Imogen Poots – The Movie Gourmet

Stream of the Week: FRANK & LOLA – Bad Girl or Troubled Girl?

April 16, 2019 by movie gourmet

Imogen Poots with Michael Shannon in FRANK & LOLA. Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society. — Michael Shannon and Imogen Poots in FRANK & LOLA.
Photo courtesy of SFFILM.

The San Francisco International Film Festival is underway, so this week’s video pick comes from the program of the 2016 festival. The absorbing neo-noir romance Frank & Lola opens with a couple lovemaking for the first time – and right away there’s a glimmer that he’s more invested than she is. Soon we’re spirited from Vegas to Paris and back again in a deadly web of jealousy.

Lola (Imogen Poots) is young and beautiful, a lively and sparkly kind of girl. Frank (the great Michael Shannon) is older but “cool” – a talented chef. He is loyal and steadfast but given to possessiveness, and he says things like, “who’s the mook?”.

In a superb debut feature, writer director Matthew Ross has invented a Lola that we (and Frank) spend the entire movie trying to figure out. Imogen Poots is brilliant in her most complex role so far. She’s an unreliable girlfriend – but the roots of her unreliability are a mystery – is she Bad or Troubled? A character describes her with “She can be very convincing”, and that’s NOT a complement. Poots keeps us on edge throughout the film, right up to her stunning final monologue.

Shannon, of course, is superb, and the entire cast is exceptional. There’s a memorable turn by Emmanuelle Devos, the off-beat French beauty with the cruel mouth. Rosanna Arquette is wonderful, as is Michael Nyqvist from the Swedish Girl With the Dragon Tattoo movies. I especially liked Justin Long as Keith Winkleman (is he a namedropping ass or something more?).

Frank & Lola has more than its share of food porn and, as befits a neo-noir, lots of depravity. But, at its heart, it’s a romance. Is Lola a Bad Girl or a Troubled Girl? If she’s bad, then love ain’t gonna prevail. But if she’s damaged, can love survive THAT either? We’re lucky enough to go along for the ride.

I saw Frank & Lola in 2016 at the San Francisco International Film Festival. I liked it more than most and put it on my Best Movies of 2016. Frank & Lola is now available to stream on Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

https://vimeo.com/188033673

Stream of the Week: FRANK & LOLA – Bad Girl or Troubled Girl?

April 13, 2017April 11, 2017 by movie gourmet

The San Francisco International Film Festival is underway, so this week’s video pick comes from the program of last year’s festival. The absorbing neo-noir romance Frank & Lola opens with a couple lovemaking for the first time – and right away there’s a glimmer that he’s more invested than she is. Soon we’re spirited from Vegas to Paris and back again in a deadly web of jealousy.

I saw Frank & Lola in May 2016 at the San Francisco International Film Festival. I liked it more than most and put it on my Best Movies of 2016. After a brief and tiny theatrical release in December which did not reach the Bay Area, Frank & Lola is now available to stream on Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

https://vimeo.com/188033673

Stream of the Week: A COUNTRY CALLED HOME – to move on, she needs another look at her past

January 24, 2017 by movie gourmet

Since this is Imogen Poots Week at The Movie Gourmet, this week’s video recommendation is a totally overlooked drama from just last year, A Country Called Home. Somehow A Country Called Home missed out on any significant theatrical release even though it’s a very satisfying Finding Yourself drama.

Poots plays Ellie, a young Los Angeles woman with an underachieving job and a lousy boyfriend who takes her for granted. She hears that her estranged father has become gravely ill, and we learn that she has escaped a Texas childhood with an alcoholic father. Her brother (Shea Whigham) also lives in Los Angeles; he is flourishing and doesn’t care a whit about their father – the brother has moved on from his upbringing. But Ellie is a poster girl for low-self esteem, and she feels obligated to travel to her father’s bedside.

Once in Texas, she finds that her father has just passed, leaving the detritus of his alcoholic life. Everything in her old hometown is trashy, complicated or just plain unsupportive. She meets a misfit wannabe singer-songwriter (Mackenzie Davis, unrecognizable from Bad Turn Worse). And there’s a pressured-out single dad played by the sad-eyed Ryan Bingham (the Oscar-winning songwriter for Crazy Heart).

A Country Called Home is the debut feature for director and co-writer Anna Axster, and it’s a successful and engaging study of a woman finally emerging from a childhood with an alcoholic parent. It turns out that, to move on with her life, she needed another look at where she came from.

A Country Called Home can be streamed from Netflix Instant, Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play. And last week’s Stream of the Week, Frank & Lola, is also available from those same streaming services.

https://youtu.be/LlT9CWKAUCI

IMOGEN POOTS: girl for all seasons

January 23, 2017 by movie gourmet

Sometimes actors become a brand name in the sense that you can depend on a movie being good if they are in it. Actors like Robert Duvall, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Parker Posey, Alfre Woodard and Michael Shannon come to mind – they just don’t seem to ever be in a lousy movie. Imogen Poots is proving that she belongs on the list.

Poots is only 26, but she’s been in EIGHT really good movies in the past eight years. She can play anything except uninteresting.

Here’s her most recent work:

Me and Orson Welles – don’t blink or you miss her in a good indie coming of age film.
Solitary Man – after Michael Douglas beds a girlfriend’s daughter (Poots) while taking her to tour colleges, she gets the best of him.
Jane Eyre – haven’t seen it, but she got good notices.
Greetings from Tim Buckley – she’s the girl who takes the musician Jeff Buckley off track from his coming-to-terms-with-his-dad navel gazing.
A Late Quartet – has the best monologue in a movie filled with great actors; she blasts her mom (Catherine Keener) out of the water with a lasered-in rant.
The Look of Love – almost steals the movie as the daughter who inherits a porn empire.
A Country Called Home – In this underrated indie, she’s a low self esteem young woman who returns to the funeral of her estranged alcoholic father and finds self-discovery.
Green Room – In this bloody thriller, she goes from a numb basket case to a fierce force of nature bent on survival at all costs.
Frank & Lola – her most complex role so far as an unreliable girlfriend; but the roots of her unreliability are a mystery – is she Bad or Troubled?

That doesn’t count two not-so-great movies from great directors: Peter Bogdanovich’s She’s Funny That Way and Terence Malick’s Knight of Cups – those certainly weren’t her fault. And we’re not counting her debut as a 15-year-old in V for Vendetta. Right now, she’s also starring in the Showtime series Roadies.

Poots is on an impressive streak, and she’s earned this much – if it’s an Imogen Poots movie, we should all go and check it out.

Stream of the Week: FRANK & LOLA – Bad Girl or Troubled Girl?

January 17, 2017 by movie gourmet

The absorbing neo-noir romance Frank & Lola opens with a couple lovemaking for the first time – and right away there’s a glimmer that he’s more invested than she is. Soon we’re spirited from Vegas to Paris and back again in a deadly web of jealousy.

I saw Frank & Lola in May at the San Francisco International Film Festival. I liked it more than most and put it on my Best Movies of 2016. After a brief and tiny theatrical release in December which did not reach the Bay Area, Frank & Lola is now available to stream on Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

https://vimeo.com/188033673

Stream of the Week: A COUNTRY CALLED HOME – to move on, she needs another look at her past

September 13, 2016 by movie gourmet

This week’s video recommendation is a totally overlooked drama from earlier this year, A Country Called Home. Somehow A Country Called Home missed out on any significant theatrical release even though it’s a very satisfying Finding Yourself drama.

Imogen Poots plays Ellie, a young Los Angeles woman with an underachieving job and a lousy boyfriend who takes her for granted. She hears that her estranged father has become gravely ill, and we learn that she has escaped a Texas childhood with an alcoholic father. Her brother (Shea Whigham) also lives in Los Angeles; he is flourishing and doesn’t care a whit about their father – the brother has moved on from his upbringing. But Ellie is a poster girl for low-self esteem, and she feels obligated to travel to her father’s bedside.

Once in Texas, she finds that her father has just passed, leaving the detritus of his alcoholic life. Everything in her old hometown is trashy, complicated or just plain unsupportive. She meets a misfit wannabe singer-songwriter (Mackenzie Davis unrecognizable from Bad Turn Worse). And there’s a pressured-out single dad played by the sad-eyed Ryan Bingham (the Oscar-winning songwriter for Crazy Heart).

A Country Called Home can be streamed from Netflix Instant, Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

https://youtu.be/LlT9CWKAUCI

GREEN ROOM: blood and suspense

December 4, 2016May 11, 2016 by movie gourmet

The bloody thriller Green Room is a fresh and satisfying, well, bloody thriller. A vagabond rock band (Anton Yelchin, Alia Shawkat and a couple of others) finds themselves playing a gig at a remote white nationalist compound in the woodsy Northwest. Inadvertently, they witness a murder and the chief skinhead (Patrick Stewart!) needs to eliminate all the witnesses. The band members and a local girl (Imogen Poots) are trapped in a room with just one way out, as the skinheads send in waves of machete- and shotgun-wielding thugs and vicious pit bulls. Who will survive and how?

Director Jeremy Saulnier proves again that he’s the rising master of the genre movie. Saulnier’s writing and directorial debut was 2014’s Blue Ruin, an entirely fresh take on the revenge thriller. An audience favorite on the festival circuit in 2013, Blue Ruin didn’t get a theatrical release, and I would have missed it entirely but for a suggestion from my friend Jose. In Blue Ruin, Saulnier was responsible for the wholly original lead character and the intense pace of the film, along with the meticulously economical storytelling; the exposition never relies on even one extra word of dialogue. Blue Ruin is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Netflix Instant, Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, Google Play, YouTube and Xbox Video.

In his superb leading performance in Blue Ruin, Macon Blair was believable both as a damaged down-and-outer and as a man-on-a-mission. In Green Room, Blair plays Gabe, the put-upon middle manager of Patrick Stewart’s compound. Blair is just so interesting an actor. Here, he brings an unusual humanity to his role as a henchman.

The actor who drives the story, however, is Imogen Poots. Her character is very practical – realistic enough to see that the situation is hopeless. At first, she is numbed by the murder of her friend. But when she finally decides that she is going to survive – watch out! Since 2012, Poots has becoming a preferred indie leading lady with Greetings from Tim Buckley, A Late Quartet , The Look of Love, A Country Called Home, Green Room and her most complex role so far in the upcoming Frank & Lola. Here in Green Room, she’s a force of nature.

Once again, Saulnier delivers a very fresh and original genre movie. The total effect is very intense and very violent. If you’re okay with some gory violence, then Green Room is a thrill ride worth taking.

The Look of Love: someday this will all be yours

August 21, 2013 by movie gourmet

In the biopic The Look of Love, Steve Coogan plays porn king Paul Raymond, once Britain’s richest man. Raymond turned a tawdry row of Soho strip clubs into an empire of smut magazines. (Sharing a $500 million fortune, Raymond’s two granddaughters are the youngest of Britain’s 100 richest women.)

Now here’s the problem with the movie – Raymond’s life has many aspects – each worthy of a movie in its own right – including his business ascent, his gift for publicity and his marriage to and divorce from his ex-wife Jean. Most singular is his indifferent relationship with his two sons, contrasted with his affection for his anointed successor and heir, his daughter Debbie; not every guy aspires to apprentice his daughter in the porn industry. The Look of Love touches on them all, but doesn’t delve deeply enough into any one.

Imogen Poots (Solitary Man, Greetings from Tim Buckley) has the most interesting character of Debbie, but there’s not enough of her. Still, what IS contained in The Look of Love makes for an interesting story hitherto unfamiliar to us non-Brits.

The Look of Love is streaming on Amazon, iTunes, Sundance Now and other VOD outlets.

Greetings from Tim Buckley: fascinated yet resentful

May 16, 2013 by movie gourmet

Greetings Tim Buckley — Imogen Poots in GREETINGS FROM TIM BUCKLEY

Greetings from Tim Buckley is a fictionalization of the events around singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley’s appearance at an actual 1991 tribute concert for his father, Tim Buckley. (The movie’s title comes from the name of the concert.) The tribute concert was emotionally charged for Jeff Buckley because he had only met his father once before Tim’s death from a drug overdose. Jeff was not invited to Tim’s funeral, so he accepted the gig primarily to clarify and express his feelings for the father who had abandoned him, but whose career path he was following. The concert came as Jeff Buckley was just launching his career. Jeff Buckley himself accidentally drowned six years after the concert at the age of 30.

In the movie, Jeff (Penn Badgley) arrives in NYC for the concert, meets his father’s admirers and musical partners, passes the time hanging out with a concert intern (Imogen Poots) and then performs. Throughout the film, the audience observes Jeff while he is internally processing his own fascination with and resentment of his father. Unfortunately, the final scene imagines an encounter that lets Tim off the parenting hook to some degree.

Penn Badgley (Margin Call) has gotten critical praise for his singing. Indeed, one of the high points is when Badgley’s Jeff shows off to the girl by riffing on seemingly every album in a record store. Badgley may not have Jeff Buckley’s freakish four octave singing range, but his pipes are pretty impressive. I was more impressed by his characterization – it must be difficult to act miffed by one’s absent father and not lapse into whininess. Poots, so outstanding in Solitary Man and A Late Quartet, is good here, too.

Primarily a movie for music fans, Greetings from Tim Buckley is also a film for those who want to see an actor depict interior conflict with very little external action. Greetings from Tim Buckley is available on VOD from Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, Vudu, Google Play and other outlets.

DVD of the Week: A Late Quartet

April 2, 2013 by movie gourmet

A Late Quartet is a compelling character-driven drama about the individuals that make up an elite and successful classical string quartet. After twenty-five years, the cellist and leader develops Parkinson’s and must consider retirement. This development takes the lid off an array of long-simmering issues and triggers personal and interpersonal crises.

What makes A Late Quartet so gripping is the level of performance – not surprising considering the top shelf cast. Christopher Walken plays a man of uncommon dignity and stateliness, without the creepiness or even the eccentricity that his characters are usually imbued. Philip Seymour Hoffman is superb as a man who unleashes deeply buried resentments and vulnerabilities. Catherine Keener is also striking as a woman who cannot answer the question, “Do you love me?”. Mark Ivanir (who I didn’t remember from Schindler’s List and who often plays Russian gangsters) is excellent as a callous perfectionist brought literally to his knees by something he never expected. Imogen Poots (Solitary Man) also shines as the prodigy daughter whose drops her youthful playfulness when it’s time to settle a score with her mother.

One more note: I relished the delightful homage to Dinner with Andre when we suddenly see Wallace Shawn holding forth in a New York restaurant.

We aren’t surprised by any of the plot points, but we are continually surprised by the reactions of the characters, so masterfully delivered by the actors.