Movies

My favorite Paul Mazursky movie

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DOWN AND OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS
DOWN AND OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS

The director Paul Mazursky, a master of the social satire and the topical movie, has died.  He’s chiefly (and rightly) being remembered for his cinematic social landmarks: Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, An Unmarried Woman and Harry and Tonto.

But my favorite Mazursky film is the 1986 comedy Down and Out in Beverly Hills. Mazursky directed and co-adapted the screenplay.   Richard Dreyfuss and Bette Midler play a rich and very unfulfilled couple.  Through circumstance, they invite a homeless guy (Nick Nolte) to stay in their Beverly Hills mansion.  This fish-out-of-water exposes the shallowness of their lifestyle, and he personally touches – and awakens – each member of the household.  And there are PLENTY of LOL moments.  It’s a 28-year-old movie that stands up very well today.  Watch for the fine actress Elizabeth Pena as Carmen the maid in her first highly visible role.  Down and Out in Beverly Hills is available streaming on Netflix Instant, iTunes, Amazon and Vudu.

My friend Steve also loves Mazursky’s most overlooked film, Moon Over Parador, in which Dreyfuss plays a down-on-his-luck actor who gets trapped into impersonating a dead Latin American dictator.  It’s very funny.  Moon Over Parador is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and Xbox Video.

Tidbit: Although his major contribution was as a director, Mazursky started out as an actor, amassing 76 screen credits through 2011.  In one of his first roles, he played a hard case teen in the troubled urban school saga Blackboard Jungle.

Paul Mazursky (left), some other guy and Vic Morrow in BLACKBOARD JUNGLE
Paul Mazursky (left), some other guy and Vic Morrow in BLACKBOARD JUNGLE

DVD/Stream of the Week: True Detective

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true detective
My DVD/Stream of the week – perfect for binge-viewing on the holiday weekend – is the eight one-hour episodes of HBO’s True Detective. It’s a dark tale of two mismatched detectives – each tormented by his own demons – obsessed by a whodunit in contemporary back bayou Lousiana. Woody Harrelson is very good – but Matthew McConaughey’s performance may have been the best on TV this year.

The two detectives are shown pursuing a case together in 1995 and then being interviewed separately about it in 2012.  In the 2012 scenes, McConaughey sits at a table, his eyes dead but occasionally flashing, behind a coffee mug and an increasing lineup of empty beer cans.  He chain smokes and stares down his interrogators – doing very little with frightening intensity.  McConaughey has recently delivered brilliant performances in excellent movies (Mud, Bernie, The Paperboy, Killer Joe, The Wolf of Wall Street, Dallas Buyers Club) – and this may be his best.  McConaughey is reason enough to watch True Detective.

True Detective is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from HBO GO.

Movies to See Right Now

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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.  I love this little movie, and it may only be in theaters for another week, so see it while you can.

It’s not up to Clint Eastwood’s usual standard, but Jersey Boys, is mostly fun – and features another jaunty performance by Christopher Walken.

Among other movies in theaters now:

  • I found the political documentary Citizen Koch to be righteous but lame.
  • I wasn’t a big fan of the bleak and hyperviolent The Rover, either;watch writer-director David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom instead.

My DVD/Stream of the week is the Backwoods thriller Joe, starring an unusually retrained Nicholas Cage and featuring two other great performances from lesser knowns. Joe is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

This week Turner Classic Movies is airing a very fun heist movie – the original 1969 The Italian Job with Michael Caine.  Another good choice is the WW II spy thriller The Fallen Sparrow with John Garfield and a 22-year-old Maureen O’Hara.

Citizen Koch: righteous but lame

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xxx Koch (center) in CITIZEN KOCH
David Koch (center) in CITIZEN KOCH

The advocacy documentary Citizen Koch exposes the terrible effects of the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which allows the right-wing billionaire Koch brothers to anonymously spend unlimited treasure to promote political candidates, measures and legislation that I (The Movie Gourmet) abhor.  Filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, who have worked with Michael Moore, share Moore’s use of documentary to persuade by observation: here are the facts that will lead you to agree with us.

