comedy – Page 19 – The Movie Gourmet

DVD/Stream of the Week: LIVING IN OBLIVION

April 14, 2015 by movie gourmet

Peter Dinklage and Steve Buscemi in LIVING IN OBLIVION

The hilarious 1995 comedy Living in Oblivion follows a grossly under-resourced indie movie director (Steve Buscemi), who must somehow finish his low-budge/no-budget art film despite being surrounded by zanies. He’s got a neurotic female lead (Catherine Keener), a preening and slumming A-list star named Chad Palomino (James Le Gros) and an elderly actress who can’t remember her lines (Rica Martens). His stubborn and sullen cinematographer (Dermot Mulroney) is bedding the First Assistant Director (Danielle von Zerneck), who has an agenda of her own. With this outfit, everything that CAN go wrong…

Living in Oblivion is filled with lines like “I can’t act. I can just do shower scenes in Richard Gere movies for the rest of my life!” and “Hey! That’s my eye patch and I don’t want anyone else wearing it. It’s insanitary.”

But the pièce de résistance is the feature debut of Peter Dinklage, 8 years before his breakout role in The Station Agent and 16 years before becoming a star in Game of Thrones. He plays an tiny actor with a gargantuan chip on his shoulder: “Why does my character have to be a dwarf?” and “I don’t even have dreams with dwarves in them. The only place I’ve seen dwarves in dreams is in stupid movies like this!”.

Director Tom Dicillo, having been Jim Jarmusch’s cinematographer, was no stranger to indie filmmaking. After Living in Oblivion, Danielle von Zerneck moved on to a producing career.

Living in Oblivion is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Xbox Video.

Cinequest: GEMMA BOVERY

May 25, 2015March 8, 2015 by movie gourmet

Fabrice Luchini and Gemma Arterton in GEMMA BOVERY

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.

Cinequest: IN THE COMPANY OF WOMEN

March 6, 2015 by movie gourmet

In the Company of Women begins with a sixty-something guy hiring a male gigolo – not for sexual favors – but to be his wing man for a night on the town. The older guy’s long marriage has ended, and he thinks he needs some tips about prowling for women. This is a classic Boys Behaving Badly set-up, but In the Company of Women morphs into an unexpectedly sweet tribute to enduring love.

Along the way, there are plenty of War of the Sexes and Odd Couple laughs. There’s a very funny set of dating “rules”, and lines like “How do you expect to be yourself around women without alcohol?”.

Writer Shoji Silver stars as the cocksure and incredibly glib younger man. He is exceedingly handsome and perhaps even more cynical. As the younger man verbally jousts, the older man’s (Paul Eenhoorn) sincerity and depth come through. Eenhoorn is perfect as a guy who is earnest, but also very perceptive (he recognizes how the younger man’s emotions are sparked by the mere mention of his father). If you don’t remember Eenhoorn from the geezer road trip comedy Land Ho!, make sure you see that delight.

Director Khalil Silver (Shoji’s brother) masterfully changes the tome of the movie without a bump. The young guy starts out giving the advice on dating, but then he receives the advice from the older man on life. I saw In the Company of Women at its Cinequest 2015 world premiere, and women audience members, in particular, seemed to love it.

WILD TALES: the first Must See of 2015

March 6, 2015 by movie gourmet

Okay, here’s the first Must See of 2015 – the hilariously dark Argentine comedy Wild Tales. Writer-director Damián Szifron presents a series of individual stories about revenge.

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 story 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 has been 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.

Thursday at Cinequest: THE HAMSTERS

March 5, 2015 by movie gourmet

Don’t miss the most overlooked nugget at Cinequest 2015. The Hamsters (Los Hamsters) is a delightfully dark social satire about a riotously dysfunctional Tijuana family. The dad, mom and two teenagers are going to such lengths to hide secrets from each other that they are completely oblivious to the drama in the others lives. In his first narrative feature, writer-director Gil Gonzalez has crafted a comedy that is completely character-driven, compressed into a very fun 71 minutes.

This family is in the upper middle class and the dad is desperately trying to stay there, the mom is denying any signs to the contrary and the kids are too spoiled and self-absorbed to notice any odd behavior by the parents. The acting is strong, especially by Angel Norzagaray, who plays the weary but driven, hangdog dad.

And here’s a bonus – Los Hamsters was filmed in Tijuana, and it’s great for a US audience to see this city as it is seen by its residents, not by its visitors.

Los Hamsters plays Cinequest today again on March 7 at Camera 12. See you around the fest. You can find my festival coverage, including both features and movie recommendations, on my Cinequest page. Follow me on Twitter for the very latest.

Cinequest: CHASING BERLUSCONI

February 26, 2015 by movie gourmet

In the bawdy Norwegian comedy Chasing Berlusconi, a beleaguered harness racing driver gets into trouble with menacing (and very, very funny) Finnish loan sharks, which precipitates a farce involving two shady dim bulbs and a pair of even dumber cops. Oh, and then there’s the driver’s nyphomaniacal wife. Did I mention the racetrack owner with a piercing, sudden cackle and a predilection for toupees and cowboy hats? (The movie’s title comes from a racehorse named for the Italian scoundrel/politician.)

This all makes for very good lowbrow comedy. And lowbrow it is, featuring jokes based on impotence, penis length, horse poop and the like. Chasing Berlusconi also features very clever references to Columbo, The Wire and Fifty Shades of Grey. The characters of the racetrack owner and the lead loan shark are especially funny.

I loved filmmaker Ole Endresen’s hilarious King Curling at the 2012 Cinequest. That story had a very original hook – to win a curling tournament, the protagonist needs to stop taking his meds, and then tries not to slip into psychosis. Chasing Berlusconi isn’t the comic masterpiece of King Curling, but it’s worth some guffaws.

Chasing Berlusconi plays again at Cinequest March 1 at the California Theatre and March 3 at Camera 12.

Cinequest: DIRTY BEAUTIFUL

February 24, 2015 by movie gourmet

OK – so down-on-his-luck guy meets a potty-mouthed vixen when she LITERALLY jumps into his car. But Dirty Beautiful is NOT your run-of-the-mill mumblecore romantic comedy!

What elevates Dirty Beautiful is that writer-director Tim Bartell has invented two characters that we’re not used to seeing. The guy and the gal each has a unique neediness that drives this offbeat battle of the sexes.

The guy is really a talented storyboard artist, but he THINKS that he is a screenwriter, which means that he spends his days not actually screenwriting, but shuffling and reshuffling his notecards. He’s drawing just enough storyboards to afford food, an apartment next to the garbage, a couple of unwashed t-shirts and a car that can’t even “make it to the 405”. And he’s oddly yearning to HAVE a girlfriend (but not prowling for sex with a woman who could turn into a girlfriend). Instead he aches to have a girlfriend primarily for the status of having a girlfriend.

She has been homeless, would mainline tequila if she could, and is, well, a HANDFUL. She’s been damaged by experiences in her past, and brings extreme volatility into his all too predictable lifestyle. And she exposes the fantasy that is trapping him in professional and personal limbo.

All in all, Dirty Beautiful is a hoot. Plus there’s the occasional memorable dialogue, like “Hey, girls that give hand jobs can be great moms. God!”

Cinequest is hosting Dirty Beautiful’s world premiere on Saturday night February 28 at 9:30 in Camera 12 with additional screenings on March 1 and March 3.

[MILD SPOILER: When the relationship becomes belligerent, each tries to hunker down and try to outlast the other. That’s not just for the plot, it’s because there’s something about each character ’s neediness that makes them dig in.]

Cinequest: LOS HAMSTERS

February 24, 2015 by movie gourmet

The Hamsters (Los Hamsters) is a delightfully dark social satire about a riotously dysfunctional Tijuana family. The dad, mom and two teenagers are going to such lengths to hide secrets from each other that they are completely oblivious to the drama in the others lives. In his first narrative feature, writer-director Gil Gonzalez has crafted a comedy that is completely character-driven, compressed into a very fun 71 minutes.

And here’s a bonus – Los Hamsters was filmed in Tijuana, and it’s great for a US audience to see this city as it is seen by its residents, not by its visitors.

Los Hamsters will have its North American premiere on February 27 at the California Theatre and plays again on March 5 and 7 at Camera 12.

DVD/Stream of the Week: A COFFEE IN BERLIN – slacker minus coffee equals plenty of laughs

January 20, 2015 by movie gourmet

Ranging from wry to hilarious, the German dark comedy A Coffee in Berlin hits every note perfectly. It’s the debut feature for writer-director Jan Ole Gerster, a talented filmmaker we’ll be hearing from again.

We see a slacker moving from encounter to encounter in a series of vignettes. Gerster has created a warm-hearted but lost character who needs to connect with others – but sabotages his every opportunity. He has no apparent long term goals, and even his short term goal of getting some coffee is frustrated.

As the main character (Tom Schilling) wanders through contemporary Berlin, A Coffee in Berlin demonstrates an outstanding sense of place, especially in a dawn montage near the end of the film. The soundtrack is also excellent – the understated music complements each scene remarkably well.

I saw A Coffee in Berlin (then titled Oh Boy) at Cinequest 2013 and singled it out as one of the three most wholly original films in the festival and as one of my favorite movie-going experiences of the year. A Coffee in Berlin was snagged for the festival by Cinequest’s film scout extraordinaire Charlie Cockey. A Coffee in Berlin is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT: an amusing new world, post-divorce

January 7, 2015 by movie gourmet

Anna Camp (center) in GOODBYE TO ALL THAT

In the light but smart comedy Goodbye to All That, a guy (Paul Schneider) is slobberknocked when his wife demands a divorce. Trying to right himself, he takes on post-divorce co-parenting and modern-age dating. Amusing episodes ensue.

Our hero encounters a slew of well-acted female characters who provide him with a menu of challenges; the cast includes Amy Sedaris, Melanie Lynskey, Heather Graham and Ashley Hinshaw. There’s a particularly hilarious scene with his wife’s steadfastly partisan therapist (Celia Weston).

But the funniest role is played by Anna Camp (Pitch Perfect, Caitlin D’arcy in The Good Wife and Gwen in The Mindy Project) – a bipolar nymphomaniac evangelical Christian. I still chuckle when I think of “I’m Debbie Spangler!”

This is the directorial debut of Angus McLachlan, the writer of the delicious Junebug. It’s not as good as Junebug, but it has the same sharp observation of human foibles. Goodbye to All That is available streaming on Amazon Instant, iTunes, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.