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.
This week’s DVD of the Week is a film from earlier this year: A Prophet (Un Prophete). It is the story of a young French-Arab from his first terrifying day in prison to his release. Once he starts to adjust to his role in the prison as the toady of a Corsican crime boss, no one else in the movie knows what he is really thinking. It evokes the DeNiro scenes in The Godfather: Part II, except set with gritty realism in contemporary France. Nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar. One of my Best Movies of 2010 – So Far and pretty high on my list of 10 Best Prison Movies.
Check out my other recent DVD recommendations at DVDs of the Week.
The Girl Who Played With Fire (Flickan Som Lekte Med Elden): This is a highly entertaining follow-up to my personal favorite film of the year so far, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Again, the story revolves around Lisbeth Salander, the tiny woman with a lethal mix of damage and drive, played by the Swedish actress Noomi Rapace. Rapace’s Lisbeth is a tiny fury of a Goth hacker. At only 88 pounds, so she will lose a fistfight with a man; but she prevails with her smarts, resourcefulness and machine-like relentlessness. Lisbeth is always mad AND always gets even. As I have written before, Lisbeth Salander is the best new crime drama character since Helen Mirren’s Inspector Jane Tennyson.
In The Girl Who Plays With Fire, Lisbeth is framed for a triple murder. She must find The Real Killer while on the run, aided by a mostly independent investigation by her ally, journalist Mikael Blomkvist. Their parallel investigations lead to a villain much closer to Lisbeth than one could imagine. Plays with Fire has the structure of a detective procedural, but has the tone of a thriller.
Although I liked them both, I did prefer The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo to Plays With Fire. The Wife and two friends who had all read the books, strongly preferred Played with Fire to Dragon Tattoo. I don’t know whether this is a gender thing or whether people who know the story react to the movies differently. I generally enjoy major plot twists more when I don’t see them coming, and I have certainly found some big surprises in both Dragon Tattoo and Plays With Fire.
Plays With Fire is the second part of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy, to be followed in October by The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.
First, the big Hollywood release Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps: I wasn’t a huge fan of Wall Street, and I’m not a fan of Shia LaBeouf, but this trailer makes the sequel look really good. Having Carey Mulligan helps. Michael Douglas’ fine performance in Solitary Man looks to be an excellent tuneup for another turn as Gordon Gekko. Releases September 24.
And now the indie It’s Kind of a Funny Story. It’s a dark comedy set in a locked psychiatric facility by Directors Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden (Half Nelson, Sugar). It’s hard for me to find humor in psych wards, but I found the trailer to be winning. Keir Gilchrist stars with Zach Galifianakis and the very promising Emma Roberts. Also releases September 24.
