moviegourmet

Updated Movies to See Right Now

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Pedro Almodovar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

The Must See films in theaters this week remain Inside Job and The Social Network. Hereafter and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest are also good choices.  Morning Glory (more tomorrow) is a passable comedy.

Charles Ferguson’s brilliant documentary Inside Job may be the most important movie of the year. It is a harsh but fair explanation of the misdeeds that led to the recent near-collapse of the global financial system. Unexpectedly, the film begins in Iceland, setting the stage for the collapse and kicking off the easily understandable explanations of the various tricks and bamboozles that have hidden behind their own complexity.

Hereafter: For the first time, Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon, The Damned United) venture into the supernatural with the story of three people and their individual experiences with death. The most skeptical, nonspiritual viewer (me) finds this to be a compelling film.

The question of What Comes Next is unanswered, and less interesting than the film’s observations of what happens on this Earth to living humans. Eastwood’s genius is in delivering moments of complete truthfulness, one after the other, across a wide range of settings, from intimate human encounters to the big CGI-enhanced action sequence at the beginning of the film. Eastwood is an actor’s director, and star Matt Damon leads a set of excellent performances, especially by Bryce Dallas Howard, Frankie McLaren, Cecile de France and Richard Kind.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is an acceptable final chapter in Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy and best as the showcase for Noomi Rapace’s final performance as Lisbeth Salander. If you’ve seen the first two movies, you should complete the trilogy by seeing this somewhat plodding film. As with the first two films, Hornet’s Nest centers on Rapace’s Lisbeth, a tiny fury of a Goth hacker, damaged and driven. Lisbeth is always mad AND always gets even.

The Social Network: The birth story of Facebook is a riveting tale of college sophomores that are brilliant, ambitious, immature, self-absorbed and disloyal – and about to become zillionaires. It’s a triumph for actor Jesse Eisenberg (Adventureland, Zombieland and Solitary Man), director David Fincher (Fight Club, Zodiac) and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, The West Wing, Charlie Wilson’s War). It’s already on my list of Best Movies of 2010 – So Far.

Leaving (Partir) is a romantic tragedy with another powerful performance by Kristin Scott Thomas and not much else. Howl has a fine performance by James Franco, but is marred by an unsuccessful animation. The Town is hanging around theaters and, without strongly recommending it, I can say that it is a satisfying Hollywood thriller.

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

I have not yet seen Welcome to the Rileys. This Sundance hit features James Gandolfini as a Midwestern plumbing contractor who visits New Orleans for a conference, meets teen runaway Kristin Stewart, and decides to stay. I also haven’t seen Fair Game, the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson story. You can see the trailers at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD of the Week is Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. My top two American films of the year are now available on DVD – the indie Winter’s Bone and Pixar’s Toy Story 3. For my recent DVD choices (including trailers), see DVDs of the Week.

Movies on TV include Leave Her to Heaven, Seven Days in May and Strangers on a Train on TCM.

DVD of the Week: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

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The stage version of Pedro Almodovar’s 1988 madcap comedy Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown has opened on Broadway, starring Patti LuPone.  The show is not getting the best of reviews, but the Almodovar film is hilarious and available on DVD.

Carmen Maura plays Pepa, a voice-over actress who has been dumped by her voice-over actor boyfriend, Ivan.  Pepa has a gal pal who has discovered that her new squeeze is a Shiite terrorist.   Ivan has a lunatic wife (who is armed and bewigged), a bespectacled son (a very young Antonio Banderas) and a new feminist attorney girlfriend.   Everyone converges in Pepa’s apartment, on the streets of Madrid and on the way to a flight to Stockholm.  Along the way, there is a mambo-loving Mad Hatter of a cabbie and some barbiturate-spiked gazpacho.  Comic mayhem ensues.

Almodovar had made several movies before, but Women on the Verge was the art house hit that first brought him to the attention of American audiences.  Today he is one of our very best film makers.  His Talk To Her (2002), Bad Education (2004) and Broken Embraces (2009) each made the top four on my lists of the years’ best films.

For my recent DVD choices (including trailers), see DVDs of the Week.

Coming Up on TV: Sam Fuller’s The Crimson Kimono

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The Crimson Kimono: a rare mixed-race encounter for 1959

The Crimson Kimono (1959) is another sensationalistic and deliciously exploitative cop noir from the great Sam Fuller.  As usual, Fuller has the guts to break ground, this time with a Japanese-American leading man (James Shigeta), an inter-racial romance and a stripper victim.  Plays on TCM November 13.

For other great movie choices on TV, see my Movies on TV.

This week's Movies to See Right Now

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Bryce Dallas Howard and Matt Damon in Hereafter

The Must See films in theaters this week remain Inside Job and The Social Network.  Hereafter and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest are also good choices.

Charles Ferguson’s brilliant documentary Inside Job may be the most important movie of the year. It is a harsh but fair explanation of the misdeeds that led to the recent near-collapse of the global financial system. Unexpectedly, the film begins in Iceland, setting the stage for the collapse and kicking off the easily understandable explanations of the various tricks and bamboozles that have hidden behind their own complexity.

Hereafter: For the first time, Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon, The Damned United) venture into the supernatural with the story of three people and their individual experiences with death. The most skeptical, nonspiritual viewer (me) finds this to be a compelling film.

The question of What Comes Next is unanswered, and less interesting than the film’s observations of what happens on this Earth to living humans. Eastwood’s genius is in delivering moments of complete truthfulness, one after the other, across a wide range of settings, from intimate human encounters to the big CGI-enhanced action sequence at the beginning of the film. Eastwood is an actor’s director, and star Matt Damon leads a set of excellent performances, especially by Bryce Dallas Howard, Frankie McLaren, Cecile de France and Richard Kind.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is an acceptable final chapter in Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy and best as the showcase for Noomi Rapace’s final performance as Lisbeth Salander. If you’ve seen the first two movies, you should complete the trilogy by seeing this somewhat plodding film. As with the first two films, Hornet’s Nest centers on Rapace’s Lisbeth, a tiny fury of a Goth hacker, damaged and driven. Lisbeth is always mad AND always gets even.

The Social Network: The birth story of Facebook is a riveting tale of college sophomores that are brilliant, ambitious, immature, self-absorbed and disloyal – and about to become zillionaires. It’s a triumph for actor Jesse Eisenberg (Adventureland, Zombieland and Solitary Man), director David Fincher (Fight Club, Zodiac) and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, The West Wing, Charlie Wilson’s War). It’s already on my list of Best Movies of 2010 – So Far.

Leaving (Partir) is a romantic tragedy with another powerful performance by Kristin Scott Thomas and not much else.  Howl has a fine performance by James Franco, but is marred by an unsuccessful animation. The Town is hanging around theaters and, without strongly recommending it, I can say that it is a satisfying Hollywood thriller.

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

I have not yet seen Welcome to the Rileys, which is just opening. This Sundance hit features James Gandolfini as a Midwestern plumbing contractor who visits New Orleans for a conference, meets teen runaway Kristin Stewart, and decides to stay. I also haven’t seen Fair Game, the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson story. You can see the trailers at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD of the Week is I’ve Loved You So Long.   My top two American films of the year are now available on DVD – the indie Winter’s Bone and Pixar’s Toy Story 3.   For my recent DVD choices (including trailers), see DVDs of the Week.

Movies on TV include The Best Years of Our Lives, Harlan County U.S.A., The Crimson Kimono and Picnic at Hanging Rock on TCM.   More on The Crimson Kimono tomorrow.

Sam Fuller's The Crimson Kimono

DVD of the Week: Kristin Scott Thomas in I've Loved You So Long

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Yesterday, I was underwhelmed by Leaving despite Kristin Scott Thomas’ great performance.  Here is a much better movie with an even better Thomas performance.  I’ve Loved You So Long was the best film of 2008.   A sad woman (Thomas) is released from prison.  She moves in with her sister, and her back story unfolds in multiple totally unanticipated surprises.   A transformative film about loss and redemption.

One of my 10 Great Movies You Missed in the 2000s.

For my recent DVD choices (including trailers), see DVDs of the Week.

Leaving (Partir)

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Leaving (Partir) has another powerful performance by Kristin Scott Thomas and not much else.  Thomas plays an under-appreciated French wife of comfortable means who falls in love with a good-hearted but unlucky Spanish laborer.  Sergi Lopez (Pan’s Labyrinth, Dirty Pretty Things) is appealing as the lover.  Her husband is not understanding and makes her life devoid of comfort, and the movie becomes a heavy-handed romantic tragedy.  So the story lets us down.  But Thomas, especially in French films (I’ve Loved You So Long), may be the best screen actress in the world, and her performance is another masterwork.

Still, it’s good to see a third serious film about middle-aged romance this year (after I Am Love and Mademoiselle Chambon).  All three have fine performances by their leading ladies, but Leaving is still the weakest of the three.

A great noir coming up on TV – The Set-Up

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The Set-Up (1949) plays on TCM on Thursday, November 11.  This is one of the great film noirs and one of my 10 Best Boxing Movies .  Robert Ryan plays a washed-up boxer that nobody believes can win again, not even his long-suffering wife.  His manager doesn’t bother to tell him that he is committed to taking a dive in his next fight.  But what if he wins?  Director Robert Wise makes use of then innovative real time narrative.  In this clip, watch for the verisimilitude of the bar where the deal goes down.

For other great movie choices on TV, see my Movies on TV.

Carlos

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I just finished watching the three-part Carlos on the Sundance Channel, Olivier Assayas’  5 1/2 hour miniseries on the 70s/80s terrorist Carlos the Jackal – and it’s really good.

Carlos begins as a playboy who thinks it would be cool to fight for the Palestinians.  It turns out that he is way smarter and more nervy than the other dippy wannabe terrorists, so he rises to lead his own crew.  At first he prudently tries to remain clandestine, but he inadvertently gains some celebrity and LOVES IT.  After his first exposure in the media, he self-consciously dons a Che Guevara beret for his next adventure.  Soon he is a legend in his own mind.  Finally, he learns what happens when he becomes too hot for anyone to shield.

The action sweeps between atrocities in Paris and Vienna, a terrorist training camp in Aden, secret bases in Berlin and Budapest.  Along the way, we meet European goofball radical posers and smarmy Syrian, Iraqi and Libyan intelligence officers.  We see dynamite action scenes as Carlos must pull off escapes and attacks in compressed time.

Carlos is a  star making performance by the Venezuelan actor Edgar Ramirez who plays Carlos and has to carry almost every scene.  Ramirez perfectly captures Carlos’ bravado, audacity, vanity, sexiness, delusion and dissolution.  Ramirez plays a few scenes in the nude, with Carlos at first admiring his own beefy body and later lolling about with a pot belly.

Carlos is a French film, but is mostly in English; there are subtitled scenes with French, Spanish and Arabic dialogue.

Carlos has also been released in a 2 hour 45 minute version on Pay Per View.  I strongly recommend waiting for the DVD release of the full length version (or watching for it to pop up again on Sundance Channel).

Movies I'm Looking Forward To: Early November Edition

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I’ve updated the Movies I’m Looking Forward To page to add trailers and descriptions of some key November releases.

November 5 brings us Fair Game and Welcome to the Rileys. Ripped from the headlines, Fair Game is the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson story with Naomi Watts and Sean Penn. Welcome to the Rileys was a hit at Sundance hit featuring James Gandolfini as a Midwestern plumbing contractor who visits New Orleans for a conference, meets teen runaway Kristin Stewart, and decides to stay.

On November 26, we’ll see some major Oscar bait with Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter in The King’s Speech.

I’ve also listed the big December movies, including The Black Swan with Natalie Portman, The Fighter with Mark Wahlberg, Julie Taymor’s The Tempest, the Coen Brothers’ True Grit and Mike Leigh’s Another Year.

Here’s the trailer for The King’s Speech.

Movies to See Right Now – updated for this week

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Charles Ferguson’s brilliant documentary Inside Job may be the most important movie of the year. It is a harsh but fair explanation of the misdeeds that led to the recent near-collapse of the global financial system. Unexpectedly, the film begins in Iceland, setting the stage for the collapse and kicking off the easily understandable explanations of the various tricks and bamboozles that have hidden behind their own complexity.

Hereafter: For the first time, Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon, The Damned United) venture into the supernatural with the story of three people and their individual experiences with death. The most skeptical, nonspiritual viewer (me) finds this to be a compelling film.

The question of What Comes Next is unanswered, and less interesting than the film’s observations of what happens on this Earth to living humans. Eastwood’s genius is in delivering moments of complete truthfulness, one after the other, across a wide range of settings, from intimate human encounters to the big CGI-enhanced action sequence at the beginning of the film. Eastwood is an actor’s director, and star Matt Damon leads a set of excellent performances, especially by Bryce Dallas Howard, Frankie McLaren, Cecile de France and Richard Kind.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is an acceptable final chapter in Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy and best as the showcase for Noomi Rapace’s final performance as Lisbeth Salander. If you’ve seen the first two movies, you should complete the trilogy by seeing this somewhat plodding film.  As with the first two films, Hornet’s Nest centers on Rapace’s Lisbeth, a tiny fury of a Goth hacker, damaged and driven. Lisbeth is always mad AND always gets even.

The Social Network: The birth story of Facebook is a riveting tale of college sophomores that are brilliant, ambitious, immature, self-absorbed and disloyal – and about to become zillionaires. It’s a triumph for actor Jesse Eisenberg (Adventureland, Zombieland and Solitary Man), director David Fincher (Fight Club, Zodiac) and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, The West Wing, Charlie Wilson’s War). It’s already on my list of Best Movies of 2010 – So Far.

Howl has a fine performance by James Franco, but is marred by an unsuccessful animation. Without strongly recommending it, I can say that The Town is a satisfying Hollywood thriller.

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

I have not yet seen Welcome to the Rileys, which is just opening.   This Sundance hit features James Gandolfini as a Midwestern plumbing contractor who visits New Orleans for a conference, meets teen runaway Kristin Stewart, and decides to stay.  I also haven’t seen Fair Game, the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson story.  You can see the trailers at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD of the Week is Toy Story 3, the best American studio film of the year. Last week’s choice was my favorite 2010 film, the indie Winter’s Bone.  For my recent DVD choices (including trailers), see DVDs of the Week.

Movies on TV include Metropolis, M and The Set-Up on TCM.