Here’s the premise of Songs She Wrote About People She Knows – a dissatisfied but very contained woman adopts the therapeutic device of SINGING her true feelings. So she expresses her resentments by leaving excoriating singing voicemails. When she melodically rips her ubercaffeinated boss, there is an unintended consequence. Her harangue sparks both his personal interest in her (unwelcome) and a sudden decision to swing his life 180 degrees. He gloms on to her as he seeks to his artistic dream. It becomes an odd couple movie, where he spends the rest of the movie annoying her (and, believe me, this is not very entertaining).
In the lighthearted Italian Wax: We Are the X, a notoriously shady producer sends two guy filmmakers to Monaco to scout locations for a commercial and meet a gal French casting director. They are all hired because they work cheap. What follows is a little whodunit, a little relationship drama, a little comedy and, as one might expect, a ménage à troisillustrating the open-mindedness of French women (in the movies, anyway).
The best five minutes of the movie is right at the beginning, when the producer demonstrates his mastery of getting someone else to pick up a tab.
There is a superfluous but welcome cameo by 70-year-old Rutger Hauer (it’s been over thirty years since Nighthawks and Blade Runner!). And there’s a Gen X hook, an attempt to make Wax: We Are themore than it is, which is basically an entertaining piece of Euro-fluff.
Here are my picks for Friday at Cinequest, starting with three of my favorites:
THE CENTER: An absorbing and topical American indie drama about the seductiveness of a cult. WORLD PREMIERE.
LOS HAMSTERS: A biting darkly hilarious Mexican social satire. NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE.
ASPIE SEEKS LOVE: A surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a guy looking for love like anyone else, but whose social skills are handicapped by Asberger’s. WORLD PREMIERE.
I also like SWEDEN’S COOLEST NATIONAL TEAM (a character-driven take on the sports movie takes us into a Nerd Olympics) and the innovative and good-hearted Hungarian comedy FOR SOME INEXPLICABLE REASONand I’ve heard great things about these following films:
GUARD DOG: dark and violent Peruvian thriller. US PREMIERE.
MILWAUKEE: US indie sex and relationship comedy. WORLD PREMIERE.
If you can make it to Cinequest, there are some great movie choices, including Sunday night’s Clouds of Sils Maria with Kristin Stewart (who won the Supporting Actress Cesar – the French Oscar) and Juliette Binoche. Here is my extensive Cinequest coverage.
The Oscars have come and gone, leaving these choices in theaters and elsewhere:
Clint Eastwood’s thoughtful and compelling American Sniper, with harrowing action and a career-best performance from Bradley Cooper.
The inspiring Selma, well-crafted and gripping throughout (but with an unfortunate historical depiction of LBJ).
The cinematically important and very funny (and, of course. Oscar-winning) Birdman.
Julianne Moore’s superb performance is the only reason to see Still Alice;
The Imitation Game – the riveting true story about the guy who invented the computer and defeated the Nazis and was then hounded for his homosexuality.
And the movie that is better than all of these: Boyhood. It’s available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
Here are some great choices for movies coming up on TV this week – all on Turner Classic Movies:
The Narrow Margin (February 28): This overlooked film noir masterpiece is a taut 71 minutes of tension. Growly cop Charles McGraw plays hide-and-seek with a team of hit men on a claustrophobic train. Marie Windsor is unforgettable as the assassins’ target.
Charles McGraw and Marie Windsor in THE NARROW MARGIN
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg(March 3): This romantic French musical is notable for three things: 1) the actors sing all of the dialogue; 2) the breakout performance by then 20-year-old Catherine Deneuve; and 3) an epilogue scene at a gas station – one of the great weepers in cinema history.
Spider Baby (March 4): This campy horror flick ain’t good, but it’s entertaining. Lon Chaney, Jr., passes the horror torch to Sid Haig. Also on March 4, TCM is bringing us one of the silliest of mutant monster movies, Night of the Lepus (thundering herds of giant killer rabbits) along with Bucket of Blood, a serial killer movie that is a time capsule of beatnik culture.
