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.
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.
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 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.
In the biopic The Look of Love, Steve Coogan plays porn king Paul Raymond, once Britain’s richest man. Raymond turned a tawdry row of Soho strip clubs into an empire of smut magazines. (Sharing a $500 million fortune, Raymond’s two granddaughters are the youngest of Britain’s 100 richest women.)
Now here’s the problem with the movie – Raymond’s life has many aspects – each worthy of a movie in its own right – including his business ascent, his gift for publicity and his marriage to and divorce from his ex-wife Jean. Most singular is his indifferent relationship with his two sons, contrasted with his affection for his anointed successor and heir, his daughter Debbie; not every guy aspires to apprentice his daughter in the porn industry. The Look of Love touches on them all, but doesn’t delve deeply enough into any one.
Imogen Poots (Solitary Man, Greetings from Tim Buckley) has the most interesting character of Debbie, but there’s not enough of her. Still, what IS contained in The Look of Love makes for an interesting story hitherto unfamiliar to us non-Brits.
The Look of Love is streaming on Amazon, iTunes, Sundance Now and other VOD outlets.
The funny and sentimental Canadian dramedy Cloudburst pairs Oscar-winning actresses Olympia Dukakis (Moonstruck) and Brenda Fricker (My Left Foot) as lesbian life partners of many decades. Because they live in Maine before the legalization of same-sex marriage there, their union is not legally recognized. The sweet-tempered Dotty (Fricker) is visually-impaired and becoming more and more infirm. Her partner Stella (Dukakis) is irascible and enjoys a startlingly vulgar vocabulary. The pair is separated when Dotty’s granddaughter moves Dotty into a convalescent home over Stella’s objection. Stella rescues Dotty and spirits the two of them off to get legally married in Nova Scotia. On the run from Maine authorities, they pick up a feckless young guy (Ryan Doucette) and head off on a very funny, and sometimes dangerous, road trip.
Cloudburst is directed and written by Thom Fitzgerald from his own play. Fitzgerald has written wonderful characters for Dukakis and Fricker to play, and their performances are superb. Surprisingly, this is the first lead role for the 68-year-old Fricker.
Cloudburst was an indie hit in Canadian theaters, but was purchased by Lifetime and didn’t get a theatrical release in the US. That’s a shame, because I think that Cloudburst could have become an art house hit like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. It’s a crowd pleaser.
Cloudburst is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and other VOD providers.
Lee Daniels’ The Butler is an entertaining and satisfying epic that explores the issue of race in America as reflected in the experiences of two men – a man who escaped a Southern cotton farm to become a butler at the White House (Forest Whitaker) and his son (David Oyelowo), who becomes engaged with the racial justice movement from the 60s through the 90s.
What The Butler gets right is the overall sweep of history, and it shines as an accessible history lesson. We get a taste of American race relations from the 1920s onward, and we glimpse the key moments in Civil Rights history: Little Rock school desegregation, lunch counter sit-ins, Freedom Rides, the JFK and LBJ civil rights speeches and legislation, the King assassination, urban riots, Black Power and anti-apartheid activism. The perspectives of the two main characters mirror those of Booker T Washington and W.E.B. DuBois.
Most importantly, The Butler reveals the African-American community as not monolithic, but with different (and conflicting) personality types, political views and generational perspectives. This is not accomplished very often in popular culture. Indeed, The Butler is strongest in the family moments – breakfasts, parties, arguments, sending the kid off to college – that allow the cast to bring out the textures of their characters. (And The Butler is dead-on perfect with all the periods, including the unfortunate fashions of the 1970s.)
That being said, the implausibility of the protagonists’ Zelig-like personal presence at every key historical moment is distracting. Every time Whitaker’s character brings a cup of coffee into the Oval Office, the President du moment is deciding on sending federal troops into the South, sending a Civil Rights bill to the Hill or some-such. Oyelowo’s character is a lunch counter sitter, a Freedom Rider, a Selma marcher, a MLK aide at the Lorraine Motel, a Black Panther, a Congressional candidate and an anti-apartheid leader. The coincidences are so improbable that it’s too much of the audience to suspend disbelief.
Forest Whitaker is a great actor. Here he perfectly plays a man who has strong feelings that he expresses among Blacks and that he conceals (sometimes stoically, sometimes charmingly) among Whites. We’ve been watching Whitaker since 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High and his searing Charlie Parker in 1986’s Bird, right through to his Oscar win for The Last King of Scotland. My personal favorite Forest Whitaker performances are in The Crying Game and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.
Oyelowo is an actor who has come on strong in the past two years (The Help,The Paperboy, Lincoln), and here delivers a perfect performance of a man with youthful strong-headedness, self-possessed whether on the right side of history or not. He’s that brave man who does dangerous things without impetuosity.
The African-American cast is a marvel. Oprah Winfrey is outstanding as the wife/mom, and an Oscar nod is likely. Terence Howard is marvelous as the shady neighbor. Clarence Williams III (yes, from The Mod Squad) is superb as the butler’s first mentor. Cuba Gooding Jr and Lenny Kravitz are excellent as White House co-workers with very different personalities. Mariah Carey, who was unbelievably good as the social worker in Daniel’s Precious, is equally good here as the butler’s tortured mother.
The cast playing the White House’s upstairs residents do not fare so well. In the movie’s funniest turn, Liev Schreiber captures LBJ’s frenetic energy but not his imposing and sinister physicality. John Cusack has Nixon’s creepiness but not his painful social awkwardness. Robin Williams plays Ike without any military bearing or snap. James Marsden plays a pretty, but wimpy JFK. And is that Alan Rickman as Ronnie? The one impeccable performance in this category (and Daniels’ sly joke on the Reagans) is Jane Fonda as Nancy.
Overall, it’s an important, if imperfect work by director Lee Daniels (Precious, The Paperboy). (BTW – the title is not because of his ego – but because of the silly refusal by another movie studio to grant the title rights.) At times profound and at times ridiculously improbable, The Butler gets the basic truths profoundly right.
In the comedy Prince Avalanche, Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch play two guys working a lonely job – painting the yellow line in the middle of a forlorn road through a wildfire-decimated Texas landscape. Neither guy is what you would call smart, but Rudd’s Alvin is brighter than Hirsch’s Lance. Alvin is quirky and more than a bit anal. Lance’s horizon isn’t much farther than his next sexual encounter. It’s funny when Alvin tries to keep Lance on task. As each faces some personal bad news, all semblance of order crumbles. Along the way, they meet a hilariously gonzo trucker (Lance LeGault). It’s all very funny in a droll kind of way.
Rudd, of course, is a solid comic actor, but Hirsch is the surprise. Hirsch has been very strong in dramatic roles (especially in Into the Wild), but he was the weak link in last year’s darkly funny Killer Joe. Here, he plays his dunderhead entirely straight, and the result is very funny. Who knew?
Green is now a successful director for hire (Pineapple Express and a load of commercials). But all of the indies that he’s written and directed have been really excellent: George Washington, Undertow, All the Real Girls and Snow Angels (which made my Best Movies of 2008).
I saw Prince Avalanche at a San Francisco International Film Festival screening introduced by Green. He said that, after filming Snow Angels’ suicide in frozen Nova Scotia, he was ready for something lighter. A member of the band Explosions in the Sky (his frequent collaborator) told him about the burned-out landscape around Bastrop, Texas. Having found a location, he needed a two-actor story, and so he adapted the Icelandic movie Either Way. Fueled by lots of coffee, he whipped out the screenplay in two days, with two more days for a rewrite.
One of the real pleasures of Prince Avalanche is the performance of Lance LeGault, who died just before he could have seen the movie, as the truck driver. LeGault was a veteran character actor who started off as Elvis’ stunt double and played scads of nasty military guys; Green discovered him working as an extra while shooting an auto commercial in Tehachapi. Now we can remember LeGault for stealing all his scenes in Prince Avalanche.
Prince Avalanche is in theaters, and is also streaming on Amazon, iTunes, DirecTV, Comcast, Vudu, GooglePlay and other VOD outlets.
The Spectacular Now is a spectacularly authentic and insightful character-driven story of teen self-discovery. It’s the best teen coming of age story since…I can’t remember.
Sutter (Miles Teller – so good in Rabbit Hole) is the high school’s gregarious party guy. Everybody loves being charmed by Sutter, but it becomes apparent that his compulsive sociability is masking some family related emotional damage. It’s also clear that he will soon face some consequences from his out-of-control and escalating drinking.
When his popular girlfriend dumps him for a guy who is less fun, but a better long-term bet, he is in the market for a rebound relationship and meets Aimee (Shailene Woodley, glammed down from the foxy brat in The Descendants). Aimee is focused, responsible, capable and smart, but has no self-esteem; she has family issues, too. Sutter becomes her first love. At first, it’s a lark for Sutter – until he assesses himself and his potential effect on her.
That’s the crux of the movie. Sutter isn’t just a shallow party guy. He’s smart – and too smart to keep from seeing where he is headed.
The Spectacular Now is directed by indie filmmaker Joe Ponsoldt (director and co-writer of Smashed), who is moving toward Hollywood’s A list. The screenplay is adapted by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber from the novel by Tim Tharp.
Smashed is a remarkably realistic depiction of alcohol abuse, and so is The Spectacular Now. Miles Teller is great in the role. And there’s a second great alcoholic performance – that of Kyle Chandler (Friday Night Lights, Argo) as Sutter’s long-estranged dad; Chandler’s turn is Oscar worthy. Woodley is just as outstanding as she was in The Descendants. The rest of the cast is uniformly excellent, especially Brie Larson and Jennifer Jason Leigh.
If you see The Spectacular Now with your teen, there will be plenty to talk about afterward – teen drinking, addiction, dating, partying, picking your friends, making choices and what a damn good movie this is.
Every teenager should see this movie, which brings me to this bit of insanity – The Spectacular Now has an R rating because teenagers are DRINKING ALCOHOL in the movie. It doesn’t matter that the movie is ABOUT teen alcoholism. It doesn’t matter that The Spectacular Now is the 2013 movie most likely to help teenagers in their real lives (by sparking discussion of the issues therein). Of course, just last year, the MPAA similarly assigned the R Rating to Bully. Just leave it to the pompous asses at the MPAA to keep those 14- to 16-year-olds out (unless they show the good taste and resourcefulness to sneak in).
I saw The Spectacular Now at the San Francisco International Film Festival in a screening with director Ponsoldt. It’s on my Best Movies of 2013 – So Far.
Okay, here’s a jaw dropper. In the chilling documentary The Act of Killing, perpetrators of genocide in Indonesia are asked to re-enact their murders – and they are pleased as punch to do so. We meet unapologetic mass murderers face-to-face. Filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer has created the year’s most startling documentary.
After the 1965 military coup, death squads sympathetic to the military labeling opponents of the regime, landless farmers and ethnic Chinese as “communists” – and killed 2-3 million fellow Indonesians. The killers were mostly Indonesian paramilitary groups and gangsters. The Act of Killing introduces us to several of these murderers, who don’t try to evade or spin their deeds, but instead look proudly and nostalgically at their murders as the highlight of their lives.
The film primarily focuses on two self-described gangsters, Anwars and Herman. The two enthusiastically embrace the film project so they can document their murders for history. Anwars is said to have killed a thousand by himself. Because beating them to death produced too much messy blood, he devised a method of strangling them with wire. The corpulent Herman chooses spends about a third of movie dressed in flamboyant drag, which is ridiculous, but the film is so disturbing that the audience just can’t laugh. Besides acting out interrogation torture murders and a village massacre, the two come up with a Bollywood-like musical number of Born Free, complete with dancing-girls in front of a waterfall, in which the garotted dead reappear to thank Anwars for sending them on to the afterlife. It is beyond bizarre.
In the film’s most riveting scene, a guy who has been recruited to play a torture victim in the film-within-a-film, recounts the death squad murder of his step-father to Anwars and Herman. To keep his composure, he awkwardly laughs as he describes the abduction – but his eyes are clearly blaming the old gangsters. Then he acts out his torture for the camera.
The Act of Killing is hypnotically compelling – you can’t believe what’s on the screen, can’t believe that you’re still watching it and can’t stop watching.
The Act of Killing is directed by Oppenheimer and co-directed by someone credited as “Anonymous” and Christine Cynn. Oddly, there is no writing credit. The great documentarians Errol Morris and Werner Herzog are among the executive producers.
[We don’t often explore genocide from the perpetrator’s point of view, although two excellent documentaries come to mind: Shoah and Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary, both on my 5 Essential Holocaust Films. The current film Hannah Arendt is about the academic theorist who coined the term “banality of evil”, but that story’s duel of letters between hand-wringing intellectuals makes for a stale discussion.]
The Act of Killing is a very uncomfortable movie, and I suspect that it wouldn’t be not a great choice for most of my readers. But it pushes the envelope of cinema and is the most uniquely original film of the year (or millennium so far?). I’m really glad that I watched it.
