First thoughts on the Oscars

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The Power of the Dog: Kodi Smit-McPhee on his breakout performance | EW.com
Photo caption: Kodi Smit-McPhee in THE POWER OF THE DOG. Courtesy of Netflix.

The Oscar nominations are out, and I am NOT howling with outrage. I’m generally pleased that the year’s best movies are receiving lots of recognition: The Power of the Dog, Belfast, Nightmare Alley, Don’t Look Up and CODA – and even my top choice Drive My Car, which I feared would be overlooked (because it is a fairly obscure, three-hour long Japanese movie).

Being the Ricardos is nominated for several major awards despite being a so-so movie; my guess is that Aaron Sorkin, Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem are so popular and respected among the Academy voters, that voters expected it to be really good and somehow failed to recalibrate after watching it.

Emilia Jones, Troy Kotsur, Marlee Matlin and Daniel Durant in CODA. Courtesy of AppleTV.

The most exciting category is Best Supporting Actor, where three exquisite performances are recognized. Kodi Smit-McPhee takes over the final third of The Power of the Dog and elevates it. Deaf actor Troy Kotsur is as fine an actor as any hearing person, as he demonstrates in his moving performance in CODA. Always very good, Ciaran Hinds knocks a grandpa role out of the park in Belfast (and gets to deliver the film’s most moving line). I will be elated whichever of the three win the statuette.

In the Best Actress category, Olivia Colman delivered another performance for the ages, but in The Lost Daughter, a film that is just not going to be popular.

My biggest quibble is in the Best Supporting Actress category, which bypassed Cate Blanchett despite her TWO spectacular supporting performances in Don’t Look Up and Nightmare Alley.

Since summer, I’ve found it inevitable that Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) would win the Best Documentary Oscar. I wasn’t expecting the Academy to spurn The Velvet Underground in this category, though.

Drive My Car and The Worst Person in the World should contend for the International Cinema Oscar. I’m dissatisfied that the Academy failed to nominate Riders of Justice, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn or Lamb. (To be fair, Riders of Justice wasn’t even submitted by Denmark, which went wih Flee instead.) Instead, Academy nods went to a movie I had never heard of – Luriana:A Yak in the Classroom from Bhutan – and to the underwhelming The Hand of God.

The Animated Feature category is usually thought of as a category for children’s films. It’s interesting that a film decidedly for adults (Flee) has a chance.

Finally, I know this is geeky, but I was especially pleased that Tamara Deverell was nominated for Best Production Design for Nightmare Alley. She created an astonishing art deco office suite for Cate Blanchett’s character and an extraordinary world of mid-century carnivals.

Judi Dench, Jude Hill and Ciarán Hinds in BELFAST. Courtesy of Focus Features

THE PACT: a pawn in someone else’s story

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Simon Bennebjerg and Birthe Neumann in THE PACT. Photo by Rolf Konow courtesy of Juno Films.

The Pact is the story of a real life Faustian bargain. In 1948, Karen Blixen (Birthe Neumann) was the rock star of Danish literature, having written Out of Africa under the pen name Isak Dinesen. Blixen was also a baroness, and from her seafront country estate near Copenhagen, she presided over a salon of leading Danish intellectuals and artists.

Thorkild Bjørnvig (Simon Bennebjerg) was an unknown poet whose promise intrigued Blixen. Blixen offered Bjørnvig the titular pact – she would help him achieve his artistic potential, but only if he followed all her guidance. She is transparent – she only cares about elevating his writing, not about his family or his personal happiness. Driven by ambition and entranced by her magnetism, he takes the deal.

She immediately finds him a financial patron and moves him into her estate to write without the distractions of his wife and their adorable but chirpy toddler. His writing starts to blossom, but then her direction becomes more and more intrusive. Soon she dictates his daily schedule, where he lives and even who he sleeps with.

She isolates him from his family, and he doesn’t know what, if any, power he still has.

Does a real life Faustian bargain sound farfetched? This really happened. Director Bille August (the Oscar winning Pelle the Conqueror) adapted the screenplay from Bjørnvig’s memoir.

Simon Bennebjerg and Birthe Neumann in THE PACT. Photo by Rolf Konow courtesy of Juno Films.

Although the story is told from Bjørnvig’s point of view, it’s really about what makes the singular Blixen tick. The Pact works because of Birthe Neumann’s exquisite performance as a woman who masks her neediness with a steely willfulness. Neumann had a key role in the 1998 classic Festen.

Tellingly, Blixen says, “It’s you who need to understand that we’re all playing a role in the story.” Not A story, but THE story. Blixen’s story.

Bennebjerg ably portrays Bjørnvig, a character difficult to sympathize with because of his submissiveness and his willingness to expose others to Blixen’s cruelty.

Naturally, Bjørnvig’s wife finds herself whipsawed as he follows Blixen’s whims. Nanna Skaarup Voss is very good in a role that seems doomed to passive victimhood until she delivers a definitive insight near the end of the story.

Asta Kamma August is also excellent as a sweet innocent whose life is upended by Blixen’s manipulation.

Throughout the film, other characters address Bjørnvig as magister, an unfamiliar word for me. Magister is a medieval term for scholar still in use in 1940s Denmark.

The Pact is opening in theaters, including at the Bay Area’s Opera Plaza and the Rafael on February 18.

Movies to See Right Now

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Katia Pascariu in BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

This week: New reviews of Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, the Alanis Morissette biodoc Jagged. Coming up on TV – an under-appreciated movie filmed in Stockton.

CURRENT FILMS

  • Drive My Car: director and co-writer Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s engrossing masterpiece about dealing with loss – and it’s the best movie of 2021. Layered with character-driven stories that could each justify their own movie, this is a mesmerizing film that builds into an exhilarating catharsis. In theaters.
  • Nightmare Alley: enough burning ambition for a thousand carnies. In theaters.
  • Belfast: a child’s point of view is universal. If you have heartstrings, they are gonna get pulled. In theaters.
  • The Power of the Dog: One man’s meanness, another man’s growth. Netflix.
  • Don’t Look Up: Wickedly funny. Filmmaker Adam McKay (The Big Short) and a host of movie stars hit the bullseye as they target a corrupt political establishment, a soulless media and a gullible, lazy-minded public. Netflix.
  • The Tragedy of Macbeth: No surprise here: Joel Coen, Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand deliver a crisp and imaginative version of the Bard’s Scottish Play. AppleTV.
  • Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn: completely different than any movie you’ve seen. AppleTV, Drafthouse On Demand.
  • Parallel Mothers: Pedro Almodovar gives us a lush melodrama, sandwiched between bookend dives into today’s unhealed wounds from the Spanish Civil War. In theaters.
  • Jagged: clear-eyed, but not that angry after all. HBO.
  • House of Gucci: Lady Gaga and Adam Driver shine in this modern tale of Shakespearean family treachery. In theaters.
  • Licorice Pizza: When nine years is a big age difference. In theaters.
  • The Hand of God: Filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino’s own coming of age story – and a time capsule of 1986 Naples. Netflix.
  • Being the Ricardos: a tepid slice of a really good story. Amazon (included with Prime).

Remember to check out all of my Best Movies of 2021.

MORE RECOMMENDATIONS ON VIDEO

ON TV

Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges in FAT CITY

On February 9, Turner Classic Movies presents John Huston’s under-appreciated Fat City (1972). Stacy Keach plays a boxer on the slide, his skills unraveled by his alcoholism. He inspires a kid (a very young Jeff Bridges), who becomes a boxer on the rise. Keach and Susan Tyrrell give dead-on performances as pathetic, sad sack barflies. Tyrrell was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Filmed in Stockton.

Susan Tyrrell in FAT CITY

JAGGED: clear-eyed, but not that angry after all

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Photo caption: Alanis Morissette in JAGGED. Courtesy of HBO.

Jagged is a surprisingly addictive biodoc of singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette, packed with Morissette’s own reflections. Jagged traces Morissette’s beginnings as a child prodigy and teen pop princess (big hair and all) to the point where she matured into an innovative songwriter and groundbreaking stadium act.

The deepest dive is appropriately on Morissette’s debut album Jagged Little Pill and the 18-month concert tour to support it. With sales of over 33 million, Jagged Little Pill is still the number one selling album by a woman. It’s amazing to reflect that Morissette was only 19-20 when writing the songs and only 20-21 on the tour.

Alanis Morissette in JAGGED. Courtesy of HBO.

Of course, Morissette’s breakthrough came with one of the bitterest of all breakup songs, You Oughta Know, raising the question of just how angry is she? Not at all, says Morissette, who notes that she released her anger in the writing of You Oughta Know and moved on.

Director Alison Klayman (Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry) takes us back to the 1994 media coverage, by male music writers, of Morissette as Angry Young Woman. Jagged takes advantage of lots of candid backstage/tour bus footage from the tour; and that Morissette is an even-tempered and playful person, not even temperamental, let alone raging.

In her years a teen pop singer, Morissette was allowed to tour the world without parental protection, which predictably made her vulnerable to exploitation by older men. It’s really worth watching Jagged to hear Morissette’s framing of how women publicly discuss sexual abuse years afterwards: “They weren’t silent. The culture wasn’t listening.”

Oddly, Morissette herself is unhappy with the documentary, calling it “salacious”. I thought that Klayton handled Morissette’s own words about her sexual abuse in a way that was the opposite of salacious. Klayton has Morissette present herself as insightful and well-grounded, which adds up to a flattering impression.

Jagged is streaming on HBO.

BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN: completely different than any movie you’ve seen

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Photo caption: Katia Pascariu in BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

The Romanian absurdist comedy Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is unlike anything feature film you’ve ever seen. For one thing, it begins with a three-and-a-half minute amateur sex video. The couple is having sex that is playful, enthusiastic and highly verbal. The sex is not simulated.

The couple turns out to be married. The wife is Emi (Katia Pascariu), a teacher of Romanian history at an upscale private school in Bucharest. Unfortunately, her husband takes their laptop to a tech shop for service and the sex video appears on the Internet – and goes viral within her school’s community.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is divided into three chapters, each approximately 30 minutes. In the first, Emi leaves their crowded apartment and walks, COVID-masked, through Bucharest to her boss’ apartment and then to school, stopping to receive a series of phone calls with ever worsening news about the video.

Beginning with the chaos of daily family life crammed in tight quarters, and spilling out through the city, this is deadpan comedy at its best. Writer-dirctor Radu Jude’s camera wryly points out the mixed martial arts studio Super Kombat Romania next door to a more aspirational Caffe Le Strada.

Jude depicts Bucharest street life as boisterous and earthy, with everyone unleashing torrents of foul invective at the slightest annoyance.  I’m an aficionado of vulgarities, and the best in this film comes from the driver of a vehicle whom Emi points out is illegally parked.

Part 2 takes a break from Emi’s story – it’s a series of brief vignettes highlighting the most ridiculous and outrageous excesses of Romanian history, including Nazi collaboration and the Ceaușescu communist dictatorship. Most of the vignettes are funny, and most are wickedly pointed. Some are just refreshingly silly, like a socially-distanced folk dance and the funniest elevator doors I’ve ever seen. 

In part 3, the school hosts a meeting of the parents to discuss the sex video – and whether Emi should keep her job. Of course, this is mortifying for Emi.

[MILD SPOILER IN THIS PARAGRAPH] The parents insist on playing the sex video at the meeting, so Emi is subjected to watching them watch her have sex – with a running commentary from the audience. Of course, if the video is offensive, then the parents are offending new viewers or re-offending those who have already seen it. But this is not about reason – it is about slut shaming.

Context completely escapes the parents. Emi’s consensual sex in her home with her husband is entirely her right; she didn’t publish the video, and she is the victim of its publication. Nevertheless, the parents plunge ahead into a witch trial that would have made colonial Salem proud, worsened by a dose of jawdropping antisemitism. That everyone is masked for the pandemic adds another layer of ridiculousness.

Katia Pascariu in BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

Through it all, Emi steadfastly tries to salvage her dignity and impose some measure of intellectual consistency on others. She is the last stand of rationality. As Emi, Katia Pascariu is on camera in every scene of the first and third segments of Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, and her performance is superb. Pascariu’s Emi is a strong and confident woman thrust into a most humiliating and desperate situation, who keeps her poise…until even she cannot any longer.

What does it all amount to? Writer-director Radu Jude is zeroing in on human foibles, some specific to Romanian society and some universal. Jude has an unsparing, clear-eyed view of human nature, and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn nails sexism and misogyny in particular.

Jude’s previous features were the much acclaimed Aferim! (which I didn’t like) and I Do Not Care If We Go Down in HIstory as Barbarians. He was the assistant director of Cristi Pulu’s high brow art house hit The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.

Beyond its title, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is unusual for its hardcore prologue and the mid-movie diversion from the plot. Those aspects may not be enjoyed by everyone; I also recognize that not everybody dials into deadpan absurdism as I do. Nevertheless, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is continuously engaging and very funny.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is Romania’s submission for the Best Intentional Picture Oscar, and I believe that it will be nominated. It appears on at least 20 critic’s top ten lists, including #1 on J. Hoberman’s and #2 on A.O. Scott’s. I streamed Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn on Drafthouse On Demand; it is also streaming on AppleTV.

Movies to See Right Now

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Did Meat Loaf star in The Rocky Horror Picture Show?
Photo caption: Meat Loaf, with Nell Campbell in THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW

The return of the in-person Noir City film festival, which had been Omicron-delayed, is now set for March 24-27. I’ll be publishing a complete preview on March 21.

REMEMBRANCE

Meat Loaf unforgettably burst into cinema in the 1975 cult favorite The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Often credited as Meat Loaf Aday, he also acted in a series of character roles, most notably in Fight Club.

CURRENT FILMS

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is parallel-baby.jpg
Penelope Cruz in PARALLEL MOTHERS. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
  • Drive My Car: director and co-writer Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s engrossing masterpiece about dealing with loss – and it’s the best movie of 2021. Layered with character-driven stories that could each justify their own movie, this is a mesmerizing film that builds into an exhilarating catharsis. In theaters.
  • Nightmare Alley: enough burning ambition for a thousand carnies. In theaters.
  • Belfast: a child’s point of view is universal. If you have heartstrings, they are gonna get pulled. In theaters.
  • The Power of the Dog: One man’s meanness, another man’s growth. Netflix.
  • Don’t Look Up: Wickedly funny. Filmmaker Adam McKay (The Big Short) and a host of movie stars hit the bullseye as they target a corrupt political establishment, a soulless media and a gullible, lazy-minded public. Netflix.
  • The Tragedy of Macbeth: No surprise here: Joel Coen, Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand deliver a crisp and imaginative version of the Bard’s Scottish Play. AppleTV.
  • Parallel Mothers: Pedro Almodovar gives us a lush melodrama, sandwiched between bookend dives into today’s unhealed wounds from the Spanish Civil War. In theaters.
  • House of Gucci: Lady Gaga and Adam Driver shine in this modern tale of Shakespearean family treachery. In theaters.
  • Licorice Pizza: When nine years is a big age difference. In theaters.
  • The Hand of God: Filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino’s own coming of age story – and a time capsule of 1986 Naples. Netflix.
  • Being the Ricardos: a tepid slice of a really good story. Amazon (included with Prime).

Remember to check out all of my Best Movies of 2021.

ON TV

Dennis O’Keefe and Ann Sheridan in WOMAN ON THE RUN

On February 2, Turner Clasic Movies presents the taut 77 minutes of Woman on the Run, one of my Overlooked Noir. When the police coming looking for a terrified murder witness, they are surprised to find his wife (Ann Sheridan) both ignorant of his whereabouts and unconcerned. And the wife has a Mouth On Her, much to the dismay of the detective (Robert Keith), who keeps walking into a torrent of sass. She starts hunting hubbie, along with the cops, a reporter (Dennis O’Keefe) and the killer, and they all careen through a life-or-death manhunt. Another star of Woman on the Run is San Francisco itself, from the hilly neighborhoods to the bustling streets to the dank and foreboding waterfront.

PARALLEL MOTHERS: moms and babies, mostly

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Photo caption: Milena Smith, Penélope Cruz and Aitana Sánchez-Gijón in PARALLEL MOTHERS. Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

In Parallel Mothers, Pedro Almodóvar gives a lush melodrama, sandwiched between bookended dives into today’s unhealed wounds from the Spanish Civil War.

Two women meet in a Madrid maternity ward, each about to give birth to her first child. Neither is in a relationship and neither pregnancy was planned, although the circumstances differ strongly. Both are haunted – one by a family tragedy and the other by her parents’ dysfunction.

Janis (Penélope Cruz) is in confident middle age, a fashion photographer. She is worldly and independent, with a support system led by her bestie (Almodóvar veteran Rossy de Palma).

Ana (Milena Smit) is a teenager tossed from her throw-up-his-hands father in Granada to her self-absorbed actress mother in Madrid.

Janis and Ana bond with their babies and with each other. It’s difficult to write about their story because there’s a Big Reveal which I will not spoil.

The story of mothers and babies makes for a compelling 100-minute or so movie on its own. But the film begins and ends with segments in which a war crime from the Spanish Civil War touches characters. When Spain suddenly transitioned from the Franco dictatorship to a democracy, the nation addressed accountability for the Civil War’s atrocities differently than did, say, South Africa or North Ireland, and Parallel Mothers is Almodóvar’s comment on the continuing wounds.

And here’s my quandary: although the characters overlap, I just don’t see the unity that Almodovar intends between the mom/baby story and the Civil War legacy story. Sorry, Pedro – this just looks like two different (good) movies cobbled together to me.

Penélope Cruz in PARALLEL MOTHERS. Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

Penélope Cruz is entering her fourth decade of Big Screen luminosity. She remains one of the most compelling presences in cinema.

Milena Smit as excellent as the troubled and immature Ana, who grows and changes more than any character in Parallel Mothers. It’s an impressive breakthrough performance, and Smit bears watching.

Penélope Cruz had already made the American art house faves Jamón Jamón and Belle Epoque before she joined the Almodóvar repertory, but it’s worth reflecting on the Spanish actresses, like Smit, that Almodóvar has introduced us to: Carmen Maura, Victoria Abril, Marisa Paredes, Cecilia Roth, Rosario Flores, Assumpta Serna and Chus Lampreave. (Plus Antonio Banderas and Javier Cámara, as well!)

Aitana Sánchez-Gijón is very good as Ana’s mom, who is initially is reflexibly insufferable, but whose role becomes more complicated as we learn about her.

Israel Elejalde is excellent as the one significant male character. It’s always great to see Rossy de Palma, who is unchallenged by her role as sympathetic sidekick. Julieta Serrano, another Almodóvar favorite also appears.

After beginning his career with two decades of subversively hilarious comedies, Almodóvar has made some of the most profound work in recent cinema. Parallel Mothers is well-crafted and engaging, but doesn’t rank with Almodóvar’s best: Talk to Her, Bad Education, Broken Embraces.

DANCE OF THE 41: overreaching while gay

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In the rapturously filmed period drama Dance of the 41, Mexican politician Ignacio de la Torre (Alfonso Herrera), a political Icarus if there ever were one, marries President Porfirio Diaz’s daughter Amada (Mabel Cadena). It’s the turn of the 20th Century, and de la Torre starts scheming with breathtaking recklessness.

The risk comes from the fact that de la Torre is in a secret club of gay aristocrats, closeted in plain sight in the most macho and homophobic mainstream culture. He has married Amada so she can be his beard, but his new bride, unaware of her new hubbie’s secret, was expecting her own sexual awakening. Instead, he spurns her for a torrid love affair with Evaristo (Emiliano Zurita).

De la Torre had married the boss’ daughter in a bid for advancement, expecting her to submit to being his pawn. But, hurt at not being desired, she calls on her dad’s capacity as an enforcer. It all culminates in a formal queer bacchanal that turns heartbreaking.

