Movies

Animal Kingdom

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In this Aussie crime drama, a high school kid’s mother OD’s on heroin, forcing him into her estranged family of brutal criminals, presided over by his sunny grandmother. Like many teen boys, he is terse in speech and impassive in demeanor.  As he is plunged into increasingly desperate situations, neither the characters nor the audience knows what he is thinking in every instance. This, along with his peril, is the key to the movie’s success.

James Frecheville does an excellent job of making us care about a character desperately trying not to speak or reveal his feelings.  Jacki Weaver is great as Grandma Smurf, an impossibly upbeat gal who can effortlessly put out a contract on her own grandson.  Ben Mendelsohn is excellent as the boy’s most psychopathic uncle. Guy Pearce, in a supporting role as a sympathetic cop, is also good.

Will the teen safely navigate through the maze of his murderous relations? Will evil prevail?  We don’t know until the final scene…and then some questions remain.

Written and directed by David Michod,  Animal Kingdom won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.

The film depicts some close range gunshot deaths with the appropriate amount of splatter.

Mesrine: Killer Instinct

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This is the riveting real life tale of Jacques Mesrine – a French criminal with a portfolio of audacious heists and even more shockingly daring escapes.  He became intoxicated by – and addicted to – his own notoriety, which he embellished with some left wing political posing.  He saw himself as a modern Clyde Barrow and positioned himself that way in the media (without thinking too much about the final scene in Bonnie and Clyde).  At the end of the day, Mesrine was just a vicious thug, although one with an unusual amount of bravado and luck.

Vincent Cassell brings Mesrine to life in a brilliant performance that does not glorify Mesrine, but inhabits a countenance that shifts  instantaneously from jokey charm to cold-blooded hatred.  American audiences may remember Cassell as the psycho Russian gangster in Eastern Promises and the suave Francois “The Night Fox” Toulour  in the Ocean’s movies.

Director Jean-Francois Richet showcases Cassell’s performance with a series of outstanding artistic choices.  The harsh violence is shown for what it is but not stylized.  Richet makes strategic use of split screen that enhances the story without distracting from it.  And when Mesrine meets his new girlfriend (Cecile De France) and she says that she’s up for anything, the movie immediately cuts to the two of them robbing a bank.  Point made.

Richet and Abdel Raouf Dafri (screenwriter of A Prophet) adapted the screenplay from Mesrine’s memoir.  Dafri has had a spectacular year in crime and prison dramas.

The entire cast is good, particularly Gerard Depardieu, who summons all his hulking menace to play a gang leader who is at least as dangerous as Mesrine.

Richet and Cassell return later this year with the second part of the story, titled Mesrine: Public Enemy #1.

DVD of the Week: Sweetgrass

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Sweetgrass: This unadorned documentary tells the story of the two (heterosexual) cowboys who drove thousands of sheep on the last sheep drive in Montana’s Beartooth Mountains.  Because it is not dressed up with narration or music, the audience is left with the story, the people, their quest, the sheep and the landscape – and that’s more than enough.

If you’re life is too frenetic, pop this movie on and take a contemplative 101 minute respite.

It’s also available on Netflix streaming.

It’s on my list of Best Movies of 2010 – So Far.

A baseball time capsule: The Busher

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On August 24, Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting the 1919 silent film The Busher. It may not be a great movie, but it is an excellent document of baseball 90 years ago.  In 1919, John McGraw was managing the Giants, Ty Cobb was in his heyday, Babe Ruth pitched 17 games for the BoSox and the White Sox were fixing the World Series.  If you want to see how baseball looked back then (how the fans and umpires dressed, how the catcher squatted, etc.), watch this movie.

DVD of the Week: Fish Tank

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A damaged and angry young woman from the British lower class has the second-worst mother in recent films (after Mo’Nique’s role in Precious).  She dreams of dancing her way out of the neighborhood in a talent contest.  Then her mother brings home a new boyfriend who kindles new feelings in the teen.  This development culminates in a scene where she dances to the Bobby Womack version of California Dreamin‘ while the audience holds its breath.

In her first film role, Katie Jarvis plays the girl; Jarvis was discovered by the filmmakers during a sidewalk argument with her boyfriend that convinced them that she could muster the sustained rage (and foul mouth) required by the role.  Michael Fassbender is excellent as the mother’s new boyfriend.

It’s on my list of Best Movies of 2010 – So Far.

Police, Adjective

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This Rumanian film played in US theaters briefly earlier this year and is showing on The Sundance Channel in August.  It’s a cop story about a cop who is trying NOT to catch someone.  The cop is a young guy who doesn’t want to ruin a teenager’s life by jailing him for a little hash smoking, especially when the kid has been fingered by another kid with designs on his girlfriend.  As far as the cop’s superiors are concerned, the informer has handed them some low hanging fruit, and they insist that the cop bring in the kid.  Here’s a first for cop movies – in the climax, a dictionary is brought into an office to facilitate a debate over definitions.

