Winter's Bone

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Winter’s Bone is the year’s best live action movie so far.  A 17-year-old Ozarks girl is determined to save the family home by tracking down her meth dealer dad – dead or alive.  The girl’s journey through a series of nasty and nastier Southern Missouri crank cookers is riveting – without any explosions, gunfights or chase scenes.  Every moment of this film seems completely real.  Winter’s Bone won the screenwriting and grand jury prizes at Sundance.

With just her second feature, Debra Granik has emerged as an important filmmaker to watch.  She presents an unflinching look at this subculture without ever resorting to stereotype.  Granik hits a home run with every artistic choice, from the locations to the spare soundtrack to the pacing to the casting.  I’ll be watching for her next film.

As the protagonist, 20-year-old Jennifer Lawrence is in every scene.  With a minimum of dialogue, she creates a lead character of rarely seen determination.

Dale Dickey is exceptional as a criminal matriarch.  John Hawkes (the kind Sol Star in Deadwood) also gives a tremendous performance as the ready-to-explode Uncle Teardrop.

TCM’s Korean War Marathon

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On June 24 and 25, TCM is showing fourteen straight Korean War movies: The Steel Helmet (1951),  Men In War (1951) , Men Of The Fighting Lady (1954), I Want You (1951), Battle Circus (1953),  Tank Battalion (1958), Mission Over Korea (1953), Battle Taxi (1955), The Bamboo Prison (1955), All the Young Men (1960), Take the High Ground! (1953), Time Limit (1957), The Rack (1956) and  Hell in Korea (1956).

If you’re gonna watch just one, I recommend The Steel Helmet, a gritty classic by the great Sam Fuller, a WWII combat vet who brooked no sentimentality about war.  Fuller and Peckinpah favorite Gene Evans is especially good as the sergeant.

This time, TCM is not showing the three most well-known Korean War movies:   Manchurian Candidate, Pork Chop Hill and M*A*S*H.

Earlier this year, TCM broadcast War Hunt,  a 1962 film about Robert Redford joining a Korean War unit as a new replacement with John Saxon as the platoon’s psycho killer.  Along with Redford, Sidney Pollack and Francis Ford Coppola are in the cast, making War Hunt the only film with three Oscar-winning directors as actors.   Don’t blink, or you’ll miss for Coppola as an uncredited convoy truck driver.

This week's Movies To See

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Gene Evans in Sam Fuller's The Steel Helmet

 

Click here for this week’s recommendations.  Scroll down this blog to watch trailers.  My top recommendations are Toy Story 3, The Secrets in their Eyes (El Secreto de Sus Ojos), Micmacs and Iron Man 2. You can still find The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in theaters.

My top picks on DVD is The Deep End. Last week’s pick, Stranded: I’ve Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains and The Messenger are also good choices on DVD.

To Kill a Mockingbird and The Steel Helmet are on TV.

Movies I'm Looking Forward To – Updated

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I’ve updated my Movies I’m Looking Forward To page (also known as The Paula Page).  I’ve included the movie Get Low and trailers or clips from/about Get Low, The Girl Who Played With Fire, Cane Toads: The Conquest, Welcome to the Rileys, Animal Kingdom, Uncle Boonmee  and Carlos.

I’m still the most eager to see Mike Leigh’s Another Year, The Girl Who Played With Fire, The Kids Are Alright, Poetry, Certified Copy, Inside Job and Cane Toads.

I had already posted the trailers for The Kids Are Alright and Homewrecker/The Locksmith, plus the teaser for Certified Copy (Copie Conforme).

Other movies featured include The Square, Biutiful, Howl, The American, Blue Valentine, Of Gods and Men (Des Hommes et des Dieu), One Too Many Mornings and Aurora.

Robert Duvall, Lucas Black and Bill Murray in Get Low

DVD of the week: The Deep End

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Tilda Swinton was so good in I Am Love, the movie I panned this week, that now I’ll plug The Deep End.  This 2001 thriller stars Swinton  as a Lake Tahoe mom who must cover up a crime to protect her teen son.  Then ER heartthrob Goran Visnjic shows up to blackmail the family.  The more the situation spirals out of control, the more gripping Swinton’s performance.

I Am Love

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I Am Love (Io sono l’amore) – the operatic tale of the family of a zillionaire Milan industrialist and how each family member seeks happiness – is less than the sum of its parts.  The movie has many successful components: another fearless performance by Tilda Swinton, searing love scenes, and some nice small touches in the screenwriting (an aristocratic family’s treatment of the new wife during a tragedy, the re-taking of a man’s suit coat, among others).  But the soundtrack’s musical crescendos at the most emotionally charged moments are too distracting, as are the over-the-top plot points in the third act.  And the character of the favorite son is written to be impossibly sweet and naive.  Marisa Berenson (whose career has been pretty quiet since 1975’s Barry Lyndon) is excellent in a small role.

There is some mouth-watering food porn (especially the glazed prawns); if this movie could generate a wider audience, the line “I made your mother prawns” would become a catch phrase, as in “I made your mother prawns and we hiked the Appalachian Trail”.

The film making is described in the New York Times.

Toy Story 3

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Toy Story 3:  It’s the best American movie of the year so far, and belongs in the elevated class of Toy Story and Toy Story 2.  I would recommend the film for anyone, not just kids.  Adults will howl at the enhanced roles of Ken and Barbie, an impassioned duet of “Dream Weaver” and the funniest scene in movie history involving a tortilla.

Pixar understands that the best animation in human history is not enough by itself, and tells great, great stories.  Pixar screenwriting is incredibly superior to that of other animation studios.

The preview version I saw was in 2D.  The 3D version should make the opening and climatic scenes even more compelling.

Movies to See This Week

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Click here for this week’s recommendations.  Scroll down this blog to watch trailers.  My top recommendations are Toy Story 3, Micmacs, The Secrets in their Eyes (El Secreto de Sus Ojos), and Iron Man 2. You can still find The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in theaters.

My top picks on DVD is Stranded: I’ve Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains. The Messenger, Crazy Heart and Broken Embraces (Abrazos Rotos) are also good choices on DVD.

Monkey Business, All The King’s Men, The 400 Blows and The Shootist are all on TV.

The Shootist

DVD pick of the week: Stranded: I’ve Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains

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In 1972, a group of privileged Latin American college guys boarded a chartered airplane for a rugby weekend.  The plane crashed in the Andes, and some of them died.  They awaited rescue.  Then an avalanche killed some more of them.  Then it became apparent that the search for them had been called off.  In this documentary, the survivors tell their story – and bring their adult children back to the scene of the crash.  They candidly explain how humans act and react in the most desperate circumstances, faced with the most appalling choices.  This was my #2 film of 2009; (made in 2007, it was only widely available in the US in 2009).  Here’s a scene from the film:

Movies I'm Looking Forward To

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Here’s my new Movies I’m Looking Forward To page.  Click to get the buzz on promising films and to see trailers.

If I were programming a theater, I would make sure I had locked up Toy Story 3, The Kids Are All Right, Another Year and Inside Job.  I would take a flyer on The Certified Copy, Poetry and Uncle Boonmee.  And I would try to track down The Locksmith, Everyone Else, The Square and Cane Toads.

On July 9, I’ll be watching for The Girl Who Played With Fire, which follows my personal favorite film of the year so far, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo as the second part of Stieg Larssen’s trilogy.  

This post is for you, Paula.