Okay – here’s a first class Argument Starter. In the past week, The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott released their list of The 25 Best Films of the 21st Century So Far. And it seems that everyone is weighing in with their own lists. Me, too.
Of course I agreed with some of the NYT picks (Boyhood, The Hurt Locker, Million Dollar Baby, Spirited Away). But I thought they picked the wrong Coen brothers movie (the dreadful Inside Llewyn Davis instead of any other Coen brothers film) and the wrong Dardennes brothers movie (The Child instead of The Kid with a Bike or The Son). Moonlight and Mad Max: Fury Road are just too 2017-trendy. I’m skeptical of their three Chinese and Taiwanese films that I haven’t seen (although I have some obscure picks on my list, too).
So, just for shits and giggles, here’s The Movie Gourmet’s Best 25 Movies of this Millennium (so far).
Boyhood
Million Dollar Baby
Minority Report
Winter’s Bone
Ida
Sideways
Hell or High Water
25th Hour
The Hurt Locker
Ex Machina
Best in Show
The Kid on a Bike
Gosford Park
Memories of Murder
Children of Men
Spirited Away
Monster’s Ball
Toy Story 3
Stories We Tell
A Serious Man
Grizzly Man
Talk to Her
I’ve Loved You So Long
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
Blue is the Warmest Color
Just missed: Margaret, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, The Secrets in Their Eyes, Incendies, Monster, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Take Shelter, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Crash, Traffic, After the Wedding, Away from Her, Mystic River, Wild Tales and The Hunt.
Jennifer Lawrence breaks through in WINTER’S BONE, featured at the Camera Cinema Club IDA Michael Polley in STORIES WE TELL
The bittersweet dramedy The Hero has one thing going for it – Sam Elliott, he of the profoundly deep and sexy voice. Elliot has a rascal’s sparkle in his eye and a smile that can make panties slide off by themselves. He pulls off a mustache that would be ridiculed on any other man walking the earth.
In The Hero, Elliott plays Lee, a selfish screen actor of Elliott’s real age (73). Lee has made “one film I’m proud of” – a Western from forty years ago titled “The Hero“. Now, in a hilarious Sam-Elliott-winks-at-himself, Lee is relegated to doing commercial voice-overs, his buttery tones hawking a supermarket BBQ sauce. He has left some relationship carnage in the wake of his career : an ex-wife (Elliott’s real-life wife Katharine Ross) and an estranged daughter (Krysten Ritter) in his wake. And his best friend is his pot dealer (Nick Offerman).
Lee receives a very, very bad cancer diagnosis (even for cancer). Contemplating – or avoiding contemplating – the end of his life, he is forced to take his own measure. He knows that he’s “The Hero” on-screen but angry daughter knows well enough that he’s no hero off-screen, and so does he.
He finds himself fascinating a younger woman (Laura Prepon – Alex from Orange Is the New Black and Donna in The 70s Show). And he stumbles into a viral social media frenzy that promises to reignite his career when it’s too late. But what he hungers for the most is patching things up with his daughter.
Lots of drugs are consumed in this movie, mostly massive amounts of marijuana going up in smoke. The Hero’s dream sequences are already vivid and then Lee takes shrooms… Lee becomes the guest star for a bottom-scraping fan group event, and shows up totally high on Molly; the scene is hilarious.
Elliott’s movie debut was playing Card Player #2 in 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. His career went through a hunky phase, but then blossomed in Elliott’s middle age with an indelible performance in 1993’s Gettysburg and then Tombstone, The Big Lebowski, We Were Soldiers,I’ll See You in My Dreams and last year’s Grandma, of which I wrote “worth seeing for ten minutes of Sam Elliott”.
I saw The Hero at the Camera Cinema Club. There’s nothing here that you haven’t seen before. But then it’s usually worth watching Sam Elliott again, anyway.
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).
Step Into Liquid is available on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=YqzHvcwJmQY%3F
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.
Riding Giants is also available on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
I recommend the David and Goliath documentary Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, the riveting story of an American family business bullied into a nightmarish fight for survival.
