Movies – Page 42 – The Movie Gourmet

Movies to See Right Now

April 15, 2016April 15, 2016 by movie gourmet

Here’s my slate of recommended movies in theaters this week:

I liked the evocative French drama My Golden Days, the beautiful tale of first love, with all its passion, importance, obsession, angst, conflict, breakups and makeups.
Ethan Hawke’s performance makes the Chet Baker biopic Born to Be Blue a success.
I enjoyed every minute of Jake Gyllenhaal’s breakdown in Demolition (but was ambivalent about why I did).
Everybody Wants Some!! is a dead-on 1980 time capsule and an amusing frolic with lots of ball busting and girl chasing – but probably more fun for a heterosexual male audience.

Tom Hiddleston makes a believable Hank Williams, but that can’t save the plodding I Saw the Light, which fails to capture any of the pathos in Hank’s life and death.

Because Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! is now in theaters, my DVD/Stream of the Week is its “spiritual prequel” – the coming of age Dazed and Confused is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon Video (free with Amazon Prime), iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Flixster.masterpiece Dazed and Confused.

The best night on TV this week is April 16, when Turner Classic Movies airs both the glorious sand-and-sandal epic Spartacus and Mel Brooks’ guffaw-fest Young Frankenstein.

If you haven’t watched Spartacus in a while, you probably remember it for Kirk Douglas’ macho tour de force, the ever stunning Jean Simmons and the sexual cat-and-mouse between Laurence Olivier and the Bronx-accented slaveboy Tony Curtis. But you might have forgotten the strength of the supporting performances by Peter Ustinov, Charles Laughton and – my favorite – Woody Strode. And watching last year’s Trumbo, I was reminded that indie producer Kirk Douglas awarded the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo the screenwriting credit that others had denied him.

Kirk Douglas and Woody Strode in SPARTACUS

EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!!: busting balls and chasing girls

April 13, 2016 by movie gourmet

Everybody Wants Some!! is director Richard Linklater’s nostalgic romp through his college jock days. He’s described Everybody Wants Some!! as a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused, and it has a similar vibe. We have college baseball players living in a house next to campus, and they drink lots of beer, get high, bust each other’s balls and chase girls. There are lots and lots of ball busting and girl chasing. All in good fun.

Everybody Wants Some!! is a dead-on 1980 time capsule, showcasing the disco, non-Urban Cowboy and punk cultural moments. And the very fun and evocative period soundtrack kicks off with My Sharona.

There is also a bong scene that has possibly the best stoned movie monologue (“language is just a construct”, Mayans, Druids, etc.) since Jack Nicholson’s “Venutians” riff around the campfire in Easy Rider.

The story’s point of view is that of the college guys, and it is not unknown for college-age guys to see women primarily as sexual opportunities. That’s pretty much the role of all the women in this movie, except for that Special Girl who gets our hero’s attention.

Linklater is the master of coming of age (Boyhood) and coming of age in relationships (the Midnight trilogy). Everybody Wants Some!! may be the least insightful of his coming of age films, but sometimes Linklater just has fun (School of Rock, Bernie), and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Everybody Wants Some!! has an appealing cast of actors that I hadn’t remembered seeing before (including the one guy who played Ryder in Glee). Dazed and Confused is known for launching the careers of hitherto unknowns Matthew McConaughey, Parker Posey, Ben Affleck, Milla Jovovich, Adam Goldberg, Joey Lauren Adams and Jason London. How about Everybody Wants Some!!? I don’t see stardom here for anyone (but keep in mind that Ben Affleck didn’t have a very showy or portentous part in Dazed and Confused).

Everybody Wants Some!! may not be Major Linklater, but it’s an amusing frolic – but probably more fun for a heterosexual male audience.

DVD/Stream of the Week: DAZED AND CONFUSED

April 12, 2016 by movie gourmet

Richard Linklater’s newest movie Everybody Wants Some!! is coming out in theaters, which he describes as a “spiritual sequel” to his coming of age classic Dazed and Confused. So let’s all go back to the last day of high school in 1976 and refresh ourselves. All of these high school kids are up for a massive year-end party, and they are either thinking about or avoiding thinking about the next phase in their lives. It all adds up to the defining coming of age film for its generation.

