Movie Recommendations, Rants and Ruminations
On June 24, Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting this 1951 Alfred Hitchcock suspense thriller – one of his very best. A hypothetical discussion about murdering inconvenient people turns out to be not so hypothetical.
Robert Walker plays one of the creepiest villains in movie history. The tennis match and carousel finale are great set pieces.
In Cars 2, Pixar reprises the cast of Cars. But the champion racer Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) steps aside so the story can focus on his dimbulb tow truck buddy Mater (Larry the Cable Guy). The inspired plot sends up the James Bond genre with wonderfully Bondish British spies voiced by Michael Caine and Emily Mortimer.
I am a huge fan of Pixar. Pixar understands that the best animation in human history is not enough by itself, and also makes the effort to tell great, great stories. Pixar screenwriting is incredibly superior to that of other animation studios. Despite that, I wasn’t a big fan of Cars. In fact, Cars and Ratatouille have been the only Pixar films that haven’t made my Best of the Year lists.
I liked Cars 2 much better than Cars because of the Bond spoof. If you have kids, don’t miss it.
This week, the best choices are the sweet, funny and thoughtful Beginners and Midnight in Paris. If you have kids, Pixar’s Cars 2 is an excellent choice (adults will especially enjoy the James Bond spoof thread). So is Super 8, a wonderful coming of age story embedded in a sci fi action thriller.
In Beginners, Ewan McGregor plays a guy who tends to the depressive and sabotages his relationships. His father (Christopher Plummer) has just died after coming out of the closet at age 75. Can he make things work out with Melanie Laurent (Inglorious Basterds)?
Woody Allen’s sweet and smart Midnight in Paris is his best comedy in twenty-five years. Owen Wilson accompanies fiancée Rachel McAdams to Paris, where she is intrigued by pretentious blowhard Michael Sheen, leaving Wilson to explore midnight Paris and time travel back to the Paris of the Lost Generation.
13 Assassins is brilliantly staged and photographed, and is one of the best recent action films; an honorable samurai must assemble and lead a team of thirteen to hack their way through a psychotically sadistic noble’s 200 bodyguards.
In Bridesmaids, Kristen Wiig plays a woman whose insecurities keep her from seeing the good and the possible in her life; it’s funny, but not one of the year’s best.
The Hangover Part 2 is just not original enough, and, consequently, not funny enough.
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.
For trailers and other choices,see Movies to See Right Now.
I haven’t yet seen the horse whisperer documentary Buck or the comic road tripper The Trip, which open this weekend. You can see trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.
My DVD pick is the nastily hard-bitten noir Kiss Me Deadly.
Movies on TV this week include the Hitchcock thriller Strangers on a Train and Kiss Me Deadly on TCM.
Ewan McGregor’s dad (Christopher Plummer) has just died, shortly after coming out of the closet. As if this weren’t enough to deal with, McGregor is a depressive anyway, with a rich history of sabotaging his relationships. But then he meets Melanie Laurent (Inglorious Basterds) (and they meet cute).
This is a winning comedy – one of the year’s best movies. It’s smart, sweet and original. All of the performances are excellent, especially Plummer’s, which should garner him an Oscar nomination. All in all, Beginners is a notable achievement by director Mike Mills (Thumbsucker).
Every ten years, Terrence Malick directs a film that critics call a masterpiece (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World). Here, he has created a bewildering, pompous mess.
The core of The Tree of Life is fine 90-minute family drama about a boy growing up in 1950s Waco (a superb Hunter McCracken) and the friction with his caring but brutishly domineering father (Brad Pitt). Unfortunately, there is another 60 minutes in the movie.
That additional 60 minutes is a self-important muddle that tries to lift the story to an exploration of life itself – from creation through afterlife. There are beautiful shots of clouds and waterfalls, with unintelligible whisperings from cast members. There are Bible verses, the Big Bang and dinosaurs (yes, dinosaurs). And, in case you don’t get how seriously the movie takes itself, there is an overbearingly pretentious score.
Plus, there is Sean Penn, silently brooding about his childhood from a skyscraper. And wandering through a desert in his suit. And reunited with his dead relatives on a tidal flat.
Malick’s pretense succeeds only in distracting the audience from could have been a good story and a beautifully shot film. Bottom line: painfully unwatchable.
Now film noir is by definition dark and cynical, but 1955’s Kiss Me Deadly is downright pissed off and nasty. Ralph Meeker stars as LA private eye Mike Hammer in this delightfully lowbrow film noir, based on a Mickey Spillane novel. Much of the fun comes from the menacing nuclear glow of the briefcase that is the film’s MacGuffin.
