Movies

Your Sister’s Sister: a promising premise and a superb performance wasted

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Your Sister’s Sister wastes a promising premise and the talents of three good actors, one of whom gives a superb performance.

A young man (Mark Duplass) is grieving a loss and his friend (Emily Blunt) suggests that he spend some time at her family’s remote island getaway cabin.  Unbeknownst to them, her sister (Rosemarie Dewitt) is already staying at the cabin.  The guy and the sister get drunk on his first night at the cabin, and the friend shows up unannounced the next morning.  Each of the three does not know a key fact about the other two.  So far so good.

In fact, it’s an excellent dramedy for two-thirds of the movie until the sister bursts out with something like, “I wouldn’t have [spoiler] if I knew that [spoiler]”.  At this point, writer-director Lynne Shelton runs out of creativity and resorts to the dreaded musical interlude, in which each of the characters stomp or bike through the rainy Northwest as the music swells to set up an ending that drew loud derisive hoots from the theater audience.

Too bad, because the actors are very good.  Mark Duplass plays the smart, talented, underachieving, goofy and sweet big lug usually played by Jason Segal or Seth Rogen.  Emily Blunt plays the sarcastic, funny, smart, vulnerable and adorable cutie usually played by Emily Blunt.  But Rosemarie Dewitt creates a wholly original and utterly authentic character that looks like a real person, someone we know in real life.  All of her actions and reactions are completely authentic, whether she’s drinking way too much tequila, pondering her failed relationship or tasting her own vegan pancakes.   Dewitt was also very good as Rachel in Rachel’s Getting Married, and her performance is so good in Your Sister’s Sister that I can’t wait to see her on screen again.

Coming up on TV: Fat City

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Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges in FAT CITY

Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting the under appreciated Fat City (1972) on June 18.  Stacy Keach plays a boxer on the slide, his skills unraveled by his alcoholism. He inspires a kid (a very young Jeff Bridges), who becomes a boxer on the rise.  Keach and Susan Tyrrell give dead-on performances as pathetic sad sack barflies.  Tyrrell was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

The great director John Huston shot the film in Stockton, and Fat City is a time capsule for the Central Valley in the early 70s.

Fat City has made two of my lists: Best Boxing Movies and Best Drug Movies.

Susan Tyrrell in FAT CITY

Moonrise Kingdom: wistfully sweet and visually singular

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In the wistfully sweet and visually singular Moonrise Kingdom, two 1965 twelve-year-olds fall into profound platonic love and run away together, with a cadre of sadly weary adult authority figures in comic pursuit.  Director Wes Anderson has had some quirky hits (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore) and some quirky misses (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), but he’s always original.  This is a hit.

While very funny, the story is deeply sympathetic to the children.  As Andrew O’Hehir of Salon.com put it,

Yes, Anderson’s principal subject, and arguably his only subject, is the collision between the emotional lives of adults and children and the paradoxical tragicomedy it can so often produce. But if Anderson’s adults yearn for the comparative simplicity of childhood while his children long for the big, important feelings they believe (wrongly) go with growing up, that in itself is a distinctly adult perspective.

We know that we’re watching something unique from the very first shot, in which the camera swivels to show each room in a home as family members enter their spaces and define their relationships to each other.  As The Wife, pointed out, we look into the family home as would a child looking into a dollhouse.

In a year that is especially rich with able child film actors, the kids here (Jared Gilman and Kara Hayman) are excellent.  Bruce Willis, Ed Norton, Bill Murray and Frances McDormand are also very good as the sad, burnt-out adults.  Tilda Swinton and Harvey Keitel show up briefly in broad comic roles.

Since Moonrise Kingdom is set in 1965, Baby Boomers will appreciate the Mad Men moments –  a portable record player,  a coonskin cap and adult indifference to a kid simultaneously holding lighter fluid and a flaming torch.  The girl’s books have cover art typical of the era’s quality young fiction (a la A Wrinkle in Time).

This is an excellent movie – and one that you haven’t seen before.

Let There Be Light: groundbreaking look at those who have endured too much

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Let There Be Light is an extraordinary documentary about WW II soldiers being treated for psychological war wounds.  Made in 1946 by fabled director John Huston, Let There Be Light was suppressed by the US military until 1980 and had since been available only in a grainy, almost unintelligible version.  Thankfully, it was restored by the National Film Preservation Foundation in 2011, and now can be viewed for free on its website.

Huston followed a group of soldiers as they entered a hospital and engaged in treatment until their release from the service eight weeks later.  Huston shot 70 hours of film, which he winnowed down to this one-hour documentary.  We see the doctors use individual talk therapy, group therapy, hypnosis and sodium pentathol.  We know the condition as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).  At the time, it was popularly known as “shell-shock” or “combat fatigue” and termed “psychoneurosis” or “neuropsychosis” by the doctors.

Modern therapists will find the treatment primitive and the movie too optimistic (there’s a sense that everybody is OK after eight weeks in the hospital), but that shouldn’t obscure the compassion of the doctors and the heartbreaking stories of the men.  This was a moment in medical history when the public still needed to learn that this was a psychiatric condition, not cowardice or weakness – and that the condition was treatable.  The narrator (Huston’s father Walter) repeatedly emphasizes that these men have endured more than any human could be expected to bear.

Watch Let There Be Light HERE.

Hemingway & Gellhorn: helluva story in a flawed epic

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That Martha Gellhorn was Ernest Hemingway’s third wife only begins to tell the story.   Gellhorn’s work as a war correspondent eclipsed Hemingway’s.  She was also the only one of Hemingway’s wives to kick his butt to the curb.  (A year ago, I had a drink at the Key West bar where Gellhorn, according to local lore,  had paid the bartender $20 to introduce her to Hemingway.)  In HBO’s  Hemingway & Gellhorn, Gellhorn is played by Nicole Kidman and Hemingway by Clive Owen.

Gellhorn once said, “We were good in war. When there was no war, we made our own.”  She’s a prototype of a liberated woman and he’s an unreconstructed alpha male preoccupied with machismo, so things are not destined to end well.  (Thought:  maybe if Hemingway hadn’t thought so much about masculinity, his own masculinity would have been less selfish.)

Theirs is a helluva story, and the movie is an epic.  As the story sweeps across the Spanish Civil War, the Soviet invasion of Finland,  the liberation of China and D-Day, the  2 1/2 hours goes pretty quickly.

Hemingway & Gellhorn is directed by the great Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff,  Invasion of the Body Snatchers,  The Unbearable Lightness of Being). He keeps Hemingway & Gellhorn shifting from color to sepia to black and white, seamlessly mixing in actual historical footage and inserting the characters Zelig-like into the documentary stock.

Kaufman lives in the Bay Area and shot Hemingway & Gellhorn’s Key West, Havana, Carnegie Hall, Finland, Germany and Spain scenes in San Francisco, San Rafael, Livermore and Oakland.

I enjoyed seeing it once, but it’s definitely not a “can’t miss”, and I’m having difficulty putting my finger on why that is.  My guess is that the screenplay lingers on the Spanish Civil War a little too long and then brings on Hemingway’s dissolute period too abruptly.  The acting and the direction are just fine.

Men in Black 3: just as delightful in 1969

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Our favorite alien-zapping secret agents return in the delightful Men in Black 3.   We still have the yapping Will Smith paired with the Titan of Terseness, Tommy Lee Jones.  In this edition of the  sci fi comedy franchise, Smith must travel back to 1969 to save his partner and the world from a new odious and scary alien villain, Boris The Animal.  We get a Mad Men size dose of 1969, including Andy Warhol’s Factory, the Miracle Mets, the Moon Launch, some hippies and lots of skinny neckties.

The cast is all good, but the most inspired casting has to be Josh Brolin as the young Tommy Lee Jones.  Michael Stuhlbarg, last seen as the uptight depressive in A Serious Man, here almost steals the movie as a blissed out but hyper-perceptive alien.  Michael Chernus, so good in a serious role in Vera Farmiga’s Higher Ground, is excellent as a shady geek. Bill Hader is very funny as Warhol.

I’m usually not one for franchise movies, but MIB3 is gloriously entertaining.  I saw it in 2D – you should, too.  As with most movies, the 3D premium isn’t worth it.

In the trailer (but not the movie) we briefly glimpse the torch-wielding Columbia Picture lady wearing MIB shades – very cool.

Hysteria: a feminist lark

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Hysteria is a breezy, feminist lark.  Victorian doctors are befuddled by all manner of female complaints, which they lump together into the diagnosis of hysteria.  One physician becomes popular when he pioneers pelvic massage as treatment.  Who knew that rubbing their clitorises (clitorii?) made them happy?

Thankfully, director Tanya Wexler keeps the whole thing light.  Maggie Gyllenhaal stars as a proto-feminist and High Dancy plays the doc who invented a proto-vibrator.  Rising star Felicity Jone (Like Crazy) pulls off a secondary role.

Where Do We Go Now?: comedy as a matter of life and death

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Christians and Muslims live together in a very isolated Lebanese village.  The men, none too bright, flare any perceived grievance into testosterone-fueled tribal fury.  Knowing that any trivial incident can spark an escalation to sectarian slaughter, the women, aided by the imam and the priest, work tirelessly to extinguish every possible provocation.  The women will stop at nothing, including sabotaging the village’s only TV, faking a miracle, medicating the pastries and even hiring a van full of Ukrainian strippers.

This story could have been played broadly like Lysistrata.  There are many funny moments, but Where Do We Go Now? is more than farce.   To these women, war is not theoretical.  We can tell from their language, which references men crouching in the attics and looking under beds, that they have survived past sectarian violence.  And we see the village cemetery, filled with the headstones of young men.  The women and the clerics have seen war, and they are desperate to avoid it.  That desperation adds a sting to the comedy, and makes Where Do We Go Now? a pretty good movie.

Polisse: how protecting children takes a toll

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Polisse is a riveting French police procedural about the child protective services unit in Paris.  Most cop movies are about how the cops solve the crime.  Instead,  Polisse is about the job’s emotional impact on the cops themselves  – when their assignment is rescuing kids from various degrees of abuse.  It’s an uncommonly good film.

Writer-director Maiwenn embedded herself with this police unit for several months.  At the San Francisco International Film Festival screening, she said that, although the film is fictional, everything in the movie happened in real life (except for the love story between Maiwenn’s photographer and Joey Starr’s cop).  Maiwenn also said that, although the real-life cops were rooting for her to do a movie about their most spectacular exploits, she chose to focus on a realistic cross-section of cases to depict the unit’s actual daily experience.

There are about ten cops in the unit, and it’s an excellent ensemble cast.  Joey Starr is the cop who cares too much.  Karin Viard (Paris, Potiche, Time Out) is the seemingly together cop whose family life has been sacrificed.  Marine Fois (seen earlier this year in Four Lovers) is wound way too tight.  Frederic Pierrot (I’ve Loved You So Long, Let It Rain, Sarah’s Key) is the conflict-averse commander trying to keep the lid on his rambunctious unit.

Polisse won the jury prize at Cannes and is on my list of Best Movies of 2012- So Far.