Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Aline Kuppenheim in CHILE ’76. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – Three excellent international films are playing arthouse theaters: the gripping Holocaust thriller Persian Lessons, the Chilean suspenser Chile ’76, and the mesmerizing Italian exploration of of male friendship and self-discovery, The Eight Mountains. See as many of them as you can find.

Plus, I have new reviews of the corporate thriller Tetris, set amid the implosion of the USSR, and the insightful documentary Body Parts, about on-screen sex from a female perspective.

REMEMBRANCE

Glenda Jackson in Elizabeth R.

Glenda Jackson won Oscars for Women in Love and a A Touch of Class. I most admired her as the fierce Queen Bess in the 1971 miniseries Elizabeth R. Many actors have tried on politics in real life, but Jackson took off 23 years from her acting career to serve as a hard Left Labor Party MP, before returning to the stage as an acclaimed King Lear.

CURRENT MOVIES

Cristiano Sassella and Lupo Barbiero in THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS. Courtesy of Janus Films.

WATCH AT HOME

THE BRA

The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:

  • The Bra: Just your average silent Azerbaijani comedy. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Revenge: The web is spun. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Blue Ruin: fresh take on the revenge thriller. Amazon, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Listening to Kenny G.: derision, devotion and a hard-working guy. HBO.
  • Piggy: surprising and darkly hilarious. Amazon, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Riders of Justice: thriller, comedy and much, much more.
  • Drinking Buddies: an unusually genuine romantic comedy. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.

ON TV

Edmond O’Brien in D.O.A.

On June 28, Turner Classic Movies brings us one of my favorites – 83 minutes of noir hysteria titled D.O.A. This gripping whodunit opens with a man walking into a police station to report HIS OWN MURDER. The man (Edmond O’Brien) finds out that he has been dosed with a poison for which there is no antidote – and that he has only a few days to live. He desperately races the clock to find out who has murdered him and why. Much of D.O.A. was shot on location in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and one SF scene has one of the first cinematic glimpses into Beat culture. The little known director Rudolph Maté gave the film a great look, which shouldn’t be a surprise because Maté had been Oscar-nominated five times as a cinematographer. The next year, he followed D.O.A. with another solid noir, Union Station, with William Holden and Barry Fitzgerald.

TETRIS: corporate thriller amid communist collapse

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Photo caption: Taron Egerton in TETRIS. Courtesy of AppleTV.

Tetris, the story of the race for the rights to the video game, is an entertaining corporate thriller.

Taron Egerton (unrecognizable from Rocketman) plays Henk Rogers, a small-time entrepreneur who is betting everything on snaring the rights to Tetris for Nintendo. As written and as played by Egerton, Henk Rogers is an ever-earnest hustler (in the best sense), with a Ted Lasso-like moral core. Rogers is plunged into a competition where the other players, a seasoned software merchant and a British billionaire, have no compunction about cheating.

To complicate things, the video game rights are owned by the government of the USSR, which is in the throes of imminent collapse. It’s unclear who can ink the deal for the Soviet state, which always moves with cumbersome suspicion and xenophobia. Here, the Soviets don’t really appreciate the value of Tetris, but they know it’s valuable and are desperate not to be taken by Westerners.

Egerton is good, and benefits from vivid supporting performances by Robert Allam as Robert Maxwell, the blustering magnate on the precipice of financial collapse, Igor Grabuzov as a menacing wannabe oligarch and the ever-reliable Toby Jones as a crooked competitor.

It’s a fun watch. Tetris is streaming on AppleTV.

BODY PARTS: on-screen sex from the female gaze

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Photo caption: A scene from BODY PARTS. Courtesy of Shout! Studios.

The documentary Body Parts is about moviemaking and sex – and from a female point of view. That is, of course, overdue because we’ve had a century of movies greenlit, financed and made by men, operating from a male perspective and generally without accountability. Of course, movies have always reflected our society and culture. How movies have been made – and how they’re being made now – is fascinating stuff. Especially the sex part.

