Movies

The Hunger Games: the harshest reality tv ever

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Jennifer Lawrence in THE HUNGER GAMES

I was impressed by The Hunger Games, a well-paced, well-acted and intelligent sci-fi adventure fable for tweens – and for the rest of us, too.

Since I apparently live under a rock, I was unaware of the source material, the popular and acclaimed young adult fiction trilogy by Suzanne Collins. The only reason I saw The Hunger Games was to accompany The Wife, who had read the first Hunger Games book. I hadn’t even seen the trailer, so I went in totally blind.

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.

Jennifer Lawrence plays the heroine, a poor Appalachian girl who volunteers to compete in place of her little sister.  Lawrence starred in Winter’s Bone, my pick for the best movie of 2010.  Here she carries the movie with her performance as an incredibly determined and resourceful girl. Her character is completely candid and unfiltered.  This creates a moment that is all the more powerful when she has to pull off smarmy inauthenticity for an insipid TV interview.

Stanley Tucci is brilliant as the oleaginous reality TV host – it’s an Oscar-worthy performance.

The Kid with the Bike: a riveting and unsentimental story of unconditional love

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The Kid with a Bike is an extraordinary film that tells a riveting story of unconditional love.  It is emotionally powerful without being sentimental and is gripping without stunts and explosions.

A 12-year-old boy wants to find the father who dumped him at a children’s home, but meets a woman who becomes his de facto foster mom.  In the face of overwhelming evidence, the boy refuses to acknowledge the possibility that his father doesn’t want him.  He becomes angry, acts out and is poised to make life-ruining choices.  His one chance in life is the woman who is drawn to caring for him, but he could alienate her, too.

The writer-directors, the Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardennes, are two of my favorite film makers (The Son, Rosetta).  Their gift is minimalistic filmmaking that addresses fundamental themes like love, loss, forgiveness and belonging.  To avoid sappiness, they set their stories in gritty industrial towns and employ vividly realistic characters.  As all their work, The Kid with a Bike is an unvarnished and utterly realistic looking film.  This helps them create a fable about absolute goodness and the saving of another human being and present it in a credible, unsentimental and immediate package.

The Dardennes are known for their success with untrained actors, and here Thomas Doret is excellent as the kid – energetic, longing and single-minded.  The Belgian-born French star Cecille De France (Hereafter, The Spanish Apartment) is wonderful as the foster mom – steadfast but unknowable.  The compelling actor Olivier Gourmet (The Son, Rosetta, Mesrine) briefly appears in a bit part.

It’s one of the best films of the year.

Footnote: a comedy of awkwardness reveals two guys choosing misery

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A rising Talmudic scholar sees his career-topping prize accidentally awarded to his grumpy father.  This potentially comic situation reveals a character study of the two men.  At the beginning, we see the father as bitterly sullen.  As the story peels back the onion, we see the pomposity and narcissism in both men.

As you would think from watching the trailer, the first two-thirds of the film is very funny.  In fact, the scene of an academic meeting in a cramped office is one of the funniest moments you’ll see in any movie this year.  However, once the father makes a discovery, the movie darkens as the two men miss every chance to grasp selflessness.

As the end of the movie nears, the filmmakers create tension that makes the ending too abrupt for me, with too little payoff.  I think that the filmmakers of A Separation, by winding down the end of the movie, created a much successful ambiguous ending.

I admired Footnote more than I liked it, and, indeed, the critical consensus warmed to the film more than I.  Footnote won the screenplay award at Cannes and was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.

Capturing the essence of the film perfectly, Roger Ebert wrote, “The Talmud provides guidance to Jews about how to lead their lives, but these two Jews have learned nothing that helps them when they find themselves in an impossible situation.”

Coming up on HBO: Hemingway and Gellhorn

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HBO has released the trailer for Hemingway & Gellhorn, which will broadcast beginning on May 28.  It’s the story of Ernest Hemingway and his third wife Martha Gellhorn.   Gellhorn was a leggy blonde whose work as a war correspondent leading up to and during World War II eclipsed Hemingway’s.  She was also the only one of Hemingway’s wives to kick his butt to the curb.  Gellhorn is played by the leggy Nicole Kidman.  Clive Owen is Hemingway.

