Oscar Isaac stars in Card Counter, Paul Schrader’s dark portrait of a highly disciplined loner who lives by a code but can’t submerge his past. Isaac’s character, improbably named William Tell, is a professional gambler, who lives in an endless string of motels and casinos.
The first thing we learn about William Tell is his rigid sense of self-discipline – in an OCD display of entering a new motel room and covering each piece of furniture in twine-bound sheets. This is an expert who can win free money at casinos, but resists winning too much, so he doesn’t get kicked out. He prefers anonymity to acclaim. More than anything, William Tell invests in keeping his head down.
It turns out that Tell has been traumatized by things he did as an army guard at Abu Ghraib – and the consequences. It’s no surprised that yet another solitary, emotionally damaged character has sprung from the dark mind of Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, First Reformed).
Above all, Tell is a man with a code. He meets a young man (Tye Sheridan), also haunted by the aftereffect of Abu Ghraib, who is consumed by a revenge fantasy. Although Tell avoids social entanglements, he is compelled to save the kid from himself.
Although most of The Card Counter takes place in casinos, it’s really not gambling movie. There is some card play and some gaming procedure. This is a character-driven story – and it’s not about who wins or how much. Schrader playfully hints at a big poker showdown, but it’s a red herring.
The role of this intense and obsessive man is perfect for Oscar Isaac and his piercing gaze. I usually don’t warm to Isaac, although he has been proficient in some films that I love: Ex Machina, The Two Faces of January. Maybe I don’t see a sense of humor in there? Anyway, he is stellar here.
Tye Sheridan is excellent as the young man bent on revenge. Tiffany Haddish plays a woman who runs a stable of professional gamblers and lives off her emotional intelligence; it’s a delight every time she is on-screen. The great Willem Dafoe appears in a brief but pivotal role.
I haven’t ever seen a movie character like William Tell, which makes The Card Counter an excellent watch.
Sir Michael Caine and Aubrey Plaza in BEST SELLERS. Photo courtesy of Screen Media Films.
Michael Caine and Aubrey Plaza star in the breezy comedy Best Sellers. Plaza plays Lucy Stanbridge, who has inherited a publishing company on the verge of insolvency. She discovers one remaining possible lifeline – the company is still owed one book by a famous author in its stable. Unfortunately, that author is Harris Shaw (Caine), an anti-social, elderly alcoholic.
Harris Shaw’s anti-sociability is anything but passive, which challenges Lucy as she drags a manuscript out of him and takes him, brimming with hostility, on a book tour.
Just when the audience is settled in for a madcap, odd-couple-on-the-road comedy, Best Sellers adds a topical layer. Harris Shaw’s bad public behavior is so extreme that, instead of sabotaging the book’s marketing campaign, it makes him a viral sensation on social media. In an even more wickedly funny turn, Shaw’s sudden popularity is with consumers who do not buy books; “you should be selling t-shirts”, mutters one fan.
Both Sir Michael Caine and Aubrey Plaza (Parks and Recreation) are funny here, in roles that do not challenge them. In particular, the character of Lucy isn’t written to take advantage of Plaza’s capacity to be simultaneously funny and dangerous (Black Bear).
Best Sellers is the first feature for director Lina Roessler. Although Lucy and Harris develop a friendship and face Harris’ end of life, Roessler manages to keep Best Sellers from becoming pretentious or maudlin.
Best Sellers opens September 17 in theaters and on VOD.
This week, I still like The Lost Leonardo and Ma Belle, My Beauty in theaters – and a host of watch-at-home suggestions.
REMEMBRANCES
Jean-Paul Belmondo
Jean-Paul Belmondo, with his flattened nose and a cigarette dangling from his full lips, was the personification of European cinema in the early 1960s, from the French New Wave to Jean-Paul Melville neo-noirs to Italian art films. Projecting an insouciant sexiness, he starred with Jean Seberg in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, which basically kicked off the Nouvelle Vague with Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. Breathless was released in 1960, the same year that Belmondo co-starred with Oscar-winner Sophia Loren in Vittorio de Sica’s Two Women, co-starred with Jena Moreau in Seven Days, Seven Nights, and starred in four other films, to boot.
