Movies

Blackthorn: Butch Cassidy rides again…through Bolivia

by

What if Butch Cassidy had survived that 1908 shootout with the Bolivian army?  That’s the premise of this stylized Western starring Sam Shepherd as Butch.

I love Westerns, and I found this one to be satisfying but not exceptional.  It’s a beautifully shot film with sound acting.  Unfortunately, once we get past the inspired premise, the screenplay is pretty routine.

Sam Shepherd’s presence and features make him well suited to play an icon, whether Chuck Yeager (The Right Stuff) or Butch Cassidy.  Eduardo Noriega (so good as the drug smuggler in Transsiberian) reeks unreliability as the one person who has what Butch needs.  Stephen Rea (The Crying Game) has a gift for hangdog performances, and he gives another good one as the Wiley Coyote of Pinkerton agents.

This is the directorial debut of noted screenwriter Mateo Gil (Open Your Eyes/Vanilla Sky, The Sea Inside).  Gil has the directorial touch – he makes full use of the dramatic Bolivian landscape and engaging Bolivian cast.

Margin Call: Will the greedy survive?

by

This is a taut drama about an investment bank facing the financial collapse of 2008.  In his first feature, writer-director J.C. Chandor (whose father worked on Wall Street) successfully creates a pressure cooker of a tale.

The story is compressed into a critical 24 hours in the life of the company.  It is set in darkened offices lit only with computer monitors that are gleaming with menacing graphs and spreadsheets.

Stanley Tucci is compelling as the bean counter who discovers an existential threat.  Kevin Spacey (also always good) is the corporate lifer who must clean up the mess.  Don’t overlook the depth of Paul Bettany’s performance as an amoral and personally empty corporate climber who is in it only for the sport and for the adrenaline, using his bonuses merely to keep score.  Finally, in Margin Call‘s most superb performance, Jeremy Irons oozes menacing confidence and power as the CEO who do anything to save his company.

Unfortunately, Chandor cannot create acting range for Simon Baker and Demi Moore, who are out of their depths among the otherwise fine cast.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2DqFRsPrns]

50/50: what’s funnier than cancer?

by

Joseph Gordon-Levitt (who has reliably excellent taste in his choice of movie scripts) stars in this cancer comedy.  Yes, cancer comedy.  Seth Rogen plays his buddy.  And it’s funny.  Pretty damn funny.

Writer Will Reiser takes the story from his own bout with the Big C.   Reiser’s real life friend Seth Rogen helped him through the ordeal.

As usual, Gordon-Levitt is excellent.  And, if you’re out chasing skirts while bald and weak from chemotherapy, who could be a better wing man than Seth Rogen?

Anna Kendrick (so good in Up in the Air) plays the cringingly green psychologist assigned to help the patient face his 50/50 chance of survival.   Bryce Dallas Howard (excellent as the achingly fragile survivor in Hereafter) plays the girlfriend with the best intentions but neither aptitude for care giving or unlimited loyalty.  Angelica Huston plays not just another smothering mom.  They’re all very good – good enough to play against Gordon-Levitt and Rogen.  So are Philip Baker Hall and Matt Frewer (Max Headroom) as fellow cancer patients.

Take Shelter: digging his fingernails into sanity

by

Michael Shannon (Shotgun Stories, Agent Van Alden in Boardwalk Empire) is perhaps our best creep actor.   And what’s creepier than watching a solid parent and spouse enduring a full-fledged psychotic breakdown?

Shannon plays the most grounded guy in America until he starts having terrifying dreams and then hallucinations.  One of his parents is mentally ill, and he is determined to resist a breakdown and protect his family.  Unlike in a lesser screenplay, Shannon’s protagonist is very aware that he may be going crazy and is digging his fingernails into sanity.

Shannon gave a breakthrough performance in Shotgun Stories, by writer/director Jeff Nichols.  (In the excellent Shotgun Stories, Nichols created a dysfunctional family with a father so dismissive of his offspring that he non-named them Son, Kid and Boy.)  This time, Nichols has given Shannon the role of a lifetime, for which Shannon should get a dark horse Oscar nomination for Best Actor.

You may have noticed that this is Jessica Chastain’s year (The Debt, The Tree of Life, The Help, Texas Killing Fields), and Chastain should receive an Oscar nod for her supporting performance as Shannon’s wife.  Chastain must react to her husband’s behavior, which starts out quirky, becomes troublesome and spirals down to GET ME OUT OF HERE.

Nichols, Shannon and Chastain have given us one of the Best Movies of 2011 – So Far.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5U4TtYpKIc]

Coming up on TV: M*A*S*H*’s precursor

by

Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting Battle Circus (1955) on October 7.  It’s not a great movie, but Baby Boomers will recognize many similarities to 1970’s MASH.   Battle Circus stars Humphrey Bogart as a doctor in a US Army mobile hospital unit in the Korean War. As in MASH, there’s plenty of casualty-laden helicopters, smart ass humor, partying and nurse-chasing.

Of course, Battle Circus‘ story came directly out of the then-contemporary Korean War. MASH was adapted from the 1968 novel by Richard Hooker, who had served in such a unit 15 years before.  And, of course, Robert Altman framed MASH so that, although it was set in the Korean War, it was really about the Vietnam War.

