Weekly Movie Recommendations

Movies to See Right Now

by
Ray Romano and Holly Hunter in THE BIG SICK

This week’s primary recommendation is to go out and see The Big Sick, the best American movie of the year so far. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll fall in love.  Here are more choices (but see The Big Sick first!):

  • Baby Driver is just an action movie, but the walking, running and driving are brilliantly time to the beat of music.
  • The Journey is a fictional imagining of a real historical event and is an acting showcase for Colm Meaney and Timothy Spall as the two longtime blood enemies who collaborated to bring peace to Northern Ireland.
  • Okja, another wholly original creation from the imagination of master filmmaker Bong Joon Ho, is streaming on Netflix and opening in theaters.
  • The amusingly naughty but forgettable comedy The Little Hours is based on the dirty fun in your Western Civ class, Boccaccio’s The Decameron.
  • The character-driven suspenser Moka is a showcase for French actresses Emmanuelle Devos and Nathalie Baye.
  • The bittersweet dramedy The Hero has one thing going for it – the wonderfully appealing Sam Elliott.

In my DVD/Stream of the Week, the thriller Locke,  Tom Hardy never leaves his car and, for the entire duration of the movie, we only see his upper body, his eyes in the rearview mirror, the dashboard and the roadway lit by his headlights. All the other characters are voiced – he talks to them on the Bluetooth device in his BMW.  Sure, that’s a gimmick – but it works because it complements the core story about the consequences of responsibility.  Locke is available on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

On July 15 Turner Classic Movies reminds why Alfred Hitchcock was the master of the suspenseful psychological thriller.  To paraphrase Hitchcock, when a bomb under a table explodes, the audience is SURPRISED.  But when the audience knows that the bomb under the table is ticking away, that creates SUSPENSE.

  • One of Hitchcock’s all-time best was Strangers on a Train.   A hypothetical discussion about murdering inconvenient people turns out to be not so hypothetical.  Robert Walker plays one of the creepiest villains in movie history. The tennis match and carousel finale are unforgettable set pieces.
  • Rope is based on the notorious 1924 Leopold and Loeb thrill kill murder in 1924.   Look for John Dall playing the insufferably smug textbook narcissist while his Nervous Nellie partner (San Jose’s own Farley Granger) is about to snap. Can they outwit Jimmy Stewart?  Hitchcock employed a gimmick to make the entire movie look like it was photographed in one single shot.
ROPE
Farley Granger, James Stewart and John Dall in ROPE

DVD/Stream of the Week: LOCKE – a thriller about responsibility

by

lockeThe thriller Locke is about an extremely responsible guy (Tom Hardy) who has made one mistake – and he’s trying to make it right. But trying to do the responsible thing in one part of your life can have uncomfortable consequences in the others. The title character drives all night trying to keep aspects of his life from crashing and burning.

In fact, he never leaves the car and, for the entire duration of the movie, we only see his upper body, his eyes in the rearview mirror, the dashboard and the roadway lit by his headlights. All the other characters are voiced – he talks to them on the Bluetooth device in his BMW. Sure, that’s a gimmick – but it works because it complements the core story about the consequences of responsibility.

Locke is written and directed by Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things, Eastern Promises). The story is actually a domestic drama – there are no explosions to dodge, no one in peril to rescue and no bad guys to dispatch. But it’s definitely a thriller because we care about whether Locke meets the two deadlines he will face early the next morning.

It’s a masterful job of film editing by Justine Wright (Touching the Void, The Last King of Scotland). After all, her cuts help keep us on the edge of our seats, despite her working with a very finite variety of shots (Locke’s eyes, the dashboard, etc.).

Hardy, who’s known as an action star, is excellent at portraying this guy who must try to keep his family, biggest career project and self-respect from unraveling at the same time, only armed with his ability to persuade others. It’s a fine film. Locke is available on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube abd Google Play.

Movies to See Right Now

by
THE BIG SICK
THE BIG SICK

After a long and boring drought, there is finally an appealing menu of movie choices in theaters:

  • Baby Driver is just an action movie, but the walking, running and driving are brilliantly time to the beat of music.
  • The Journey is a fictional imagining of a real historical event and is an acting showcase for Colm Meaney and Timothy Spall as the two longtime blood enemies who collaborated to bring peace to Northern Ireland.
  • Okja, another wholly original creation from the imagination of master filmmaker Bong Joon Ho, is streaming on Netflix and opening in theaters.
  • The delightfully smart and character-driven Israeli comedy The Women’s Balcony with a community of traditional women in revolt. The longer you’ve been married, the funnier you’ll find The Women’s Balcony.
  • The character-driven suspenser Moka is a showcase for French actresses Emmanuelle Devos and Nathalie Baye.
  • The bittersweet dramedy The Hero has one thing going for it – the wonderfully appealing Sam Elliott.

My DVD/Stream of the Week is the darkly realistic Western Dead Man’s Burden.   Dead Man’s Burden is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and Google Play.

Tonight on TV, Turner Classic Movies presents Raw Deal (1948), with some of the best dialogue in all of film noir, a love triangle and the superb cinematography of John Alton.

Later this week on July 11, TCM offers the very best Orson Welles Shakespeare movie, Chimes at Midnight.

And on July 12, TCM airs Days of Wine and Roses, Blake Edwards’ unflinching exploration of alcoholism, featuring great performances by Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick (both nominated for Oscars) and Charles Bickford.

Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon in DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES
Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon in DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES

DVD/Stream of the Week: DEAD MAN’S BURDEN – times are hard and the women are harder

by
DEAD MAN’S BURDEN

I always welcome a new Western, and writer-director Jared Moshe’s impressive debut Dead Man’s Burden takes us to a darkly realistic Old West. The dry New Mexico landscape is beautiful but unforgiving, and the law is three days ride away. The times are hard and the women are harder. The Civil War ended five years before, but families are still reeling from losing a generation of young men.

As the film opens, a man rides away on horseback. A petite woman, young but worn, hoists an 1853 Enfield rifle to her shoulder, takes aim and fires. We later learn the identity of the man, his relationship to the woman and her reason for firing. It’s not what you might guess. And the villain is not who you expect it to be.

Moshe’s story reveals some characters to be bound by duty and others to be opportunistic. They are caught in the same web of circumstance, which funnels inevitably them to conflict. The movie’s final two shots echo an earlier moment, and neatly (if grimly) wrap up the tale.

The cast – Barlow Jacobs, Clare Bowen (Scarlet in ABC’s Nashville), David Call and veteran Richard Riehle – is uniformly good. Jacobs (Kid in Shotgun Stories) is especially well suited for a Western hero, with expressive eyes that narrow like Eastwood’s or Van Cleef’s.

There’s a gunfight that is more historically typical than the usual cinematic facedown in the street. These men, hunters and former soldiers, chase each other through the brush, firing from cover. It ain’t heroic. And Dead Man’s Burden is remarkably unsentimental.

DEAD MAN’S BURDEN

Dead Man’s Burden was shot on 35mm by Robert Hauer, and the look of the film brings out the isolating vastness of the land. Sadly, the sound is substandard, and I had difficulty comprehending some of the dialogue.

Dead Man’s Burden is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and Google Play.

Movies to See Right Now

by
OKJA
OKJA

Current movie recommendations (Okja and Moka are both good – don’t get them mixed up):

  • Okja, another wholly original creation from the imagination of master filmmaker Bong Joon Ho, is streaming on Netflix and opening in theaters.
  • The delightfully smart and character-driven Israeli comedy The Women’s Balcony with a community of traditional women in revolt. The longer you’ve been married, the funnier you’ll find The Women’s Balcony.
  • The character-driven suspenser Moka is a showcase for French actresses Emmanuelle Devos and Nathalie Baye.
  • The David and Goliath documentary Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, the riveting story of an American family business bullied into a nightmarish fight for survival.
  • The bittersweet dramedy The Hero has one thing going for it – the wonderfully appealing Sam Elliott.

My DVD/Stream of the Week is the geezer roadtrip comedy Land Ho!, available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, and Google Play.