Linklater is the master of coming of age (Boyhood) and coming of age in relationships (the Midnight trilogy). In Dazed and Confused the most unforgettable – and cautionary – character is Wooderson; as played with sheer genius by Mayygew McConaughhey, Wooderson is the one character who aggressively embraces NOT coming of age – kind of a shady, dissolute Peter Pan.

Dazed and Confused is known for launching McConaughey’s career, as well as unleashing indie fave Parker Posey as a Mean Girl of uncommon enthusiasm. This was Ben Affleck’s first main role, although his character is more of a one-dimensional bully, and doesn’t hint at his future success as an Oscar-winning screenwriter or major movie star. The rest of the cast includes then-newcomers Milla Jovovich, Adam Goldberg, Joey Lauren Adams and Jason London. I especially enjoy the turns by Wiley Wiggins and the hilarious Rory Cochrane (Black Mass).

Dazed and Confused is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon Video (free with Amazon Prime), iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Flixster.

Dazed and Confused is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon Video (free with Amazon Prime), iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Flixster.

DEMOLITION: a most entertaining nervous breakdown

April 10, 2016April 10, 2016 by movie gourmet

I was thoroughly entertained during Demolition, but I’m very ambivalent about just why that was.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays a corporate striver who suddenly loses his wife in a car accident and then, well, he loses it. He has what we used to call a Nervous Breakdown (I don’t what the current euphemism is), and it’s a doozy. His behavior becomes strange and then bizarre – and we can’t keep our eyes off him.

And that’s what causes my ambivalence. In real life, nervous breakdowns aren’t very entertaining. The folks who suffer may pull the covers up over their heads, lapse into sobbing or catatonia or panic attacks – it’s just not fun to watch. But Gyllenhaal gets to do a goofy dance through crowded Manhattan streets, demolish stuff without committing vandalism, and it’s all great fun.

Demolition poses the question of whether this guy was a wackadoodle all along whose marital routine was keeping him functional – or whether he really loved his wife and the sheer grief from her loss knocked him for a loop. We find out at the end, but it’s really not that important.

Our hero encounters a woman who’s a bit of an oddball (Naomi Watts) and her kid, a smart and creative boy who is heading into adolescence with a major identity issue.

Chris Cooper and Polly Draper are superb as Gyllenhaal’s grieving in-laws. Cooper is also Gyllenhaal’s boss and brilliantly modulates his responses as he tries to be appropriately sympathetic and supportive – until Gyllenhall’s behavior becomes just too bizarre and offensive. Draper has a smaller role, but gets to deliver a stunning monologue near the end. Judah Davis is exceptional as the kid.

If you look at Gyllenhaal’s body of work (Donnie Darko, The Good Girl, Brokeback Mountain, Zodiac, End of Watch, Prisoners, Nightcrawler), you first note that he’s in some very good movies, movies that are that good because of his performances. And you see that his characters range from the tightly wound to the maladjusted to the way-out-there cra-cra. If you need an actor from the post-Nicholas Cage generation to play “tortured”, Jake’s your guy.

Gyllenhaal is so charismatic that Demolition is entertaining (unless you overthink it, as I did).

BORN TO BE BLUE: aching to get clean

April 8, 2016 by movie gourmet

In Born to Be Blue, Ethan Hawke plays jazzman Chet Baker as he seeks to overcome his heroin addiction and mount an artistic comeback.

Writer-director Robert Budreau made the successful choice to start the story when Baker had hit bottom in the mid-1960s. Baker is relearning how to play the trumpet after his teeth were smashed by an angry creditor. Now he’s living in his girlfriend’s VW van and playing for free in a pizza joint, trying to work his way back up to a marquee venue and a recording deal. We see his 1950s glory days in flashback.

In a typically outstanding performance, Ethan Hawke makes us root for this guy, even as we cringe at the likelihood that his disease is going to find a way to destroy him. If you’ve seen Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, you know that Hawke is a master at playing unreliable characters – which makes him a perfect choice for a junkie like Chet Baker. Still, in a bowling alley scene, we glimpse the Chet Baker charm that could attract a woman who certainly knew better. Hawke convincingly fingers the horn as we hear the real Chet Baker play; Hawke himself sings on Baker’s signature vocal numbers Over the Rainbow and My Funny Valentine.

