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
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.
In the taut 76 minutes of Caesar Must Die, convicts in an Italian maximum security prison put on a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Every year, there’s a drama laboratory at this prison. It turns out that Julius Caesar is a perfect choice.
Julius Caesar is, most of all, a play about high stakes. And high stakes, where a decision can result in life or death or power or failure or freedom or incarceration, is something these guys profoundly understand – and have time to reflect upon. During rehearsal, one actor snaps at the director, “I’ve been in here for 20 tears, and you’re telling me not to waste time?”. When Cassius states that he has wagered his life on the outcome of one battle and lost, the line is more powerful because we know the actor playing Cassius is himself a lifer.
When the prisoners audition, we learn that their sentences range from 14 years to “life meaning life”. Most of them are naturalistic and very effective actors. The guy who plays Caesar is especially powerful in his acting and reacting.
The Julius Caesar story unfolds in black-and-white as the prisoners rehearse and then play the early scenes in the contemporary prison setting. Segments from the performance itself – about 15 minutes – are filmed in color.
It all works very well as a very successful Shakespeare movie – and as a prison movie, too. Caesar Must Die is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Netflix Instant, Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and Hulu.
We Are the Best! is about Swedish thirteen-year-old girls in 1986 – and the most important descriptor here is “thirteen-year-old”. It’s perhaps the age where friendship is most important. It’s the age when the needle flips back and forth between moroseness and exuberance. When you feel like your peers despise you, when you’re skittish about your own body, you’re exploring feelings about the opposite gender and you are certain that your parents are the most embarrassing on the planet – you really need someone on your own team to check in with.
In We Are the Best!, we have two girls with punk hair who are NOT the popular kids in school. Trying to stake out some personal dignity, they find themselves claiming to be a punk band, despite not owning or knowing how to play any musical instruments. They reach out to the other social outcast at their school, a serious practicing Christian who plays classical guitar, and she soon sports a punk haircut, too. Together, they test the bonds of friendship and navigate the adventures that all thirteen-year-olds encounter. As it explores the value of teen friendship, We are the Best! is funny, poignant and charming.
Ruby Dee, who died this week at age 91, was a great actress of film and stage, as well as the artistic and political partner of her husband Ossie Davis. One of her most affecting scenes is “Gator’s Last Dance” in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever. Samuel L. Jackson (in the breakthrough performance that set up Jackson for his star-making turn in Pulp Fiction) plays a crackhead. Badly strung out, he bursts into the home of his parents (Dee and Davis) looking for some dope money. At first look, Dee seems to have less of a role in the scene than Jackson or Davis. But the key is her intense desperation to avoid – and then to mitigate – the encounter between son and father. And, finally, her fears are realized and manifest into profound grief. It’s a searing performance (and it’s worth sitting through the advertisement).
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.
The raucous comedy Neighbors is a pleasant enough diversion.
My DVD/Stream of the Week is Run & Jump, an Irish film by a Bay Area filmmaker that works equally well as a romance and as a family drama. Run & Jump is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Netflix Instant, Amazon, iTunes, Google Play, YouTube and Xbox Video.
Set your DVR to Turner Classic Movies for next Friday’s showing of the wonderful noir mystery Laura from 1944. What lifts any great film above the others in its genre is the depth of the characterization, and here we have the unforgettable star columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) – a compelling mixture of megalomania and insecurity; there’s also the proto-career woman Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney at her most stunning) and the cynical detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews), a guy whose emotions have been depleted but are rekindled by a murder victim he’s never met. Watch for future horror movie regular Vincent Price in an early role as an oily gigolo. David Raksin composed one of cinema’s most evocative musical themes. Laura makes my list of Greatest Movies of All Time.
“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.
In the indie Run & Jump, a rare type of stroke has changed the personality of an Irish furniture maker; he has survived, but now prone to rages and catatonia, he is never going to be the same as before. He is returned to his family, led by his firecracker wife (Maxine Peake). Along comes an American medical researcher (Will Forte from Saturday Night Live and Nebraska), who moves with the family so he can continually film his patient’s symptoms.
The family initially resents the constant filming, although they desperately need the income from the research stipend. The researcher is so socially awkward that he’s almost catatonic himself, but he is able to provide the adult male presence that the family now misses, and they are eventually drawn to his kindness. Although he tries to maintain clinical distance, he is inevitably attracted to the vitality of the wife – a real live wire. But this isn’t going where you might expect…
Run & Jump succeeds both as a romance and as a family drama. The primary credit goes to co-writer and director Steph Green. A Bay Area filmmaker who now works in Ireland, Green was Oscar nominated for a live action short. Run & Jump is her first feature.
