Movie Recommendations, Rants and Ruminations
Good news. The indie comedy Here’s the Kicker, which I labeled the biggest surprise at San Jose’s Cinequest film festival last year, is now out on DVD.
Please go to the movie’s Netflix page and click SAVE – once it gets enough SAVES, it will become available on Netflix.
It’s hard to write comedy. Otherwise, we’d be seeing lots of good comedies. That’s why it’s worth tagging along on the uproarious road trip in Here’s the Kicker.
My DVD pick this week is the gripping drama Detachment, with Adrien Brody’s best performance since winning an Oscar for The Pianist. Detachment is on my list of Best Movies of 2012 – So Far.
Detachment is a gripping drama about the failure of American public schools from the teachers’ point of view. Adrien Brody plays a long-term sub on a 60-day assignment at a high school that has burned out virtually every other teacher. I can’t use the words “grim” or “bleak” to describe this school environment – it’s downright hellish. It’s making their very souls decay.
The students are rebellious and disrespectful, and somehow manage to be zealously apathetic. No parents support the teachers, but some enthusiastically abuse and undermine them. Administrators demand better test results but offer little support beyond “flavor of the month” educational fads. The ills of the high school in Detachment are exaggerated – this is not a documentary – but there isn’t an urban public high school in American that hasn’t endured some elements of Detachment.
Brody won an Oscar for 2002’s The Pianist, and, in Detachment, he makes the most of his best role since. Brody plays a haunted and damaged man with strong core beliefs, who, faced with a menu of almost hopeless choices, picks his battles.
Detachment’s cast is unusually deep, and the performances are outstanding. James Caan is particularly outstanding as the veteran educator whose wicked sense of humor can still disarm the most obnoxiously insolent teen. Christina Hendricks (Mad Men) is excellent as the young teacher hanging on to some idealism. Blythe Danner and William Petersen (CSI) are the veterans who have seen it all. Lucy Liu plays the educator who is clinging by her fingerprints, trying not to flame out like the basket case played by Tim Blake Nelson. Marcia Gay Harden and Isiah Whitlock Jr. (Cedar Rapids) are dueling administrators. Sami Gayle and Betty Kaye are superb as two troubled kids. Louis Zorich delivers a fine performance as Brody’s failing grandfather. There’s just not an ordinary performance in the movie.
For all its despair, Detachment doesn’t let the audience sink into a malaise. Director Tony Kaye (American History X) keeps thing moving, and his choices in structure and pacing work well. This is an intense film with a dark viewpoint. It is also a very ambitious, thoughtful and originally crafted movie – one well worth seeing.
In the unsettling Slovak film Visible World (Vidite ny Svet), the protagonist Oliver lives by himself in a high-rise apartment building and trains his binoculars on unsuspecting people in the high-rise across the street. The tag line is “There’s a man with binoculars at the window, watching the people across the street. And he’s definitely not James Stewart.”
It’s an uncommon voyeur film. First, the voyeur isn’t looking at any bad behavior by the people across the street. Second, although he is compelled to spy, he isn’t getting any apparent sexual kick out of what he sees. Instead – and this is the really, really disturbing aspect – he is using what he sees to interfere with their lives – and to insinuate himself into their lives.
Most women like a guy who makes that extra effort to find out what she likes. But going through a woman’s garbage to see what products she uses – before he has met her – that’s pretty high up on the Creep-O-Meter. “I like Chilean Carmenere. You do, too? Imagine that!”
Oliver is played by Ivan Trojan as an extremely terse and focused guy, but one who can surprise the audience by putting on an act of affability to get what he wants. He is an odd duck, for sure – often rudely abrupt with people who wander between him and his obsessions. But he is that unusually high functioning crazy who can hide how very, very sick he is.
I saw Visible World at its North American premiere at Cinequest 22.
Today and tomorrow, I’m catching up by commenting on two films from last week’s Cinequest 22.
In the thoughtful French film Four Lovers, two happily married couples hit it off socially. They quickly decide that it’s okay to have sex with each others’ spouses. It’s not “spouse swapping”. It’s an arrangement whereby both couples continue to live as couples, but each adds a permitted fling with one of the other couple.
