Movies

THE RIDER: a life’s passion is threatened

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Brady Jandreau in THE RIDER

In her contemporary Western The Rider, director Chloé Zhao has made a beautiful and emotionally powerful film and announced herself as an American filmmaker of significance. In The Rider, 20-year-old Brady is a rodeo rider and horse trainer who lives on the least romantic ranch on the windblown South Dakota prairie. Brady lives with his 15-year-old sister, who has a cognitive disability somewhere on the autism spectrum, and his non-touchy feely dad. The mom has died a few years before. The family lives in a trailer on a hardscrabble working ranch.

Brady’s soaring career as a rodeo star has been ended by a bronco’s hoof; Brady now has a metal plate in his skull and seizures in his hand. His rodeo career – and his only shot at fame and fortune – is over. But Brady is also a gifted horse trainer – and he may not even be able to ride horses without risk to his health and life. What makes that risk not at all theoretical is that Brady’s rodeo friend Dane is in even worse shape and lives in a rehab facility. So Brady’s story is one of confronting loss and figuring out how to negotiate the rest of his life without access to his passions.

Brady’s story is emotionally powerful and devoid of cheap sentiment.  The Rider is not even the least bit corny.

I went to see The Rider knowing almost nothing about it.  When the end credits rolled, I was stunned to see that the actors playing Brady, his sister and his dad are a real family.  Indeed, ALL of the cast are non-professional actors.

Director Chloé Zhao met The Rider’s star, Brady Jandreau, when he wrangled horses on her first film Songs My Father Taught Me, also shot on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation.  After the making of that film, she reached out to Brady after he suffered a serious real life rodeo injury.  When he told her that he would risk his life to continue training horses, she determined to make Brady’s story into this movie.

THE RIDER

Zhao’s partner, the Brit cinematographer Joshua James Richards, shot both of her films.  The cinematography, in The Rider is exceptional, especially the weather in the Big Sky above the prairie. There’s a cowboy campfire scene which may be the most beautifully shot scene in movies this year.  The Jandreaus live on a scruffy working ranch, neither romantic or picturesque.

I’m not fascinated by horses, but I found the horse training scenes in The Rider to be riveting.

It’s clear that Zhao and Richards are major artists. The Rider is a significant movie and one of the year’s best.

ISMAEL’S GHOSTS: indecipherable waste of talent

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Marion Cotillard and Charlotte Gainsbourg in ISMAEL’S GHOSTS

Suppose that you’re in mid-life, mid-career and mid-relationship, and your ex-spouse – whom you have thought dead for a decade – suddenly shows up.  In Arnaud Desplechin’s Ismael’s Ghosts, that is exactly what happens to a filmmaker (Mathieu Amalric) when his long-disappeared ex (Marion Cotillard) pops in.  So far, so good.  But then Ismael’s Ghosts begins to slide off the rails.

The filmmaker accompanies his ex-father-in-law, who is being honored in Israel, but then the story becomes unhinged and, finally, impossible to follow.  It’s just one indecipherable mess.

I was actually looking forward to this movie.  I loved Desplechin’s My Golden Days, and I admire Cotillard and Charlotte Gainsbourg (who plays the filmmaker’s current partner).  But Ismael’s Ghosts is just a waste of their talent and my time.  I saw Ismael’s Ghosts at Cinequest before its US theatrical release.

CLAIRE’S CAMERA: a deadpan human camera observes…

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Min-hee Kim in a scene from Hong Sang-soo’s CLAIRE’S CAMERA, playing at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 4 – 17, 2018. Courtesy of SFFILM.

Claire’s Camera is the latest nugget from writer-director Hong Sang-soo, that great observer of awkward situations and hard-drinking.  Jeon (Min-hee Kim of The Handmaiden) is a film company assistant who ia traveled to the Cannes Film Festival for the premiere of a Korean film.  It turns out that the film company executive has had a long-term relationship with the movie’s director, and she immediately fires Jeon when she learns of Jeon’s fling with the director.  With several days sill to go before her return flight, Jeon wanders around Cannes. Jeon meets the French schoolteacher and amateur photographer Claire (Isabelle Huppert) and they hang out.  Coincidentally, Claire also meets the director.  Most of the dialogue is in English, the common language of the French and Korean characters – and the earnestly imperfect English-speaking supplies some of the film’s humor.

Not only does Claire have a camera, she IS the camera through which we observe the foibles of the other characters.  Jeon is breathtakingly clueless (or in denial) about the reason for her dismissal.  The director, as many Hong Sang-soo characters, has an enthusiastic relationship with alcohol.  It’s all dryly funny, although the director and the executive redefine their relationship in a powerfully realistic scene.

