Movies

Touchy Feely: just watch the trailer instead

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Josh Pais and Rosemarie DeWitt in TOUCHY FEELY

OK, maybe I just shouldn’t keep expecting writer-director Lynn Shelton to make the first mumblecore movie that I will like.  Touchy Feely begins with a promising premise – a massage therapist (Rosemarie DeWitt)  suddenly develops an aversion to touching the human body, which understandably threatens both her career and her relationship with her boyfriend.  Unfortunately, Shelton takes both the premise and the excellent cast and crashes them into a crater of boredom.

Shelton made last year’s Your Sister’s Sister (also with DeWitt), which was really good for about 58 minutes, until it petered out in a senseless musical interlude and a montage of rainy bike riding.  In Touchy Feely, the massage therapist addresses her affliction by moping and yakking and encountering Ron Livingston and moping and yakking some more.  There’s a fun thread about her quirky uncle’s dental practice, but that’s entirely disconnected from the protagonist’s story.

DeWitt was exceptional in Your Sister’s Sister and uniformly excellent in Rachel Getting Married, Promised Land and Margaret – and Touchy Feely is not DeWitt’s fault.  The fine actors Ellen Page, Scoot McNairy (Argo), Alison Janney and Josh Pais are similarly wasted.

Now I tend to like character-driven, talky movies.  But I don’t like to watch self-involved twits obsess over their own avoidable, First World problems.  That pretty much describes the mumblecore genre, especially when the male characters have bedhead.  (This movie could have been even worse – the Gigli, Ishtar or Moment by Moment of mumblecore – had Greta Gerwig played Alison Janney’s role.)

There’s one really funny scene in Touchy Feely – where Alison Janney introduces the painfully awkward Josh Pais to Reiki.  Other than that, just watch the trailer – it’s much better than the movie and it will cost you less than three minutes of your remaining lifetime.

Touchy Feely is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Netflix Instant, Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, Google Play and XBOX Video.

The Past: how life resists our desire to make everything tidy

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bejo In the French movie The Past, a French woman has requested that her estranged husband return from Iran to expedite their divorce; he obliges and walks into a family life that gets messier by the minute.  Why does she suddenly want the divorce right now? Can she marry her current boyfriend?  Who are the fathers of all of her kids?  What happened to her current boyfriend’s wife – and why?  As the answers are revealed one-by-one, our understanding of the events and characters evolve.

This shifting viewpoint is similar that into writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning Iranian film A Separation, which I summarized as “brilliant film/tough to watch”.  Farhadi’s art reflects life at its messiness – especially how life resists our desire to make everything tidy and symmetrical.  It all makes for a compelling drama – we care about each character and what’s going to happen.  Each development further complicates the story – all the way up to the movies final shot, which adds another pivotal complication.

The Artist’s Berenice Bejo won Best Actress at Cannes for playing the woman completely overstressed by the pressures that her own choices have brought upon her; (her careworn character is just about 180 degrees from Peppy Miller in The Artist).  The acting is uniformly excellent, and especially by the child actors.

One more thing – in writing and directing the part of the teenage daughter, Farhadi shows that he has a superb understanding of teenage girls.  He captures the mix of self-absorption, volatile unpredictability and the paradoxical yearning for both independence and parental protection, while avoiding turning the character into a sitcom brat.  Indeed, he’s done it before, having directed his own teenage daughter to an excellent performance in A Separation.  This is one of his most notable gifts as a filmmaker.

The realism of The Past may cause some viewers to reflect on their own family drama, so not everyone will find it enjoyable.  Nevertheless, it’s an admirable and thought-provoking story told so very well – right up to that final shot.

All Is Lost: resilience meets hopelessness

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all is lostJ.C. Chandor’s All Is Lost begins with Robert Redford reading a farewell letter to an unidentified someone.  Then it flashes back to a boating mishap eight days earlier. For the rest of the film there is only one character and there are only three more lines.  Redford plays a solo yachtsman, adrift in the middle of the vast Indian Ocean, who must deal with a disabled (and then shipwrecked) boat, storms and other calamities.  All alone. With his survival at stake.

The protagonist is unusually resourceful but his resilience is tested by each catastrophe and the increasing hopelessness of his situation.  The entire time, we’re watching only Redford, and gauging his thoughts and feelings from his expression and his actions.  It’s a powerful experience.

Chandor showed a lot of promise with last year’s Wall Street thriller Margin Call, and he has another winner with All Is Lost.

White Reindeer: wickedly deadpan for the Holidays

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white reindeer“Autumn is my stripper name.  My real name is Fantasia.”

I think that’s pretty funny. If you think so, too, you should watch White Reindeer on VOD. In this dark and subversive comedy, we meet a comfortable suburbanite who enjoys going overboard at Christmastime; suddenly, her husband is killed and she plunges into shock, grief and various manifestations of depression. Believe it or not, this is a comedy, and what makes it so funny is her deadpan reaction to each of the secondary indignities she undergoes. As she tries to cope with her loss, she learns some unexpected things about her late husband and winds up partying with strippers, dabbling in shoplifting and visiting a neighbors’ creepy swingers mixer. It’s all subversively funny.

