Movies

coming up on TV: NIGHT ON EARTH

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NIGHT ON EARTH in Rome

Coming up on Turner Classic Movies on September 8 is Night on Earth, with one of the very funniest scenes and one of the very saddest scenes in the same movie.  Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch, Night on Earth is comprised of five vignettes each in a taxi and each in a different city: Los Angeles, New York, Paris Rome and, of all places, Helsinki.

Moving west to east across the time zones, Night on Earth opens with the contrast between a working class driver (Wynona Ryder) and a striver executive (Gena Rowlands) and how they connect – or don’t.

Then we move to New York where a totally disoriented East German immigrant (Armin Mueller-Stahl) gets a job driving a hack (on his first or second day in the US) and picks up potty-mouthed passengers (Giancarlo Esposito and Rosie Perez).

The LA and NYC scenes are good, but Night on Earth really accelerates in Paris when an African immigrant driver (Isaach De Bankolé) picks up a blind woman (the gap-toothed beauty Béatrice Dall). They are both a bit touchy and immediately get underneath each others skins. The prickly conversation that follows teaches each a little about the other.

Now we get to perhaps the funniest episode in the movies (yes, I mean in the history of cinema).   A manic, motormouth Roman cabbie (Roberto Benigni) picks up an ailing Catholic cleric and regales him with an unwanted stream of consciousness confession, highlighting his own ever more inappropriate sexual partners, including a pumpkin and a sheep. It’s a rapid fire comedic assault sure to convulse any audience.

Finally, in Helsinki, two guys toss their passed-out buddy into a cab, and explain that he’s had the worst day ever – he has lost his job just when he has a wife looking for a divorce and a pregnant daughter. But the driver (Matti Pellonpää) tells them a story that tops it. Profound sadness.

The cult director and indie favorite Jarmusch made Night on Earth in 1991 after he first made a splash with Mystery Train.  He followed it with Dead Man, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Coffee and Cigarettes, Broken Flowers and last year’s Paterson.  Night on Earth is one of the few movies that I own on DVD, and it’s now available from the Criterion Collection.  But you can see it Friday on TCM. Go for it.

NIGHT ON EARTH in Paris

Stream of the Week: OBIT – it’s really not about death

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OBIT

The one absolutely essential requisite for a fine documentary film is a fascinating subject, and Obit proves that an insightful filmmaker can find the fascination in the most unlikely place.  It’s about the writing of New York Times obituaries.  Director Vanessa Gould chose the subject when the NYT published the obit of an acquaintance whom she feared would become overlooked;  the story in her own words is here (scroll down).

The writers in Obit explain something counter-intuitive – good obituaries are very little about a person’s death.  Sure, they are published upon a death, but the key to an obit is to explain the person’s life.  It helps that the NYT obits eschew the old-fashioned and hypocritical canonization of the dead, instead pseudo-resurrecting them by finding what was most interesting about their lives.

Obit is a superb study on writing. We sit on the writers’ shoulders and observe their process in real-time.  Obit lives up to its tagline: Life on a Deadline.

Obit was released briefly earlier this year and is now available to stream on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

WIND RIVER: another masterpiece from Taylor Sheridan

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Elizabeth Olsen and Jeremy Renner in WIND RIVER

With the contemporary Western thriller Wind River, screenwriter Taylor Sheridan has delivered another masterpiece, this time in his first effort as director. Wind River was probably my most anticipated film of the year because I pegged Sheridan’s previous movie Hell or High Water as the best movie of 2016.  Wind River doesn’t disappoint.

The story is set in and around Wyoming’s Wind River Indian Reservation.  Cory (Jeremy Renner) is a professional hunter who finds the body of a native American teenage girl.  To find out what happened to her and who is responsible, the tribal police chief Ben (Graham Greene) calls for help from the feds.  That assistance arrives in the form of FBI agent Jane (Elizabeth Olsen), an inexperienced city slicker who has no clue how to survive in the lethal elements of the wild country.  She is canny enough to understand that she needs the help of Cory, who knows every inch of the back country.  He has his own reason – very important to the story – to solve the mystery, and the unlikely duo embark on a dangerous investigation, which they know will end in a man hunt.

