Arrival – Page 2 – The Movie Gourmet

Movies to See Right Now on Thanksgiving Weekend

November 23, 2016 by movie gourmet

My top movie recommendation is Isabelle Huppert in the perverse wowzer Elle. Other top choices:

The Korean period con artist movie The Handmaiden is gorgeous, erotic and extraordinarily entertaining.
Sonia Braga is still luminous in the character-driven Brazilian drama Aquarius.
Mascots is the latest mockumentary from Christopher Guest (Best in Show) and it’s very funny. Mascots is streaming on Netflix Instant.

Also in theaters or on video:

Despite a delicious performance by one of may faves, Michael Shannon, I’m not recommending Nocturnal Animals; I’m writing about it tomorrow.
Arrival with Amy Adams, is real thinking person’s sci-fi. Every viewer will be transfixed by the first 80% of Arrival. How you feel about the finale depends on whether you buy into the disconnected-from-linear-time aspect or you just get confused, like I did.
The remarkably sensitive and realistic indie drama Moonlight is at once a coming of age tale, an exploration of addicted parenting and a story of gay awakening. It’s almost universally praised, but I thought that the last act petered out.
The end of the thriller The Girl on the Train (starring Emily Blunt) is indeed thrilling. But the 82 minutes before the Big Plot Twist is murky, confusing and boring.

My DVD/Stream of the Week is one of the year’s very, very best films, the character-driven crime drama Hell or High Water. It’s now available to rent on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

On November 28, Turner Classic Movies will present two excellent (and totally different) films:

Chandler is the 1971 neo-noir starring Warren Oates as a seedy private detective who gets in over his head. I mention, but don’t dwell on Chandler in my essay Warren Oates: a gift for desperation.
Crumb is the award-winning 1994 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. I thought that Crumb was the very best movie of the year – and so did Gene Siskel; Roger Ebert pegged it at #2.

Movies to See Right Now

November 19, 2016 by movie gourmet

The best reason to go to the movies is to see Isabelle Huppert in the wowzer Elle, which has opened at the Embarcadero in San Francisco and will open more widely in the Bay Area on the Thanksgiving weekend. Here are top choices that are easier to find:

The Korean period con artist movie The Handmaiden is gorgeous, erotic and extraordinarily entertaining.
Sonia Braga is still luminous in the character-driven Brazilian drama Aquarius.
John Travolta, Ethan Hawke and Jumpy the dog sparkle in the spaghetti western In a Valley of Violence.
Mascots is the latest mockumentary from Christopher Guest (Best in Show) and it’s very funny. Mascots is playing in very few theaters, but it’s streaming on Netflix Instant, too.

Also in theaters or on video:

Despite a delicious performance by one of may faves, Michael Shannon, I’m not recommending Nocturnal Animals; I’m writing about it tomorrow.
Arrival with Amy Adams, is real thinking person’s sci-fi. Every viewer will be transfixed by the first 80% of Arrival. How you feel about the finale depends on whether you buy into the disconnected-from-linear-time aspect or you just get confused, like I did.
The remarkably sensitive and realistic indie drama Moonlight is at once a coming of age tale, an exploration of addicted parenting and a story of gay awakening. It’s almost universally praised, but I thought that the last act petered out.
Not much happens in the talented and idiosyncratic filmmaker Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, but it’s well-acted and feels real.
If you are entertained by the epically disgusting, you can catch the horror comedy The Greasy Strangler before it hits the midnight cult movie circuit. The Greasy Strangler can be streamed from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
The end of the thriller The Girl on the Train (starring Emily Blunt) is indeed thrilling. But the 82 minutes before the Big Plot Twist is murky, confusing and boring.

I’ve written farewells to actor Robert Vaughn and musician Leon Russell, who died earlier this week.

My Stream of the Week is the documentary The Lovers and the Despot, the story of a crazy dictator’s kidnapping of a movie director and his movie star wife – and how they escaped and proved that it really happened. The Lovers and the Despot is now available streaming from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and cable and satellite TV on demand.

On November 23, Turner Classic Movies plays a groundbreaking cinéma vérité documentary from 1968. Salesman is as revealing a depiction of the sales life as Glengarry Glen Ross, and just as heartbreaking – you can’t have capitalism without winners and losers. Imagine selling Bibles door-to-door.

ARRIVAL: communicating in an unknown dimension

November 14, 2016 by movie gourmet

In Arrival, Amy Adams plays a linguistics professor at a Midwestern college who is drifting, having not recovered emotionally from the death of her child and the failure of her marriage. When space aliens come to earth (!) with very unclear intentions, she is deployed to figure out how to communicate with them.

Now if aliens (meaning living creatures in the universe who are not us) ever DO visit earth, I guarantee that we will be surprised at their appearance. I can’t imagine what they will look like, but they won’t look like the ones in The Day the Earth Stood Still, E.T. or Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Here, Arrival hits a home run. These aliens don’t look how we would expect, they don’t sound like we would expect and they don’t communicate like we would expect.

More central to the story, the aliens don’t think like we do. For them, time is not linear, which adds the mystic element that defines Arrival. Will our linguist learn how to communicate with these advanced beings who don’t seem to have language as we understand it? Will she connect with beings that think in different (additional?) dimensions?

Arrival is directed by Denis Villaneuve, who made Incendies, rated at the #1 slot on my Best Movies of 2011, as well as the thrillers Prisoners, Enemy and Sicario. His skill at thrillers pays off in the scenes with the aliens, when we are constantly on the edges of our seats. The people are actually going INTO the alien spacecraft? Holy Moley!

I loved Amy Adams in Arrival, as I tend to do in everything she does. Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker and Michael Stuhlbarg are also solid. The Wife pointed out that Renner succeeds in an unusual movie role – a hotshot with a healthy ego who recognizes that someone else has the better idea and becomes collaborative. But Arrival is about the story, not the performances.

Arrival is real science fiction. So many so-called “sci-fi” movies are really just war movies, revenge dramas, survival tales or Westerns that are set in the future or in space. Fortunately, we have recently had some truly thoughtful sci-fi including I Origins, Her and, now, Arrival.

Every viewer will be transfixed by the first 80% of Arrival. How you feel about the finale depends on whether you buy into the disconnected-from-linear-time aspect or you just get confused, like I did.

LOOKS LIKE AN AMAZING FALL SEASON FOR MOVIES

October 1, 2016 by movie gourmet

Every October through New Year, Hollywood rolls out its most cinematically aspirational movies to compete with indie and foreign Oscar bait. This shaping up to be a killer Prestige Season – the depth of the upcoming offerings is especially promising. We know about them because they’ve been screened at major film festivals earlier this year, and the buzz has leaked out. These movies start rolling out into theaters on October 7 and 14 (Birth of a Nation and Certain Women) and continue opening through January 20 in the Bay Area (Toni Erdmann).

The top candidates for the Best Picture Oscar are looking to be:

Arrival stars Amy Adams as a linguist dispatched to communicate with alien lifeforms Directed by Denis Villaneuve (Incendies – my top movie of 2011, Prisoners, Sicario).
La La Land is a big studio musical a la Singing in the Rain with Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling.
Loving tells the story of the Virginia couple whose 1967 US Supreme Court case overturned state laws banning inter-racial marriage. Stars Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga. Directed by Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter, Mud, all three of which made my Best of the Year lists).
Manchester By the Sea, a family drama from writer-director Kenneth Lonergan, the genius behind the little-seen Margaret. Stars Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams and Kyle Chandler. Big hit at Sundance.

Other major releases that could break through:

Lion stars Dev Patel as an Australian adoptee returning to India to search for his biological parents; costarring Nicole Kidman and Rooney Mara.
Birth of a Nation – Nate Parker writes, directs and stars in this depiction of Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion. This was an awards favorite after Sundance in January, but the buzz has been sinking after the publicizing of director Parker’s own involvement in a 1999 campus rape case; (he was tried and acquitted).
Jackie – Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy.
Hacksaw Ridge is the true story of the WWII conscientious objector who served as a battlefield medic and earned the Congressional Medal of Honor. Being a Mel Gibson movie, the battle scenes are realistic and vivid.
And the big family hit of the Holiday season may turn out to be, of all things a documentary about a Mongolian girl – The Eagle Huntress; reportedly it’s both a crowd pleaser and spectacular eye candy.

LOVING Credit: Ben Rothstein/Focus Features

Then there is an entire herd of foreign and indie films that will grace the art houses. Some will break through as popular hits and, undoubtedly, some will spawn Oscar nominations for acting, directing and writing awards.

Toni Erdmann is writer-director Maren Ade’s perspective of a father-daughter relationship, creating a totally original and unforgettable father who takes prankstering into performance art. You might not expect an almost three-hour German comedy to break through, but I’ve seen it, and I think that it’s a lock to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Picture.
Nocturnal Animals is a violent thriller with Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Shannon.
The Handmaiden is a mystery romance set in Japan, from Chan-wook Park of Oldboy.
Julieta is Pedro Almodovar’s latest. That’s enough for some of us.
Aquarius, stars Sonia Braga as a woman battling developers to protect her home; Braga is still luminous 40 years after Donna Flor and Her Two Husbands.
Certain Women comes from Kelly Reichardt of Wendy and Lucy, starring Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart and Laura Dern.
The Salesman is another personal drama from Asghar Farhadi of A Separation.
Personal Shopper is a Parisian ghost story that stars Kristen Stewart. From director Olivier Assayas.
Elle, from director Paul Verhoeven, stars Isabelle Huppert in, what else?, a psychological thriller with disturbing sex.
Paterson Adam Driver stars in this drama from Jim Jarmusch.

Keep coming back to The Movie Gourmet. and I’ll keep you current on this year’s Big Movies.