I Am Not Your Negro – The Movie Gourmet

Movies to See Right Now

February 17, 2017 by movie gourmet

This week’s best choices in theaters are:

La La Land: the extraordinarily vivid romantic musical staring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling.
Lion: an emotionally affecting family drama that makes the audience weep (in a good way).
The Founder: the enjoyably addictive story of how a the money-grubbing visionary Ray Kroc built the McDonald’s food service empire.
Hidden Figures: a true life story from the 1960s space program – a triumph of human spirit and brainpower over sexism and racism; the audience applauded.
I Am Not Your Negro, the documentary about the American public intellectual James Baldwin. It’s a searing examination of race in America as analyzed through Baldwin’s eyes and as expressed through his elegant words.
The Salesman is another searing and authentic psychological family thriller from Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi (A Separation, The Past).

My TV/Stream of the Week is Tower, a remarkably original retelling of the 1966 mass shooting at UT Austin. It’s playing on the PBS documentary series Independent Lens, and you can also stream Tower on Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

This week Turner Classic Movies will present two of my very favorite Alfred Hitchcock films. First, on February 19, there’s North by Northwest, with perhaps the greatest ever collection of iconic set pieces – especially the cornfield and Mount Rushmore scenes, but also those in the UN Building, hotel, mansion, art auction and the 20th Century Limited train – they’re all great. Back in the days of the Production Code, some filmmakers could deliver sexual and erotic content without actually showing nudity or simulated sexual activity; one of the best examples is the flirtation between Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint on the train (and it even culminates with the notorious allegory of the train penetrating the tunnel).

Then TCM brings us Rear Window in February 21st. Here we have James Stewart playing a guy frustrated because he is trapped at home by a disability. When he observes some activity by neighbors that he interprets as a possible murder, he becomes more and more obsessed and voyeuristic. When it looks like he has been correct instead of paranoid, that business about being trapped by a disability takes on a whole new meaning.

Movies to See Right Now

February 10, 2017 by movie gourmet

This week’s best choices in theaters are:

La La Land: the extraordinarily vivid romantic musical staring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling.
Lion: an emotionally affecting family drama that makes the audience weep (in a good way).
The Founder: the enjoyably addictive story of how a the money-grubbing visionary Ray Kroc built the McDonald’s food service empire.
Hidden Figures: a true life story from the 1960s space program – a triumph of human spirit and brainpower over sexism and racism; the audience applauded.
I Am Not Your Negro, the documentary about the American public intellectual James Baldwin. It’s a searing examination of race in America as analyzed through Baldwin’s eyes and as expressed through his elegant words.
The Salesman is another searing and authentic psychological family thriller from Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi (A Separation, The Past).

For the second consecutive week, my DVD/Stream of the Week is the Argentine neo-noir The Aura. Featured last week at San Francisco’s Noir City film fest, The Aura is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and to stream on Amazon Instant.

On February 13, Turner Classic Movies presents one of the greatest ever courtroom dramas, Stanley Kramer’s brilliant Inherit the Wind from 1960. The story is taken from the real-life Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, so it has elements of culture wars and politics that resonate today. Spencer Tracy and Fredric March are superb as the warring thought-leaders (based on Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan).

Spencer Tracy, Harry Morgan and Fredric March in INHERIT THE WIND

Movies to See Right Now

February 3, 2017 by movie gourmet

This week’s absolute MUST SEE is the wholly original German comedy Toni Erdmann.

You’ll also enjoy these four movies:

La La Land: the extraordinarily vivid romantic musical staring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling.
Lion: an emotionally affecting family drama that makes the audience weep (in a good way).
The Founder: the enjoyably addictive story of how a the money-grubbing visionary Ray Kroc built the McDonald’s food service empire.
Hidden Figures: a true life story from the 1960s space program – a triumph of human spirit and brainpower over sexism and racism; the audience applauded.

I also recommend I Am Not Your Negro, the documentary about the American public intellectual James Baldwin. It’s a searing examination of race in America as analyzed through Baldwin’s eyes and as expressed through his elegant words.

Other top recommendations:

Manchester by the Sea: MUST SEE. Don’t miss Casey Affleck’s career-topping performance in the emotionally authentic drama .
Elle: MUST SEE (but increasingly hard to find in theaters). A perverse wowzer with the year’s top performance by Isabelle Huppert. Manchester by the Sea is #2 and Elle is #4 on my Best Movies of 2016.
Paterson, Jim Jarmusch’s gently funny portrait of a poet’s inner life. Starring Adam Driver.
The Salesman is another searing and authentic psychological family thriller from Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi (A Separation, The Past).
The Eagle Huntress: This documentary is a Feel Good movie for the whole family, blending the genres of girl power, sports competition and cultural tourism.

Also in theaters:

Arrival with Amy Adams, is real thinking person’s sci-fi. Every viewer will be transfixed by the first 80% of Arrival. How you feel about the finale depends on whether you buy into the disconnected-from-linear-time aspect or you just get confused, like I did.
The remarkably sensitive and realistic indie drama Moonlight is at once a coming of age tale, an exploration of addicted parenting and a story of gay awakening. It’s almost universally praised, but I thought that the last act petered out.
Skip the dreary and somnolent Jackie – Natalie Portman’s exceptional impersonation isn’t enough.

This week’s DVD/Stream of the Week is the Argentine neo-noir The Aura. Featured last week at San Francisco’s Noir City film fest, The Aura is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and to stream on Amazon Instant.

On February 6, Turner Classic Movies brings us two INTENSE movies. First, there’s The Deer Hunter from 1978. This was director Michael Cimino’s three hour masterpiece. Cimino chose to spend the first hour setting up the characters and their hometown life – just so we can later measure the personal cost of the Vietnam War. When we are plunged into the War, it is terrifying. Then Cimino’s third act – also with some suspenseful moments unmatched in cinema – explores the personal aftermath. After I saw this in a theater for the first time in 1979, I settled myself with a whisky.

And then we have another classic just as INTENSE: Deliverance from 1972. It’s one of my all-time favorites – still gripping today – with a famous scene that still shocks. Jon Voigt, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox form an impressive ensemble cast. Beautifully and dramatically shot by the late great cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond.

I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO: searing thoughts in elegant words

February 1, 2017 by movie gourmet

The documentary I Am Not Your Negro centers on the American public intellectual James Baldwin. It’s a searing examination of race in America through Baldwin’s eyes and through his elegant words.

Those words are voiced by Samuel L. Jackson, and there is no third-party “narration”. The spoken words are Baldwin’s, either voiced by Jackson or spoken by Baldwin himself in file footage. Baldwin’s associates Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr. are heard in file footage, but that’s it – the rest is all Baldwin.

The content of those words is about the African-American experience in America and Baldwin’s insistence on understanding and acknowledging the grievance and the moral imperative for remedy. The very last thing that Baldwin cared about was the comfort of his readers and listeners.

I Am Not Your Negro is an important film because Baldwin’s words today, stripped of their relation to temporal events, are stirring as we hear them again, naked and with urgency. Lest we fail to connect the dots to our current situation, snippets of current day events (Obama, Black Lives Matter, etc.) make it clear how relevant Baldwin’s thinking still is today.

The choice to present Baldwin’s thinking through only his own words, unadorned by talking heads is very successful. Director/co-writer Raoul Peck gets the credit for that, and the film that he has constructed with editor Alexandra Strauss is compelling.

It occurred tome that we really don’t have “public intellectuals” (thought leaders who were authors and columnists) as we did before cable television and Internet. Today we must make do with Talking (or Yelling) Heads on cable TV and bloggers (hey, I’m one of those); the current focus is more temporal and focused on instant reaction instead of presenting a coherent body of thought.

But, in the Good Old Days, book and newspaper publishers and network television producers were the gatekeepers of public discourse. Those gatekeepers in Baldwin’s time were older white heterosexual men, and even the well-meaning could not have shared his experiences. Given that, it’s surprising and fortunate that Baldwin’s words were able to become accessible to a wide audience.

Baldwin was living the life of an ex-pat in Paris until he watched the newscast of Charlotte, North Carolina, school integration with a lone African-American girl walking thru agitated and abusive racist mob. That’s what motivated him to return to his country and to try to fix it.