On his indieWIRE blog, Peter Bogdanovich writes that Robert Aldrich hated Spillane’s pulp so much that he concluded the screenplay with nuclear annihilation.
In the subversive 1984 cult classic Repo Man, the glowing briefcase reappears in the truck of a repossessed sedan.
The Criterion Collection has just released its DVD of Kiss Me Deadly.
On June 18, Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting this 1934 screwball comedy, which holds up as well today as it did 77 years ago. A flamboyantly narcissistic Broadway producer (John Barrymore) has fallen on hard times and hops a transcontinental train to persuade his former star (Carole Lombard), now an A-list movie star, to headline his new venture. Barrymore’s shameless self-entitlement and hyper dramatic neediness makes for one of the funniest performances in the movies.
Here’s one of my Best Movies of 2011 – So Far.
Well, they have ambulance chasers in Argentina, too, and that seamy world is the setting for this dark and violent noirish thriller. Ricardo Darin (The Secrets of Their Eyes, Nine Queens) stars as a suspended lawyer running insurance scams. (I think of Darin as the Argentine Joe Mantegna.) Set in the gloom of urban nighttime emergency rooms and funeral homes, it’s a love story between the lawyer and an equally troubled doctor (Martina Gusman), nestled into a crime thriller.
The story is as cynical and dark as it comes. The handheld camera keeps it out of the noir category, but the story is as hard-bitten as Kiss Me Deadly or any of the really nasty noirs. The violence is realistic, and there’s lots of it – I had never seen anyone beaten to death with a file drawer before. If you like dark and edgy (and I do), this is the film for you.
The top picks this week are Incendies, Midnight in Paris and Cave of Forgotten Dreams. I’m still urging people to see the searing drama Incendies, the year’s best film so far. Upon their mother’s death, a young man and woman learn for the first time of their father and their brother and journey from Quebec to the Middle East to uncover family secrets. As they bumble around Lebanon, we see the mother’s experience in flashbacks. We learn before they do that their lives were created – literally – by the violence of the Lebanese civil war.
Woody Allen’s sweet and smart Midnight in Paris is his best comedy in twenty-five years. Owen Wilson accompanies fiancée Rachel McAdams to Paris, where she is intrigued by pretentious blowhard Michael Sheen, leaving Wilson to explore midnight Paris and time travel back to the Paris of the Lost Generation.
Don’t miss Cave of Forgotten Dreams while it can be seen in 3D; Werner Herzog explores the amazing 30,000 year old Chauvet cave paintings.
13 Assassins is brilliantly staged and photographed, and is one of the best recent action films; an honorable samurai must assemble and lead a team of thirteen to hack their way through a psychotically sadistic noble’s 200 bodyguards.
In Bridesmaids, Kristen Wiig plays a woman whose insecurities keep her from seeing the good and the possible in her life; it’s funny, but not one of the year’s best. The Hangover Part 2 is just not original enough, and, consequently, not funny enough.
For trailers and other choices, see Movies to See Right Now.
I haven’t yet seen Beginners or The Trip, which open this weekend with very strong buzz. You can see trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.
My DVD pick is one of the best movies from last year, True Grit.
Movies on TV this week include the brilliant Buster Keaton masterpiece The General on TCM.
Joel and Ethan Coen (Fargo, Blood Simple, No Country for Old Men) have brought us the splendid Old West story of Mattie Ross, a girl of unrelenting resolve and moxie played by 14-year-old Hailee Steinfeld in a breakthrough performance. Without her performance, the movie could not have been the success that it is, and Steinfeld has no problem standing up to the likes of Jeff Bridges, Josh Brolin and Matt Damon. Mattie’s merciless smarts and resourcefulness become clear in her negotiations with prairie mogul Col. Stonehill (magnificently played by Dakin Matthews).
Jeff Bridges is perfect as the hilarious, oft-besotted and frequently lethal Rooster Cogburn. Damon, Brolin and the rest of the cast are excellent, especially Matthews and Barry Pepper.
This film is made from the same source material as, but is not a remake of, the 1969 John Wayne oater (a movie that I particularly dislike). The 1969 film is burdened by a hammy effort by Wayne, the miscast and undertalented Kim Darby (playing a 14-year-old at 22) and Glenn Campbell.
The film opens (without title credits) with the old hymn Leaning on the Everlasting Arms, signaling that the Coen Brothers will play True Grit absolutely straight within the traditional Western genre – no ironic winks at the audience.
True Grit is one of my Best Movies of 2010.