With Body Parts, director Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and producer Helen Hood Scheer have created an impressively comprehensive survey of history and current practices. We get unflinching looks at titillation and exploitation, the casting couch and worse (Harvey Weinstein). And there are fascinating, behind the scenes procedurals on the filming of scenes of sexual intimacy, including the new deployment of intimacy coordinators in filmmaking.

Jane Fonda leads a brigade of actress talking heads who share their experiences. Of course, Fonda is an Oscar-winning movie star and a feminist icon. But before that, she was a starlet in an age where there were essentially zero women’s voices in filmmaking. While the Production Code was still in its final days in the US, she was acting in European films that were free of those restrictions, but before the women’s liberation movement had traction. Fonda’s candor (and ruefulness) adds important perspective to Body Parts.

On IMDb’s User Reviews, one perceptive contributor has noted that “men are giving this an average rating of 5.8 while women are averaging an 8.3.” I understand why women love Body Parts, but not why some men don’t. It’s decidedly not a screed, and, as a man, I didn’t find it at all scolding, threatening or unpleasant.

I screened Body Parts for the SLO Film Fest. Body Parts is streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Nahuel Pérez Biscayart and Lars Eidinger in PERSIAN LESSONS. Photo courtesy of Cohen Media Group.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – The gripping Persian Lessons is opening more widely in LA and the Bay Area. Plus new reviews of the Chilean suspenser Chile ’76, the mesmerizing Italian exploration of of male friendship and self-discovery, The Eight Mountains, and the unpretentious Korean action comedy The Roundup: No Way Out.

REMEMBRANCE

Actor Treat Williams began his career with a string of interesting movies from 1976 through 1981: The Ritz, Hair, and the highly acclaimed Prince of the City. He continued a prolific and respectable career for four more decades, but his films never matched his early ones.

CURRENT MOVIES

Aline Kuppenheim in CHILE ’76. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

WATCH AT HOME

The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:

Siren Jørgensen in REVENGE. Courtesy of Cinequest.
  • Revenge: The web is spun. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Blue Ruin: fresh take on the revenge thriller. Amazon, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Listening to Kenny G.: derision, devotion and a hard-working guy. HBO.
  • Piggy: surprising and darkly hilarious. Amazon, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Riders of Justice: thriller, comedy and much, much more.
  • The Bra: Just your average silent Azerbaijani comedy. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Drinking Buddies: an unusually genuine romantic comedy. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.

ON TV

Lizabeth Scott, Dick Powell and Raymond Burr in PITFALL

On June 19, Turner Classic Movies features one of my Overlooked Noir, Pitfall (1948), a noir thriller without either a conventional sap or a conventional femme fatale. Dick Powell plays a WW II vet who is bored with the post-war suburban humdrum, and Lizabeth Scott plays a gal with terrible taste in boyfriends. Neither deserves to be dragged into a thriller, but they are. Raymond Burr, again, makes for a menacing sicko stalker.

Dick Powell and Lizabeth Scott in PITFALL

THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS: two men, each finding himself

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Photo caption: Cristiano Sassella and Lupo Barbiero in THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS. Courtesy of Janus Films.

The sweeping Italian drama The Eight Mountains is a mesmerizing exploration of of male friendship and self-discovery. Pietro is the 11-year-old son of a successful engineer in bustling, industrial Turin. When his parents rent a summer apartment in a tiny village high in the Italian Alps, he meets the only local child, Bruno, also an 11-year-boy. The two become inseparable and forge the profound, lifelong bond that can only come from a friendship you are lucky enough to make in childhood.

Each summer, the two cavort together in the mountains. Pietro’s father (Filippo Timi), a force nature, revels in climbing the local mountains and brings the boys along, not afraid to challenge them with a treacherous cliff or a bottomless abyss.

In contrast to Pietro’s, Bruno ‘s family shows him neither warmth nor affection, and values him only for his manual labor. Pietro’s parents generously offer to take in the teenage Bruno so he can realize his potential, but Bruno’s ignorant and selfish father nixes the arrangement.

There’s a pause in their relationship as each man grows as a man. A family event draws Pietro (Luca Marinelli) and Bruno (Alessandro Borghi) back together as adults. Bruno is committed to living in his mountains. Pietro has been drifting, an undisciplined wannabe writer, but he, too, is drawn to the mountains where he spent the best days of his youth with Bruno. As Neil Young sang, “All my changes were there”. Both men are sons of Pietro’s father, one literally, and both chase the father’s dream in their individualistic ways.

The Eight Mountains is a remarkably genuine portrait of a masculine friendship, between boys and then between men. It captures the way such a friendship can resume instantly after a years-long pause. And it authentically depicts how male friends can communicate without verbalizing.

This story of two men’s individual growth and common friendship over 30 years, an intimate and tightly focused human story, is juxtaposed against an epic setting. The scenes of mountaineering in the Italian Alps are stunning enough, and then part of the story moves to the Nepali Himalayas.

Directors Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch adapted the screenplay from a novel by Paolo Cognetti. I am getting very grumpy about movies that are too long, and I was skeptical of The Eight Mountains’ 2 1/2 hour duration (even vowing beforehand to walk out if it became a slog).  But the story really does take that long to unwind, and I’m glad that van Groeningen and Vandermeersch didn’t rush it.

The Eight Mountains is playing in select arthouse theaters. I’ll let you know when it becomes more widely accessible.

THE ROUNDUP: NO WAY OUT: a loveable lug with a gift for the one-punch knockout

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Photo caption: Don Lee as Detective Ma in THE ROUNDUP: NO WAY OUT. Courtesy of Capelight Pictures

Sometimes we just need an unapologetic gene movie, and the Korean action comedy The Roundup: No Way Out is just that. Our burly hero, detective Ma Seok-do (Don Lee), is a loveable lug with a gift for the one-punch knockout. Ma is also the smartest cop on the force and must suffer the fools around him. But it’s his singular physicality that makes for bull-in-the-china shop mayhem when he is forced into violence.

The Roundup: No Way Out is the third movie in the Detective Ma franchise, following The Outlaws (2017) and The Roundup, Korea’s #1 hit film of 2022.

Don Lee (right) as Detective Ma in THE ROUNDUP: NO WAY OUT. Courtesy of Capelight Pictures

I think that much of Detective Ma Seok-do’s appeal is that, as determined as he is to get the bad guys, he doesn’t have any of the meanness, bitterness or alienation of a Dirty Harry-type cop hero. Interestingly, the character’s name resembles Don Lee’s non-stage name, Ma Dong-seok.

The plot of The Roundup: No Way Out involves the interruption of a designer drug deal, which results in two gangs racing the cops to find a missing $30 million drug stash. Each villainous gang leader villains is more ruthless and cruel than the last. This time, for a little added umami, one of the gangs is from Japan.

The charm of The Roundup: No Way Out is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. There are no deep themes to explore here and no message – just an amiable protagonist, some laughs and almost non-stop action.

CHILE ’76: simmering suspense

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Photo caption: Aline Kuppenheim in CHILE ’76. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

Chile ’76 is a masterfully understated thriller set in the first days of Pinochet’s coup in Chile and the resultant reign of terror.

Carmen (Aline Kuppenheim), the wife of a prosperous Santiago physician, is away at the family’s beach house when she is approached by the small coastal town’s priest. Knowing that she has medical training, the priest asks her to secretly nurse a young man (Nicolás Sepúlveda) with a gunshot wound. The priest says that he is hiding the young man because he had become a petty criminal through hard luck and deserves a break; but Carmen is savvy enough enough to know that the young man must be a leftist who is hunted by Pinochet’s secret police. To care for the young man would be taking a grievous risk. If discovered, the consequences for Carmen, and perhaps for her family, would be unspeakable.

Carmen embraces the risk, and the tension simmers. The audience follows her, knowing that her secret could be uncovered at any moment. All the time, she is carrying on the appearance of a privileged matron, directing servants and focused on interior decorating and the children’s birthday cakes.

Chile ’76 is the first feature for director and co-writer Manuela Martelli. What Martelli achieves in Chile ’76 is a remarkably subtle suspenser, without jump scares or on-screen violence. Instead, Martelli builds tension in the minds of the audience, as we wonder if her phone is tapped and if she is being followed. Carmen’s each chance encounter becomes more sinister. Even the meticulous tissue wrapping of new store-bought shoes is chilling. Without seeing it, we are ever conscious of the horrors of merciless repression.

Aline Kuppenheim and Nicolás Sepúlveda in in CHILE ’76. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

Aline Kuppenheim is excellent as Carmen, a cipher who seems so confident in her role as affluent doctor’s wife and grandmother. She likes her cigarettes and a drink, and lets others lead the cocktail party banter. Her family takes her presence for granted and would never suspect her of going on a potentially deadly secret mission.

So, why is Carmen doing this? There are clues. Although she is not overtly political, she doesn’t embrace the rightwing sentiments of her peers. She is a bit of a do-gooder, volunteering to read to the vulnerable. Because of her gender, she wasn’t able to choose a career more important (or dangerous). The answers are behind Carmen’s impassive affect. Still waters run deep.

Chile ’76 is all about how Kuppenheim’s Carmen navigates her situation. In deciding “where to look from”, Martelli says that she and cinematographer Yarará Rodríguez adopted a “rule…to always be with her, sometimes to look at her, and sometimes to look at what she was looking.”

(Back in 2004, Martelli was one of the kid actors in the fine coming of age film Machuca.)

Chile ’76 is now playing in select theaters, including in LA and the Bay Area.

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Sam Harkness in SAM NOW. Courtesy of HA/HA Productions.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – my top pick is the gripping Persian Lessons.

CURRENT MOVIES

WATCH AT HOME

LISTENING TO KENNY G. Courtesy of HBO.

The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:

  • Listening to Kenny G.: derision, devotion and a hard-working guy. HBO.
  • Blue Ruin: fresh take on the revenge thriller. Amazon, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Piggy: surprising and darkly hilarious. Amazon, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Riders of Justice: thriller, comedy and much, much more.
  • The Bra: Just your average silent Azerbaijani comedy. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Drinking Buddies: an unusually genuine romantic comedy. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Revenge: The web is spun. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.

ON TV

Samuel Fuller in A FULLER LIFE. Courtesy of Chrisam Films, Inc.

On June 14, Turner Classic Movies will air A Fuller Life, the biodoc of one of my favorite film directors, the irascible Samuel Fuller, the master of the In Your Face Movie. In Depression Era New York City, Fuller grew up working as a child in the tabloid newspaper industry and became a boy reporter at 17. Fuller never lost his gift for the shocking hook, and he reveled unashamedly in the salacious; perhaps the best example is his neo-noir The Naked Kiss, which opens with a prostitute beating her john senseless with her shoe; she moves to another town to go straight, finds herself in a relationship with the rich, handsome and seemingly saintly benefactor of a hospital for disabled children – only to find out that he is preying sexually on the children.

Without any hint of snobbery or pretention, Fuller just told great stories. His The Crimson Kimono was racially groundbreaking by normalizing a Japanese-American protagonist, and he used the outrageous to comment on race in Shock Corridor and White Dog.

In World War II, Fuller served in the First Infantry Division (the “Big Red One”), which landed in North Africa, Sicily and Normandy, and which liberated the Falkenau death camp. Immersed in the horrors of war, he was determined to make war movies with no “recruitment value”, and his are some of the best, especially The Steel Helmet and the autobiographical The Big Red One.

Fuller has been revered by Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and a host of French filmmakers. I don’t remember Marty or Quentin appearing in A Fuller Life, but William Friedkin, Wim Wenders, Buck Henry, James Toback and Monte Hellman do. A Fuller Life is dierected by Sam Fuller’s daughter Samantha Fuller, who has sourced the film exquisitely.

PERSIAN LESSONS: walking the tightrope

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Photo caption: Nahuel Pérez Biscayart in PERSIAN LESSONS. Photo courtesy of Cohen Media Group.

The Holocaust thriller Persian Lessons walks a tightrope of tension, and the ending is very emotionally powerful. Gilles (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) is a Belgian Jew sent to a German concentration camp. He seeks to avoid death by claiming to be Persian named Reza. He is not anticipating that a Nazi officer will demand to be taught Farsi. That officer, Koch (Lars Eidinger), aspires to a postwar future as a Tehran restaurateur.

Gilles/Reza, who doesn’t know ANY Farsi, must invent an entire faux Farsi language, word-by-word, and remember it. All the while, he’s sweating out the likelihood that his ruse will be discovered.

The blustery Koch, with his Persian fixation, is an oddball. A chef when he opportunistically joined the Nazi Party, he’s not a True Believer, although he is very comfortable with genocide. In another time or place, he could have easily been a corrupt official or a mafioso. While Gilles/Reza is the protagonist, the story rises and falls on Koch’s whims, and Eidinger’s performance is excellent.

Nazis were bullies at their core, and some of Persian Lessons’ lighter moments are when Gilles/Reza is offscreen and the Nazis’ own foibles, with their sexual peccadilloes and their petty internal power plays, are on display. There’s an especially funny scene when Koch gets a leg up on his boss, the camp’s Commandant.

Nahuel Pérez Biscayart and Lars Eidinger in PERSIAN LESSONS. Photo courtesy of Cohen Media Group.

Persian Lessons was directed by Ukrainian-born Vadim Perelman (2003’s Oscar nominated House of Sand and Fog). Belarus tried to submit Persian Lessons for an Academy Award, but it was too international to qualify as a Belarus film. IMDb catalogues it as a Russian/German/Belarus film; Biscayart is Argentine, Eidinger is German, and screenwriter Ilja Zofin is Russian.

I screened Persian Lessons for its North American premiere at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival in July 2021. It opens June 9 at the Laemmle Royal in LA and more widely on June 16, including San Francisco’s Opera Plaza and the Landmark Pasadena.

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: BEING MARY TYLER MOORE. Courtesy of HBO.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – a new review of the irresistible family psychological documentary Sam Now, which begin streaming on June 6. And I warn you away from 32 Sounds – check out the better movies below.

Note that the wonderful documentary about writer Bob Caro and editor Robert Gottlieb, Turn Every Page, is now widely available to stream.

CURRENT MOVIES

WATCH AT HOME

LEVINSKY PARK. Courtesy of JFI.

The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:

  • Levinsky Park: refuge for refugees? Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube.
  • The Speed Cubers: odd, and then profound. Netflix.
  • Rodents of Unusual Size: 5 million orange-toothed critters and a Cajun octogenarian. Amazon, AppleTV.
  • Satan & Adam: more than an odd couple. Amazon, AppleTV.
  • The 11th Green: a thinking person’s paranoid conspiracy. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • The Wave: Everything you want in a disaster movie. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Magallanes: some wrongs cannot be righted. AppleTV.

ON TV

Robert Montgomery, Walter Huston and Madge Evans in HELL BELOW.

On June 7, TCM airs the 1933 submarine movie Hell Below. It’s a pretty contrived Robert Montgomery vehicle, but there are some elements worth fast-forwarding to. The comic relief is provided by Jimmy Durante, who plays the ship’s cook Ptomaine; Baby Boomers tend to remember Durante for his shtick on variety shows of the 1950s and 1960s – here’s the unadulterated Durante. Durante even boxes with a kangaroo! 

Hell Below also features Walter Huston, who was a major star at the time and who, with his naturalistic acting style and relatability, I think would be a star today. Madge Evans plays the love interest, and Durante is joined by the bullfrog-voiced Eugene Pallette.

Eugene Pallette and Jimmy Durante in HELL BELOW.