Weekly Movie Recommendations

MEA MAXIMA CULPA: SILENCE IN THE HOUSE OF GOD: the blame climbs until it cannot climb higher

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MEA MAXIMA CULPA: SILENCE IN THE HOUSE OF GOD

We’ve just seen another appalling Catholic Church sex abuse scandal, this one in Pennsylvania. In Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, documentarian Alex Gibney explores the Catholic Church’s decades-long cover-up of priest abuse from a Wisconsin parish to the top of the Vatican (and I mean the top). The film begins with the horrifying and disgusting abuse of the most vulnerable – children at a residential Catholic school for the deaf; the children’s devout parents could not communicate with the children through American Sign Language, making them even more easy to victimize.

At first it seems like just another story of Church leaders suppressing the truth to avoid bad publicity and lawsuits – and it is for the first few years. But then we learn about an American bishop trying to remove a pedophile from ministry, but being thwarted by superiors across the Atlantic. As Gibney pulls apart the onion, the focus of the story climbs the Church hierarchy. The brilliant and prolific Gibney’s work includes Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, Casino Jack and the United States of Money and the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side.

I also recommend another documentary on this difficult subject, Deliver Us From Evil, which made my top ten list for 2006. That is the story of a serial pedophile priest moved from parish to parish in the Diocese of Stockton, California. This has become, sadly, a familiar narrative, but what distinguishes Deliver Us From Evil is its breathtaking interviews with the pedophile himself.

Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God is available to stream from Amazon (included with Prime), iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and HBO GO. Deliver Us from Evil is available to stream from iTunes, Vudu and YouTube.

Movies to See Right Now

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Awkwafina in CRAZY RICH ASIANS

Crazy Rich Asians is wildly popular for a reason – it’s damn entertaining and probably the year’s most appealing date movie. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry and you’ll wait for the chance to see Awkwafina in her next movie. Other choices in theaters:

OUT NOW

  • Spike Lee’s true story BlacKkKlansman is very funny and, finally, emotionally powerful.
  • Three Identical Strangers is an astonishing documentary about triplets separated at birth that ranges from the exuberance of discovering siblings to disturbing questions of social engineering.
  • The hyper-violent and stylized Belgian thriller Let the Corpses Tan is a contemporary thriller that pays loving homage to the Sergio Leone canon. Essentially a soulless exercise in style, more interesting than gripping. It’s a visual stunner, though, and the Leone references are fun.
  • The coming-of-age drama We the Animals is imaginative, but a grind.

 

ON VIDEO

My Stream of the Week is the cheeky and original sex comedy Threesomething, which I saw at its world premiere at this year’s Cinequest. Comedy is hard to write, especially comedy as smart and original as this.  Threesomething is now available to stream on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

ON TV

On September 1, Turner Classic Movies presents the iconic 1946 film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice. An essential element in film noir is a guy’s lust for a Bad Girl driving him to a Bad Decision, and when John Garfield first sees Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice, you can tell that he’s hooked. She’s a Bad Girl, and a Bad Decision is on its way.

John Garfield's first look at Lana Turner in THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE
John Garfield’s first look at Lana Turner in THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE

Stream of the Week: THREESOMETHING – original and cheeky

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Isabelle Chester and Sam Sonenshine in THREESOMETHING

In the cheeky and original comedy Threesomething, Charlie (Sam Sonenshine) and his buddy Isaac (James Morosini) invite Charlies’ friend Zoe (Isabelle Chester) to engage in a three-way sexual encounter. That pitch alone is one of the funniest three-minute, fifteen-second, openings to a film I’ve seen in years. But then Threesomething finds the ridiculous moments in both the sex itself and in the all-consuming passion of new infatuation. After a crisp 72 minutes, Threesomething‘s ending is very fresh and non-formulaic, posing just enough ambiguity about the characters’ futures.

Co-writers Morosini and Sonenshine have identified the comic possibilities within the notion that a threesome is more or less symmetrical. Let me explain it this way. What if your idea of a threesome is three participants, but it evolves into two participants and a spectator?

