movie recommendations

My take on the Oscar nominees

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I’m pretty pleased with this year’s Oscar nominees.  The Academy did better than usual and avoided its frequent horribly undeserving nominations and inexplicably unjust missed nominations.

I’m downright giddy that my pick for the year’s best movie, the underdog indie Winter’s Bone, earned four Oscar nominations: Best Picture, Best Actress (Jennifer Lawrence), Best Supporting Actor (John Hawkes) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Director Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini).

Of the ten nominees for Best Picture, eight are on my list of Best Movies of 2010 – all except  127 Hours (which I have not seen) and The Kids Are Alright (which was OK but not great in my book).  The one-year old format of ten Best Picture nominees made it pretty obvious that True Grit, The Social Network, Black Swan, The King’s Speech and Inception would make the list along with the deserving Pixar entry Toy Story 3. The question was about the other four, and, fortunately, Winter’s Bone and The Fighter slipped in.

I’m also delighted that Australian veteran actress Jacki Weaver was nominated for her role in Animal Kingdom as an impossibly upbeat gal who can effortlessly put out a contract on her own grandson.

Christopher Nolan should have gotten a Best Director nod for his Best Picture nominee Inception.  I wish that Winter’s Bone‘s Debra Granik had been nominated for Best Director.  And I did find it odd that GasLand rated an Oscar nod for Best Documentary, but not The Tillman Story or Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work.  But those are just quibbles relative to my complaints in other years.  Here’s to the Oscars!

DVD of the Week: The Trip

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It’s Roger Corman Week at The Movie Gourmet, but our DVD is NOT the just released Roger Corman’s Sci Fi Classics.  Instead, I’m going with an unintentionally hilarious movie that Corman himself directed, The Trip (1967).  It’s a time-capsule exploitation film written by Jack Nicholson.   TV director Peter Fonda decides to take LSD.  After buying acid from Dennis Hopper (there’s a stretch!), the plan is for Fonda to trip at his friend Bruce Dern’s house.  Now is it a good idea to entrust someone tripping for the first time to Bruce Dern?  Of course not!  Fonda wanders off and wall-bangs nightmarishly down Sunset Boulevard.  The DVD is available from Netflix.

The Trip is on my list of 10 Movies So Bad They Are Fun.

Coming up on TV – giant carnivorous mutant rabbits!

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On Friday, Turner Classic Movies will be broadcasting Night of the Lepus (1972).  If you enjoy mocking cheesy special effects in bad Mutant Animal Monster movies, you’ll love the giant mutant rabbits rumbling through small Western towns, bursting through windows to kill humans and even chowing down on a herd of horses.  Here’s a clip of the thundering herd of bloodthirsty bunnies.

And here’s the trailer, which gives you a very good sense of the movie’s production values.

Congrats, Roger Corman!

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This week’s DVD release of Roger Corman’s Sci Fi Classics is my occasion for celebrating the prolific low-budget producer Roger Corman.  So far, Corman has produced 395 titles –  mostly shameless and delicious exploitation movies for the teen market.  In one four-year period, he produced The Student Nurses, Private Duty Nurses, Night Call Nurses and Candy Stripe Nurses – and 21 other movies!

Corman’s great gift to us all is his mentorship of young and talented filmmakers.  Filmmakers who got their first assignment from Corman (called “the Corman Film School”) include Oscar winning directors James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Curtis Hanson, Ron Howard and Martin Scorsese.  Not to mention cult directors Paul Bartels and Monte Hellman (Corman produced Hellman’s Warren Oates classic Cockfighter).  And Chinatown screenwriter Robert Townsend.

Jack Nicholson first got some attention playing the masochistic dental patient in Corman’s 1960 Little Shop of Horrors.  Nicholson showed up again in Corman’s 1967 The Wild Angels (biker gangs), 1967 The Shooting (trippy Western) and 1967’s LSD flick The Trip (more on that tomorrow).

Probably the best movie that Corman has produced was St. Jack (1976), directed by Peter Bogdanovich.  Corman had given Bogdanovich his start, and in the intervening 12 years Bogdanovich’s star had risen (The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon) and fallen (Daisy Miller).   Ben Gazzara and Denholm Elliott delivered great performances in this story of a hustling American expat running a GI brothel in Singapore during the Vietnam War.

Roger Corman’s Sci Fi Classics includes three films that I haven’t seen (or don’t remember seeing): Attack of the Crab Monsters, War of the Satellites and Not of this Earth.  Although I may not have seen them, I can tell you that 1) they don’t have fancy production values; 2) they are fast paced and not too long; and 3) they’re a kick.

The Way Back

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The Way Back is inspired by the story of a 1940 escape from a Siberian prison; three men slipped out of the gulag and walked out of Siberia, across Mongolia, across China’s Gobi Desert, through Tibet and over the Himalayas to freedom in India – a trek of 4000 miles.  This is not a spoiler, because, at the very beginning of the movie, we are told that three men make it from the gulags to India.  The remaining dramatic tension is in finding out which three of the seven who start the journey will finish it.

Of course, director Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Year of Living Dangerously, Witness, Master and Commander) knows how to make a movie, and it is beautifully shot on locations chosen to illustrate the magnitude of the distances and the challenges.  It is well acted, especially by Ed Harris, Jim Sturgess, Saoirse Ronan and Colin Farrell.

It’s a tremendous survival tale that results in a good, but not great movie.  It comes down to this:  eleven months of trudging through dangerous, unfamiliar territory while suffering from starvation and exposure is really impressive, but not that engaging.

