comedy

DVD/Stream of the Week: CHEVALIER – male competitiveness, brilliantly skewered

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CHEVALIER. Photo courtesy of Strand Releasing
CHEVALIER. Photo courtesy of Strand Releasing

One of the best films of the year, Chevalier is a sly and pointed exploration of male competitiveness, with the moments of drollness and absurdity that we expect in the best of contemporary Greek cinema. Chevalier is also now the Most Overlooked Movie of 2016, and I’m hoping that its popularity explodes now that it’s available on video.

In Chevalier, six guys are taking a holiday week on a yacht in the Aegean Sea. Each has his own stateroom, and the crew includes a chef. They spend their days scuba diving, jet skiing and the like. After a post-dinner game of charades, one suggests that they play Chevalier, a game about “Who is best overall?”. Of course, men tend to be competitive, and their egos are now at stake. The six guys began appraising each other, and their criteria get more and more absurd. “How many fillings do you have?”

In one especially inspired set piece, the guys race each other to construct IKEA bookcases, which results in five phallic towers on the boat’s deck (and one drooping failure). Naturally, some of the guys are obsessed with their own erections, too.

Director Athina Rachel Tsangari is obviously a keen observer of male behavior. Both men and women will enjoy laughing at male behavior taken to extreme. I sure did. Chevalier is perhaps the funniest movie of 2016, and it’s on my list of Best Movies of 2016 – So Far.

I saw Chevalier at the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF), where I pegged it as the Must See of the fest. (In 2011, Tsangari brought her hilariously offbeat Attenberg to SFIFF.)  Unfortunately, in the Bay Area, Chevalier only got a blink-and-you’ve-missed-it release in June.  Chevalier is now available to rent on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Netflix Instant, Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Athina Rachel Tsangari, director of CHEVALIER . Photo courtesy of San Francisco Film Society
Athina Rachel Tsangari, director of CHEVALIER . Photo courtesy of San Francisco Film Society

TONI ERDMANN: Must See at MVFF

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TONI ERDMANN
TONI ERDMANN

One MUST SEE at the Mill Valley Film Festival is Toni Erdmann, from writer-director Maren Ade. You might not expect an almost three-hour German comedy to break through, but I’ve seen it, and I think that it’s a lock to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Picture. Ade gives us a woman’s perspective of a father-daughter relationship, creating a totally original and unforgettable father who takes prankstering into performance art. This is a movie with the funniest nude brunch you’ll ever witness that still will leave you choked up at the end.

Toni Erdmann opens January 20 in the Bay Area, but you can see it at the MVFF today, October 8, and on October 13; both screenings are at the Rafael in San Rafael.

This year’s MVFF runs from October 6-16, mostly at the Sequoia in Mill Valley and the Rafael in San Rafael, but also at three other Marin venues. Check out the program and tickets for the MVFF. I’ll be adding more festival coverage, including both features and movie recommendations. Follow me on Twitter for the very latest coverage.

TONI ERDMANN
TONI ERDMANN

DVD/Stream of the Week: LOVE & FRIENDSHIP – new heights for manipulation and twittery

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Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale in LOVE & FRIENDSHIP
Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale in LOVE & FRIENDSHIP

Based on Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, the sharply witty Love & Friendship centers on the unabashedly amoral efforts by Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale) to get exactly what she wants despite lack of resources and position.

Love & Friendship is filled with the 19th century version of “snappy dialogue” – old-fashioned wit. Mark Twain would have loved this movie. Much of the comes from Lady Susan’s clueless sense of entitlement and her unashamed and outrageous manipulation of the other characters. An unabashed moocher and deadbeat, she finds that, because her daughter’s school fees are “too high to even consider paying, it is actually an economy”.

It’s a pleasing turn from Kate Beckinsale at age 42, who has so often played ornamental movie roles. She first came to our attention at age 20 as the beauteous Hero in Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing, and broke through at age 23 by dominating the British indie Shooting Fish. After playing a bunch of less interesting roles, it’s great to see get a chance to really act in Love & Friendship.

Love & Friendship’s director is Whit Stillman, who debuted with two delightful indies from the world of old money Northeastern preppies. Metropolitan and Barcelona were talky and perceptive explorations of human nature, set in what usually is a less accessible and less sympathetic social set. (Unfortunately, he most recently made the dreadful Damsels in Distress with the always execrable Greta Gerwig.)