This is an especially fine performance by Min-hee Kim.  She pulled off some deadpan humor in The Handmaiden, a film more thought of for its eroticism and mystery.  Here, she’s often just wandering around in reflection and making small talk.  But Kim is just so watchable, she keeps the audience’s interest keen.

Claire’s Camera is not as surreal as last year’s Hong Sang-soo entry, Yourself and Yours, but just as observational and droll.  I saw Claire’s Camera at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM), where Hong Sang-soo has a cult following and always appreciative audiences.  It’s now playing at the 4 Star in San Francisco.

Min-hee Kim and Isabelle Huppert in a scene from Hong Sang-soo’s CLAIRE’S CAMERA, playing at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 4 – 17, 2018. Courtesy of SFFILM.

DVD/Stream of the Week: THE FIREMEN’S BALL

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THE FIREMEN’S BALL

As a tribute to the great director Miloš Forman, who just died at age 86, this week’s video pick is Forman’s 1967 Czech comedy The Firemen’s Ball.  Forman came of age in Communist Czechoslovakia, and the prevalent thread in his films was the challenging, even mocking, of authority.  That’s what The Firemen’s Ball is all about.

It’s a comedy of errors set during the annual ball of a small town fire brigade. It’s an obligatory occasion, and everyone is just going through the motions. No one is willing or able to do what they are supposed to be doing, whether it is protecting the raffle prizes or even putting out fires. The film eviscerated the moral bankruptcy of the Communist society.

The bumbling old farts on the ball committee try to put on a beauty contest, and they shanghai a bunch of young women in attendance and parade them around the committee room to prep them for the pageant.  The Wife was offended by the sexism of the scene, but she didn’t stick around to see the committee get their comeuppance when the contestants themselves blow up the Big Announcement and turn the committee members into objects of ridicule.  Stick with it – the whole movie is only 73 minutes long.

In his youth, Forman lived through the Nazis, who he described as evil, and the Communists, who he described as absurd.  Indeed, the Czech ruling Politburo did recognizer themselves in The Firemen’s Ball’s bumbling firemen’s ball committee, and they concocted a pretext to ban the film in Czechoslovakia.

The Firemen’s Ball (which is also sometimes listed as The Fireman’s Ball) can be streamed from Amazon Prime and rented on DVD from Netflix. It’s only one hour, thirteen minutes long, and it’s a hoot.

THE FIREMEN’S BALL

GODARD, MON AMOUR: squandering artistic genius with political dilletantism

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Louis Garrel in a scene from Michel Hazanavicious’s GODARD, MON AMOUR, playing at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 4 – 17, 2018. Courtesy of SFFILM.

Godard, Mon Amour is a bitingly funny portrait of flawed genius. Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist) pays tribute to the genius of filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s early career while satirizing Godard’s personal excesses.

Godard, Mon Amour traces the three pivotal years after Godard married Anne Wiazemsky, the 19-year-old star of his La Chinoise. Godard (Louis Garrel) is age 37. In the preceding seven years he has helped revolutionize cinema as a leader of the French New Wave. He has made three masterpieces: Breathless, Contempt and Band of Outsiders. This is the Godard of “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.”

But now Godard has become a doctrinaire Maoist and rejects his past work. He sees himself as a thought leader of revolutionary politics – but that is a delusion. He’s just a political amateur, a poseur, a tourist.

Stacy Martin (center) in a scene from Michel Hazanavicious’s GODARD, MON AMOUR, playing at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 4 – 17, 2018. Courtesy of SFFILM.

“Godard is dead”, Godard declaims. But young Anne (Stacy Martin) has hitched her star to the old Godard, the master of cinematic innovation and rock star, not this new dogmatic Godard.

This is also a snapshot of 1967, when many on the French Left believed that revolution in France was around the corner.  By 1969, it was apparent to virtually everyone that this had been a mirage, that revolution was not going to happen.  To everyone but Godard, who stubbornly stuck with his dogma.

Louis Garrel, his dreamboat looks glammed down with Godard’s bald spot, is often very funny as he deadpans his way through Godard’s pretensions.  In Godard, Mon Amour, Godard’s thinking has become so devoid of humor, nuance, texture and ambiguity that his art has become one-dimensional and boring.  Indeed, I have found all of the Godard films since 1967’s Weekend to range from disappointing to completely unwatchable.  Godard is alive at age 87 and still making movies today – and they all suck.

In his very biting send-up of Godard’s personal failings, Michel Hazanavicius pays tribute to Godard’s groundbreaking cinematic techniques.  We see jump cuts, breaking the fourth wall, shifting between color and negative imagery, subtitling the characters’ interior thoughts over their spoken dialogue and references to earlier movies.  It’s all very witty.

