Best Movies of 2014 So Far

by
Eller Coltrane, Ethan Hawke and Lorelei Linklater in BOYHOOD
Eller Coltrane, Ethan Hawke and Lorelei Linklater in BOYHOOD

Instead of waiting for my year end Top Ten list, I keep a running list throughout the year: Best Movies of 2014 – So Far.  That list is shaping up, though, and my recommendations are getting validated by the early critics awards.  In the last two weeks, both the New York Film Critics Circle and the San Francisco Film Critics Circle recognized my #1 film, Boyhood, as the top film of the year and my #2 film, Ida, as the top foreign film.  And the New York Times’ A.O. Scott picked Boyhood and Ida #1 and #2 on his top ten list.

Boyhood is pretty much out of theaters, awaiting a DVD release in January.  So is Dear White People, out on DVD in February.  But you can see almost all the rest right now:

Birdman, Gone Girl and Force Majeure are in theaters right now.  And Ida, Locke, Calvary, Alive Inside, A Coffee in Berlin, Borgman, True Detective and The Grand Seduction are available on DVD and/or streaming.  Check my Best Movies of 2014  for DVD/streaming availability.

To get on my list, a movie has to be one that I’m still thinking about them a couple of days later.  I’m still mulling over whether to add A Most Wanted Man, The One I Love or Whiplash.

I’m still waiting to see several contenders for my year-end list: A Most Violent Year, Big Eyes, Inherent Vice, Selma, American Sniper, The Overnighters and Two Days, One Night.  From what I read, any or all of these might end up on my final list.  [Although it’s likely to be nominated for a Foreign Language Oscar this year, most of us won’t get a chance to see the Russian Leviathan until well into 2015, so I’ll leave it for next year’s list.]

For some reason, Under the Skin, Snowpiercer, Grand Budapest Hotel , The Lego Movie and Love Is Strange are all showing up on some top ten lists. I really can’t understand why. At least Under the Skin and Snowpiercer were entertaining, but none of these were great.

DVD/Stream of the Week: THE SKELETON TWINS – lots of depression and lots of laughs

by
Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader in THE SKELETON TWINS
Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader in THE SKELETON TWINS

The term “dramedy” has never been more apt – The Skeleton Twins is a serious exploration of two complex and textured characters with depression, and yet most of the movie is very, very funny. Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig play adult twins who haven’t spoken in ten years; they share a troubled upbringing, bitingly wicked and often morbid humor and serious melancholy. Their blues manifest in different, but serious ways. Brought together when the sister invites the brother to move in with her and her husband, past memories are evoked, each calls the other on their bullshit and everyone’s serene routine is overturned.

The two stars are excellent – and this is Hader’s best film work so far. His monologue about how far he’s come since high school is heart-breaking.

There is lots to like about The Skeleton Twins:

  • perhaps Luke Wilson’s best performance as the ever-decent and upbeat husband, hopelessly out of his depth with his troubled spouse;
  • a hilarious Wilson monologue about “land mines”, which will make everyone who has been either a boyfriend or a husband fall out of his seat laughing;
  • a sparkling turn by Joanna Gleason as the twins’ insufferably self-absorbed New Agey mother;
  • watching Wiig finally outshine Hader in lip-syncing to Starship’s execrable power ballad “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”. (BTW, on YouTube, you can find Starship’s original video for “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” – Mickey Thomas at his most insincere and Grace Slick in 80s Big Hair – YIKES.)

So the film works overall, but I was left a little short on the mental health aspect (see, if you want, under SPOILER ALERT below). Nevertheless, I recommend The Skeleton Twins for its intelligence, honesty and humor. It’s available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

[SPOILER ALERT: The main characters are both clinically depressed. I didn’t buy the ending where – without any medication or talk therapy – the two seemed to trending hopefully because they have embraced honesty and the support of each other. Now The Wife, who is a trained therapist, DID buy the ending, saying that the movie didn’t show them to be OK, just doing well with each other’s support. The critical consensus seems to be with her.]

WILD: a quest against her own demons

by
Reese Witherspoon in WILD
Reese Witherspoon in WILD

Based on the popular memoir by Cheryl Strayed, Wild is the story of how Strayed dealt with her own emotional collapse.   Suffering emotionally from the death of her mother, among other issues, Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) had become a red-hot mess, playing around with heroin and destructive serial sex and, in the process, dooming her marriage to a solid guy (Tomas Sadoski from The Newsroom).   To cleanse herself from her demons, Strayed embarked on a solitary thousand mile hike along the Pacific Crest Trail.

Hiking the Pacific Coast Trail is a mighty quest – both an ordeal and an achievement. But walking it alone as a woman – that’s a whole different deal. The camera is on Reese Witherspoon in every scene, and she carries the movie with her performance – both as Cheryl implodes in the flashbacks and as she overcomes her fears and inexperience on her hike. It’s been eight years since Witherspoon won the Oscar for Walk the Line.  Recently, she’s been reinventing her career with high quality fare like Mud, Devil’s Knot, Wild and the upcoming Inherent Vice.  Her work in Wild is top rate.

Laura Dern’s performance may be even better than Witherspoon’s. She plays Strayed’s mom, a woman who has been dealt a shit sandwich every day of her life, but who relentlessly insists on appreciating life’s small pleasures. It’s a compelling and heartbreaking performance.

Now I have done some back country hiking and I know what it’s like to walk for 15 miles in a day.  It can be pretty damn monotonous.  But not this movie.  Writer Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About a Boy) and director Jean-Marc Vallée do a fine job in presenting the scope of a thousand mile journey by pulling out the most compelling components – the moments that illustrate the impressiveness of the feat and the depths of Strayed’s emotional damage and healing.

It’s pretty fine piece of filmmaking overall, and I’m going to start looking for the work of Jean-Marc Vallée.  As he did in Dallas Buyers Club, here he tees up extraordinary performances while avoiding what could have become trite and sentimental audience manipulation.  Watching Witherspoon and Dern in Wild is a good use of anyone’s time.

Movies to See Right Now

by
Laura Dern in WILD
Laura Dern in WILD

I really liked Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern in WILD.  Just saw THE IMITATION GAME and liked it too.  I’ll be writing about both of them this weekend.  The Theory of Everything, Foxcatcher and Whiplash are really good, too. And Birdman, Force Majeure and Gone Girl are three of the VERY BEST OF THE YEAR.   Here are the links to my recommendations:

  • The Theory of Everything is a successful, audience-friendly biopic of both Mr. AND Mrs. Genius.
  • Set in the macho world of Olympic wrestling, Foxcatcher is really a relationship movie with a stunning dramatic performance by Steve Carell.
  • The cinematically important and very funny Birdman.
  • The best Hollywood movie of 2014, the thriller Gone Girl, with a career-topping performance by Rosamund Pike.
  • I liked the droll Swedish dramedy Force Majeure, which won an award at Cannes and is Sweden’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.
  • If you want a stark and grim look at the Old West, there’s Tommy Lee Jones’ feminist Western The Homesman.
  • J.K. Simmons is brilliant in the intense indie drama Whiplash, a study of motivation and abuse, ambition and obsession.
  • Bill Murray’s funny and not too sentimental St. Vincent.
  • If you’re in the mood for a brutal, brutal World War II tank movie, there’s Fury.

I very rarely recommend a sci-fi movie, but I really liked the thought-provoking romance I Origins that explores the tension between science and spirituality.  I Origins is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Instant Video.

Tomorrow, Turner Classic Movies airs John Huston’s 1949 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It’s still a gripping yarn – three down-and-outers improbably (and literally) strike gold. But can they trust each other enough to realize their gains once envy and greed appear? The Treasure of the Sierra Madre features one of Humphrey Bogart’s most colorful and compelling performances, which is reason enough to watch this classic.

But I also love watching director Huston’s real life father Walter Huston, who is cast as another of the trio. Most of us know Walter Huston, with his Gabby Hayes visage, from this movie, but Walter Huston was a major movie star as cinema moved to the talkies. Just between 1929 and 1939, he starred in thirty films. I love Huston’s work in this era, and I think that, with his very modern sensibility, he would be successful if he were working in today’s cinema. This is a good introduction to his work. (He also appeared very briefly in John Huston’s directorial debut The Maltese Falcon – as Captain Jacoby, the guy who staggers into Sam Spade’s office with the titular black bird and expires.)

Michael Pitt and Brit Marling in I ORIGINS
Michael Pitt and Brit Marling in I ORIGINS

DVD/Stream of the Week: I ORIGINS – a thoughtful romance that muses on the boundaries of science and spirituality

by
Michael Pitt and Brit Marling in I ORIGINS
Michael Pitt and Brit Marling in I ORIGINS

The romance I Origins (which opens tomorrow) explores the conflict between science and spirituality. Our scientist protagonist (Michael Pitt) is completely empirical and militantly anti-spiritual. He is obsessed with the study of iris scans and patterns of the eye (the “I” in the title is a pun). He is hoping to prove that eyes can be evolved, which he believes will debunk the Creationist pseudo-science of Intelligent Design. He meets a model (Astrid Berges-Frisbey) – and they don’t meet CUTE, they meet HOT. Through a string of scientifically improbable coincidences, he is able to track her down for a second encounter that is sharply romantic. They fall in love – an attraction of opposites because she is mercurial and vaguely New Agey.

Along the way, he gains a new lab assistant (Brit Marling), who is just as smart and more driven than is he. Together they find the lab breakthrough to prove his theory. The main three characters are affected by a life-altering tragedy. Seven years later, the story resumes with the public release of the discovery. As our hero takes his victory lap over religion, he is faced with new evidence that cannot be explained by science…

Writer-director Mike Cahill (Another Earth, also starring Marling) has constructed a story that sets up a discussion on the limits of empiricism. I give Cahill extra points for raising the issue without ponderosity or pretension. Some critics have harshly judged the movie, but they see it wrongly as a corny religion-beats-science movie instead of a contemplation on the possibilities. And they altogether miss the fact that the film is basically a romance, which Cahill himself sees as one of the two central aspects of I Origins. Cahill explores and compares the intense lust-at-first-sight, opposites-attract type of love with the love relationship based on common values and aspirations.

There are, however, two shots involving pivotal moments in the story (and both involving billboards) that are such self-consciously ostentatious filmmaking that they distracted me, rather than bringing emphasis to each moment.

Pitt, an actor of sometimes unsettling affect, is very good here, as he was in The Dreamers and Last Days. Berges-Frisbey and Marling deliver fine performances, too. If Marling is in a movie, it aspires to being good – I loved The East, which she co-write and starred in. Archie Panjabi, without the boots and the upfront sexiness she wears on The Good Wife, is solid in a minor part.

I Origins works both as a scientific detective story and as a meditation on romance. I found it to be smart and entertaining.  I Origins is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Instant Video.

Movies to See Right Now

by
DEAR WHITE PEOPLE
DEAR WHITE PEOPLE

It’s time to catch the some of the VERY BEST MOVIES OF 2014: Dear White People, Birdman, Force Majeure and Gone Girl.  The Theory of Everything, Foxcatcher and Whiplash are really good, too.  Here are the links to my recommendations:

  • The Theory of Everything is a successful, audience-friendly biopic of both Mr. AND Mrs. Genius.
  • Set in the macho world of Olympic wrestling, Foxcatcher is really a relationship movie with a stunning dramatic performance by Steve Carell.
  • I really don’t want anyone to miss the brilliant comedy about personal identity, Dear White People.
  • The cinematically important and very funny Birdman; and
  • The best Hollywood movie of 2014, the thriller Gone Girl, with a career-topping performance by Rosamund Pike.
  • I liked the droll Swedish dramedy Force Majeure, which won an award at Cannes and is Sweden’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.
  • If you want a stark and grim look at the Old West, there’s Tommy Lee Jones’ feminist Western The Homesman.
  • J.K. Simmons is brilliant in the intense indie drama Whiplash, a study of motivation and abuse, ambition and obsession.
  • Bill Murray’s funny and not too sentimental St. Vincent.
  • If you’re in the mood for a brutal, brutal World War II tank movie, there’s Fury.

My DVD/Stream of the Week is the appealing musical Jersey Boys.  Jersey Boys is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

And here’s a bonus DVD/Stream:  I really liked Blue Ruin, an entirely fresh take on the revenge thriller. Blue Ruin was an audience favorite on the festival circuit in 2013 but didn’t get a theatrical release.  It’s now available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Netflix Instant, Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, Google Play, YouTube and Xbox Video.

