Movies to See Right Now

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LETTERS FROM THE BIG MAN

This week’s best two movies can be found on Video on Demand (I saw them on Amazon Instant), and both feature magical realism:

  • Letters from the Big Man: a beautifully looking and sounding fable about a prickly woman with a guy and a Bigfoot competing for her affections.
  • Electrick Children: an entirely unique teen coming of age story with fundamentalist Mormon teens in Las Vegas.

The best bets in theaters:  

  • No: Gael Garcia Bernal stars as the regular guy who brainstormed the guerrilla advertising campaign that dethroned Chilean dictator Pinochet.
  • The Incredible Burt Wonderstone: a pleasant comedy and a showcase for Jim Carrey.
  • Side Effects: Steven Soderbergh’s psychological thriller starring Rooney Mara, Jude Law and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
  • Quartet: a pleasant lark of a geezer comedy with four fine performances.

Music fans will enjoy the bio-documentary Beware of Mr. Baker, available on VOD.

Emperor, with Tommy Lee Jones as Gen. Douglas MacArthur leading the American occupation of Japan, is historical but plodding.  On the Road is the faithful but ultimately unsuccessful adaptation of the seminal Jack Kerouac novel, with surprisingly little energy.  The HBO movie Phil Spector is really just a freak show.

 I haven’t yet seen the upcoming PBS documentary Philip Roth: Unmasked. You can read descriptions and view trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD of the week is the smart, actress-written romantic comedy Celeste and Jesse Forever.

On Easter Sunday, Turner Classic Movies offers a Jesusathon of Sword and Sandal movies: Ben-Hur, The Robe and Barabbas. Ben-Hur has the thrilling chariot race around that phenomenal set – one of the greatest sets in movie history. In Barabbas, Anthony Quinn sees Charlton Hestons’s galley slavery and raises it by a tour in the sulpher mines, a stint as a gladiator and the witnessing of the burning of Rome, all culminating in a Christian martyrdom.

Letters from the Big Man: Sasquatch is her stalker

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Employing magical realism like Electrick Children, Letters from the Big Man is a completely original movie.  A young woman of fierce independence has left a career with the US Forest Service to do art.  Upended by a bad breakup, she takes an assignment from her former employer that conveniently requires her to do what she really needs to do – make a solo backpacking trip deep into the southern Oregon forests.

The opening quarter of the movie establishes two things.  First, the ancient Oregon forest is awesomely beautiful and inspires reflection.  Second, this woman’s wilderness skills are beyond impressive – she hikes, kayaks, chops wood, makes camp and kindles fire with great ease.  It’s clear that she is extremely experienced in the wild, and she exudes confidence.  She recognizes every plant species, snorkels to count the horns on a sturgeon and wades into streams to measure the siltation. And she can handle a handgun, too.  Wow. (Later in the movie, we see her matter-of-factually rig her bike to recharge her laptop battery with pedal power.)  She comes to realize that someone/something is following her, a thought that may terrify the audience (especially at night), but which only annoys and intrigues her.

As the young woman, Lily Rabe carries the film with her physicality and strength of will.  (Rabe is the daughter of the late Jill Clayburgh.)  Her character is also prickly, which keeps us from warming to her right away.  But she attracts the attention of two males.  The first is another backpacker, who turns out to be an environmental activist at odds with the Forest Service and ready for female company.  The second is a Bigfoot, who rages against logging in his forest, but who melts at the sight of our heroine and leaves her piles of twigs as tokens of his affection (this is the magical realism).  The movie turns on her response to her two suitors.

Writer-director Christopher Munch has created a movie of uncommon beauty, and he has the balls to include a lovelorn Bigfoot.  The magical realism works because he presents it absolutely straight, as if having a Sasquatch in the story is as normal as a squirrel.  Most of the rest of the story is extremely realistic, especially the interactions between officials of the Forest Service, environmentalist activists and loggers.  The one exception is an unnecessarily farfetched conspiracy theory about military intelligence.

Letters from the Big Man is one of the best looking and best sounding movies of the year.  Visually, it’s like trekking through wilderness (but without the insects).  And the sound track is exquisite, centered on the natural sounds of rushing water and animal calls, occasionally augmented with an ensemble’s reverential music.

Will Sasquatch get the girl?  It’s worth finding out.  Letters from the Big Man is available on VOD, including on Amazon Instant.

 

Electrick Children: magical Mormon runaways in Vegas

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With Electrick Children, a new 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.

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.

Phil Spector: look at the freak

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Who better to play the explosively wacked-out music genius in Phil Spector than Al Pacino?  Here, Spector is living in self-delusional isolation and still taking way too many drugs, and he’s on trial for his life.  His defense lawyer (Helen Mirren) faces a dilemma – the only way the court will hear her best evidence is if she first calls her very unsympathetic client to the stand.

Phil Spector is written and directed by David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross, House of Games), but it’s very minor Mamet.  The only reason to watch Phil Spector is for the inevitable Pacino meltdown.  That meltdown is a doozy, but it exposes Phil Spector as more of a freak show than a complete film.

DVD of the Week: Celeste and Jesse Forever

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I really enjoyed Celeste and Jesse Forever, starring Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg as best friends who have been married, are now working on an amiable divorce and are still best friends. The screenplay is co-written by Rashida Jones (Paul Rudd’s fiance in I Love You, Man) and, once you accept the comic premise that this couple is made for each other but not as a married couple, everyone’s behavior is authentic. Sure, he wants to get back with her when she isn’t in a place to do that – and, then, vice versa – but the characters resolve the conflict as they would in real life. Here’s a mini-spoiler – this movie is just too smart to end in rushing to the airport or disrupting the wedding or any of the other typical rom com contrivances.

The supporting characters are funny without being absurdly zany (except for one pot dealer). Chris Messina pops up in Celeste, as he did in the other smart actress-written comedy Ruby Sparks, and does a good job here, too. I’m certainly looking forward to Rashida Jones’ next screenplay.

On the Road: surprisingly little energy from all that Benzedrine

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On the Road is the faithful but ultimately unsuccessful movie adaptation of the seminal Jack Kerouac novel.  The novel is itself primarily remembered as memoir of the Beat Generation’s defining literary voices, for its stream of consciousness narrative and for the unforgettable portrait of Keroauc’s muse Neal Cassady as the character Dean Moriarity.  Director Walter Salles succeeds in creating a wonderful time capsule of the Beats – but that’s not enough.

The story is centered on the famous series of road trips where Keroauc latches on to the the charismatic and erratic Cassady, hoping that their adventures will unclog Kerouac’s writer’s block.  Although he has some independent escapades, Kerouac is essentially the observer, unleashing Cassady on North America.  Cassady had insatiable appetites for sex, Benzedrine, marijuana, nonstop talking and driving long distances at high rates of speed, and he was a pillar of unreliability.  If Cassady is known for anything, it’s for his twitchy freneticism and speedy monologues.  If you’ve read On the Road and especially if you’ve seen film footage of the real Neal Cassady, you’ll find the actor Garret Hedlund’s portrayal too measured.  Except for one jazz party scene, it seems as if Hedlund has never witnessed the effects of amphetamines.  Unfortunately, the Cassady character – the throttle for the novel – is the brakes to the movie.

The narrative is pretty linear.  We are SHOWN stream of consciousness at the end of the movie when Kerouac bangs out On the Road on his single 120-foot roll of typewriter paper.  But the movie has none of the novel’s helter-skelter flavor.

But if anyone knows how to direct a road movie, it’s Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries).  Salles captures the long hauls across the vast continent and vividly depicts settings from gritty NYC to the never ending Nebraska plains. In one particularly nice touch, the characters enter San Francisco on a completely fog-shrouded Golden Gate Bridge, which Bay Area residents know to be a more typical experience than postcard weather on the Bridge.

The Keroauc character is ably played by Sam Riley, who has the less showy role of Kerouac’s cultural sponge.

Kristen Stewart plays Cassady’s 16-year-old bride; since she’s a big movie star, she gets more screen time than she gets pages in the book.  That’s a good thing, because, despite all the grief she gets for the Twilight movies, Stewart can really act.

The surrounding cast is excellent.  Tom Sturridge stands out as the young Allen Ginsburg.   Alice Braga sparkles as the Mexican-American single mom that Keroauc picks cotton with.  We glimpse Viggo Mortensen and Amy Adams as Beat figures William S. Burroughs and June Vollmer.   Steve Buscemi is always welcome in a movie, and here he gets a creepy pencil-thin mustache.  Kirsten Dunst and Elisabeth Moss do what they can with the roles of women scolding their unreliable men.

On the Road, with its fine secondary cast, is a leisurely tour through the Beat period, but without the energy of its pioneers.

Movies to See Right Now

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Gael Garcia Bernal in NO

This week’s best movie in theaters is the suspenseful German historical drama Barbara.  In No, Gael Garcia Bernal stars as the regular guy who brainstormed the guerrilla advertising campaign that dethroned Chilean dictator Pinochet.  The Incredible Burt Wonderstone is a pleasant comedy and a showcase for Jim Carrey. I admire Steven Soderbergh’s psychological thriller Side Effects, starring Rooney Mara, Jude Law and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Emperor, with Tommy Lee Jones as Gen. Douglas MacArthur leading the American occupation of Japan, is historical but plodding.

I haven’t yet seen Walter Salles’ Jack Kerouac movie On the Road, which opens today, or Sunday’s HBO movie Phil Spector. You can read descriptions and view trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD/Stream of the week is the most under-appreciated Big Movie of 2012, Zero Dark Thirty, director Kathryn Bigelow’s inspired telling of the hunt for Bin Laden.

