Warren Oates in BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA
Yesterday I wrote about the actor Warren Oates and the biodoc Warren Oates Across the Border. On Monday, August 24, Turner Classic Movies will show seven, count ’em, SEVEN Warren Oates films: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, The Wild Ones, Chandler, Badlands, There Was a Crooked Man, The Thief Who Came to Dinner and The Split. Of these, the best two movies are Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (Oates plays one of the treacherous but moronic Gorch brothers)and in Terence Malick’s Badlands (Oates plays Sissy Spacek’s father, blown away by teen punk Martin Sheen). But the iconic Warren Oates lead performance is in the Peckinpah neo-noir Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. (TCM will not be screening Two-Lane Blacktop, Cockfighter, Barquero or Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand – more about the first two on Tuesday). Set your DVR for Warren Oates.
In the movie theaters, we are in the dreaded Mid August Doldrums, but there are some good choices:
The End of the Tour is the smartest road trip movie ever, starring Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg. It opens today more widely, so be sure to see it.
Joel Edgerton’s The Giftis a satisfying thriller – and much more.
I really liked Amy, the emotionally affecting and thought-provoking documentary on Amy Winehouse.
Listen to Me Marlon is the excellent documentary with Marlon Brando’s own words revealing the keys to his life.
In Mr. Holmes, Ian McKellen is superb as the aged Sherlock Holmes, re-opening his final case.
My DVD/Stream of the Week is the inventive, scary and non-gory It Follows– a rare horror movie choice from The Movie Gourmet. It Follows is available on DVD from both Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
Warren Oates in BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA
I love the character actor Warren Oates for his idiosyncratic performances in the period 1969-74 – and this is Warren Oates Week at The Movie Gourmet. Friday, I’ll write about the upcoming Oatesathon on Monday night, when Turner Classic Movies will be presenting SEVEN Warren Oates movies. And next week’s DVD.Stream of the Week will feature two Oates cult classics that TCM will be missing.
Oates was one of those actors whose performances always make an impression. He could turn a stock Western Bad Guy into a memorable character by adding a touch of cowardice, dimwittedness or venality. In Barquero, he was formidable enough to go gun barrel-to-gun barrel with Lee Van Cleef for 115 minutes.
Oates had a special gift for portraying desperation, so he triumphed in neo-noirs like Chandler, Cockfighter, The Brinks Job and his crowning achievement, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. By early 1970s, the counter-culture was bringing lots of screenplay cynicism and anti-hero roles to the movies – both perfect for Oates.
Warren Oates died in 1982 at age 53. He has 123 acting credits on IMDb, mostly Westerns. He was a favorite of directors Sam Peckinpah and Monte Hellman. Indeed, he is most well-known for playing one of the Gorch brothers in Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Sissy Spacek’s father (blown away by teen punk Martin Sheen) in Terence Malick’s Badlands.
Some of Oates’ best work was in 1974 as the leads in Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and Hellman’s Cockfighter. He was also unforgettable in the offbeat Barquero (1970), Hellman’s Two-lane Blacktop (1971) and Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand (1971).
The 53-minute 1993 documentary Warren Oates Across the Border includes clips of Oates’ work, along with commentary from his widow Teddy Oates, Hellman, and fellow actors Ned Beatty, Robert Culp, Ben Johnson, Peter Fonda, Stacy Keach and Millie Perkins. Here it is.
The Movie Gourmet doesn’t watch many horror movies, but I really liked the inventive, scary and non-gory It Follows. 19-year-old Jay (Maika Monroe) has sex with a guy who then tells her that he has passed on to her a kind of supernatural infection – a monster will follow her and kill her if she doesn’t pass it on to someone else. The monster shambles along at zombie speed and takes the form of a different human being each time. It’s terrifying – there’s a constant sense of dread and a convulsive shock every time It appears.
Writer-director David Robert Mitchell has created a very scary horror film with an excellent soundtrack and a minimum of makeup, special effects and hardly any blood. It’s even more frightening that she’s being stalked by something that usually looks normal.
Before the screening, I had to sit through several trailers from the horror genre. There was NOTHING in those trailers that I hadn’t seen before in The Shining, The Exorcist or a multitude of less elevated films. I have to note the contrast with It Follows, which is definitely something that you haven’t seen before.