There’s even a motif of repeatedly broken spectacles as an homage to Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run.  In one of the more obvious jokes, Godard and Anne debate whether either would choose to appear nude in a movie while they walk around their room in complete, full-frontal nudity.

The more of Godard’s films you have seen, the more enjoyable you will find Godard, Mon Amour. If you don’t get the allusions to Godard’s filmmaking, you may find the protagonist of Godard, Mon Amour to be miserably tedious.  I saw Godard, Mon Amour at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM). It opens this Friday in the Bay Area.

A QUIET PLACE: satisfyingly scary

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Emily Blunt (left) in A QUIET PLACE

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a more satisfyingly scary movie than A Quiet Place.  Director John Krasinski proves an economical story-teller – with essentially no dialogue, he helps us learn the set-up in  few minutes.  The earth has been overrun by man-eating monsters, who are blind but have a super-acute sense of hearing.  Anyone who makes noise is immediately eaten by a monster.  There aren’t many human survivors, but one family is holding out on their remote farm – a dad (Krasinski), a mom (Krasinski’s real life wife Emily Blunt), a daughter who is eleven or twelve and a son who is a year younger.

They walk only barefoot, speak only in sign language, and have devised ways to do every possible task silently.  However, the mom is pregnant; childbirth and babies tend to be noisy, so there’s a ticking time bomb element to the story.

In fact, the characters (and we) are in a state of intensely heightened alertness during the entire movie – except for when a monster shows up and plunges us into outright terror.  Mercifully, the gore and splatter happen off-screen, but the monster is plenty scary, and it hunts the family members at the closest of quarters and when they are at their most vulnerable.  I saw A Quiet Place in a theater, and the audience stayed in a state of tense silence – like we were all afraid to make any noise by gasping or shrieking.

Each family member blames himself or herself for the loss of the third and youngest child, so there’s also an element of family drama in A Quiet Place.  Krasinski and Blunt are excellent, and the kid actors (Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe) are, too.

I’m not a big horror movie fan, but I enjoyed and admired A Quiet Place.

John Krasinski (right) in A QUIET PLACE

THE STRANGLER: momma’s boy hunts down women, then fondles dolls

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Victor Buono in THE STRANGLER
Victor Buono in THE STRANGLER

This Friday night, Turner Classic Movies will air the 1964 serial killer movie The Strangler, the masterpiece of director Burt Topper, who specialized in low-budget exploitation movies.  It’s on my list of Overlooked Noir.

First, we see that lonely lab tech Otto Kroll (Victor Buono) is twisted enough to murder random women and then return to his lair to fondle his doll collection. Then we learn his motivation – he dutifully visits his hateful mother (Ellen Corby – later to play Grandma Walton) in her room at the convalescent home; she heaps abuse on him in every interaction. Pretty soon, even the audience wants to kill Mrs. Kroll, but Otto sneaks around taking out his hatred for his mom by strangling other women.

Because Otto is outwardly genial to a fault, it takes a loooong time to fall under the suspicion of the cops.  The character of Otto and Buono’s especially brilliant and eccentric performance elevate The Strangler above its budget and launches it into the top rank of serial killer movies.

Victor Buono and Ellen Corby in THE STRANGLER
Victor Buono and Ellen Corby in THE STRANGLER

The Strangler, which plays occasionally on Turner Classic Movies, is NOT available for rent from Netflix or streaming providers. You can buy the DVD from Amazon or find a VHS on eBay.

Victor Buono in THE STRANGLER
Victor Buono in THE STRANGLER

THOROUGHBREDS: which of these girls is the most sociopathic?

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THOROUGHBREDS

The psychological thriller Thoroughbreds is a witty and novel exploration of sociopathy.  The story is about two teen daughters of the Connecticut super-rich:  Amanda (Olivia Cooke – so good in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) and Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy).   Although the girls have known each other since early childhood, it turns out that Amanda’s mom, at her wit’s end, has paid for a “play date” with Lily.  This seems like a mismatch, but the two bond and then scheme to murder Lily’s odious step-father, Mark.

Amanda admits that she doesn’t feel emotions. That being said, she is very perceptive and self-aware about her lack of feelings.  Although she has an Asberger’s affect, she has learned to mimic emotional behavior.   Amanda has shocked the community with a disturbing act and has been socially ostracized.

Lily, on the other hand, is at first glance a normal teen – normal for the over-privileged, that is.  It turns out that she has her issues, too.  In the film’s biggest understatement, one girl says to the other, “empathy not your strong suit”.

