Gemma Bovery

Movies to See Right Now

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THE WAVE
THE WAVE

I really liked the gripping Norwegian disaster movie The Wave, with its ticking clock tension and cool disaster effects. I saw The Wave last week at Cinequest, and it opens in theaters this weekend.  I also liked Cinequest’s Eye in the Sky, with Helen Mirren, and I’ll be writing about that by next week before it opens widely in the Bay Area.

I remain completely absorbed with Silicon Valley’s own film festival, Cinequest. Check out my up-to-the-moment coverage both on my Cinequest page and follow me on Twitter for the latest.  I especially recommend the exquisite Chilean contemplation of grief The Memory of Water, which plays Cinequest tomorrow evening; I’ve seen 25 Cinequest movies so far, and this is the best one. Tomorrow night, I’ll be checking out two movies I haven’t seen yet:  The Adderall Diaries with James Franco, Ed Harris and Amber Heard, Christian Slater and Cynthia Nixon and February, a horror flick with Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka.

Then there are the Oscar winners and contenders, whose theatrical runs are winding down but still out in theaters:

  • Spotlight – a riveting, edge-of-your-seat drama with some especially compelling performances.
  • The Revenant, an awesome and authentic survival tale that must be seen on the BIG SCREEN. I predict that The Revenant will be the biggest winner at the Oscars.
  • The Irish romantic drama Brooklyn, an audience-pleaser with a superb performance by Saoirse Ronan.
  • The deserved Oscar winner for Screenplay, The Big Short – a supremely entertaining thriller – both funny and anger-provoking.

The Italian drama My Mother is a deeply personal film about loss with some comedic highlights from John Turturro. The Coen Brothers’ disappointingly empty comedy Hail, Caesar contains some cool Hollywood parodies.

In honor of Cinequest, my Stream of the Week is the delightful dark comedy Gemma Bovery from last year’s festival.  Gemma Bovery is available to stream from Amazon Video (free with Amazon Prime), iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

This week, watch for two wonderfully fun gender-crossing comedies on Turner Classic Movies on March 13: Victor/Victoria and Tootsie. TCM is playing Blow-up on March 17. Set in the Mod London of the mid-60s, a fashion photographer (David Hemmings) is living a fun but shallow life filled with sports cars, discos and and scoring with supermodels (think Jane Birkin, Sarah Miles and Verushka). Then he discovers that his random photograph of a landscape may contain a clue in a murder and meets a mystery woman (Vanessa Redgrave). After taking us into a vivid depiction of the Mod world, director Michelangelo Antonioni brilliantly turns the story into a suspenseful story of spiraling obsession. His L’Avventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse made Antonioni an icon of cinema, but Blow-up is his most accessible and enjoyable masterwork. There’s also a cameo performance by the Jeff Beck/Jimmy Page version of the Yardbirds and a quick sighting of Michael Palin in a nightclub.

BLOW-UP
BLOW-UP

Stream of the Week: GEMMA BOVERY

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Fabrice Luchini and Gemma Arterton in GEMMA BOVERY
Fabrice Luchini and Gemma Arterton in GEMMA BOVERY

In honor of Cinequest, here’s a highlight from last year’s fest. In the delightful dark comedy Gemma Bovery, Fabrice Luchini plays a guy who has left his Type A job in Paris to take over his father’s bakery in a sleepy village in Normandy. He gets new neighbors when a young British couple named Bovery moves in. The young British woman (played by the delectable Gemma Arterton) is named Gemma Bovery, and only the baker notices the similarity to Emma Bovary. But, like the protagonist of Madame Bovary, the young British woman is also married to a Charles, becomes bored and restless and develops a wandering eye. The baker rapidly becomes obsessed with the Flaubert novel being re-enacted before his eyes and soon jumps into the plot himself. Gemma Bovery, which I saw at Cinequest 2015, is a French movie that is mostly in English.

Fabrice Luchini is a treasure of world cinema. No screen actor can deliver a funnier reaction than Luchini, and he’s the master of squeezing laughs out of an awkward moment. For me, his signature role is in the 2004 French Intimate Strangers, in which he plays a tax lawyer with a practice in a Parisian professional office building. A beautiful woman (Sandrine Bonnaire), mistakes Luchini’s office for that of her new shrink, plops herself down and, before he can interrupt, starts unloading her sexual issues. It quickly becomes awkward for him to tell her of the error, and he’s completely entranced with her revelations, so he keeps impersonating her shrink. As they move from appointment to appointment, their relationship takes some unusual twists. It’s a very funny movie, and a great performance.

