Moonrise Kingdom: wistfully sweet and visually singular

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In the wistfully sweet and visually singular Moonrise Kingdom, two 1965 twelve-year-olds fall into profound platonic love and run away together, with a cadre of sadly weary adult authority figures in comic pursuit.  Director Wes Anderson has had some quirky hits (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore) and some quirky misses (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), but he’s always original.  This is a hit.

While very funny, the story is deeply sympathetic to the children.  As Andrew O’Hehir of Salon.com put it,

Yes, Anderson’s principal subject, and arguably his only subject, is the collision between the emotional lives of adults and children and the paradoxical tragicomedy it can so often produce. But if Anderson’s adults yearn for the comparative simplicity of childhood while his children long for the big, important feelings they believe (wrongly) go with growing up, that in itself is a distinctly adult perspective.

We know that we’re watching something unique from the very first shot, in which the camera swivels to show each room in a home as family members enter their spaces and define their relationships to each other.  As The Wife, pointed out, we look into the family home as would a child looking into a dollhouse.

In a year that is especially rich with able child film actors, the kids here (Jared Gilman and Kara Hayman) are excellent.  Bruce Willis, Ed Norton, Bill Murray and Frances McDormand are also very good as the sad, burnt-out adults.  Tilda Swinton and Harvey Keitel show up briefly in broad comic roles.

Since Moonrise Kingdom is set in 1965, Baby Boomers will appreciate the Mad Men moments –  a portable record player,  a coonskin cap and adult indifference to a kid simultaneously holding lighter fluid and a flaming torch.  The girl’s books have cover art typical of the era’s quality young fiction (a la A Wrinkle in Time).

This is an excellent movie – and one that you haven’t seen before.

DVD of the Week: Safe House

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Safe House, the first big Hollywood movie of 2012, is a fine paranoid spy thriller.  Ryan Reynolds is a green but determined CIA agent who finds himself isolated in South Africa and forced to bring in rogue superspy Denzel Washington.  Like Hannibal Lector, Denzel’s character Tobin Frost over matches everyone he faces; it takes entire teams of elite commandos to trap and transport Frost, so Reynolds has his hands full. Not to mention that more teams of elite commandos keep popping up, trying to kill them both.  Swedish director Daniel Espinosa keeps his pedal jammed to the floor, and this two hour movie flashes by in what seems like 90 minutes.

It takes a screen presence like Denzel’s to make Tobin Frost, with his unique mix of charisma, menace and lethal skills, credible.   Reynolds holds up well against Denzel, and the always excellent Vera Farmiga, Brendan Gleeson and Sam Shepherd round out the cast.

I wouldn’t rate Safe House at the very top of the genre.  Espinosa didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to flesh out the characters played by Farmiga, Gleeson and Shepherd, who all end up playing oft-recycled types.  And there are some holes in the plot that you’ll recognize in the few moments when you can catch your breath (See spoiler below the trailer).

But the action and thrills are there, and the extremely well-paced Safe House is a satisfying watch.

 

Spoiler alert:  Since the CIA knows about Reynolds’ girlfriend, why don’t they kidnap her or at least tap her phone to help them track down Reynolds?

Best Movies of 2012 – So Far

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I’ve started my ongoing list of Best Movies of 2012 – So Far. I’ve included the foreign films The Kid with a Bike, A Separation, Polisse and Monsieur Lazhar, and the American indies Rampart and Detachment.  When Take This Waltz comes out at the end of June, it will go on the list, too.

Polisse is still playing in theaters.  Here’s the trailer.

Movies to See Right Now

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Judi Dench, Tom Wilkenson and Bill Nighy in THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL

Man, there are some good movies out right now!  My top pick is still Polisse, the riveting story of the police child protection unit in Paris. Bernie, a very funny dark comedy by Richard Linklater, shows off Jack Black’s talents in a whole new light. The story of aged Brits seeking a low-budget retirement in India, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, is much more than a fish-out-of-water comedy. I also really like the Norwegian dark comedy Headhunters, with Aksel Hennie as a smug corporate headhunter/art thief who panics when a high tech commando hunts him down.