Right from the get-go, Stillman lets us know that he’s not taking this too seriously with self-mocking character introductions. In another nice touch, Stillman clads some of the male characters in noticeably ill-fitting clothes – something you never see in a movie from this period. It’s funny – and authentic, when you think about it.

In the funniest moments of the film, the enthusiastically dim Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett) takes twittery to new heights. Bennett, a British TV actor previously unknown to me, is quite a revelation. It’s always nice to see Chloe Sevigny, too, and she’s here playing Lady Susan’s equally amoral American friend.

Although I did not see it there, Love & Friendship was the opening night feature of the 59th San Francisco Film Festival, and folks were still praising it in festival lines a week later.   It’s now available on DVD from Netflix (and coming soon to Redbox) and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and DirecTV.

DON’T THINK TWICE: dramedy in the world of comedy

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DON'T THINK TWICE
DON’T THINK TWICE

Don’t Think Twice is a dramedy set in the world of comedy. Six artists of varying talent have formed an improvisational comedy troupe. They’re scraping by without much affirmation and with no financial success when one of them gets a chance to join the cast of a hit show a la Saturday Night Live. How do they react when only one attains the stardom that they all crave?

The comic Mike Birbiglia wrote and directed Don’t Think Twice about a world that he knows well. Like his previous Sleepwalk with Me, Don’t Think Twice is smart, funny and filled with authentic human reactions.

Here are the questions that Don’t Think Twice explores. When is “following your dream” an excuse for staying comfortable? When is it delusional? When is it an excuse to sabotage your own success? And when does following your dream keep you from following a more promising dream? When do you call it off?

Keegan-Michael Key and Gillian Jacobs flash the best performances, but the entire troupe is watchable. Generously, Birbiglia plays the least sympathetic character himself. Birbiglia, who is in real life a brilliant comic, is up to the challenge of playing someone whose talent just falls short.

Key is half of Comedy Central’s Key and Peele, creators of the hilarious viral sketches Obama’s Anger Translator and East/West College Bowl (Ozamataz Buckshank!).

Because it is about very funny people who work in comedy, Don’t Think Twice is very witty. It’s also packed with moments of Cringe Humor, and we’re cringing because we’ve seen these behaviors in our own lives. This is another good little movie by Mike Birbiglia.

 

DVD/Stream of the Week: WILD TALES

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WILD TALES
WILD TALES

Okay, here’s the hilariously dark Argentine comedy Wild Tales. Writer-director Damián Szifron presents a series of individual stories about revenge. It’s still high my list of Best Movies of 2015 – So Far.

We all feel aggrieved, and Wild Tales explores what happens when rage overcomes the restraints of social order. Think about how instantly angry you can become when some driver cuts you off on the highway – and then how you might fantasize avenging the slight. Indeed, there is a story in Wild Tales that has the most severe case road rage since Spielberg’s Duel in 1971. Now Wild Tales is dark, and you gotta go with it. The humor comes from the EXTREMES that someone’s resentment can lead to.

One key to the success of Wild Tales is that it is an anthology. In a very wise move, Szifron resisted any impulse to stretch one of the stories into a feature-length movie. Each of the stories is just the right length to extract every laugh and pack a punch. The funniest stories are the opening one set on an airplane and the final one about a wedding.

The acting is uniformly superb. In one story, Oscar Martínez plays a wealthy man in a desperate jam, who buys the help of his shady lawyer fixer (Osmar Núñez) and his longtime household retainer (Germán de Silva) – until their prices get just a little too high. The three actors take what looks like it’s going to a thriller and morph into a (very funny) psychological comedy with a very cynical view of human nature.

One of the middle episodes stars one of my favorite film actors, Ricardo Darín, who I see as the Argentine Joe Mantegna. I suggest that you watch Darín in the brilliant police procedural The Secrets in Their Eyes (on my top ten for 2010), the steamy and seamy Carancho and the wonderful con artist movie Nine Queens.

Wild Tales was a festival hit (Cannes, Telluride, Toronto and Sundance) around the world and was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar. I saw Wild Tales at Cinequest 2015. It’s now available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu and Xbox Video.

