The Names of Love is an amusing but forgettable romantic comedy about the attraction of opposites – a flighty leftwing women who converts conservatives by sleeping with them and an uptight and controlled guy. Sara Forestier won the Cesar (France’s Oscar) for her portrayal of the most attention deficient character in recent cinema. Indeed, Forestier is actually convincing as a woman so distractable that she doesn’t notice that she has left her flat and boarded the Paris Metro without wearing any clothes.
Movies
DVD of the Week: The Music Never Stopped
Here’s a crowd pleasing movie. Parents find their long lost adult son in a hospital, suffering from a brain tumor that has erased his much of his memory (and all of his short term memory). A speech therapist discovers that the son’s personality is sparked by music that he remembers from his teens. The father and the son have been estranged since the son left after an argument between them. The father finds that he can reach over the memory disability and re-connect by learning the son’s music.
The son’s music is all from the period 1964 to 1970 – and this music is another character in the film. Dad leaves behind his Big Band sensibilities to embrace Bob Dylan, Donovan, Steppenwolf, Crosby Stills & Nash and, especially the Grateful Dead. Baby Boomers and Dead Heads will really enjoy this movie from the music alone. Indeed, the Dead’s Bob Weir and Mickey Hart have been out supporting the movie.
The film is a showcase for the excellent actor J.K. Simmons, who plays the father. Simmons is always very, very good (Juno‘s dad, getting fired in Up in the Air and on TV’s Oz and Law and Order). Here, he plays a guy who is secure in his own righteousness, but then sees and accepts his own responsibility for the estrangement, and whose love for his son motivates him to make some big changes. Lou Taylor Pucci is excellent as the son. Julia Ormond does a good job playing the speech therapist.
Now I generally hate “disease of the week” movies. Really hate them. But here the real story is about the relationship between father and son, and the rebuilding of the bond between them. The memory disability, along with their past and the father’s initial stubbornness, is just another obstacle to their communication.
The story is based on an actual case described by Oliver Sacks in his essay The Last Hippie.
Other recent DVD picks have been Source Code, Potiche, Step Into Liquid and Riding Giants, and Another Year.
Crazy Stupid Love: Gosling, Stone shine in romcom
Crazy Stupid Love is an altogether very satisfying romantic comedy starring Steve Carell as the middle-aged sad sack who has been dumped by his longtime wife (Julianne Moore) and comes under the tutelage of uber lounge lizard Ryan Gosling, who in turn is falling for Emma Stone. Lots of laughs ensue, leading up to a madcap climax in Moore’s back yard, before the film slows down for the last 20 minutes. But, it’s plenty funny (and not many romcoms are these days).
Gosling, who earned indie favorite status playing tortured/damaged characters, is great here as the guy who can melt any gal in a bar with stunning ease and speed. Emma Stone is always good in comedies. Lisa Lapira shines as Stone’s wingman, and Analeigh Tipton is excellent as Carrel’s babysitter.
The first cowboys & aliens movie
I really enjoyed the first cowboys and & aliens movie, the sci fi spoof 1994 Oblivion, now available on DVD. It is set in the year 3030 on the planet Oblivion, which strongly resembles a frontier town from a spaghetti Western, peppered with the occasional cyborg, ray gun and ATM machine.
Oblivion is intentionally campy, has a silly plot and lots of tongue-in-cheek dialogue. The scene where the funeral is interrupted by the weekly bingo game upstairs is especially funny. The cast seems to be having lots of fun with the material. Musetta Vander as the rawhide whip-wielding dominatrix Lash and Carel Struycken as the death-forboding undertaker Gaunt are especially over-the-top good. In addition, Julie Newmar plays a cougarish saloon proprietor, and Star Trek’s George Takei is the Jim Beam-swilling town doc. Amazingly, Oblivion rated a 1996 sequel, Oblivion 2: Backlash, in which most of the cast returned.
I haven’t yet seen the $100 million summer blockbuster Cowboys & Aliens, which opens this weekend. Cowboys & Aliens is set on the planet Earth, where Daniel Craig, playing a Clint Eastwoodesque Man With No Name, awakes with his memory erased by aliens and a futuristic bracelet. Harrison Ford’s torch-bearing mounted lynch mob is interrupted by laser attack from an alien spaceship. Saloon gal Olivia Wilde (House, The OC) is pulled into the sky by alien forces. It takes itself much more seriously than does Oblivion, and I only hope that it’s half as entertaining as Oblivion.
A Little Help: pulling herself out of malaise
A Little Help is a Jenna Fischer vehicle that illustrates the depth that Fischer can bring to even a shallow character. In this dramedy, Fischer is suddenly widowed and must reassemble her life and support her quirky 12-year-old son despite the intrusions of her shrill, micro-controlling sister (Brooke Smith) and their chilly mother (Leslie Anne Warren). Fischer’s biggest challenge is helping her son navigate social life at his new school, where he has told a preposterous lie on his first day.
Kim Coates steals every scene as a medical malpractice attorney. Ron Liebman sparkles as the blowhard father.
Writer/Director Michael J. Weithorn made the very smart decision to hold Fischer’s character accountable for the bad choices she has made in her life. If she were instead written as a completely innocent victim, the story would have lapsed into cliche. Instead, it’s a pretty good movie and a fine showcase for Jenna Fischer.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI2qIul29Iw]Tabloid: a gut-bustingly funny documentary
In Tabloid, master documentarian Errol Morris delivers the hilarious story of Joyce McKinney, a beauty queen jailed for manacling a Mormon missionary as her sex slave. McKinney doesn’t like the film, but she has no complaint because two-thirds of the film is her telling her story in her own words. The humor derives from her being such a clearly unreliable narrator – “barking mad” in the colorfully accurate description of a British journalist. Morris came across her story decades after the kidnapping, when she had her dead dog Booger cloned from “Spirit Booger” into a litter of Korean-named Boogers.
Morris’ last two films (Standard Operating Procedure about the Abu Ghraib abuses and The Fog of War) were as funny as a heart attack. But remember that Morris’ earliest films (Gates of Heaven, Vernon Florida and Fast Cheap & Out of Control) also focused on eccentrics and were plenty funny. Just for fun, this time Morris even leaves in some of his snarky wisecracks to the interviewees.
This is one of the funniest movies of the year and the funniest documentary since The Aristocrats.
DVD of the Week: Source Code
Source Code is a gripping thriller, and I admired both its intelligence and its heart. The key is a breakthrough screenplay by Ben Ripley. The scifi premise is that supersoldier Jake Gyllenhaal can inhabit the brain of a terrorism victim for the same 8 minutes – over and over again. Each time, he has 8 minutes to seek more clues. Can he build the clues into a solution and prevent the terrorist atrocity? Gyllenhaal is excellent. So is Vera Farmiga as his handler and Michelle Monaghan as a girl you could fall in love with in 8 minutes. Jeffrey Wright chews the scenery with his homage to Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove. Director Duncan Jones solidly brings Ripley’s screenplay home.
It’s on my list of Best Movies of 2011 – So Far.
Other recent DVD picks have been Potiche, Step Into Liquid and Riding Giants, and Another Year.
Terri: something new in a teen misfit movie
We’ve all seen the teen misfit movie. But Terri has some originality and lots of heart. Jacob Wysocki plays an overweight teen caring for his mentally ill uncle. He doesn’t have much going for him until John C. Reilly’s school counselor intervenes, sometimes clumsily (who knows what will make a teen respond?). Soon there’s a ripple effect among other troubled teens. Screenwriter Patrick Dewitt deserves some plaudits for the authenticity of the teen characters.
It’s going to hard to find Terri in theaters, but it’s well worth it.
Coming Up on TV and DVD: The Battle of Algiers
On July 28, Turner Classic Movies will broadcast The Battle of Algiers, the story of 1950s French colonialists struggling to suppress the guerrilla uprising of Algerian independence fighters. Although it looks like a documentary, it is not. Instead, filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo recreated the actual events so realistically that we believe that we are watching strategy councils of each side. Urban insurgency and counter-insurgency are nasty, brutal and not very short – and we see some horrifically inhumane butchering by both sides.
Among the great war films, it may be the best film on counter-insurgency. In 2003, the Pentagon screened the film for its special operations commanders.
In addition, Criterion is about to release The Battle of Algiers in one of its magnificent DVDs.
Coming up on TV: Midnight Express
On July 23, Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting 1978’s Midnight Express. This film is so gripping that, thirty-plus years after its release, you can’t hear “Turkish prison” without immediately thinking of Midnight Express. It’s probably done more to keep American kids from bringing drugs into Turkey than any other factor. Midnight Express is based on a true story, and is amped up considerably by Oliver Stone’s screenplay. Nominated for six Oscars, it won two.
TCM is also showing Cool Hand Luke on July 23. Both are on my list of 10 Best Prison Movies