Other recommendations in theaters:
Paris Can Wait, a female fantasy with glorious French cuisine to tantalize all genders.
My Stream of the Week is one of my Overlooked Noir,The Burglar (1957). Dan Duryea leads an initially successful heist team as they go stir crazy waiting for the environment to cool down so they can safely fence the booty. Martha Vickers plays one of the most direct of the noir vixens, and it’s the debut of 50s sexpot Jayne Mansfield. The Burglar is available streaming on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, Xbox Video and Flixster.
On June 12, Turner Classic Movies will broadcast The Battle of Algiers, the story of 1950s French colonialists struggling to suppress the guerrilla uprising of Algerian independence fighters. Although it looks like a documentary, it is not. Instead, filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo recreated the actual events so realistically that we believe that we are watching the strategy councils of each side. Urban insurgency and counter-insurgency are nasty, brutal and not very short – and we see some horrifically inhumane butchering by both sides.
Among the great war films, it may be the best film on counter-insurgency. In 2003, the Pentagon screened the film for its special operations commanders.
Nobody likes a bully, and the documentary Abacus: Small Enough to Jail tells the riveting story of an American family business bullied into a nightmarish fight for survival. We meet the members of family, the Sungs of New York, and relive their existential struggle. It’s a compelling story, well-told.
Thomas Sung founded the Abacus Federal Savings Bank, a small bank in New York’s Chinatown, and passed on the management of the bank to his daughters. The bank’s customers are almost all Chinese from the neighborhood. The bank management discover a corrupt loan officer, fire him and turn him in to regulators. But prosecutors go on to blame the whole loan department and then the bank leadership – and file criminal charges against the bank. Suddenly, the Sungs are in a fight for their professional lives.
The Manhattan prosecutor was looking for a scapegoat for the financial crisis of 2008. Let’s remember that the global crisis was caused by the biggest players in the American financial system. The very biggest financial institutions were guilty of overt corruption – the banks were packaging and selling worthless financial products and the credit rating agencies were falsely labeling them as valuable. Banks were making crazy, unsustainable and predatory home loans. Insured accounts turned out to be not really insured.
But those crooked big banks were “too big to fail” They were bailed out by the taxpayers and escaped accountability for their crimes. Here’s what is mind-boggling: to this day, the tiny Abacus Federal Savings Bank remains the ONLY bank that has faced criminal charges from the financial crisis. Hence the movie’s subtitle “Small Enough to Jail“.
Abacus: Small Enough to Jail comes from the documentarian Steve James, who directed Hoop Dreams, the masterpiece that both Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel picked as the best movie of 1994, as well as the more recent Ebert celebration Life Itself. Abacus is brilliantly sourced – James was able to get prosecutors, defense attorneys and even jurors on camera, along with the entire Sung family.
Getting to know the individuals in the Sung family is one of the pleasures of viewing Abacus. Let’s just say that it’s a mistake to take a family business to court when the whole family are lawyers.
Right at the beginning of Abacus, James makes an inspired choice – he matches the family patriarch and bank founder Thomas Sung with George Bailey from It’s a Wonderful Life. And the engrossing saga of the Sungs begins.
Why so few good films in theaters right now? I’ll tell you why! According to my calculations, a whopping 45% of all theater screens in Silicon Valley are devoted to ONLY THREE MOVIES: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Guardians of the Galaxy 2, and Baywatch. (It doesn’t help that the miserable A Quiet Passion is taking up some of the very few art house screens.) Nevertheless, you can still go out and see:
Paris Can Wait, a female fantasy with glorious French cuisine to tantalize all genders.
The Commune looks like a comedy of errors, but it’s a family drama with a searing performance by Trine Dyrholm.
The Lost City of Z, a thoughtful and beautifully cinematic revival of the adventure epic genre.
In Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer, writer-director Joseph Cedar and his star Richard Gere combine to create the unforgettable character of Norman Oppenheimer, a Jewish Willy Loman who finally gets his chance to sit with the Movers and Shakers. This may be Gere’s best movie performance ever.