Stream of the Week: MEET THE PATELS – a documentary funnier than most comedies

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MEET THE PATELS
MEET THE PATELS

Meet the Patels is both a documentary and a comedy – and ultimately, a satisfying crowd-pleaser. Over several years, filmmaker Geeta Patel filmed her own brother Ravi and their parents in their quest to find a wife for Ravi. Ravi and Geeta’s parents were born in India, had a traditional arranged marriage which has resulted in decades of happiness. Their American-born kids, of course, reject the very idea of an arranged marriage. But Ravi finds the pull of his Indian heritage compelling enough to dump his redheaded girlfriend and try to find a nice Indian-American girl. His parents try to help him with unbounded and unrelenting enthusiasm.

Meet the Patels is very funny – much funnier than most fictional comedies. It’s always awkward when parents involve themselves in their child’s romantic aspirations. That’s true here, and produces some side-splitting moments. It helps that the Patel parents are very expressive, and downright hilarious. The dad is so funny that I could watch him read a telephone book for 90 minutes, and the mom is herself a force of nature.

We learn that the Patels of Gujarat have adapted an entire menu of marriage opportunities unfamiliar to mainstream American society: a matchmaking profile system called “biodata”, matrimonial fairs, “the wedding season” and more.

Meet the Patels has its share of cultural tourism and the clash of generations. But it is so damn appealing because it’s much more than that – it’s a completely authentic saga of family dynamics, dynamics that we’ve all experienced or at least observed. The family members’ mutual love for each other drives family conflict and, finally, family unity.

I saw Meet the Patels at the Camera Cinema Club last year, and it had a brief theatrical run in the Bay Area. Meet the Patels is available to stream from Netflix Instant, Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play. It’s hilarious and heart-warming, so don’t miss it.

THE LOBSTER: the movie disappointment of the year

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Colin Farrell in THE LOBSTER
Colin Farrell in THE LOBSTER

The Lobster, which is supposed to be a dark comedy, won the Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, along with acclaim at the Toronto and Sundance fests, so I had been eagerly awaiting it for just over twelve months.  I had liked Director Yorgos Lanthimos’ Greek absurdist film Dogtooth.  Unfortunately, The Lobster is a disagreeable misfire, which makes it the biggest movie disappointment of the year.

The Lobster takes place in an imagined world that looks like ours, but where being single is the worst status possible.  Single people go to a woodsy resort hotel, where they are under a time limit to find a partner or be turned into the animal of their choice. After all, in the city, they are challenged by law enforcement to produce their most important form of identification – the certificate that proves they are in a couple.  Guests at the resort go on daily hunts in the forest, where they shoot escaped single people  – the Loners – with tranquilizer darts.  (The Loners have their own monstrous leader (Lea Seydoux) and harsh rules.)

If a guest finds a partner, they enjoy a double room for two weeks and then a holiday on a yacht.  The hotel manager (Olivia Colman) drily announces,  that if the new relationship  becomes troubled, “We will assign you children. That always helps.”

It’s all very deadpan.  As the cast earnestly complies with ever more absurd rules at the hotel, The Lobster is darkly funny.

But then, The Lobster runs off its rails.  We lose the drollery and find our way in a survivalist love story with Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz, and then, into a what is essentially a horror ending.  Inside all this mess is an allegory about society putting obstacles in the way of our reaching happiness through a love match.  But it stops being funny, and starts becoming tedious and uncomfortable.

Colin Farrell leads a fine cast with Weisz, Colman, Seydoux and James C. Reilly.  The failings of The Lobster are not their fault.

The first third of the The Lobster is amusing, and I hung hopefully with the second third.  The final third is dark, without much, if any, leavening humor, and the last fifteen minutes is almost unwatchable.  Stay away.

 

LOVE & FRIENDSHIP: new heights for manipulation and twittery

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Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale in LOVE & FRIENDSHIP
Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale in LOVE & FRIENDSHIP

Based on Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, the sharply witty Love & Friendship centers on the unabashedly amoral efforts by Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale) to get exactly what she wants despite lack of resources and position.

Love & Friendship is filled with the 19th century version of “snappy dialogue” – old-fashioned wit.  Mark Twain would have loved this movie.  Much of the comes from Lady Susan’s clueless sense of entitlement and her unashamed and outrageous manipulation of the other characters.  An unabashed moocher and deadbeat, she finds that, because her daughter’s school fees are “too high to even consider paying, it is actually an economy”.

It’s a pleasing turn from Kate Beckinsale at age 42, who has so often played ornamental movie roles.  She first came to our attention at age 20 as the beauteous Hero in Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing, and broke through at age 23 by dominating the British indie Shooting Fish.  After playing a bunch of less interesting roles, it’s great to see get a chance to really act in Love & Friendship.