Men In Black 3 is delightfully entertaining, as Will Smith time travels back to 1969 and meets the young Tommy Lee Jones (nailed by Josh Brolin).  Hysteria is a breezy, feminist lark. HBO is still broadcasting its new epic Hemingway & Gellhorn, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman.  Where Do We Go Now? is a Lebanese comedy about village women who go to extreme lengths to extinguish the sparks of sectarian violence.

I haven’t yet seen Moonrise Kingdom, which opens widely this weekend, and which is already looking like an indie hit.  You can read descriptions and view trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD pick this week is Rampart, with a sizzling showcase performance by Woody Harrelson as a corrupt and brutal LA cop trying to stay alive and out of jail.

And don’t forget to watch the short film On S’Embrasse? (Can We Kiss?) on my site HERE.

DVD of the Week: Rampart

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In a sizzling performance, Woody Harrelson plays a corrupt and brutal LA cop trying to stay alive and out of jail.  Woody’s Dave Brown is always seeking control.  He manipulates his superiors.  From behind his badge, he unleashes sadistic brute force on every other unfortunate within his sight.  Yet he is a man out of control, whose impulses to bully,  to drink and to seduce increasingly endanger his job security, his finances and what is left of his relationship with his family.  He is already skating on the edge of self-destruction when one brutal incident is caught on video and goes viral a la Rodney King.

Rampart benefits from the one of the best large supporting casts – less an ensemble than a series of great single performances as individual characters tangle with Dave Brown.  Ben Foster (The Messenger) is brilliant as a homeless man with too many drugs and not enough meds.  Robin Wright is also superb as an emotionally damaged lawyer who sleeps with Dave until his paranoia takes over.   Sigourney Weaver and Ice Cube are two LA officials who see Dave as a walking, talking threat to public order and the City treasury.  Ned Beatty is the retired cop who has kept his finger in the police corruption racket. The Broadway star Audra McDonald plays a cop groupie that Dave meets in a bar.   As one would expect, Anne Heche and Cynthia Nixon are excellent as Dave’s two amiable but bullshit-proof ex-wives.  Brie Larson and Sammy Boyarsky are especially effective as the daughters, who figure in Rampart‘s most breathtaking scenes.

Rampart is a singularly visual film – we always know that we are in the sunwashed, diverse, sometimes explosive anarchy that is LA.  The movie is structured and shot to heighten the experience of both the chaos that Dave causes and that the chaos that he feels.  This is Oren Moverman’s second effort as writer-director, the first being the searing The Messenger, also starring Harrelson and Foster.  Moverman keeps Rampart spinning along wildly as we wonder what will happen next to unravel Dave Brown’s life.

If you need some redemption to leaven a very dark story, this is not the movie for you.  Rampart reminds us that not everyone finds redemption.  It made my list of the Best Movies of 2012 – So Far.

June at the movies

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June 2012 looks pretty promising at the movies.  June 15 is the opening for the always quirky Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, which premiered in Cannes.

We’ll also get Elena, a Russian contemporary noir about a rich guy who marries his nurse and then tells her that he is leaving his fortune to someone else.  Plotting ensues.

That weekend, I’m also looking forward to the opening of the Kristin Scott-Thomas thriller The Woman in the Fifth, the screen version of Broadway’s Rock of Ages and an indie dramedy with Emily Blunt, Your Sister’s Sister.

The next weekend, June 22, brings the opening of Woody Allen’s latest, To Rome With Love.  We’ll also get to see two blockbusters – Brave, Pixar’s much anticipated fable of a Scottish princess and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, the movie from Seth Grahame-Smith’s bestselling novel

Finally, Take This Waltz with Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen opens on June 29.  33-year-old Canadian actress Sarah Polley wrote and directed;  Polley’s debut feature was Away From Her, my pick for best movie of 2006.  I’ve seen Take This Waltz and it’s a very special movie.

You can read descriptions and watch the trailers on my Movies I’m Looking Forward To page. Here’s the trailer for The Woman in the Fifth.

