DVD of the Week: Project Nim

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The documentary Project Nim tells the extraordinary story of a chimpanzee that was taught a human language – American Sign Language.  In a remarkable and compelling journey, the chimp Nim is first placed as a baby with a human hippie family and then at a university-owned country estate and at college laboratories.  Amazingly, he learns to use an ASL vocabulary – not just responding to commands, but initiating communication and forming sentences.  Then, the experiment ends, and he is off to an assortment of post-placements, some terrifying.

Along the way, we hear from the motley assortment of humans involved in his raising, his exploitation and his care. One human who enters the story as a grad student, Bob Ingersoll, emerges as the hero of the story.  It’s the story of a chimp, but we learn more about the foibles of humans.

Acclaimed documentarian James Marsh (Man on Wire) delivers another great story – one of the 2011’s best documentaries.

Coming up on HBO: Hemingway and Gellhorn

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HBO has released the trailer for Hemingway & Gellhorn, which will broadcast beginning on May 28.  It’s the story of Ernest Hemingway and his third wife Martha Gellhorn.   Gellhorn was a leggy blonde whose work as a war correspondent leading up to and during World War II eclipsed Hemingway’s.  She was also the only one of Hemingway’s wives to kick his butt to the curb.  Gellhorn is played by the leggy Nicole Kidman.  Clive Owen is Hemingway.

(A year ago, I had a drink at the Key West bar where Gellhorn had paid the bartender $20 to introduce her to Hemingway; I understand that the movie may move the bar to Bimini).

Hemingway & Gellhorn is directed by Philip Kaufman, one of the great American directors.  His masterpiece is The Right Stuff, the story of the Mercury astronauts.  But his remake of the sci fi horror classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers is also excellent.  And I just rewatched his art film about love and sex set in the Prague Spring of 1968 and its aftermath, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and it still stands up.  That’s three top-rate movies in three different genres, an accomplishment few filmmakers can claim.

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. Incidentally, earlier this year, Kaufman was in the house at Noir City this year for Bad Girl Night.

I’ve added Hemingway & Gellhorn to Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

Movies to See This Week

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DETACHMENT

Yes, it’s Despair Week at the Movie Gourmet, where you can experience the hopeless human experience with my three top picks.  First, the gripping drama Detachment features a top-rate performance by Adrien Brody as a teacher in a hellish school system that decays teachers’ souls.  In a sizzling performance, Woody Harrelson plays a corrupt and brutal LA cop trying to stay alive and out of jail in Rampart.  The searing and brilliantly constructed Iranian drama A Separation won the Best Foreign Language Oscar.

Joshua Marston, writer-director of the brilliant Maria, Full of Grace, has made a fine drama set in Albania, The Forgiveness of Blood.  It’s slightly less depressing than my top three this week.

Safe House is a fine paranoid action spy thriller with Denzel Washington and the director’s pedal jammed to the floor. Thin Ice is a Fargo Lite diversion.

The Best Picture Oscar-winning The Artist is still playing in theaters.

I have also commented on the biopics My Week with Marilyn (thumbs up) and The Iron Lady (thumbs down).

I haven’t yet seen Footnote and The Kid with the Bike, which open 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 Take Shelter, #2 on my list of Best Movies of 2011 and probably the single most overlooked film of last year.

Coming up on TV: Night and the City

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Richard Widmark running out of luck in THE NIGHT AND THE CITY

On March 25, Turner Classic Movies is showing the under appreciated film noir classic Night in the City (1950).  Richard Widmark is superb as a  loser who tries to corner the pro wrestling business in post-war London – and, as in any noir classic, it doesn’t end well for the sap.

The American director Jules Dassin had just made the noir classics The Naked City and Thieves’ Highway when he shot Night and the City in the UK.  He was blackballed in the McCarthy Era and never moved back to the US.

At the request of a studio exec, Dassin created a role in Night and the City for the stunningly beautiful but emotionally fragile Gene Tierney.  The cast also includes real life wrestlers Stanislaus Zbyszko and Mike Mazurki.

Night in the City (along with The Wrestler) represents wrestling on my list of Best Sports Movies., and there’s a clip of an extended wrestling scene from the movie on that page.  (Also, Dassin’s Brute Force makes my list of Best Prison Movies.)

DVD of the Week: Take Shelter

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My DVD pick is Take Shelter, #2 on my list of  Best Movies of 2011 and probably the single most overlooked film of last year.

Michael Shannon (Shotgun Stories, Agent Van Alden in Boardwalk Empire) is perhaps our best creep actor. And what’s creepier than watching a solid parent and spouse enduring a full-fledged psychotic breakdown?

Shannon plays the most grounded guy in America until he starts having terrifying dreams and then hallucinations. One of his parents is mentally ill, and he is determined to resist a breakdown and protect his family. Unlike in a lesser screenplay, Shannon’s protagonist is very aware that he may be going crazy and is digging his fingernails into sanity.

Shannon gave a breakthrough performance in Shotgun Stories, by writer/director Jeff Nichols. (In the excellent Shotgun Stories, Nichols created a dysfunctional family with a father so dismissive of his offspring that he non-named them Son, Kid and Boy.) This time, Nichols has given Shannon the role of a lifetime, for which Shannon should have received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.

This is also the performance that should have earned Jessica Chastain her Oscar nod as Shannon’s wife. Chastain must react to her husband’s behavior, which starts out quirky, becomes troublesome and spirals down to GET ME OUT OF HERE.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5U4TtYpKIc]

movies for late March

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We begin on March 23 with Israel’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, Footnote.  A rising Talmudic scholar sees his career-topping prize accidentally awarded to his grumpy father.  It won the the screenplay award at Cannes.

