The Swedish comedy Staying Alivetreads the now familiar ground of An Unmarried Woman – a woman’s husband has traded her in for a newer model, leaving her to address the challenges of self-identity, parenting, sexuality and economic survival in an post-marriage environment. Staying Alive has two things going for it – an appealing performance by its lead actress, Agnes Kittelsen, and some bawdy, broad humor from her bestie.
Staying Alive is mildly enjoyable entertainment, but there’s really no other reason for this film to have been made.
Remember Me is an odd couple comedy about two mismatched cousins who visit their grandparents just as the old man dies so they have to take grandma (the great Rita Moreno) off on a road trip to the old folks home. Remember Me is written and directed by Steve Goldbloom, who also stars as the more professionally successful and reserved cousin; Joel Kelly Dauten plays the wild man cousin, banging around between failed fantasies. Both guys are emotionally stunted in their own ways.
The dead grandpa situation is very funny, and there’s a witty joke about the Goldbloom character’s day job as a guy who reads news stories about wars in the Third World for NPR (without ever leaving the US to cover a story). But these two immature thirty-year-olds just aren’t interesting enough to carry a feature film.
Rita Moreno is very good, but this is a one of those man-child-coming-of-age movies. That subgenre is getting tiresome, as was Remember Me.
Fabrice Luchini and Gemma Arterton in GEMMA BOVERY
In honor of Cinequest, here’s a highlight from last year’s fest. In the delightful dark comedy Gemma Bovery, Fabrice Luchini plays a guy who has left his Type A job in Paris to take over his father’s bakery in a sleepy village in Normandy. He gets new neighbors when a young British couple named Bovery moves in. The young British woman (played by the delectable Gemma Arterton) is named Gemma Bovery, and only the baker notices the similarity to Emma Bovary. But, like the protagonist of Madame Bovary, the young British woman is also married to a Charles, becomes bored and restless and develops a wandering eye. The baker rapidly becomes obsessed with the Flaubert novel being re-enacted before his eyes and soon jumps into the plot himself. Gemma Bovery, which I saw at Cinequest 2015, is a French movie that is mostly in English.
Fabrice Luchini is a treasure of world cinema. No screen actor can deliver a funnier reaction than Luchini, and he’s the master of squeezing laughs out of an awkward moment. For me, his signature role is in the 2004 French Intimate Strangers, in which he plays a tax lawyer with a practice in a Parisian professional office building. A beautiful woman (Sandrine Bonnaire), mistakes Luchini’s office for that of her new shrink, plops herself down and, before he can interrupt, starts unloading her sexual issues. It quickly becomes awkward for him to tell her of the error, and he’s completely entranced with her revelations, so he keeps impersonating her shrink. As they move from appointment to appointment, their relationship takes some unusual twists. It’s a very funny movie, and a great performance.
Gemma Bovery is directed and co-written by Anne Fontaine (The Girl from Monaco, Coco Before Chanel). Fontaine has a taste for offbeat takes on female sexuality, which she aired in the very trashy Adore (Naomi Watts and Robin Wright as Australian cougars who take on each other’s sons as lovers) and the much better Nathalie (wife pays prostitute to seduce her cheating hubby and report back on the details).
Gemma Bovery isn’t as Out There as Nathalie, but it’s just as good. The absurdity of the coincidences in Gemma Bovery makes for a funny situation, which Luchini elevates into a very funny movie. Gemma Bovery is available to stream from Amazon Video (free with Amazon Prime), iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
In the sex comedy Friends Effing Friends Effing Friends, several twenty-somethings start hooking up with each other in random combinations, even though some are in relationships. The sexual entanglements predictably lead to both comic situations and hurt feelings.
Happily, sometimes there is Truth in Advertising, and there is a lots of Effing in Friends Effing Friends Effing Friends. There’s so much sex that, although it has a real plot and much better acting, it wouldn’t be totally out-of-place on late night Showtime.
The cast is young, appealing and able, and Friends Effing Friends Effing Friends works as a trifle (and there’s nothing wrong with that). Its world premiere was at Cinequest.
The contemporary and topical comedy Search Enginestakes on our obsession with We see an extended family Thanksgiving – and everyone is bowing into that screen-gazing posture. All the characters are preoccupied by their smart phones as they text, video, read recipes and blog away. Suddenly, something blocks their coverage, and we see what happens when all the screens go dark.
Search Engines has a promising cast (Daphne Zuniga, Joely Fisher, Natasha Gregson Wagner and even Connie Stevens!), and they all perform well. The strongest part of Search Engines is its topicality, but as mildly amusing as it is, it just ain’t a knee slapper.
The shamelessly low brow comedy A Beginners Guide to Snuff features a very dim pair of would-be actors who seek to win a horror movie contest by simulating a snuff film. What could possibly go wrong? To get the most realistic performance out of their leading lady, they decide to kidnap her and pretend that they’re going to torture her to death on film. Their choice of that leading lady (played by Bree Williamson) brings some very unexpected consequences.
Most of the humor in Beginners Guide comes from the dumb and dumber filmmakers and spoof on low-budget horror cinema. But Williamson’s electric performance, like a shot of adrenaline, animates and elevates the movie whenever she is on-screen. Her character is so many tiers above the two boobs that she remains in charge even when chained to a table. On top of that, she has some unanticipated skills and characteristics…
A Beginners Guide to Snuff ends with a particularly inspired trailer for the movie-within-the-movie. If you’re looking for broad and dark comedy with a sparkling performance by an actress, this is your movie. World Premiere at Cinequest on March 4, 6 and 11.