White Reindeer is available streaming on Amazon, iTunes, Sundance Now, GooglePlay and XBOX.

Me and You: looking for solitude, finding adventure

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ME AND YOU

In the Italian coming of age dramedy Me and You, we meet fourteen-year-old Lorenzo with his pimply face, see through mustache and bad attitude.  Lorenzo lives with his mom in a comfortable Rome apartment and yearns for some low-pressure solitude. Telling his mom that he’s off to a weeklong ski holiday with schoolmates, he instead hides out in their apartment’s basement storage unit.  He has stocked the basement with his favorite foods, it has a bathroom and he can listen to his tunes on headphones.  It’s all looking up for him until his heroin-addicted older half-sister Olivia intrudes, looking for a place to go cold turkey.

Lorenzo resents the intrusion, but Olivia threatens to tell his mom.  It turns out that the two don’t really know each other. (Lorenzo’s dad had left Olivia’s mom for his mom – and the two mothers don’t communicate.)  The siblings bicker.  As any 14-year-old would be, Lorenzo is fascinated by this young woman.  Still immature herself, she has already lived a life – and there’s much Lorenzo can learn about the adult world from Olivia.  Perhaps they can even bond for the first time as brother and sister…Lorenzo isn’t going to get his solitude, but he may get an unforgettable adventure instead.

There’s a lot of humor in Me and You, primarily stemming from the ski trip ruse and the sibling interactions.  Me and You also contains a very realistic and unvarnished depiction of detox and relapse.

This is 72-year-old Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci’s first film since The Dreamers in 2003 (my choice for the best film of that year).  Bertolucci, of course, is the writer-director of Last Tango in Paris (which I don’t think holds up well today) and The Conformist, 1900, The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky (which still stand up as excellent films).  With The Dreamers and Me and You, Bertolucci seems to be matching his finest work.

I saw Me and You at the San Francisco International Film Festival; it is still waiting for a US theatrical release.

Go for Sisters: three more great characters from John Sayles

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go for sistersMy favorite indie writer-director John Sayles has created three more wonderful characters in Go for Sisters.  Bernice (LisaGay Hamilton from Men of a Certain Age and Jackie Brown) is a no-nonsense parole officer. Fontayne (Yolonda Ross) is an ex-con fighting to maintain her sobriety through minimum wage jobs in a drug-filled neighborhood.  Freddy (Edward James Olmos) is an unfairly disgraced cop who is almost blind from macular degeneration.  Bernice and Fontayne were high school friends who took different paths.  Bernice’s adult son has gotten involved in some illegal activity, and when he disappears, Bernice need Fontayne’s street connections to help find him.  Soon they need to enlist Freddy, and soon the three are off on chase back and forth through the under world on both sides of the US-Mexico border.  All three characters are emotionally damaged from personal loss – and all three are fighting through their pain.

Go for Sisters is in the construct of a thriller, but it’s not the greatest thriller around, although Sayles gets what he can from a radio tracking device and an attempted miggung in a Tijuana dildo shop.  What makes Go for Sister – and all of Sayles’ films – worthwhile is the characters.  We’ve never met these individuals before, but they are believable and we care about them.  Excellent acting from the three stars helps a lot.  (And there’s a nice scene with Hector Elizondo.)

This is minor Sayles – it doesn’t compare to Eight Men Out, Passion Fish, The Secret of Roan Inish, City of Hope or his 1996 masterpiece Lone Star.  Still, it’s a solid character driven film (and will be a good video choice in 2014).

Inside Llewyn Davis: unlovable loser

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INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS

In Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coen Brothers take us back to the Greenwich Village folk scene just before the emergence of Bob Dylan. Oscar Isaac plays a talented folk singer who is always a day late and a dollar short – and it’s all his own fault.  His self-absorption sabotages his career and his relationships. Unfortunately, to paraphrase The Wife leaving the theater, we don’t care enough about the protagonist to root for him, and he’s not hateful enough to make us root against him.  And that’s why Inside Llewyn Davis isn’t a great movie.  (In contrast, Sideways is a great movie about another guy who is making his own bad luck – but we care about THAT guy.)

What Inside Llewyn Davis does right is to take us back to the Village in 1961 – the music is great and so are all the period details,  Oscar Isaacs is quite good, and there are some stellar turns by Justin Timberlake, F. Murray Abraham and character actor Stan Carp as Llewyn’s senile dad.  And Inside Llewyn Davis is often very, very funny.

Inside Llewyn Davis was perhaps the most critically praised film at this year’s Cannes International Film Festival and is on the Best of 2013 lists of most critics – but not mine.  It’s watchable for the period and the humor, but the main character just doesn’t engage us enough.

