Crumb (1995): The Criterion Collection has released a great documentary, Terry Zwigoff’s profile of the counterculture cartoonist R. Crumb, the creator of Keep On Truckin’, Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat and influential rock album covers. By exploring Crumb’s troubled family, Zwigoff reveals the origins of Crumb’s art. When we meet Crumb’s shattered brothers, it’s clear that Crumb’s artistic expression preserved his very sanity.
In honor of At The Movies, which ends its long run on television, let’s hear Siskel & Ebert assess Crumb. Siskel placed it #1 on his Top 10 list for 1995 and Ebert had it at #2.
Check out my other recent DVD recommendations at DVDs of the Week.
Mother is a Korean film released in America earlier this year and now available on DVD. It’s about an obsessively protective mother. Her adult son has a vague mental disability that afflicts his memory and keeps him from understanding the consequences of his words and actions. The son is framed for a murder and the mother relentless launches a campaign to find The Real Killer.
What is so inventive about this story is that it is told from the points of view of – not one, but – two unreliable narrators. This causes periodic confusion for the viewer and sets up some shockers in the plot. On the other hand, the viewer cannot relate to either main character – the dim son or the unhinged mother. The film is original, well-made and a little off-putting.
Farewell (L’affaire Farewell) is mostly a riveting Cold War espionage film, with an unfortunately off kilter secondary story that doesn’t belong in the same movie. The main story is based on fact: a senior KGB colonel becomes dissatisfied with the stagnant corruption of the Soviet Union and decides to bring about revolutionary change by leaking Soviet secrets to the West. To avoid detection, he chooses to pass the secrets in plain sight to an amateur civilian, a midlevel French corporate manager in Moscow.
The Russian lead is played by Serbian director Emir Kusturica, who gave good acting performances in The Good Thief and The Widow of St. Pierre. Kusturica is outstanding here as the canny and world-weary master spy, and he carries the film when he is on-screen.
The French lead is played by French director Guillaume Canet, who directed one of my recent favorites, Tell No One, and played a villain in that movie. Tell No One is on my list of 10 Great Movies You Missed in the 2000s. Niels Arestrup (from The Prophet, this week’s DVD choice) is excellent as the French security chief.
The spycraft, the complex Francophile character played by Kusturica (code-named “Farewell”), his struggling family life and the attempts by the amateur Frenchman to keep his head bobbing above water combine for a compelling story.
So far, so good. But then the film tries to tell another story – the geopolitical impact of Farewell’s leaks. And the tone of the film switches from the serious spy tale with serious consequences to its main characters to not-so-dark comedy. Suddenly, we see Fred Ward broadly playing Ronald Reagan as if in a Saturday Night Live skit, Philippe Magnan as a somber, one-note Francois Mitterand and Willem Dafoe lacking any kind of gravitas as a CIA chieftain. Fortunately, although this mini-farce distracts from a good film, Kusturica’s character and his performance maintain the movie’s worthiness to see.
This week’s DVD of the Week is a film from earlier this year: A Prophet (Un Prophete). It is the story of a young French-Arab from his first terrifying day in prison to his release. Once he starts to adjust to his role in the prison as the toady of a Corsican crime boss, no one else in the movie knows what he is really thinking. It evokes the DeNiro scenes in The Godfather: Part II, except set with gritty realism in contemporary France. Nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar. One of my Best Movies of 2010 – So Far and pretty high on my list of 10 Best Prison Movies.
Check out my other recent DVD recommendations at DVDs of the Week.
The Girl Who Played With Fire (Flickan Som Lekte Med Elden): This is a highly entertaining follow-up to my personal favorite film of the year so far, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Again, the story revolves around Lisbeth Salander, the tiny woman with a lethal mix of damage and drive, played by the Swedish actress Noomi Rapace. Rapace’s Lisbeth is a tiny fury of a Goth hacker. At only 88 pounds, so she will lose a fistfight with a man; but she prevails with her smarts, resourcefulness and machine-like relentlessness. Lisbeth is always mad AND always gets even. As I have written before, Lisbeth Salander is the best new crime drama character since Helen Mirren’s Inspector Jane Tennyson.
In The Girl Who Plays With Fire, Lisbeth is framed for a triple murder. She must find The Real Killer while on the run, aided by a mostly independent investigation by her ally, journalist Mikael Blomkvist. Their parallel investigations lead to a villain much closer to Lisbeth than one could imagine. Plays with Fire has the structure of a detective procedural, but has the tone of a thriller.
Although I liked them both, I did prefer The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo to Plays With Fire. The Wife and two friends who had all read the books, strongly preferred Played with Fire to Dragon Tattoo. I don’t know whether this is a gender thing or whether people who know the story react to the movies differently. I generally enjoy major plot twists more when I don’t see them coming, and I have certainly found some big surprises in both Dragon Tattoo and Plays With Fire.
Plays With Fire is the second part of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy, to be followed in October by The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.
Joseph Gordon Levitt and Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception
I recommend the summer’s one high quality blockbuster, Inception. If you have followed The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, you will want to continue the trilogy with The Girl Who Played With Fire. The indie dramedy The Kids Are All Right is enjoyable, too. One of the year’s best, Toy Story 3, is still playing, but the equally great Winter’s Bone has become difficult to find. For trailers and other choices, see Movies to See Right Now.
My DVDs of the week are the gnarly Step into Liquid and the way awesome Riding Giants. For the trailers and other DVD choices, see DVDs of the Week.
Movies on TV include The Searchers and Bad Day at Black Rock, coming up on TCM. Before Sunrise is still playing on IFC.
It’s a great time for the two coolest 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 skateboading, (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.
Check out my other recent DVD recommendations at DVDs of the Week.
Inception is the year’s most successful Hollywood blockbuster. Because it’s written and directed by Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Dark Knight), we expect it to be brilliantly inventive and it exceeds that expectation. The story places the characters in reality and at least three layers of dreams simultaneously. A smart viewer can follow 85% of the story – which is just enough. Then you can go out to dinner and argue over the other 15%. The Wife said it was “like The Wizard of Oz on acid”.
Leonardo DiCaprio leads the cast, but the supporting players give the best performances: Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Caine, Marion Cotillard, Pete Postlethwaite, Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe, Tom Berenger and Tom Hardy.
I can’t speak to the three most promising new films, because I haven’t seen them yet: The Kids Are All Right, Inception andThe Girl Who Played With Fire. But that should be remedied by next week’s recommendations. In the mean time, I can say that the “must see” films in theaters remain Winter’s Bone and Toy Story 3. Winter’s Bone has been out for a while, so, if you haven’t seen it in a theater, you’d better see it soon. For trailers and other choices, see Movies to See Right Now.
My DVD of the week is Tortilla Soup. It’s the closest thing to a chick flick that I’ll be recommending for at least a month. For the trailer and other DVD choices, see DVDs of the Week.
John Ford's The Searchers
Movies on TV include The Searchers and Bad Day at Black Rock, coming up on TCM. The Crying Game and Before Sunrise are still playing on IFC.
John C. Reilly plays a sad sack who kindles a romance with a woman played by Maris Tomei. So far, so good. But then he learns that she lives with her very smart and very possessive adult son (Jonah Hill). This is a very, very dark comedy and a showcase for Jonah Hill, who plays a very manipulative and creepy character with contained intensity. Reilly, Tomei and Cathrine Keener are excellent as always. But, overall, not the most accessible comedy.