Tune your DVRs to Turner Classic Movies on December 14 for three unforgettable classics. There’s the sexy, cynical prototype film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice. Then Henry Fonda is at his most appealing in the subversive WW II comedy Mister Roberts.

Finally, there’s Blow-up. Set in the Mod London of the mid-60s, a fashion photographer (David Hemmings) is living a fun but shallow life filled with sports cars, discos and and scoring with supermodels (think Jane Birkin, Sarah Miles and Verushka). Then he discovers that his random photograph of a landscape may contain a clue in a murder and meets a mystery woman (Vanessa Redgrave). After taking us into a vivid depiction of the Mod world, director Michelangelo Antonioni brilliantly turns the story into a suspenseful story of spiraling obsession. His L’Avventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse made Antonioni an icon of cinema, but Blow-up is his most accessible and enjoyable masterwork. There’s also a cameo performance by the Jeff Beck/Jimmy Page version of the Yardbirds and a quick sighting of Michael Palin in a nightclub.

BLOW-UP
BLOW-UP

DVD/Stream of the Week: JERSEY BOYS – evocative pop and a dash of Christopher Walken

by
Erich Bergen, John Lloyd Young, Vincent Piazza and Michael Lomenda in JERSEY BOYS
Erich Bergen, John Lloyd Young, Vincent Piazza and Michael Lomenda in JERSEY BOYS

Jersey Boys, while not great cinema, is definitely a fun time at the movies. We might have expected great cinema because this is Clint Eastwood’s version of the Broadway musical, itself a show biz bio of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. The acting is a little uneven, the female parts are underwritten and some parts drag. But what Jersey Boys does offer – the Four Season’s evocative pop hits, a couple charismatic performances and a dash of Christopher Walken – is worth the trip to the theater.

The story’s arc is a familiar one – after paying their dues with years of bottom-scraping gigs, a bunch of nobodies achieve overnight fame and wealth and then destruct. Three things are a little different about these guys. First, the core of the group is mobbed up (and you can see how the real Frankie Valli could later play a mobster so well in The Sopranos). Second, their catalyst is the pop music-writing genius Bob Gaudio, a suburban teen who joins the hardscrabble threesome from a tough neighborhood and serves them their hits: Sherry, Big Girls Don’t Cry, Walk Like a Man, Rag Doll, Dawn (Go Away) and Can’t Take My Eyes Off You. Finally, the cause of the group’s downfall is neither external (e.g., crooked business manager or evil record company) nor pervasive substance abuse.

Eastwood tells the story in four segments – each from the perspective of one of the guys – and this works pretty well. He gets a big boost from the performances of Vincent Piazza as the cocky group leader, Erich Bergen as the creative mastermind Gaudio and Mike Doyle as their flamboyant producer. John Lloyd Young reprises his Broadway role as the group’s big star, lead singer Frankie Valli. Young can do Valli’s very distinctive voice, but has a very limited emotional range. And it turns out that Valli, because he’s a pretty square guy, has the least interesting story of the group. When Valli does have relationship angst, the story gets bogged down. Michael Lomenda plays the fourth guy and gets to ask the plaintive question, “What if you’re Ringo?”

Jersey Boys also contains yet another delightful turn by Christopher Walken, this time as the Four Seasons’ mobster mentor. Walken himself started out as a chorus boy, and it’s fun to see him holding his own in the grand musical finale. And remember the young and dreamy Christopher Walken belting out The Four Seasons’s Can’t Take My Eyes Off You in The Deer Hunter’s great bar scene? It’s near the beginning of this trailer.

Jersey Boys is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

BLUE RUIN: fresh take on the revenge thriller

by
Macon Blair in BLUE RUIN
Macon Blair in BLUE RUIN

Here’s an entirely fresh take on the revenge thriller. Blue Ruin, an audience favorite on the festival circuit in 2013, didn’t get a theatrical release, and I would have missed it entirely but for a suggestion from my friend Jose.

As the film opens, we are following a homeless man and observing his survival tactics; once we’re hooked, we learn that a traumatic incident led to his homelessness.  Then we watch him methodically prepare for an entirely different mission.  There is very little dialogue in the first 30 minutes.  And then we have 60 minutes of lethal cat-and-mouse, with intense suspense about which of the characters will survive and how.  As a thriller, this is first class.