Love & Friendship’s director is Whit Stillman, who debuted with two delightful indies from the world of old money Northeastern preppies. Metropolitan and Barcelona were talky and perceptive explorations of human nature, set in what usually is a less accessible and less sympathetic social set. (Unfortunately, he most recently made the dreadful Damsels in Distress with the always execrable Greta Gerwig.)

Right from the get-go, Stillman lets us know that he’s not taking this too seriously with  self-mocking character introductions.  In another nice touch, Stillman clads some of the male characters in noticeably ill-fitting clothes – something you never see in a movie from this period. It’s funny – and authentic, when you think about it.

In the funniest moments of the film, the enthusiastically dim Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett) takes twittery to new heights.  Bennett, a British TV actor previously unknown to me, is quite a revelation.  It’s always nice to see Chloe Sevigny, too, and she’s here playing Lasy Susan’s equally amoral American friend.

Although I did not see it there, Love & Friendship was the opening night feature of the 59th San Francisco Film Festival, and folks were still praising it in festival lines a week later.

DOUGH: light, fluffy and empty

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DOUGH
DOUGH

The British comedy Dough treads the familiar territory of the mismatched buddy movie, specifically the Old Guy/Young Guy type.  Dough is distinguished from the rest of the genre by a culture clash element and the eminent actor Jonathan Pryce.  The story is set in contemporary London and the Old Guy is an Orthodox Jewish bakeshop owner (Pryce) and the Young Guy is a Muslim African refugee drug dealer (Jerome Holder).

The main characters are thrown together uncomfortably in the bakeshop, which is inexorably dying until Young Guy accidentally launches a new product line when he drops marijuana into the dough.  Suddenly business begins to boom, and all would be well but for two villains, a reptilian business rival and a scary skinhead drug lord.

Jonathan Pryce and Holder act as well as they can with this material, as does the sprightly Pauline Collins (Shirley Valentine).  But you’ve seen every one of Dough’s plot developments in a movie before.  The villains and the physical comedy are WAY too broad.  Overall, Dough is better than the average sitcom on broadcast TV, but pretty banal.

Light, fluffy and empty, Dough is the Twinkie of movies. I don’t choose to eat Twinkies myself, but I understand that sometimes you might want one.

SFIFF: LEAF BLOWER

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LEAF BLOWER. Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.
LEAF BLOWER. Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

Leaf Blower is an amiable Mexican slice-of-life comedy.  Three young guys are drifting rudderless though their adolescences, doing what teenage males do – wasting time, busting each others balls and achieving new heights of social awkwardness and sexual frustration.  Its first screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) is on April 24, and director Alejandro Iglesias Mendizábal is expected to attend.

In his promising first feature, director and co-writer Iglesias Mendizábal has created an entirely character-driven portrait of male teen friendship and restlessness.  After all, the only real plot is whether they will find the keys that one of them dropped into a pile of leaves.   But we want to keep watching these guys to see what happens to them, and it’s all pretty funny.

  • Ruben (Alejandro Guerrero) is too cool for school.  He’s sure that he’s the only one in charge of his life – he just doesn’t know where he wants to go.  So he masks his indecision and avoidance by brooding.
  • Lucas (Fabrizio Santini) is nervous and a little hyper, but his bossy girlfriend totally paralyzes him with dread.  He’s always a day late and a peso short, the kind of guy who is stuck wearing his dirty soccer uniform to a funeral.
  • Emilio (Francisco Rueda) is constrained by his status as the fat kid (and I was a fat kid, so I relate).  Self-isolated, he yearns to be more social, but then counterproductively comforts himself with more and more calories.

All three are sexually awakened but inept.   Only Lucas has a girlfriend, and she causes him to sigh painfully every time his cellphone rings.  Ruben and Emilio are so intimidated by females that they’re too scared to even borrow a rake from one.

Come to think about it, Leaf Blower is not a pure coming of age movie because its characters don’t seem to grow or change as a result of their experiences.  It’s more of a “being-of-age” movie because they just are who they are.  Perceptive and observational, Leaf Blower is pretty far away from the American Pie kind of teen comedy.

The 59th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) runs through May 5. Throughout the fest, I’ll be linking more festival coverage to my SFFIF 2016 page, including both features and movie recommendations. Follow me on Twitter for the very latest coverage.