Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Wes Studi and Dale Dickey in A LOVE SONG. Courtesy of Bleecker Street.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – a new review of A Love Song with Dale Dickey and Wes Studi, the how-could-this-happen? documentary My Old School, and the fluffy Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris. I’ve also completely refreshed most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE. Plus my preview of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, now underway.

I’m traveling and don’t have time to write a review, but I saw Nope and it is excellent – an unusually intelligent popcorn movie. I’m not a big horror/sci fi guy and I loved it. One of the best movies of 2022.

REMEMBRANCE

Bob Rafaelson was a New Hollywood director, a peer of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, William Friedkin, Peter Bogdanovich and Brian De Palma. But Rafaelson only made one great movie, Five Easy Pieces, which he co-wrote. Five Easy Pieces, though, is by itself an eternal legacy.

ICYMI here are my remembrances of actor L.Q. Jones and composer Monty Norman (scroll down).

CURRENT MOVIES

WATCH AT HOME

Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman in BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD

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

  • Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead: for Philip Seymour Hoffman. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Jockey: he finally grapples with himself. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • The Visitor: self-isolation no longer. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • The Bra: Just your average silent Azerbaijani comedy. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • The East: how do we punish corporate crime? HBO, Amazon, AppleTV, redbox.
  • Project Nim: a chimp learns the foibles of humans. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube.
  • Bombshell: The Hedy Lamar Story: the world’s most beautiful woman and her secrets. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, KINO Now.
  • The Gatekeepers: winning tactics make for a losing strategy. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Colma: The Musical: a refreshing hoot. Amazon, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Auggie: Who do you see when you put on the glasses? Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube
  • Step Into Liquid: “insanely gorgeous” surfing. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Riding Giants: obsessive search for the biggest wave to surf. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.

ON TV

Claire Trevor in RAW DEAL

Tomorrow night, July 30, Turner Classic Movies presets Raw Deal, featuring some of the best dialogue in all of film noir, a love triangle and the superb cinematography of John Alton. A con (Dennis O’Keefe) escapes from prison and goes on the run with his girlfriend (Claire Trevor) and a hostage, his prison social worker (Marsha Hunt). None of them know that the jailbreak had been engineered by the convict’s ruthless partner (Raymond Burr), who was expecting that he would be killed in the attempt. On the desperate road trip, attractions blossom, and the Bad Girl and the Good Girl begin to share the Good/Bad Guy.

Raw Deal is one of my Overlooked Noir, and TCM will air it Saturday night and Sunday morning on its Noir Alley with an intro and an outro by Eddie Muller.

Marsha Hunt, Claire Trevor and Dennis O’Keefe in RAW DEAL

A LOVE SONG: bittersweet, heartfelt and funny

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Photo caption: Dale Dickey in A LOVE SONG. Courtesy of San Luis Obispo Film Fest.

A Love Song is a welcome starring vehicle for the longtime character actress Dale Dickey, whose every good night and every bad night is etched into the lines on her face. Dickey plays Faye, whom we meet camping alone in her travel trailer in the remote high desert of Western Colorado.

After a decades-long marriage, Faye has been widowed for seven years, paralyzed by grief in the first two. Now she moves confidently around her solo campsite, displaying her serious outdoor skills and an impressive touch for fishing for crawdads.

It is revealed that Faye is waiting for someone. She has invited a high school friend, whom she hasn’t seen for over three decades, to re-connect. That friend is Lito (Wes Studi), who has also been widowed after a long marriage.

A Love Song wistfully explores loneliness and how grief can impact the ability to love again.

Dickey is on screen almost every moment, and she’s great. Dickey has a way of making even her supporting performances unforgettable. She broke through as the scary meth matriarch in Winter’s Bone, and played the flinty bank teller in Hell and High Water.

Wes Studi and Dale Dickey in A LOVE SONG. Courtesy of Bleecker Street.

Studi recently received a deserved lifetime Oscar. His performances as very scary Native American warriors in Dances with Wolves and The Last of the Mohicans sparked a very impressive body of film work.

Dickey and Studi have said that each had their very first on-screen kiss in A Love Song.

A Love Song is the first feature for writer-director Max Waterman-Silver, who uses his debut to show off his native Western Colorado. I found his direction inconsistent, but he delivered two perfect single-shot scenes, both of very long duration, one when Lito and Faye are sitting with guitars, the other when the two are standing outside Faye’s trailer.

Faye is occasionally visited by four Native American brothers with their little sister as their spokeswoman. Waterman-Silver’s sense of comic timing in these scenes is flawless.

