Movies

Short Term 12: powerful and satisfying

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SHORT TERM 12

Here’s the first MUST SEE of the fall movie season.  The compelling and affecting Short Term 12 is set in a foster care facility unit named Short Term 12; since the kids can live there for years, it seems pretty long-term to me.  These are kids who have suffered abuse and neglect and who act out with disruptive and dangerous behaviors.  Runaways, assaults and suicide attempts are commonplace, and some of the kids thrive on creating drama.

The gifted lead counselor on the unit is Grace (Brie Larson), who isn’t much older than the kids.  She’s kind of a Troubled Kid Whisperer who, in each impossible situation, knows exactly what to do to defuse or comfort or protect.  But while she is in total command of her volatile and fragile charges, she is profoundly troubled herself.  She and her boyfriend Mason (John Gallagher Jr.), who also works on the unit, are themselves survivors and former foster youth.  Mason seems to have resolved his issues, but Grace’s demons lurk just under her skin.

In Short Term 12’s taut 96 minutes, we watch Grace navigate through crisis after crisis until she must face her own.  We share many of the most powerful moments in 2013 cinema, particularly one kid’s unexpectedly painful insightful and sensitive rap, another kid’s authoring a wrenching children’s story and Grace’s own outburst of ferocity to protect a kid from a parent.

Brie Larson’s performance as Grace is being widely and justifiably described as star-making, and I think she deserves an Oscar nomination.   I noticed her performances in much smaller roles in Rampart and The Spectacular Now , and I’m really looking forward to the launch of a major career.  Think Jennifer Lawrence.

John Gallagher Jr. must be a superb actor, because nobody in real life can be as appealing and sympathetic as his characters in Margaret, Newsroom and Short Term 12.  I’ll watch any movie with Gallagher in it, and he’s almost good enough to help me stomach Newsroom.

In his debut feature, writer-director Destin Cretton has hit a home run with one of the year’s best dramas.  Some might find the hopeful ending too pat, but I say So What – I have met many former foster youth who have transcended horrific childhoods to become exemplary adults.

DVD/Stream of the Week: Mud

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MUD

In the brilliant drama Mud, two Arkansas boys venture onto a river island and discover a man named Mud (Michael McConaughey) hiding from the authorities. Ellis (Tye Sheridan of The Tree of Life) is a hopeless romantic, consumed by an ideal view of love. His more hard-eyed buddy Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) is on the outlook for cool stuff. Both are ready for the excitement of a secret adventure.

Mud is another triumph for writer-director Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter). The story has aspects of a boyhood adventure and of an escape thriller which hook the audience. But Mud is, at its heart, a coming of age story in which Ellis (primarily) gets a big dose of realism about love and human constancy. Neckbone doesn’t have many illusions about human nature. His parents aren’t in the picture, and he lives with his wacky uncle Galen (Michael Shannon) in a trailer. Neckbone has a knack for immediately getting to the core of situation by bargaining an errand for a pistol or asking “Didja feel her titties?”. A step down from Neckbone’s trailer lifestyle, Ellis lives on a floating shack tied to the riverbank. His parents are together, but, it seems, not for long. Somehow, Ellis believes in an ideal and forever love.

There are many relationships for Ellis to observe: his parents’ troubled journey, the sacrifices Mud makes for his lover (Reese Witherspoon), the mysterious bond between Mud and another houseboat dweller (Sam Shepherd), a rich man’s (Joe Don Baker) own obsession with his sons, his partnership with Neckbone and Ellis’ own first foray into dating. It’s all a bigger mouthful than Ellis was expecting.

The two kid actors are great. So are McConaughey, Shepherd, Witherspoon, Baker and Nichol’s favorite actor, Shannon.  Mud primarily succeeds because Nichols has created compelling characters and woven a top-rate story, both gripping and thoughtful.

Mud is one of the best movies of 2013.   Mud is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, GooglePlay, YouTube and other VOD outlets.

I Give It a Year: a twist on the rom com

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I GIVE IT A YEAR

In a twist on the usual romantic comedy plot, I Give It a Year starts out with the perfect wedding, and then traces the couple’s (Rafe Spall and Rose Byrne) adventurous first year of marriage. They have married after a brief infatuation, and it turns out that they aren’t a great fit. It becomes rapidly apparent that she is more well suited with her new client (Simon Baker), and his true soul mate is his ex-girlfriend (Anna Faris).