The very best aspect of Citizen Koch is the core story of Governor Scott Walker’s assault on public employees and their unions in Wisconsin.   Citizen Koch meticulously connects the dots between the Koch Brothers’ strategy of degrading the Democratic Party’s strength by weakening public employee unions and Walker’s machinations.  It’s a conspiracy in plain sight.  Citizen Koch is at its best when this thread is told from the perspective of a few Wisconsin public employees – who are themselves Republicans.

Unfortunately, what could have been a superb film on the political conflict in Wisconsin gets flabby and diluted with threads about Citizens United and Charles and David Koch.  The worst part is a fourth thread about Buddy Roemer, a sleazy opportunist who has changed political parties three times but is held up as some sort of beacon of good government; it’s outrageously naive and potentially discredits the rest of the film.

And here’s a little controversy that is illustrative of the Koch Brothers political power.  PBS was going to air Citizen Koch on its documentary series POV, but chickened out because David Koch sits on the board of PBS’ NYC affiliate WNET and is a huge contributor to PBS products like Nova.

Jersey Boys: evocative pop and a dash of Christopher Walken

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Erich Bergen, John Lloyd Young, Vincent Piazza and Michael Lomenda in JERSEY BOYS
Erich Bergen, John Lloyd Young, Vincent Piazza and Michael Lomenda in JERSEY BOYS

Jersey Boys, while not great cinema, is definitely a fun time at the movies.  We might have expected great cinema because this is Clint Eastwood’s version of the Broadway musical, itself a show biz bio of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.  The acting is a little uneven, the female parts are underwritten and some parts drag.  But what Jersey Boys does offer – the Four Season’s evocative pop hits, a couple charismatic performances and a dash of Christopher Walken – is worth the trip to the theater.

The story’s arc is a familiar one – after paying their dues with years of bottom-scraping gigs, a bunch of nobodies achieve overnight fame and wealth and then destruct.  Three things are a little different about these guys.  First, the core of the group is mobbed up (and you can see how the real Frankie Valli could later play a mobster so well in The Sopranos).  Second, their catalyst is the pop music-writing genius Bob Gaudio, a suburban teen who joins the hardscrabble threesome from a tough neighborhood and serves them their hits: Sherry, Big Girls Don’t Cry, Walk Like a Man, Rag Doll, Dawn (Go Away) and Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.  Finally, the cause of the group’s downfall is neither external (e.g., crooked business manager or evil record company) nor pervasive substance abuse.

Eastwood tells the story in four segments – each from the perspective of one of the guys – and this works pretty well.  He gets a big boost from the performances of Vincent Piazza as the cocky group leader, Erich Bergen as the creative mastermind Gaudio and Mike Doyle as their flamboyant producer.  John Lloyd Young reprises his Broadway role as the group’s big star, lead singer Frankie Valli.  Young can do Valli’s very distinctive voice, but has a very limited emotional range.  And it turns out that Valli, because he’s a pretty square guy, has the least interesting story of the group.  When Valli does have relationship angst, the story gets bogged down.  Michael Lomenda plays the fourth guy and get to ask the plaintive question, “What if you’re Ringo?”

Jersey Boys also contains yet another delightful turn by Christopher Walken, this time as the Four Seasons’ mobster mentor.  Walken himself started out as a chorus boy, and it’s fun to see him holding his own in the grand musical finale.  And remember the young and dreamy Christopher Walken belting out The Four Seasons’s Can’t Take My Eyes Off You in The Deer Hunter’s great bar scene?  It’s near the beginning of this trailer.

The Rover: bleakness and hyperviolence aren’t not enough

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Guy Pearce in THE ROVER
Guy Pearce in THE ROVER

Man, I was really looking forward to the violent Aussie thriller The Rover, because its co-writer/director David Michôd had written and directed one of my recent favorites: Animal Kingdom. Unfortunately, although The Rover delivers the dark violence of Animal Kingdom, it really just doesn’t have enough story.

That story is set “10 years after The Collapse”, in an Australian outback where the social order has completely broken down. No manufactured goods seem to available except for gasoline, which fuels the armed thugs who cruise through the severely bleak landscape preying on what locals remain fortified in their homes and on each other. A perpetually angry and sweaty loner (Guy Pearce) has his car stolen by a gang of robbers, and sets off after them. He soon picks up the injured, half-witted brother of one of the gang (Robert Pattinson of the Twilight movies), who had been left to die at a robbery gone bad. Driving and violence ensues.

By the end of the story co-written by Michôd and the actor Joel Edgerton, we learn why Pearce’s character is so angry and why he wants his car back. But those answers just aren’t enough of a payoff to justify the ride.

I gotta mention the eccentric performance by Pattinson, adorned with some really bad teeth and, for some reason, effecting a West Virginia hillbilly accent. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve seen an actor employ more tics – so many that Pattinson often looks like he is doing a Joe Cocker impression. The rest of the cast, especially Pearce and Gillian Jones, are uniformly excellent.

Skip The Rover and watch Animal Kingdom again instead.

Eli Wallach: a character actor who amplified his roles

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Eli Wallach in THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY
Eli Wallach in THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY

The actor Eli Wallach has died at age 98.  He was a star of the New York stage and of NYC-based TV series and live television dramas of the 1950s.  Wallach was a great movie character actor who had the gift of packing maximum entertainment value into any role.  Movie fans will probably best remember him for two bandito bad guys – Cavela in The Magnificent Seven and Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Wallach had 167 screen credits – he was in Polanski’s The Ghost Writer just four years ago.  I hope we don’t overlook his feature film debut in 1956, Elia Kazan’s
comedy of seduction Baby Doll.  Wallach plays a cotton gin owner who knows – and is trying to prove – that his gin has been burnt down by his rival (Karl Malden).   Getting even involves the seduction of Malden’s dim, oversexed and luscious young wife (Carroll Baker).  In this scene, watch Wallach pour on the charm while his eyes reveal predatory horniness.  I love it when Baker exclaims, “Mr. Vacaro – this conversation is certainly taking a personal turn!”.

DVD/Stream of the Week: Joe

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JoeIn Joe, Nicholas Cage plays the title character, who lives a solitary life in backwoods Texas – self-isolated by problems with anger management and booze that long ago estranged his family and cost him some time in the state pen. Somehow Joe has stayed out of trouble for years, but he’s always on a slow simmer, seemingly close to boiling over. Joe meets Gary (Tye Sheridan of Mud), a boy who belongs to a family of drifters led by a father who beats them and takes all their money to spend on cheap likker. Joe bonds with Gary, and ultimately finds redemption in a sacrifice he makes for the boy. Dark and violent, Joe is ultimately successful as a gripping drama.

Indie writer-director David Gordon Green excels at authentic character-driven Southern dramas (George Washington, All the Real Girls and Undertow). Here he brings us to a world of nasty chained-up dogs, where everyone smokes cigarettes and eats canned food, and nobody has heard of espresso or the Internet.

Cage’s performance is excellent – never over-the-top and much more modulated and realistic than we’ve come to expect from him.

Sheridan, so good in Mud, might be even better here; he smolders at the abuse and neglect the family suffers at the hands of his father. He’s become a strapping kid who came employ violence against an adult, but the father-son tie keeps him from unleashing it on his despicable father. Sheridan is especially brilliant in an early scene where he playfully banters with his drunken dad and in another where Joe teaches him how to fake a pained smile to attract girls.

The biggest revelation in Joe is a searing performance by non-actor Gary Poulter as the drunken father who may shamble like a zombie, but is always cruising like a shark, on the hunt for someone to manipulate or rob. It’s stirring portrait of final stage alcoholism, where there is no moral filter anymore – he will resort to ANY conduct for some three dollar wine. There is nothing left but evil borne of desperation for a drink. Although Poulter was a reliable member of the filmmaking team, within two months after the conclusion of photography, he had resorted to his previous self-destructive lifestyle and died. Thanks to Green, he leaves one great cinematic performance as his legacy.