My DVD/Stream of the Week is Paterson, a genial and occasionally very funny portrait of an artist’s creative process. Paterson is now available on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
On June 5, Turner Classic Movies is airing the very idiosyncratic Convicts 4, the true-life tail of one convict, played by Ben Gazzara, who develops into a fine artist while in prison. There’s a particularly unforgettable supporting turn by one of my favorite movie psychos, Timothy Carey, here in one of his most eccentrically self-conscious performances. The rich cast includes Stuart Whitman, Vincent Price, Rod Steiger, Jack Albertson, Ray Walton, Brodrick Crawford and Sammy Davis Jr.
On June 8 on TCM, look for John Dall playing the classic narcissist in Hitchcock’s psychological thriller Rope. Can he outwit Jimmy Stewart?
And, guess what? Pedro Almodóvar has ascended into Classic Cinema. His raucous and provocatively sexy comedy Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! will play on Turner Classic Movies on July 4. Almodóvar a classic? Makes you feel old…
a young Antonio Banderas and Victoria Abril in TIE ME UP! TIE ME DOWN!
In Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, Adam Driver plays a Paterson, New Jersey, bus driver named Paterson. Paterson is a poet, and, when you think about it, bus driver is a perfect job for someone who eavesdrops and observes, and who needs time to rework phrases in his head. Paterson the movie is a genial, occasionally very funny, portrait of an artist’s creative process.
There’s not much overt action or conflict in Paterson. Every morning Paterson awakes between 6:09 and 6:27 AM, kisses the cheek or naked shoulder of his girlfriend Laura and heads to the kitchen for coffee and Cheerios. While his bus is warming up, he drafts and edits poems in his notebook until his supervisor appears at his bus. After work, he walks home past old factories and straightens his leaning mailbox. After dinner, he walks Laura’s bulldog Marvin and stops for exactly one beer at the neighborhood tavern. The bus, the bar and Paterson’s time going to and fro constitute the platform for his art: finding material for observation and for crafting and recrafting poems.
The city of Paterson is a perfect setting for this story. Paterson is not a tourist destination, and there doesn’t seem to be much interesting in the place that boasts of its memorial to Lou Costello. But a careful, open-minded observer like Paterson can revel in the beauty of the Great Falls of the Passaic River and find interest in all the dingy places and seemingly ordinary denizens.
Paterson doesn’t share any of his poetry, except VERY occasionally to Laura; in Paterson, he even chooses to quote her a poem from someone else when she asks for one of his. Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), a suitably kooky artist, is impractical and adorable, and obsessed with black and white. She seems as frivolous as Paterson is deep, but he is devoted to her, and she lightens his life and is the unrelenting cheerleader for his poetry.
Paterson is filled with sly humor, much coming from the antics of the regular folks that Paterson encounters, along with Laura’s goofiness. I particularly enjoyed the two guys on bus talking about women they think have hit on them and the knowitall college student posing as an anarchist. At my screening, wry chuckles kept erupting in the audience.
To make sure we’re paying attention (and enjoying the film on other levels), Jarmusch has filled it with patterns, with recurring themes like twins and secrets and with repeated phrases. Paterson meets three other poets – none anything like him – and at the most unexpected locales.
For Paterson to work, an actor is needed who has the charisma to be interesting while acting very passively. Adam Driver is the perfect choice, and he is exceptional. I also really liked Barry Shabaka Henley as Doc, the tavern’s proprietor and bartender.
Not everyone will enjoy Paterson, but I did. A viewer needs to appreciate the juxtaposition of a routine exterior with an artist’s sometimes bursting inner dialogue. I recommend settling in and going for the ride. Paterson is now available on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
In the Danish family drama The Commune, Erik (Ulrich Thomsen) is an architecture professor married to the television newscaster Anna (Trine Dyrholm). Erik is very reserved, tends to be harsh and does not suffer fools. Anna is bubbly. They have a watchful 14-year-old daughter.
