with the director of a pelican rescue facility, but she didn’t know how to begin the movie. Then, two weeks later, a pelican landed in the middle of traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge. Irving takes us through the life of that pelican, known to biologists as Pink 193 and named Gigi by Irving (for Golden Gate). Irving has a decidedly non-clinical view of the birds: “I would like a pelican in MY back yard”.
Pelican Dreams has a dreamy and meandering pace; like listening to Wyndham Hill New Age music for 80 minutes, it’s not a bad thing, you just need to be ready to settle in.
One more thing – the movie’s final shot (through a Panorama camera) is spectacular and unforgettable – a pelican diving at sunset – against a pink sky and purple coastline.
White Bird in a Blizzard is by no means a bad movie, but there just isn’t enough story to sustain its brief but leisurely 91 minutes. Shailene Woodley plays a 17-year-old whose neurotic mother (Eva Green!) suddenly disappears without a trace. She’s now living alone with her stolid dad (Christopher Meloni), hanging with her offbeat high school buddies and exploring her sexuality with the investigating police detective. The crux of the movie is that she’s trying to imagine why and how her mother left, all the while ignoring one of the most likely scenarios.
It’s all a mild disappointment from writer-director Gregg Araki. I loved Araki’s 2004 masterpiece Mysterious Skin (with Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and enjoyed his sci-fi sex romp Kaboom. White Bird in a Blizzard is weird at times, but not as “Araki weird” as it perhaps needed to be. He pretty much wastes Woodley, one of our very finest screen actresses. She’s very good, as is Thomas Jane as the detective.
White Bird in a Blizzard opens tomorrow in theaters and is available streaming on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
On Halloween, Turner Classic Movies is bringing us a campy Vincent Price horror classic from 1959, The Tingler. It has a scary premise – a parasite embedding itself in people’s spine and feeding on them – unaware until they feel a tingle AND THEN IT MAY BE TOO LATE! When finally revealed, the grown parasite is VERY scary-looking. Conveniently, the infested can weaken the parasite by screaming. Horror schlockmeister William Castle reportedly installed buzzers in the backs of some theater seats, so some audience members would get an actual tingle in the spine at the scariest moments. In the trailer below, Castle preps his audiences to scream if they feel a tingle. It’s a cult classic.
As the French psychological drama The Blue Room opens, a couple is having sex. We quickly learn that they are both married, but not to each other. And next, we see the man being interviewed in a police station. But The Blue Room is not a conventional police procedural, because the audience doesn’t know what crime he is suspected of committing. He knows what the crime is, but he doesn’t know how it happened. In The Blue Room‘s brisk 75 minutes, more and more is revealed to the audience and to our protagonist. He finally understands it all, but it’s too late.
The structure of the story is very inventive, co-written by the movie’s stars, Mathieu Amalric and Stéphanie Cléau, and directed by Amalric. Amalric is very good as a guy who spends the movie wondering “how did I get here, and how bad can this get?” It’s a dark little story that requires the audience to keep pace – and it’s pretty successful.
