Movies

Buck: the man inside the horseman

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Buck is a documentary about real-life horse whisperer Buck Brannaman, an exceedingly grounded and gentle man who knows everything about horse behavior.  But the movie is more about human behavior,  about the disturbing crucible that formed Buck, and about what we can learn about people from their handling of horses.

Fortunately, Director Cindy Meehl realized that she had a great story and got out of the way.  The understated guitar-based score never becomes melodramatic.  And Meehl never lets the admiring talking heads elevate Buck to more than what he is, which is remarkable enough.  This movie could have easily been painfully corny or pretentious and is neither.  I’d happily view it again today.

Buck’s own background is so nasty that it would totally unremarkable for him to have emerged mean or emotionally crippled – and he is the farthest from either.  With some help from loving people, Buck has chosen to become something different from his apparent fate.  In this way, Buck could be a companion piece to Mike Leigh’s Another Year.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCMm5uoZtXw]

Movies to See Right Now

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Project Nim

The cream of the crop are still the sweet, funny and thoughtful comedies Beginners and Midnight in Paris, along with the riveting documentary Project Nim. All three are on my list of Best Movies of 2011 – So Far.

Buck is a wonderful documentary about a real-life horse whisperer with a compelling human story.  If you have kids, Pixar’s Cars 2 is an excellent choice (adults will especially enjoy the James Bond spoof thread).  So is Super 8, a wonderful coming of age story embedded in a sci fi action thriller.  The Trip delivers some chuckles.  Turkey Bowl is a delightful indie comedy available from iTunes.  Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times explores journalism’s evolution in an age of new media, and I recommend it for hard news junkies.

In Bridesmaids, Kristen Wiig plays a woman whose insecurities keep her from seeing the good and the possible in her life; it’s funny, but not one of the year’s best.  The Hangover Part 2 is just not original enough, and, consequently, not funny enough. Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life contains a good 90-minute family drama that is completely derailed by an additional hour of mind-numbingly self-important claptrap.

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

I haven’t yet seen Tabloid, which opens this weekend. You can see trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD picks are the surfing classics Riding Giants and Step into Liquid.

Movies coming up on TV include the prison classics Midnight Express and Cool Hand Luke on TCM, both on my list of 10 Best Prison Movies.

Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times: whither journalism?

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Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times takes advantage of insider access to the newsroom and editorial conferences at the Times to explore the transition from the Era of Print Media to the Era of New Media Age.  Bopping between topics like WikiLeaks, Gawker.com, Iraq coverage, the Tribune Company bankruptcy and ProPublica, Page One is kind of all over the place, but I recommend it for hard news junkies (such as myself).

Fortunately, director Andrew Rossi recognizes an appealing character in NYT media columnist David Carr and lets the idiosyncratic and passionate, yet highly professional, Carr carry most of the film.  Rossi also makes the exceedingly wise choice not to predict how journalism will evolve in the new environment.

DVDs of the Week: hang ten this summer!

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Let’s go surfin’ now

Everybody’s learning how

Come on and safari with me

It’s a great time for the two most awesome and gnarly surfing movies, the documentaries Step Into Liquid and Riding Giants.

Step Into Liquid (2003):  We see the world’s best pro surfers in the most extreme locations.  We also see devoted amateurs in the tiny ripples of Lake Michigan and surfing evangelists teaching Irish school children.  The cinematography is remarkable – critic Elvis Mitchell called the film “insanely gorgeous”.  The filmmaker is Dana Brown, son of Bruce Brown, who made The Endless Summer (1966) and The Endless Summer II (1994).

 

Riding Giants (2004):  This film focuses on the obsessive search for the best wave by some of the greatest surfers in history. We see “the biggest wave ever ridden” and then a monster that could be bigger.  The movie traces the discovery of the Half Moon Bay surf spot Mavericks.  And more and more, all wonderfully shot.

The filmmaker is Stacy Peralta, a surfer and one the pioneers of modern skateboarding (and a founder of the Powell Peralta skateboard product company).  Peralta also made Dogtown and Z-boys (2001), the great documentary about the roots of skateboarding, and wrote the 2005 Lords of Dogtown.

 

Both of these films make my list of Best Sports Movies.

Project Nim: a chimp learns the foibles of humans

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The documentary Project Nim tells the extraordinary story of a chimpanzee that was taught a human language – American Sign Language.  In a remarkable and compelling journey, the chimp Nim is first placed as a baby with a human hippie family and then at a university-owned country estate and college laboratories.  Amazingly, he learns to use an ASL vocabulary – not just responding to commands, but initiating communication and forming sentences.  Then, the experiment ends, and he is off to an assortment of post-placements, some terrifying.

Along the way, we hear from the motley assortment of humans involved in his raising, his exploitation and his care. One human who enters the story as a grad student, Bob Ingersoll, emerges as the hero of the story.  It’s the story of a chimp, but we learn more about the foibles of humans.

Acclaimed documentarian James Marsh (Man on Wire) delivers another great story – one of the year’s best documentaries.

Movies to See Right Now

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Christopher Plummer and Ewan McGregor in Beginners

This week, the best choices are still the sweet, funny and thoughtful Beginners and Midnight in Paris. This week’s Project Nim is one of the year’s best documentaries.  If you have kids, Pixar’s Cars 2 is an excellent choice (adults will especially enjoy the James Bond spoof thread).  So is Super 8, a wonderful coming of age story embedded in a sci fi action thriller.  The Trip delivers some chuckles.  Turkey Bowl is a delightful indie comedy available from iTunes.

In Bridesmaids, Kristen Wiig plays a woman whose insecurities keep her from seeing the good and the possible in her life; it’s funny, but not one of the year’s best.  The Hangover Part 2 is just not original enough, and, consequently, not funny enough. Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life contains a good 90-minute family drama that is completely derailed by an additional hour of mind-numbingly self-important claptrap.

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

You can see trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD pick is Another Year. Mike Leigh (Secrets and Lies, Vera Drake) has brought us another brilliant observation of the human condition, and asks why some people find contentment and others just cannot. Another Year is one of Leigh’s best, and on my list of Best Movies of 2010.

 

Turkey Bowl: touch football brings out the laughs

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This delightful indie comedy is set in a group of friends’ annual touch football game.   Take a bunch of friends that haven’t seen each other for a while and put them in a competitive situation, and you’ve got a promising premise. Newcomer writer-director Kyle Smith pulls off a tight, well-paced 62 minutes of smart laughs.

The cast of relative unknowns is very good, especially Tom DiMenna and Bob Turton.  At the screening that I attended, Smith said that the football game was tightly structured in the screenplay, but much of the dialogue was improvised by the cast.Smith financed the film with $25,000 that he earned from a reality TV show, and shot it over ten days in an East LA city park.

Smith is a native of Columbia, Missouri, and college football fans will note a very funny reference to an infamous Colorado-Missouri game.

Turkey Bowl just released on iTunes and VOD.  Reward this bright and enterprising filmmaker and see this film – you won’t be disappointed.

I am adding Turkey Bowl to my list of Best Sports Movies to represent touch football.

 

DVD of the Week: Another Year

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Mike Leigh (Secrets and Lies, Vera Drake) has brought us another brilliant observation of the human condition, and asks why some people find contentment and others just cannot.  The film observes a year in the life of a happily married couple (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen).  They generously host their friends and family; the couple (and we the audience)  pick up insights about the visitors – variously scarred by unhappy circumstance, cluelessness and self-destructiveness.

Mike Leigh may be the cinema’s best director of actors, and Another Year is filled with excellent performances, especially Broadbent and Sheen, David Bradley and Peter Wight. The wonderful Imelda Staunton drops in with a searing cameo at the beginning of the film.  But Lesley Manville has the flashiest role – and gives the most remarkable performance – as a woman whose long trail of bad choices hasn’t left her with many options for a happy life.

Another Year is one of Leigh’s best, and on my list of Best Movies of 2010.

The Movie Gourmet hits the all-you-can-eat buffet

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It was a perfect storm.  Lots of important movies were opening where I live.  The Wife was out-of-town.  And my buddy Kiefer was game to join me.  It was time for the all-you-can-eat buffet of movie-going – five movies in 48 hours!

We started on Friday night by catching Super 8 at San Jose’s Camera 12.  We were both impressed with authenticity of the coming of age story embedded in the sci-fi thriller.  Good start!

Saturday morning, we drove to San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center Cinema for the noon show of Beginners.   Home run!  We both loved this smart and original comedy by Mike Mills.  Christopher Plummer will certainly get an Oscar nod.  I rated it as one of the year’s best.

We jumped in a cab to make the 2:30 show of Le Quattro Volte at the Lumiere.  The cabbie knows most of the San Francisco Giants – and even two of their moms; he keeps a box of baseballs in the front seat for autographs.

We settled in for Le Quattro, the Italian goatherd movie and a critical fave.  An aged goatherd moves his goats up and down a hill, coughing as he goes.  The next day, he does the same, only coughing more. Suddenly, a young goat is born, starts to grow up and gets lost.  Here’s where Kiefer fell asleep.  Then the villagers cut down a tall tree for a festival.  After the festival, it is added to a pile of wood that becomes charcoal.  I get that it is intended to comment on The Circle of Life, but I found it less a tranquil and profound reflection than an eye-glazing bore.  After the screening, other patrons were asking who voted this Best of Europe?

Okay – back to the Embarcadero for an early dinner at San Francisco’s oldest restaurant The Tadich Grill.  Cioppino still awesome!

Now we needed to drive back to San Jose for the 7:15 PM show of The Tree of Life.  We got stuck in San Francisco Giants traffic, and we’d never make it to San Jose in time.  Never fear, some Blackberry surfing in the car revealed a 7:15 show in Palo Alto that we COULD make.

So we got to the Palo Alto Square CineArts in time for The Tree of Life.  This screening was packed.  We were both stunned, and most of the crowd stumbled out mumbling something like “What the hell was THAT?”.  Kiefer and I were laughing – even after we had mentally cut out all of the Sean Penn scenes, we were still trying to figure out whether Tree of Life was worse than the Italian goatherd movie.

Sunday morning, we have breakfast and amble into my 10:30 AM Camera Cinema Club at The Camera 7 in Campbell.  This month’s Club selection was Turkey Bowl, a delightful indie comedy set in a group of friends’ annual touch football game.  It is a mere 62 minutes, but loaded with laughs.  After the screening, we heard writer-director Kyle Smith tell how he financed the film with $25,000 that he earned from a reality TV show, and shot it over ten days in an East LA city park.

So, all-in-all, we had a very rich film experience sampling indies, art films, a mini-blockbuster, foreign cinema, the most accessible movies and the most obtuse.  Doesn’t get any better.