Movies

Deadfall: Two killers, one shotgun and Thanksgiving dinner

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Deadfall is a solid thriller that is flying under the radar this holiday season.  Eric Bana and Olivia Wilde are brother and sister running for the Canadian border after a casino heist.  They wreck their car and split up.  The brother sets off overland, leaving a trail of murderous carnage.   The local cops are on the alert, including the sheriff’s deputy daughter (Kate Mara).   Meanwhile,  a bad luck boxer (Charlie Hannum of Sons of Anarchy) is released from prison, impulsively commits another crime and is headed for his parents’ (Sissy Spacek and Kris Kristofferson) remote northern cabin.  The sister hitches a ride with the boxer.  Everybody converges at the boxer’s parents’ place for an extremely stressful Thanksgiving dinner.

An essential element of this thriller is that all of the families are dysfunctional.   The siblings have survived a hellish upbringing, from which the older brother has rescued his little sister; unfortunately, he has emerged as a psychopath himself and has infantilized the sister.  The relationship between the boxer and his father has been poisoned by a long-festering dispute.  The sheriff resents and belittles his bright and highly professional daughter while doting on her idiot brothers.

The core of the movie is the evolving relationship between Wilde’s sister and Hunnam’s boxer.  Neither knows that the other is on the lam.  She cynically seduces him because he is useful.  But then she starts to fall for him, and, by Thanksgiving dinner, her loyalties are uncertain.

Sissy Spacek is brilliant as the boxer’s mom, who must steer over the wreckage of the relationship between her son and her husband, and who must then serve a Thanksgiving dinner to a volatile killer who is holding a shotgun on the other guests.  She is a great actor, and she’s as good here as in any of her signature performances.

The cinematography, characters, acting and the directorial choices by Stefan Ruzowitzky are excellent.  What keeps Deadfall from being one of the year’s best is some trite, TV movie level dialogue along the way.  Still, it’s a good watch.

Note: This is NOT the 1993 Deadfall, with Nicholas Cage even more over-the-top than usual.

The Matchmaker: a character-driven gem from Israel

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Fascinating characters make good stories and good movies, and the Israeli gem The Matchmaker has them aplenty.   A middle class teenager falls into a very unusual summer job – the “spy guy” for a matchmaker based in a Haifa neighborhood where prostitutes and smugglers ply their trades.  His job is to shadow prospective brides and grooms to verify their suitability for a match.  The kid is a pretty normal teen with an affection for detective fiction and an emerging talent for writing, and we see the other characters through his prism.

The Matchmaker is set in 1968, when many Israeli adults were Holocaust survivors who refused to talk about the Holocaust.  Ironically, the adult conspiracy of silence means that the teen characters know less about the Holocaust than do other kids around the world.  Almost all the adult characters are emotionally scarred in ways the kids really can’t understand.

The matchmaker himself is a shambling, secretive and somewhat shady guy, with unexplained facial scars.  He is an uncanny, but not always perfect, judge of human foibles.  He advises his clients, “I find you what you need, not what you want”.  It turns out that matchmaking is his passion, but he makes his living from another, less legal business.

The matchmaker himself pines for a charming but extremely emotionally fragile woman who works with him.  There’s also a kind, beautiful and lovelorn woman who owns a theater and is a dwarf.  We also have an obsessive librarian who is even more tightly wound than we see at first.  Oh, and the kid’s best friend’s American cousin comes for a visit, and she’s smokin’ hot.

So The Matchmaker is a coming of age movie, but one unlike any you have seen because of the singular characters.  Credit goes to Director Avi Lesher, who adapted the screenplay from a novel by Amir Gutfreund.

Starlet: an odd couple with a surprising bond

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In the indie relationship drama Starlet, a 21-year-old woman is living in a seedy part of the San Fernando Valley and working in an even sketchier industry, when she buys an old thermos from a woman sixty years older than she.  She finds a considerable sum of cash hidden within the thermos, keeps it, and, out of guilt, insinuates herself into the old woman’s life.  The octogenarian is initially resistant, but a bond grows between them; each has a need that is revealed during the movie.  It’s worth sitting back and going with the leisurely story, because the payoff at the end is surprisingly moving.

Model Dree Hemingway (daughter of Mariel and great-granddaughter of Ernest) demonstrates an engaging screen presence as the young woman.  In her first movie credit, Besedka Johnson is astonishingly good as the older woman, both formidable and vulnerable.  Stella Maeve is very convincing as the young woman’s nogoodnik roommate.

In the Family: debut of a brilliant director

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6-year-old Chip has two daddies, Cody and Joey.  When his biological father Cody is killed in an auto accident, Cody’s sister takes custody of Chip, and Joey fights to get his son back.  Writer-director Patrick Wang stars as Joey, and what makes In the Family more than just another social issue picture is Wang’s authenticity as a writer and brilliance as a director.

Wang uses long scenes shot by a static camera and an almost silent soundtrack to draw in the audience.   We watch Joey being told of Cody’s death through a hospital window and we only hear the passing truck traffic.  We see the kitchen when Joey and Chip come home after the funeral – Joey sits stunned, fingering the mail, and Chip, yearning for some normalcy, sets up beverages.  The film climaxes with Joey’s testimony at a deposition, mostly shot from the end of a conference table.  These are some of the most compelling scenes that I’ve seen this year.

The problem with In the Family is that it is 2 hours and 47 minutes long.  There are long films that need to be long (e.g., Once Upon a Time in Anatolia), but this isn’t one of them.  There’s probably a 130 minute indie hit somewhere inside In the Family.

It’s clear that Patrick Wang is a fine actor and an unusually talented writer-director (who needs to find an equally talented editor).  I’m certainly looking forward to his next work.

Lay the Favorite: purported to be a comedy

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What a disappointment.  Lay the Favorite, opening this weekend, sports a fine director, Stephen Frears (The Queen, High Fidelity, The Snapper), and a promising cast (Bruce Willis, Rebecca Hall, Catherine Zeta-Jones, John Carroll Lynch).  But the story fails, and it’s just not funny.

Willis plays a Vegas sports gambler who apprentices a naive young thing (Hall).  They face the ups and downs of sports betting, his embittered wife, a welching better (Lynch) and a sleazeball bookie (Vince Vaughan).  Nothing in the story rings true.  Rebecca Hall, so good as the classy smart girl in Vicky Christina Barcelona, plays Florida trailer trash – even wearing Daisy Dukes throughout the whole movie – and it just doesn’t work.  Worse, Vince Vaughan takes his usual wild man to an even more manic level, which falls flat.

Skip it.

Killing Them Softly: almost as good as a Sopranos rerun

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In Killing Them Softly, a low-level gangster gets two hapless losers to hold up a poker game that is protected by the mob.  The mob, of course, brings in an enforcer to put things right.   Perhaps Killing Them Softly would have been a great gangster movie in the 60s, before Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and David Chase raised the bar.  It was a big hit at Cannes, but that crowd may not be used to watching The Sopranos.

We know what is going to happen in the plot.  Fortunately, we have some excellent actors, led by Brad Pitt in a character role as the ruthless and nihilistic mob enforcer.  Pitt’s enforcer brings in a trusted colleague, a hit man from New York (James Gandolfini) to help him out – but the hit man is emotionally damaged from a betrayed romance and can only focus on drinking and whoring.  Richard Jenkins plays an unusually squeamish mid-level manager in the mob.  Scoot McNairy (one of the “house guests” in Argo) and Ben Mendelsohn (the most psychopathic criminal in Animal Kingdom) are especially good as the doomed hold-up men.

As good as the cast is, there’s just not much here.  An attempt to intertwine a thread about the 2008 economic collapse and Presidential election is a misguided device that only serves as a distraction.

Coming up on TV: Anatomy of a Murder and its great jazz soundtrack

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Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting Anatomy of a Murder on December 9.  I love this film for its great courtroom scene, for the great performances by James Stewart, George C. Scott, Ben Gazzara and Lee Remick and for its exquisite pacing.  But today, I want to recommend it because of its great jazz soundtrack by none other than Duke Ellington.  It’s one of the few movie soundtrack CDs that I own.

The music perfectly complements the story of a murder investigation that reveals more and more ambiguity as it proceeds.  Stewart’s character relaxes by dabbling in jazz piano, and Duke himself has a cameo leading a bar band in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (of all places).

Here’s the music under the opening credits.

Here’s Duke Ellington’s cameo.

Hitchcock: it takes two to make Psycho

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In Hitchcock, Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren star as Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Hitchcock as they collaborate on making Psycho.  It’s a glimpse into their relationship and their professional teamwork, both challenged by Hitchcock’s quirkiness.  In a very successful device, the serial killer Ed Gein (who inspired Psycho) appears as a character visible only to Hitchcock.

Of course, Mirren and Hopkins (beneath heavy makeup) are excellent as always.  Scarlett Johansson is very good as Janet Leigh, as are Danny Huston, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jessica Biel and Toni Colette in supporting roles.  (The actor who plays Ed Gein, Michael Wincott, resembles Warren Oates, one of my favorite actors from 60s and 70s.)

Hitchcock is entertaining and even rises to exhilarating when Hitchcock paces the theater lobby at Psycho’s premiere, waiting for the audience to scream at the shower scene.

Life of Pi: wry and visually astonishing

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In Life of Pi, Ang Lee’s visually spectacular version of the Yann Martel fable, an Indian teenager is shipwrecked and must share a lifeboat for 227 days with a Bengal tiger.  This is no Disney tiger – it will eat the teenager if it can.  Packaged as a survivalist adventure, Life of Pi turns out to be a sage commentary on storytelling.

Over an hour of the movie is spent floating helplessly on the seas, but this part of the story doesn’t lag because of the wry humor (the tiger is named Richard Parker, for instance), the ever-present menace (said tiger) and the incredible spectacle created by Lee.  Life of Pi is one of the most visually astonishing films ever.  In scene after scene, we gasp at a flotilla of flying fish chased by torpedo-like tuna, a floating island filled with meerkats, nighttime views of bio-luminescent sea creatures and on and on.

And then there’s the tiger.  Almost all of the tiger footage is CGI – and I never for a moment doubted that I was watching a real tiger.  I saw it in 2D, but I imagine that Life of Pi might be even more magical in 3D, and one of the few 3D movies worth the premium ticket price.

Holy Motors: wild and puzzling

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Holy Motors is a wild and puzzling art film by the French director Leos Carax.  A man named Oscar (the pockmarked Denis Lavant) gets into a white stretch limo driven by a reserved elderly blonde and heads to the first of his “appointments” throughout Paris.  He emerges from the limo disguised as a contorted elderly beggar woman and panhandles for a while.  For his next appointment, he puts on a motion capture suit and acts out a sci-fi scene that culminates in reptilian space alien sex.  We see that the inside of the limo is his dressing room, and later learn that he is acting out scenes to hidden cameras for someone’s viewing pleasure.  Each scene is in a different genre – sci-fi, domestic drama, absurdist, crime action and even romantic musical.

It’s up to the audience to connect the dots – and some dots are just not connectable.  As confused as we are, however, we keep paying attention to try to figure it all out.  Carax’s success here is that he keeps surprising us with stuff that no audience could anticipate.  However, if you need a linear and comprehensible story, you will hate this movie.

I don’t think that I would enjoy the film a second time as much without the element of surprise.  And some of the episodes work better than others.  The motion capture and absurdist segments were riveting, and I loved Oscar leading a head-banging accordion orchestra through the nighttime streets.  The deathbed melodrama didn’t work as well for me, and when Kylie Minogue’s character burst into song in the romantic musical, I gagged. I did appreciate the impressive visuals, the loving shots of Paris and the many homages to films of the past.

Spoiler Alert:  To give you an idea of how wacked out Holy Motors is, here’s the synopsis of the absurdist episode.  Oscar leaves the limo dressed as a filthy and demonic troll, uncovers a man-hole and descends to the sewers under the streets.  He pops up in the Pere Lachaise cemetery, where the gravestones are engraved with websites.  He rampages through the cemetery, eating the flowers left on the graves.  He crashes a fashion shoot and bites off the fingers of the photographer’s assistant.  He then licks the armpit of the supermodel (Eva Mendes), smearing it with blood, picks her up and carries her off to his lair in the sewers.  There he rips off some of her gown and refashions it into a burqa.  Then he sits her (burqa-clad) on a bench, takes off his own clothes and lays next to her with an erection.  Wowza.