Movies

Hereafter

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For the first time, Clint Eastwood ventures into the supernatural with the story of three people and their individual experiences with death.  It’s also a departure for screenwriter Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon, The Damned United).   The most skeptical, nonspiritual viewer (me) finds this to be a compelling film.

The question of What Comes Next is unanswered, and less interesting than the film’s observations of what happens on this Earth to living humans.  Eastwood’s genius is in delivering moments of complete truthfulness, one after the other, across a wide range of settings.  Young boys enabling a druggie mother.  People in a hostel watching for the last breath of a loved one.  Experienced, skilled and loving foster parents facing a challenge that they cannot fathom.  Every instance of human behavior is completely authentic.

Equally realistic is the big CGI-enhanced action sequence at the beginning of the film – an Indonesian tsunami, not overblown in any way, but frightening in its verisimilitude.

Eastwood is an actor’s director, and star Matt Damon leads a set of excellent performances.  Bryce Dallas Howard has an Oscar-worthy performance of a woman achingly eager to move past the painful episodes of her life.   The child actor Frankie McLaren carries significant stretches of the story with his unexpressed longing and childish relentlessness.  Cecile de France ably plays a successful television anchor compelled by events to veer her life in a different direction. Richard Kind delivers a moving portrayal of a man seeking closure after the death of his wife.

DVD of the Week: Winter's Bone

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My pick for 2010’s best movie to date is Winter’s Bone, which is just now available on DVD.  A 17-year-old Ozarks girl is determined to save the family home by tracking down her meth dealer dad – dead or alive.  The girl’s journey through a series of nasty and nastier Southern Missouri crank cookers is riveting – without any explosions, gunfights or chase scenes.  Every moment of this film seems completely real.  Winter’s Bone won the screenwriting and grand jury prizes at Sundance.

With just her second feature, Debra Granik has emerged as an important filmmaker to watch.  She presents an unflinching look at this subculture without ever resorting to stereotype.  Granik hits a home run with every artistic choice, from the locations to the spare soundtrack to the pacing to the casting.  I’ll be watching for her next film.

As the protagonist, 20-year-old Jennifer Lawrence is in every scene.  With a minimum of dialogue, she creates a lead character of rarely seen determination.

Dale Dickey is exceptional as a criminal matriarch.  John Hawkes (the kind Sol Star in Deadwood)  also gives a tremendous performance as the ready-to-explode Uncle Teardrop.

For my recent DVD choices (including trailers), see DVDs of the Week.  Winter’s Bone is on my lists of Best Movies of 2010 – So Far and 5 Great Hillbilly Movies.

Inside Job

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Charles Ferguson’s brilliant documentary Inside Job may be the most important movie of the year.  It is a harsh but fair explanation of the misdeeds that led to the recent near-collapse of the global financial system.  Unexpectedly, the film begins in Iceland, setting the stage for the collapse and kicking off the easily understandable explanations of the various  tricks and bamboozles that have hidden behind their own complexity.

Like this year’s other best documentaries, The Tillman Story. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work and Sweetwater, Inside Job gets out of its own way and just lets the story speak for itself.  There is no need for a Michael Moore to portray the financial sector as criminally greedy and reckless – the facts speak for themselves and the audience can be trusted to “get it”.  At the showing I attended, there was general applause at the end.

Besides the obvious villains at the investment banks (Goldman Sachs, etc.) , the insurers of credit default swaps (like AIG) and the rating agencies (e.g., Moody’s), Ferguson also takes aim at these thieves’ political enablers and economist apologists.  There are some 60 Minutes-style ambushes, but they are far less interesting for the squirming of the subjects than for exposing the completely clueless entitlement of the financial sector and its governmental and academic lackeys.

Inside Job exposes our Wall Street government, and is unflinchingly bipartisan in meting out the blame.

Matt Damon narrates.

Coming up on TV: The Americanization of Emily

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Julie Andrews and James Garner in The Americanization of Emily

 

One  of my Overlooked Masterworks plays on TCM on October 25th.  Set in England just before the D-Day invasion, The Americanization of Emily (1964) is a biting satire and one of the great anti-war movies. James Garner plays an admiral’s staff officer charged with locating luxury goods and willing English women for the brass.  Julie Andrews plays an English driver who has lost her husband and other male family members in the War.  She resists emotional entanglements with other servicemen whose lives may be put at risk, but falls for Garner’s “practicing coward”, a man who is under no illusions about the glory of war and is determined to stay as far from combat as possible.