Dance of the 41 is a fictionalized (but very plausible) telling of a historical event, the salacious scandal called the “Dance of the Forty-One” or the “Ball of the Forty-One”.

I found the century-old story of Mexican LGBTQ history and the forbidden love between the men to be less interesting than the story between the husband and the young bride he had wildly underestimated. He is trapped because he’s gay and ambitious, but he is also a dick who is relying on male privilege to dismiss a young woman’s needs and aspirations and to cynically use her.

Director David Pablos and cinematographer Carolina Costa have created a visually extravagant film that makes use of its architecturally stunning locations. Much of Dance of the 41 takes place in gorgeously lit – candlelight.

I screened Dance of the 41 for the 2021 SFFILM. It is now streaming on Netflix.

OUT OF THE BLUE: when there is no redemption

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Linda Manz in OUT OF THE BLUE. Courtesy of Discovery Productions, Inc..

Newly restored for re-release, Dennis Hopper’s 1980 Out of the Blue is an anti-redemptive parable of alienation. It features both an unforgettable performance and an unforgettable ending.

The spirited teenager Cebe (Linda Manz) has the worst parents in her British Columbia town, maybe in the entire province. Her dad (Dennis Hopper), is a drunk, deservedly in prison for an act of irreparable harm. (Cebe bears a facial scar from this incident – and lots of emotional damage as well).

Her chirpy mom (Sharon Farrell) can’t keep a needle out of her arm or guys out of her pants. Ever impulsive, she ruefully observes that there are two kinds of men – the sexy, adventuresome types and the good providers; it’s evident that she hasn’t bet her life on the good providers.

After five years in prison, the dad is released and gets a job operating heavy machinery at a garbage dump overrun by sea gulls. But he’s still sucking on his ever-present pint bottle, and the town won’t forget why he was incarcerated.

Cebe is full of life and has a gum-chewing swagger. She’s comfortable leading her teen peers in some rowdiness, but she also has a rich imagination and she spends a lot of time in her room alone, acting out her interests in Elvis and punk music.

But Cebe doesn’t know in what direction to channel her exuberance; she can’t tell her sympathetic, court-appointed psychologist (Raymond Burr) what she wants.

The one thing that Cebe doesn’t want is what’s best for her – to be separated from her parents. As is common with neglected and abused children, she clings to the bad situation that she is familiar with.

Cebe acts out in mildly rebellious mischief at school, and she runs away for a night of adventure in Vancouver, somehow emerging unscathed from risky situations.

Back home, she hides from her parent’s arguing in her room. Suddenly, the audience is shocked by something the father says (what??!!), and it is revealed that the parents’ dysfunction is MUCH darker, more twisted than previously apparent.

Cebe erupts, and Out of the Blue ends with a stunning, utterly unpredictable climax. Hopper follows Billie Wilder’s screenwriting advice – “don’t hang around”; the ending is not even one second too long.

Dennis Hopper wrote and directed Out of the Blue, pacing the film well and delivering verisimilitude from the Vancouver-area setting. The camera swirls around the actors at times, and Hopper makes good use of the thousands of seagulls populating a garbage dump.

Out of the Blue is really all about Linda Manz’s singular performance as Cebe. Often improvised, her performance is naturalistic and unpredictable. When she is in her room or walking through a Vancouver night, she acts like no one is watching her, and it’s riveting.

By the time she was 19 in 1980, Linda Manz had acted in and narrated a masterpiece (Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven) and appeared in two cult films (Philip Kaufman’s The Wanderers and Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue). Then she retired to raise a family. Manz died at 59 in 2020.

Don Gordon (left) and Dennis Hopper (center) in OUT OF THE BLUE. Courtesy of Discovery Productions, Inc.

As the dad, Hopper is able to demonstrate the charm that attracted the mom and the playfulness that endears him to Cebe. In a scene where the dad dramatically gets himself fired, Hopper shows a man so enjoying his ballsy action, and then, his visage changes as the consequences of his impulsivity sink in, reflecting on his helplessness when he is once again done in by his own impulses.

