Movies

Movies to See this Week

by
MONSIEUR LAZHAR

My top pick this week is Monsieur Lazhar, the story of French-Canadian fifth graders recovering from a traumatic experience with their replacement teacher, an Algerian immigrant.  It’s an emotionally compelling film that was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.

On a lighter note, Goon is a hockey comedy that manages to be violent, raunchy and sweet.

In Footnote, a rising Talmudic scholar sees his career-topping prize accidentally awarded to his grumpy father. This potentially comic situation reveals the characters of the two men.

Then there’s the searing and brilliantly constructed Iranian drama A Separation, which won the Best Foreign Language Oscar, and the Best Picture Oscar-winning The Artist.  Both are still still playing in theaters.

You can skip Damsels in Distress, Whit Stillman’s misfire of an absurdist campus comedy.

You can read descriptions and view trailers of these and other upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD pick this week is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, director David Fincher’s hold-on-to-your-seat version of Stieg Larsson’s rip snorting stories centered on the damaged and driven Goth hacker Lisbeth Salander.

Levon Helm RIP

by

We just lost Levon Helm to throat cancer. Of course, he is best known as the drummer and singer with the influential rock group The Band – it’s Levon’s voice on Up on Cripple Creek, The Weight and The Night They Drove Dixie Down, among others. He appeared with The Band in Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece 1978 concert film The Last Waltz.

Levon also had a rich movie career. His 17 acting credits include some very top shelf stuff. He was Loretta’s father in Coal Miner’s Daughter. In The Right Stuff, he played Ridley, test pilot Chuck Yeager’s aircraft mechanic, the guy who loans him Beeman’s chewing gum before each life-risking test flight. He was also the narrator in The Right Stuff.

Levon Helm in THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA

I particularly loved one of his last roles, Old Man with Radio in Tommy Lee Jones’ overlooked 2005 The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Playing a blind man living alone on the Mexican border, he was absolutely haunting.

Here’s an 8-minute clip from The Right Stuff in which Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier for the first time. The scene is introduced by Levon Helm as the narrator, and then Levon as Ridley helps Yeager (Sam Shepherd) into the test plane and loans him his Beeman’s. What a wonderful voice.

Goon: violence, vulgarity and a nice Jewish boy

by

Doug Glatt is not very smart and he knows it.  He struggles to find the right word in every situation.  Because his only talent is the ability to knock others unconscious, he is only in demand as a bar bouncer.  But Doug is not a brute – he is goodhearted and loyal, and yearns to be part of something.  By chance, Doug gets hired by a minor league hockey team to become its thuggish enforcer – despite his inability to ice skate.

We get lots of funny hockey violence a la the Hanson Brothers in Slap Shot.  It’s very funny when Doug mangles his every attempt at cogent conversation.  The comedy also comes from Doug’s innocent fish out of water in the cynical, sleazy and cutthroat world of minor league hockey.  (He’s even reverential about the team logo on the locker room floor.)

There are lots of nice comic touches.  For example, when Doug becomes a sensation, one of his fans in the stands holds up a sign reading “Doug 3:69” (Doug wears jersey number 69); we glimpse the sign for only a second, but I appreciate the filmmakers planting such nuggets in the movie.  Doug is also that rarity – a Jewish hockey goon, with parents horrified that he isn’t following his brother to med school.

Although plenty raunchy, Goon is a rung above the normal gross-out guy comedy because Doug is such a fundamentally good and well-meaning person.  As Doug, Seann William Scott (Stifler in American Pie) plays a naive simpleton, but one fiercely committed to his core values.  It’s got to be hard to play that combination, and Scott’s performance is special.

The cast is excellent.  Co-writer Jay Baruchel plays Doug’s sophomoric friend.  Alison Pill (Milk, Midnight in Paris) is the troubled smart girl who can’t figure out why she’s attracted to a word-fumbling hockey goon.  Liev Schreiber, excellent as always,  dons a Fu Manchu and a mullet to play the league’s toughest goon.  Kim Coates, who almost stole A Little Help as the personal injury attorney, plays the coach.

Perhaps because it has just been released, Goon hasn’t yet made Wikipedia’s “Films that most frequently use the word “f**k”, but I am sure that it meets the qualifying threshold of 150 f-bombs.

Damsels in Distress: say it ain’t so, Whit

by

What writer-director Whit Stillman does really well is bring us unto the world of old money Eastern preppies with their refined manners and their odd customs like debutante balls.  His well-educated characters have earnest late-night existential conversations in complete sentences.  Nobody else does this, and Stillman’s dialogue has always kept me wholly absorbed.  That’s why I liked his films Metropolitan and Barcelona so much.

What Stillman does not do well is absurdist film, like his current entry, Damsels in Distress, set in a Northeastern liberal arts college that is decidedly non-Ivy.  Indie film darling Greta Gerwig plays the seriously off-kilter leader of some coeds who are intent on rescuing fellow students from depression, fashion mistakes and bad hygiene, whether they want it or not.

While his earlier films were earnestly realistic, Damsels is way over the top.  The girls’ boyfriends are so stupid that one does not yet know his colors.  Gerwig’s character is so obviously disturbed that anyone, even a horny college male, would run the other way.

That means that the patter of Stillman’s dialogue must carry the day, and it fails him.  Gerwig’s two friends are one-note jokes – one profoundly stupid, the other profoundly suspicious – that aren’t that funny the first time.  There are lame body odor jokes.  The fraternity system uses Roman, rather than Greek letters – which is not the sidesplitter that Stillman may imagine.

For sure, there are some funny moments.  At the campus Suicide Prevention Center (the word “Prevention” keeps falling off the sign)  Gerwig offers a fellow student a doughnut, but then snatches it back after one bite when she discovers that he isn’t the suicidal one.  One student has adopted the Cathar religion, which he associates with a certain sexual practice.  But, over all, the movie is not funny.  Worst of all, it’s not engaging.

Analeigh Tipton, who was very good as the smitten babysitter in Crazy Stupid Love, does especially well again as a transfer student who falls under Gerwig’s wing.

My recommendations:  1) Stillman should leave the absurdism to Bunuel and 2) the rest of us can skip Damsels to watch Metropolitan and Barcelona.

Coming Up on TV: Wasp Woman

by
Wasp Woman

On April 18, you can watch Wasp Woman (1960) on Turner Classic Movies.  This is notable because Wasp Woman, a slender, attractive woman wearing an insect mask, has made my list of Least Convincing Movie Monsters.  The owner of a cosmetics manufacturer became worried that she was aging out of her looks and injected some wasp material from her R&D lab.  She wreaked havoc until carbolic acid was thrown in her face, allowing her to be pushed to death from a skyscraper.

Coming Up on TV: Hot Rods from Hell

by
Dana Andrews and his innocent family

Here’s a guilty pleasure that has earned it way into my Bad Movie Festival and you can watch it on Turner Classic Movies on April 17.  In Hot Rods from Hell, Dana Andrews’ (!) innocent family is terrorized by two teen punks and a punkette in the Mojave.  This 1967 movie has the odd feel of a 1962 or even 1957 film.

Watch Dana Andrews asking himself why he is in this movie, 23 years after starring in Laura and The Ox-Bow Incident.

The terrorizing hot rodders

Movies to See this Week

by
Gianni Di Gregorio (right) and his wing man in THE SALT OF THE EARTH

The Kid with the Bike is an extraordinary film that tells a riveting story of unconditional love. It is emotionally powerful without being sentimental and is gripping without stunts and explosions.  It’s now topping my list of Best Movies of 2012 – So Far.  It may be out in theaters for only another week or to, so see it now.

The Hunger Games is a well-paced, well-acted and intelligent sci-fi adventure fable with excellent performances by Jennifer Lawrence and Stanley Tucci.

The Deep Blue Sea is well-crafted and deeply, deeply sad tragedy of a woman (Rachel Weisz) who loves too much.

The Salt of the Earth is a gently funny and insightful Italian comedy about men of a certain age.

In Footnote, a rising Talmudic scholar sees his career-topping prize accidentally awarded to his grumpy father. This potentially comic situation reveals the characters of the two men.

The searing and brilliantly constructed Iranian drama A Separation won the Best Foreign Language Oscar. The Best Picture Oscar-winning The Artist is still playing in theaters.

I haven’t yet seen Monsieur Lazhar, which opens this week. You can read descriptions and view trailers of these and other upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD pick this week is The Descendants, a family drama with superb performances by George Clooney and Shailene Woodley.

The Salt of Life: men will be boys

by

The Salt of Life (Gianni e le donne) is a gently funny and insightful comedy about a certain time in a man’s life.  In the lives of men who are not rich, famous or powerful, there comes a time when attractive young women no longer see them as potential lovers.  This is painful for any guy, and our contemporary Roman hero Gianni, with the help of his portly lawyer/wing man, sets out to deny that he has reached this plateau.

In a standard movie fantasy, some adorable young hottie would come to appreciate Gianni’s true appeal and find him irresistible.  But in The Salt of Life, the story is more textured, complex and realistic.

The Salt of Life  stars and is written and directed by Gianni Di Gregorio, just like the very fun Mid-August Lunch.  It is definitively a movie for guys of a certain age and the women who tolerate them, as well as the younger guys who will become them.

Sorry, no subtitles yet on the trailer embedded here.  You can watch the English subtitled trailer on IMDb.

 

SF Film Fest to show “Polisse” and “Oslo August 31”

by

Two films on my Movies I’m Looking Forward To are coming to the San Francisco International Film Festival in late April.

Polisse is a reputedly riveting French police procedural about the child protective services unit.  It was a hit at Cannes and stars an ensemble cast led by Karin Viard (Paris, Potiche, Time Out).

In Oslo August 3, the Danish director Joachim Trier (Reprise made my list of the 2007’s best) returns to Norway with a slice-of-life about a recovering addict.

Find out how to see these films and others at the SFIFF here.

Here’s the trailer for Oslo August 3.

 

 

DVD of the Week: The Descendants

by

In director Alexander Payne’s first film since Sideways, George Clooney seeks to care for his daughters in Hawaii after his wife is hospitalized, but then learns that she has been cheating on him.  That news sends him on a quest that he defines along the way.  To complicate things, his daughters are cooperative to various degrees.  The heat is turned up even higher by a potential land deal that could make Clooney and his many entitled slacker cousins wildly rich, but the deal’s deadline looms and he is pressured by his VERY interested relations.

The situation is promising enough, but Payne takes the story in unanticipated directions.   And, as you would expect from Sideways, there are many funny moments in The Descendants.

Clooney’s performance is brilliant.  Here, he does not play The Coolest Man on the Planet.  Instead, Clooney is a grinding workaholic who is so clueless about his kids that he doesn’t realize how clueless he is.  He is stunned by news of the affair that he never suspected.  Perhaps for the first time in his life, he must work through his situation figuring it out as he goes along.

Shailene Woodley’s performance as the older daughter is even more essential to the success of The Descendants. It’s not just that she perfectly plays a bratty teenager, but that we can see that some of her brattiness is hormonal and some of it is entirely voluntary and manipulative. Woodley had to convincingly play a character who is at times self-centered and shallow, but who can rally and reach within herself to serve as the family glue and support her dad and little sister.

The Descendants approaches being a perfect movie but for two things: 1) the daughter’s stoner boyfriend is just too oblivious to be credible among the other colorful yet completely authentic characters; and 2)  the audience can never believe that there’s any chance that George Clooney is going to allow bulldozers on thousands of pristine Hawaiian acres.  Still, almost perfect is pretty good.