Let There Be Light: groundbreaking look at those who have endured too much

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Let There Be Light is an extraordinary documentary about WW II soldiers being treated for psychological war wounds.  Made in 1946 by fabled director John Huston, Let There Be Light was suppressed by the US military until 1980 and had since been available only in a grainy, almost unintelligible version.  Thankfully, it was restored by the National Film Preservation Foundation in 2011, and now can be viewed for free on its website.

Huston followed a group of soldiers as they entered a hospital and engaged in treatment until their release from the service eight weeks later.  Huston shot 70 hours of film, which he winnowed down to this one-hour documentary.  We see the doctors use individual talk therapy, group therapy, hypnosis and sodium pentathol.  We know the condition as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).  At the time, it was popularly known as “shell-shock” or “combat fatigue” and termed “psychoneurosis” or “neuropsychosis” by the doctors.

Modern therapists will find the treatment primitive and the movie too optimistic (there’s a sense that everybody is OK after eight weeks in the hospital), but that shouldn’t obscure the compassion of the doctors and the heartbreaking stories of the men.  This was a moment in medical history when the public still needed to learn that this was a psychiatric condition, not cowardice or weakness – and that the condition was treatable.  The narrator (Huston’s father Walter) repeatedly emphasizes that these men have endured more than any human could be expected to bear.

Watch Let There Be Light HERE.

Movies to See This Week

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Karin Viard and Marine Fois in POLISSE

I’m still plugging Polisse, the riveting story of the police child protection unit in Paris.  Bernie, a very funny dark comedy by Richard Linklater, shows off Jack Black’s talents in a whole new light. The story of aged Brits seeking a low-budget retirement in India, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, is much more than a fish-out-of-water comedy. Another entertaining movie is the Norwegian dark comedy Headhunters, with Aksel Hennie as a smug corporate headhunter/art thief who panics when a high tech commando hunts him down.

Men In Black 3 is delightfully entertaining, as Will Smith time travels back to 1969 and meets the young Tommy Lee Jones (nailed by Josh Brolin).  Hysteria is a breezy, feminist lark.  HBO is still broadcasting its new epic Hemingway & Gellhorn, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman.  Where Do We Go Now? is a Lebanese comedy about village women who go to extreme lengths to extinguish the sparks of sectarian violence.

You can read descriptions and view trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD pick this week is Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle in the Irish dark comedy The Guard, one of my very favorite films from last year.

Hemingway & Gellhorn: helluva story in a flawed epic

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That Martha Gellhorn was Ernest Hemingway’s third wife only begins to tell the story.   Gellhorn’s work as a war correspondent eclipsed Hemingway’s.  She was also the only one of Hemingway’s wives to kick his butt to the curb.  (A year ago, I had a drink at the Key West bar where Gellhorn, according to local lore,  had paid the bartender $20 to introduce her to Hemingway.)  In HBO’s  Hemingway & Gellhorn, Gellhorn is played by Nicole Kidman and Hemingway by Clive Owen.

Gellhorn once said, “We were good in war. When there was no war, we made our own.”  She’s a prototype of a liberated woman and he’s an unreconstructed alpha male preoccupied with machismo, so things are not destined to end well.  (Thought:  maybe if Hemingway hadn’t thought so much about masculinity, his own masculinity would have been less selfish.)

Theirs is a helluva story, and the movie is an epic.  As the story sweeps across the Spanish Civil War, the Soviet invasion of Finland,  the liberation of China and D-Day, the  2 1/2 hours goes pretty quickly.

Hemingway & Gellhorn is directed by the great Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff,  Invasion of the Body Snatchers,  The Unbearable Lightness of Being). He keeps Hemingway & Gellhorn shifting from color to sepia to black and white, seamlessly mixing in actual historical footage and inserting the characters Zelig-like into the documentary stock.

Kaufman lives in the Bay Area and shot Hemingway & Gellhorn’s Key West, Havana, Carnegie Hall, Finland, Germany and Spain scenes in San Francisco, San Rafael, Livermore and Oakland.

I enjoyed seeing it once, but it’s definitely not a “can’t miss”, and I’m having difficulty putting my finger on why that is.  My guess is that the screenplay lingers on the Spanish Civil War a little too long and then brings on Hemingway’s dissolute period too abruptly.  The acting and the direction are just fine.