Coming Up on TV: Diabolique

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If you like suspense, you will want to check out Diabolique, to be broadcast by Turner Classic Movies on May 12.  The headmaster of a provincial boarding school is so cruel, even sadistic, that everyone wants him dead, especially his wife and his mistress.  When he goes missing, the police drain the murky pool where the killers dumped the body, and the killers get a big surprise.  Now the suspense from director Henri-Georges Clouzot really starts.

A master of the thriller, Clouzot was nicknamed the French Hitchcock.  In an achingly scary scene from Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, two truck drivers try to get a long truck around a cliff side hairpin curve  – and the truck is filled with nitroglycerin.  If you like Diabolique, you’ll probably also like another domestic murder – this time set in Paris – Quai des Orfevres.

DVD of the Week: Haywire

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One of the first 2012 releases, Haywire is a rockem sockem spy action thriller by Steven Soderbergh, starring Gina Carano.  I was not familiar with Gina Carano, who is an accomplished star of mixed martial arts.  Haywire is a vehicle seeking to launch her as an action film star.  And why not, for she is attractive (with “real girl”, not Hollywood, looks), well-endowed and can kick ass?  She can, after all, kick ass for real, not just pretend to in a movie.

As an actor, Carano is plenty good enough.  She’s way better than Chuck Norris, Jackie Chan and the Rock, and is at least as good as Schwarzenegger.  And, when she beats up a swat team, it is believable (and fun).

Soderbergh is always interesting, as he moves between high brow/arty (sex lies and videotape, The Good German) and lowbrow/popular (Ocean’s Twelve, Contagion).  Here he takes an inexperienced leading woman and an unremarkable story and makes the most of it.  It’s a good watch.

Soderbergh delivers fast pacing and great locations (Barcelona, Dublin, New Mexico).  Soderbergh and Carano benefit from a top rate cast:  Michael Douglas, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas, Michael Angarano and Bill Paxton.  Overall, it’s good entertainment and, for once,  I’m actually looking forward to the sequels.

Pirates! Band of Misfits: merely amusing

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I’ve always loved the good-hearted and wry Aardman Studio films like Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run.  Aardman’s Pirates! Band of Misfits doesn’t quite match up to Aardman’s past work.  The claymation is exquisite and the jokes are smart, but the overall effect is merely amusing and guffaw-free.  Silly pirate stereotypes should have been much richer fodder for the writers.

I saw this in 3D, but I wouldn’t pay the 3D premium if I were taking a bunch of kids to see it.

The Hunter: looks for the beast, finds a thriller

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In this paranoid thriller, a sinister corporation sends a professional hunter (Willem Dafoe) to Tasmania to find the Tasmanian Tiger, thought extinct.  He is given a cover identity as a scientist, which immediately makes him a target of hostile loggers   He is renting a room in the primitive cabin of a scientist who searched for the Tasmanian Tiger and has been missing and is presumed dead by everyone except his traumatized family.  The scientist’s wife is so heavily sedated that she only briefly wakes into a stupor, the 6-year-old son has become mute and only the 10-year-old daughter is resilient enough to converse.  The suspense begins immediately.  Will he find the Tasmanian Tiger? What happened to the scientist? Is he being hunted himself?

The weirdly beautiful scenery and breathtaking vistas of Tasmania enhance the dramatic tension.  The forests are so primordial that you expect to see a creature from Jurassic park bursting out.

Dafoe’s hunter spends much of the movie alone in the wilderness with no one to talk to and, being on a secret mission, he can’t tell other people what he finds anyway.  So his discoveries have to be depicted by the director and their impacts reflected in Dafoe’s expressive eyes.

Overall, it’s a fine genre film, although the paranoia is over the top and some will find the ending too stark.  The scenes of Dafoe’s driven hunter, solitary in the wilderness, make up for the flaws.

Movies to See this Week

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MONSIEUR LAZHAR

My top pick this week is once again Monsieur Lazhar, the story of French-Canadian fifth graders recovering from a traumatic experience with their replacement teacher, an Algerian immigrant. It’s an emotionally compelling film that was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.

On a lighter note, Goon is a hockey comedy that manages to be violent, raunchy and sweet.

In Footnote, a rising Talmudic scholar sees his career-topping prize accidentally awarded to his grumpy father. This potentially comic situation reveals the characters of the two men.

Then there’s the searing and brilliantly constructed Iranian drama A Separation, which won the Best Foreign Language Oscar, and the Best Picture Oscar-winning The Artist. Both are still still playing in theaters.

You can skip Damsels in Distress, Whit Stillman’s misfire of an absurdist campus comedy.

I have not yet seen Pirates! Band of Misfits, The Five-Year Engagement or The Hunter, all opening this week. You can read descriptions and view trailers of these and other upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD pick this week is Michele Williams’ dazzling performance in My Week with Marilyn.

Coming Up on TV: Lawrence of Arabia

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Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia

It’s time to revisit a spectacle. On April 29, Turner Classic movies is broadcasting Lawrence of Arabia. For decades, many of us watched this epic squeezed into tinny-sounding TVs. In 1989, I was fortunate enough to see the director’s cut in an old movie palace. Now technology has caught up, and modern large screen HD televisions can do this wide screen classic justice. Similarly, modern home sound systems can work with the great Maurice Jarre soundtrack.