Lust and love are such ripe sources of comedy because we humans are our most ridiculous when we are the most absorbed and single-minded – and that is definitively the case while having sex. And everyone’s sexual fantasies and fetishes – even if shared with one’s sexual partner – are laughable or creepy to someone else. Threesomething reaps the laughs from these situations without being sit-commy.

This is the Are you good? generation. Threesomething’s commentary on the compulsive over-checking in and over-supportiveness is all very sharply witty. And over-sharing is the core of Charlie’s relationship with his mother (Dru Mouser, who steals all of her scenes).

Sonenshine is just about perfect in his reactions during the threesome. He is fantastically gifted at playing both awkward discomfort and contained frustration.

Chester’s performance has several highlights, beginning with Zoe’s takes on the initial proposition and a particularly ill-timed outburst of weeping (inspired). As the story concludes, watch Chester’s face as Zoe considers and reconsiders how comfortable she really is in her choice of partner(s).

Threesomething is Morosini’s directorial debut and the first feature screenplay for both Morodini and Sonenshine. Comedy is hard to write, especially comedy as smart and original as this. I saw Threesomething’s world premiere at this year’s Cinequest.  It is available to stream on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Movies to See Right Now

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John David Washington and Laura Harrier in BlacKkKlansman, a Focus Features release.Credit: David Lee / Focus Features

OUT NOW

  • Spike Lee’s true story BlacKkKlansman is very funny and, finally, emotionally powerful.
  • You can still see the best movie of the year: the emotionally powerful coming of age drama Leave No Trace from Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone). Superbly well-crafted, impeccably acted, thoughtful and emotionally powerful, it’s a Must See. Still at one theater in Silicon Valley and one in San Francisco.
  • The savagely funny social satire Sorry to Bother You carries the message that humans are more than just their commercial value as consumers and labor to be exploited.
  • The political documentary Dark Money exposes the growing threat of unlimited secret money in political campaigns.
  • Puzzle intelligently and authentically traces one woman’s journey of self discovery.
  • The surprisingly emotional biodoc Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is about Fred Rogers’ fierce devotion to the principle that every child is deserving of love and our protection.
  • Three Identical Strangers is an astonishing documentary about triplets separated at birth that ranges from the exuberance of discovering siblings to disturbing questions of social engineering.
  • RBG is the affectionate and humanizing biodoc about that great stoneface, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

ON VIDEO

My DVD/Stream of the week is the period thriller The Two Faces of January, a Patricia Highsmith tale of dark hearts in sunny Greece. The Two Faces of January is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

ON TV

Turner Classic Movies is airing Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962). Anthony Quinn is Mountain Rivera, a fighter whose career is ended by a ring injury by Cassius Clay (played by the real Muhammed Ali). His manager, Jackie Gleason, continues to exploit him in this heartbreaking drama. There’s no boxing in this clip, but it illustrates the quality of the writing and the acting.

DVD/Stream of the Week: THE TWO FACES OF JANUARY – dark hearts in sunny Greece

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two faces of january2
The successful period thriller The Two Faces of January, set in gloriously bright Greek tourist destinations, may not have the shadowy look of a traditional film noir, but its story is fundamentally noirish. Viggo Mortenson and Kirsten Dunst play an affluent couple vacationing in Athens in the early 1960s. They meet a handsome young American expat (Oscar Isaacs) knocking around Greece. The husband quickly and accurately sizes up the younger man as a con man – “I wouldn’t trust him to mow my lawn”. The central noir element is that NO ONE is as innocent as they seem, and the three become interlocked in a situation that becomes increasingly desperate for all three, culminating in a thrilling manhunt.

It’s the first feature directed by Hossein Amini, who adapted the screenplay for the markedly intense Drive, and he does a fine job here with a film that becomes more and more tense each time more information about the characters is revealed. The source material is a Patricia Highsmith novel.

The Two Faces of January is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Movies to See Right Now

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Adam Driver and John David Washington in BLACKKKLANSMAN

My top choice this weekend is Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, which I’ll be writing about this weekend.