Of course, this is a romantic comedy, so be prepared for some silliness and some implausibility. But I give it credit for an original story, and it’s mostly entertaining, with some moments of hilarity. Anna Faris is brilliant in her character’s earnest but futile attempt to master the acrobatics required in a three-way sexual encounter. And it’s very funny when the young groom realizes that the honeymoon photos that the bride is showing her parents includes some naughty bits.

I especially enjoyed the fine dramatic actress Olivia Colman (Tyrannosaur, Broadchurch, The Iron Lady) playing broadly against type as the worst imaginable marriage counselor (she interrupts a session to take a call on her cell phone and scream abuse at her husband). As in the very best comedy, Colman plays it absolutely straight as she, in turn, violates every professional precept.

Stream of the Week: How to Make Money Selling Drugs

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HOW TO MAKE MONEY SELLING DRUGS

Filmmaker Matthew Cooke’s documentary How to Make Money Selling Drugs is a dispassionate critique of the Drug War.  Using the How To format as an attention grabber, Cooke presents the job opportunities in illegal drug commerce as rational economic decisions  How much money can you make as a street dealer?  As a drug smuggler or kingpin?  What is the risk that you will need to defend your product inventory from a violent robbery?  What are the risks that you will be incarcerated?  How do those risks change if you are African-American?

The talking heads are former industry insiders, ranging from former street dealer 50 Cent to big league smuggler Brian O’Dea and notorious LA druglord Freeway Rick.

How to Make Money Selling Drugs is effective because Cooke generally strips away the value judgements and lets the audience draw its own conclusions, balancing out the risks and rewards.  The final risk presented, that of addiction, is particularly sobering.  (How to Make Money strays from this approach just once, with a Woody Harrelson diatribe.)    I expect that most viewers will conclude that 1) drug dealing is not a great long-term career path; and 2) the Drug War has not been effective in reducing drug abuse or illegal commerce.

How to Make Money Selling Drugs is available streaming from Amazon, iTunes and Vudu.

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints: absorbing and unforgettable

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AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS

The skeleton of the story in Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is simple – a Texas prison escapee goes looking for his wife and kid.  But that capsule understates the totality of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, an atmospheric romantic drama that is superbly written, directed, acted and scored.

Every filmmaker should watch the first ten minutes of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints for its extremely economic story-telling, which lets the audience piece together the setting and the cores of the characters without obvious exposition.  Bob and Ruth are young lovers, and Ruth is pregnant.   They are involved in a crime, for which Bob goes to prison before their child is born.  When the daughter is four, he escapes from prison and everyone – Ruth, Bob’s old crime partners, the community and the cops – know that he’s headed back to Ruth.  Both the cops and the criminals are awaiting – the story follows the path to the inevitable conflict.

The characters are unforgettable.   Bob, played with ferocity by Casey Affleck (Gone Baby Gone and The Assassination of Jesse James blah blah), has an obsession to reunite with Ruth and the daughter he has never seen.  He has framed this quest as his moral obligation to take care of his family – but, of course, they would be better off without him and the trouble he will bring.  He’s not really capable of nobility, but he doesn’t know that.

Ruth has a profound passion for Bob, and she owes him for taking the fall for her. But, despite her loyalty, she is entirely realistic about the consequences of his return.  We see Ruth’s steely determination and wilfulness in yet another searing performance by Rooney Mara (The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo).

The complexity of the secondary characters contribute to the compelling story.  With an unsettling mixture of decency and creepiness, the local cop (Ben Foster, equally good in The Messenger and Rampart)  becomes very attentive to Ruth and her daughter.  He had been wounded at Bob and Ruth’s capture, seems to be genuinely interested in the welfare of the little daughter and also clearly has a thing for Ruth.

Ruth has also been helped by a fatherly gentleman storekeeper (Keith Carradine), whom we later learn is the local crime lord.  His actions seem rooted in all the right values, but, given his criminality, how benevolent can he really be?  As a leading man, Carradine had an impressive run in the 70s where he starred in Robert Altman’s Nashville, Ridley Scott’s The Duellists and Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby, all within three years.  Now with 128 screen credits, Carradine’s performance here perfectly strikes every note.

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints looks beautiful – much like a Terence Malick film without all the confusion and boring parts.  I also liked Daniel Hart’s atmospheric but unobtrusive music.

