Cinequest – Detachment: nightmare for teachers

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Detachment is a gripping drama about the failure of American public schools from the teachers’ point of view.   Adrien Brody plays a long-term sub on a 60-day assignment at a high school that has burned out virtually every other teacher.  I can’t use the words  “grim” or “bleak” to describe this school environment – it’s downright hellish.    It’s making their very souls decay.

The students are rebellious and disrespectful, and somehow manage to be zealously apathetic.  No parents support the teachers, but some enthusiastically abuse and undermine them.  Administrators demand better test results but offer little support beyond “flavor of the month” educational fads.   The ills of the high school in Detachment are exaggerated – this is not a documentary – but there isn’t an urban public high school in American that hasn’t endured some elements of Detachment.

Brody won an Oscar for 2002’s The Pianist, and, in Detachment, he makes the most of his best role since.  Brody plays a haunted and damaged man with strong core beliefs, who, faced with a menu of almost hopeless choices, picks his battles.

Detachment’s cast is unusually deep, and the performances are outstanding.   James Caan is particularly outstanding as the veteran educator whose wicked sense of humor can still disarm the most obnoxiously insolent teen.  Christina Hendricks (Mad Men) is excellent as the young teacher hanging on to some idealism.  Blythe Danner and William Petersen (CSI) are the veterans who have seen it all.  Lucy Liu plays the educator who is clinging by her fingerprints, trying not to flame out like the basket case played by Tim Blake Nelson.  Marcia Gay Harden and Isiah Whitlock Jr. (Cedar Rapids) are dueling administrators.  Sami Gayle and Betty Kaye are superb as two troubled kids.  Louis Zorich delivers a fine performance as Brody’s failing grandfather.  There’s just not an ordinary performance in the movie.

For all its despair, Detachment doesn’t let the audience sink into a malaise.  Director Tony Kaye (American History X) keeps thing moving, and his choices in structure and pacing work well.  This is an intense film with a dark viewpoint.  It is also a very ambitious, thoughtful and originally crafted movie – one well worth seeing.

DVD of the Week: Waking Ned Devine

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David Kelly's unforgettable naked motor scooter ride in WAKING NED DEVINE

For St. Patrick’s week, I recommend the 1998 comedy Waking Ned Devine in memory of one of it stars, David Kelly, who died last month.  Kelly and the late Ian Bannen play two mischievous geezers who learn that someone in their tiny Irish village has won the national lottery, and they connive to share the wealth.  It’s very Irish and very funny.

Recapping Cinequest 22

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San Jose’s Cinequest 22 film festival has ended.  For me, Cinequest 22 meant seeing 17 features, a short and several interviews and Q&As with filmmakers – all including several world and US premieres.  I saw my share of American films, but I also saw movies from China, Spain, Belgium, the Slovak Republic, Argentina, Hungary, Russia, Sweden and Norway.

Among the festival crowd, movies about overcoming disability and disease seemed to be the most popular.  I generally preferred the comedies and romances that prove that it is still possible to write a good movie in those genres.

I especially liked two of the biggest movies in the festival:  the zany Chinese action film Let the Bullets Fly and the drama about the American education system Detachment (I’ll be commenting on Detachment on Wednesday before its release this weekend).

There were some smaller films that I hope gain distribution:  King Curling, the Norwegian comedy about a curling star who must go off his psych meds to win the big match; the Argentine modern-day spaghetti western Salt; and the hipster screwball comedy Percival’s Big Night.  If given the chance to see these films, American audiences will love them.

Here’s the trailer for King Curling.

 

 

 

Coming up on TV: She Freak

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She's lookin' for trouble and she's gonna find it

Turner Classic Movies is airing a real guilty pleasure of mine on March 16:  She Freak from 1967.  A nasty and manipulative skank mistreats all the slimeballs in a carnival until they disfigure her and she becomes the unwilling monster star of the sideshow.  It’s fun to mock the lame-o acting, the dim dialogue and the low, low, low budget.

It’s also a time capsule – with real 1967 carnival crowds in Bakersfield, Sacramento and Los Angeles.   You may recognize the diner-in-the-middle-of-nowhere because it was filmed at Piru, California (look it up on a map), where at least 50 movies have been filmed.

Look for Bill McKinney  (famed for the infamous “Squeal like a pig” scene in Deliverance) as Steve St. John.

Cinequest – Let the Bullets Fly: can 1.3 billion Chinese be wrong?

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Ever seen a movie where the outlaw rides into town and sticks up for the little guys against the local bully of a crime boss?  Well, maybe so, but you probably haven’t seen a movie like Let the Bullets Fly (Rang Zidan Fei), which is set in southeastern China in the Chinese warlord period around 1919.

For one thing, it’s an unusually exuberant film that’s extremely funny for an action western.

For another, it’s a deeply cynical assessment of government corruption.  It quickly becomes apparent that the professional bandit is more honest and reliable than any of the local institutions.  (That subtext is not lost on the Chinese public.)

And the Chinese movie fans have embraced Let the Bullets Fly.  It’s the highest-grossing Chinese language movie ever, and is the all-time #2 most popular movie in China (behind Avatar).

Writer-director Wen Jiang plays the stalwart bandit hero who substitutes himself for the newly arriving appointed Governor (played by You Ge as a hilariously unabashed sleazeball).  Jiang’s bandit comes up against the local baddie (Chow Yun Fat), who doesn’t want to relinquish any of his power or ill-gotten gains.  As the two match wits, a fast, funny and utterly rambunctious ride ensues.

In this case, 1.3 billion Chinese are correct – this is one fun movie.

Coming up on TV: The Stunt Man

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On March 11, Turner Classic Movies is showing The Stunt Man (1980).  It’s on a list of Overlooked Masterworks that I’m working on.

Steve Railsback plays a fugitive chased on to a movie location shoot.  The director (Peter O’Toole) hides him out on the set as long as he works as a stunt double in increasingly hazardous stunts.  The man on the run is attracted to the leading lady (Barbara Hershey).  It doesn’t take long for him to doubt the director’s good will and to learn that not everything is as it seems.  Shot on location at San Diego’s famed Hotel Del Coronado. Listen to Director Robert Rush describe his movie in this clip.

Cinequest – Percival’s Big Night: screwball comedy for hipsters

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Imagine if Howard Hawks were making a screwball comedy today –  a guy and a girl spar with snappy patter, survive the crazed antics of their goofy friends and fall in love.   If he set the movie in the shambles of a hipster pot dealer’s NYC apartment, you’d have Percival’s Big Night, one of the gems of Cinequest 22.

You’ll recognize the set-up:  Two 24-year-old underachievers have so far made the least of their BFAs.  Percy is infatuated with Chloe, and needs his roommate Sal to introduce her to him.  Chloe arrives with her friend Riku, who is appropriately crazy enough to match up with Sal.   The guys and girls bicker and banter, eavesdrop on each other and pair into couples.

What’s so refreshingly welcome about Percival’s Big Night is how well all of this is executed, due to the frantically paced dialogue from writer-director Jarret Kerr, who also stars as Sal.  It’s briskly paced by director Will Sullivan and very, very funny.

The cast has performed Percival’s Big Night as an off-Broadway play.  They were able to shoot the movie in six 15-minute captures that are blended together to look like one shot.  Because of the madcap pace, the audience isn’t distracted by the single shot; instead, the technique intensifies the story compressed into the small apartment.

Percival’s Big Night is enough of crowd-pleaser to deserve theatrical release; in any case, hopefully, it will be available soon on cable TV, DVD, streaming or some other outlet.

Movies to See This Week

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Writer-director Asghar Farhadi's real life daughter Samina plays the daughter at the center of A SEPARATION

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, which opens this weekend.

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.

If you still need to catch up on the Oscar winners, you can see the Best Picture Oscar winning The Artist and the rockem sockem thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,

I have also commented on Steven Spielberg’s War Horse, the sex addiction drama Shame, the biopic The Iron Lady, the feminist action thriller Haywire and Ralph Fiennes’ contemporary adaption of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.

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

My DVD pick of (last) week is the fine political drama The Ides of March with Ryan Gosling, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti and George Clooney.

The Forgiveness of Blood: modern teens trapped by ancient idiocy

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The new film by Joshua Marston, writer-director of the brilliant Maria, Full of Grace, is about a bizarre custom that has survived in modern Albania.  When a person is killed, a blood feud begins, and the relatives of the killer cannot leave their homes until released by the family of the victim.  Families can and do spend years – even a decade – in self-imposed house arrest enforced by the wronged family upon pain of death.  This is the way of the ancient Albanian oral tradition, the Kanun.  The most bizarre aspect of the house arrest is that it still exists in an otherwise modern world, among people using cell phones and text messaging.

But it is a mistake to look on The Forgiveness of Blood as “the Albanian blood feud movie” because Marston focuses on the teenagers in the family.  What can it be like for a teen to be isolated in his house indefinitely?  Teens have no greater craving than to be with their peers.  American kids can get bored while surrounded by games, Internet access and 400 TV channels.  You can imagine sitting in rural Albania with four walls and Albanian TV.  Teens are also so dramatic and impulsive, the mere threat of death isn’t always enough to prevent a rash act.  And then there are the hormones…

This is the omnipresent tension in The Forgiveness of Blood – what happens when the kids just can’t stand it any longer?   The adults all accept a cultural logic, but the kids can see that this custom doesn’t make any sense.

The movie, as befits rural Albania, has a leisurely pace, but there is a throbbing tension underneath.  That ever present tension, and the look into a strange aspect of another culture, make me recommend The Forgiveness of Blood.

Here’s the teaser (which I like more) and then the trailer.