Thoroughbreds is the writing and directing feature debut for Cory Finley.   Although it has its obvious similarities to psychological thrillers in the vein of Strangers on a Train, this film is not so much about the plot as an exploration of these two personalities   Finley has taken two types of sociopaths and combined them into a very original match-up.  For example, one of the girls is definitely a very high-functioning borderline personality – but she’s not the one who has been diagnosed as such.

As we are immersed in the story, we focus less about whether they’re going to kill Mark and more on which girl is more disturbed.

Both Cooke and Taylor-Joy deliver fine performances.  The late Anton Yechin appears in a very funny role as the Connecticut suburbs’ bumbling bottom-feeder.

Paul Sparks is excellent as the repellent step-dad Mark.  In Mark, Finley has crafted a character who excels in business and his many hobbies (riding, tennis, kendo), each of which he pursues obsessively.  He is the only character who has a very clear and accurate analysis of Lily’s personality.  Mark is the guy who outsiders would see as a high-achiever in many fields, even though he’s gone beyond the pale with his mega-rowing machine and monthly juice purges.  But once we see his domination and control of Lily’s mom and the creepy sexual undertones of his relationship with Lily, we want him to go.

I had been eager to see Thoroughbreds since I first watched this deliciously noirish trailer.  It was worth the wait.  Thoroughbreds is a very promising calling card by Cory Finley.

 

THE DEATH OF STALIN: gallows humor from the highest of scaffolds

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Jason Isaacs and Steve Buscemi in THE DEATH OF STALIN

One might not expect the death of Josef Stalin and the subsequent maneuvering of his cronies to make for a savagely funny movie, but that is exactly what writer-director Armando Ianucci has accomplished in in The Death of Stalin.  In his Veep and In the Loop, Ianucci has proved himself an expert in mocking the ambition, venality and flattery of those reaching for power.  In The Death of Stalin, he adds terror to his quiver of motivations, and the result is darkly hilarious.

Serving Stalin was a high-wire act.  By the end of Stalin’s Great Terror, everyone still standing in the Soviet leadership had survived by flattering Stalin and by loyally carrying out every Stalin command, no matter how misguided and/or murderous.  Given that the slightest misstep – or even a wholly imagined fragment of Stalin’s paranoia – could lead to a summary bullet-in-the-head, this was no small achievement.  These may have been the most powerful men at the very top of a superpower, but they have all been traumatized into extreme caution by years of fear.

For example, when Stalin suffers a cerebral hemorrhage and falls to the floor, his guards are afraid to burst into his room.  When Stalin is discovered on the floor by his housekeeper, the regime’s top leaders gather around him and decide on next steps.  The first question is whether to call a doctor, because they fear that if Stalin wakes up and finds that someone else has made a decision, he will have them executed.  (Once they get past that, they must work around the fact that Stalin has already killed or exiled all the competent doctors in Moscow.)

Of course, it would be absurd for Stalin’s inner circle to refrain from calling a doctor for hours and hours.  But it really happened.  So did all of the other key occurrences in the movie, although the events were compressed from the real six months into a three-day movie plot.

This cast is brilliant.  Steve Buscemi is cast as Nikita Kruschev and proves to be an inspired choice.  Jason Isaacs, with a ridiculously broad (but historically accurate) chest full of medals, is especially delightful as Field Marshal Zhukov.   Michael Palin, as Molotov, has one of the best bits as he deadpans political correctness while figuring out whether he can admit that the sudden release of his imprisoned wife is really good news.  Each one of the actors – Simon Russell Beale, Olga Kuryenko, Paddy Considine, Jeffrey Tambor, Andrea Riseborough – gets to shine with Ianucci’s dialogue.

This is gallows humor from the highest of scaffolds.  The Death of Stalin is an insightful exploration of terror – and hilarious, too.

Cinequest: BROTHERS IN ARMS

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BROTHERS IN ARMS

Brothers in Arms is a documentary on the making of Platoon, directed by Paul Sanchez, who played Doc.  Platoon, of course, won the Best Picture Oscar and launched the careers of many actors in its young cast.   Except for Tom Berenger, this was the first movie job for most of them. including Charlie Sheen, Johnny Depp and Willem Dafoe.

Director Oliver Stone, a Vietnam vet himself, assembled the cast two weeks before filming and put them through basic military training in the Philippine jungle under real military trainers.  The cast developed an usual bond during that process, as well as in coping with the mercurial Stone.

In Brothers in Arms, we get to hear from the actors (except for Dafoe, who was making a movie in South Africa) and the military advisers (but not from Oliver Stone).  There plenty of entertaining anecdotes and some insights into the filmmaking.