Erik inherits a huge house and wants to sell it. Anna wants to move the family in. Erik points out that it’s totally impractical and too expensive to keep up. Anna suggests taking in their friends as tenants – essentially starting a commune. After all, it’s the 1970s. What could possibly go wrong?
The folks who move in, of course, are a collection of oddballs. Anna embraces everyone’s eccentricities, and Erik tries, but it’s hard for him. At this point, we think we’re watching a comedy of manners – but we’re wrong.
The Commune is really the story of Erik and Anna and their marriage. Each is having a mid-life crisis that will test their marriage. The foibles of the commune are just a distraction.
Trine Dyrholm gives a remarkable performance as Anna. Is Anna shockingly open-minded and permissive, a desperate enabler or is she masking an internal implosion?
I loved writer-director Thomas Vinterberg’s earlier films Celebration (Festen) and The Hunt (Jagten). Vinterberg’s Funny Funny Squirm rhythm in The Commune reminds me of Celebration. But the payoff in The Commune just doesn’t match Celebration and The Hunt, which are exceptionally good films. I especially detested the death of a character in The Commune, which I found to be grossly manipulative.
Still, Dyrholm’s performance is stunning, and Vinterberg remains a master at the cold-eyed observation of human behavior. I saw The Commune at Cinequest.
My video pick for Memorial Day Week is Mel Gibson’s powerful Hacksaw Ridge. Just before the 2017 Oscars, The Wife and I finally got around to watching Hacksaw Ridge, which had been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. Before you see this movie, you need to know that it’s a true story – otherwise you wouldn’t believe it. It’s the story of American Army Medic Desmond T. Doss who single-handedly rescued 75 fellow soldiers at the Battle of Okinawa and became the first Conscientious Objector in American history to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Hacksaw Ridge shows Doss (Andrew Garfield) growing up in rural Virginia as a devout Seventh Day Adventist. After Pearl Harbor, Doss feels compelled to serve his country but, as a religious pacifist, he can’t sign up for combat. So he enlists as a conscientious objector to become a combat medic. He’s thrown into a combat unit for training and endures bullying from both his officers and his fellow troops.
Doss and his unit are ordered into the Battle of Okinawa. They must climb a 350-foot cliff on cargo netting, The Americans can carry up radios, bazookas, machine guns and flamethrowers but not anything heavier than that. The Japanese are not contesting the climb up because they have set up a killing field on the ridge-top, which they have fortified with concrete pill-boxes. The Japanese have also constructed a network of tunnels, in which they can wait out the US naval artillery bombardments.
It’s a blood bath. Historically, this was an extraordinarily brutal battle – even by War in the Pacific standards. And so director Mel Gibson, who never shies away from violence, graphically depicts that violence. Of course, being Mel, he can’t resist a few completely gratuitous moments, including a hara-kiri and the very cool-looking slo-mo ejection of casings from an automatic weapon. But, generally, the movie violence is proportionate to the real-life violence.
Nevertheless, the real focus is on the bravery of the US troops, of which Doss’ is extraordinary. Their and his courage to climb the cliff a SECOND time – after learning what it is like on top – is unimaginable.
Andrew Garfield is superb as Doss, playing him with a goofy and infectious grin, whose niceness and sweetness masks formidable strong will. I’ve never see him as Spider-Man, but Garfield’s work in Red Riding, The Social Network, 99 Homes and now Hacksaw Ridge has been very impressive.
There isn’t a bad, or even mediocre performance in Hacksaw Ridge. You can’t tell that Aussies Teresa Palmer, Hugo Weaving and Rachel Griffiths (Brenda in Six Feet Under) aren’t from Blue Ridge Virginia. Sam Worthington and Vince Vaughn are especially good as Doss’ commanders.
I’ve been a fan of Hugo Weaving since he so compellingly played a blind man in the 1991 Proof (also our first look at a very young Russell Crowe). Since then, Weaving has earned iconic roles in the Matrix movies and V for Vendetta and is usually the most interesting performer in big budget movies. Here Weaving plays Doss’ father, not just as the mean drunk who terrorizes his family, but as a vet still reeling from the PTSD of his own WWI combat experience.