Turner Classic Movies is showing a couple of my guilty pleasures this week.  The 1958 Terror in a Texas Town is a lousy movie with an wonderfully implausible climax where the good guy (Sterling Hayden with a Swedish accent) take on a gunfighter with a harpoon.   An even worse movie, 1964’s The Outrage tried to remake Rashomon with a Mexican bandit – and landed Paul Newman the #8 spot on my list of Least Convincing Mexicans.

Beware of Mr. Baker: please don’t hit me again, Ginger

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The documentary Beware of Mr. Baker traces the life of the extremely volatile legendary rock drummer Ginger Baker (Cream, Blind Faith).  Baker is undeniably a musical genius, and the film highlights the stature of his work in both rock and jazz.  Unfortunately, the nasty combination of his aggressively anti-social personality and his heroin addiction precluded successful professional and familial relationships.  We hear about Baker’s good and bad sides from his former Cream band mates Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton, several of his ex-wives and his son, drummer Kofi Baker.  And we meet Ginger Baker himself, for better and for worse.  At one point, the septuagenarian Baker employs his cane to break the nose of the film’s director, Jay Bulger.

Bulger gets credit for comprehensive research into Baker’s life and times, for his inventive use of animation in depicting stages of Baker’s life and for getting the combustible Baker himself on camera.  Beware of Mr. Baker is the skillfully told story of a fascinating life.  Beware of Mr. Baker is now available on VOD through Amazon and other outlets.

 

DVD of the Week: Zero Dark Thirty

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My DVD pick is the most under-appreciated Big Movie of 2012, Zero Dark Thirty,  director Kathryn Bigelow’s inspired telling of the hunt for Bin Laden.  Zero Dark Thirty got smeared with some unfair punditry and didn’t get either the box office or the Oscar recognition that it deserved.  Zero Dark Thirty is on my list of Best Films of 2012.

Bigelow, who won the directorial Oscar for The Hurt Locker, once again demonstrates an uncommon ability to enthrall. She chose to tell the story of the frustrating, wearying and dangerous ten-year man hunt, not just the exciting raid in Abbottabad.

We should all be grateful that this movie was made with Bigelow’s directorial choices. She is content to invest half of her screen time on false leads and wasted efforts – and makes them utterly gripping. She neither lingers on the violence nor shies away from it. In a scene where a CIA operative is looking for a man talking on a cell phone, the camera pulls back to reveal that he is on a chaotic Pakistani street with hundreds of men on cell phones – perfectly conveying the needle-in-a-haystack aspect of the search.  As the Navy Seal team returns from the successful raid, the music is deeply thoughtful and reflective, not the triumphalist anthem that many directors would have used.

Zero Dark Thirty contains realistic and non-gratuitous depictions of war, terrorism and torture. The movie is, to my sensibilities, not too uncomfortable for most viewers. (You can also read my rant on Zero Dark Thirty and torture – I conclude that the filmmakers did not seek to promote, justify or apologize for torture used by US forces).

Jessica Chastain brilliantly plays the CIA analyst who doggedly and passionately pursues an unlikely lead that finally pays off after a ten-year grind. I’ve already rhapsodized several times about Chastain’s sudden emergence as perhaps our best current screen actress. She is profoundly gifted and can do anything. Let’s just say that, as good as Zero Dark Thirty is, she carries it.

The rest of the fine cast includes Jason Clarke (Lawless), Joel Edgerton (Animal Kingdom), Jennifer Ehle (The Ides of March, The King’s Speech), Kyle Chandler (Friday Night Lights), Fares Fares (Safe House), Jeremy Strong (The Guard), Mark Duplass and James Gandolfini.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone: Jim Carrey gets to be funny again

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In The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, Steve Carrell plays the title character, a schlub who has lucked into Vegas headliner success as a magician and has developed narcissistic entitlement, along with some destructive spending habits.  Steve Buscemi plays his long suffering partner.  Their prop-driven act, with its Siegfried and Roy schtick, is challenged by an emerging street magician a la David Blaine (Jim Carrey).  Laughs result when the clueless Burt Wonderstone sabotages his own successful act and must come to terms with his own limitations; this being show biz, there’s a lot of unabashed backstabbing.  There’s also a brief but very funny poke at celebrity charity in the Third World.

As we remember from his breakthrough performance in 1994’s The Mask, there are things that Jim Carrey can do that no other performer can.  His movie vehicles since The Mask, however, have tempted him to preen and wink at the audience.   Here, he has a well-written role that is perfect for his rubber face, physicality and sheer force of character, and he takes it to the max. It turns out that, while he can make us wince in a Jim Carrey movie, Carrey can make us belly laugh in a Steve Carrell movie.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone benefits from a deep cast.  The very game and able Olivia Wilde plays the exploited intern.  James Gandolfini plays a deliciously ruthless and self-interested casino tycoon.  The great Alan Arkin just gets funnier as he ages.  And Jay Mohr is delightful in one his best recent roles, a hopelessly unsuited comedian named Rick the Implausible.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone is fluff, but it’s fun fluff.  And a showcase for Jim Carrey.