OUT NOW

    • You can still see the best movie of the year: the emotionally powerful coming of age drama Leave No Trace from Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone). Superbly well-crafted, impeccably acted, thoughtful and emotionally powerful, it’s a Must See.  Still at one theater in Silicon Valley amd one in San Francisco.
    • The savagely funny social satire Sorry to Bother You carries the message that humans are more than just their commercial value as consumers and labor to be exploited.
    • The political documentary Dark Money exposes the growing threat of unlimited secret money in political campaigns.
    • Puzzle intelligently and authentically traces one woman’s journey of self discovery.
    • The surprisingly emotional biodoc Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is about Fred Rogers’ fierce devotion to the principle that every child is deserving of love and our protection.
    • Three Identical Strangers is an astonishing documentary about triplets separated at birth that ranges from the exhuverance of discovering siblings to disturbing questions of social engineering.
    • RBG is the affectionate and humanizing biodoc about that great stoneface, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

ON VIDEO

My Stream of the Week is a tale of magical Mormon runaways in Vegas. With Electrick Children, first-time feature filmmaker Rebecca Thomas has created an entirely unique teen coming of age story. Electrick Children employs an element of magical realism that requires the audience to accept a premise which cannot be real. The result is a highly original success. Electrick Children can be streamed from Amazon (included in Amazon Prime) and can be purchased from several other VOD platforms.

ON TV

On August 22, Turner Classic Movies presents the still-powerful 1943 The Ox-Bow Incident, a parable about mobs acting rashly on the basis of fear and prejudice (which certainly resonates in today’s political environment). Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan lead an excellent period cast with Dana Andrews, Anthony Quinn and Jane Darwell, along with Frank Conroy and Harry Davenport, whose performances are perfect little gems. Which character most resembles Donald Trump?

Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan in THE OX-BOW INCIDENT
Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan in THE OX-BOW INCIDENT
THE OX-BOW INCIDENT
THE OX-BOW INCIDENT

Stream of the Week: ELECTRICK CHILDREN – magical Mormon runaways in Vegas

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Julia Garner in ELECTRICK CHILDREN

With Electrick Children, a first-time feature filmmaker has created an entirely unique teen coming of age story. Electrick Children employs an element of magical realism that requires the audience to accept a premise which cannot be real. The result is a highly original success.

A 15-year-old Utah girl has been raised in a remote fundamentalist Mormon enclave where everyone dresses as 19th century pioneers. She has been immersed in Bible stories, but hasn’t been exposed to any modern culture or to the facts of life. She happens upon a hidden cassette tape and finds her first rock and roll song revelatory – so revelatory that she thinks that the song has moved her to pregnancy. Here comes the magical realism – she really is a virgin, and she really is pregnant.

Because of her faith, she doesn’t find immaculate conception to be the least bit implausible. Not so with her parents, who wrongly blame her 17-year-old brother. Their answer is to kick the boy out of the home and to marry off the girl to a neighboring fundamentalist. Facing the unwanted shotgun wedding, the girl commandeers the family pickup and flees; her brother, seeking a way to prove his innocence, stows away.

The kids surface in Las Vegas, where they fall in with a band of runaway teens. Of course the Mormon kids are completely unprepared to navigate any modern city, let alone Vegas. Their guides, the more streetwise kids, are more comfortable with the glitz and sleaze of Vegas, but are just as untethered. The Mormon kids and the suburban runaways have life-altering adventures on the streets.

The girl embarks on a quest to find the singer who she thinks has fathered her child, not understanding that there is more than one rock band in the world (or that Blondie’s Hanging on the Telephone has not made her pregnant.) Central to the film’s success is that the girl is naive but never silly. The young actress Julia Garner shines in a performance that is never ironic and always completely sincere. The girl is determined and devout, seeking teen independence in ways that are logical for someone with her isolated upbringing.  Garner is currently the best thing about the Netflix series show Ozark.

As good as Garner is, the real talent here is writer-director Rebecca Thomas, a Mormon from Nevada with an MFA from Columbia. This is her first feature film, and I can’t wait for her next one.  Thomas is currently attached to several upcoming projects, including a live action version of The Little Mermaid.

