Movies to See Right Now

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Matt Damon in THE MARTIAN
Matt Damon in THE MARTIAN

Plenty of excellent movie choices in the theaters – and something for everyone:

  • The Martian – an entertaining Must See space adventure – even for folks who usually don’t enjoy science fiction;
  • Sicario – a dark and paranoid crime thriller about the drug wars.
  • Meet the Patels, a heartwarming crowd-pleaser – a documentary that’s funnier than most fictional comedies.  Now hard to find in theaters, it’s worth tracking down.
  • 99 Homes, a riveting psychological drama about the foreclosure crisis with searing performances by Andrew Garfield and Michael Shannon.
  • Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine – Alex Gibney’s anything but reverential documentary on Steve Jobs.
  • The excellent true life crime drama Black Mass with Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton and a brilliant cast.
  • Going Clear: The Prison of Belief, documentarian Alex Gibney’s devastating expose of Scientology, originally shown on HBO and now in theaters.

My Stream of the Week is the unforgettable coming of age dramedy Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.  It’s available streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.  You will be able to rent it on DVD from Netflix and Redbox on November 3.

On October 12, Turner Classic Movies presents the groundbreaking French noir Elevator to the Gallows(1958). A thriller about the perfect crime that goes awry, it still stands up today, .It’s one of my Overlooked Noir. Elevator to the Gallows is such a groundbreaking film, you can argue that it’s the first of the neo-noir. It’s difficult now to appreciate the originality of Elevator the Gallows; but in 1958, no one had seen a film with a Miles Davis soundtrack or one where the two romantic leads were never on-screen together. Directed by Louis Malle when he was only 24 years old.

On October 15, TCM brings us the 1979 Oscar-winner Harlan County U.S.A. Filmmaker Barbara Kopple embedded herself among the striking coal miners and got amazing footage – including of herself threatened and shot at. Also one of my 5 Great Hillbilly Movies.

HARLAN COUNTY, USA
HARLAN COUNTY, USA

THE MARTIAN: an entertaining Must See

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Matt Damon in THE MARTIAN
Matt Damon in THE MARTIAN

The space adventure The Martian delivers what the best big Hollywood movies can offer – a great looking movie that convincingly takes us to a place we’ve never been, inhabited by our favorite movie stars at their most appealing.

In The Martian, Matt Damon plays Mark Watney, a member of a scientific expedition to Mars who is (understandingly) left for dead when his team must make an emergency escape from the Red Planet.  The next manned mission to Mars is scheduled to land four years later 1000 miles away and he only has a four months supply of food, so his chances don’t look promising.  But Mark Watney is a character of irrepressible resilience, with a wicked sense of humor, and he immediately embarks on solving the many individual problems that stand between him and survival.  NASA leadership (Jeff Daniels, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kristen Wiig, Sean Bean and more) and his team en route back to Earth (Jessica Chastain, Kate Mara, Michael Pena) all try to help.

Directed masterfully by Ridley Scott, The Martian pops along and there’s never a dull moment.  It helps that the character of Watney is very funny.

I’m not highly scientifically literate, but the science in The Martian seemed to be at least internally consistent.  I do think that – in real life – the NASA team would have immediately come to the solution thought up in the movie by the geek in the Jet Propulsion Lab.

The awesomely desolate Marscapes are fantastic.  It’s all CGI, but you can’t tell – it looks like it is shot on location.

Here’s why The Martian isn’t a great movie:

  • Other than Damon’s Mark Watney, the other characters are types, getting all of their authentic texture from the performances instead of from the writing.
  • Never for a moment does the audience think there’s any chance that The Martian is really going to kill off Matt Damon.

But, overall,  The Martian is so entertaining, it’s a Must See – even for folks that usually pass on science fiction.

Stream of the Week: ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL – perched on the knife edge between comedy and tragedy

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ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL
ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL

Here’s a MUST SEE – the unforgettable coming of age Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, a brilliant second feature from director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. The title suggests a weeper (and it is), but 90% of Me and Earl is flat-out hilarious. It’s high on my list of the Best Movies of 2015 – So Far.