What makes Blue Ruin so fresh is the lead character, who has been shattered by a tragedy in his life – and who isn’t at all confident about his ability to redress it. This ain’t a Charles Bronson or Liam Neeson type hunter-of-bad-guys. Instead, our hero is as scared and fragile as most of us would be if we were being hunted for our lives – and so we relate to him.

Macon Blair is superb as the protagonist. He’s entirely believable both as a damaged down-and-outer and as a man-on-a-mission. Man, I hope Blair gets cast in more movies – he’s just great here.

Devin Ratray, one of the execrable, buffoonish cousins in Nebraska, is very good in an entirely different role here – a slacker scarred by his war experiences who nevertheless remains very skilled.

Blue Ruin was written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier. He is responsible for the wholly original lead character and the intense pace of the film, along with the meticulously economical storytelling; the exposition never relies on even one extra word of dialogue.

Blue Ruin is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Netflix Instant, Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, Google Play, YouTube and Xbox Video.

Movies to See Right Now

by
Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne in THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING
Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne in THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING

We’re in Movie Prime Time – with fine Holiday movies big and small.  Here are the best:

  • The Theory of Everything is a successful, audience-friendly biopic of both Mr. And Mrs. Genius.
  • Set in the macho world of Olympic wrestling, Foxcatcher is really a relationship movie with a stunning dramatic performance by Steve Carell.
  • I really don’t want anyone to miss the brilliant comedy about personal identity, Dear White People.
  • The cinematically important and very funny Birdman; and
  • The best Hollywood movie of 2014, the thriller Gone Girl, with a career-topping performance by Rosamund Pike.
  • I liked the droll Swedish dramedy Force Majeure, which won an award at Cannes and is Sweden’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.
  • If you want a stark and grim look at the Old West, there’s Tommy Lee Jones’ feminist Western The Homesman.
  • J.K. Simmons is brilliant in the intense indie drama Whiplash, a study of motivation and abuse, ambition and obsession.
  • Bill Murray’s funny and not too sentimental St. Vincent.
  • I liked the meditatively paced nature documentary Pelican Dreams.
  • If you’re in the mood for a brutal, brutal World War II tank movie, there’s Fury.

My DVD/Stream of the Week is still the singular Dutch thriller Borgman – a smart and relatively non-gory horror film for adults.

Yesterday I wrote about the late filmmaker Mike Nichols, and his films The Graduate and Primary Colors.  Turner Classic Movies is airing The Graduate and two mother Nichols classics tomorrow, December 6.  Primary Colors is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant, Vudu and Xbox Video.

THE GRADUATE
THE GRADUATE

Mike Nichols: a belated remembrance

by
Mike Nichols
Mike Nichols

I didn’t get a chance to weigh last week on the passing of the seminal filmmaker Mike Nichols, but on this Saturday Turner Classic Movies is airing three of Nichol’s movies: The Graduate, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Carnal Knowledge. The superb Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was Nichol’s directing debut. Imagine, as a rookie director, handling the world’s two biggest movie stars, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, at the height of their media circus celebrity, tempetuous relationship and individual willfulness. Three quick reflections on Mike Nichols:

1. It’s easy to recognize the greatness of The Graduate today, but it’s hard to appreciate how groundbreaking it was – all because of Nichol’s directorial choices. Dustin Hoffman’s performance was central to the success of the film, yet he was a nobody at the time and Nichols had to fight for him – the studio preferred a conventionally handsome leading man. Nichols sure wasn’t copying anybody else when he put the Simon and Garfunkle songs in the soundtrack. And the final shot – where Nichols kept his camera lingering on Hoffman and Katherine Ross until the actors became uncomfortable – is one of cinema’s best.

2. Nichols was still at the top of his form in 1998 with the Bill Clinton story Primary Colors. We can see his continuing comedic mastery when Allison Janney’s teacher union president emerges in a Walk of Shame from the candidate’s hotel room. And when the Hillary character explains the “momma” phenomenon where the Bill and Carville characters are weeping about their mommas. Primary Colors is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant, Vudu and Xbox Video.

3. And this precedes his movie career, but it occurs to me that Mike Nichols’ comedy sketch collaboration with Elaine May was really the precursor of the 50’s becoming the 60’s in America. Just search on YouTube for “Mike Nichols Elaine May” and watch some clips – you’ll see why.