Carmen Ejogo (Coretta Scott King in Selma) is also excellent as two of the women in Baker’s life.

This movie’s elephant in the room is Baker’s addiction to heroin, about which he says, “It makes me happy”. Some very incisive scenes with his father hint at the roots of Baker’s disquiet. The people closest to Baker want him to kick the habit, but, unfortunately, more than he wants to himself. As he clings on with his fingerprints, Born to Be Blue is achingly effective.

MY GOLDEN DAYS: the urgency of first love

April 7, 2016 by movie gourmet

The first love depicted in Arnaud Desplechin’s coming of age film My Golden Days is completely evocative. That first love is inevitable even if the young lovers don’t know it yet, and then filled with passion, importance, obsession, angst, conflict, breakups and makeups. And then it runs its course.

The performance of Lou Roy-Lecollinet as the unpredictable object of the young protagonist’s affection really elevates My Golden Days. Roy-Lecollinet has looks which won’t attract every guy, but would be irresistible to some. She’s able to convincingly play a girl with a devastating combination of confidence, forthrightness, charm, wit, impulsivity and a wandering eye.

That story makes up the core of My Golden Days, a flashback bookended by the contemporary, middle-aged version of the protagonist (Mathieu Amalric). The story of young romance is perfect – one that we can all recognize. But, in the epilogue, the Amalric character (who has lived a full and eventful life in the 15-20 years since) is oddly still fervently bitter about what happened years before; with that distance, most of us would look back with nostalgia or, at least, a wistful acknowledgement of lessons learned. I was a bit put off.

And what’s with the lame title My Golden Days, which makes this sound like the story set in a retirement home? The original title is Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse which I think translates into Three Memories of My Youth – that would be better and there’s gotta be plenty of more appealing and descriptive titles.

My Golden Days, which I saw at Cinequest, is a movie that anyone who is decades removed from first love should see.

I SAW THE LIGHT: but the theater was projecting this dull movie

April 2, 2016 by movie gourmet

You really can’t blame Tom Hiddleston, Elizabeth Olson or any of the cast for the unremitting dullness of the biopic I Saw the Light. The life of Hank Williams, Sr. was so filled with pathos and singular achievement that it should inspire a captivating movie. After all, Hank’s songwriting genius (36 hits and six #1 songs in only six years) catapulted him from the obscurity of backwater Alabama to national celebrity. Being a womanizing alcoholic with chronic back pain made him a less than ideal husband, resulting in martial carnage. And his meteoric career ended when he died in the back seat of his Cadillac at age twenty-nine. Now THAT’S a compelling life story.

Unfortunately, neither the singularity of Hank’s talent nor the urgency of his self-destructiveness comes through in the series of vignetted in I Saw the Light. Marc Abraham is an able producer (The Commitments, The Hurricane, Children of Men) – writer-director not so much. Halfway through, I was contemplating where to dine afterwards.

As Hank, Hiddleston impersonates Hank’s singing voice well and brings a special gleam to the performances. But he can’t enliven this plodding movie.

Movies to See Right Now

April 1, 2016 by movie gourmet

I recommend the totally unpredictable and well-crafted drama Take Me to the River, a very strong feature debut for writer-director Matt Sobel, a San Jose native.

Thriller meets thinker in Eye in the Sky, a parable from modern drone warfare starring Helen Mirren and with a wonderful final performance from the late Alan Rickman.

My DVD/Stream of the Week is the character-driven The Gift, even more than the satisfying suspense thriller that it is. It’s also a surprisingly thoughtful film and a filmmaking triumph for writer-director-producer-actor Joel Edgerton. The Gift is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and to stream from Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and a host of cable/satellite PPV platforms.

On April 7, Turner Classic Movies showcases the films of one of the earliest female directors, the movie star Ida Lupino. In her early 30s,she broke the glass ceiling by writing and producing her own low-budget topical movies. TCM is screening Hard, Fast & Beautiful, Never Fear,The Bigamist and Outrage (one of the very first movies about rape). Lupino’s signature movie is the noir thriller The Hitch-Hiker. The bad guy is a sadistic serial killer played by William Talman (most well known as DA Hamilton Berger in Perry Mason). He kidnaps and terrorizes two guys played by noir favorites Edmond O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy. It’s a tension-filled story that still holds up today.