Unfortunately, Garner’s boss (Melvyn Douglas) has fits of derangement and becomes obsessed with the hope that the first American killed on the beach at D-Day be from the Navy.   Accordingly, he orders Garner to lead a suicide mission to land ahead of the D-Day landing, ostensibly to film it.  Fellow officer James Coburn must guarantee Garner’s martyrdom.

It’s a brilliant screenplay from Paddy Chayefsky, who won screenwriting Oscars for Marty, The Hospital and Network.

Today, Americanization holds up as least as well as its contemporary Dr. Strangelove and much better than Failsafe.

Reportedly, both Andrews and Garner have tagged this as their favorite film.

One of the “Three Nameless Broads” bedded by the Coburn character is played by Judy Carne, later of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.

It’s Kind of a Funny Story

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This is a light and wry coming-of-age comedy set in a locked psychiatric facility by Directors Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden (Half Nelson, Sugar).  It’s hard for me to find humor in psych wards, but this good-hearted fluff had a few chuckles.  Keir Gilchrist and Emma Roberts star as the teens.  But the film is more of a showcase for Zach Galifianakis’ restrained and textured performance, less Wild Man and more  heartfelt – who knew?

DVD of the Week: The Day of the Jackal

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My DVD of the Week is The Day of the Jackal (1973), like The American, the tale of an international master assassin – only fact-based and even better.  In Day of the Jackal, French security forces are tipped off to a plot to assassinate President DeGaulle and they eventually figure out where and when the assassination will be attempted.  But they don’t know who they are looking for or what he looks like.  Without computers or cell phones, they must track down the unknown assassin in time.

Edward Fox is excellent as the resourceful and meticulously professional killer.  So is Michael Lonsdale as the creative yet methodical cop leading the manhunt.  But the real star is director Fred Zinnemann (High Noon, From Here to Eternity, A Man for All Seasons).  As he showed in High Noon, Zinnemann knows how to tell a story and build tension, and the ending in Day of the Jackal is thrilling.

The Day of the Jackal has nothing to do with Carlos the Jackal of The Sundance Channel’s Carlos.

For my recent DVD choices (including trailers), see DVDs of the Week.

Carlos

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I haven’t seen it yet, but Cannes audiences loved this 5-hour biopic of the 70s terrorist Carlos the Jackal, and the film was bought by IFC and Sundance Channel.  The Sundance Channel is broadcasting it in three parts, this Monday through Wednesday, October 11-13.  Set your TiVos.

Many see this as a star-making breakthrough for its Venezuelan star Edgar Ramirez.

Howl

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Howl‘s filmmakers made a risky choice that pays off and a safe choice that doesn’t.  The risky choice is to make the film about a poem, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, not a conventional biopic of Ginsberg or a courtroom drama about the famous obscenity trial.  This is risky because poetry is not embraced by the mass audience; in our culture, poetry makes opera look like NASCAR in terms of popularity.  Yet the movie is at its strongest in the segments where James Franco’s Ginsberg reads from Howl.  The poem Howl – with its pain, rage, alienation and rebellion – is the best part of the movie Howl.   Snippets of Ginsberg’s life and the trial are placed about to give context to the poem.

The unfortunately safe choice is using animation to interpret the poem.  The poem evokes powerful imagery in the minds of the audience.  Here, the animation is very literal, so we see – and are distracted by – the images instead of thinking them up ourselves.  Maybe the filmmakers didn’t think that the audience would accept the unadorned reading of a poem.  Howl is a long poem, but the filmmakers do an effective job in delivering it to us in segments.  The language of the poem is not a shocking today as it was in the 50s, but definitely gets your attention.

Franco is great.  Jeff Daniels has a small juicy part, but David Straithern, Jon Hamm, Mary-Louise Parker, Bob Balaban, Treat Williams and Allesandro Nivona don’t have much to do.

The writer-directors here are Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, who made the Oscar-winning The Times of Harvey Milk., which is one of the great documentaries and one of the great political films.

Upcoming on TV: Hail! The Conquering Hero

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Eddie Bracken surrounded by his new Marine pals in Hail! The Conquering Hero

 

Don’t miss this brilliantly funny movie.  It’s one of Preston Sturges’ less well known great comedies.  Eddie Bracken plays a would-be soldier discharged for hay fever – but his hometown mistakenly thinks that he is being 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.  It will be broadcast on TCM on October 10th.

Baby boomers will also appreciate crusty William Demarest (the crusty housekeeper in TV’s My Three Sons) as the crusty Marine Sarge.