The very talented actress Maika Monroe is almost always on-screen and she proves that she can carry a movie. I first noticed her in At Any Price , where she played the son ‘s girlfriend. That role was especially well-written – beginning as a simple teen from a broken family looking for some fun, her journey takes several surprising turn – and Monroe’s performance was memorable. Until fairly recently, Monroe was pursuing a professional career in freestyle kite surfing.
All the acting is good in It Follows, but Keir Gilchrist is especially good at portraying the ACHING sexual frustration of a teenage boy.
It Follows has a wonderful sense of place. It is set and was shot in the Detroit suburbs, the rural lakefront and the decaying inner city. The extraordinary High Lift Building in Detroit’s Water Works Park serves as the exterior for the climactic set piece.
But the key to It Follows is its originality – without expensive f/x or disgusting gore – it’s likely the best horror movie of the year. It Follows is available on DVD from both Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel in THE END OF THE TOUR
The End of the Tour is the smartest road trip movie ever, starring Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg. It opens today more widely, so be sure to see it. Other top recommendations:
Joel Edgerton’s The Giftis a satisfying thriller – and much more.
I really liked Amy, the emotionally affecting and thought-provoking documentary on Amy Winehouse.
Listen to Me Marlon is the excellent documentary with Marlon Brando’s own words revealing the keys to his life.
In Mr. Holmes, Ian McKellen is superb as the aged Sherlock Holmes, re-opening his final case.
Alicia Viksander inEX MACHINA
My DVD/Stream of the Week is one of my Best Movies of 2015 – So Far, the intensely thoughtful Ex Machina. It’s available on DVD from both Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel in THE END OF THE TOUR
[Note: I’m repeating this post because The End of the Tour, which opened two weeks ago is being released much more widely today, and will be much easier to find in theaters. See also my The End of the Tour: the filmmakers speak.]
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.
Rachel McAdams in the second season of TRUE DETECTIVE
So my friend Steve emailed me: “If you include the second season of True Detective in your top ten films of the year you should be required to walk around with a paper bag over your head for at least six months.” He was right – True Detective’s second season was disappointingly lame.
I had high hopes because I loved the first season, and creator Nic Pizolatto returned to write this year’s version. The cast seemed promising, too: the story revolved around three cops (Rachel McAdams, Colin Farrell, Taylor Kitsch) from different agencies investigating a corrupt Southern California city. Vince Vaughn played a shady – and once criminal – businessman, with Kelly Reilly as his wife.
But I never really cared about Kitch’s or Vaughn’s characters. The plot was disjointed and, at time, risible. Pizzolato tried to echo Chinatown’s water scandal with a wholly improbable High Speed Rail scheme. The Wife and I were constantly asking each other “Where are they now?” and “Who is that guy?”. There are many ridiculously impossible coincidence and the like, but I just don’t care enough about True Detective to list them.
Rachel McAdams, forced to wear perhaps this year’s worst hairdo, is very good. So is Farrell, who, as he ages, is more and more compelling in dissolute roles. I always appreciate the chance to see Kelly Reilly – she elevates (almost) everything she’s in.
But the 2015 True Detective is a stinker. Don’t waste your time.
Rebecca Hall, Jason Bateman and Joel Edgerton in THE GIFT
The character-driven The Gift is more than a satisfying suspense thriller – it’s a well-made and surprisingly thoughtful film that I keep mulling over. It’s a filmmaking triumph for writer-director-producer-actor Joel Edgerton, the hunky Australian action star (the Navy Seal leader in Zero Dark Thirty).
Simon (Jason Batemen), a take-no-prisoners corporate riser, has moved back to Southern California with his sweetly meek and anxiety-riddled wife Robyn (Rebecca Hall). In a chance encounter, they meet Gordo (Edgerton), who knew Simon in high school. Gordo is an odd duck, but the couple feels obligated to meet him socially when he keeps dropping by with welcome gifts. At first, The Gift seems like a comedy of manners, as Jason and Robyn try to figure out a socially appropriate escape from this awkward entanglement. But then, the audience senses that Gordo may be dangerously unhinged, and it turns out that Simon and Gordo have more of a past than first apparent. Things get scary.
Edgerton uses – and even toys with – all the conventions of the suspense thriller – the woman alone, the suspicious noise in the darkened house, the feeling of being watched. And there’s a cathartic Big Reveal at the end.
But The Gift isn’t a plot-driven shocker – although it works on that level. Instead it’s a study of the three characters. Just who is Gordo? And who is Simon? And who is Robyn? None of these characters are what we think at the movie’s start. Each turns out to be capable of much more than we could imagine. I particularly liked Bateman’s performance as a guy who is masking his true character through the first half of the movie, but dropping hints along the way. Hall is as good as she is always, and Edgerton really nails Gordo’s off-putting affect.
And, after you’ve watched The Gift, consider this – just what is the gift in the title?
The intensely thought-provoking Ex Machinais a Must See and one of the year’s best films. Set in the present or the very near future, we meet the genius Nathan (played with predatory menace by Oscar Isaac) who developed the worlds top search engine when he was 13 and is now fantastically wealthy. Nathan lives in an extremely remote wilderness with his apparently mute housekeeper Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), and brings up one of his smartest software engineers under the pretext of winning a contest for a week with the boss. But Nathan really has brought in the young coder Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) to test his latest invention – a machine equipped with artificial intelligence.
Specifically, Caleb is tasked with the Turing Test (named after Alan Turing, the subject of The Imitation Game) – he is to converse with the machine to determine whether it’s thinking and behavior is indistinguishable from a human’s. Nathan and Caleb reference that a chess-playing computer may be very efficient, but does it know that it’s playing chess and does it know what chess is? Nathan says that – if he has succeeded – he has the greatest advancement in the history of the world; Caleb rejoins that it would be the greatest invention in the history of gods.
That raises the issue of playing god. If a being – even one that is human-created – is self-aware, conscious and has feelings and its own thoughts, then who has the right to end its life or take away its liberty? And can it seek liberty on its own?
We care about these questions because the machine, named Ava, is so, well, human. Ava is played by Alicia Vikander, an actress with an uncommonly sensitive face. Vikander’s performance is top-notch, and like Caleb, we are soon seduced into liking her and then NEEDING to protect her.
Ex Machina makes so much so-called science fiction pale in comparison, because it really challenges the audience with the moral implications of a real scientific concept. Not everything set in the future is really SCIENCE fiction. Gravity, a superb movie, was basically a survival tale, and Star Wars was a Quest Fantasy and Avatar was basically a remake of the Western A Man Called Horse. Most movies set in the future are just dumb excuses to put a lot of explosions on-screen. The few recent examples of truly thoughtful sci-fi include I Origins and Her.
Ex Machina is both a great-looking movie and a stellar example of economic filmmaking. There essentially only four characters and one set. Computer graphics aren’t used for empty action eye candy, just to allow an actress to credibly play a machine. Nathan’s house/laboratory looks amazing, and the overall art direction and production design is stellar. The stark landscape surrounding Nathan’s hideaway was shot in Norway.
This is the first directing feature for writer-director Alex Garland, and it’s a triumph. He wrote the screenplay for Danny Boyles’ brilliant 28 Days Later, one of my Zombie Movies for People Who Don’t Like Zombie Movies.
Ex Machina is on my Best Movies of 2015 – So Far. It’s available on DVD from both Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
The End of the Tour is the smartest road trip movie ever, starring Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg. It opens today, but it may be hard to find until next weekend. I really liked Amy, the emotionally affecting and thought-provoking documentary on Amy Winehouse. In Mr. Holmes, Ian McKellen is superb as the aged Sherlock Holmes, re-opening his final case.
Opening today is the excellent documentary Listen to Me Marlon, with Marlon Brando’s own words revealing the keys to his life.
The coming of age comedy Dopeis a nice little movie that trashes stereotypes. This summer’s animated Pixar blockbuster Inside Out is very smart, but a little preachy, often very sad and underwhelming. The Melissa McCarthy spy spoof Spy is a very funny diversion.
On August 12, Turner Classic Movies is presenting The Yazuka, with a tired and world weary Robert Mitchum taking on the Japanese crime syndicate in the 1960s.
My DVD/Stream of the Weeks is the Oscar-winning Argentine mystery thriller The Secret in Their Eyes. Make sure that you see it before the Hollywood remake comes out. The Secret in Their Eyes is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, Xbox Video and Flixster.
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 fall, 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 breathtaking, “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.