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is completely absorbing – and that doesn’t happen by accident.  This is writer-director David Lowery’s first feature with a theatrical release.  Who is this guy?  Lowery edited two recent indies that I criticized for other reasons, Upstream Color and Sun Don’t Shine, but in which his editing was remarkable.  It’s clear from Ain’t Them Bodies Saints that Lowery is a major talent.

So there you have it – a gripping story with brilliant performances by Rooney, Affleck, Carradine and Ben Foster in the debut of a promising filmmaker.

What does the title mean?  I have no idea.  And I hope that Lowery lets someone else name his next exceptional movie.

The World’s End: some LOL moments, but not a Must See

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THE WORLD'S END

In the British farce The World’s End, five guys return to their sleepy hometown for a fabled pub crawl through all twelve local establishments – and find their old neighbors infiltrated by robot monsters from outer space (a la Invasion of the Body Snatchers).  The central joke is that four of them have matured into forty-year-olds with families and careers, and they have been manipulated into this escapade by the fifth who is still stuck at age eighteen.  That guy, well-played by Simon Pegg, still dresses and acts as he did in high school (and still drives the same car) – and he doesn’t see why that is not OK.  The clash between this man-boy and the four regular guys is funny, and then the filmmakers add a send-up of the alien monster genre.

It’s a stellar crew – besides, Pegg, our heroes include Nick Frost (Pegg’s partner in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, Martin Freeman (those movies plus The Office), Paddy Considine (In America, Red Riding) and Eddie Marsan (Vera Drake, Happy-Go-Lucky, Ray Donovan).  The usually upper crusty Rosamund Pike is a good sport, too.

I wish it were as funny as Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, but Pegg’s earnestly immature bozo and the silliness of the alien robots can only take The World’s End so far.  It’s mildly entertaining with some LOL moments, but not a Must See.

Pieta: sickening violence

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PIETA

Here’s proof that it’s possible for a movie to be too dark and violent even for The Movie Gourmet.

Pieta is about a 30-year-old Korean loan shark so heartless that he cripples his unpaying clients and steals their disability payoffs.  Out of nowhere, a woman finds him and claims to be the mother that abandoned him as an infant.  To test whether she is really his mother, he brutalizes and defiles her (in ways that I wish I had not witnessed).  Nevertheless she clings to him, and a heaping portion of maternal guilt causes him to rethink his ways.

Now my taste in film runs to the violent.  I revel in Killer Joe and Django Unchained and have just praised the exploitation films Outrage and Outrage Beyond.  Very violent movies like End of Watch, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Sin Nombre and Gomorrah have all recently made it on to my Best of the Year lists.  I particularly like the often grim and twisted offerings of contemporary Korean cinema (Memories of Murder, Mother, Oldboy, The Housemaid).

But I don’t like torture porn (which Pieta approaches) or slasher cinema.  And some stories – like Pieta’s –  just don’t have a payoff that makes it worthwhile to sit through the most uncomfortable screen violence.  Call me a sissy.

Pieta has received some critical praise because it is well made and emotionally powerful.  But that just isn’t enough to justify such sickening violence.  Pieta is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from some VOD outlets.

In a World…: best comedy this year so far

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IN A WORLD...

Actress Lake Bell wrote/directed/stars in In a World…, the story of an underachieving voice coach who still lives in the house of her dad, the king of movie trailer narration.   She’s disheartened when he kicks her out to make room for his new and very young squeeze, but she lucks into a voiceover gig herself and is “discovered” as the hot new talent.  In fact, she’s up for the most prestigious new payday when she finds out that her dad is not as supportive as one might expect…

Here’s why In a World… is so damn good – Bell has written a very funny comedy about a generational rivalry and woven it together with a Hollywood satire, an insider’s glimpse into the hitherto under-the-radar voiceover industry and a romantic comedy.  The romantic comedy thread, in which our heroine is oblivious to the nice guy who really likes her, is better by itself than most romantic comedies.  But we also get many LOL moments among the self-absorbed and back-stabbing Hollywood set.  Plus there’s a very sweet story of the relationship between the protagonist’s sister and her hubby – that could stand alone and be better than a lot of indies as well..

Bell gets most of the laughs from the foibles of the characters and from really intelligently crafted dialogue.  But she know how to pull off a physical gag, too.  At one point, our heroine wants to be kissed by a handsome Hollywood bigshot, but when it happens, his technique is to put her entire nose into his mouth – and her surprise and discomfort is very funny.