As the mom, prolific television actress Sharon Farrell excels in a rare movie role.

Don Gordon plays Charlie, the dad’s marginally more functional pal. Gordon had key supporting roles in Bullitt and Papillon and over a hundred appearances in the episodic TV of the 60s and 70s.In Out of the Blue, Gordon displays his gift for playing drunk convincingly. Gordon really understood the essence of drunk thinking and behavior, and has an even more compelling drunk scene in Hopper’s The Last Movie).

Out of the Blue premiered at Cannes and enjoyed praise from Roger Ebert (“Bitter, unforgettable. An unsung treasure.“) and other critics. But the ending is so shocking and emotionally desolate, that it wasn’t released in the US; no distributor wanted to bet on its acceptance by a US audience. John Alan Simon acquired the distribution rights for a 17-week art house tour in 1982 with Hopper. Now Simon and Elizabeth Karr have digitally restored Out of the Blue from the only two 35mm prints in existence.

Out of the Blue has only recently become available to stream; (I own the DVD.) In late 2021, the 4K restoration opened at a New York City screening presented by Chloë Sevigny and Natasha Lyonne. Now you can find Out of the Blue on the Criterion Channel, AppleTV, YouTube and Fandango.

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand in THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH. Photo courtesy of A24.

This is simple: stream The Tragedy of Macbeth, Don’t Look Up or The Power of the Dog. If you’re game for a theater experience, see Drive My Car, Nightmare Alley or Belfast.

IN THEATERS

  • Drive My Car: director and co-writer Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s engrossing masterpiece about dealing with loss – and it’s the best movie of 2021. Layered with character-driven stories that could each justify their own movie, this is a mesmerizing film that builds into an exhilarating catharsis.
  • Nightmare Alley: enough burning ambition for a thousand carnies.
  • Licorice Pizza: When nine years is a big age difference.
  • Belfast: a child’s point if view is universal. If you have heartstrings, they are gonna get pulled.
  • Red Rocket: a genius at burning bridges.
  • C’mon C’mon: In Mike Mills’ charming and authentic film, Joaquin Phoenix plays a well-intentioned, emotionally intelligent guy who gets an immersion course in parenting.
  • House of Gucci: Lady Gaga and Adam Driver shine in this modern tale of Shakespearean family treachery.
  • Benedetta: Paul Verhoeven’s entertaining parable of belief and class, wrapped in scandal and sacrilege.

ON VIDEO

The Tragedy of Macbeth: No surprise here: Joel Coen, Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand deliver a crisp and imaginative version of the Bard’s Scottish Play. AppleTV.

Styx: In this gripping drama, a skilled and resourceful woman embarks on an open-sea solo voyage, and we think we’re about to watch a survival tale. But then she is confronted with a situation that presents all bad choices – and, this time, she can’t fix it by herself. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu.

Western: In the evocative and thought-provoking German drama, an alienated man goes native. Western played the Cannes and Toronto film festivals in 2017, and then five US film fests, but never got a US theatrical release.  Western can be streamed from The Criterion Channel, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.

Some of my choices for Best Movies of 2021 are already on video:

  • Riders of Justice: Thriller, comedy and much, much more. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.
  • The Power of the Dog: One man’s meanness, another man’s growth. Netflix.
  • Don’t Look Up: Wickedly funny. Filmmaker Adam McKay (The Big Short) and a host of movie stars hit the bullseye as they target a corrupt political establishment, a soulless media and a gullible, lazy-minded public. Netflix.
  • Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain: Bad ass romantic. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and redbox.
  • Lamb: This dark, cautionary fable of karma is a brilliant and unsettling debut by writer-director Valdimar Jóhannsson. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and redbox.

More 2021 movies on video:

ON TV

Spencer Tracy and Robert Ryan in BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK

On January 24, Turner Classic Movies serves up the John Sturges masterpiece Bad Day at Black Rock. Spencer Tracy investigates a disappearance in an especially hostile, racist and sinister town. Besides having Tracy at his best and being a great looking movie, Bad Day at Black Rock is notable for its menacing crew of Bad Guys – Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin.