Movie Recommendations, Rants and Ruminations
On June 18, Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting this 1934 screwball comedy, which holds up as well today as it did 77 years ago. A flamboyantly narcissistic Broadway producer (John Barrymore) has fallen on hard times and hops a transcontinental train to persuade his former star (Carole Lombard), now an A-list movie star, to headline his new venture. Barrymore’s shameless self-entitlement and hyper dramatic neediness makes for one of the funniest performances in the movies.
The Hangover Part II has its moments (the buddies lose a little brother on a wild night in Bangkok) , but is just not as gut-busting funny as The Hangover. Not so much sequel as photocopy, the same story loses its impact the second time through. Right from the start, when they awake memory-free in a trashed hotel room, their discoveries just don’t match up to the comic value of the missing tooth, the tiger and the baby in The Hangover. The revelations in Part II are just as extreme, but they just don’t register as funny.
The one original thought is when we see what’s in the socially retarded Zach Galifianakis’ brain – and we learn that he sees the buddies as his crew of 13-year-olds. But that’s really the only imaginative part of the movie.
With Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen has made his best movie since 1986’s Hannah and Her Sisters. It’s a funny and wistful exploration of the nostalgia for living in another time and place – all set in the most sumptuously photographed contemporary Paris.
Successful but disenchanted screenwriter and would be novelist Owen Wilson accompanies his mismatched fiancée Rachel McAdams to Paris, where he fantasizes about living in the artistically fertile Paris of the 1920s. Indeed, at midnight, he happens upon a portal to that era, and finds himself hanging out with the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Stein. He meets Marion Cotillard, a 1920s gal who is herself nostalgic for the 1890s.
Midnight in Paris shines because of the perfectly crafted dialogue. McAdams’ every instinct is cringingly wrong for Wilson. She is enraptured by the pretentious blowhard Michael Sheen, who couldn’t be more insufferable.
As usual, Allen has attracted an excellent cast. Owen Wilson rises to the material and gives one of his best performances. Corey Stoll is hilarious as Hemingway and Adrien Brody even funnier as Salvador Dali. Cotillard is luminous.
It makes my list of Best Movies of 2011 – So Far.
Director Takeshi Miike’s take on the samurai movie is the best contribution to the genre since Kurosawa. Brilliantly staged and photographed, this is one of the best recent action films in any language or setting.
It’s a familiar set-up: an honorable samurai must assemble and lead a team of thirteen to kill a psychotically sadistic noble. But first they must hack their way through the bad guy’s 200 bodyguards. What sets 13 Assassins apart is the inventively booby-trapped town and the frenzied pace of the climactic battle. It even has exploding boars!
Kôji Yakusho, a veteran with 72 acting credits, gives an impressive performance as the lead assassin. You may remember him from Shall We Dance? or Babel.
Bridesmaids is a funny movie, but one that could have been much better. In a role that she wrote for herself, Kristen Wiig plays a woman whose insecurities keep her from seeing the good and the possible in her life. Instead, she wreaks havoc on her best friend’s wedding planning and is about to sabotage a sweet romance with Chris O’Dowd. So far, so good.
Producer Judd Apatow salted Wiig’s screenplay with some low brow stuff. Now, I like to see gals at an upscale wedding boutique puking on each other and shitting themselves as much as the next guy (and it was the guys in the audience that were laughing the most at that scene). But the Apatow additions didn’t quite mesh with the central story.
Still, we can conclude that Kristen Wiig has what it takes to carry a movie by herself. Hopefully, next time she’ll get her script greenlighted as is.
Meek’s Cutoff is an unfortunate misfire by the excellent director Kelly Reichardt (Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy). The masterpiece Picnic at Hanging Rock has already been made. We didn’t need an indifferent covered wagon version.
The route of the Oregon Trail was not yet well established in 1845, so a covered wagon train hires a mountain man who claims that he has found a shortcut through the Cascades. However, it becomes clear that the mountain man (Bruce Greenwood) is unreliable, and there is a new option of following an Indian of unknown motives. We can’t even tell if the Indian is sane. The men (Will Patton, Paul Dano) must figure out what to do while their wives (Michelle Williams, Shirley Henderson) eavesdrop and guess their fate.
There are possibilities there, but Reichardt hasn’t made much of a point by the time the movie ends. We know that human decision making cannot guarantee survival in a harsh and unfamiliar environment, but that’s not enough of a payoff after tromping around bleak Eastern Oregon for two hours.
Oddly, Reichardt shot the movie in a 1.37:1 Academy screen ratio. This looks especially boxy in a Western set in a vast, horizonless wilderness.
The headmaster of a provincial boarding school is so cruel, even sadistic, that everyone wants him dead, especially his wife and his mistress. When he goes missing, the police drain the murky pool where the killers dumped the body, and the killers get a big surprise. Now the suspense from director Henri-Georges Clouzot really starts.
A master of the thriller, Clouzot was nicknamed the French Hitchcock. In an achingly scary scene from Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, two truck drivers try to get a long truck around a cliff side hairpin curve – and the truck is filled with nitroglycerin. If you like Diabolique, you’ll probably also like another domestic murder – this time set in Paris – Quai des Orfevres. Criterion has released the Diabolique DVD.
In the fine French drama Queen to Play, a working class woman discovers a passion for chess in midlife. It’s a film about aspiration. First, she must muster the courage and resourcefulness to learn the game. When it becomes an obsession, she and her family must adjust.
The excellent actress Sandrine Bonnaire (Intimate Strangers) is the perfect choice to play this laconic and controlled character, who reveals her thoughts and emotions to the audience almost only through her eyes. A French-speaking Kevin Kline is also very good as the crusty American widower who teaches her chess..
Come along with Werner Herzog as he explores the 33,000-year-old Chauvet cave paintings in southern France. It’s a great topic for a film – a specially authorized descent into the claustrophobic confines of a prehistoric cave, littered with human footprints and the skulls of extinct cave bears. Surprisingly, some of the paintings look like they were painted in the Renaissance or later.
And, of course, Herzog (Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Grizzly Man) is a great story teller. Here, he made the wise choice to film in 3D. The paintings are not on flat canvasses, but on uneven rock faces. The 3D allows the audience to appreciate how the artists used the curves in the rock to give the illusion of motion in their subjects.
Don’t miss Cave of Forgotten Dreams while it can be seen in 3D.
This brilliantly funny movie is one of Preston Sturges’ less well known great comedies. Eddie Bracken plays a would-be soldier discharged for hay fever – but his hometown mistakenly think that he is sent home a war hero. Hilarity ensues. All the funnier when you realize that this film was made in 1944 amid our nation’s most culturally patriotic period.
Turner Classic Movies broadcasts Hail! The Conquering Hero several times a year, and a new DVD has been released today.