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.
Movies
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.
Somewhere
This is Sofia Coppola’s (Lost in Translation) story of an A-list movie star (Steven Dorff) living at the Chateau Marmont with his expensive toys, booze and drugs and an inexhaustible supply of beautiful, sexually available women. Without any purpose or connection to others, his debauchery is completely joyless. To his surprise and discomfort, his eleven-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning) moves in for a few weeks. He slowly finds some connection to her, but then she leaves for summer camp and he is aimless, again.
Somewhere is an artsy portrait of a man so purposeless that he can find no pleasure in pleasure.
Fanning is great as the kid. Surprisingly, Jackass‘ Chris Pontius shines as the movie star’s best bud.
DVD of the Week: The Naked Kiss
Here’s another delightfully trashy gem from Sam Fuller, my favorite tabloid reporter turned Hollywood auteur. In The Naked Kiss, a prostitute opens the movie by beating her pimp to a pulp, and then moves to a new town, seeking a new beginning in the straight world. She gets a job as a nurse at the clinic for disabled children, and becomes engaged to the town’s leading philanthropist. She thinks that everything will be great unless someone reveals her tawdry past. But, instead, she discovers that her Mr. Perfect is molesting the crippled kids! (Only Sam Fuller could pull this off!)
Biutiful
Biutiful is about a great performance by Javier Bardem in a grim, grim, really grim role. (Yes, this film is grimmer than Bardem’s The Sea Inside, in which he plays a suicidal paraplegic.) In this film, Bardem plays Uxbal, a Barcelona lowlife who lives by perpetrating various petty scams. Low level crime does not pay well, and he lives in poverty with his kids, who he cannot trust with his bipolar, alcoholic wife (who is sleeping with his brother). Then he receives a medical death sentence – only two months to live. And then, things get even worse!
Can he leave his kids with a stable life? Can he find some redemption? It’s a compelling portrait of a desperate man in desperate circumstance, directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Amores perros, 21 Grams, Babel).
Has anyone has five better performances in the past decade than Bardem in The Dancer Upstairs, The Sea Inside, No Country for Old Men, Vicky Christina Barcelona and Biutiful? Bardem won Best Actor at Cannes for Biutiful.
Season of the Witch
Okay, I’ll admit that I saw Season of the Witch because the trailer made me laugh out loud. I thought that it might have been goofily bad enough to qualify for my list of 10 Movies So Bad They Are Fun. Unfortunately, it’s just bad and not much fun.
Season of the Witch is a Nicholas Cage/Ron Perlman buddy movie set among the plague, crusades and witch hunts of the 13th century. Cage and Perlman play two knights who, after slaughtering more than their share of women and children infidels, become disgusted with the Crusades. The deserters find themselves back in plague-ridden Central Europe escorting a comely accused witch to her abbey trial. Along the way, they encounter the cheesiest of CGI effects, the most portentous of soundtracks and every medieval cliché.
My recommendation: get some laughs from the trailer and skip the 95 minute version.