(By the way, the novel and the 1970 movie were titled MASH, and the epic TV series was titled M*A*S*H*. )

 

DVD of the Week: The Last Lullaby

by

This is a surprisingly brilliant contemporary noir film from 2008 (that I KNOW that you haven’t seen).  Tom Sizemore plays a retired hit man, a professional loner now living what would be a comfortable loner life (except for his chronic insomnia).  He is offered a very large sum to take out a librarian (Sasha Alexander), but he is attracted to her and wonders why?  And, as in any noir film, is she the innocent that she seems?  Sizemore’s performance and a smart screenplay by Peter Biegen and Max Alan Collins carry this film, and Alexander is good, too.

Other recent DVD picks have been Road to Nowhere,  Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, Poetry, Queen to Play and Kill the Irishman.

DVD of the Week: Incendies

by

This searing drama is the year’s best film so far.  Upon their mother’s death, a young man and woman learn for the first time of their father and their brother and journey from Quebec to the Middle East to uncover family secrets.  As they bumble around Lebanon, we see the mother’s experience in flashbacks.  We learn before they do that their lives were created – literally – by the violence of the Lebanese civil war.

Because the film is anything but stagey, you can’t tell that Canadian director Denis Villaneuve adapted the screenplay from a play.  Lubna Azabal, a Belgian actress of Moroccan and Spanish heritage, is brilliant as the mother.

It’s a tough film to watch, with graphic violence against women and  children.  But the violence is neither gratuitous nor exploitative – it is a civil war, after all, and the theme of the film is the cycle of retribution.

Incendies was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, but lost out to a much inferior film on the same subject of violence, In a Better Life.

Higher Ground: a provocative and respectful film about faith

by

The fine actress Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air, Source Code, The Departed) directs and stars in this drama about a woman in a tightly communal church and how her faith supports and fails her.  Farmiga’s character is not a naturally spiritual person, but lives within an intensely spiritual community.  It’s rare that a film examines the question of religion so personally.  It’s a thoughtful and provocative film that takes a position, albeit a respectful one.

Higher Ground, adapted from a novel, would have benefited from less sexism from the male characters and more contemporary clothing for the female characters;  both distract from the central question of the usefulness of faith.  As a director, Farmiga is not afraid of using some magic realism, which generally works.

The performances are especially strong.  Vera’s little sister Taissa Farmiga, aided by a strong physical resemblance, is eerily perfect as the younger version of the protagonist.  Also especially excellent are Dagmara Dominczyk as an especially vibrant church member,  Michael Chernus as her sincere and dutiful husband and Norbert Leo Butz as the pastor.  The always reliable Bill Irwin (Rachel Getting Married) and John Hawkes (Deadwood, Winter’s Bone) are good, too.

DVD of the Week: Road to Nowhere

by

Road to Nowhere could be subtitled Monte Hellman’s Jigsaw Puzzle.  It’s the first film in twenty years from 79-year-old cult director Hellman, and he has delivered a multi-layered riddle that challenges the audience.  There is the story of a crime as it was originally understood, the story of what really happened and the story of a film being made about the crime.  The same actors play the characters in all three stories.  One of the actors in the movie may actually be one of the participants in the original crime.

It’s not a film for everyone.  You must be willing to accept that the story is not going to make sense for a while, and some issues are never going to be resolved.  If you can engage in the puzzle, there’s enough of a payoff.

My guilty pleasures include Hellman’s 1974 Cockfighter with Warrren Oates and his 1971 Two-Lane Blacktop with Oates and James Taylor (yes, the singer-songwriter James Taylor).  Road to Nowhere is far more stylish and ambitious than those films, but far more baffling.

In Road to Nowhere, the director of the film within the film discovers and becomes besotted, even obsessed, with his leading lady – and things do not turn out happily.  I had to think of the female lead in Two Lane Blacktop, Laurie Bird;  Hellman had a relationship with Bird, who later became Art Garfunkle’s companion and committed suicide in Garfunkle’s apartment.

 

Other recent DVD picks have been Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, Poetry, Queen to Play, Kill the Irishman and The Music Never Stopped.

DVD of the Week: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

by

In this 1979 miniseries version of the classic John le Carre spy novel, there is a Soviet mole in the highest echelon of British intelligence.  It could be anyone except George Smiley, whom the other top spies have pushed out to pasture.  Smiley, in one of Alec Guinness’ greatest performances, begins a deliberate hunt to unmask the double agent.  Guinness is joined by a superb cast that includes Ian Richardson, Patrick Stewart, Ian Bannen and Sian Phillips.  It’s 290 minutes of pressure-packed whodunit.

The Labor Day weekend is a great opportunity to watch the old master spy drilling down through the characters of his former peers to expose the mole – one of the best mysteries ever on film.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy has been remade into a much shorter theatrical version that will open in the US on November 18.  This new film version will also feature a top tier cast – Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Ralph Fiennes, Michael Fassbender, Ciaran Hinds, Benedict Cumberbatch, Toby Jones and Stephen Rea.   The trailer is at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

Other recent DVD picks have been Poetry, Queen to Play, Kill the Irishman and The Music Never Stopped.