(A year ago, I had a drink at the Key West bar where Gellhorn had paid the bartender $20 to introduce her to Hemingway; I understand that the movie may move the bar to Bimini).

Hemingway & Gellhorn is directed by Philip Kaufman, one of the great American directors.  His masterpiece is The Right Stuff, the story of the Mercury astronauts.  But his remake of the sci fi horror classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers is also excellent.  And I just rewatched his art film about love and sex set in the Prague Spring of 1968 and its aftermath, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and it still stands up.  That’s three top-rate movies in three different genres, an accomplishment few filmmakers can claim.

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. Incidentally, earlier this year, Kaufman was in the house at Noir City this year for Bad Girl Night.

I’ve added Hemingway & Gellhorn to Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

Coming up on TV: Night and the City

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Richard Widmark running out of luck in THE NIGHT AND THE CITY

On March 25, Turner Classic Movies is showing the under appreciated film noir classic Night in the City (1950).  Richard Widmark is superb as a  loser who tries to corner the pro wrestling business in post-war London – and, as in any noir classic, it doesn’t end well for the sap.

The American director Jules Dassin had just made the noir classics The Naked City and Thieves’ Highway when he shot Night and the City in the UK.  He was blackballed in the McCarthy Era and never moved back to the US.

At the request of a studio exec, Dassin created a role in Night and the City for the stunningly beautiful but emotionally fragile Gene Tierney.  The cast also includes real life wrestlers Stanislaus Zbyszko and Mike Mazurki.

Night in the City (along with The Wrestler) represents wrestling on my list of Best Sports Movies., and there’s a clip of an extended wrestling scene from the movie on that page.  (Also, Dassin’s Brute Force makes my list of Best Prison Movies.)

Coming up on TV: Boomerang!

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BOOMERANG!

Having practiced law in my misspent youth, I often roll my eyes (or change the channel) when I see something in a courtroom movie that could NEVER happen in real life.  Watching Elia Kazan’s 1957 Boomerang!, I saw the same District Attorney convict a guy of murder, change his mind and then successfully prove the guy’s innocence.  Although scornful of the plot, I kept watching and was shocked to see that the ending credits claimed that this was a true story.  In disbelief, I looked it up and found that, indeed, while state’s attorney for Bridgeport, Connecticut, Homer Stille Cummings convicted – and then cleared – Harold Israel of the same murder!  Cummings then went on to become the Attorney General of the United States.

Once I got over my disbelief, I realized that Boomerang! is a pretty good movie.  It’s one of Elia Kazan’s very first features, just before Gentleman’s Agreement, Panic in the Streets, A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, East of Eden, Baby Doll and A Face in the Crowd.

Boomerang! opens with a shocking scene – a man executes a priest with a pointblank gunshot on a busy downtown street and then melts away.  Dana Andrews plays the prosecutor and Arthur Kennedy is the hapless convicted guy.  The fine cast also features Lee J. Cobb, Ed Begley (in the first of his 103 screen credits) and (one of my favorites) Sam Levene.  Look for Karl Malden and Brian Keith in bit roles.

Turner Classic Movies is airing Boomerang! on March 22.

The real Homer Stille Cummings

 

Cinequest – Visible World: creepy, even for a voyeur movie

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visible worldIn the unsettling Slovak film Visible World (Vidite ny Svet), the protagonist Oliver lives by himself in a high-rise apartment building and trains his binoculars on unsuspecting people in the high-rise across the street. The tag line is “There’s a man with binoculars at the window, watching the people across the street. And he’s definitely not James Stewart.”

It’s an uncommon voyeur film.  First, the voyeur isn’t looking at any bad behavior by the people across the street.  Second, although he is compelled to spy, he isn’t getting any apparent sexual kick out of what he sees.  Instead – and this is the really, really disturbing aspect – he is using what he sees to interfere with their lives – and to insinuate himself into their lives.

Most women like a guy who makes that extra effort to find out what she likes. But going through a woman’s garbage to see what products she uses – before he has met her – that’s pretty high up on the Creep-O-Meter.  “I like Chilean Carmenere.  You do, too? Imagine that!”

