On April 2, Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting the 1951 Korean War movie The Steel Helmet. It’s a gritty classic by the great writer-director Sam Fuller, a WWII combat vet who brooked no sentimentality about war. Gene Evans, a favorite of the two Sams (Fuller and Peckinpah), is especially good as the sergeant.
DVD of the Week: Fair Game
Ripped from the headlines, this is the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson story with Naomi Watts and Sean Penn. We already knew the story of Joe Wilson exposing the Bush Administration’s false WMD pretext for the Iraq war, and the White House striking back by outing an American covert intelligence operative – Wilson’s wife, Plame. But this film adds two more dimensions to the story.
First, this screenplay is based on Plame’s book, and the first act chronicles Plame’s exploits as a CIA officer. She indeed ran undercover operations. The depiction of real life, contemporary spycraft is even more thrilling than a fictional spy movie.
Second, the story also explores the excruciating pressure on the Plame/Wilson marriage. Joe is an able and principled guy with a little too much testosterone. His short fuse leads him to act impulsively to pick a fight that has even more severe consequences for his wife. In principle, Joe is right, but Valerie’s career is ruined, her family’s safety is threatened and her social life is shattered; she is both scared and resentful. And at the moment that they are under the most unbearable stress, each of them wants to react by moving in an opposite direction. Will the relationship survive? This dimension – a study of an adult relationship – makes this film much more than a typical history.
It’s also on my list of Best Movies of 2010.
Certified Copy: Hmmmmmmmm
Abbas Kiarostami, the critically acclaimed Iranian-born director, presents us with a puzzle set in beautiful Tuscan hill towns. An apparently unacquainted man and woman spend the day together. Then they pretend that they are married. And then they seem to have been long (and unhappily) married.
So after watching the film, one may ask if the couple was married and only pretending not to be at first? Or did they instead start pretending to be married and just get more realistic toward the end of the film? Or do different stages of the film depict different realities? If you need to know what is going on in a movie and why, this is not a good choice for you.
The couple is played by the Juliette Binoche, and the British opera singer William Shimell. They are excellent. Binoche won the Best Actress award at Cannes for this role.
Some Carnage to Look Forward To
Roman Polanski is currently in post-production with his newest film Carnage, based on the popular comic play God of Carnage by the French playwright Yasmina Reza. God of Carnage won the 2009 Tony for Best Play. It is the story of two couples whose sons have tangled in a schoolboy row; the couples meet to discuss the matter, but the discussion keeps veers off into bickering and rants.
In Polanski’s movie, the couples are played by John C. Reilly and Jodie Foster and Christoph Walz and Kate Winslet. On Broadway, the likes of Jeff Daniels, Marcia Gay Harden, James Gandolfini, Hope Davis, Christine Lahti, Jimmy Smits, Dylan Baker and Lucy Liu cycled through the roles. Daniels has played both male roles and Harden won a Tony for Best Actress.
Polanski (Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, The Pianist) is one of the greatest living directors. With last year’s The Ghost Writer, Polanski proved that he’s still on the top of game. So I’m looking forward to this one, too.
The Music Never Stopped: sentimental movies can be good, after all
Here’s a crowd pleasing movie. Parents find their long lost adult son in a hospital, suffering from a brain tumor that has erased his much of his memory (and all of his short term memory). A speech therapist discovers that the son’s personality is sparked by music that he remembers from his teens. The father and the son have been estranged since the son left after an argument between them. The father finds that he can reach over the memory disability and re-connect by learning the son’s music.
The son’s music is all from the period 1964 to 1970 – and this music is another character in the film. Dad leaves behind his Big Band sensibilities to embrace Bob Dylan, Donovan, Steppenwolf, Crosby Stills & Nash and, especially the Grateful Dead. Baby Boomers and Dead Heads will really enjoy this movie from the music alone. Indeed, the Dead’s Bob Weir and Mickey Hart have been out supporting the movie.
The film is a showcase for the excellent actor J.K. Simmons, who plays the father. Simmons is always very, very good (Juno‘s dad, getting fired in Up in the Air and on TV’s Oz and Law and Order). Here, he plays a guy who is secure in his own righteousness, but then sees and accepts his own responsibility for the estrangement, and whose love for his son motivates him to make some big changes. Lou Taylor Pucci is excellent as the son. Julia Ormond does a good job playing the speech therapist.
Now I generally hate “disease of the week” movies. Really hate them. But here the real story is about the relationship between father and son, and the rebuilding of the bond between them. The memory disability, along with their past and the father’s initial stubbornness, is just another obstacle to their communication.
The story is based on an actual case described by Oliver Sacks in his essay The Last Hippie.
Updated Movies to See Right Now
The best bets in theaters now are the combo thriller/love story The Adjustment Bureau and the Baby Boomer-friendly The Music Never Stopped.
Cedar Rapids is a fun and unpretentious comedy. Nora’s Will is a wry family dramedy, which is also now playing on HBO Signature as Cinco Dias Sin Nora (Five Days Without Nora).
Oscar winner The King’s Speech is on my Best Movies of 2010 and is still kicking around in some theaters.
For trailers and other choices, see Movies to See Right Now.
You can see trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.
My DVD pick is The Fighter. For my recent DVD choices (including trailers), see DVDs of the Week.
Movies on TV this week include two all-time greats, Lawrence of Arabia and All About Eve on TCM.
Elizabeth Taylor – Farewell to a Movie Star
Elizabeth Taylor was a fine actress and a compelling screen presence. The movies are full of extraordinary beauties, but few could better dominate a camera’s attention.
She won her Oscar for Butterfield 8, which was entirely her vehicle. But my favorite Elizabeth Taylor performances were in the ensemble casts of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Giant. Although A Place in the Sun is Montgomery Clift’s movie, Elizabeth Taylor is essential – if an 18-year-old Elizabeth Taylor fell in love with him, what man wouldn’t at least think about killing for her?
DVD of the Week: The Fighter
Here’s you chance to see the Oscar-winning performance by Christian Bale and Melissa Leo in The Fighter. Mark Wahlberg stars as a boxer trying to succeed despite his crack addict brother (Bale) and his powerful, trashy mom (Leo). As one would expect, Bale nails the flashier role of the addict, deluding himself about both past glories and his importance to his family. Leo is almost unrecognized under her teased hair, and is accompanied by a hilarious Greek Chorus of adult daughters, each trashier than the last.
The boxing scenes are very well done, and Wahlberg matches Sylvester Stallone and Hilary Swank in making us believe that he is, indeed, a boxer. See my list of 10 Best Boxing Movies. It’s also on my list of Best Movies of 2010.
Coming Up on TV: Another Sam Fuller Trashterpiece
On March 23, Turner Classic Movies is airing Shock Corridor (1963). Director Sam Fuller started out as a tabloid reporter and never missed a chance to shamelessly sensationalize a subject (except for war, which he insisted on treating realistically). Shock Corridor is one of Fuller’s most sensationalistic films.
In Shock Corridor, Peter Breck plays a reporter who gets himself committed to an insane asylum so he can gather facts for an expose. He meets an African-American patient who dons Klan garb and gives white supremacist speeches in the corridor. He meets a fellow patient named Psycho who thinks he’s pregnant. He is attacked by a horny mob of women in the nymphomaniac ward, which causes him to yell a truly great movie line, “Nymphos!”. And then things don’t go so well for him after the electroshock therapy…
And, as you can see from the trailer, if Sam Fuller could get a stripper in his movie, he would find a way.
Hereafter’s special effects and the real tsunami
In recommending Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter as my DVD of the Week, I mentioned the amazing tsunami scene at the beginning of the film. You can easily find and watch this sequence on YouTube by searching for “Hereafter tsunami”.
Here’s a featurette by Scanline VFX that illustrates how they created the Oscar-nominated special effects for Hereafter.
To compare it with the real thing, here are some real tsunami videos from last week.