The Kid with a Bike is the latest from the Belgian Dardennes brothers, two of my favorite film makers (The Son, Rosetta).  A 12-year-old boy wants to find the father who dumped him at a children’s home, but meets a woman who becomes his de facto foster mom.  The Kid with the Bike will be released in the US by Sundance Selects on March 23.

The Salt of the Earth (Gianni e le donne) stars and is written and directed by Gianni Di Gregorio, just like the very fun Mid-August Lunch.  Releases March 30.

You can read descriptions and watch trailers at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

Here’s the trailer for Footnote.

Coming up on TV: Boomerang!

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BOOMERANG!

Having practiced law in my misspent youth, I often roll my eyes (or change the channel) when I see something in a courtroom movie that could NEVER happen in real life.  Watching Elia Kazan’s 1957 Boomerang!, I saw the same District Attorney convict a guy of murder, change his mind and then successfully prove the guy’s innocence.  Although scornful of the plot, I kept watching and was shocked to see that the ending credits claimed that this was a true story.  In disbelief, I looked it up and found that, indeed, while state’s attorney for Bridgeport, Connecticut, Homer Stille Cummings convicted – and then cleared – Harold Israel of the same murder!  Cummings then went on to become the Attorney General of the United States.

Once I got over my disbelief, I realized that Boomerang! is a pretty good movie.  It’s one of Elia Kazan’s very first features, just before Gentleman’s Agreement, Panic in the Streets, A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, East of Eden, Baby Doll and A Face in the Crowd.

Boomerang! opens with a shocking scene – a man executes a priest with a pointblank gunshot on a busy downtown street and then melts away.  Dana Andrews plays the prosecutor and Arthur Kennedy is the hapless convicted guy.  The fine cast also features Lee J. Cobb, Ed Begley (in the first of his 103 screen credits) and (one of my favorites) Sam Levene.  Look for Karl Malden and Brian Keith in bit roles.

Turner Classic Movies is airing Boomerang! on March 22.

The real Homer Stille Cummings

 

Cinequest – Visible World: creepy, even for a voyeur movie

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visible worldIn the unsettling Slovak film Visible World (Vidite ny Svet), the protagonist Oliver lives by himself in a high-rise apartment building and trains his binoculars on unsuspecting people in the high-rise across the street. The tag line is “There’s a man with binoculars at the window, watching the people across the street. And he’s definitely not James Stewart.”

It’s an uncommon voyeur film.  First, the voyeur isn’t looking at any bad behavior by the people across the street.  Second, although he is compelled to spy, he isn’t getting any apparent sexual kick out of what he sees.  Instead – and this is the really, really disturbing aspect – he is using what he sees to interfere with their lives – and to insinuate himself into their lives.

Most women like a guy who makes that extra effort to find out what she likes. But going through a woman’s garbage to see what products she uses – before he has met her – that’s pretty high up on the Creep-O-Meter.  “I like Chilean Carmenere.  You do, too? Imagine that!”

Oliver is played by Ivan Trojan as an extremely terse and focused guy, but one who can surprise the audience by putting on an act of affability to get what he wants. He is an odd duck, for sure – often rudely abrupt with people who wander between him and his obsessions.  But he is that unusually high functioning crazy who can hide how very, very sick he is.

I saw Visible World at its North American premiere at Cinequest 22.

Cinequest – Four Lovers: those French sure are open-minded

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Today and tomorrow, I’m catching up by commenting on two films from last week’s Cinequest 22.

In the thoughtful French film Four Lovers, two happily married couples hit it off socially.  They quickly decide that it’s okay to have sex with each others’ spouses.  It’s not “spouse swapping”.  It’s an arrangement whereby both couples continue to live as couples, but each adds a permitted fling with one of the other couple.

Plenty of explicit sex follows, but this is not primarily an erotic film.  Instead it explores what follows from this arrangement.  What rules need to be agreed upon? Is there jealousy and/or insecurity?  Will anyone go past the fling to fall in love with the new partner? Can one be in love with more than one lover?  Can they keep this from their kids?  How deeply do they need their new lovers?  How will this affect the original marriages?

It’s all complicated.  In fact, I think that watching this movie would be far superior than trying this out in real life.

Spoiler Alert:  After the arrangement ends, the couples return to their original married lives.  Something is missing in their lives, but it’s not the sexual thrill of the affairs.  Instead each grieves the loss of a lover.  Given this loss, all four are unhappy for the first time in the film and perhaps wishing that it had never happened.

Movies to See This Week

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It's not going well for Adrien Brody in DETACHMENT

The gripping new drama Detachment features a top-rate performance by Adrien Brody as a teacher in a hellish school system that decays teachers’ souls.

In a sizzling performance, Woody Harrelson plays a corrupt and brutal LA cop trying to stay alive and out of jail in Rampart.

The searing and brilliantly constructed Iranian drama A Separation won the Best Foreign Language Oscar.

Joshua Marston, writer-director of the brilliant Maria, Full of Grace has made a fine drama set in Albania, The Forgiveness of Blood.

Safe House is a fine paranoid action spy thriller with Denzel Washington and the director’s pedal jammed to the floor. Thin Ice is a Fargo Lite diversion.

The Best Picture Oscar-winning The Artist is still playing in theaters.

I have also commented on  the biopics My Week with Marilyn (thumbs up) and The Iron Lady (thumbs down).

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

My DVD pick of St. Patrick’s week is the Irish comedy Waking Ned Devine.