Nobody has ever created better epics than director David Lean (Bridge Over the River Kwai, Dr. Zhivago). Peter O’Toole stars at the moment of his greatest physical beauty. The rest of the cast is unsurpassed: Omar Sharif, Jose Ferrer, Anthony Quinn, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains, Arthur Kennedy, thousands of extras and entire herds of camels. The vast and severe Arabian desert is a character unto itself.

Settle in and watch the whole thing – and remember what “epic” really means.

DVD of the Week: My Week with Marilyn

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Not only is Michele Williams one of our finest film actors (Wendy and Lucy, Blue Valentine, Brokeback Mountain),  but she has the courage to play that icon Marilyn Monroe.  And she does so in a dazzling performance.  Williams so inhabits the persona of Marilyn that we suspend recognition of the physical differences between the two.

My Week with Marilyn is about a young man observing the encounter between Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) during the making of the 1957’s The Prince and the Showgirl.  That movie starred and was directed by Olivier, who expected a high level of craft, promptness and professionalism from all actors.  Naturally, Marilyn, with all of her neediness, professional unreliabilty and reliance on The Method, was a bad fit.

Williams perfectly tunes in each frequency of the Marilyn dial, from the terrified, insecure actress to the confident sex symbol.  There’s a great moment – after we’ve already seen her as troubled, flirtatious, needy, mischievous and, above all, lonely  – where she announces that she will become “Her”; she flips an inner switch and becomes the Marilyn sex symbol persona, delighting a crowd of regular folks.

The underrated Zoe Wanamaker has a great turn as Marilyn’s Method acting coach. Judi Dench is perfect as a kind veteran actress.  Emma Watson (so good as Hermione in the Harry Potter films) has an unfortunately tiny role as a non-wizard young adult.  Dougray Scott, Dominic Cooper, Julia Ormand and Toby Jones fill out the great cast.  Wanamaker, Scott and Jones play American characters flawlessly.

Upcoming movies: late April edition

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After a dry spell, we’re starting to get promising movies by the handful.  This weekend will bring a promising Hollywood romantic comedy, The Five-Year Engagement, the animated Pirates! Band of Misfits and the indie thriller The Hunter.

The Five-Year Engagement features Forgetting Sarah Marshall’s writer-star Jason Segal and the director Nicholas Stoller, plus Emily Blunt.

Pirates! Band of Misfits comes from Aardman Studios, the folks that created Wallace and Gromit.

The weekend after will bring The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a story of aged Brits seeking a low-budget retirement in India that looks like fluff, but fun fluff.  Great cast:  Bill Nighy, Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Maggie Smith, Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire), Celia Imrie, Penelope Wilton (Downton Abbey).

You can read descriptions and watch the trailers on my Movies I’m Looking Forward To page.

In The Hunter,  Willem Dafoe stars as a hunter sent to find the Tasmanian Tiger, thought extinct.  He looks for the beast, finds a thriller.  Here’s the trailer.

 

Coming Up on TV: Pigskin Parade

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Football fans may be interested in the silly comedy Pigskin Parade because it shows how college football was played in 1936.  It airs on Turner Classic Movies on April 22.

Like many sports movies, Pigskin Parade ends with a climactic game – and there’s footage of real football being played in a snowstorm (in long shot) interspersed with the comic movie football (in medium shot).  You can see the formations, men in motion and punt formation.  I knew about the leather helmets for the players, but I didn’t know that the referees wore unstriped white Knickerbockers and baker boy caps or that the coaches sent in  substitutions by written note.

Jack Haley plays a dim football coach hired at the fictional Texas State.  His spark plug wife (the very funny Patsy Kelly) is the real football brain.  Out in the countryside, they find a hayseed QB who can throw the ball out of the stadium and outrun a deer when he is barefoot; he is played by Stuart Erwin (who garnered a Supporting Actor Oscar nod).

In the final game, Texas State, referred to as “Texas” by the radio broadcaster, is a big underdog to Yale.  Yale was indeed a power at the time.  Yale players won the Heisman in both 1936 and 1937.

Pigskin Parade was the first feature film for Judy Garland and the second acting credit of over 200 for Elisha Cook Jr.  Betty Grable appears before she became a star.  Judy, Betty and Elisha are all billed below the comic quartet The Yacht Club Boys.  (Creepiness alert:  all but one of The Yacht Club Boys were way too old to be hanging around a college campus acting zany and wearing varsity gear.)

Movies to See this Week

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MONSIEUR LAZHAR

My top pick this week is Monsieur Lazhar, the story of French-Canadian fifth graders recovering from a traumatic experience with their replacement teacher, an Algerian immigrant.  It’s an emotionally compelling film that was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.

On a lighter note, Goon is a hockey comedy that manages to be violent, raunchy and sweet.

In Footnote, a rising Talmudic scholar sees his career-topping prize accidentally awarded to his grumpy father. This potentially comic situation reveals the characters of the two men.

Then there’s the searing and brilliantly constructed Iranian drama A Separation, which won the Best Foreign Language Oscar, and the Best Picture Oscar-winning The Artist.  Both are still still playing in theaters.

You can skip Damsels in Distress, Whit Stillman’s misfire of an absurdist campus comedy.

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

My DVD pick this week is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, director David Fincher’s hold-on-to-your-seat version of Stieg Larsson’s rip snorting stories centered on the damaged and driven Goth hacker Lisbeth Salander.