My DVD/Stream of the Week is the 2010 Oscar-winner The Secret in Their Eyes. The Hollywood remake is coming out this weekend, but you should first see the original. The Secret in Their Eyes is a police procedural set in Argentina with two breathtaking plot twists, original characters, a mature romance and one forehead-slapping, “how did they do it?” shot. It’s available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, Xbox Video and Flixster.
If you haven’t seen the 1947 film noirLady in the Lake, you must record it on November 22 when it plays on on Turner Classic Movies. Directed by actor Robert Montgomery, the story is entirely shot from the point of view of hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe (played by Montgomery), so we never see Marlowe except when his image is reflected in mirrors. That may be a gimmick, but it works here. Audrey Totter plays one her classic noir dames – an alluring and dangerous cocktail of cynicism, toughness and sex appeal.
Audrey Totter and Robert Montgomery in LADY IN THE LAKE
Saoirse Ronan brings alive the satisfying mid-century romantic drama Brooklyn. Ronan plays a very young woman who leaves her Irish small town in 1952 and, after a difficult start, builds a life in Brooklyn. When she must return to Ireland for a visit, things gets complicated. It’s a coming of age story and a romance and a study of the loneliness that comes with immigration.
Ronan’s performance is exquisite. Her character is neither talky nor expressive, yet Ronan conveys her wit and profound feelings in every situation. An uncommon acting talent, Ronan burst on the scene in the pivotal role as the little sister in Atonement, filmed when she was just 12. Since then, she’s made the girl power action flick Hannah and the wry The Grand Budapest Hotel (she was the relentlessly loyal girlfriend with the birthmark of Mexico on her cheek), along with a variety of other films that illustrate her versatility. She will be nominated for Best Actress for this performance in Ronan, which at times rises to the profound.
Saoirse Ronan in BROOKLYN
The director John Crowley has done an excellent job here. Brooklyn looks great – watch for the differing color palettes in the Irish and Brooklyn scenes, and it’s remarkably well-paced. Crowley is an excellent story-teller – I loved his early Irish indies Intermission and Boy A (one of my Best Movies of 2008). The Irish scenes in Brooklyn were shot in the real town of Enniscorthy, County Wexford, where the story is set. There’s an especially moving scene with an Irish song – brilliant.
The supporting cast is excellent, especially the always reliable Jim Broadbent. Brid Kelly nails the role of Miss Kelly, a shopkeeper who is remarkably enthusiastic about her own malevolent small-mindedness. If Ronan’s performance weren’t so brilliant, Julie Walters would steal this movie as our heroine’s Brooklyn landlady. Jessica Paré (Mad Men) is also very good (and has Brooklyn’s biggest laugh line). And child actor James DiGiacomo is unforgettable.
With its focus on the protagonist’s relationships with her family members and girlfriends and the question of which suitor she’ll pick, Brooklyn is a “woman’s picture” (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Well-crafted and satisfying, Brooklyn is a safe bet to have wide audience appeal and to earn Ronan an Oscar nod.
The superb The Secret in Their Eyes (El Secreto de Sus Ojos) won the 2010 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Picture. The Hollywood remake is coming out this weekend, but you should first see the original. The Secret in Their Eyes is a police procedural set in Argentina with two breathtaking plot twists, original characters, a mature romance and one forehead-slapping, “how did they do it?” shot. The story centers on a murder in Argentina’s politically turbulent 1970s, but most of the story takes place twenty years later when a retired cop revisits the murder.
Veteran Argentine actor Ricardo Darin shines once again in a Joe Mantegna-type role. Darin leads an excellent cast, including Guillermo Francella, who brings alive the character of Darin’s drunk assistant. Darin’s detective is a solitary guy who retracts into his lair to bang away at a novel. He has feelings for his boss, a tough judge played by Soledad Villamil. Her career and her personal life can’t wait for the detective to get his own stuff together. All three characters throw themselves into solving the murder and, when stymied, are all scarred by the lack of resolution.
The movie is titled after one element that I hadn’t seen before in a crime movie. And then there are the major plot twists. The final one is a jaw-dropper.
Director Juan Jose Campanella received justifiable praise for the amazing shot of a police search in a filled and frenzied soccer stadium. It ranks as one of the great single shots of extremely long duration, right up there with the opening sequence of Touch of Evil, the kitchen entrance in Goodfellas and the battle scene in Children of Men. This shot alone makes watching the movie worthwhile.
Filmmaker Billy Ray has remade the Argentine film as Secret in Their Eyes, to be released October 23 starring Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts and Chiwetelu Ejiofor. Ray is no hack – he’s adapted the screenplays for Shattered Glass (which he also directed), Captain Phillips and the first The Hunger Games. The plot has been turned into a story about thee US federal law enforcement officials and the murder of one of their children; unfortunately, the trailer looks more like a plot-driven Law & Order, with none of the characters as singular or as memorable as in the Argentine original. We shall see.
The Secret in Their Eyes is high on my Best Movies of 2010. It’s available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, Xbox Video and Flixster.
Spotlight – a riveting, edge-of-your-seat drama with some especially compelling performances;
The Martian – an entertaining Must See space adventure – even for folks who usually don’t enjoy science fiction;
Bridge of Spies – Steven Spielberg’s Cold War espionage thriller with Tom Hanks, featuring a fantastic performance by Mark Rylance.
Sicario – a dark and paranoid crime thriller about the drug wars.
My Stream of the Week is the smartest road trip movie ever, The End of the Tour. It’s available streaming from Amazon Instant, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Rachel McAdams, Michael Keaton and Mark Ruffalo in SPOTLIGHT
Bolstered with some superb supporting performances, filmmaker Tom McCarthy turns a journalistic procedural into the riveting. edge-of-your-seat-drama Spotlight. The story centers on a team of Boston Globe investigative reporters (Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo, Brian d’Arcy James, John Slattery and LievSchrieiber) as they untangle the sex abuse scandal in the Boston Archdiocese. Starting with the already-known Father Geoghan case, they uncover sexual abuse by two Boston priests, then four, then thirteen and soon an unthinkable magnitude, all intentionally covered up by the Church. Reminiscent of All the President’s Men, the team’s shoe leather efforts nets the Big Story.
We already are familiar with the horrible and disgusting revelations. But writer-director Tom McCarthy builds suspense and keeps us totally engaged in this brilliantly paced movie. McCarthy also wrote and directed the brilliant, character-driven fictional films The Visitor and The Station Agent.
Michael Keaton, coming off his tour de force in Birdman, is especially good here, especially in a reflective scene near the end. McAdams and Schreiber are also solid. Ruffalo has the most showy part, as a frenetic and volatile reporter.
But this most compelling acting comes from several of the supporting players, especially Michael Cyril Creighton, Jimmy LeBlanc and Anthony Paolucci as survivors of sexual abuse. The ever-reliable Jamey Sheridan is superb as a diocesan lawyer. Richard O’Rourke is affecting as an addled pedophile priest. Paul Guilfoyle, so convincing as true blue guys in CSI and Primary Colors, gets to play convincingly smarmy here. I don’t see Richard Jenkins in the credits, but the voice of an expert psychotherapist sure sounds like him.
At the end, McCarthy uses epilogue titles to effectively show the extent of the horrors revealed.
All in all, Spotlight is the first top rate movie of the Fall.
Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel in THE END OF THE TOUR
The brilliantly witty and insightful road trip movie The End of the Tourisn’t great because of what happens on the road – it’s great because we drill into two fascinating characters and see how their relationship evolves (or doesn’t evolve). Leads Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg are both Oscar-worthy, and The End of the Tour is on my Best Movies of 2015 – So Far.
In 1996, David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) is a novelist of modest success, having deeply embraced the New York City writer’s scene, and is supporting himself as a journalist for Rolling Stone Magazine. Suddenly- and out of nowhere – David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel) explodes on the scene with his masterpiece Infinite Jest and is immediately recognized as a literary genius. Lipsky is confounded by Wallace’s meteoric rise – and jealous and resentful, too.
Lipsky arranges to accompany Wallace on the last few stops of his book tour and record their conversations, so Lipsky can write a profile of Wallace for Rolling Stone. It’s clear that Lipsky plans to write a sensationalistic celebrity take down – and Wallace is so odd that there’s plenty of ammunition.
All of this REALLY HAPPENED. Years later, after Wallace’s death, Lipsky wrote a memoir of the encounters, on which the movie is based. Eisenberg and Segel got to listen to the tapes of the actual conversations between the two.
The End of the Tour is a battle of wits between two very smart but contrasting guys. Wallace is new to fame, very personally awkward, not at all confident and gloriously goofy; he seems to be an innocent, but he’s VERY smart and not entirely naive. Lipsky is all Chip On the Shoulder as he probes for Wallace’s weaknesses. As different as they are, the two are competitive and snap back and forth, verbally jousting for the entire trip. At one point, Lipsky accuses Wallace of pretending to be not as smart as he is as a “social strategy”.
As funny as is their repartee, it becomes clear that Wallace is inwardly troubled, and clinging to functionality by his fingernails. Wallace gets more confident and begins to trust Lipsky, but Lipsky is still predatory, glimpsing into Wallace’s medicine cabinet and chatting up an old flame of Wallace’s. Still, the intimacy of a road trip forces them to share experiences, which COULD become the basis for a bond.
They even share moments of friendship. But will they become friends? Is there real reciprocity between them?
Who has the power here? Wallace has the power of celebrity, and dominates Lipsky’s chosen vocation. Lipsky has the power to destroy and humiliate Wallace. Ultimately, as we see in the movie, the person who NEEDS the most will cede the power in the relationship.
Director James Ponsoldt has succeeded in making a brilliantly entertaining drama about two smart guys talking. There’s never a slow moment. We’re constantly wondering what is gonna happen. Ponsoldt has already made two movies that I love – Smashed and The Spectacular Now. No one else has made conversation so compelling since the My Dinner with Andre, and The End of the Tour is much more accessible and fun than that 80s art house hit.
Ponsoldt fills the movie with sublime moments. In one scene, we see the two watching a movie with two female companions. In the darkened theater, two characters are focused on the screen and two are gazing at others. It’s a shot of a couple of seconds, nothing happens, and there’s no dialogue – but the moment is almost a short story in and of itself.
For a true-life drama, The End of the Tour is very funny. The humor stems from situations (the two rhapsodize on Alanis Morisette, of all people), behavior (Wallace’s peculiarities and Lipsky’s limitless snoopiness) and the very witty dialogue. There’s a classic moment when Lipsky has Wallace talk on the phone to Lipsky’s wife (Anna Chlumsky) and is very uncomfortable with the results.
What is the funniest line in the movie? Who wins the battle of wits? And what’s their relationship at the end? Those questions propel the audience along the smartest road trip movie ever – The End of the Tour. It’s available streaming from Amazon Instant, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Chris Stamp, Pete Townsend and Kit Lambert in LAMBERT & STAMP
The documentary Lambert & Stamp is the story of the two guys, Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert, who managed The Who to rock immortality. It’s an interesting odd couple story: hardscrabble and posh, straight and gay. There’s also this improbable but actual premise – in a quest to become movie directors, Lambert and Stamp decided to find a rock group to manage, film themselves managing the group and then use the resulting film as their filmmaking calling card. Of course, because they stumbled on a struggling band named The High Numbers and turned them into The Who, they never got to make the movie.
Chris Stamp survives, along with The Who members Pete Townsend and Roger Daltrey, and we get to hear the story from their lips, and there’s plenty of film from the 60s and 70s, too. (The actor Terence Stamp is in the movie, too – he’s Chris Stamp’s big brother.)
However, rich source material can be too much of a good thing if you use more of it than you need. It’s interesting to see Lambert hold forth in German and French with European journalists, but not on and on and on. Lambert & Stamp is a little too long for me to recommend to a general audience, but to people interested in rock history or fans of The Who, it’s a Must See.
Lambert & Stamp is available streaming on Amazon Instant Video, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
The stars of 3 STILL STANDING: Larry “Bubbles” Brown, Johnny Steele, Will Durst
The San Francisco comedy club scene of the 1980s was a Golden Age for the art form of stand-up comedy – and its practitioners do consider it an art form, not just an entertainment product. That Bay Area scene launched major careers: Robin Williams, Dana Carvey, Paula Poundstone, Ellen DeGeneres, Bobby Slayton, Kevin Pollack, Whoopi Goldberg and Rob Schneider. The documentary 3 Still Standingtells the story of three of their comedy peers who flourished in the 1980s but chose not to “go to LA” and how they’ve dealt with the “downsizing”, when cable TV killed the market for stand-up comedy in clubs.
The three comics – Will Durst, Larry “Bubbles” Brown and Johnny Steele – are what make 3 Still Standing so compelling. Durst is a master of sharp political comedy in a society that is now more interested in vacuous celebrities. Steele’s observations are too subversive for a mainstream that is less hip and a whole lot less smart. Brown, whose appearances on Letterman were 21 years apart, is no longer young enough for the decision-makers who book comedy. But they’re all experts in their craft, and their material is hilarious.
Larry “Bubbles” Brown is a revelation. His comic persona is based on his half-empty world view and his self-deprecating view of his looks.
“It’s been a great day for me. Haven’t passed any blood.”
“I’m in the medical textbooks as one of the major causes of vaginal dryness”.
“Giving me Viagra is like giving a doorbell to a homeless guy.”
We’ve seen the global and technological economic changes that end once-promising career paths and force us to adapt or else. Here, the catalysts are both techno-economic (the supplanting/absorption of the comedy market by cable television) and cultural (the continued dumbing-down of our society). But it’s rare that the aging victims among us are so damn fun to watch as these three artists.
Filmmakers Donna Locicero and Richard Campos started the project “as a Valentine to the era that we enjoyed so much”. That would have been an entertaining movie. But 3 Still Standing gained more depth and texture when it evolved into the character-driven story of these three guys and their plight. In a post-screening Q & A, Campos also noted that “the San Francisco Bay Area is a character in the film”.
Robin Williams and Dana Carvey are prominent parts of 3 Still Standing. Locicero said that Williams had seen several versions of the film, including the final cut – all to ensure that his segments didn’t overshadow the story of the three principals.
3 Still Standing opens on November 12 at Camera 3 in San Jose. On November 11, the San Jose Improv will host a screening with outtakes from the movie and live appearances by Durst, Brown and Steele.
Durst, Brown and Steele are inventive originals and important artists. They prove that you can be on the wrong side of the marketplace and still be on the right side of history. I saw 3 Still Standing at the Camera Cinema Club.
Matt Damon in THE MARTIAN
Here are this week’s recommendations:
The Martian – an entertaining Must See space adventure – even for folks who usually don’t enjoy science fiction;
Bridge of Spies – Steven Spielberg’s Cold War espionage thriller with Tom Hanks, featuring a fantastic performance by Mark Rylance.
Sicario – a dark and paranoid crime thriller about the drug wars.
My DVD/Stream of the Week is the unforgettable coming of age dramedy Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. It’s available streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play and now available to rent on DVD from Netflix and Redbox.
On November 7, tune into Turner Classic Movies for The Producers – this zany 1967 Mel Brooks madcap classic is probably my nominee for Funniest Movie of All Time (and is one of my Greatest Movies of All Time). Much better than the 2005 remake.
Also on November 7, TCM will feature the oft overlooked 1951 film noirThe Prowler, starring the usually sympathetic good guy Van Heflin as the twisted bad guy.
On November 8, The Candidate reappears on TCM. The Candidate may still be the greatest political film of all-time, with a searing leading performance by Robert Redford. My day job is in politics, and so many moments in The Candidate are absolutely real. Excellent supporting performances by Peter Boyle, Don Porter and Melvyn Douglas. (Significant parts of The Candidate were shot in the Bay Area, including San Jose’s Eastridge mall and Oakland’s Paramount Theatre.)
THE CANDIDATE – Robert Redford learns that running for elected office has its disadvantages
When Michel Houellebecq, one of the most well-known writers in France, disappeared for a few weeks recently, there were media rumors that he had been kidnapped. The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq is an absurdist mockudrama in which Houellebecq himself plays himself in an imagined kidnapping. Once Houellebecq’s captors hide him in a farmhouse, the interactions between the characters become very funny.
The humor is all very droll and stems from the characters’ reactions to what Houellebecq finds to be an absurd situation. He is kept in the frilly room of a little girl, complete with large doll. And we see one of France’s leading public intellectuals and his less gifted captors fully engaged in existential discussions on topics such as “Does Poland exist?”.
Unfortunately, The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq opens with an almost intolerably slow segment BEFORE he is kidnapped. In fact, the pace of the entire film is pretty slow, so The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq is not for everyone.
But if you fast forward over the beginning and settle into observing the writer and his motley crew of kidnappers, you’ll find some laughs. The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq is available streaming on Netflix Instant, Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
