Movie Recommendations, Rants and Ruminations
In honor of Cinco de Mayo, here’s 10 Least Convincing Mexicans, my list of the ten least convincing portrayals of Mexicans and Chicanos in film history. In Viva Zapata, Marlon Brando (above) proves that he can mumble with a Mexican accent. But Marlon is only 10th on the list!
My friend Ed advises me that today is Star Wars Day – “May the Fourth be with you”.
We just lost Levon Helm to throat cancer. Of course, he is best known as the drummer and singer with the influential rock group The Band – it’s Levon’s voice on Up on Cripple Creek, The Weight and The Night They Drove Dixie Down, among others. He appeared with The Band in Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece 1978 concert film The Last Waltz.
Levon also had a rich movie career. His 17 acting credits include some very top shelf stuff. He was Loretta’s father in Coal Miner’s Daughter. In The Right Stuff, he played Ridley, test pilot Chuck Yeager’s aircraft mechanic, the guy who loans him Beeman’s chewing gum before each life-risking test flight. He was also the narrator in The Right Stuff.
I particularly loved one of his last roles, Old Man with Radio in Tommy Lee Jones’ overlooked 2005 The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Playing a blind man living alone on the Mexican border, he was absolutely haunting.
Here’s an 8-minute clip from The Right Stuff in which Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier for the first time. The scene is introduced by Levon Helm as the narrator, and then Levon as Ridley helps Yeager (Sam Shepherd) into the test plane and loans him his Beeman’s. What a wonderful voice.
After the very brief February appearance of the universally panned This Means War, Brooke Barnes wrote in the New York Times: “Hollywood keeps trying to turn Reese Witherspoon into a Sandra Bullock or Julia Roberts for a new generation. A new generation keeps refusing to take the memo.”
It’s a good point. Starting in 1998, Witherspoon acted in a string of smart, high quality movies, most notably Pleasantville, Election and American Psycho, culminating in an Oscar for 2005’s Walk the Line. The operative word is “smart”, and even in the popular hit Legally Blonde, Witherspoon played a smart woman who was only acting like a ditz.
But since then she’s been plugged into popular crap like How Do You Know and This Means War, with very little artistic or commercial success.
Happily, I see that Reese Witherspoon is taking on what look to be some high quality projects. She’ll be starring with Michael Shannon in the film Mud, by writer director Jeff Gordon (Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter).
She’ll also be acting with Colin Firth in Devil’s Knot, Atom Egoyan’s (Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter) version of the Robin Hood Hills murders and witch hunt, the subject of the three Paradise Lost documentaries.
And she’ll star in Big Eyes, writer Scott Alexander’s (The People vs Larry Flynt, Man on the Moon) screenplay for bio of the artist Margaret Keane, whose husband claimed credit for her works.
The common thread here for Witherspoon is avoiding Hollywood fluff to work with top quality filmmakers. At last, good for her.
Gotta love this photo by my friend Kiefer in the The Movie Gourmet’s LA bureau. The billboard is promoting the HBO movie Game Change.
San Jose’s Cinequest 22 film festival has ended. For me, Cinequest 22 meant seeing 17 features, a short and several interviews and Q&As with filmmakers – all including several world and US premieres. I saw my share of American films, but I also saw movies from China, Spain, Belgium, the Slovak Republic, Argentina, Hungary, Russia, Sweden and Norway.
Among the festival crowd, movies about overcoming disability and disease seemed to be the most popular. I generally preferred the comedies and romances that prove that it is still possible to write a good movie in those genres.
I especially liked two of the biggest movies in the festival: the zany Chinese action film Let the Bullets Fly and the drama about the American education system Detachment (I’ll be commenting on Detachment on Wednesday before its release this weekend).
There were some smaller films that I hope gain distribution: King Curling, the Norwegian comedy about a curling star who must go off his psych meds to win the big match; the Argentine modern-day spaghetti western Salt; and the hipster screwball comedy Percival’s Big Night. If given the chance to see these films, American audiences will love them.
Here’s the trailer for King Curling.
The good news is that there weren’t any huge surprises at the Oscars. All of the awards were deserved, even Meryl Streep’s (I would have preferred Michele Williams or Viola Davis to win Best Actress).
The bad news was that the show was a bit of a drudge and instantly forgettable.
The producers made some good choices this year: 1) dropping the full-length renditions of nominated songs; 2) reshuffling the order of awards to mix in the boring ones; 3) limiting the Academy President’s drone to about 30 seconds; 4) subbing in the spectacular Cirque du Soleil for the usual big dance number snorefest; and 5) bringing in the Best of Show/A Mighty Wind cast for a skit on a studio focus group in 1939. The show was well-paced and ended relatively on-time.
The Academy used the telecast to deliver a message – “Watch our movies in a theater – not on your iPhone!”. Unfortunately, the delivering was both vague and heavy-handed, using talking heads and a pointless montage of random great film moments.
So the framework was better than in the past, but the Academy still needs to punch up this show.
I’m really not too exercised about tonight’s Oscars because I trust that it will a good night for my favorites among the nominated films: The Artist and The Descendants. Most of the nominations are relatively deserved, so it’s not like two years ago, when I was gnashing my teeth over the battle between The Hurt Locker (my fave) and Avatar (NOT my fave).
I am really rooting for Michele Williams to win the Best Actress Oscar. Her performance is deserving, and she warrants recognition as the best of our younger actresses – and one who bravely picks quality scripts (Brokeback Mountain, Wendy and Lucy, Blue Valentine).
If you’re betting, the three biggest locks are Christopher Plummer for Supporting Actor, Rango for Animated Feature and A Separation for Foreign Language Picture.
Every year, The Movie Gourmet watches the Oscars while enjoying a meal inspired by the Best Picture nominees. You can read more at Oscar Dinner.
Here is my menu for Oscar Dinner 2012.
COCKTAILS AND STARTERS
First, The Artist inspired both strawberries (George Valentin was breakfasting on strawberries while avoiding his wife’s glare) and whiskey (George later downs more than his share).
From Moneyball, we have a ballpark hot dog.
DINNER
Fried chicken from The Help and turnips (remember the ruined crop?) from War Horse. This also kinda fits with the 50s meat-and-potatoes fare that Jessica Chastain was serving up to Brad Pitt in The Tree of Life.
When George Clooney and Shailene Woodley show up at the beach bungalow in The Descendants, wine is offered. And we have selected a French wine, a Bordeaux that Michael Sheen in Midnight in Paris can continue to prattle on about.
DESSERT
From Hugo, we have one of the stolen croissants he subsisted upon (although we bought our croissant) served with some of the jam made by the Niels Arestrup character in War Horse.
We are bypassing the most obvious choice on the movie menu – Minnie’s chocolate pie from The Help. Instead, The Wife is making a Big Apple pie for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
Every year, The Movie Gourmet watches the Oscars while enjoying a meal inspired by the Best Picture nominees. For example, last year’s highlight was the ice sculpture of severed hands for 127 Hours and Winter’s Bone. We also had Appletinis for The Social Network, cowboy beans for True Grit, and steak and organic roast vegetable salad with a Petite Syrah from The Kids Are All Right. (I decided not to skin my own squirrel for Winter’s Bone and not to recycle my urine for 127 Hours.) You get the idea and you can read more at Oscar Dinner.
The pickins are slimmer this year, but fortunately I have found food and/or beverages referenced in or inspired by the Best Picture nominees.
You may remember George Valentin’s uneasy breakfast with his wife in The Artist, or the ruined crop in War Horse, or Jessica Chastain serving up some 50s fare to Brad Pitt in The Tree of Life. One thing for sure: Minnie’s chocolate pie from The Help will make an appearance!