Movie Recommendations, Rants and Ruminations
On June 24, Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting this 1951 Alfred Hitchcock suspense thriller – one of his very best. A hypothetical discussion about murdering inconvenient people turns out to be not so hypothetical.
Robert Walker plays one of the creepiest villains in movie history. The tennis match and carousel finale are great set pieces.
In Cars 2, Pixar reprises the cast of Cars. But the champion racer Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) steps aside so the story can focus on his dimbulb tow truck buddy Mater (Larry the Cable Guy). The inspired plot sends up the James Bond genre with wonderfully Bondish British spies voiced by Michael Caine and Emily Mortimer.
I am a huge fan of Pixar. Pixar understands that the best animation in human history is not enough by itself, and also makes the effort to tell great, great stories. Pixar screenwriting is incredibly superior to that of other animation studios. Despite that, I wasn’t a big fan of Cars. In fact, Cars and Ratatouille have been the only Pixar films that haven’t made my Best of the Year lists.
I liked Cars 2 much better than Cars because of the Bond spoof. If you have kids, don’t miss it.
Ewan McGregor’s dad (Christopher Plummer) has just died, shortly after coming out of the closet. As if this weren’t enough to deal with, McGregor is a depressive anyway, with a rich history of sabotaging his relationships. But then he meets Melanie Laurent (Inglorious Basterds) (and they meet cute).
This is a winning comedy – one of the year’s best movies. It’s smart, sweet and original. All of the performances are excellent, especially Plummer’s, which should garner him an Oscar nomination. All in all, Beginners is a notable achievement by director Mike Mills (Thumbsucker).
Every ten years, Terrence Malick directs a film that critics call a masterpiece (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World). Here, he has created a bewildering, pompous mess.
The core of The Tree of Life is fine 90-minute family drama about a boy growing up in 1950s Waco (a superb Hunter McCracken) and the friction with his caring but brutishly domineering father (Brad Pitt). Unfortunately, there is another 60 minutes in the movie.
That additional 60 minutes is a self-important muddle that tries to lift the story to an exploration of life itself – from creation through afterlife. There are beautiful shots of clouds and waterfalls, with unintelligible whisperings from cast members. There are Bible verses, the Big Bang and dinosaurs (yes, dinosaurs). And, in case you don’t get how seriously the movie takes itself, there is an overbearingly pretentious score.
Plus, there is Sean Penn, silently brooding about his childhood from a skyscraper. And wandering through a desert in his suit. And reunited with his dead relatives on a tidal flat.
Malick’s pretense succeeds only in distracting the audience from could have been a good story and a beautifully shot film. Bottom line: painfully unwatchable.
Now film noir is by definition dark and cynical, but 1955’s Kiss Me Deadly is downright pissed off and nasty. Ralph Meeker stars as LA private eye Mike Hammer in this delightfully lowbrow film noir, based on a Mickey Spillane novel. Much of the fun comes from the menacing nuclear glow of the briefcase that is the film’s MacGuffin.
On his indieWIRE blog, Peter Bogdanovich writes that Robert Aldrich hated Spillane’s pulp so much that he concluded the screenplay with nuclear annihilation.
In the subversive 1984 cult classic Repo Man, the glowing briefcase reappears in the truck of a repossessed sedan.
The Criterion Collection has just released its DVD of Kiss Me Deadly.
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.