The man hunt leads to a violent set piece that Sheridan directs masterfully.  There’s a sudden escalation of tension, then apparent relief and then an explosion of action.  Deadly chaos envelops several characters, but we’re able to follow it all clearly, while we’re on the edges of our seats.

Jeremy Renner’s performance as Cory is brilliant.  Cory is a man whose life has been redirected by a family tragedy.  He’s a Western stoic of few words, but – unusual for his type – an individual who deals with his grief in a very specific and self-aware way.  Playing a character who reloads his own rounds, Renner is able to deliver hard-ass, determined efficiency along with some unexpected tenderness.

Olsen is also very good as Jane who understands that she may appear to be the bottom of the FBI’s barrel because she is a woman and very green and tiny.  Resolute and spunky, she moves past what others might take as a slight because no unaided outsider is going to be able to navigate the harsh environment and the culture of the reservation.  She isn’t trying to make a name for herself, but just to take responsibility in the old-fashioned way that we would expect from characters played by Glenn Ford, Gregory Peck, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.  She’s got to do the right thing.

As Martin, the dead girl’s father, Gil Birmingham (Hell or High Water) has two unforgettable scenes. His first scene is phenomenal first scene, as he processes the worst possible news with an outside Jane, and then with his friend Cory.   Graham Greene and Tantoo Cardinal are also excellent.   Kelsey Asbille and Jon Bernthal are also stellar in a flashback of the crime.

Sheridan and cinematographer Ben Richardson (Beasts of the Southern Wild) make great use of the Big Sky country, with the jagged topography of its mountains and the feral frigidity of its forests.  Wind River opens as Cory hunts in spectacular postcard scenery; when we first see the reservation, we are jarred  – this is a very bad place.

Taylor Sheridan has a gift for writing great, great movie dialogue:

      “Who’s the victim today? Looks like it’s gonna be me.”

and

      “This isn’t the land of backup, Jane.  This is the land of you’re on your own.”

When Cory says, “This isn’t about Emily”, we know that this is precisely about Emily.  When Cory says, “I’m a hunter”, we know exactly what his intentions are – and so does Martin.

Sheridan hates that, in much of our society, people are disposable. He has explored that theme in Sicario, Hell or High Water and now Wind River. Wind River begins with a title explaining that the story is inspired by actual events, and ends with a particularly horrifying non-statistic.

Smart, layered and intelligent, Wind River is another success from one of America’s fastest-rising filmmakers.

THE TRIP TO SPAIN: 100 minutes of laughs, travel, food in a 115-minute movie

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Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan in THE TRIP TO SPAIN
In The Trip to Spain, comics Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan play caricatures of themselves assigned to a gourmet road trip, just as in The Trip and The Trip to Italy.  Both masters of impressions and improvisation, the amiable Brydon and the snootily competitive (but needy) Coogan banter their way through delectable Spanish cuisine.  One of the franchise’s running gags is Coogan’s constant name-dropping and one-upmanship, which begs Brydon to deflate him.

Brydon’s wonderful impressions of Sean Connery and Michael Caine are legendary, and Coogan is no slouch.  They do impressions of Marlon Brando and Robert Deniro, and mimic across the British acting greats John Hurt, Ian McKellen, Anthony Hopkins and Michael Holdern.  Brydon even “does” Mick Jagger doing Michael Caine and Jagger playing Shakespeare’s Shylock.

In one of the funniest bits, a lunchtime reference to the “Moors in Spain” sparks a Rob Brydon marathon of ROGER Moore riffs; as Coogan and their companions try in vain to change the subject, Brydon is hilariously unstoppable.

There are plenty of other laughs, too, as  Coogan tries to pronounces the French name “Aurore” and Brydon quips that the Spanish Inquisition was launched by a “Catalytic Converter”.  They even refuse to pass up the obvious joke about Herb Alpert’s Spanish Flea.