Electrick Children can be streamed from Amazon (included in Amazon Prime) and can be purchased from several other VOD platforms.

Movies to See Right Now

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Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson in SORRY TO BOTHER YOU

It’s getting harder to find the year’s best movie so far, so please track down Leave No Trace. I’ll be seeing the muc anticipated BlacKKKlansman by Spike Lee.

OUT NOW

  • Please make every attempt to see the best movie of the year, now in Bay Area theaters: the emotionally powerful coming of age drama Leave No Trace from Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone). Superbly well-crafted, impeccably acted, thoughtful and emotionally powerful, it’s a Must See.
  • The savagely funny social satire Sorry to Bother You carries the message that humans are more than just their commercial value as consumers and labor to be exploited.
  • The political documentary Dark Money exposes the growing threat of unlimited secret money in political campaigns.
  • Puzzle intelligently and authentically traces one woman’s journey of self discovery.
  • The Third Murder is a legal procedural that takes a philosophical turn.
  • The surprisingly emotional biodoc Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is about Fred Rogers’ fierce devotion to the principle that every child is deserving of love and our protection.
  • Three Identical Strangers is an astonishing documentary about triplets separated at birth that ranges from the exhuverance of discovering siblings to disturbing questions of social engineering.
  • RBG is the affectionate and humanizing biodoc about that great stoneface, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

ON VIDEO

I’m sure that you’ve never seen this week’s video pick because I don’t think it got a theatrical release. It’s the indie thriller Dose of Reality, which brings a jaw-dropper of a Big Surprise. Dose of Reality is available to stream on Amazon.

ON TV

On August 16, Turner Classic Movies will offer the delightful Peter Bogdanovich screwball comedy What’s Up, Doc? The nerdy academic Howard (Ryan O’Neal) and his continually aggrieved fiance Eunice (Madeline Kahn) travel to San Francisco to compete for a career-launching grant. The luggage with Howard’s great discovery (musical rocks) is mixed up with two identical suitcases, one containing valuable jewelry, the other with spy secrets, and soon we have juggling MacGuffins.

That’s all funny enough, but Howard bumps into Judy (Barbra Streisand), the kookiest serial college dropout in America, who determines that she must have him and utterly disrupts his life. Our hero’s ruthless rival for the grant is hilariously played by Kenneth Mars (the Nazi playwright in The Producers). Austin Pendleton is wonderful as the would-be benefactor.

The EXTENDED closing chase scene is among the very funniest in movie history – right up there with the best of Buster Keaton; Streisand and O’Neal lead an ever-growing cavalcade of pursuers through the hills of San Francisco, at one point crashing the Chinese New Year’s Day parade. I love What’s Up, Doc? and own the DVD, and I watch every time I stumble across it on TV. Bogdanovich’s hero Howard Hawks, the master of the screwball comedy, would have been proud.

WHAT’S UP, DOC?

Movies to See Right Now

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Kôji Yakusho in Hirokazu Koreeda’s THE THIRD MURDER. Photo courtesy of San Francisco Film Society (SFFILM).

Opening this week: The Third Murder is the work of director Hirokazu Koreeda, who made the 1995 art house hit Maborosi and one of the best movies of 2008, Still Walking. Koreeda’s Shoplifters just won the Palm d’Or at Cannes, and will be released in the US by Magnolia Pictures on November 23. I saw The Third Murder at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM). The Third Murder is a legal procedural that takes a philosophical turn.

OUT NOW

  • Please make every attempt to see the best movie of the year, now in Bay Area theaters: the emotionally powerful coming of age drama Leave No Trace from Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone). Superbly well-crafted, impeccably acted, thoughtful and emotionally powerful, it’s a Must See.
  • The savagely funny social satire Sorry to Bother You carries the message that humans are more than just their commercial value as consumers and labor to be exploited.
  • The political documentary Dark Money exposes the growing threat of unlimited secret money in political campaigns.
  • Puzzle intelligently and authentically traces one woman’s journey of self discovery.
  • The surprisingly emotional biodoc Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is about Fred Rogers’ fierce devotion to the principle that every child is deserving of love and our protection.
  • First Reformed: Ethan Hawke stars in this bleak, bleak psychological thriller with an intense ending.
  • Three Identical Strangers is an astonishing documentary about triplets separated at birth that ranges from the exhuverance of discovering siblings to disturbing questions of social engineering.
  • American Animals is funny documentary/reenactment of a preposterous heist.
  • RBG is the affectionate and humanizing biodoc about that great stoneface, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

ON VIDEO

I’m sure that you’ve never seen this week’s video pick because I don’t think it got a theatrical release.  It’s the indie thriller Dose of Reality, which brings a jaw-dropper of a Big Surprise. Dose of Reality is available to stream on Amazon.

ON TV

  • This is a great week for film noir and neo-noir on Turner Classic Movies.  We begin on August 6 with The Set-Up (1949), one of the great film noirs and one of my 10 Best Boxing Movies. Robert Ryan plays a washed-up boxer that nobody believes can win again, not even his long-suffering wife (Audrey Totter).  His manager doesn’t even bother to tell him that he is committed to taking a dive in his next fight.  But what if he wins?  Director Robert Wise makes use of real-time narrative, then highly innovative. Watch for the verisimilitude of the bar where the deal goes down.
  • Also on August 6, there’s the 1950 Perfect Murder noir Tension, with Richard Basehart as the meek night manager of a pharmacy who is married to a slutty shrew (Audrey Totter – of course).  She sneers, “”You were full of laughs then. Well, you’re all laughed out now””  When the wife humiliates him with her newest affair, he works a pair of the newly invented contact lenses and some flashy clothes into a new second identity.  The wife’s boyfriend ends up fatally shot, and the cops start looking for the pharmacy manager.  Will he take the fall?  Barry Sullivan is the cop and Cyd Charisse is the good girl.
  • And on August 9, TCM plays one of my favorite neo-noirs, the Don Siegel thriller Charley Varrick.  Walter Matthau stars as the title character, an expert heist man who sets up a “perfect crime” bank robbery which, of course, goes awry. Worst of all, it turns out that Varrick has stolen a secret Mob fortune being laundered by the bank, and now the underworld organization is after him. Only his wits can save him. I’ve rewatched Charley Varrick a couple of times recently, and it still holds up for me.
Audrey Totter and Richard Basehart in TENSION

Stream of the Week: DOSE OF REALITY

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Fairuza Balk, Ryan Merriman (rear) and Rick Ravanello in DOSE OF REALITY
Fairuza Balk, Ryan Merriman (rear) and Rick Ravanello in DOSE OF REALITY

I’m sure that you’ve never seen this week’s video pick because I don’t think it got a theatrical release.  It’s the indie thriller Dose of Reality, which I saw at Cinequest in 2013.

Dose of Reality packs wire-to-wire intensity and a surprise ending that no one will see coming. A woman is found in a bar’s restroom after closing time, apparently beaten and raped, but unable to remember by whom. Two bar employees are the only possible suspects. Both deny it, and the woman launches a series of searing mind games to determine her attacker.

Fairuza Balk (American History X, Almost Famous) commands the screen as the woman. Her character, starting from a place of utter victimization, becomes totally dominant over the men. The most interesting of the guys is played by veteran TV actor Rick Ravanello (106 acting credits on IMDb). Ravanello’s eyes have an uncommon capacity to credibly take the character through dimness, cunning, tweaked impairment, guilt and terror.

It’s a plenty compelling movie for the first 75 minutes, but Dose of Reality is all about the Big Surprise at the end – which is a shocker on the scale of The Crying Game. Afterward, I was able to reflect back and identify at least four clues in the story, but every one of the 250 audience members at Dose of Reality’s Cinequest world premiere was rocked by the surprise on first viewing. Actor Ravanello recounts that when he first read the script, he got to the end and blurted “No Fucking Way!”.  It’s a success for writer-director Christopher Glatis.

Dose of Reality is available to stream on Amazon.