Greg (Thomas Mann) is a Pittsburgh teenager who has decided that the best strategy for navigating high school is to foster good relations with every school clique while belonging to none. Embracing the adage “hot girls destroy your life”, he gives the opposite gender a very wide berth. Outwardly genial, Greg is emphatically anti-social in practice, except for his best friend Earl (Ronald Cyler II). But he even refuses to admit that Earl is his friend, describing him “as more of a co-worker”.

Greg’s parents disrupt Greg’s routine by forcing him to visit his classmate Rachel (Olivia Cooke), who has just been diagnosed with leukemia. Rachel doesn’t want any pity, so this is awkward all around until Greg makes Rachel laugh, which draws him back again to visit -and again. A friendship, based on their shared quirky senses of humor, blossoms, but – given her diagnosis – how far can it go?

Rachel is delighted to learn that Greg and Earl shoot their own movies – short knock-offs of iconic cinema classics. She first laughs when she finds that he has remade Rashomon as MonoRash. Their other titles include Death in Tennis, Brew Velvet and A Box of Lips Now.

Why is Me and Earl so successful? Most importantly, it perches right on the knife-edge between tragedy and comedy, and does so more than any movie I can think of. As funny as it is, we all know that there’s that leukemia thing just under the surface. But, with its originality and resistance to sentimentality, Me and Earl is the farthest thing from a disease-of-the-week movie.

Any movie lover will love all the movie references, as well as Greg and Earl’s many short films. Gomez-Rejon shot these shorts with Super 8, Bolex, digital Bolex and iPhone. Jesse Andrews adapted his own novel, and, as Gomez-Rejon expanded the number of “films within the film”, he called on Andrews to supply him with the new titles – and there are scores of them, right through the ending credits.

Finally, Me and Earl’s art direction is the most singular of any coming of age film. In fact, all the art direction led to the movie’s very satisfying ending; Gomez-Rejon brought in those surprises on the wall at the end – it’s not in the novel.

But Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is at its heart a coming of age story. Sure, the character of Greg is an original, but the life lessons that he must learn are universal.

Thomas Mann is hilarious as Greg; he could be a great comic talent in the making. Cooke and newcomer Cyler are also excellent. Nick Offerman and Connie Britton are perfect as Greg’s well-meaning parents, as is Molly Shannon as Rachel’s needy mom. Jon Bernthal also rocks the role of Mr. McCarthy, another great character we haven’t seen before – a boisterously vital, but grounded history teacher; Mr. McCarthy lets Greg and Earl spend their lunch hours in his office watching Werner Herzog movies on YouTube. (And Herzog himself reportedly loves the references.)

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon started as a personal assistant to Martin Scorsese and worked his way up to second unit director. With the startling originality of Me and Earl, he’s proved his chops as an auteur.

I saw Me and Earl and the Dying Girl in early May at the San Francisco International Film Festival at a screening with Gomez-Rejon. It also just screened at San Jose’s Camera Cinema Club, another fine choice by Club Director Tim Sika, President of the San Francisco Film Critics Circle.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser and a Must See. It’s available streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play. You will be able to rent it on DVD from Netflix and Redbox on November 3.

STEVE JOBS: THE MAN IN THE MACHINE – anything but reverential

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The first two-thirds of Alex Gibney’s documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine provides us with remarkable insight into the personal life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.  We see plenty of evidence that Jobs was obsessively driven, a marketing genius, consumed by self-absorption and a nasty bully.

Gibney brings us an interview with the mother of Jobs’ first daughter (who he initially refused to acknowledge).  We also hear from their roommate (and presumably Apple’s #3 employee), who articulates the movie’s theme:

How much of an asshole do you need to be, to be successful?

There’s no question that Jobs qualifies as a jerk of singular proportions – grudgingly agreeing to $500/month in child support at the moment his wealth zoomed to $200 million.  And calculating the IPO stock awarded to his former roommate (“How about I give him zero?”).