Long segments of the film are taken up by real-time trods through a grim industrial city for  surveillance and by the filling of reports with minute details.

I appreciated seeing a police procedural without chases and fire fights, but wasn’t sure that the payoff was worth watching so much tedious surveillance.

Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune pretty well nailed it in his review: “It’s not for all tastes; it requires some patience. The more your own job involves absurd, time-consuming bits of minutiae, the more familiar (and amusing) it’ll seem.”

Police, Adjective won a jury prize and the Critic’s Prize at Cannes and has a very high Metacritic rating of 81.

Mother

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Mother is a Korean film released in America earlier this year and now available on DVD.  It’s about an obsessively protective mother.  Her adult son has a vague mental disability that afflicts his memory and keeps him from understanding the consequences of his words and actions.  The son is framed for a murder and the mother relentless launches a campaign to find The Real Killer.

What is so inventive about this story is that it is told from the points of view of – not one, but – two unreliable narrators.  This causes periodic confusion for the viewer and sets up some shockers in the plot.  On the other hand, the viewer cannot relate to either main character – the dim son or the unhinged mother.  The film is original, well-made and a little off-putting.

Thanks, Paula, for recommending this film.

Get Low

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Get Low:  Robert Duvall is a hermit who decides to put on his own funeral while he is alive.  It runs out that his 40 years of isolation is self-imposed house arrest for a mistake in his youth.  So what seems like a humorous Appalachian anecdote  turns out to be a fable of redemption.  Bill Murray and Sissy Spacek are excellent, while Duvall’s performance elevates the movie.  It’s a little movie that is entertaining and satisfying, with a dose of greatness from Duvall.

Farewell (L'affaire Farewell)

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Emir Kusturica

Farewell (L’affaire Farewell) is mostly a riveting Cold War espionage film, with an unfortunately off kilter secondary story that doesn’t belong in the same movie. The main story is based on fact:  a senior KGB colonel becomes dissatisfied with the stagnant corruption of the Soviet Union and decides to bring about revolutionary change by leaking Soviet secrets to the West.  To avoid detection, he chooses to pass the secrets in plain sight to an amateur civilian, a midlevel French corporate manager in Moscow.

The Russian lead is played by Serbian director Emir Kusturica, who gave good acting performances in The Good Thief and The Widow of St. Pierre.  Kusturica is outstanding here as the canny and world-weary master spy, and he carries the film when he is on-screen.

The French lead is played by French director Guillaume Canet, who directed one of my recent favorites,  Tell No One, and played a villain in that movie.  Tell No One is on my list of 10 Great Movies You Missed in the 2000s.  Niels Arestrup  (from The Prophet, this week’s DVD choice) is excellent as the French security chief.

The spycraft, the complex Francophile character played by Kusturica (code-named “Farewell”), his struggling family life and the attempts by the amateur Frenchman to keep his head bobbing above water combine for a compelling story.

So far, so good.  But then the film tries to tell another story – the geopolitical impact of Farewell’s leaks.   And the tone of the film switches from the serious spy tale with serious consequences to its main characters to not-so-dark comedy.  Suddenly, we see Fred Ward broadly playing Ronald Reagan as if in a Saturday Night Live skit, Philippe Magnan as a somber, one-note Francois Mitterand and Willem Dafoe lacking any kind of gravitas as a CIA chieftain.   Fortunately, although this mini-farce distracts from a good film, Kusturica’s character and his performance maintain the movie’s worthiness to see.

The Girl Who Played With Fire

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Lisbeth Salander locked and loaded

 

The Girl Who Played With Fire (Flickan Som Lekte Med Elden):  This is a highly entertaining follow-up to my personal favorite film of the year so far, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  Again, the story revolves around Lisbeth Salander, the tiny woman with a lethal mix of damage and drive, played by the Swedish actress Noomi Rapace.  Rapace’s Lisbeth is a tiny fury of a Goth hacker.  At only 88 pounds, so she will lose a fistfight with a man; but she prevails with her smarts, resourcefulness and machine-like  relentlessness.  Lisbeth is always mad AND always gets even.  As I have written before, Lisbeth Salander is the best new crime drama character since Helen Mirren’s Inspector Jane Tennyson.

In The Girl Who Plays With Fire, Lisbeth is framed for a triple murder.  She must find The Real Killer while on the run, aided by a mostly independent investigation by her ally, journalist Mikael Blomkvist.  Their parallel investigations lead to a villain much closer to Lisbeth than one could imagine.  Plays with Fire has the structure of a detective procedural, but has the tone of a thriller.

Although I liked them both, I did prefer The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo to Plays With Fire.  The Wife and two friends who had all read the books, strongly preferred Played with Fire to Dragon Tattoo.  I don’t know whether this is a gender thing or whether people who know the story react to the movies differently.  I generally enjoy major plot twists more when I don’t see them coming, and I have certainly found some big surprises in both Dragon Tattoo and Plays With Fire.

Plays With Fire is the second part of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy, to be followed in October by The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.