Michael Constantine in MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING
Super-prolific character actor Michael Constantine appeared in hundreds of television episodes (113 in Room 222 alone). I liked him in his movie comedies – as the grumpy former GI in If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be Belgium and as the Windex-obsessed dad in My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
IN THEATERS
CODA: a thought-provoking audience-pleaser. Also streaming on AppleTV.
Annette: opening and closing sparks, but tiresome and creepy in between
ON VIDEO
On Being a Human Person: A documentary on Roy Andersson, an auteur who makes very, very odd movies that are deeply profound, humanistic and mostly funny. Laemmle.
The Unknown Saint: Here’s another pitch for this delightful crime comedy from Morocco. It’s a deadpan dive into human foibles and really, really bad luck. Netflix.
THE UNKNOWN SAINT. Photo courtesy of The Match Factory.
The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:
The Dry: a mystery as psychological as it is procedural. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
ON TV
Timothy Bottoms (standing) in THE PAPER CHASE
On September 14, Turner Classic Movies airs one my personal favorite movies, The Paper Chase, which traces a young man’s (Timothy Bottoms) first year at Harvard Law School and is based on the memoir of a recent grad. Although IMDb labels The Paper Chase as 1973 movie, I saw it in the summer of 1975, just as I was about to enter law school myself. It’s such a personal favorite because just about EVERYTHING in the movie is something that I experienced myself at in my first year at Georgetown Law – everything, that is, EXCEPT dating Lindsay Wagner. It’s a compelling story and the great producer John Houseman won an acting Oscar for his performance as the mentor/nemesis law professor; Houseman immediately cashed in with his ”They make money the old fashioned way… they EARN it” commercials for Smith Barney.
The Paper Chase is also notable as the first feature film credit for actors Craig Richard Nelson, Graham Beckel (Brokeback Mountain, L.A. Confidential) and Edward Herrmann (known for many portrayals of FDR). All three are stellar as members of the law school study group, and these guys have now combined for over 300 screen acting credits. The Paper Chase is also available to stream from Amazon, Vudu and YouTube.
In the documentary Being a Human Person, we meet the filmmaker Roy Andersson as he makes what he acknowledges to be his final film at age 76. Andersson is an auteur who makes very, very odd movies that are humanistic, deeply profound and mostly funny. The movies, like A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Contemplating Existence and this year’s About Endlessness, are comprised of apparently random tableaus in which ordinary-looking Scandinavians do very little.
In thinking about Being a Human Person, I was initially going to recommend it to folks who have seen Andersson’s films. But then it occurred to me that it really a perfect vehicle to introduce newbies to Andersson’s work.
Now, I treasure watching Andersson’s films, but if you’re looking for movies that immediately make sense, then Andersson, most assuredly, is not your guy. In each film, Andersson curates a range of human behavior and lets the audience try to connect the dots. But when he is interviewed for Being a Human Person, he’s happy to tell you what he intends the movies to mean.
Andersson does not equate success and happiness. A wunderkind, Andersson directed a hit movie at age 28, and then plunged into depression. He bought a central Stockholm warehouse in 1981 to “develop my own language”. He built his studio inside and lives in an apartment above.
Andersson’s process is as peculiar as are his movies. He builds the set for each vignette one at a time in his studio. He expertly deploys a range of old school techniques like trompe-l’œil.
Andersson’s movies are about the foibles of everyday humans. They show people’s moments of fragility, vulnerability, confidence and lack thereof. One of his colleagues observes, “Roy sees people who aren’t in the movies. It’s people who who haven’t been very successful in life. He gives them dignity .” For research, Andersson sits in sidewalk cafes to people-watch (“so I can see the menu“).
Andersson himself notes, “When you think there’s no escape, you are a prisoner in your own mortality.“ Overusing alcohol to combat boredom, Andersson struggles to finish his movie.
Director Fred Scott made excellent use of his access to Andersson, Andersson’s coworkers and family to tell this story. Being a Human Person is streaming from Laemmle.
Photo caption: Idella Johnson, Sivan Noam Shimon and Hannah Pepper in Marion Hill’s film MA BELLE, MY BEAUTY. Courtesy of SFILM.
This week – an expectation-busting documentary in theaters and two new audience-pleasers to watch at home.
IN THEATERS
499: Photo courtesy of Cinema Guild.
499: In this critique of contemporary Mexico, director Rodrigo Reyes has invented the medium of “docu-fable”. It is all as real as real can be (the documentary), except for the fictional, 500-year-old conquistador (the fable). Opens today at San Francisco’s Roxie with Reyes in attendance and plays through September 8.
Also in theaters:
CODA: a thought-provoking audience-pleaser. Also streaming on AppleTV.
Annette: opening and closing sparks, but tiresome and creepy in between
Zola: the road trip is not what it seems, (and neither is this movie). Still in theaters, but getting harder to find.
ON VIDEO
The Unknown Saint: I loved this crime comedy from Morocco. It’s a deadpan dive into human foibles and really, really bad luck. Netflix.
Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal and Greed. This doc tells two improbable stories. The first is how Bob Ross, the soft-talking, permanent-coiffed painting instructor on PBS, could become such a cultural phenomenon. The second is a sordid tale of bone-picking exploitation. Netflix.
The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:
The Dry: a mystery as psychological as it is procedural. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
ON TV
Clint Eastwood in THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY
On September 6, Turner Classic Movies gives us a helluva choice, depending on how you prefer your movie violence. For stylized movie violence (and stylized movie music, camerawork and everything else, there’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Then there’s the serious-as-a-heart-attack Battle of Algiers.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly completes Sergio Leone’s hugely influential triad of Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns. The wonderfully idiosyncratic score by Ennio Morricone is indelible.
The Battle of Algiers is the story of 1950s French colonialists struggling to suppress the guerrilla uprising of Algerian independence fighters. Although it looks like a documentary, it is not. Instead, filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo recreated the actual events so realistically that we believe that we are watching strategy councils of each side. Among the great war films, it may be the best film on counter-insurgency. In 2003, the Pentagon screened the film for its special operations commanders.
Photo caption: THE UNKNOWN SAINT. Photo courtesy of The Match Factory.
Here’s the premise of the crime comedy The Unknown Saint: a thief is being hunted down in the vast Moroccan desert. Just before capture, he buries his loot on a sandy hilltop and disguises it to look like a grave. After serving time in prison, he returns to dig up his loot. But he finds that some people, believing the “grave” to be that of a saint, have built a mausoleum over the grave. Even worse, an entire village has sprung up to support pilgrimage commerce, and the shrine is guarded around the clock.
The thief (Younes Bouab) starts plotting to sneak in and dig up the loot, but he’s got to overcome, among other obstacles, the night watchman’s canine corps. It doesn’t help when he brings in an accomplice so stupid that he doesn’t get that his prison nickname of “Ahmed the Brain” is ironic. And he is surprised when he is not the only nighttime tomb raider.
The thief has to wait in a village filled with eccentrics and small timers on the hustle. The dispensary has a bored young doctor, an aged nurse with a wicked sense of humor, and a waiting room full of “patients” putting on a charade of medical need.
Younes Bouab in THE UNKNOWN SAINT. Photo courtesy of The Match Factory.
The Unknown Saint is relentlessly deadpan, as all the characters plunge ahead with profound cynicism or earnest absurdity, with at least one critic likening it to Fargo. It’s all very, very funny, especially an unexpected triumph of dog dentistry involving the town barber.
The Unknown Saint is the first feature for writer-director Alaa Eddine Aljem, and it is an auspicious debut. Aljem knows how to use the vastness of the desert to express human futility and how to wring laughs out of human foibles.
The Unknown Saint is Morocco’s submission for this year’s Best International Feature Oscar. The Unknown Saint is streaming from Netflix.
Photo caption: BOB ROSS: HAPPY ACCIDENTS, BETRAYAL & GREED. Photo courtesy of Netflix.
The documentary Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed tells two improbable stories. The first is how Bob Ross, the soft-talking painting instructor on PBS, could become such a cultural phenomenon. It’s hard not to smile when thinking of the signature permanent adorning Ross, at once ridiculous and kind of innocent, and big enough to warrant its own zip code. [Come to think of it, can you imagine ANY personality who sounded like and looked like Ross, Julia Child or Fred Rogers starring on commercial TV?]
In any event, Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed lets us glimpse the secret sauce that Ross used to make a mundane craft into something singular and indelible. By all accounts, Ross was a very sweet guy. The edgiest thing anyone says about him is that he could tell “ornery jokes”.
The Betrayal and Greed in the title relates to the bone-picking after his death to exploit his legacy. This is a sordid tale, in sharp juxtaposition to Ross’ own career and persona.
Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed is streaming on Netflix.
In director and co-writer Rodrigo Reyes’ highly original docu-fable 499, one of Hernán Cortés’ soldiers (Eduardo San Juan Breñais) is transported centuries into the future and plunged into contemporary Mexico. The movie’s title reflects a moment 499 years after Cortés’ conquest of the Aztecs in 1520; the conquistador and the audience discover that the dehumanization inherent in colonialism has persisted to plague modern Mexico.
I’m calling Reyes’ medium a “docu-fable” because it is all as real as real can be (the documentary), except for the fictional, 500-year-old conquistador (the fable).
Cast upon a Veracruz beach after a shipwreck (but 500 years later), the conquistador is terribly disoriented, and retraces Cortés’ march from Veracruz to Tenochtitlan/Mexico City. Seeing everything with a 500 year old lens, he is initially disgusted that the Indians that he conquered are now running things.
Soon he finds a Mexico reeling from narco terror. He meets Mexicans who have been victimized by the cruel outrages of the drug cartels, those risking their lives to hop a northbound train, and those in prison. In the emotional apex of 499, one mother’s account of a monstrous atrocity, clinical detail by clinical detail, is intentionally unbearable.
Reyes wants the audience to connect the dots from Mexico’s Original Sin – a colonialism that was premised on devaluing an entire people and their culture. Will the conquistador find his way to contrition?
499, with its camera sometimes static, sometimes slowly panning, is contemplative. Cinematographer: Alejandro Mejía’s work won Best Cinematography at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival.
499 opens at San Francisco’s Roxie on September 3 with Rodrigo Reyes in attendance, and will play the Roxie for a week before its national rollout.
Photo caption: Jennifer Hudson as Aretha Franklin in RESPECT.
Five new movies this week, plus a seminal neo-noir on TV.
IN THEATERS
Ma Belle, My Beauty: This simmering romantic drama is a gorgeous, sexy, character-driven film. I screened Ma Belle, My Beauty at the 2021 SFFILM.
Respect: Jennifer Hudson is up to the challenge of portraying Aretha Franklin in this revealing biopic, especially her struggles to wrest command of her own creativity from both well-intentioned and ill-intentioned men. A little too long, but then there’s I Never Loved a Man (Like the Way I Love You), Respect, Think, Natural Woman and Amazing Grace.
The Lost Leonardo: This documentary peels back the onion on an ever surprising tale of discovery, scholarship, fraud, commerce and politics in the refined and pretentious art world. Is a rediscovered Renaissance masterpiece authentic, and does it matter?
Searching for Mr. Rugoff: The story of a now-unknown giant in independent cinema – a guy with the best possible movie taste and the most elevated artistic sensibilities who was personally a barbarian. Will also be streaming from the Roxie.
Eugenio Derbez in CODA
Also in theaters:
CODA: a thought-provoking audience-pleaser. Also streaming on AppleTV.
Annette: opening and closing sparks, but tiresome and creepy in between
Zola: the road trip is not what it seems, (and neither is this movie). Still in theaters, but getting harder to find.
ON VIDEO
Curiosa: This French romantic drama is set in the Belle Epoque, when the Eiffel Tower was new and sexual liberation was burgeoning among literati. It would be more erotic if we cared about the characters. Laemmle.
The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:
The Dry: a mystery as psychological as it is procedural. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
ON TV
Lee Marvin in POINT BLANK
On August 28, Turner Classic Movies presents the seminal 1960s neo-noir Point Blank, starring Lee Marvin. Marvin stars as Walker, a heist man who is shot and left for dead by his partner Reese (John Vernon, Animal House’s Dean Wormer), who absconded with Walker’s share of the loot and Walker’s wife. When Walker recovers, he is hellbent on revenge, aided by his sister-in-law Chris (Angie Dickinson).
