The Leisure Seeker

Movies to See Right Now

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Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie and Ben Foster in a scene from Debra Granik’s LEAVE NO TRACE, playing at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 4 – 17, 2018. Courtesy of SFFILM.

This week I’m diving deep into the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM). Here’s my festival preview.

OUT NOW

This week’s top picks:

  • The wonderfully dark, dark comedy The Death of Stalin.
  • Another dark comedy, this one about two teen girl sociopaths, Thoroughbreds.
  • Outside In: Now on Netflix, this fine Lynn Shelton drama about a man returning to his community after 20 years in prison is an acting showcase for Kaitlin Dever (Justified), Jay Duplass (Transparent) and, especially, Edie Falco. Falco’s performance is stunning.
  • The Last Movie Star: An aged action movies star (Burt Reynolds playing someone very similar to Burt Reynolds) examines his life choices. Funny and sentimental (in a good way).
  • Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story is the riveting biopic of a glamorous movie star who invented and patented the precursor to wireless technology; that’s amazing enough, but Bombshell delves deeply into how Lamarr’s stunning face, her Jewish heritage and mid-century gender roles shaped her career, marriages and parenting. Top notch.
  • The Leisure Seeker is an Alzheimer’s road trip dramedy with Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland. Mirren and Sutherland are excellent, possibly enough to see this in a theater.

VIDEO

In tribute to SFFILM, my Stream of the Week is from last year’s SFFILM Festival: NUTS! is the persistently hilarious (and finally poignant) documentary about the rise and fall of a medical and radio empire – all built on goat testicle “implantation” surgery in gullible humans. NUTS! is available to stream from Amazon (free with Prime), iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

TV

Tonight, Turner Classic Movies will air the 1964 serial killer movie The Strangler, with its brilliant and eccentric performance by Victor Buono.

And on April 8, TCM will air Stalag 17 (1960), adapted and directed by the great Billy Wilder. This is a taut WW II POW drama from a play written by two former POWs. If it’s not bad enough being held in a Nazi prison camp, there is a German mole informing on the prisoners. The POWs blame the wrong guy – the cynic played by William Holden – and he must uncover and expose the real traitor and help a POW in peril to escape.

This is a thriller, not a comedy, but you can’t tell from this trailer, which oversells the humor; it makes you expect Hogan’s Heroes.

Movies to See Right Now

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Jason Isaacs and Steve Buscemi in THE DEATH OF STALIN

Leading off this week’s top picks is the wonderfully dark, dark comedy The Death of Stalin.  I’ll be writing about it tomorrow. I’ll also be writing about another dark comedy that I liked very much, Thoroughbreds, about two teen girl sociopaths.

Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story is the riveting biopic of a glamorous movie star who invented and patented the precursor to wireless technology; that’s amazing enough, but Bombshell delves deeply into how Lamarr’s stunning face, her Jewish heritage and mid-century gender roles shaped her career, marriages and parenting. Top notch.

The Leisure Seeker is an Alzheimer’s road trip dramedy with Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland. Mirren and Sutherland are excellent, possibly enough to see this in a theater.

These Oscar winners are still in theaters:

  • The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro’s imaginative, operatic inter-species romance may become the most-remembered film of 2017.
  • Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri a powerful combination of raw emotion and dark hilarity with an acting tour de force from Frances McDormand and a slew of great actors.
  • Pixar’s Coco is a moving and authentic dive into Mexican culture, and it’s visually spectacular.
  • I, Tonya is a marvelously entertaining movie, filled with wicked wit and sympathetic social comment. I just watched it again with The Wife!

My DVD/Stream of the Week is the droll Swedish dramedy Force Majeure, a family learns that there are some things you just can’t get past.   Force Majeure was Sweden’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Oscar. It is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and Xbox Video.

On Sunday, March 25, Turner Classic Movies will air I Want to Live! Susan Hayward’s performance as a good-hearted, but very unlucky, floozy won her an Oscar. It’s about a party girl who takes up with a couple of lowlifes. The lowlifes commit a murder and pin it on her. There is a great jazz soundtrack and a dramatic walk to The Chair.

Susan Hayward in I WANT TO LIVE!

Movies to See Right Now

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Woody Harrelson and Frances McDormand in THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI

Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story is the riveting biopic of a glamorous movie star who invented and patented the precursor to wireless technology; that’s amazing enough, but Bombshell delves deeply into how Lamarr’s stunning face, her Jewish heritage and mid-century gender roles shaped her career, marriages and parenting. Top notch.

These Oscar winners are still in theaters:

  • The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro’s imaginative, operatic inter-species romance may become the most-remembered film of 2017.
  • Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri a powerful combination of raw emotion and dark hilarity with an acting tour de force from Frances McDormand and a slew of great actors.
  • Pixar’s Coco is a moving and authentic dive into Mexican culture, and it’s visually spectacular.
  • I, Tonya is a marvelously entertaining movie, filled with wicked wit and sympathetic social comment.

Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland are excellent in the otherwise underwhelming The Leisure Seeker, an Alzheimer’s road trip dramedy.

Speaking of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, you can see the Oscar-winner Frances McDormand‘s 1984 screen debut in Blood Simple tomorrow on TCM.

On March 18, Turner Classic Movies presents the grievously underrated Don Siegel thriller Charley Varrick. Siegel was a master of crime movies (and was the primary filmmaking mentor to Clint Eastwood). I particularly love Siegel’s San Francisco noir The Lineup, the guilty pleasure Two Mules for Sister Sara and John Wayne’s goodbye, The Shootist. The 1973 neo-noir Charley Varrick is right up there with Siegel’s best. Walter Matthau stars as the title character, an expert heist man who sets up a “perfect crime” bank robbery which, of course, goes awry. Worst of all, it turns out that Varrick has stolen a secret Mob fortune being laundered by the bank, and now the underworld organization is after him. Only his wits can save him. I’ve rewatched Charley Varrick a couple of times recently, and it still holds up for me.

Walter Matthau in CHARLEY VARRICK
Walter Matthau in CHARLEY VARRICK

Movies to See Right Now

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BOMBSHELL: THE HEDY LAMARR STORY

As usual, I’m deep into covering Cinequest rigorously with features and movie recommendations. Bookmark my Cinequest 2018 page, with links to all my coverage. Follow me on Twitter for the latest.

Opening in the Bay Area today, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story is the riveting biopic of a glamorous movie star who invented and patented the precursor to wireless technology; that’s amazing enough, but Bombshell delves deeply into how Lamarr’s stunning face, her Jewish heritage and mid-century gender roles shaped her career, marriages and parenting. Top notch.

Also opening is The Leisure Seeker, an Alzheimer’s road trip dramedy with Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland.  Mirren and Sutherland are excellent, possibly enough to see this in a theater.

These Oscar winners are still in theaters:

  • The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro’s imaginative, operatic inter-species romance may become the most-remembered film of 2017.
  • Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri a powerful combination of raw emotion and dark hilarity with an acting tour de force from Frances McDormand and a slew of great actors.
  • Pixar’s Coco is a moving and authentic dive into Mexican culture, and it’s visually spectacular.
  • I, Tonya is a marvelously entertaining movie, filled with wicked wit and sympathetic social comment.

My Stream of the Week, the insightful and topical documentary The Brainwashing of My Dad, comes from the 2016 Cinequest. The Brainwashing of My Dad is available streaming on Amazon Video, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

On March 10, Turner Classic Movies airs 99 River Street (1953), featured in my Overlooked Noir. Film noir tends to be about guys with bad luck, but nobody would trade their luck with Ernie Driscoll (John Payne), the anti-hero of 99 River Street; a former boxer with a career cut short, he’s being emotionally abused AND cuckolded by his no good wife, framed for a murder, beaten up, and THEN he’s set up by the Good Girl, of all people. That Good Girl is played by one of the most underrated of 1950s actresses, Evelyn Keyes. She has two killer scenes in 99 River Street. An “acting scene” on a darkened theater stage is one of the movie’s highlights. And later, her character gets to pretend to be a boozy floozy who lights her cigarette in the most suggestive manner possible.

Off-screen, Evelyn Keyes enjoyed a very rich personal life. “I always took up with the man of the moment and there were many such moments,” she said. She married directors Charles Vidor and John Huston and big band leader Artie Shaw. Her kiss-and-tell autobiography recounted affairs with Glenn Ford, Sterling Hayden, Dick Powell, Anthony Quinn, David Niven, Kirk Douglas.and Mike Todd (who left her for Elizabeth Taylor). Wow.

Evelyn Keyes in 99 RIVER STREET

THE LEISURE SEEKER: Mirren and Sutherland on a road trip

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Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren in THE LEISURE SEEKER, Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

In The Leisure Seeker, a strong-willed suburban retiree (Helen Mirren) finds her longtime husband (Donald Sutherland) sinking into Alzheimer’s.   Having been a teacher who has found the greatest joy in his recall of literature, the impact of the memory disease will be very specific.  Facing a health issue of her own, she decides to take him on a road trip all the way down the Eastern Seaboard to Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West. Off they go in their trusty Winnebago and adventures ensue.

There’s plenty of humor here, and this is not a particularly heartbreaking Alzheimer’s movie.  Mirren and Sutherland are both just so good in their roles.  Sutherland’s hubby is good-natured as long as he can pilot his 20-foot RV and get a decent hamburger without having to learn a restaurant server’s first name; he slips into a literary revelry at the slightest provocation.   Mirren is the social navigator, now faced with corralling somebody who now dips into another reality.

It’s the first American film for the accomplished Italian director Paolo Virzi (Like Crazy).  Unfortunately, there’s just something about the iconic American road trip and, perhaps, America itself that Virzi just doesn’t get, and The Leisure Seeker never quite ascends to greatness.

I was amused more than thrilled or moved by The Leisure Seeker.  Yet the performances of Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland can justify catching the movie.