Gemma Bovery is directed and co-written by Anne Fontaine (The Girl from Monaco, Coco Before Chanel). Fontaine has a taste for offbeat takes on female sexuality, which she aired in the very trashy Adore (Naomi Watts and Robin Wright as Australian cougars who take on each other’s sons as lovers) and the much better Nathalie (wife pays prostitute to seduce her cheating hubby and report back on the details).

Gemma Bovery isn’t as Out There as Nathalie, but it’s just as good. The absurdity of the coincidences in Gemma Bovery makes for a funny situation, which Luchini elevates into a very funny movie. Gemma Bovery is available to stream from Amazon Video (free with Amazon Prime), iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Movies to See Right Now

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'71
’71

This week’s opener is Mr. Holmes; Ian McKellen is superb as the aged Sherlock Holmes, re-opening his final case.

If you haven’t seen it yet, you owe it to yourself to see the CAN’T MISS coming of age masterpiece Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. Besides Me and Earl, two more of my Best Movies of 2015 – So Far are playing in theaters:

Don’t miss Fabrice Luchini in the delightfully dark comedy Gemma Bovery. The coming of age comedy Dope is a nice little movie that trashes stereotypes. Alicia Vikander’s strong performance carries the anti-war memoir Testament of Youth. 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. Mad Max: Fury Road is a rock ’em sock ’em action tour de force but ultimately empty-headed and empty-hearted.

My DVD/Stream of the Week is the year’s best thriller so far – ’71, a harrowing tale set in the Troubles of Northern Ireland. ’71 is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Amazon Instant Video, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

Don’t forget that Turner Classic Movies is filling each June and July Friday with film noir in its Summer of Darkness series, hosted by Film Noir Foundation president Eddie Muller – the Czar of Noir. The series schedule includes several favorites of my Overlooked Noir. Tonight features next Friday, look out for 99 River Street.

Saturday night, Saturday, July 18, TCM is presenting THREE of the greatest films about politics: The Dark Horse, The Last Hurrah and The Candidate. On the 21st, TCM brings us that classic suspense Western 3:10 to Yuma, along with Peeping Tom – still one of the very best serial killer movies after 50 years.

On July 24, Turner Classic Movies will show the groundbreaking French noir Elevator to the Gallows. It’s a groundbreaking film with so many outstanding elements that I’ll be writing about it next week. But set your DVR now.

Marcel Ronet in ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS
Marcel Ronet in ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS

Movies to See Right Now

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John Cusack and Elizabeth Banks in LOVE & MERCY
John Cusack and Elizabeth Banks in LOVE & MERCY

If you haven’t seen it yet, you owe it to yourself to see the CAN’T MISS coming of age masterpiece Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.  Besides Me and Earl, two more of my Best Movies of 2015 – So Far are playing in theaters:

Don’t miss Fabrice Luchini in the delightfully dark comedy Gemma Bovery. The coming of age comedy Dope is a nice little movie that trashes stereotypes. Alicia Vikander’s strong performance carries the anti-war memoir Testament of Youth. 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. Mad Max: Fury Road is a rock ’em sock ’em action tour de force but ultimately empty-headed and empty-hearted.

My Stream of the Week is the thriller Nightcrawler, with Jake Gyllenhaal as a highly functioning psychotic. You can stream it from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes and Vudu and rent it on DirecTV PPV.

Don’t forget that Turner Classic Movies is filling each June and July Friday with film noir in its Summer of Darkness series, hosted by Film Noir Foundation president Eddie Muller – the Czar of Noir. The series schedule includes several favorites of my Overlooked Noir. Tonight I recommend D.O.A. and Caged; next Friday, look out for 99 River Street.

On July 15, Turner Classic Movies features the 1948 film noir Pitfall. Dick Powell plays a bored middle class married guy who is aching for some excitement. In his humdrum job as an insurance investigator, he investigates an embezzlement and meets the captivating Lizabeth Scott, the girlfriend of the imprisoned embezzler. They fall into a torrid but short-lived affair. Just when Powell thinks that he’s back to his normal family life, both he and Scott are dragged into a thriller by two baddies – the sexually obsessed sickie of a private eye (Raymond Burr) and the nasty and very jealous embezzler (Byron Barr), just released from the hoosegow. Jane Wyatt plays Powell’s wife.

Pitfall is especially interesting because it deviates from two prototypical characterizations. Unlike the usual noir sap, Powell doesn’t fall for Scott “all in”; although he has a brief extramarital fling, he’s never going to leave his family for her. And Scott, although she allures Powell, is not femme fatale. She’s not a Bad Girl, just an unlucky one. She has horrible taste in a boyfriend and the bad luck to attract a menacing stalker (Burr), but she’s fundamentally decent. Will her sexual promiscuity be punished at the end of this 1948 movie?

I feature Pitfall in my list of Overlooked Noir.

Lizabeth Scott, Dick Powell and Raymond Burr in PITFALL
Lizabeth Scott, Dick Powell and the looming Raymond Burr in PITFALL

Movies to See Right Now

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ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL
ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL

This is as good as it gets until December – FOUR of my Best Movies of 2015 – So Far are playing in theaters:

Don’t miss Fabrice Luchini in the delightfully dark comedy Gemma Bovery. The coming of age comedy Dope is 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.  Mad Max: Fury Road is a rock ’em sock ’em action tour de force but ultimately empty-headed and empty-hearted.

My DVD/Stream of the Week is the period thriller The Two Faces of January – a tale of dark hearts in sunny Greece. The Two Faces of January is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

Don’t forget that Turner Classic Movies is filling each June and July Friday with film noir in its Summer of Darkness series, hosted by Film Noir Foundation president Eddie Muller – the Czar of Noir. The series schedule includes several favorites of my Overlooked Noir.

On July 8, Turner Classic Movies will present The Leopard (Il gattopardo), an Italian period epic starring Burt Lancaster as a 19th century Sicilian prince who is trying to remain master of his changing time. Director Luchino Visconti came from Italian nobility himself. As befits an epic of this scope, it’s a sweeping 187 minutes long. One highlight is stunning entrance by 24-year-old Claudia Cardinale as the local mayor’s daughter, suddenly all grown up.

On July 10, TCM is playing Caged, the 1950 prototype for Orange Is the New Black; (I wrote the linked article for for the annual blogathon in celebration of Turner Classic Movies’ 31 Days of Oscars). Sixty-five years later, Caged might still be the best women’s prison movie ever, and it features a rich female cast and two Oscar-nominated performances.

Claudia Cardinale and Burt Lancaster in THE LEOPARD
Claudia Cardinale and Burt Lancaster in THE LEOPARD

Movies to See Right Now

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ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL
ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL

This is as good as it gets until December – FOUR of my Best Movies of 2015 – So Far are playing in theaters:

Don’t miss Fabrice Luchini in the delightfully dark comedy Gemma Bovery. The Melissa McCarthy spy spoof Spy is a very funny diversion. Far from the Madding Crowd is a satisfying choice for those looking for a period bodice ripper. I also liked the two-in-one Swedish comedy The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, a rich mixture of absurdity and broad physical humor.

My DVD/Stream of the Week is the savagely funny Argentine comedy Wild Tales. It’s now available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu and Xbox Video.

Don’t forget that Turner Classic Movies is filling each June and July Friday with film noir in its Summer of Darkness series, hosted by Film Noir Foundation president Eddie Muller – the Czar of Noir. The series schedule includes several favorites of my Overlooked Noir.

This week Turner Classic Movies is also bringing us some of the very best Westerns. On June 29, we can see the now-overlooked masterpiece The Emigrants (1971), depicting the journey of Swedish emigrants to frontier Minnesota. It is remarkably realistic and faithful to the historical period. The same cast (Max von Sydow, Liv Ullman) continued the story in the sister film The New Land (1972). Both films were directed by Jan Troell and both were nominated for Oscars. It’s a Must See for anyone whose heritage includes 19th century European immigration to the prairie states.

Then on July, TCM shows Sydney Pollack’s under recognized 1972 masterpiece Jeremiah Johnson, which features a brilliantly understated but compelling performance by Robert Redford. If you want to understand why Redford is a movie star, watch this movie. It’s only 108 minutes long, and today’s filmmakers would bloat this epic tale to 40 minutes longer. (The same night, TCM is accompanying Jeremiah Johnson with with two other great Westerns, Little Big Man and The Searchers.)

Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman in THE EMIGRANTS
Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman in THE EMIGRANTS

GEMMA BOVERY: jumping into the plot of a novel

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Fabrice Luchini and Gemma Arterton in GEMMA BOVERY
Fabrice Luchini and Gemma Arterton in GEMMA BOVERY

In the delightful dark comedy Gemma Bovery, Fabrice Luchini plays a guy who has left his Type A job in Paris to take over his father’s bakery in a sleepy village in Normandy. He gets new neighbors when a young British couple named Bovery moves in. The young British woman (played by the delectable Gemma Arterton) is named Gemma Bovery, and only the baker notices the similarity to Emma Bovary. But, like the protagonist of Madame Bovary, the young British woman is also married to a Charles, becomes bored and restless and develops a wandering eye. The baker rapidly becomes obsessed with the Flaubert novel being re-enacted before his eyes and soon jumps into the plot himself. Gemma Bovery, which I saw at Cinequest 2015, is a French movie that is mostly in English.

Fabrice Luchini is a treasure of world cinema. No screen actor can deliver a funnier reaction than Luchini, and he’s the master of squeezing laughs out of an awkward moment. For me, his signature role is in the 2004 French Intimate Strangers, in which he plays a tax lawyer with a practice in a Parisian professional office building. A beautiful woman (Sandrine Bonnaire), mistakes Luchini’s office for that of her new shrink, plops herself down and, before he can interrupt, starts unloading her sexual issues. It quickly becomes awkward for him to tell her of the error, and he’s completely entranced with her revelations, so he keeps impersonating her shrink. As they move from appointment to appointment, their relationship takes some unusual twists. It’s a very funny movie, and a great performance.

Gemma Bovery is directed and co-written by Anne Fontaine (The Girl from Monaco, Coco Before Chanel). Fontaine has a taste for offbeat takes on female sexuality, which she aired in the very trashy Adore (Naomi Watts and Robin Wright as Australian cougars who take on each other’s sons as lovers) and the much better Nathalie (wife pays prostitute to seduce her cheating hubby and report back on the details).

Gemma Bovery isn’t as Out There as Nathalie, but it’s just as good. The absurdity of the coincidences in Gemma Bovery makes for a funny situation, which Luchini elevates into a very funny movie.

Movies to See Right Now

by
Blythe Danner in I'LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS
Blythe Danner in I’LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS

The two exceptionally good films in theaters are:

Far from the Madding Crowd, is a satisfying choice for those looking for a bodice ripper. If you’re looking for a scare, try the inventive and non-gory horror gem It Follows. Don’t bother with Slow West, a failed Western that never gets into rhythm.

I really enjoyed the Argentine comedy The Film Critic, which is now available for streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

I really enjoyed the dark comedy Gemma Bovery, in which Fabrice Luchini – a treasure of comic cinema – sees a famous novel being acted out in real lie and jumps right in himself.

My Stream of the Week is the So Bad It’s Funny An American Hippie in Israel, available streaming from Amazon and Xbox Video.

Don’t forget that Turner Classic Movies is filling each Friday in June and July with film noir in its Summer of Darkness series, hosted by Film Noir Foundation president Eddie Muller – the Czar of Noir. The series schedule includes several favorites of my Overlooked Noir.

Turner Classic Movies is playing the unforgettable The Man Who Would Be King (1975) on June 6. Sean Connery and Michael Caine star as two vagabond British soldiers adventuring in colonial India when one of them is mistaken for a god by the indigenous people. They play the misunderstanding into a kingdom – until hubris, greed and lust causes them to reach a little too high. It’s a great story, well told by director John Huston. Connery and Caine are wonderful.

On June 9, TCM is playing some of the greats of early 1970s American cinema: Annie Hall, Shaft, Dog Day Afternoon and Mean Streets. Put on your flairs and tune in.

Michael Caine and Sean Connery in THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING
Michael Caine and Sean Connery in THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING

Cinequest 2015: festival recap

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THE CENTER
THE CENTER

A pronounced overall success, Cinequest 2015 delivered hearty audience-pleasers from a varied and satisfying menu that featured some real gems from the indie, documentary and world cinema categories.

The fest kicked off with two huge popular successes: the feel-good BATKID BEGINS and the hilariously dark WILD TALES, and kept up the pace throughout the first weekend with an assortment of successful premieres.

Cinequest’s Director of Programming Mike Rabehl presented a fest especially rich in first features, including:

  • THE CENTER: An absorbing and topical American indie drama about the seductiveness of a cult; and especially promising debut from filmmaker Charlie Griak.
  • ANTOINE ET MARIE: A brilliantly constructed French-Canadian drama with two unforgettable characters (actually a second feature).
  • IN THE COMPANY OF WOMEN: Unexpectedly sweet, this starts out with a Boys Behaving Badly set-up and then morphs into a tribute to enduring love.  A festival surprise hit.
  • FOR SOME INEXPLICABLE REASON: A good-natured Belgian comedy containing some very innovative nuggets.

 

CORN ISLAND
CORN ISLAND

Cinequest’s international film scout Charlie Cockey came through once again with the fest’s best film, the transcendent Georgian drama CORN ISLAND, which won the Jury Award for Best Narrative Drama.

 

ASPIE SEEKS LOVE
ASPIE SEEKS LOVE

This 2015 fest was the strongest recent Cinequest for documentaries. The well-deserved Jury Award for best Documentary went to ASPIE SEEKS LOVE, the story of a surprisingly sympathetic subject. Other excellent docs included:

 

Not every film was a home run.  Director John Boorman’s personal appearance was a hit, but his QUEEN AND COUNTRY was only moderately entertaining.  And the eagerly awaited  CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA (Cesar-winning Kristen Stewart) and the Sundance award-winning SLOW WEST were clunkers.

Richard von Busack, the highly respected local film critic, picked Tuesday night’s L’ATALANTE:, rarely seen on the big screen. It’s the 1934 masterpiece of French writer-director Jean Vigo, who died at age 29 soon after its completion. A packed house agreed that this was one of Cinequest 2015’s top experiences.

Other highlights included the Belgian romantic dramedy THREE HEARTS, the French comedy GEMMA BOVERY and the exceptionally well-directed Kosovan drama THREE WINDOWS AND A HANGING.

The most underrated movie at Cinequest? Somehow, the biting darkly hilarious Mexican social satire LOS HAMSTERS is flying under the radar. I think this tale of a dysfunctional family is both very smart and very funny.

BARCO Escape showcased developing three-screen technology to envelope the audience in the cinematic experience.  I have reservations about the BARCO experience, but the short film WITHDRAWAL was a definite winner.

Here’s all my Cinequest coverage – with several features and comments on over twenty-five movies – conveniently linked on one page.

WILD TALES
WILD TALES

Cinequest: GEMMA BOVERY

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Fabrice Luchini and Gemma Arterton in GEMMA BOVERY
Fabrice Luchini and Gemma Arterton in GEMMA BOVERY

In the delightful dark comedy Gemma Bovery, Fabrice Luchini plays a guy who has left his Type A job in Paris to take over his father’s bakery in a sleepy village in Normandy. He gets new neighbors when a young British couple named Bovery moves in. The young British woman (played by the delectable Gemma Arterton) is named Gemma Bovery, and only the baker notices the similarity to Emma Bovary. But, like the protagonist of Madame Bovary, the young British woman is also married to a Charles, becomes bored and restless and develops a wandering eye. The baker rapidly becomes obsessed with the Flaubert novel being re-enacted before his eyes and soon jumps into the plot himself. Gemma Bovery, which I saw at Cinequest 2015, is a French movie that is mostly in English.

Fabrice Luchini is a treasure of world cinema. No screen actor can deliver a funnier reaction than Luchini, and he’s the master of squeezing laughs out of an awkward moment. For me, his signature role is in the 2004 French Intimate Strangers, in which he plays a tax lawyer with a practice in a Parisian professional office building. A beautiful woman (Sandrine Bonnaire), mistakes Luchini’s office for that of her new shrink, plops herself down and, before he can interrupt, starts unloading her sexual issues. It quickly becomes awkward for him to tell her of the error, and he’s completely entranced with her revelations, so he keeps impersonating her shrink. As they move from appointment to appointment, their relationship takes some unusual twists. It’s a very funny movie, and a great performance.

Gemma Bovery is directed and co-written by Anne Fontaine (The Girl from Monaco, Coco Before Chanel). Fontaine has a taste for offbeat takes on female sexuality, which she aired in the very trashy Adore (Naomi Watts and Robin Wright as Australian cougars who take on each other’s sons as lovers) and the much better Nathalie (wife pays prostitute to seduce her cheating hubby and report back on the details).

Gemma Bovery isn’t as Out There as Nathalie, but it’s just as good. The absurdity of the coincidences in Gemma Bovery makes for a funny situation, which Luchini elevates into a very funny movie.