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.
Christop Walz in his Oscar winning role in Inglorious Basterds
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.
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.
Lou Tayor Pucci and JK Simmons in The Music Never Stopped
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 winnerThe King’s Speech is on my Best Movies of 2010 and is still kicking around in some theaters.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The Must See film right now is The Adjustment Bureau, a first rate love story embedded in the action thriller genre. The Music Never Stopped is a crowd pleaser that opens this weekend.
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). The Illusionist is the wistful and charming animated story of a small time magician who drifts through an ever bleaker array of gigs while helping a waif blossom.
Oscar winners True Grit, The King’s Speech and The Fighter are on my Best Movies of 2010 and are still kicking around in some theaters, as is Oscar nominee 127 Hours.
On March 17, Turner Classic Movies is airing Trouble Along the Way (1953). John Wayne plays a gleefully corrupt football coach who buys players in an attempt to build up the football program overnight at a small Catholic school. And he utters the famous coachspeak, “Winning isn’t everything – it’s the only thing.” John Wayne wasn’t the first to utter that line – it was UCLA coach Red Sanders. But the Duke said it nine years before Vince Lombardi did.
I discuss Trouble Along the Way and other football movies on my Best Sports Movies (scroll down for football).