As in the other Trip movies, the travel and food porn is exquisite.  They cross Spain from the Basque country, through the dinosaur sites of Rioja, the Don Quixote heritage of  La Mancha, the streets of Cuenca and the marvels of Granada, ending in Malaga.   I didn’t notice any green vegetables until their fifth day of eating (always fine by me).  (However, Spain’s ubiquitous jamón doesn’t show up until their final day.)

Frankly, Brydon’s and Coogan’s improvisations are reason enough to make (and see) one of these movies.  Unfortunately,  someone felt the need to focus the final 15 minutes of The Trip to Spain on the contrast between Brydon’s happly family life and Coogan’s disconnected loneliness and his career and personal insecurities.  Blaaaaaaaaaah.  Snooooooze.

So it’s simple:  go see The Trip to Spain and, when the characters say goodbye to each other in Malaga – leave the theater.

ATOMIC BLONDE: kicks ass, looks great doing it

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Charlize Theron and James McAvoy in ATOMIC BLONDE

Charlize Theron kicks ass and looks great doing it in the most entertaining espionage action thriller Atomic Blonde.  Theron plays a British secret agent on a mission behind the Iron Curtain just before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.  The MacGuffins that she must recover are a list of clandestine operatives and the double agent who has memorized the list.  She runs into more shady characters than in The Third Man’s Vienna, chief amongst them a debauched British agent gone rogue (James McAvoy).

There is intrigue and backstabbing, double-crossing and  at least one major plot twist.  The brutal action is exquisitely filmed and edited, and the Atomic Blonde qualifies as a full-fledged martial arts movie.  Theron’s character is so Stoli-fuelled, that Stolichnaya Vodka must have paid a fortune for product placement.

Atomic Blonde makes excellent use of a more somber version of 99 luftballons (a 1983 hit by the German group Nena).  There’s a Bond-like opening song, too.

Theron is a superb actress with wide-ranging skills (Monster, The Italian Job, In the Valley of Elah).  And, as we saw in Mad Max: Fury Road, she can credibly carry an action movie.  The rest of the cast is also very good:  McAvoy, Toby Jones, John Goodman, Eddie Marsan and a bunch of scary-looking guys who play commie thugs.

Atomic Blonde is the first feature directing credit for David Leitch, a guy with a long resume as a stunt man as and a stunt coordinator  Leitch sure knows how to film fights and chases, and Atomic Blonde is really a top-notch action film.

Stream of the Week: ELLA BRENNAN: COMMANDING THE TABLE – one woman’s climb to a culinary legacy

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ELLA BRENNAN: COMMANDING THE TABLE
ELLA BRENNAN: COMMANDING THE TABLE

The documentary Ella Brennan: Commanding the Table tells the story of the New Orleans powerhouse restaurateur – and it’s one compelling story.

Ella Brennan is a woman who, before she was thirty, started running restaurants in the pre-feminist 1950s.  Ella Brennan started as the little sister and became the matriarch of the famous New Orleans restaurant family.  She launched Brennan’s and Commander’s Palace, the latter still the greatest of New Orleans Creole restaurants.  On her journey, she had to overcome Mad Men-era sexism,  a slew of business cycles and hurricanes – and even family betrayal.

We see a woman with old-fashioned obsession with detail and very high standards.  We also see culinary and marketing creativity that can only be described as genius.  Ella Brennan is responsible for Bananas Foster, the Jazz Brunch and a host of food trends.  Along the way, she mentored the celebrity chefs Paul Prudhomme, Emeril Lagasse and Jamie Shannon.  Here’s a New York Times profile of Ella Brennan that mentions this film.

I saw Ella Brennan last fall at the Mill Valley Film Festival. Ella Brennan: Commanding the Table can be streamed from Netflix Instant.

DUNKIRK: personal, spectacular and thrilling

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Fionn Whitehead in DUNKIRK

In Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan has written and directed a gripping historical thriller, somehow both personal and vast.  It’s a remarkable achievement of both storytelling and filmmaking.  Nolan chooses to tell us the story through the lenses of a few minor participants without losing any of the epic sweep of the event.

Dunkirk is the story of one of World War II’s most pivotal events.  It’s May, 1940 – over a year before Hitler invaded Russia and over a year-and-a-half before the US entered the war. German forces have swept across Europe and now control the entire continent.  It’s very thinkable that Germany will invade Britain.  Germany is winning, and it’s more plausible than not that Germany will win the war.