Saving Mr. Banks: Hanks as Disney, slathered with sentimentality

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SAVING MR. BANKS - TRAILER NO. 1 -- Pictured: Tom Hanks (Screengrab)

Saving Mr. Banks is Disney’s story of the making of Mary Poppins, centering on the conflict between the avuncular Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) and the harshly fastidious author of the source material, P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson).  It’s a pleasing and satisfying movie, albeit sentimental, predictable and emotionally manipulative.  (I saw this with The Wife, who found the movie to be deeper than I did.)

From top-to-bottom, Saving Mr. Banks is quite well-acted.  It’s great to see Hanks bring alive Walt Disney – such an icon, especially to the Baby Boomers who watched him introduce the most imaginative family entertainment every Sunday night on television. Colin Farrell is very good as the playful and loving but unreliable father. Kathy Baker and Paul Giamatti are good in particularly unchallenging roles.  Emma Thompson does just fine, too, although her role has been written to be somewhat one-dimensional.

Here’s a pet peeve of mine – the trailer gives away the heart of story (and the reason for the title).  If you’re interested in Walt Disney and/or Mary Poppins – and you have two hours – skip the trailer and see the movie.  Otherwise, just watch the trailer.

American Hustle: gloriously entertaining

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american hustleWhy is American Hustle so gloriously entertaining?  It’s certainly successful as a con man movie, as a 70s period piece and as a fast-paced (sometimes almost screwball) comedy.  But I think the key is that writer-director David O. Russell develops such compelling characters – lots of them – and they’re so endearingly wacky, we just need to see what happens next.  That’s the recipe he used in last year’s triumph Silver Linings Playbook (and in his under-appreciated 1996 Flirting with Disaster).

American Hustle opens with the wonderfully sly disclaimer “Some of this actually happened”, and then we see Christian Bale assembling the worst comb-over in cinematic history – and we’re hooked.  The story follows the arc of the real-life Abscam scandal with the FBI forcing con artists to sting elected officials in an outlandish bribery-by-phony-sheik scheme.  Bale plays an unattractive yet magnetic con man.  Amy Adams is his tough and sexy partner.  Bradley Cooper is their hyper-ambitious FBI handler.

As we would expect, Bale, Adams and Cooper are all fun to watch with this material.  But Russell ‘s cast is very deep – the secondary and tertiary characters are just as fun.  Jennifer Lawrence is a force of nature as Bale’s estranged wife, who takes passive aggressiveness to an entirely unforeseen level.  Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) almost steals the picture as an extremely sympathetic and good-hearted local pol who doesn’t see what’s coming.  And Louis C.K. is hilarious as Cooper’s put-upon boss;  as he did so successfully in Blue Jasmine, C.K. plays the character completely straight and lets the material generate the laughs; many comedians make the mistake of trying to act funny in movie comedies, but C.K. has a real gift for the lethal dead pan.

American Hustle plants us firmly in the late 1970s with an especially evocative score and very fun costumes and hair.   Besides Bale’s comb-over, we enjoy the tightly permed curls of Adams and Cooper, along with Lawrence’s Jersey updo.  And Adams and Lawrence sport an unceasing series of dresses with severely plunging necklines.

Funny and gripping at the same time, with scads of movie stars at their very best, American Hustle is a surefire good time at the movies.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire – smart, fast-paced and Jennifer Lawrence

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The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is another gripping episode from the popular and acclaimed young adult fiction trilogy by Suzanne Collins. Just like The Hunger Games, it’s a well-paced, well-acted and intelligent sci-fi adventure fable.  And it’s yet another showcase role for Jennifer Lawrence.

To review, the story is set in the future, where several generations after a rebellion, an authoritarian government plucks teenagers from the formerly rebellious provinces to fight to the death in a forest. It’s all broadcast on reality TV for the entertainment of the masses. Children killing children – it doesn’t get much harsher than that.

This time, the malevolent tyrant picks his gladiators from the winners (i.e., survivors) of the past Games.  Because they have survived by killing off the other children, they could constitute their own PTSD support group; they range from emotionally fragile to raging bonkers.  This adds a particularly flavorful set of roles, acted especially deliciously by Jeffrey Wright, Amanda Plummer and Jena Malone.

The main purpose of a second act is to tee up the third, and Catching Fire is very successful, with the help of a new character played by Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Francis Lawrence (no relation to Jennifer) does a fine job directing his first Hunger Games movie – and he’s set to direct the final chapter in the trilogy (which will actually be two movies –  The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 and – Part 2).

[Gary Ross, the director of the original The Hunger Games, is in pre-production on two new Jennifer Lawrence movies – Burial Rites from the Hannah Kent novel and Steinbeck’s East of Eden (where Lawrence’s role is the one played by Julie Harris in the 1955 Elia Kazan/James Dean version).]

But, at the end of the day, it’s all about Jennifer Lawrence, who must carry the movie as the plays the determined and resourceful Appalachian heroine.  She’s an amazing screen presence, capable of believably portraying both panic attacks and action hero sequences.  She’s worth the price of admission all by herself.

The source material may be aimed at tweens, but I haven’t met an adult yet who hasn’t enjoyed and been impressed with The Hunger Games or The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.  I’ll probably go see Catching Fire again (this time with The Wife), and I’m looking forward to Mockingjay.