Plenty of explicit sex follows, but this is not primarily an erotic film. Instead it explores what follows from this arrangement. What rules need to be agreed upon? Is there jealousy and/or insecurity? Will anyone go past the fling to fall in love with the new partner? Can one be in love with more than one lover? Can they keep this from their kids? How deeply do they need their new lovers? How will this affect the original marriages?
It’s all complicated. In fact, I think that watching this movie would be far superior than trying this out in real life.
Spoiler Alert: After the arrangement ends, the couples return to their original married lives. Something is missing in their lives, but it’s not the sexual thrill of the affairs. Instead each grieves the loss of a lover. Given this loss, all four are unhappy for the first time in the film and perhaps wishing that it had never happened.
Detachment is a gripping drama about the failure of American public schools from the teachers’ point of view. Adrien Brody plays a long-term sub on a 60-day assignment at a high school that has burned out virtually every other teacher. I can’t use the words “grim” or “bleak” to describe this school environment – it’s downright hellish. It’s making their very souls decay.
The students are rebellious and disrespectful, and somehow manage to be zealously apathetic. No parents support the teachers, but some enthusiastically abuse and undermine them. Administrators demand better test results but offer little support beyond “flavor of the month” educational fads. The ills of the high school in Detachment are exaggerated – this is not a documentary – but there isn’t an urban public high school in American that hasn’t endured some elements of Detachment.
Brody won an Oscar for 2002’s The Pianist, and, in Detachment, he makes the most of his best role since. Brody plays a haunted and damaged man with strong core beliefs, who, faced with a menu of almost hopeless choices, picks his battles.
Detachment’s cast is unusually deep, and the performances are outstanding. James Caan is particularly outstanding as the veteran educator whose wicked sense of humor can still disarm the most obnoxiously insolent teen. Christina Hendricks (Mad Men) is excellent as the young teacher hanging on to some idealism. Blythe Danner and William Petersen (CSI) are the veterans who have seen it all. Lucy Liu plays the educator who is clinging by her fingerprints, trying not to flame out like the basket case played by Tim Blake Nelson. Marcia Gay Harden and Isiah Whitlock Jr. (Cedar Rapids) are dueling administrators. Sami Gayle and Betty Kaye are superb as two troubled kids. Louis Zorich delivers a fine performance as Brody’s failing grandfather. There’s just not an ordinary performance in the movie.
For all its despair, Detachment doesn’t let the audience sink into a malaise. Director Tony Kaye (American History X) keeps thing moving, and his choices in structure and pacing work well. This is an intense film with a dark viewpoint. It is also a very ambitious, thoughtful and originally crafted movie – one well worth seeing.
San Jose’s Cinequest 22 film festival has ended. For me, Cinequest 22 meant seeing 17 features, a short and several interviews and Q&As with filmmakers – all including several world and US premieres. I saw my share of American films, but I also saw movies from China, Spain, Belgium, the Slovak Republic, Argentina, Hungary, Russia, Sweden and Norway.
Among the festival crowd, movies about overcoming disability and disease seemed to be the most popular. I generally preferred the comedies and romances that prove that it is still possible to write a good movie in those genres.
I especially liked two of the biggest movies in the festival: the zany Chinese action film Let the Bullets Fly and the drama about the American education system Detachment (I’ll be commenting on Detachment on Wednesday before its release this weekend).
There were some smaller films that I hope gain distribution: King Curling, the Norwegian comedy about a curling star who must go off his psych meds to win the big match; the Argentine modern-day spaghetti western Salt; and the hipster screwball comedy Percival’s Big Night. If given the chance to see these films, American audiences will love them.
Here’s the trailer for King Curling.
Imagine if Howard Hawks were making a screwball comedy today – a guy and a girl spar with snappy patter, survive the crazed antics of their goofy friends and fall in love. If he set the movie in the shambles of a hipster pot dealer’s NYC apartment, you’d have Percival’s Big Night, one of the gems of Cinequest 22.
You’ll recognize the set-up: Two 24-year-old underachievers have so far made the least of their BFAs. Percy is infatuated with Chloe, and needs his roommate Sal to introduce her to him. Chloe arrives with her friend Riku, who is appropriately crazy enough to match up with Sal. The guys and girls bicker and banter, eavesdrop on each other and pair into couples.