The Germans have trapped a British/French army of 400,000 on a beach in France, certain to be captured or annihilated.  The British navy has the capacity to evacuate 40,000 of them in the best case.  But the best case can’t be operationalized because, when the British load 800 soldiers on a destroyer, German bombers and submarines sink it.  So the British resort to a desperate measure by enlisting 700 small civilian boats – fishing boats, pleasure craft, trawlers, ferries and tugs – to cross the English Channel and pick up the soldiers from an active battle zone.  Amazingly, it worked and 340,000 of the troops were rescued, saving them to deter a German invasion of Britain.

Nolan shows us every conceivable peril faced by the rescuers and the rescued, from aerial bombardment to submarine attack. He starts us following a couple of ordinary infantrymen (Fionn Whiteheand and Aneurin Barnard). When they find a wounded man on the beach, they look at each other wordlessly, toss him on a stretcher take off at the full run for a waiting naval vessel; it’s not spelled out, but they aren’t being selfless – they are trying to jump the line to the ship and get evacuated before hundreds of thousands of other men. They learn that getting off the beach isn’t that easy. Soon, Nolan weaves in a determined civilian heading his tiny boat across the English Channel (the great actor Mark Rylance) and the RAF fighter pilots (the commander played by Tom Hardy) who try to protect the beaches and the evacuation vessels. It’s a race against time for each of the characters as they navigate hazard after hazard, and the experience throbs with intensity

Dunkirk is very historically accurate, although the story has been compressed to a couple of days, and the actual evacuation took over a week. Nolan jumbles his timelines, and sometimes we are jarred by moving from daytime in one story thread to nighttime in another. But the threads eventually converge.

In particular, the depiction of aerial warfare is extraordinary, including what it must have been like inside a cockpit that is hit by enemy fire. Dunkirk contains probably the best ever movie shot of a plane ditching in the ocean. We see what it must have been like to be on a ship sunk by submarine torpedo (hint: much less romantic than Titanic‘s sinking). The Germans employed a Stuka dive bomber, which was outfitted with sirens to terrify its victims on the ground or sea; Dunkirk actually replicates the scream of the Stuka’s sirens very convincingly.

Rylance is superb and the rest of the cast does very well, including Cillian Murphy as a shell-shocked soldier and Kenneth Branagh as an embattled naval commander.

Near the end of Dunkirk, a fighter plane runs out of fuel and glides across the beachfront in one of the most beautiful series of shots in recent cinema.

Dunkirk is that rare breed – a white knuckler with relateable characters and historical integrity. It’s one of the very best films of 2017.

THE MIDWIFE: life disrupted

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Catherine Deneuve and Catherine Frot in THE MIDWIFE

A woman’s life is utterly disrupted – for better and for worse – by the unexpected appearance of someone from her past.  Claire (Catherine Frot) is a middle-aged Paris midwife who lives a completely contained life, focused only on her passion for childbirth. Her other only other devotion is to her son, who, between med school and his girlfriend, she doesn’t see much of. Claire is so abstemious that she must be the only non-recovering and non-Muslim resident of France who eschews even a glass of wine.

Suddenly Béatrice (Catherine Deneuve) shows up and, in a most unwelcome development, intrudes on Claire’s life. Thirty years before, Béatrice was Claire’s father’s mistress when Claire was a teenager. After dragging Claire’s father into financial ruin, Béatrice suddenly disappeared, and he committed suicide. Now Béatrice, for the first time in thirty years, expects to pick up the relationship with Claire as though none of this had happened.

Béatrice is an irascible libertine and hedonist with champagne tastes and a gambling habit. She’s a master manipulator who has survived by flitting between rich boyfriends, but now she’s down – really down – on her luck. Béatrice has adopted “depending on the kindness of strangers” as her personal creed.

The Midwife is a welcome showcase for the veteran French actress Catherine Frot, whom we don’t get to see enough of in the US, despite her 96 screen credits (most recently in Haute Cuisine). Frot perfectly portrays the generally strong-willed woman who is ultimately unable to resist, bit by bit, the changes to her world.

