As I said yesterday, the thing that Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert did better than anyone was to evangelize good films with their series At the Movies (which ends this weekend). They helped create audiences for indie and foreign films that were ignored by the Hollywood promotion machine. They even had the guts to rate documentaries like Hoop Dreams and Crumb as their picks for the year’s best film. Without Siskel and Ebert, I would never seen some of the greatest films of the 80s and 90s.
Here are Siskel and Ebert introducing a great indie film, David Mamet’s House of Games.
And a great foreign film (that launched a great film trilogy), Blue.
And the revival of a restored classic film noir, Touch of Evil.
At the Movies ends its long run on television this weekend. The show went through different versions in the last few years, but its greatness was in the two decades of Gene Siskel and Robert Ebert – their concept, their standards and their passion.
On a personal note, I would say that, along with an excellent local art house theater, Siskel & Ebert’s At the Movies helped me develop my passion for film more than any other factor. In fact, At the Movies’ Sunday evening broadcast was the reason that I got my very first VCR.
The thing that Siskel and Ebert did better than anyone was to evangelize good films that were out of the Hollywood mainstream, bringing attention to and creating audiences for independent film, foreign films, documentaries and to new and indie film makers. Here’s a great example – Siskel and Ebert’s review of Mike Leigh’s great Secrets and Lies.
Inception andToy Story 3 are two of the year’s best.If you want a thriller, go with The Girl Who Played With Fire. Robert Duvall gives another masterful performance in Get Low. For an indie dramedy, try The Kids Are All Right. For trailers and other choices, see Movies to See Right Now.
My DVD of the week is the great 1995 documentary, Crumb. For the trailers and other DVD choices, see DVDs of the Week.
Movies on TV include The Set-Up, Leave Her to Heaven and The Fallen Sparrow, all coming up on TCM.
Well, we’re at the halfway point of the movie year – the summer movies are winding down, and the Oscar bait is still ahead of us in the autumn and holidays. So it’s time to take stock of the year’s movies to date. I now have ten movies on my list of Best Movies of 2010 – So Far. You can read my comments and watch the trailers on the Best Movies of 2010 – So Far page.
Better yet, you can see Toy Story 3and Inception in the theater this week.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, A Prophet, The Girl on the Train, Fish Tank, The Ghost Writer and Sweetgrass are all available on DVD right now. Sweetgrass is also available on Netflix streaming video.
The Secrets of Their Eyes will be available on DVD on September 21. The DVD release of my top film of the year so far, Winter’s Bone, is October 26.
Crumb (1995): The Criterion Collection has released a great documentary, Terry Zwigoff’s profile of the counterculture cartoonist R. Crumb, the creator of Keep On Truckin’, Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat and influential rock album covers. By exploring Crumb’s troubled family, Zwigoff reveals the origins of Crumb’s art. When we meet Crumb’s shattered brothers, it’s clear that Crumb’s artistic expression preserved his very sanity.
In honor of At The Movies, which ends its long run on television, let’s hear Siskel & Ebert assess Crumb. Siskel placed it #1 on his Top 10 list for 1995 and Ebert had it at #2.
Check out my other recent DVD recommendations at DVDs of the Week.
Mother is a Korean film released in America earlier this year and now available on DVD. It’s about an obsessively protective mother. Her adult son has a vague mental disability that afflicts his memory and keeps him from understanding the consequences of his words and actions. The son is framed for a murder and the mother relentless launches a campaign to find The Real Killer.
What is so inventive about this story is that it is told from the points of view of – not one, but – two unreliable narrators. This causes periodic confusion for the viewer and sets up some shockers in the plot. On the other hand, the viewer cannot relate to either main character – the dim son or the unhinged mother. The film is original, well-made and a little off-putting.
Get Low: Robert Duvall is a hermit who decides to put on his own funeral while he is alive. It runs out that his 40 years of isolation is self-imposed house arrest for a mistake in his youth. So what seems like a humorous Appalachian anecdote turns out to be a fable of redemption. Bill Murray and Sissy Spacek are excellent, while Duvall’s performance elevates the movie. It’s a little movie that is entertaining and satisfying, with a dose of greatness from Duvall.
I recommend the summer’s one high quality blockbuster, Inception. If you have followed The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, you will want to continue the trilogy with The Girl Who Played With Fire. The indie dramedy The Kids Are All Right is enjoyable, too. One of the year’s best, Toy Story 3, is still playing. For trailers and other choices, see Movies to See Right Now.
My DVD of the week is one of 2010’s best: A Prophet (Un Prophete). For the trailers and other DVD choices, see DVDs of the Week.
Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven
Movies on TV include The Set-Up and Leave Her to Heaven, coming up on TCM.
So how does A Prophet stack up against other films in that time honored genre – the Prison Movie? Can a French film rank high among the Alcatraz, Sing Sing and Folsom fare?
My top ten includes familiar themes – the fact-based stories, the great escape attempts, the characters who resist the oppressive authority and those who work the system to become crime bosses. Plus Death Row. My list includes American penitentiaries, British, French and Turkish prisons, enemy POW camps and Southern chain gangs. But some of the best known prison movies do NOT make the cut.
Edward James Olmos, Pepe Serna and William Forsythe in a very under rated prison movie
Farewell (L’affaire Farewell) is mostly a riveting Cold War espionage film, with an unfortunately off kilter secondary story that doesn’t belong in the same movie. The main story is based on fact: a senior KGB colonel becomes dissatisfied with the stagnant corruption of the Soviet Union and decides to bring about revolutionary change by leaking Soviet secrets to the West. To avoid detection, he chooses to pass the secrets in plain sight to an amateur civilian, a midlevel French corporate manager in Moscow.
The Russian lead is played by Serbian director Emir Kusturica, who gave good acting performances in The Good Thief and The Widow of St. Pierre. Kusturica is outstanding here as the canny and world-weary master spy, and he carries the film when he is on-screen.
The French lead is played by French director Guillaume Canet, who directed one of my recent favorites, Tell No One, and played a villain in that movie. Tell No One is on my list of 10 Great Movies You Missed in the 2000s. Niels Arestrup (from The Prophet, this week’s DVD choice) is excellent as the French security chief.
The spycraft, the complex Francophile character played by Kusturica (code-named “Farewell”), his struggling family life and the attempts by the amateur Frenchman to keep his head bobbing above water combine for a compelling story.
So far, so good. But then the film tries to tell another story – the geopolitical impact of Farewell’s leaks. And the tone of the film switches from the serious spy tale with serious consequences to its main characters to not-so-dark comedy. Suddenly, we see Fred Ward broadly playing Ronald Reagan as if in a Saturday Night Live skit, Philippe Magnan as a somber, one-note Francois Mitterand and Willem Dafoe lacking any kind of gravitas as a CIA chieftain. Fortunately, although this mini-farce distracts from a good film, Kusturica’s character and his performance maintain the movie’s worthiness to see.