It turns out that Walker needs to trace the money through a cavalcade of Mr. Bigs (Lloyd Bochner, Keenan Wynn, Carroll O’Connor). There’s a great set piece where Walker invades a highrise penthouse, despite the heavily guarded elevator being the only entrance. It all ends in a thrilling nighttime finale at Fort Point.
Walker is a very uncomplicated character, all he wants is to kill Reese and reclaim his $93,000. Anyone in Walker’s situation would be pissed off, but Lee Marvin plays Walker in a constant state of cold rage. Lee Marvin’s unique charisma animates this relentless killing machine.
Marvin, just coming off The Dirty Dozen and having won an Oscar for Cat Ballou, was at the peak of his stardom. Marvin’s other contribution to the film was handpicking the then unheralded John Boorman to direct; (this was five years before Boorman’s masterpiece Deliverance). Boorman intentionally delivered a morally bleak story in the most deserted of locations: empty parking lots, the Los Angeles River channel. and San Francisco’s two icons of abandonment – Alcatraz and Fort Point.
Lee Marvin in POINT BLANK
If you’re wondering why Angie Dickinson was a movie star, Point Blank is for you. Angie was ballsy, sexy and always unashamedly very direct, and she rocked midcentury fashion. (She plays one unforgettable scene in a dress with bold horizontal stripes in the colors of Denny’s restaurants.)
Watch for James B. Sikking as the professional sniper; Sikking became well-known as the supercilious SWAT team commander Lt. Howard Hunter in Hill Street Blues. Future horror icon Sid Haig pops up as the security guard in the penthouse lobby.
The insightful and thought-provoking documentary The Lost Leonardo starts out as a mystery. We learn that there are “sleeper hunters” in the art world, who seek unrecognized or mislabeled art and buy them on speculation. Our two sleeper hunters buy a beat up, old painting for $1100 to find out if is a long lost original Leonardo da Vinci painting, “the male Mona Lisa”. So, the initial question is, is this a real Leonardo painting, of which only 15 are known to exist?
Around 1500, Leonardo painted a Jesus portrait titled Salvator Mundi (The Savior of the World), of which many copies were made by others. The speculators send their painting to the world’s top restorer of Renaissance masterpieces to query whether this could be the original. Then they approach the National Gallery of Art, which has the painting scrutinized by three leading world experts in Leonardo’s work.
The initial findings are promising. The transition between the lip and the upper lip resembles only one other painting – the Mona Lisa. Removal of patchwork paint reveals that Jesus’ thumb has been repositioned, which was a common practice by Renaissance masters, but is never is seen in a copy.
But questions remain for some. Why would Leonardo, who was meticulous, choose a piece of wood with a knothole that would assuredly eventually cause a disfiguring crack? Worse, how could a 600-year-old Leonardo show up in New Orleans with no provenance?
Both the proponents of the painting’s authenticity and those who would discredit it agree that the restorer contributed up to 85% of the actual paint on the current painting. So, even if Leonardo painted it in 1500, is it now just a masterpiece by the restorer?
The story diverts to an amazing con job that is unrelated to the painting’s authenticity. A shrewd and audacious French businessman bilks a Russian billionaire out of $45 million by pretending to be negotiating the purchase of a painting that that he has already bought. And, as the Frenchman later notes ruefully, you don’t want to piss off a Russian oligarch.
At this point, The Lost Leonardo takes us into a record-breaking $450 MILLION art sale (in which the purchaser is revealed by the CIA – yes, the CIA) with implications for global politics. Implicitly, The Lost Leonardo poses a second question – does it matter whether the Salvator Mundi is real or not? It certainly doesn’t need to be proven to those who would benefit from it being a real Leonardo – the sellers, the National Gallery of Art, Christie’s auction house – or to those who are emotionally moved by it as a piece of art.
The Lost Leonardo peels back the onion on an ever surprising tale of discovery, scholarship, fraud, commerce and politics in the refined and pretentious art world. It’s a good watch.
