Director Gregg Araki created the brilliant and searing Mysterious Skin, but here he’s just having fun. In the first hour of Kaboom, I lost track of how many characters had sex with each other – it’s just about non-stop and guy-on-guy, girl-on-girl, guy-on-girl, guy-and-girl-on-guy, etc. I would characterize the sex as casual, but that would make it seem that the characters were having even a modicum of difficulty in finding partners. Anyway, the chaotic sexathon is fun and very funny. The last twenty minutes takes the film into a campy version of a paranoid apocalypse film, before an abrupt (and I mean abrupt) ending. Did I mention the bad guys in the animal masks? It’s fun and doesn’t take itself too seriously.
Movies
Cedar Rapids
Cedar Rapids is surprisingly winning comedy about a guy (Ed Helm) whose life is so boring that an insurance agent conference in Cedar Rapids is a revelatory experience. Helm plays a character whose sincerity and decency elevate his guileless cluelessness. There are excellent supporting performances by Anne Heche, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and the irrepressible John C. Reilly.
This could have been a much courser and a lesser movie in the wrong hands. It’s directed by Miguel Arteta, who also brought an appealing sense of humanity to the underrated The Good Girl and Youth in Revolt.
Set your TiVo for Carlos
The Sundance Channel is broadcasting Olivier Assayas’ 5 1/2 hour miniseries Carlos again on February 23. Don’t miss this miniseries on the 70s/80s terrorist Carlos the Jackal.
Carlos begins as a playboy who thinks it would be cool to fight for the Palestinians. It turns out that he is way smarter and more nervy than the other dippy wannabe terrorists, so he rises to lead his own crew. At first he prudently tries to remain clandestine, but he inadvertently gains some celebrity, and he LOVES IT. After his first exposure in the media, he self-consciously dons a Che Guevara beret for his next adventure. Soon he is a legend in his own mind. Finally, he learns what happens when he becomes too hot for anyone to shield.
The action sweeps between atrocities in Paris and Vienna, a terrorist training camp in Aden, secret bases in Berlin and Budapest. Along the way, we meet European goofball radical posers and smarmy Syrian, Iraqi and Libyan intelligence officers. We see dynamite action scenes as Carlos must pull off escapes and attacks in compressed time.
Carlos is a star making performance by the Venezuelan actor Edgar Ramirez who plays Carlos and has to carry almost every scene. Ramirez perfectly captures Carlos’ bravado, audacity, vanity, sexiness, delusion and dissolution. Ramirez plays a few scenes in the nude, with Carlos at first admiring his own beefy body and later lolling about with a pot belly.
Carlos is a French film, but is mostly in English; there are subtitled scenes with French, Spanish and Arabic dialogue.
Carlos has also been released in a 2 hour 45 minute version on Pay Per View. I strongly recommend the full length version on the Sundance Channel.
The Illusionist – wistful and charming
Sylvain Chobert (The Triplets of Belleville) made this wistful animated charmer from a screenplay by the French master director Jacques Tati, who died in 1982. The Illusionist tells the story of a small time magician whose act no longer appeals to a postwar audience. As he prospects for an ever bleaker array of gigs, he drifts through show a biz detritus of seamy dressing rooms and broken talent. He meets a girl, who attaches herself to him to escape her drab existence. The magician selflessly works to help her blossom. It’s an innocent and sweet tale made bitterweet by the harsh grimness of his situation.
I wasn’t a big fan of Triplets of Belleville, but here Chobert strikes every note perfectly. It’s an essentially silent film that captures the tone of Tati’s Mr. Hulot’s Holiday. (Indeed, when the magician drops into a movie theater, it’s showing Tati’s masterpiece Mon Oncle.) It’s a fine movie with a sweetness that is rare in modern cinema.
127 Hours – Not just a cringefest
127 Hours is surprisingly entertaining – surprisingly because you know, even before entering the theater, that the protagonist is going to get trapped under a rock and make his escape by cutting off his own arm. Although there are cringeworthy moments (not only the amputation), it’s not just a cringefest. This is a Danny Boyle movie after all, so there is lots of eye candy and a pounding score. But Boyle also framed a character for James Franco to play who is very fun at the beginning and more textured as his ordeal unfolds. And Franco, as usual, is wonderful.
Another Year
Mike Leigh (Secrets and Lies, Vera Drake) has brought us another brilliant observation of the human condition, and asks why some people find contentment and others just cannot. The film observes a year in the life of a happily married couple (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen). They generously host their friends and family; the couple (and we the audience) pick up insights about the visitors – variously scarred by unhappy circumstance, cluelessness and self-destructiveness.
Mike Leigh may be the cinema’s best director of actors, and Another Year is filled with excellent performances, especially Broadbent and Sheen, David Bradley and Peter Wight. The wonderful Imelda Staunton drops in with a searing cameo at the beginning of the film. But Lesley Manville has the flashiest role – and gives the most remarkable performance – as a woman whose long trail of bad choices hasn’t left her with many options for a happy life.
Another Year is one of Leigh’s best.
DVD of the Week: The Trip
It’s Roger Corman Week at The Movie Gourmet, but our DVD is NOT the just released Roger Corman’s Sci Fi Classics. Instead, I’m going with an unintentionally hilarious movie that Corman himself directed, The Trip (1967). It’s a time-capsule exploitation film written by Jack Nicholson. TV director Peter Fonda decides to take LSD. After buying acid from Dennis Hopper (there’s a stretch!), the plan is for Fonda to trip at his friend Bruce Dern’s house. Now is it a good idea to entrust someone tripping for the first time to Bruce Dern? Of course not! Fonda wanders off and wall-bangs nightmarishly down Sunset Boulevard. The DVD is available from Netflix.
The Trip is on my list of 10 Movies So Bad They Are Fun.
Coming up on TV – giant carnivorous mutant rabbits!
On Friday, Turner Classic Movies will be broadcasting Night of the Lepus (1972). If you enjoy mocking cheesy special effects in bad Mutant Animal Monster movies, you’ll love the giant mutant rabbits rumbling through small Western towns, bursting through windows to kill humans and even chowing down on a herd of horses. Here’s a clip of the thundering herd of bloodthirsty bunnies.
And here’s the trailer, which gives you a very good sense of the movie’s production values.
Mid-August Lunch
This is a wry Italian comedy about a contemporary Roman bachelor in his 50s who is saddled with housing his mother AND the mothers of three friends in his ordinary apartment during a getaway weekend. The old gals relish his attention and the freshly caught fish, the baked eggplant and, especially, the macaroni casserole. Here are recipes from the movie. Starring and written and directed by Gianni Di Gregorio. Made my list of Food Porn Movies.
The Way Back
The Way Back is inspired by the story of a 1940 escape from a Siberian prison; three men slipped out of the gulag and walked out of Siberia, across Mongolia, across China’s Gobi Desert, through Tibet and over the Himalayas to freedom in India – a trek of 4000 miles. This is not a spoiler, because, at the very beginning of the movie, we are told that three men make it from the gulags to India. The remaining dramatic tension is in finding out which three of the seven who start the journey will finish it.
Of course, director Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Year of Living Dangerously, Witness, Master and Commander) knows how to make a movie, and it is beautifully shot on locations chosen to illustrate the magnitude of the distances and the challenges. It is well acted, especially by Ed Harris, Jim Sturgess, Saoirse Ronan and Colin Farrell.
It’s a tremendous survival tale that results in a good, but not great movie. It comes down to this: eleven months of trudging through dangerous, unfamiliar territory while suffering from starvation and exposure is really impressive, but not that engaging.