One of the striking aspects of The Midwife is the opportunity for the great Catherine Deneuve to depart from her often icy and imperious roles. Béatrice is out of control and uncontrollable.

Paul, a simple and lusty long haul trucker shows up and show interest in Claire.   Paul is played by Olivier Gourmet from the great Dardennes Brothers movies Rosetta, The Son, L’enfant and The Kid with a Bike.  This is a much less brow-furrowing role, and Gourmet gets to unleash a delightful measure of gusto.

The Midwife is written and directed  by Martin Provost, the actor who has recently written and directed Seraphine, The Long Falling and Violette.  quite brilliantly edited  and his editor Albertine Lasta – (one of the editors on Blue Is the Warmest Color) know just when to end a scene – down to the nano-second.  This is a very effectively edited film.

The Midwife is a film to settle into and to meet and understand Claire, then to watch her life change.

BEN-GURION, EPILOGUE: in his own words, Israel’s founding leader reflects

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Ben-Gurion, Epilogue

In Ben-Gurion, Epilogue, footage from a recently discovered video interview allows us to hear from Israel’s founding leader in his own words. In 1968, David Ben-Gurion was 82 years old and had been retired from public office for five years. Living on a remote kibbutz in the Negev Desert, he still had a lot to say.

Ben-Gurion was interviewed for seven hours over several days, but the video was lost until recently. First the images were found, which triggered a search for the sound. The result is Ben-Gurion, Epilogue, with the seven hours distilled down to one hour. Director Yariv Moser gets out of the way and lets Ben-Gurion speak for himself. The result is an important document of 20th Century history.

Not a guy who naturally “holds forth”, Ben-Gurion is prodded into revealing his inside view of his controversial acceptance of German reparations.  We also get his take on the Zionist movement (not exactly what you’d expect) and, of course the Big Question: land for peace.  There are also telling insights into his marriage.

You can find a separate 24-minute “making of” documentary on YouTube.

Ben-Gurion, Epilogue will screen at the SFJFF:

  • Cinearts (Palo Alto), Sunday, July 23 Noon
  • Castro (San Francisco), Saturday, July 29 1:45 PM
  • Albany Twin (Albany), Sunday, July 30 Noon.

The SFJFF runs from July 20 through August 6 at theaters in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Albany, San Rafael and Oakland. You can peruse the entire program and buy tickets and passes at San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

LEVINSKY PARK: refuge for refugees?

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LEVINSKY PARK

Israel was created as a home for refugees.  What happens when African refugees overwhelm a neglected Tel Aviv neighborhood is the subject of the topical documentary Levinsky Park.

Director Beth Toni Kruvant takes us to Tel Aviv’s hardscrabble Hatikva neighborhood,  now burdened with an influx of African refugees from sub-Saharan Africa.  The refugees aren’t Jewish, they don’t speak Hebrew and they sure aren’t white.  Discouraged from working legally, the refugees encamp on the streets and do what they need to survive.  The Israeli government senses a lose-lose media profile on the issue and tries to duck it entirely.

So how do the local Israelis react?  There is a wide spectrum. Some welcome and try to help people fleeing for their lives.  Others tag the newcomers with the loaded pejorative “infiltrators” and try to kick them out.  We see some ugly, overt racism in Levinsky Park, but nothing unlike what we’ve seen in the US in the Trump Era.

It’s the same question that confronts all countries in the West about political asylum-seekers – who will actually invite them in?  What’s different about Levinsky Park, of course, is that this is Israel – the one nation  created by and for refugees.

A leader emerges from the refugees, the charismatic and articulate Mutasim Ali.  He frames their plight as a movement, and they strive to regain some control over their own futures.  Levinsky Park is a compelling real-life story and screens at the SFJFF:

  • Castro (San Francisco), Thursday, July 27 11:15 AM
    Albany Twin (Albany), Friday, August 4 4:05 PM.

The SFJFF runs from July 20 through August 6 at theaters in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Albany, San Rafael and Oakland. You can peruse the entire program and buy tickets and passes at San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.