What’s so refreshingly welcome about Percival’s Big Night is how well all of this is executed, due to the frantically paced dialogue from writer-director Jarret Kerr, who also stars as Sal. It’s briskly paced by director Will Sullivan and very, very funny.
The cast has performed Percival’s Big Night as an off-Broadway play. They were able to shoot the movie in six 15-minute captures that are blended together to look like one shot. Because of the madcap pace, the audience isn’t distracted by the single shot; instead, the technique intensifies the story compressed into the small apartment.
Percival’s Big Night is enough of crowd-pleaser to deserve theatrical release; in any case, hopefully, it will be available soon on cable TV, DVD, streaming or some other outlet.
I love spaghetti westerns and so does the protagonist of Salt (Sal), a would-be screenwriter who must have the only cat in Spain named Clint. He has written a movie set in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth, but nobody else thinks it’s any good. When he decides to visit the Atacama to improve his script, he is mistaken by all the locals for someone else – the guy who had cuckolded the local crime boss. That first night in Chile, he is plunged into a real life shoot em up and is soon experiencing a story that Sergio Leone himself would have loved to film.
Much of the fun is in the fact that our hero has never shot a gun or been shot at, and he doesn’t take easily to either – he’s no Clint, for sure. Salt is filmed in the style of a modern-day spaghetti western and comes with its own spaghetti western score with jangly guitar and jarring harmonica. If you love A Fistful of Dollars, this is the movie for you. Even if you don’t love the spaghetti western, you’ll find this a satisfyingly funny movie.
I attended the North American premiere of Salt at Cinequest 22.
Faust is Russian director Aleksander Sokurov‘s take on the famous story of a man who bargains with the devil for knowledge of the profound, with a young hottie thrown in the deal for good measure.
I saw this film primarily because I had admired Sokurov‘s Russian Ark, a 19th century period drama in which an aristocrat wanders through St. Petersburg’s Hermitage and encounters figures from earlier in Russian history. Sokurov filmed the entire 99-minute movie in a single shot. That’s a gimmick, but even beyond the singular achievement of the one shot, Russian Ark is a complete and effective film.
The German language Faust is also strikingly original. Filmed in the Czech Republic, Sokurov vividly creates a grimy and economically depressed German town of the early 1800s. The alleys, doorways and staircases are all so narrow that people are constantly jammed together. Sokurov’s Faust is not an old man, but a 40-year-old beaten down by poverty and malaise. Similarly, his Mephistopheles is not a slick charmer, but physically gross and repellent character who is a canny manipulator.
Unfortunately, the originality is for naught, because the film fails to engage the viewer. You watch Faust with the indifference one feels while observing someone park a car awkwardly.
Faust’s Aspect Ratio is a TV-like 1.37 : 1 (but goes wider for the final scene), which is odd for a literary epic. And some of the scenes are filmed through a distorted lens for some reason. The 140 minute length just contributes to the sense of self-indulgence by Sokurov. It’s not a pleasant way to spend 140 minutes of your life.
You gotta like a movie whose tag line is: “They sing! They dance! They’re juvenile delinquents from outer space!” I saw The Ghastly Love of Johnny X at its world premiere at Cinequest 22, and writer-director Paul Bunnell said that he was primarily inspired by the teenage delinquent movies of the 50’s. But it’s also clear that Bunnell has seen more than his share of sci-fi movies from the 50s (and maybe a Russ Meyer film or two).
Bunnell evoked the genre by shooting in a crisply beautiful black and white (on the last of Kodak’s 35mm black and white Plus X film stock). Ghastly Love is about some space aliens in the form of T-bird driving hard guys. Having been exiled to our planet, they grease their hair and snap their gum, and occasionally break into a musical number.
Before I saw it, I was concerned that Ghastly Love might be trying too hard to be the next The Rocky Horror Picture Show cult classic, but, not to worry, Ghastly Love definitely stands on its own. The cast and crew evidently had fun making this picture, and the fun carries over to the audience.
This was the last film for the late Kevin McCarthy, who was enough of a good sport to don a Devo hat and play the Grand Inquisitor. McCarthy, whose Oscar-nominated performance as Biff in Death of a Salesman was 61 years ago, brought some sci-fi cred from the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers.