Movie Recommendations, Rants and Ruminations
This one-minute movie, Discovery of the Woodsprites by Jadrien Steele, was shot on a cell phone. Sandisk was a sponsor of Cinequest 2010, and four films shot on cell phones – all less than a minute and six seconds – were shown before most features at the festival. You can watch all four movies at 4 Movies Shot on a Cell Phone
Here is Discovery of the Woodsprites.
My top choice choice this week is still the Irish dark comedy The Guard, starring Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle.
There are three movies now in theaters from my list of Best Movies of 2011 – So Far, including Woody Allen’s sweet, funny and thoughtful comedy Midnight in Paris. Buck is an extraordinary documentary about a real-life horse whisperer with a compelling human story. You might still be able to find Errol Morris’ documentary Tabloid, the hilarious story of Joyce McKinney, a beauty queen jailed for manacling a Mormon missionary as her sex slave and, decades later, cloning her dog.
A Little Help is a funny Jenna Fischer vehicle about a sad sack mom. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are excellent in the romcom Crazy Stupid Love. The Names of Love is an amusing but forgettable French comedy about a flighty leftwinger who seeks to educate and convert conservatives by sleeping with them.
Turkey Bowl is a delightful indie comedy available from iTunes.
Despite Rachel Weisz’s performance, The Whistleblower is a misfire – a potentially riveting story clumsily told. Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life contains a good 90-minute family drama that is completely derailed by an additional hour of mind-numbingly self-important claptrap.
You can see trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.
My DVD pick is Queen to Play.
Movies on TV this week include the Hitchcock thriller North by Northwest and the Burt Lancaster epic The Leopard, both on TCM.
In the fine French drama Queen to Play, a working class woman discovers a passion for chess in midlife. It’s a film about aspiration. First, she must muster the courage and resourcefulness to learn the game. When it becomes an obsession, she and her family must adjust.
The excellent actress Sandrine Bonnaire (Intimate Strangers) is the perfect choice to play this laconic and controlled character, who reveals her thoughts and emotions to the audience almost only through her eyes. A French-speaking Kevin Kline is also very good as the crusty American widower who teaches her chess.
Other recent DVD picks have been Kill the Irishman, The Music Never Stopped, Source Code, Potiche and Another Year.
Here’s another random movie list: Worst Movie Mothers. These range from the stomach-turning to the chuckle-inducing. And three of the top ten are in movies from the past three years.
Here’s 7-year-old Frankie “Sugar Chile” Robinson in 1955’s No Leave, No Love with Van Johnson, Keenan Wynn and Marina Koshetz. He’s playing his hit “Caldonia”. Frankie was performing “Caldonia” at a 1946 gala when he belted out “How’m I Doin’, Mr President?” to Harry Truman, which became a catch phrase of the moment.
As a teenager, Robinson chose to return to school, graduated from high school at 15 and then earned his college psychology degree.
The Whistleblower is a potentially riveting story, clumsily told. It’s a paranoid thriller about human trafficking that was tolerated and even assisted by UN peacekeepers in Bosnia. After seeing this movie, I was determined to debunk its claim of “inspired by real events”. So I looked up the story and was surprised to learn that it is essentially true. The problem is that the filmmaking caused me to think it was fictionalized.
Director Larysa Kondracki throws every Hollywood trope at the screen. The photography is dark when the movie is supposed to be foreboding, and extra dark and jerky when things are supposed to be scary. To keeps things dark and scary, Weisz uses a flashlight instead of flipping the light switch when entering an uninhabited room. Several characters exist primarily to give exposition-filled speeches. Various Eastern Europeans conveniently speak English when they encounter Rachel Weisz. And Weisz’s character is the only person in Bosnia who drives a jeep around unaccompanied.
The Whistleblower is a vehicle for star Rachel Weisz and she does a good job. David Straithern and Vanessa Redgrave contribute their customarily excellent performances. Human trafficking is topical. But this movie just isn’t up to its subject or its cast.
The best choice in theaters this week is the Irish dark comedy The Guard, starring Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle.
There are three movies now in theaters from my list of Best Movies of 2011 – So Far, including Woody Allen’s sweet, funny and thoughtful comedy Midnight in Paris. Buck is an extraordinary documentary about a real-life horse whisperer with a compelling human story. You might still be able to find Errol Morris’ documentary Tabloid, the hilarious story of Joyce McKinney, a beauty queen jailed for manacling a Mormon missionary as her sex slave and, decades later, cloning her dog.
A Little Help is a funny Jenna Fischer vehicle about a sad sack mom. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are excellent in the romcom Crazy Stupid Love. The Names of Love is an amusing but forgettable French comedy about a flighty leftwinger who seeks to educate and convert conservatives by sleeping with them.
If you have kids, Pixar’s Cars 2 is an excellent choice (adults will especially enjoy the James Bond spoof thread).
Turkey Bowl is a delightful indie comedy available from iTunes.
Despite Rachel Weisz’s performance, The Whistleblower is a misfire – a potentially riveting story clumsily told. Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life contains a good 90-minute family drama that is completely derailed by an additional hour of mind-numbingly self-important claptrap.
You can see trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.
My DVD pick is Kill the Irishman.
Movies on TV this week include two Jimmy Stewart classics: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Anatomy of a Murder on TCM.
Tom Laughlin, the groundbreaking independent film maker who created the 70s iconic character Billy Jack, turns 80 today. Laughlin originated the character in his biker exploitation movie Born Losers (1967), and then fully unleashed him in Billy Jack (1971), The Trial of Billy Jack (1974) and Billy Jack Goes to Washington (1977).
Billy Jack is a Vietnam vet who embraces his own combo of New Age mysticism and Native American spiritualism and uses martial arts to kick the crap out of the bad guys who bully women, Native Americans and teenagers. Laughlin played a character along similar themes in his The Master Gunfighter (1975), only bearded and wielding a samurai sword.
The prickly Laughlin made and distributed his films independently, and Billy Jack and Trial were huge box office successes, among the most financially successful indies ever. For The Trial of Billy Jack, Laughlin engineered the then-unheard-of simultaneous release on 1500 screens. This excellent Bill Gibron article in Pop Matters describes this precursor of the Hollywood blockbuster strategy. Billy Jack was also the first widely seen martial arts movie in America.
Despite his innovations in the movie business, Laughlin never succeeded in making a good movie. Filled with clumsy acting and hackneyed dialogue, the films are still pompous, self-important and humorless.
Laughlin’s signature as a screenwriter is heavy-handedness. It’s never enough for the bad guys in the Billy Jack movies to be bad. They also have to be racist AND mean to animals AND sexually perverted. Billy Jack opens with the bad guys illegally raiding an Indian reservation to steal a herd of wild mustangs and herd them to a corral where they will be shot at pointblank range to bring in six cents per pound as dog food. One of the Billy Jack villains seduces a 13-year-old, insists on forcing a willing floozie at knifepoint and, for good measure, stakes a saintly teacher to the ground for a ritual rape. In The Trial of Billy Jack, a government henchman shoots a child – in the back – while he is cradling a bunny.
I have a Bad Movie Festival that features unintentionally bad movies that are fun to watch and mock. The Billy Jack movies are too painful for this list. While bad enough, they are gratingly platitudinous.
Laughlin has been married since 1954 to his Billy Jack co-writer and co-star Delores Taylor.
Kill the Irishman is based on the real story of Danny Greene, a 70s Irish gangster who took on the Cleveland Mafia. Ray Stevenson (Titus Pullo on Rome) stars as the ambitious hood with uncommon charm, ruthless determination and knack for survival. All-in-all, it’s a worthy crime drama with an excellent cast of veteran “mobsters”: Christopher Walken, Vincent D’Onofrio, Tony Lo Bianco, Paul Sorvino, Steve Schirripa,Robert Davi, Vinny Vella and Mike Starr.
Other recent DVD picks have been The Music Never Stopped, Source Code, Potiche and Another Year.
This Irish dark comedy is a showpiece for Brendan Gleeson as a lowbrow cop happening upon an international drug conspiracy. Gleeson is always very good and was especially memorable in director Martin McDonagh’s 2008 In Bruges, which was either the funniest hit man movie ever or the darkest and most violent buddy comedy ever. This time, McDonagh’s brother John Michael McDonagh directs Gleeson as a very canny man who convincingly strives to appear much dumber than he is. The perfect foil for Gleeson’s sloppy local cop is the refined FBI agent played by Don Cheadle. Those familiar with Ireland will recognize the Connemara Coast. Don’t miss The Guard.