Here’s the problem with the Coen Brothers’ disappointingly empty comedy Hail, Caesar – there is no real story at its core. The plot ostensibly centers on commies kidnapping a movie star and a studio exec mulling over a job outside the movie industry. But these are contrived as an excuse to parody Old Hollywood and the movie conventions of the studio Golden Age. And that’s not enough by itself to make up a really good movie. At the end of Hail, Caesar, the guy sitting behind me said, “That’s it?”.
The parodies are well-executed, and the more you know about movies, the richer the laughs. The characters are making a ponderously devout sword-and-sandal epic called Hail, Caesar, which is closely modeled on the 1959 Ben-Hur, right down to the subtitle of the source novel, “A Tale of the Christ”. The epic stars a charismatic but shallow leading man, played well by George Clooney. This part is funny.
So is a spectacularly executed Busby Berkeley number with Scarlett Johansson as an Esther Williams type aquatic movie star. And Channing Tatum shines in a Gene Kelly-like song-and-dance set piece. Later in the film, famed cinematographer Roger Eakins brilliantly lights Tatum as an icon of Soviet-era Socialist Realism.
By far the best part of Hail, Caesar is Alden Ehrenreich as a singing cowboy. Where did they find this guy? Ehrenreich is convincing and hilarious as he performs tricks with his pistol, horse and lariat in a formula Western and then is forced to fit into a period costume for a drawing-room romantic drama. It’s an exuberantly singular performance, and something we haven’t seen on-screen since Gene Autrey and Roy Rogers.
All of the actors are good here, including Josh Brolin as the lead, and Clooney, Johansson, Tatum, Ralph Fiennes and Tila Swinton. Frances McDormand is wasted in a very brief physical comedy bit. That old scene-stealer Clancy Brown, here growling as the actor playing Gracchus in the Hail, Caesar-in-the-movie-Hail, Caesar shows why he’s one of my favorite character actors
There are always expectations of a Coen Brothers film, because of their masterpieces: Fargo, True Grit, Blood Simple and their seriously underrrated A Serious Man. Plus there’s the critical favorite No Country for Old Men and the cult fave The Big Lebowski. But they’ve also made some more forgettable fare (Inside Llewyn Davis, Burn After Reading) and Hail, Caesar is one of them.
Bottom line: if you want to enjoy a string of first class movie parodies, see Hail, Caesar. If you’re looking for something more, skip it.
The premise of Moonwalkers is that the US Government conspired to film a simulated moon landing so, just in case something went wrong with the 1969 Moon Landing, they could bamboozle the public with a faux success. (This, of course, is a wry joke on the conspiracy theories claiming that the historical Moon Landing was faked.) In Moonwalkers, a burned-out CIA agent (Ron Perlman) is tapped to get Stanley Kubrick, no less, to shoot the phony movie. Unfortunately, he happens upon precisely the wrong drug addled hustler (Rupert Grint of Harry Potter) to put him in touch with Kubrick, and a mediocre madcap comedy ensues.
Nothing much here, but it’s all in good fun, and Ron Perlman is always a hoot. Moonwalkers is available streaming from Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Some viewers are going to hate, hate, hate the droll Swedish existentialist comedy A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Contemplating Existence, but it’s kind of a masterpiece. For most of its 101 minutes, dull Swedes sit and stand talking about dull things. It’s no secret that the Scandinavians (who The Wife refers to as “Your people”) are not the most lively bunch. Filmmaker Roy Andersson uses this trope to probe the meaning of life itself.
Salon.com critic Andrew O’Hehir has accurately described this film as “extreme-deadpan”. It is made up of vignettes filmed in static shots where people hardly move for 1-4 minutes – a looooong time. There is nothing on the walls of any of the bleak rooms. The characters converse in empty social conventions, talking about weather and such. Everyone says, “I’m happy to hear that you’re doing fine” because they can’t think of anything else to say. The highlight of their lives is when a comely young woman removes a stone from her shoe. In one bus stop discussion about what day of the week it is, we have the theme distilled: “it would be chaos” if we didn’t follow the routine. All of these people need more than a little chaos.
This is the third movie in a trilogy by Andersson. (I’ve seen and relished one of the prior films, Songs from the Second Floor). Like Pigeon, Songs is very funny, but Pigeon is more ambitious and digs deeper.
In the primary recurring thread, we follow a pair of sad sack novelty salesmen, who see their hopeless mission as “to help people have fun”. The joke is there may not be any value/fun/point to life but ESPECIALLY if you are a brooding Swede.
During the end credits, there is a final contrast, juxtaposing the unrestrained American rockabilly music set against an image of mordant Swedes.
There are absurdist episodes where 18th Century King Carl XII rides his steed into a modern Swedish cafe. (It helps to know that Carl spurned the company of women and that his defeat in the Battle of Poltava signaled the end of Swedish empire.)
And then there is a horrifyingly surreal dream sequence that illustrates the horrors of European colonialism. It is about inhumane brutality that Andersson believes still haunts Europe until forgiveness is sought; there is a reference to Sweden’s brief colonial past. This segment is less evocative (and even unnecessary) for US viewers unless we relate it to our own legacy of slavery.
Is the movie pointless? Or is the point that life is pointless? We do see some brief tender moments of a couple at a window and another in a meadow. The foe, it seems, is loneliness. We have only each other.
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Contemplating Existence is available to stream from Netflix Instant, Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Here’s an offbeat choice for a Christmas movie – the raucous and raunchy high energy comedy Tangerine is set on Christmas Eve. Of course, it’s not a family movie in that it’s appropriate for children, but it is about families by choice. Tangerine is available to stream from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
