comedy

MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT: yes, there CAN be too much witty repartee

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Emma Stone and Colin Firth in MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT
Emma Stone and Colin Firth in MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT

Woody Allen’s annual movie is the disappointing romantic comedy of manners Magic in the Moonlight. Set in the late 1920s, a master magician (Colin Firth) goes to the South of France to unmask a phony psychic (Emma Stone). Things do not go as he had been expecting.

There’s plenty of witty banter, especially between Stone and Firth. Both do well in their parts, and they both look fabulous in the period dress. There’s also a really wonderful (as in Oscar-worthy) performance by Eileen Atkins as the magician’s life-seasoned aunt.  The superb actress Jacki Weaver isn’t given anything to do except to beam some batty and vacant smiles.  The rest of the cast is not as deep as in other Woody Allen movies.

But the movie never reels you in emotionally, and it’s only about as entertaining as one of those British sitcoms playing on your local PBS station.  Albeit VERY briefly, I dozed off. Two scenes in particular are extended several moments too long, apparently just to accommodate more repartee.  And the empiricism vs spiritualism debate seems shallow, contrived and stale when compared to that in the recent sci-fi romance  I Origins.

It’s not unwatchable Woody like The Curse of the Jade Scorpion.  But it’s not really good Woody, either.  So, if you MUST have a dose of Woody this summer, watch one of Woody’s masterpieces: Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors and Midnight in Paris.  Or better yet, go see Boyhood or A Most Wanted Man or – beginning on Friday – Calvary or Alive Inside.

LAND HO! – rowdy geezer roadtrip to Iceland

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Paul Eenhoorn and Earl Lynn Nelson in LAND HO!
Paul Eenhoorn and Earl Lynn Nelson in LAND HO!

Here’s a really fun movie.  Land Ho! features a vibrant and irascible geezer who conscripts an old friend into a rowdy road trip to – of all random places – Iceland.  It’s a showcase for Earl Lynn Nelson, who essentially plays himself in the movie.  Nelson is a 72-year-old Kentucky doctor who is a force of nature and has possibly an even dirtier mind than The Movie Gourmet’s.  He is a friend of the 29-year-old writer director Martha Stephens who was INSPIRED to see the possibilities in sending him off on an adventure and filming the results.  His friend (and ex-brother-in-law) is played by an actor, Paul Eenhoorn.

It all works.  Nelson – an unapologetic hedonist – is funnier than hell, and Eenhorn stays right with him as the more reserved and sometimes aggrieved buddy.  Land Ho! is a string of LOL moments, whether Nelson is providing politically incorrect fashion advice to young women or unsolicited marital advice to a honeymooning couple or pulling out a joint and proclaiming “It’s time for some doobiefication”.

This is a geezer comedy that doesn’t make the geezers cute.  Nelson may be a piece of work, but there’s nothing in Land Ho! that isn’t genuine.

I just have two knocks on the movie.  It’s only 95 minutes long, but it would be crisper at about 87.  And, as The Wife pointed out,  there’s really no need for the huge jarring subtitles to let us know precisely where these guys are in Iceland.

Nevertheless, it’s worth a watch.  The audience at Sundance loved this movie, and I think Land Ho! is a hoot-and-a-half.

Witching and Bitching: witty comment on mysogyny inside a rockin’ horror spoof

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WITCHING AND BITCHING
WITCHING AND BITCHING

The rockin’ Witching and Bitching (Las brujas de Zugarramurdi), by Spanish cult director Alex de la Iglesia, features a gang of robbers – one is dressed as a silver Jesus on the cross and another as a Green Army Guy – on the lam rocketing into an occult nightmare.  They run smack dab into a coven of witches – the full-out Macbeth-stir-the-cauldron kind of witches.  This film has the feel of an early Almodovar madcap comedy – if Almodovar were into goth horror. It’s all rapid-pulsed fun – and surprisingly smart.

The underlying theme is misogyny.  The male characters grouse about the stereotypical complaints about women – all while themselves exemplifying the worst of the stereotypical male flaws.  For example, one guy complains that his ex won’t consent to joint custody on the grounds of his irresponsibility – yet he brings their seven-year-old along on an armed robbery.  One underlying joke is that the men see women as bitches, but it’s the men who spend the whole movie bitching.  Another is that the men become trapped by REAL witches whose ball busting far exceeds the men’s most negative misogynistic fantasies.

These Spanish actors are wonderful, including the great Carmen Maura (Almodovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Volver) and appropriately named hottie Carolina Bang. They’re very adept at the deadpan delivery of lines like this:

Driver: This village is damned. They hold witches sabbaths.
Boy: What’s that?
Robber: Like a kegger but medieval.

De la Iglesia maintains a deliciously frantic pace throughout.  The final orgiastic ritual goes on a long time but maintains audience engagement.

This was the first de la Iglesia movie that I’d seen, but I’m definitely going to check out more of his work.  Speaking of which, he nicely sets up a sequel.  But go ahead and watch Witching and Bitching now – streaming in Amazon Instant, iTunes and Xbox Video.

A Coffee in Berlin: slacker minus coffee equals plenty of laughs

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A COFFEE IN BERLIN (OH BOY)
A COFFEE IN BERLIN (OH BOY)

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

Jan Ole Gerster
Jan Ole Gerster

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.

The Final Member: the Icelandic penis documentary – not so much about penises

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final chapter“Of course you are” is what The Wife says when I answer one of her questions with something like, “I’m watching the Icelandic penis documentary”.  Indeed, the documentary The Final Member is about the curator of the Icelandic Phallological Museum.  He has collected and displays sample penises from every mammalian species from hamster to sperm whale.   THAT’S NOT THE WEIRD PART.

The museum still lacks a sample from Homo Sapiens.  It’s the curator’s quest – and the men vying to contribute their own organs – that is central to The Final Member.   Like the
Errol Morris films Days of Heaven (pet cemetery) and Tabloid (Mormon missionary, cloning dogs), it’s not that the OBJECT of obsession is so funny – it’s the obsession itself.  It’s that the documentary presents people who are SO OBSESSED and SO EARNEST about the topic.  Of course, it is pretty funny when guys are each striving to put their penises on museum display.

In fact, the lengths to which one guy is willing to go for penis fame and fortune is astounding and, for male viewers, wince-inducing.  I’m working on a list of Jawdropping Documentaries, and – believe me – The Final Member is gonna make that list.  I recommend The Final Member for its 75 minutes of “he said WHAT?” LOL moments.

BTW that’s one-third of a sperm whale penis in the image at the top of this post.  (And the very last shot in The Final Member is a very wry filmmaking joke, too.)

The Final Member is now streaming on Amazon and iTunes.

The Grand Seduction: funniest movie of the year so far

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THE GRAND SEDUCTION
THE GRAND SEDUCTION

The Canadian comedy The Grand Seduction is the funniest movie of the year so far.  It’s a MUST SEE.

Brendan Gleeson (In Bruges, The Guard, The General, Braveheart) and Gordon Pinsent (Away from Her) play isolated Canadians try to snooker a young doctor (Taylor Kitsch of Friday Night Lights) into settling in their podunk village. They enlist the entire hamlet in an absurdly elaborate and risky ruse, and the result is a satisfying knee-slapper that reminds me of Waking Ned Devine with random acts of cricket.

The Grand Seduction opened this year’s Cinequest on an especially uproarious note. The audience, including me and The Wife, rollicked with laugh after laugh.   Like Ned Devine, I think that The Grand Seduction can become a long-running imported art house hit like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel or The Full Monty.

DVD/Stream of the Week: The Wolf of Wall Street

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wolfWhat do you get when testosterone-fueled and morally challenged stock salesmen discover how to make piles of easy money by defrauding investors? Well, when Martin Scorsese tells the tale, we get three hours of full throttle, hilariously bad behavior. The Wolf of Wall Street is the story of a (real life) guy who found out how to make a fortune scamming middle class investors – and then a bigger fortune scamming rich investors – on penny stocks and shady IPOs. It’s a wild ride that is destined to end in a perp walk, propelled by enormous amounts of recreational drug use. In fact, the movie is really about excess – the sales meetings here make the toga party in Animal House look like an Amish barn-raising.

This is not economic story-telling. Scorsese indulgently lets his scenes run on and on – not so we lose interest, but just so he can milk out every drop of spectacle. Although he could have told the story in two hours instead of three, he just couldn’t resist supplying three hours of exhilaration. Fine by me.