In the Mexican drama The Life After, two brothers are raised by a very unreliable single mom. When she disappears and leaves them on their own, they go on a road trip where the emotional damage she has wreaked on them is exposed. It’s well-acted and well-photographed, but grim and slow-paced. Ultimately, I’m just not convinced that this story needed to be told.
29-year-old slacker Aron (Áron Ferenczik) is coming off a bad break-up – so bad that his girlfriend took all of her stuff out of their apartment and even removed her hair from the bathroom drain. Stunned, Aron spends the rest of the Hungarian comedy For Some Inexplicable Reason staggering around Budapest trying to escape a profound personal confusion. In the opening sequence, Aron feigns dropping dead in a variety of Budapest locations amidst unconcerned passersby. That (along with the hair removed from the drain – what a great gag) sets the mood of this witty and good-hearted comedy.
We meet Aron’s buddies, who are all farther along in their careers, but only marginally more mature. His well-intentioned parents are not helping his mental health. There is the specter of his ex Ezter, hopefully to be replaced by one of the young women who wander into his crosshairs.
Writer-director Gábor Reisz delivers some highly original moments, including Aron being followed by an increasing lineup of Ezters. There’s a priceless kitchen table argument between Aron’s parents shot-from-high. There is Aron’s totally unexpected reaction to a sexual opportunity. And, is you see For Some Inexplicable Reason, DO NOT MISS the closing credits – well worth it!
These inventive fragments are all reminiscent of the 2013 Cinequest gem Oh Boy, which later secured a US theatrical release as A Coffee In Berlin. For Some Inexplicable Reason isn’t quite as unified a work as Oh Boy, but it’s entertaining throughout and the best parts are really clever.
For Some Inexplicable Reason plays again February 27 at Camera 12 and on March 7 at the California Theatre.
In the bawdy Norwegian comedy Chasing Berlusconi, a beleaguered harness racing driver gets into trouble with menacing (and very, very funny) Finnish loan sharks, which precipitates a farce involving two shady dim bulbs and a pair of even dumber cops. Oh, and then there’s the driver’s nyphomaniacal wife. Did I mention the racetrack owner with a piercing, sudden cackle and a predilection for toupees and cowboy hats? (The movie’s title comes from a racehorse named for the Italian scoundrel/politician.)
This all makes for very good lowbrow comedy. And lowbrow it is, featuring jokes based on impotence, penis length, horse poop and the like. Chasing Berlusconi also features very clever references to Columbo, The Wire and Fifty Shades of Grey. The characters of the racetrack owner and the lead loan shark are especially funny.
I loved filmmaker Ole Endresen’s hilarious King Curling at the 2012 Cinequest. That story had a very original hook – to win a curling tournament, the protagonist needs to stop taking his meds, and then tries not to slip into psychosis. Chasing Berlusconi isn’t the comic masterpiece of King Curling, but it’s worth some guffaws.
Chasing Berlusconi plays again at Cinequest March 1 at the California Theatre and March 3 at Camera 12.
Not many filmmakers could say that they LITERALLY saved someone’s life, but Bruce Sinofsky could. Sinofsky has died at age 58 from complications of diabetes.
Sinofsky and Joe Berlinger co-directed the three Paradise Lostdocumentaries, which chronicled the eighteen-year ordeal of the West Memphis Three, who were wrongly convicted of child murders in Arkansas. The three were released from prison in 2011 – one of them from death row. This wouldn’t have happened without the first two Paradise Lost documentaries that Sinofsky and Berlinger made for HBO. The 1996 film is available steaming on Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video; the 2000 and 2011 films are available from those providers plus Amazon Instant Video.
Sinofsky and Joe Berlinger also co-directed the wonderful Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, which was among on my top ten movies for 2004. It’s available on DVD from Netflix.