Joe is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

Movies to See Right Now

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Juliette Binoche in BLUE
Juliette Binoche in BLUE

This a GREAT WEEK for cinema. The wonderfully wry German dark comedy A Coffee in Berlin opens today. In a brilliant debut feature, writer-director Jan Ole Gerster has created a warm-hearted but lost character who needs to connect with others – but sabotages his every opportunity. Besides laughing through A Coffee in Berlin, you’ll probably also notice the singularly complementary soundtrack and the vivid sense of time and place.

And don’t miss the two MUST SEE movies out now. The first is the Canadian knee-slapper The Grand Seduction – the funniest film of the year so far and a guaranteed audience pleaser. The second is my pick for the year’s best movie so far – the Polish drama Ida, about a novice nun who is stunned to learn that her biological parents were Jewish victims of the Holocaust – watching shot after shot in Ida is like walking through a museum gazing at masterpiece paintings one after the other. Ida may only be in theaters for another week or so.

Here are other good movie choices:

My DVD/Stream of the week is the Italian Caesar Must Die, with maximum security prisoners putting on a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Caesar Must Die is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Netflix Instant, Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and Hulu.

Julie Delpy in WHITE
Julie Delpy in WHITE

Okay, fire up the DVR for something special coming up on June 22 on Turner Classic Movies: the masterpiece Three Colors trilogy Blue, White and Red from the mid-1990s. The films are in French, and made by the director that I may admire more than any other, Krzysztof Kieslowski of Poland. The first film, Blue, stars Juliette Binoche and addresses grief; it is somber but its humanity is inspiring. Julie Delpy stars in White the second and much lighter film – a relationship dramedy. In Red, Irene Jacob stars in a story about how strangers treat each each other in modern society, with a redemptive conclusion to the trilogy. Together, the three movies profoundly explore aspects of the human condition, and the result is evocative, intelligent and emotionally satisfying. The stories of the three films intersect – and you can spot the characters from the first two movies in the third.

Kieslowski labored in obscurity in Communist Poland until he attained European recognition and US art house hits with The Decalogue (1988) and The Double Life of Véronique (1990). The Blue/White/Red trilogy came out in 1993 and 1994 to international acclaim, but Kieslowski, reportedly suffering from AIDS, had to retire and died two years later at age 54.  I can’t imagine what cinematic masterpieces would have been produced in two more decades of Kieslowski.

Just so folks can calibrate my taste, I keep a list of the 50 Greatest Movies of All Time, and the Blue/White/Red trilogy is in the first ten films on that list. This trilogy is very special – and perfect for binge viewing.

Irene Jacob in RED
Irene Jacob in RED

Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia: the man who invented snark

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GORE VIDAL: THE UNITED STATES OF AMNESIA

Nicholas D. Wrathall’s documentary Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia is an affectionate portrait of the famously prickly novelist. Vidal, himself an American blue blood, delighted in the harshest criticism of American society, culture and politics. In the film, he observes “When I want to know what the United States is up to, I look into my own black heart.”

Vidal practically invented snark. Most of all, he seemed to relish the role of provocateur, publicly spewing out outrageous (and oft factually unreliable) statements. There has never been a more entertaining TV talk show guest.  In Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia, we see many of the famous talk show moments – including the 1968 NBC debate when he baited the ubercool William F. Buckley into calling him a queer; that was a pricelessly typical moment, where Vidal playfully PRETENDED to take himself very seriously in labeling Buckley “crypto-Nazi”, causing Buckley – who really WAS taking himself seriously – to erupt.

Wrathall’s film benefits from his access to Vidal himself, facilitated by Vidal’s nephew, the director Burr Steers (who co-produced and appears).  So there are glimpses into less well-known aspects of Vidal’s life, including his longtime partner and his love of living in Italy.

Say what you must, Vidal was both absorbing and ever-amusing, which makes Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia an intelligent diversion.