Oliver is played by Ivan Trojan as an extremely terse and focused guy, but one who can surprise the audience by putting on an act of affability to get what he wants. He is an odd duck, for sure – often rudely abrupt with people who wander between him and his obsessions.  But he is that unusually high functioning crazy who can hide how very, very sick he is.

I saw Visible World at its North American premiere at Cinequest 22.

Cinequest – Four Lovers: those French sure are open-minded

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Today and tomorrow, I’m catching up by commenting on two films from last week’s Cinequest 22.

In the thoughtful French film Four Lovers, two happily married couples hit it off socially.  They quickly decide that it’s okay to have sex with each others’ spouses.  It’s not “spouse swapping”.  It’s an arrangement whereby both couples continue to live as couples, but each adds a permitted fling with one of the other couple.

Plenty of explicit sex follows, but this is not primarily an erotic film.  Instead it explores what follows from this arrangement.  What rules need to be agreed upon? Is there jealousy and/or insecurity?  Will anyone go past the fling to fall in love with the new partner? Can one be in love with more than one lover?  Can they keep this from their kids?  How deeply do they need their new lovers?  How will this affect the original marriages?

It’s all complicated.  In fact, I think that watching this movie would be far superior than trying this out in real life.

Spoiler Alert:  After the arrangement ends, the couples return to their original married lives.  Something is missing in their lives, but it’s not the sexual thrill of the affairs.  Instead each grieves the loss of a lover.  Given this loss, all four are unhappy for the first time in the film and perhaps wishing that it had never happened.

Cinequest – Detachment: nightmare for teachers

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Detachment is a gripping drama about the failure of American public schools from the teachers’ point of view.   Adrien Brody plays a long-term sub on a 60-day assignment at a high school that has burned out virtually every other teacher.  I can’t use the words  “grim” or “bleak” to describe this school environment – it’s downright hellish.    It’s making their very souls decay.

The students are rebellious and disrespectful, and somehow manage to be zealously apathetic.  No parents support the teachers, but some enthusiastically abuse and undermine them.  Administrators demand better test results but offer little support beyond “flavor of the month” educational fads.   The ills of the high school in Detachment are exaggerated – this is not a documentary – but there isn’t an urban public high school in American that hasn’t endured some elements of Detachment.

Brody won an Oscar for 2002’s The Pianist, and, in Detachment, he makes the most of his best role since.  Brody plays a haunted and damaged man with strong core beliefs, who, faced with a menu of almost hopeless choices, picks his battles.

Detachment’s cast is unusually deep, and the performances are outstanding.   James Caan is particularly outstanding as the veteran educator whose wicked sense of humor can still disarm the most obnoxiously insolent teen.  Christina Hendricks (Mad Men) is excellent as the young teacher hanging on to some idealism.  Blythe Danner and William Petersen (CSI) are the veterans who have seen it all.  Lucy Liu plays the educator who is clinging by her fingerprints, trying not to flame out like the basket case played by Tim Blake Nelson.  Marcia Gay Harden and Isiah Whitlock Jr. (Cedar Rapids) are dueling administrators.  Sami Gayle and Betty Kaye are superb as two troubled kids.  Louis Zorich delivers a fine performance as Brody’s failing grandfather.  There’s just not an ordinary performance in the movie.

For all its despair, Detachment doesn’t let the audience sink into a malaise.  Director Tony Kaye (American History X) keeps thing moving, and his choices in structure and pacing work well.  This is an intense film with a dark viewpoint.  It is also a very ambitious, thoughtful and originally crafted movie – one well worth seeing.

DVD of the Week: Waking Ned Devine

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David Kelly's unforgettable naked motor scooter ride in WAKING NED DEVINE

For St. Patrick’s week, I recommend the 1998 comedy Waking Ned Devine in memory of one of it stars, David Kelly, who died last month.  Kelly and the late Ian Bannen play two mischievous geezers who learn that someone in their tiny Irish village has won the national lottery, and they connive to share the wealth.  It’s very Irish and very funny.