Hacksaw Ridge deservedly won Oscars for both film editing and sound mixing. Gibson’s directing is excellent, as is the work of cinematographer Simon Duggan (who shot Baz Luhrman’s otherwise dreadful but great-looking The Great Gatsby).
Make sure that you watch through the epilogue and closing credits to see and hear the real life folks portrayed in the film.
You can rent Hacksaw Ridge on DVD from Netflix and Redbox or stream it from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play and DirecTV.
[SPOILER ALERT: I have also read on the Internet about something that is NOT in the movie. Reportedly, when Doss was being evacuated by stretcher after being wounded by the grenade, he ROLLED OFF the stretcher when he passed another wounded soldier and demanded that the stretcher bearers take the other guy. Doss then CRAWLED the final 300 yards to the cargo netting to rescue himself. Again reportedly, Mel Gibson kept this out of the movie because he thought the audience just couldn’t be expected to believe that it really happened.]
The droll dark comedy Radio Dreams explores the ambivalence of the immigrant experience through the portrait of a flamboyant misfit, a man who rides the roller coaster of megalomania and despair. That misfit is Hamid Royani (Mohsen Namjoo), the director of programming at an Iranian radio station in the San Francisco Bay Area. Radio Dreams opens tomorrow for a one-week-only run at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco.
Hamid, an author in Iran, is a man of great certainty, with an unwavering sense of intellectual superiority He assumes that everyone should – and will – buy in to his idiosyncratic taste. This results in extremely random radio programming, and Hamid tries to sabotage everything that he finds vulgar (which is everything that might bring more listeners and revenue to the station.)
With his wild mane and indulgent programming, we first think that Hamid is simply batty. But immigrants to the US generally forge new identities, and we come to understand that Hamid has not, perhaps will not, forge that new identity. His despair is real but it’s hard to empathize with – he might be a legitimate literary figure in Iran, but he’s probably a pompous ass over there, too.
The highlight of Radio Dreams is Hamid’s reaction when he is surprised that Miss Iran USA, whom he has dismissed as a bimbo, might have literary chops that rivaling his.
Hamid has concocted a plan to have Afghanistan’s first rock band visit with the members of Metallica on air, and that’s the movie’s MacGuffin. As we wait to see if Metallica will really show up, the foibles of the radio station crew dot Radio Dreams with moments of absurdity. There are the cheesy commercials about unwanted body hair, Hamid’s obsession with hand sanitizer, a radio jungle played live on keyboards EVERY time, a new employee orientation that focuses on international time zones, along with a station intern compelled to take wrestling lessons.
Writer-director Babak Jalali is an adept storyteller. As the movie opens, we are wondering, why do these guys have musical instruments? Why are they talking about Metallica? What’s with the ON AIR sign? Much of the movie unfolds before Hamid Royani emerges as the centerpiece character.
Hamid is played by the well-known Iranian singer-songwriter Mohsen Namjoo, “Iran’s Bob Dylan”. This is only Namjoo’s second feature film as an actor. He’s a compelling figure, and this is a very fine performance.
Except for Namjoo, the cast is made up of Bay Area actors. Masters of the implacable and the stone face, all of the actors do deadpan really, really well.
As befits the mix of reality and absurdism, here’s a podcast by the characters in Radio Dreams. I saw Radio Dreams at the Camera Cinema Club, and Babak Jalali took Q&A after the screening by phone from Belgium.
Radio Dreams is the second feature for Jalali, an Iranian-born filmmaker living and working in Europe. He shot Radio Dreams with a small crew over only 24 days in San Francisco. About 60% of the dialogue was scripted and 40% improvised. The band in the movie, Kabul Dreams, really is Afghanistan’s first rock band, they did get to meet Metallica in real life and the PARS-FM were filmed at a real Iranian radio station in the Bay Area.
Babak Jalali is a promising filmmaker and Radio Dreams is a movie that we haven’t seen before.