Frank Lovejoy, William Talman and Edmond O’Brien in THE HITCH-HIKER

TAKE ME TO THE RIVER: fresh, unpredictable and gripping

April 4, 2016March 31, 2016 by movie gourmet

San Jose native Matt Sobel’s impressive directorial debut Take Me to the River is entirely fresh. Not one thing happens in Take Me to the River that you can predict, and it keeps the audience off-balance and completely engaged.

A California couple and their teenage son drive to an annual family reunion in rural Nebraska. The son is gay and out, but that’s not going to be the drama here. There’s almost immediately an unexpected development that rocks the extended family. Then we settle in for over an hour of simmering unease and tense dread until something REALLY disturbing happens.

The story may be told from the teen’s point of view, but the real story turns out to be in the highly-charged relationship between his mom (Robin Weigert) and her brother Keith (Josh Hamilton). Keith, the boy’s uncle, is not a redneck rube, but very angry and very manipulative. By the end of the movie, we understand why. It’s an excellent performance by Hamilton, and whenever he’s on-screen, we fidget and wait for him to explode.

Weigert (Calamity Jane in Deadwood, Ally in Sons of Anarchy) is also excellent – her character is a Los Angeles physician who hasn’t lost the Nebraskan gift of never referring to the elephant in the room, no matter how huge. She embraces the Nebraskan imperative of avoidance with persistent geniality, covering up any unpleasantness with with niceties. My family is from rural Nebraska, which I have visited many times, so I know of what I speak.

The child actress Ursula Parker (the youngest daughter in Louie) is also especially outstanding here. Take Me to the River contains some sexual behavior by a child which is very uncomfortable for the audience, but central to the story and non-exploitative.

Take Me to the River played at Sundance in 2015, was finally released March 18 in New York and LA, and opens in the Bay Area tomorrow. I saw a preview at the Camera Cinema Club.

LAST DAYS IN VIETNAM: folly, desperation, heroism

March 22, 2016 by movie gourmet

History is a compendium of individual human stories, oft caught up in a world event. That’s what drives the riveting documentary Last Days in Vietnam, which chronicles the desperate attempts of many South Vietnamese to escape before the Communist takeover in 1975. Over 140,000 got out in the initial exodus, including 77,000 through the means depicted in this film – mostly compressed into just two panicked days. Last Days in Vietnam will be televised tonight in the Bay Area on KQED-Channel 9 at 8 PM on American Experience.

As if there weren’t enough American folly in Vietnam, the first evacuation plan didn’t include any non-Americans, even including the Vietnamese dependents of Americans. Then there were evacuation plans that were never implemented because of the blockheadedness of the US Ambassador. In the final week, young American military and intelligence officers took matters into their own hand, and began a sub rosa evacuation – ignoring the chain of command, breaking immigration laws and risking career-killing charges of insubordination.

Last Days in Vietnam is directed by Rory Kennedy (daughter of RFK), who recently made Ethel, the affecting bio-doc of her mother. Kennedy does a good job of setting the historical stage for those who didn’t live through the era, and then letting the witnesses tell their compelling personal stories.

The talking heads include:

the six-year-old who jumped out of a helicopter and then watched his mother drop his baby sister on to a ship’s deck;
the US Navy vet who plays the taped diary that he sent home to his wife after the fateful day;
the CIA analyst who unsuccessfully tried to convince the deluded US Ambassador that the end was at hand;
the college student who managed to get over a wall inside the embassy, but found that his freedom was not guaranteed;
Ford Administration officials Henry Kissinger and Ron Nessen, who relate the White House view of the events.

One heroic young American officer managed with ingenuity and chutzpah to get out hundreds of Vietnamese. In the film’s most poignant moment, it falls to him to tell the final American lie to the 400 Vietnamese remaining in the US embassy, for whom there were no more helicopters.

I saw the movie in San Jose with an audience that was about half Vietnamese-American, some of the age to have lived through this period. San Jose’s 100,000 Vietnamese population is largest of any city outside Vietnam, and many Vietnamese-Americans still memorialize the subject of this film as Black April. The exit from the theater was somber.

Besides, tonight’s telecast, Last Days in Vietnam is available streaming from Netflix Instant, Amazon Video, iTunes, YouTube and Google Play.