This week Turner Classic Movies brings us three classics of film noir:

  • While the City Sleeps is a tale of boardroom backstabbing from the cinema great Fritz Lang. The killer cast is so deep (Dana Andrews, Ida Lupino, Vincent Price, George Sanders, Thomas Mitchell, Rhonda Fleming), that noir leading man Howard Duff is stuck playing the cop. July 5 on TCM.
  • Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is another film noir from the great Fritz Lang.  Seeking to discredit capital punishment, a reporter (Dana Andrews) gets himself charged with and CONVICTED of a murder – but then the evidence of his innocence suddenly disappears! Crackerjack (and deeply noir) surprise ending. July 5 on TCM.
  • Raw Deal features some of the best film noir dialogue, a love triangle and the superb cinematography of John Alton. July 7 on TCM.

Also on July 5, TCM presents Sam Peckinpah’s very underrated neo-noir crime drama The Getaway (1972) starring Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw. McQueen and MacGraw are delightful to watch as they move between violent clashes and double- and triple-crosses. There’s a still-shocking but funny plot thread involving a sadistic villain (Al Lettieri – Sollozzo the Turk in The Godfather), a trashy bimbo (Sally Struthers) and her poor hubbie (Jack Dodson – Howard Sprague in The Andy Griffith Show). The wonderful cast is rounded out with Peckinpah regulars: Slim Pickens, Ben Johnson, Dub Taylor, Richard Bright and Bo Hopkins.

Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw in THE GETAWAY
Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw in THE GETAWAY

DVD/Stream of the Week: LAND HO! – rowdy geezer roadtrip to Iceland

by
Paul Eenhoorn and Earl Lynn Nelson in LAND HO!
Paul Eenhoorn and Earl Lynn Nelson in LAND HO!

Here’s a really fun movie. Land Ho! features a vibrant and irascible geezer who conscripts an old friend into a rowdy road trip to – of all random places – Iceland. It’s a showcase for Earl Lynn Nelson, who essentially plays himself in the movie. Nelson is a 72-year-old Kentucky doctor who is a force of nature and has possibly an even dirtier mind than The Movie Gourmet’s. He is a friend of the 29-year-old writer director Martha Stephens who was INSPIRED to see the possibilities in sending him off on an adventure and filming the results. His friend (and ex-brother-in-law) is played by an actor, Paul Eenhoorn.

It all works. Nelson – an unapologetic hedonist – is funnier than hell, and Eenhoorn stays right with him as the more reserved and sometimes aggrieved buddy. Land Ho! is a string of LOL moments, whether Nelson is providing politically incorrect fashion advice to young women or unsolicited marital advice to a honeymooning couple or pulling out a joint and proclaiming “It’s time for some doobiefication”.

This is a geezer comedy that doesn’t make the geezers cute. Nelson may be a piece of work, but there’s nothing in Land Ho! that isn’t genuine.

I just have two knocks on the movie. It’s only 95 minutes long, but it would be crisper at about 87. And, as The Wife pointed out, there’s really no need for the huge jarring subtitles to let us know precisely where these guys are in Iceland.

Nevertheless, it’s worth a watch. The audience at Sundance loved this movie, and I think Land Ho! is a hoot-and-a-half. Land Ho! is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, and Google Play.

{Note: I got the meet and spend some time with Paul Eenhorn at Cinequest 2015, when he was premiering his film In the Company of Women. Great guy.]

Movies to See Right Now

by

THE WOMEN'S BALCONY
THE WOMEN’S BALCONY

In theaters this week:

  • The delightfully smart and character-driven Israeli comedy The Women’s Balcony with a community of traditional women in revolt. The longer you’ve been married, the funnier you’ll find The Women’s Balcony.
  • The David and Goliath documentary Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, the riveting story of an American family business bullied into a nightmarish fight for survival.
  • The bittersweet dramedy The Hero has one thing going for it – the wonderfully appealing Sam Elliott.

Here’s my contribution to the argument about the Best 25 Movies of the 21st Century.

My Stream of the Week won the Oscar for Best Documentary feature.  Searching for Sugar Man is the story of a Detroit construction laborer who didn’t know that he was a rock star. You can stream it from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

On June 27, 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

Movies to See Right Now

by
THE WOMEN'S BALCONY
THE WOMEN’S BALCONY

In theaters this week:

  • The delightfully smart and character-driven Israeli comedy The Women’s Balcony with a community of traditional women in revolt.  The longer you’ve been married, the funnier you’ll find The Women’s Balcony.
  • The David and Goliath documentary Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, the riveting story of an American family business bullied into a nightmarish fight for survival.
  • Paris Can Wait, a female fantasy with glorious French cuisine to tantalize all genders.
  • You can still find Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer in theaters, perhaps Richard Gere’s best movie performance ever, and strongly recommended.
  • The bittersweet dramedy The Hero has one thing going for it – the wonderfully appealing Sam Elliott.