I had never thought of Leonardo DiCaprio as a comic actor, but he does a fine job in the lead role – driving what is essentially a comedy. Speaking of comic actors, this may be Jonah Hill’s finest performance – he plays the top henchman, a character who wears horn-rimmed glasses (without corrective lenses) just to look more WASPish; no one can play schlubby desperation or drug-impaired overreaching better than Hill. There is a huge cast, and some of the year’s best acting gems include:

  • Kyle Chandler (Friday Night Lights and so brilliant in The Spectacular Now) as the FBI agent targeting DiCaprio. In particular, Chandler performs an exceptional scene on a yacht, where the agent lets the con artist (and the audience) think that his con is working – for just a bit. Top notch stuff.
  • Matthew McConaughey, at the height of his new-found acting powers, as our hero’s first mentor in amorality;
  • Rob Reiner (!) as the hero’s emotionally explosive but common sensical dad;
  • the stunning blonde Australian actress Margot Robbie as the Brooklyn-bred trophy wife; and
  • Joanna Lumley (a top model in London’s 60s Mod scene and popularizer of the Purdey bob hairstyle) as the trophy wife’s conveniently European aunt.

I’m certainly going to add this to my Best Drug Movies. Multiple scenes make this the best Quaalude movie ever, and one extended ‘lude scene with DiCaprio and Hill had the audience howling for several minutes.

Is this one of Scorsese’s best films? No – but it is one of the most entertaining and certainly the funniest.  The Wolf of Wall Street is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

Dom Hemingway: full throttle into a brick wall

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dom hemingway
The title character in Dom Hemingway is always in a determined hurry, one of those guys whose brow is always 12 inches in front of his feet.  He is played by Jude Law as a force of nature who takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’.  Dom Hemingway is a none-too-smart professional safe-cracker who has taken the rap for his partners and is just getting out after twelve years in the slammer. He’s been fantasizing about what he wants to do when he gets out, and he intends to do it all in as compressed a time period as possible. Unfortunately, as he tells a small boy, “Dom is English for unlucky sonofabitch”.  His headlong onslaught into misadventure is ribald, profane and pretty funny.

This movie is not a masterpiece.  Think of Dom Hemingway as The Wolf of Wall Street Lite.  Still, Jude Law is very watchable and very funny, as is Richard E. Grant as his almost-as-unlucky and almost-as-dim buddy.  Director Richard Shepard made a much better movie in 2005, The Matador with Pierce Brosnan and Greg Kinnear.  Still, Dom Hemingway works as a pedal-to-the-metal romp.

I saw Dom Hemingway three weeks ago at Cinequest 2014.

Cinequest: Hunting Elephants

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Hunting ElephantsAlong with The Grand Seduction, the Israeli caper comedy Hunting Elephants has been the audience favorite at Cinequest. Apparently, Israelis see just as little generosity, fair-mindedness and decency in their bankers as we do in ours. When a particularly smarmy banker goes too far, a victimized family unleashes a team of septuagenarians led by a 12-year-old to make things right. The old guys are veterans of Irgun, the Zionist terrorists (or freedom fighters, depending on your perspective) who forced an end to the British Mandate in Palestine, so they’re a particularly tough set of characters (even ravaged as they are by age). To their – and his – discomfort, they are teamed with an effete and pretentious scoundrel from the British stage (Patrick Stewart).

The genius of Hunting Elephants is that it combines the comic potential of a coming of age story, a geezer liberalization tale, a gang-that-couldn’t-shoot-straight saga and a fish-out-of-water (the Patrick Stewart character) farce. Mixed with the poignancy of the boy and the old men grasping for some dignity, the result is satisfying crowd pleaser.

Cinequest: Zoran, My Nephew the Idiot

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ZoranThe Italian comedy Zoran, My Nephew the Idiot is centered around Paolo, a hard-drinking slob who works in a cafe kitchen in the Italian region that borders Slovenia.  Boorish as he is, Paolo is mostly marked for his unrestrained selfishness.  “You are a bad man,” he is told.  When an aunt dies, he is dismayed to learn that, not only has he not inherited anything of value, he is to burdened for a few days by her grandson, his nephew. Having been raised in isolation, the nephew is an odd duck with some tendencies of autism and/or Asberger’s. Paolo wants to dump the kid until he finds out that the nephew is a savant in one area that Paolo just might be able to exploit.

The comedy comes from the outrageousness of Paolo’s bad behavior (a very funny sprinkling of ashes, for example) and his venal attempts to profit from the nephew.  Of course, he has an opportunity for redemption at the end.  Although I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it, it’s all pretty funny, and Zoran, My Nephew the Idiot is a pretty satisfying little comedy.