Both The Wife and I were periodically distracted by holes or inconsistencies in the screenplay. At one point, the dog inexplicably vanishes (fortunately temporarily). And there’s no way that someone with Faye’s seasoning would hike up a mountain without water, especially when she can’t make it back down by nightfall.

I admire filmmakers who make their films short enough (82 minutes) so they can pace them slowly. The Wife, less patient with slow burns, still thought that it ran long.

The performances by Dickey and Studi are reason enough to watch this bittersweet, gentle, heartfelt and funny film. I saw A Love Song at the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival. It releases into theaters this weekend.

MY OLD SCHOOL: how could this happen? and why?

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Alan Cumming in MY OLD SCHOOL, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

The absorbing documentary My Old School is about a guy who fooled his Scottish high school classmates and, notably, the school authorities, into believing that he was not who he really was. The impersonation was extreme, audacious and more than a little creepy, and resulted in a scandal well-known in the British Isles.

Writer-director Jono McLeod was one of those classmates, and he has been able to garner more than a handful of the kids and teachers who were eyewitnesses. And he secured over five hours of audio from the impersonator himself, which are brilliantly lip-synced by actor Alan Cummings (kind of the opposite of voiced by).

MY OLD SCHOOL, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

If that weren’t creative enough, McLeod uses animation to illustrate key moments in the story. And, surprisingly, there comes a video clip of a high school performance of the musical South Pacific, a performance that would be excruciatingly mundane – except for what the audience knows.

In telling My Old School, McLeod reveals the deception itself right away and then gradually unspools a series of more shockers, about how the ruse was executed, with whose help and the motivation. It’s quite the story.

My Old School opens in theaters this weekend, including at the Opera Plaza in San Francisco.

MRS. HARRIS GOES TO PARIS: nothing wrong with a dose of sentimentality once in a while

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Photo caption: Alba Baptista and Lesley Manville in MRS. HARRIS GOES TO PARIS. Courtesy of Focus Features / © 2021 Ada Films Ltd – Harris Squared Kft.

In the goodhearted Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, Lesley Manville plays the titular character, a war widow who cleans houses in 1957 London. Although there is nothing in her hardscrabble circumstance that seems to justify her bubbly hopefulness, we in the audience know that everything is going to work out. This is an unabashed Feel Good movie.

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is an unchallenging, fluffy film and doesn’t pretend to be anything else. It is well-crafted and well-acted, especially by Manville.

Lesley Manville has amassed a distinguished body of work in Mike Leigh films alone: Secrets & Lies, Topsy-Turvy, High Hopes, All or Nothing, Vera Drake, and, most brilliantly, in Another Year. She was Oscar-nominated for Phantom Thread.

The great Isabelle Huppert plays the sourpuss role that Lesley Manville often plays in Mike Leigh films. I’m always glad to see Isabelle Huppert and Nathalie Baye, even in the one-dimensional roles they’ve gotten in the past two years.

The one singular segment of Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is a depiction of the opening for the 1957 Dior collection. I have little (maybe no) interest in fashion, but I was riveted.

I wasn’t planning to see this movie, but The Wife really felt like sitting in a movie theater, which I always encourage. Although I had predicted the the ending within 30 minutes, it wasn’t a painful experience.

Nothing wrong with a dose of sentimentality once in a while. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is in theaters.

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Antonio Banderas, Penélope Cruz and Oscar Martínez in OFFICIAL COMPETITION. Courtesy of IFC Films.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – a preview of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, including new reviews of Speer Goes to Hollywood and The Faithful: The King, The Pope and The Princess. Plus reviews of the year’s wittiest movie so far, Official Competition, and My Donkey, My Lover and I.

REMEMBRANCES

L.Q. Jones in HANG ‘EM HIGH

Actor L.Q. Jones, born with the already Texas-colorful name of Justus E. McQueen, took the name of his first movie character (in Battle Cry) and rode it through 165 roles, bringing something interesting and different in every one. His NYT obit quoted him an liking to play “a heavy that is not crazy or deranged — although we play those, of course — but rather someone who is a heavy because he enjoys being a heavy.” Jones worked in some excellent war movies (Men in War, Torpedo Run, The Naked and the Dead, Hell Is for Heroes) and revisionist westerns (The Wild Bunch, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Hang ‘Em High). He was also a delightful raconteur, which you can enjy by searching for “LQ Jones” on YouTube.

Composer Monty Norman created the James Bond Theme for Dr. No, which has been used in every Bond film flick since. Norman massaged a tune he had written earlier, and, as his NYT obit quoted him, “I thought, ‘My God, that’s it. His sexiness, his mystery, his ruthlessness — it’s all there in a few notes’.”

CURRENT MOVIES

WATCH AT HOME

TOUCHING THE VOID

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

  • Touching the Void: the gripping true life story of a mountaineer who had to cut his climbing partner’s rope. Amazon, AppleTV.
  • The Outfit: no one is just what they seem to be. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Jockey: he finally grapples with himself. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • The Imposter: you gotta see this. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Step Into Liquid: “insanely gorgeous” surfing. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Riding Giants: obsessive search for the biggest wave to surf. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Electrick Children: magical Mormon runaways in Vegas. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube.
  • NUTS!: the rise and fall of a testicular empire. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Dick Johnson Is Dead: funny, heartfelt and frequently bizarre. Netflix.
  • The Women’s Balcony: a righteous man must keep his woman happy. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • The Handmaiden: gorgeous, erotic and a helluva plot. Amazon (included with Prime), Vudu.
  • Very Semi-Serious: glorious The New Yorker cartoons. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube.

ON TV


Cynda Williams and Billy Bob Thornton in ONE FALSE MOVE

On July 27, Turner Classic Movies will air the gripping contemporary neo-noir One False Move. This is a fundamentally noir story – there are guys overreaching for greed and ambition, a femme fatale, and a very dark secret. America’s original sin – race – is at the core of One False Move.

The tale begins with a home invasion in Los Angeles. Two vicious professional robbers, with one’s beautiful girlfriend, steal money and cocaine, leaving a trail of corpses. The crime is solved right away – the cops know who did it and that the murderers are headed to a small town in Arkansas. The LA cops fly to Arkansas and lay in wait with the local constabulary. One False Move is a ticking time bomb as we wait for the criminals to drive across the Southwest to the inevitable confrontation.

One False Move features a great performance by the late Bill Paxton. It’s one of my Overlooked Neo-noir, and can also be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.

Bill Paxton in ONE FALSE MOVE

SAN FRANCISCO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL is back with a rich slate of docs

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Raya Burstein and Uri Burstein in CHARM CIRCLE. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.

One of the Bay Area’s top cinema events is back – the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF). This year’s festival is a hybrid, with in-person screenings at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre and the Albany Twin in Albany through July 31, with some films streaming from the SFJFF digital screening room August 1-7. The SFJFF is the world’s oldest and largest Jewish film festival, and the program offers over 71 films from over 14 countries (but mostly from the US and Israel), plus 4 programs of short films (Jews in Shorts).

The SFJFF always presents an impressive slate of documentaries, in recent years including What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, Satan & Adam, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, The Mossad and Levinsky Park.

The Must Sees from this year’s documentary program are:

  • Charm Circle: You think YOUR family has issues? In this superbly structured film, writer-director Nira Burstein exquisitely unspools the story of her own bizarre family, a cautionary and ever-surprising chronicle of mental illness.
  • Speer Goes to Hollywood: In this absorbing documentary, filmmaker Vanessa Lapa takes us inside a Nazi war criminal’s brazen attempt to rehabilitate his image into “the Good Nazi”. Previously unheard private audio recordings of Albert Speer himself reveal him to be one of history’s most audacious spin doctors.
  • The Faithful: The King, the Pope, the Princess: Filmmaker Annie Berman follows the people who are devoted to iconic celebrities, both dead (Elvis Presley and Princess Diana) and alive (the Pope du jour). I don’t mean “fans”, I mean “devoted”, as in those who make annual pilgrimages and who decorate shrines. Who are these faithful, and how did someone they never met “touch their lives”? The journey is sometimes amusing, sometimes appalling, but fundamentally meditative.

You can peruse the festival’s program and schedule at SFJFF.

THE FAITHFUL: THE KING, THE POPE, THE PRINCESS: are there limits to devotion?

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Photo caption: THE FAITHFUL: THE KING, THE POPE, THE PRINCESS. Courtesy of Annie Berman.

In the documentary The Faithful: The King The Pope The Princess, filmmaker Annie Berman follows the people who are devoted to iconic celebrities, both dead (Elvis Presley and Princess Diana) and alive (the Pope du jour). I don’t mean “fans”, I mean “devoted”, as in those who make annual pilgrimages and who decorate shrines.

At first, Berman wryly observes the endless variety of cheesy Elvis souvenirs, and the possibly cheesier panoply of Pope souvenirs. She archly interviews a Papal spokesman about the Vatican’s commercial licensing of the Pope’s image. We see what are purported to be Pope lollipops, but when they are unwrapped, the Pope’s image turns out to be on a paper cover, so no tongues actually commit the sacrilege of licking the papal face.

But Berman – herself returning yearly to Graceland and Elvis’ Tupelo birthplace, a London Princess Di shrine and the Vatican – focuses on the faithful. She lets them talk about their obsessions, and how someone they never met “touched their lives”. Berman is remarkably nonjudgmental with these people and their sincere devotion and chooses not to mock them.

THE FAITHFUL: THE KING, THE POPE, THE PRINCESS. Courtesy of Annie Berman.

Finally, Berman has to ask herself whether she herself is too obsessed with this project on obsession.

Berman’s narration takes us on a journey that sometimes amusing, sometimes appalling, but fundamentally meditative.

SPEER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD: immune from shame

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SPEER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD. Courtesy of Vanessa Lapa.

In her absorbing documentary Speer Goes to Hollywood, filmmaker Vanessa Lapa takes us inside a Nazi war criminal’s brazen attempt to rehabilitate his image into “the Good Nazi”. Previously unheard private audio recordings of Albert Speer himself reveal him to be one of history’s most audacious spin doctors.

Speer, the highest ranking Nazi to escape execution at the Nuremberg Trials, was the master of the Nazis’ wartime production efforts. A trained architect, any ability Speer had to design structures was surpassed by his genius in logistics. In Speer Goes to Hollywood, Speer displays an ever greater gift for dissembling.

After being released from prison in the mid 1960’s, Speer published a bestselling (and self-serving) memoir, Inside the Third Reich, to perpetuate what is known as The Speer Myth. Speer would have us believe that the worst crimes in history occurred – right under his nose and to his benefit – without any participation on his part. Speer’s defense was essentially, “Hey, it was the OTHER Nazis“.

(Note: not even a liar as bald-faced as Speer denied that the Holocaust happened.)

To supply the German war machine, Speer exploited the nearly limitless pool of those conquered, persecuted and to be exterminated by the Nazis. Powering his production with forced labor, Speer enslaved 12.5 million victims and worked many of them to death, all to perpetrate a war of aggression.

In the tapes, we hear Speer collaborating with Andrew Birkin, a Stanley Kubrick protege, on the script for a film to further Speer’s version of history. In the face of damning evidence, Speer never wavered in his deflections, dodges and denials. Speer Goes to Hollywood reveals Albert Speer to stay on message with unmatched relentlessness, discipline and audacity.

Andrew Birkin was trying to cash in on the popularity of Inside the Thrd Reich. The tapes show Birkin to be stunningly enabling in the attempted whitewash. Once Birkin slips and blames a kerfuffle on “the Jewish machine”.

Another Birkin mentor, Carol Reed is the truth teller. Reed, the director of The Third Man, gives Birkin a reality check – this IS a whitewash, pure and simple.

A prime example of the banality of evil, Speer doesn’t seem to be a fanatic hater, but an amoral grasper/climber, willing to swallow even genocide as an acceptable price for getting ahead. He does display an ingrained antisemitism, once tossing off “Of course, we resented the Jews“, as if, who wouldn’t?

Here’s a tantalizing nugget from Speer Goes to Hollywood. We hear Speer claim to have written the top Nuremberg prosecutor, American Robert Jackson, to claim important knowledge of Germany’s neurological warfare research, using it as leverage to avoid being turned over to the Soviets. Speer hints at an implied quid pro quo, but given Speer’s credibility, who knows if any of it is true.

The ever-watchable Speer Going to Hollywood chronicles unashamedness on a mass scale.

OFFICIAL COMPETITION: egos, power and a perfect ending

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Photo caption: Oscar Martínez, Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas in OFFICIAL COMPETITION. Courtesy of IFC Films.

The smart and biting satire Official Competition uses the world of filmmaking (where better?) to send up professional jealousies. A billionaire wants to produce a great movie as his legacy, so he assembles a filmmaking Dream Team: the famed director Lola (Penélope Cruz), the global movie star Félix (Antonio Banderas) and the renowned sage actor Iván (Oscar Martínez). Their egos come along, too.

Ivan, a leading acting teacher who pioneers new and challenging theater, is the critical and academic world’s most esteemed actor. There’s a wonderful scene where Ivan and his wife (a children’s’ author) sit in their boho apartment listening to an avant garde audio performance.

Felix, in contrast, has become a world-wide celebrity by starring in what Martin Scorsese calls global audio-visual entertainment to distinguish these movies from cinema. Adored by millions of fans and used to having his whims and appetites satisfied by toadies, Felix is convinced that he has earned his reputation as a great actor. (And he shows up to every event with a different bimbo on his arm.)

The tycoon has purchased a Nobel Prize-winning novel (that he hasn’t read) to be adapted into a screenplay. It’s about a rivalry between brothers. (In one of Official Competition’s many delicious ironies, this source material is very pedestrian, several rungs below East of Eden, for example.)

Lola (Cruz wears a wig that is a mountain of reddish tangles) is a piece of work herself. She enjoys abusing her power as director and is devoid of personal boundaries.

Felix and Ivan are oil and water,and Lola, for artistic reasons (and more than a touch of sadism), provokes their latent rivalry, seeking to enhance what will be the tension in their on-screen rivalry. In nine days of rehearsals before the shoot, Lola plunges Ivan and Felix into a series of evermore ridiculous, intrusive and degrading acting exercises. She has them read lines under a huge, suspended rock, binds their bodies together in cling wrap, and overamplifies their kissing noises.

Lola’s caprices accomplish two things with Ivan and Felix. She turns their passive contempt for each other into open hatred. And she makes them hate her, too.

Each actor (and Lola, too) has a massive ego begging to be deflated, and the battles between them in Official Competition are very, very funny.

The ending of Official Competition is perfect – one of the cleverest and most satisfying that I’ve seen in a good long while.

The Argentines Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat co-directed Official Competition, which they co-wrote with Andrés Duprat. Official Competition is being described as an arch takedown of the movie industry, but the egos parodied here are present in many walks of life.

Cruz, Banderas and Oscar Martínez (the hilariously dark Wild Tales) each deliver dynamite performances. Irene Escolar is very good in a deadpan and essentially silent role as the billionaire’s daughter cast in the movie.

[Note: Prior to Official Competition, the Spanish stars Cruz and Banderas had only shared the screen for about two minutes in I’m So Excited; they did not work together in Pain and Glory, in which they both appeared in different segments.]

Official Competition, so far the wittiest film of 2022, is in theaters.

MY DONKEY, MY LOVER & I: it had me at the title

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Laure Calamy in MY DONKEY, MY LOVER AND I

In the intriguingly titled French comedy My Donkey, My Lover & I, Antoinette (Laure Calamy) is a vivacious and goofy schoolteacher in a French provincial town.  She’s single, but she’s head over heels into a fling with a married man.  She’s excited that’s he’s taking her away to a resort at the upcoming school holiday, but – at the very last minute – he instead submits to a mountain hiking trip with his family.

Antoinette’s distraught and angry disappointment soon transforms into determination and lunacy – she decides to go to the same network of mountain trails, rent a donkey and encounter him in the mountains.

Here’s what I didn’t know before I stumbled on this film at the Mill Valley Film Festival.  In 1879, a lovelorn Robert Louis Stevenson, with only a donkey companion, took a solitary hike in Southern France and penned his travel memoir Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. It’s common for today’s French to spend a week of their vacations re-creating Stevenson’s experience.  It’s a thing, and it’s spawned a cottage industry of donkey rentals and mountain hostels.

Antoinette can be an over-sharer, and when she blurts her mission to another hiker, it goes viral, and soon everyone else in the mountains knows.  Having prepared for a lie-by-the-pool vacation, she is ill-equipped, especially in the footwear department, to trudge over mountains,.  And, of course, she gets the very most uncooperative donkey.  How is she going to find her lover – and, if she does,  what is she going to do with him?

Laure Calamy is a brilliant comic actress (and one of the highlights of last summer’s Sibyl). She knows that the key to comedy is for an actor to be absolutely committed (with no hint of winking at the audience) to an absurd course of action.  This is why Buster Keaton, Lucille Ball and Gene Wilder were performance geniuses.  And it is why Will Ferrell isn’t as funny as Bill Hader or Kristen Wiig.

In My Lover, My Donkey & I, Calamy is all in on Antoinette, a woman who can be both alarmingly unself-conscious and cringingly self-conscious, and both pathetic and empowered.  Antoinette endures indignity after indignity, but Calamy’s radiance shines through.

The premise of this film seems utterly unbelievable, but the story is based on actual events which are well-known in France, hence the French title Antoinette dans les Cévennes.

My Lover, My Donkey & I may not be Annie Hall or even There’s Something About Mary, but there are worse ways to spend 97 minutes than with the delightful Laure Calamy. It’s opening July 22, including in the Bay Area at the Opera Plaza and the Rafael.