Updated Movies to See Right Now

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Somewhere: It's Dad/Daughter Month at the Chateau Marmont

Now is the time to catch future Oscar contenders on the big screen, especially crowd pleasers like True Grit, The King’s Speech and Black Swan.

True Grit is the Coen Brothers’ splendid Old West story of Mattie Ross, a girl of unrelenting resolve and moxie played by 14-year-old Hailee Steinfeld in a breakthrough performance, and Jeff Bridges is perfect as the hilarious, oft-besotted and frequently lethal Rooster Cogburn. The King’s Speech is the crowd pleasing story of a good man (Colin Firth) overcoming his stammer to inspire his nation in wartime with the help of a brassy commoner (Geoffrey Rush). Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is a rip roaring thriller and a showcase for Natalie Portman and Barbara Hershey.

Biutiful is a grim, grim movie with a great performance by Javier Bardem in a compelling portrait of a desperate man in desperate circumstance, directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Amores perros, 21 Grams, Babel).

Somewhere is Sofia Coppola’s (Lost in Translation) artsy portrait of a man so purposeless that he can find no pleasure in pleasure.  An A-list movie star (Steven Dorff) is living at the Chateau Marmont with his expensive toys, booze and drugs and an inexhaustible supply of beautiful, sexually available women, but without Without any purpose or connection to others, his debauchery is completely joyless.  To his surprise and discomfort,  his eleven-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning) moves in for a few weeks.

I strongly recommend Rabbit Hole, an exquisite exploration of the grieving process with great performances by Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhardt, Diane Wiest, Sandra Oh and Miles Tenner. The Fighter is an excellent drama, starring Mark Wahlberg as a boxer trying to succeed despite his crack addict brother (Christian Bale) and trashy mom (Melissa Leo). Fair Game, the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson story with Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, is also excellent. All are on my list of Best Movies of 2010.

I Love You, Phillip Morris is an entertaining offbeat combo of the con man, prison and romantic comedy genres. Red Hill is a stylish contemporary Aussie Western. Season of the Witch is a bad Nicholas Cage/Ron Perlman buddy movie set among the plague, crusades and witch hunts of the 13th century.

For trailers and other choices, see Movies to See Right Now.

I have not yet seen Another Year or The Way Back , opening this weekend. You can see the trailers at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD pick is The Naked Kiss. For my recent DVD choices (including trailers), see DVDs of the Week.

Movies on TV include Jason and the Argonauts, Hannah and Her Sisters, D.O.A., The Shop Around the Corner and Night of the Lepus on TCM.

Somewhere

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This is Sofia Coppola’s (Lost in Translation) story of an A-list movie star (Steven Dorff) living at the Chateau Marmont with his expensive toys, booze and drugs and an inexhaustible supply of beautiful, sexually available women.  Without any purpose or connection to others, his debauchery is completely joyless.  To his surprise and discomfort,  his eleven-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning) moves in for a few weeks.   He slowly finds some connection to her, but then she leaves for summer camp and he is aimless, again.

Somewhere is an artsy portrait of a man so purposeless that he can find no pleasure in pleasure.

Fanning is great as the kid.  Surprisingly, Jackass‘ Chris Pontius shines as the movie star’s best bud.

DVD of the Week: The Naked Kiss

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Here’s another delightfully trashy gem from Sam Fuller, my favorite tabloid reporter turned Hollywood auteur.  In The Naked Kiss, a prostitute opens the movie by beating her pimp to a pulp, and then moves to a new town, seeking a new beginning in the straight world.  She gets a job as a nurse at the clinic for disabled children, and becomes engaged to the town’s leading philanthropist.  She thinks that everything will be great unless someone reveals her tawdry past.  But, instead, she discovers that her Mr. Perfect is molesting the crippled kids!  (Only Sam Fuller could pull this off!)

Biutiful

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Biutiful is about a great performance by Javier Bardem in a grim, grim, really grim role.  (Yes, this film is grimmer than Bardem’s The Sea Inside, in which he plays a suicidal paraplegic.)  In this film, Bardem plays Uxbal, a Barcelona lowlife who lives by perpetrating various petty scams.  Low level crime does not pay well, and he lives in poverty with his kids, who he cannot trust with his bipolar, alcoholic wife (who is sleeping with his brother).  Then he receives a medical death sentence – only two months to live.  And then, things get even worse!

Can he leave his kids with a stable life?  Can he find some redemption?  It’s a compelling portrait of a desperate man in desperate circumstance, directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Amores perros, 21 Grams, Babel).

Has anyone has five better performances in the past decade than Bardem in The Dancer Upstairs, The Sea Inside, No Country for Old Men, Vicky Christina Barcelona and Biutiful?   Bardem won Best Actor at Cannes for Biutiful.

Season of the Witch

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Okay, I’ll admit that I saw Season of the Witch because the trailer made me laugh out loud.  I thought that it might have been goofily bad enough to qualify for my list of 10 Movies So Bad They Are Fun.  Unfortunately, it’s just bad and not much fun.

Season of the Witch is a Nicholas Cage/Ron Perlman buddy movie set among the plague, crusades and witch hunts of the 13th century.  Cage and Perlman play two knights who, after slaughtering more than their share of women and children infidels, become disgusted with the Crusades.  The deserters find themselves back in plague-ridden Central Europe escorting a comely accused witch to her abbey trial.  Along the way, they encounter the cheesiest of CGI effects, the most portentous of soundtracks  and every medieval cliché.

My recommendation:  get some laughs from the trailer and skip the 95 minute version.