Maxine Peake’s affecting performance as the wife drives the film; Run & Jump is really the story of the wife’s struggles as she fights to keep her family afloat while making a near impossible adjustment.
Run & Jump is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Netflix Instant, Amazon, iTunes, Google Play, YouTube and Xbox Video.
There are 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.
In the documentary Finding Vivian Maier, we go on journey to discover why one of the great 20th Century photographers kept her own work a secret.
The raucous comedy Neighbors is a pleasant enough diversion.
Like all Wes Anderson movies, The Grand Budapest Hotel is wry and imaginative, but it’s not one of his most engaging.
My DVD/Stream of the Week is the powerful dramaShort Term 12, newly available on Netflix Instant. It’s ranked as number 7 on my Best Movies of 2013. Short Term 12 is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Netflix Instant, Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, GooglePlay and Xbox Video.
This week Turner Classic Movies offers two fine revisionist Westerns from the 1970s. A Man Called Horse (1970). In the early 19th century, Richard Harris is captured by American Indians and becomes assimilated into their culture. Modern viewers will recognize most of the plot of Avatar herein. Harris’ initiation into the tribe is one of cinema’s most cringe-worthy moments. The film still stands up well today. Although why is it that when the white guy encounters a native girl, it’s always the chief’s beautiful, unattached, nubile daughter?
In Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, the title characters are played by James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson. The great Katy Jurado and Chill Wills join Peckinpah company players, including Luke Askew, L.Q. Jones, Harry Dean Stanton, Slim Pickins, Jack Elam, R.G. Armstrong, Dub Taylor, Richard Bright (Al Neri in The Godfather) and Richard Jaeckel. Bob Dylan also holds his own; Dylan wrote the score, including the iconic Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, featured in a heartbreaking scene with Jurado and Wills. I maintain that, if you delete the unfortunate scenes with Emilio Fernandez, you have a Western masterpiece. Still, it’s one of my favorites.
If you want some nasty film noir, there’s The Hitch-Hiker from 1953, directed by movie star Ida Lupino – one of the very few female directors of the 1950s. The bad guy is played by William Talman, who baby boomers will recognize as the never victorious DA Hamilton Burger in Perry Mason.
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.
The powerful drama Short Term 12 is now available streaming on Netflix Instant. It ranked as number 7 on my Best Movies of 2013. The compelling and affecting Short Term 12 is set in a foster care facility unit named Short Term 12; since the kids can live there for years, it seems pretty long-term to me. These are kids who have suffered abuse and neglect and who act out with disruptive and dangerous behaviors. Runaways, assaults and suicide attempts are commonplace, and some of the kids thrive on creating drama.
The gifted lead counselor on the unit is Grace (Brie Larson), who isn’t much older than the kids. She’s kind of a Troubled Kid Whisperer who, in each impossible situation, knows exactly what to do to defuse or comfort or protect. But while she is in total command of her volatile and fragile charges, she is profoundly troubled herself. She and her boyfriend Mason (John Gallagher Jr.), who also works on the unit, are themselves survivors and former foster youth. Mason seems to have resolved his issues, but Grace’s demons lurk just under her skin.
In Short Term 12’s taut 96 minutes, we watch Grace navigate through crisis after crisis until she must face her own. We share many of the most powerful moments in 2013 cinema, particularly one kid’s unexpectedly painful insightful and sensitive rap, another kid’s authoring a wrenching children’s story and Grace’s own outburst of ferocity to protect a kid from a parent.
Brie Larson’s performance as Grace is being widely and justifiably described as star-making, and I think she deserves an Oscar nomination. I noticed her performances in much smaller roles in Rampart and The Spectacular Now , and I’m really looking forward to the launch of a major career. Think Jennifer Lawrence.
John Gallagher Jr. must be a superb actor, because nobody in real life can be as appealing and sympathetic as his characters in Margaret, Newsroom and Short Term 12. I’ll watch any movie with Gallagher in it, and he’s almost good enough to help me stomach Newsroom.
In his debut feature, writer-director Destin Cretton has hit a home run with one of the year’s best dramas. Some might find the hopeful ending too pat, but I say So What – I have met many former foster youth who have transcended horrific childhoods to become exemplary adults.
Short Term 12 is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Netflix Instant, Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, GooglePlay and Xbox Video.