We hear from the daughter herself (off-camera), with whom Jobs eventually kindled a relationship.  And we hear from the members of the executive team responsible for Apple’s resurgence, including the guys who brought us the iPod and iPhone.  We do not see Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak or the family from Jobs’ second marriage.

How did he get to be so driven?  There are insights in what molded him, especially his feelings about his adoption.  What made him a genius?  Not so much on that one.

In the final third of the film, Gibney piles on.  But it’s not a shock to hear about a Silicon Valley CEO enriching himself by back-dating stock options or exploiting Chinese workers. It ‘s more telling to find out Jobs reveled in parking in handicapped spaces.

There’s a major Hollywood biopic about Jobs coming out in just two weeks:  Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs, starring Michael Fassbender in the titular role.

Alex Gibney is one our very, very best documentarians. He won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, and he made the superb Casino Jack: The United States of Money, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Elliot Spitzer, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God and Going Clear: The Prison of Belief.  Man in the Machine doesn’t rise to the level of those films, but it’s worthwhile to those already interested in its subject.

Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine is in theaters and also available streaming from Amazon, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, and, of course, iTunes.

Movies to See Right Now

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MEET THE PATELS
MEET THE PATELS

The Matt Damon space adventure The Martian is a crowd pleaser that I’ll be writing about soon. Here are this week’s other recommendations:

  • Meet the Patels, a heartwarming crowd-pleaser – a documentary that’s funnier than most fictional comedies.
  • 99 Homes, a riveting psychological drama about the foreclosure crisis with searing performances by Andrew Garfield and Michael Shannon.
  • The excellent true life crime drama Black Mass with Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton and a brilliant cast.
  • Going Clear: The Prison of Belief, documentarian Alex Gibney’s devastating expose of Scientology, originally shown on HBO and now in theaters.

This week’s Stream of the Week comes from The Movie Gourmet’s list of Overlooked Noir. The Burglar (1957) is known primarily as the movie debut of Jayne Mansfield, but it’s a fine film noir. The Burglar plays from time to time on Turner Classic Movies and is available streaming on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, Xbox Video and Flixster.

On October 4, Turner Classic Movies airs Key Largo (1948), one of the classic film noirs and still satisfying to this day. Trapped in a claustrophobic Florida island resort by a hurricane, Humphrey Bogart has to face down sadistic mobster Edward G. Robinson. 23-year-old Lauren Bacall was at her most appealing. Claire Trevor’s heartbreaking performance as a gangster’s moll aging out of her looks is one of her best.

Stream of the Week: THE BURGLARS

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Jayne Mansfield and Dan Duryea in THE BURGLAR
Jayne Mansfield and Dan Duryea in THE BURGLAR

This week’s Stream of the Week comes from The Movie Gourmet’s list of Overlooked Noir. The Burglar (1957) is known primarily as the movie debut of Jayne Mansfield, but it’s a fine film noir. It starts out with a tense burglary, but once the necklace is successfully burgled, the story focuses on the heist team going stir crazy as they wait for the environment to cool down so they can safely fence the booty. They are strung so tight that even the whistle of a tea kettle is enough to startle the gang. While dodging the cops, they find that they are also being hunted by a corrupt rogue cop and his partner.

The core of The Burglar is the stellar lead performance of Dan Duryea as the chief burglar. He’s a tortured and worn-out guy – with one deep loyalty.

There are plenty of noir moments – lots of shadows, uplit faces in the darkness and amoral, grasping characters. We have not one, but two noir vixens – Jayne Mansfield and Martha Vickers. Asked at a bar by Duryea what she wants, Vickers answers “Basically, I’m out to find myself a man.” The characters in this fine film noir find themselves in Atlantic City, where the bad cop chases the protagonists through the House of Horrors and the Steel Pier, culminating in a final confrontation under the boardwalk.

The acting is excellent, other than Peter Capell, who gives over-acting a bad name while playing the most nerve-wracked member of the gang. Even Mansfield is good; (The Burglar was held in the can for two years and then released when Mansfield became a sensation with The Girl Can’t Help It).

The movie was shot on location in Philadelphia and Atlantic City. We see Independence Hall, and it’s hard not to think of Rocky when Duryea climbs the steps to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The Burglar plays from time to time on Turner Classic Movies and is available streaming on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, Xbox Video and Flixster.

[Note: The Burglar features John Facenda as his real-life role as a Philadelphia newscaster (when local TV stations aired 15-minute newscasts). Facenda later found much broader fame as “The Voice of God” for his narration for NFL Films football documentaries.]

Movies to See Right Now

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99 HOMES
99 HOMES

Now we’re talkin’ – it’s late September and once again we have some fine movie choices in the theaters:

  • Meet the Patels, a heartwarming crowd-pleaser – a documentary that’s funnier than most fictional comedies.
  • 99 Homes, a riveting psychological drama about the foreclosure crisis with searing performances by Andrew Garfield and Michael Shannon.
  • The excellent true life crime drama Black Mass with Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton and a brilliant cast.
  • Going Clear: The Prison of Belief, documentarian Alex Gibney’s devastating expose of Scientology, originally shown on HBO and now in theaters.

My DVD/Stream of the Week is the hilariously dark Argentine comedy Wild Tales. It’s available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu and Xbox Video.

On September 28, Turner Classic Movies brings us that paragon of madcap comedies, Arsenic and Old Lace (1944); Cary Grant leads a cast that is perfect, right down to Jack Carson as Officer O’Hara, the new cop on the beat.

MEET THE PATELS: a documentary funnier than most comedies

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MEET THE PATELS
MEET THE PATELS

Meet the Patels is both a documentary and a comedy – and ultimately, a satisfying crowd-pleaser.  Over several years, filmmaker Geeta Patel filmed her own brother Ravi and their parents in their quest to find a wife for Ravi.  Ravi and Geeta’s parents were born in India, had a traditional arranged marriage which has resulted in decades of happiness.  Their American-born kids, of course, reject the very idea of an arranged marriage.  But Ravi finds the pull of his Indian heritage compelling enough to dump his redheaded girlfriend and try to find a nice Indian-American girl.  His parents try to help him with unbounded and unrelenting enthusiasm.

Meet the Patels is very funny – much funnier than most fictional comedies.  It’s always awkward when parents involve themselves in their child’s romantic aspirations.  That’s true here, and produces some side-splitting moments.  It helps that the Patel parents are very expressive, and downright hilarious.  The dad is so funny that I could watch him read a telephone book for 90 minutes, and the mom is herself a force of nature.

We learn that the Patels of Gujarat have adapted an entire menu of marriage opportunities to American society: a matchmaking profile system called “biodata”, matrimonial fairs, “the wedding season” and more.

Meet the Patels has its share of  cultural tourism and the clash of generations.  But is so damn appealing because it’s much more than that – it’s a completely authentic saga of family dynamics, dynamics that we’ve all experienced or at least observed.  The family members’ mutual love for each other drives family conflict and, finally, family unity.

I saw Meet the Patels at the Camera Cinema Club earlier this year, and it opens in the Bay Area tomorrow.  It’s hilarious and heart-warming.  Go see it.

 

GOING CLEAR: THE PRISON OF BELIEF: a devastating expose

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GOING CLEAR: THE PRISON OF BELIEF
GOING CLEAR: THE PRISON OF BELIEF

Going Clear: The Prison of Belief, documentarian Alex Gibney’s devastating expose of Scientology, originally shown on HBO in April, is opening theatrically tomorrow. The indictment of Scientology as dangerous cult is stunning. Gibney is sunshining an amazingly rich reservoir of source material: we hear from several former Scientologists, including the former chief spokesperson, the former top deputy to the Chairman of the Board, along with former believer director Paul Haggis and the John Travolta’s original Scientology handler.

Gibney begins by tracing the journey of Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard and reviewing the organization’s history. Now I knew about the science fiction writer Hubbard, his book Dianetics and even the E-meter. But I sure didn’t know about the Sea Org with its billion-year employment contracts, the Scientology Navy and the bizarro theology with invisible Thetans, volcanos and H-bombs. Nor had I seen the North Korea-style cult-of-personality spectacles featuring Chairman of the Board David McCavige. And I hadn’t heard about the church’s opposition to same-sex marriage.

Then come the really scary stuff. We hear from former Scientology officials who testify that they have been incarcerated in the Rehabilitation Project Force – a concentration camp on a top floor of the Scientology’s Los Angeles HQ and in what is essentially a prison camp in Florida to “re-educate” suspected heretics and backsliders. And there is testimony about the prisoners being separated from their children, who are shunted off to Cadet Org. One official offers personal testimony of his assignment to break up Nicole Kidman’s marriage to Tom Cruise and to alienate her children from her. It’s horrifying stuff. And it’s a riveting viewing experience.

Alex Gibney is one our very, very best documentarians. He won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, and he made the superb Casino Jack: The United States of Money, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Elliot Spitzer and Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God. (He can’t seem to pass up a really long movie title – but Going Clear etc., came from a book title.)

If you’re asking “How can smart, able people fall into this stuff?”, then I recommend finding a film that I reviewed at Cinequest 2015 – The Center. Upon its release, The Center should become the perfect narrative fiction companion to Going Clear.

99 HOMES: desperation leads to indecency, then redemption

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Andrew Garfield and Michael Shannon in 99 HOMES
Andrew Garfield and Michael Shannon in 99 HOMES

The opening scene of the brilliant psychological drama 99 Homes illustrates the life-and-death stakes of our nation’s foreclosure crisis.  It’s a topical film, but 99 Homes is emotionally raw and as intense as any thriller.  Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) is a working class single dad, down on his luck.  He loses his home to foreclosure and then must make a Faustian choice about supporting his family.  Can he live with his choice, and what are the consequences?

With capitalism, where there are losers, there are also winners who have bet against the losers.  Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) has built a prosperous real estate business on legitimate evictions and flips, supplemented with schemes to defraud federal home loan agencies, housing syndicates and individual homeowners.  His world view is defined in a monologue about this nation bailing out the winners, not the losers – a cynical, but perceptive, observation.

Director Ramin Bahrani is a great American indie director, with a knack for drilling into the psyches of overlooked subsets of our society – immigrants (Chop Shop, Man Push Cart, Goodbye Solo), industrial farmers (At Any Price) and now the victims and profiteers of the Mortgage Bubble.

As foreclosure inexorably approaches, Garfield’s Nash is absorbed by dread, then desperation and, finally, to panic.  His mom (Laura Dern) takes a different tack, settling firmly into denial and then erupting in hysteria.  That denial recurs again and again in 99 Homes among those about to be evicted.   These are people who have bought homes and can’t believe/grok/internalize that one day they will actually be forced out of them.  One of the strongest aspects of 99 Homes is the use of non-actors who have lived through the nightmare.   Some of the individual stories, especially one with a confused old man, are so wrenching as to be hard to watch.

This may be Andrew Garfield’ strongest cinema performance.  Dennis Nash is a decent man incentivized to do the indecent.  Garfield takes this good man through an amazing internal journey.  Nash is forced to accept the failure resulting from his attempts to do what is right, juxtaposed with the success from conduct that he finds repulsive.  Bahrani’s arty shot of the reflection of a swimming pool shimmering in a sliding glass door makes it look like Garfield is under water –  which he metaphorically is at this point in the film.

Michael Shannon, one of my very favorite actors, is superb as a guy completely committed to pursuing his own survival/prosperity strategy – no matter that it is based on ruining the lives of other humans.  Unlike Nash, Shannon’s Carver has accepted the incentives to act badly and has overcome any qualms about either moral ambiguity or even stark amorality.

Veteran television actor Tim Guinee is remarkable as homeowner Frank Green.  Laura Dern is excellent in a pivotal role.  The character actor Clancy Brown proves once again that he can grab the screen, even when he’s only visible for a minute or two.

With its searing performances by Garfield and Shannon, 99 Homes is unsparingly dark and intense until a final moment of redemption.  It opens on Friday.