Fortunately, Bell was able to cast Fred Melamed, a distinguished voiceover artist, as the father.  Melamed has been the voice of CBS Sports, the Super Bowl, the Olympics and Mercedes-Benz.  He’s also a brilliantly funny actor.   I called Melamed’s performance as the hilariously pompous and blatantly manipulative Sy Ableman in A Serious Man “the funniest movie character of the decade”.

Bell’s previous roles have been secondary parts that have taken advantage of her unconventionally severe beauty.  You may remember Bell as Alec Baldwin’s new trophy wife in It’s Complicated.  Having written it herself, she finally has a role in which she can show her comic chops.  I turns out that she’s a gifted comic actress, with screwball timing, a rich take and a knack for physical comedy.

The rest of the cast is uniformly good.  I especially enjoyed Rob Corddry (Warm Bodies) as the long suffering husband of the sister.

In a World… is a complete and winning film.  It’s already almost September, and so far, In a World… is the year’s best comedy.

DVD/Stream of the Week: Top of the Lake

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Elisabeth Moss in TOP OF THE LAKE

If you’re looking for an episodic drama before you can get another taste of Treme, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Justified or the like, you can do a lot worse than the Sundance Channel’s seven part series Top of the Lake, staring Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss.  It’s just right for a Labor Day Weekend marathon.

Moss plays a cop who returns to her rural New Zealand hometown only to get entangled in the case of a missing pregnant 12-year-old. Moss’ cop begins unraveling the community’s secrets, and it turns out that she has a past herself.  It’s easy to find oddballs and seekers in a mountain community, along with the usual crop of redneck louts, and this New Zealand backwater has more than its share of both.  There’s a dodgy police commander, a slimy real estate broker, a bunch of edgy teenagers – and the protagonist’s old prom date is now living in a tent.

But that’s nothing compared to one of the most twisted characters of recent years, the sadistic local drug lord played by Peter Mullan (the Red Riding series, Tyrannosaur, The Claim).

And then there’s a colony of women living in shipping containers while they heal from life’s traumas and seek enlightenment.   Their sometimes catatonic and always harsh guru is played by Holly Hunter.

Throw all these characters together into a cleverly constructed plot, and you’ve got one highly entertaining series.

Peter Mullan in TOP OF THE LAKE

Top of the Lake was created by New Zealand’s own Oscar-winning director Jane Campion.

Each of the episodes is only 48-50 minutes long, so watching all seven episodes goes pretty briskly.

Holly Hunter in TOP OF THE LAKE

You can catch Top of the Lake episodes on the Sundance Channel or watch all seven episodes on DVD or streaming from Netflix.

The Rambler: are you kidding me?

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THE RAMBLER

The indie The Rambler begins as stylish mood piece.  Somewhere in the barren Great Basin, a laconic guy (Dermot Mulroney) is released from prison back to his trailer, his snotty and unfaithful girlfriend and his cretinous friends.  When offered a job by his brother in Oregon, he begins a road trip across the West.  Although not much is happening as he begins the trek, there’s an inventive soundtrack that reels us in, along with a supporting cast of grotesques right out of Fellini or Leone.

So far, so good.  Our hero picks up a mad scientist with a gadget that can supposedly record a person’s dreams on to VHS (VHS is another nice touch).  26 minutes into the film, they meet another guy in a bar, hook him up to the gadget – and his head explodes – Holy Shit – didn’t see that coming!

And then there’s the first of a few extremely disturbing dream sequences, with lots of gore.  Although Dermot Mulroney keeps staring impassively through his aviator sunglasses, The Rambler turns next into an homage to David Lynch, and, finally, to Rob Zombie.

At 70 minutes, Mulroney dreams that he is strapped to a bed when a dummy dressed like an old hag plunges through the window above his head and vomits what looks like yellow paint on to his face and into his mouth.  It is an extended vomit scene – 58 seconds (I timed it).

The writer/director responsible for this disjointed collection of shock pieces is Calvin Lee Reeder.  It’s pretty bad, but the most insulting part of the film is the last three minutes –  a montage of the road trip’s horrors, essentially a highlight reel of the movie’s shockers in case you have already erased them from your memory.  I am now certainly going to follow Reeder’s career (if he has one), because The Rambler is astonishingly bad.

The Rambler is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube.