Movie Recommendations, Rants and Ruminations
First-time actress Katie Jarvis plays Mia, a damaged and angry young woman from the British lower class. Her party-girl mom is the second-worst mother in recent films (after Mo’Nique’s role in Precious). Can Mia use her passion for dance to escape her grim surroundings? Mom brings home a new boyfriend and everything changes. Michael Fassbinder, starring soon as Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre, is great as the mother’s boyfriend in Fish Tank.
Criterion has released the DVD.
PBS is airing Troubadours, the documentary about the singer-songwriter scene at LA’s Troubadour Club in the late 60s/early 70s, on March 2. I haven’t yet seen it, but it was well-regarded at Sundance. It features Carole King and James Taylor. Here’s the trailer.
Every year, The Movie Gourmet watches the Oscars while enjoying a meal inspired by the Best Picture nominees. You can read more at Oscar Dinner.
Planning this year’s Oscar Dinner proved challenging (despite being a great year for movie Food Porn). Fortunately I received some great suggestions from my readers.
Here is my menu for Oscar Dinner 2011.
COCKTAILS AND STARTERS
First, the pièce de résistance: Severed Hand Ice Sculpture for 127 Hours and Winter’s Bone.
We will be floating the ice sculpture in an Appletini Punch for The Social Network. I read that, after seeing the film, Mark Zuckerberg made the Appletini the official cocktail of Facebook.
Pistachios from Inception. It looks like the guys are sharing a bowlful of pistachios while assembling the team in Mombasa.
Beer Nuts from The Fighter. Amy Adams’ bar looks like a beer nut kind of place. I am told by a New Englander that the Eklund-Ward clan would be drinking Narragansett, but I can’t find ‘Gansetts in California, so a MGD or PBR will have to do.
Tortilla Roll Ups from Toy Story 3. This is inspired by the all-time funniest movie scene involving a tortilla: Mr. Potato Head executes a prison escape by putting his facial features on a tortilla that can slide under a door.
DINNER
Cowboy beans from True Grit. Obvious and right out of the movie.
Steak and Organic Roast Vegetable Salad served with a Petite Syrah from The Kids Are All Right. The Mark Ruffalo character serves steak (he mists it with truffle oil) while hosting the family at his house. Earlier, he brings a bottle of Petite Syrah to dinner, which impresses the Annette Bening character (before she drinks too much of it too fast). We see organic strawberries from his restaurant’s garden, but I can see his menu featuring a nice salad of roasted veggies.
DESSERT
Coffee from Inception. From the Parisian cafe scene.
Sheet cake from Black Swan. (We will not vomit it back up.)
English toffees for The King’s Speech. They’re English and we will have difficulty speaking when we are chewing them.
(I decided not to skin my own squirrel for Winter’s Bone and not to recycle my urine for 127 Hours.)
Director Gregg Araki created the brilliant and searing Mysterious Skin, but here he’s just having fun. In the first hour of Kaboom, I lost track of how many characters had sex with each other – it’s just about non-stop and guy-on-guy, girl-on-girl, guy-on-girl, guy-and-girl-on-guy, etc. I would characterize the sex as casual, but that would make it seem that the characters were having even a modicum of difficulty in finding partners. Anyway, the chaotic sexathon is fun and very funny. The last twenty minutes takes the film into a campy version of a paranoid apocalypse film, before an abrupt (and I mean abrupt) ending. Did I mention the bad guys in the animal masks? It’s fun and doesn’t take itself too seriously.
Cedar Rapids is surprisingly winning comedy about a guy (Ed Helm) whose life is so boring that an insurance agent conference in Cedar Rapids is a revelatory experience. Helm plays a character whose sincerity and decency elevate his guileless cluelessness. There are excellent supporting performances by Anne Heche, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and the irrepressible John C. Reilly.
This could have been a much courser and a lesser movie in the wrong hands. It’s directed by Miguel Arteta, who also brought an appealing sense of humanity to the underrated The Good Girl and Youth in Revolt.
You can still see True Grit, The King’s Speech, Black Swan, The Fighter and Another Year. They are on my Best Movies of 2010. 127 Hours and Biutiful are also good movies out now. The Illusionist is the wistful and charming animated story of a small time magician who drifts through an ever bleaker array of gigs while helping a waif blossom. Cedar Rapids is a fun and unpretentious comedy.
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 Animal Kingdom. For my recent DVD choices (including trailers), see DVDs of the Week.
Movies on TV this week include Tom Jones, The Silence of the Lambs and All About Eve on TCM.
Watch this, and you’ll be rooting for veteran Australian actress Jacki Weaver to win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.
In this 2010 Aussie crime drama, a high school kid’s mother OD’s on heroin, forcing him into her estranged family of brutal criminals, presided over by his sunny grandmother. Like many teen boys, he is terse in speech and impassive in demeanor. As he is plunged into increasingly desperate situations, neither the characters nor the audience knows what he is thinking in every instance. This, along with his peril, is the key to the movie’s success. Will the teen safely navigate through the maze of his murderous relations? Will evil prevail? We don’t know until the final scene…and then some questions remain. Animal Kingdom won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.
The Sundance Channel is broadcasting Olivier Assayas’ 5 1/2 hour miniseries Carlos again on February 23. Don’t miss this miniseries on the 70s/80s terrorist Carlos the Jackal.
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 he 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 the full length version on the Sundance Channel.
You’ve sent me some great suggestions for my Oscar Dinner. Every year, The Movie Gourmet watches the Oscars while enjoying a meal inspired by the Best Picture nominees. For example, last year’s highlight was Grandma Ethel’s Brisket for A Serious Man. We also had airplane bottles of liquor for Up in the Air, fastfood chicken for Precious and Middle Eastern fare for The Hurt Locker. I particularly relished having prawns for District 9; (“prawn” is the South African slur for the aliens). You get the idea and you can read more at Oscar Dinner.
But this year, I was stumped on 127 Hours The King’s Speech and The Fighter and asked for your help.
127 Hours: imagemoved said, “all he had was freeze dried food and granola bars. He also left that bottle of Gatorade in his car. Maybe do something with that?” The Wife suggested a water bottle with the exact number of milliliters of water that he had when he got stuck. The Wife has so far vetoed my idea of a water bottle with faux urine (the protagonist recycles his own urine while trapped). But Ana may have a winning idea: “Ginger ale, pineapple, white grape, and cranberry juice punch with an ice hand floating inside (pour water in a latex glove and freeze, remove glove and place in punch) — A bit gruesome but funny too, right? …right..? lol”.
The King’s Speech: I think Ana also has a winner here: “English toffees. 1) They’re English 2) Their stickiness renders you temporarily incapable of speech. Get it? Eh, eh? 
“. They also made a big deal of serving tea in The King’s Speech, but I really like the idea of gumming up my jaw with the toffee.
The Fighter: Ana suggests “Boneless Buffalo Wings — They’re manly and something you’d eat while watching a boxing match…and their flavor is a real ‘knockout’.” But something tells me that Amy Adams would be serving the buffalo wings WITH bones in that bar. Maybe I’ll just pick up some MGD or PBR.
Any more ideas?
We’re nearing the end of that period in January and February where the theaters are filled with 1) Oscar nominees lingering from the Holidays and 2) the very worst Hollywood inventory. Some intriguing new films are now ready to be released. I’ve updated the Movies I’m Looking Forward To page to add trailers and descriptions.
This weekend brings us Cedar Rapids and Kaboom. Cedar Rapids is an “aim low” comedy about a lame guy (Ed Helm) whose life is so boring that an insurance agent conference in Cedar Rapids is a revelatory experience. It’s got John C. Reilly as the Wild and Crazy Insurance Agent and is directed by Miguel Arteta, director of the underrated The Good Girl and Youth in Revolt. Kaboom: A trippy sex comedy from director Greg Araki, creator of the brilliant and searing Mysterious Skin.
Here’s the trailer for next weekend’s Nora’s Will, a Mexican dramedy in which a man’s mother dies and he uncovers some jarring family secrets.
The Movies I’m Looking Forward To page also features Troubadours, Certified Copy, Of Gods and Men, Carancho, Hanna, Jane Eyre, Restless, The Tree of Life, Tabloid, Cold Weather, Boxing Gym and American Grindhouse.