Here’s my contribution to the argument about the Best 25 Movies of the 21st Century.

School is out for the summer, and my DVD/Streams of the Week are the two surfing documentaries Step Into Liquid and Riding Giants.  Both are available on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Here’s an interesting nugget from Turner Classic Movies on June 17. Three different actors play Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled LA detective Philip Marlowe: Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep, James Garner in Marlowe and Robert Montgomery in Lady in the Lake.

The most famous – and my favorite – of these is The Big Sleep, with its iconic performance by Bogart and its impenetrably tangled plot. It’s also one of the most overtly sexual noirs, and Lauren Bacall at her sultriest is only the beginning. The achingly beautiful Martha Vickers plays a druggie who throws herself at anything in pants. And Dorothy Malone invites Bogie to share a back-of-the-bookstore quickie.

Lady in the Lake is more cinematically inventive.  Shot entirely from the point of view of the protagonist detective (Montgomery), we never see him except when reflected in mirrors. Even without this interesting gadget, it’s a good movie. Audrey Totter plays one of her iconic noir Bad Girls.

Marlowe is less distinguished a film, but James Garner is always watchable.

Dorothy Malone and Humphrey Bogart in THE BIG SLEEP
Dorothy Malone and Humphrey Bogart in THE BIG SLEEP

DVD/Stream of the Week: hang ten this summer!

by

Let’s go surfin’ now

Everybody’s learning how

Come on and safari with me

It’s a great time for the two most awesome and gnarly surfing movies, the documentaries Step Into Liquid and Riding Giants.

Step Into Liquid (2003): We see the world’s best pro surfers in the most extreme locations. We also see devoted amateurs in the tiny ripples of Lake Michigan and surfing evangelists teaching Irish school children. The cinematography is remarkable – critic Elvis Mitchell called the film “insanely gorgeous”. The filmmaker is Dana Brown, son of Bruce Brown, who made The Endless Summer (1966) and The Endless Summer II (1994).

Step Into Liquid is available on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Riding Giants (2004): This film focuses on the obsessive search for the best wave by some of the greatest surfers in history. We see “the biggest wave ever ridden” and then a monster that could be bigger. The movie traces the discovery of the Half Moon Bay surf spot Mavericks. And more and more, all wonderfully shot.

The filmmaker is Stacy Peralta, a surfer and one the pioneers of modern skateboarding (and a founder of the Powell Peralta skateboard product company). Peralta also made Dogtown and Z-boys (2001), the great documentary about the roots of skateboarding, and wrote the 2005 Lords of Dogtown.

Riding Giants is also available on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Movies to See Right Now

by
ABACUS: SMALL ENOUGH TO JAIL
ABACUS: SMALL ENOUGH TO JAIL

I recommend the David and Goliath documentary Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, the riveting story of an American family business bullied into a nightmarish fight for survival.

Other recommendations in theaters:

My Stream of the Week is one of my Overlooked Noir, The Burglar (1957).  Dan Duryea leads an initially successful heist team as they go stir crazy waiting for the environment to cool down so they can safely fence the booty.  Martha Vickers plays one of the most direct of the noir vixens, and it’s the debut of 50s sexpot Jayne Mansfield.   The Burglar is available streaming on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, Xbox Video and Flixster.

On June 12, Turner Classic Movies will broadcast The Battle of Algiers, the story of 1950s French colonialists struggling to suppress the guerrilla uprising of Algerian independence fighters. Although it looks like a documentary, it is not. Instead, filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo recreated the actual events so realistically that we believe that we are watching the strategy councils of each side. Urban insurgency and counter-insurgency are nasty, brutal and not very short – and we see some horrifically inhumane butchering by both sides.

Among the great war films, it may be the best film on counter-insurgency. In 2003, the Pentagon screened the film for its special operations commanders.

THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS
THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS
THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS
THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS