Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Art house fare’ Category

“THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES”: Half a great movie

Posted in Art house fare on April 12, 2013| 1 Comment »

Ryan Gosling

Ryan Gosling

“THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES”  My rating: B (Opens April 12 at the Tivoli and Glenwood Arts)

140 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Derek Cianfrance’s “The Place Beyond the Pines” is actually two movies sharing several characters.

One of the movies, the first one, is borderline brilliant.  The second not so much.

The brilliance of Part I is largely due to Ryan Gosling, who re-amazes  every time he tackles a new role.

Here he is  Luke, a bleached-blond motorcycle daredevil with a seedy (is there any other kind?) traveling carnival.

 He’s in Schenectady, NY, doing his act, which consists of him riding his bike at top speed inside a big steel mesh ball. This is an apt

Eva Mendes

Eva Mendes

metaphor for his life – moments of terrifying excitement as centrifugal force allows him to ride upside down on the ball’s interior…but his path is a tight circle that never really takes him anywhere.

Luke discovers that Romina (Eva Mendes), the local woman with whom he spent a night the previous summer, has given birth to his son.  He surreptitiously follows her and her new guy (Mahershala Ali) to a church where the three-month-old baby is baptized.

Standing alone at the rear of the sanctuary, the heavily tattooed Luke finds himself incredibly moved by the ceremony and the knowledge that he is now a parent. Gosling expresses all this without saying a word…but you can see every thought and feeling on his features. It’s astoundingly moving.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

“GINGER and ROSA”: Protesting adulthood

Posted in Art house fare, tagged , , , , on April 5, 2013| 5 Comments »

Elle Fanning, Alice Englert

Elle Fanning, Alice Englert

“GINGER & ROSA”  My rating: B- (Opening April 5 at the Glenwood at Red Bridge)

90 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

When confronted by someone of fierce political and social commitment – particularly if their bent is way to the left – I always wonder  if  they’re really that dedicated to the cause or whether the cause fills some desperate void in their life.

You don’t have to wonder for too long in Sally Potter’s “Ginger & Rosa,” a film about an impressionable and innocent London teen who converts her anger and anxiety over personal betrayals into a righteous anti-nuke crusade.

The girls of the title are among the first of Britain’s post-war baby boomers. It’s 1962 and Ginger (Elle Fanning) and Rosa (Alice Englert, daughter of director Jane Campion) are coming of age beneath the threat of nuclear annihilation.

On one level they’re just regular kids who listen to rock ‘n’ roll, giggle conspiratorially, dream about boys and shrink their new blue jeans by wearing them into the bathtub.

On another level, though, the two young friends are nascent radical activists, terrified of dying in a radioactive mushroom cloud and determined to do something about it.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

“LORE”: Undrinking the Kool-Aid

Posted in Art house fare on March 30, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Saskia Rosendahl, Kai

Saskia Rosendahl, Kai Malina

“LORE”  My rating: B (Opening May 3 at )109 minutes | No MPAA rating

You’re born into a world of privilege and comfort. You grow up thinking you’re superior, that you’re entitled to all the good that comes your way.

And then it ends. Abruptly and forever.

That’s the situation facing five German children in “Lore,” Cate Shortland’s quietly devastating tale of siblings struggling to survive in the last days of World War II.

From the time of their births Lore (Saskia Rosendahl), Liesl (Nele Trebs), Gunther (Andre Frid) and Jurgen (Mika Seidel) have lived a blessed existence as the children of a high-ranking Nazi official. 

Now their father (Hans-Jochen Wagner) has returned to kiss them goodbye. The war is lost. The Americans, Russians and British are advancing and Papa’s work in the concentration camps makes him a marked man. (more…)

Read Full Post »

“ON THE ROAD”: Rebellion and sadness

Posted in Art house fare, tagged , , , , , on March 29, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Sam Riley as Sal Paradise/Jack Keroac; Garret Hedlund as Dean Moriarty/Jack Cassady

Sam Riley as Sal Paradise/Jack Keroac; Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassady

“ON THE ROAD”  My rating: B (Opens March 29 at the Glenwood Arts)

124 minutes | MPAA rating: R

 “That’s not writing. It’s typing.”

Such was Truman Capote’s withering critique of Jack Keroac’s “On the Road.”

Having long assumed that Keroac’s stream-of-consciousness beat odyssey was unfilmable, I was pleasantly surprised by Brazilian  director Walter Salles’ intelligent, sensitive and evocative new screen adaptation.

Not that it’s going to please everyone. Like the novel, the film lacks anything like a conventional plot, being a series of episodes experienced over several years and a half-dozen cross-country treks by its protagonist, wannabe writer Sal Paradise.

But Salles, who has given us the Oscar-nominated “Central Station” and “The Motorcycle Diaries” (about the early travels of the young Che Guevera), finds a narrative and visual style that mimics the book’s pleasant ramblings and heartfelt rants. It’s not perfect, but it’s about as good a screen version of this controversial American classic as we’re likely to see.

In large part that’s due to Garrett Hedlund’s superb (I’m tempted to use the word “monumental”) portrayal of Dean Moriarty, the womanizing, overindulging, incredibly charismatic figure based on Keroac’s real-life friend Neal Cassady.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

“LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE”: Who they really are

Posted in Art house fare on March 22, 2013| Leave a Comment »

blahblahblah

Rin Takanashi

“LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE” My rating: B (Now showing at the Tivoli)

109 minutes | No MPAA rating

I’m not exactly sure that I like “Like Someone in Love.” But it’s stuck with me for a couple of weeks now, and that’s a sure indication that Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s latest film is getting the job done.

You could call this the story of a call girl, one of her clients and her jealous boyfriend. That’s accurate as far as it goes, but it gives an entirely wrong impression of what this quiet, thoughtful, non-lurid movie is all about.

It begins in a noisy Tokyo bar where Akiko (Rin Takanashi) is having a drink, talking to a girlfriend, and getting some heartfelt advice from her pimp, the middle-aged bar owner who’s about as threatening as a civil service clerk.

For the first 10 or so minutes of the film we view the establishment from Akiko’s vantage point – we don’t see her. But we do hear her on her cell phone talking to her boyfriend, who apparently has no idea that she is putting herself through college by working as an escort. She lies to him about her whereabouts and her plans for the night.

The very word “escort” is vague.  Is Akiko actually a prostitute or just a companion for hire? When the camera finally does turn to her she seems terribly childlike and innocent. But then perhaps that’s a role she plays…Japanese businessmen notoriously have a thing for schoolgirls.

Akiko’s assignment requires an hour-long taxi ride to the Tokyo suburbs; along the way she declines to answer the many phone messages from her grandmother, who is visiting the city for the day and would like to get together.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

“STOKER”: Deconstrucing Hitchcock

Posted in Art house fare, tagged , , on March 21, 2013| 1 Comment »

Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode

Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode

“STOKER” My rating: B- (Opens March 22 at the Glenwood Arts and Tivoli)

99 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Stoker” represents an extraordinary level of film craftsmanship.

Every shot, every color choice, every cut and transition, the soundtrack – even  the opening credits –suggest an almost obsessive determination to get all the details exactly right. On so many levels the movie is breathtaking.

Given this, why isn’t Korean director Park Chan-wook‘s first English-language film more satisfying?

I think it’s because in trying to give us a classic Hitchcock-style suspense film he (and his writer, the actor Wentworth Miller) has in fact given us a somewhat academic deconstruction of a Hitchcock-style suspense film.

Big difference.

 If you’re looking for thesis material “Stoker” is chock full of allusions, references and outright steals.

But for genuine suspense, go elsewhere.  Unlike Hitch, Park (whose best-known film in this country is probably the incest-and-savagery epic “Old Boy”) doesn’t allow us to identify with his characters. They might as well be specimens of exotic insects in glass jars.

Our heroine is high school senior India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska), whom we meet at the funeral of her beloved father, who has died in some sort of fiery car crash.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

“AMOUR”: A different sort of horror story

Posted in Art house fare, tagged , , on February 7, 2013| 4 Comments »

amour 1

amour 2

“AMOUR” My rating: A- (Opening Feb. 8 at the Tivoli and Glenwood Arts)

95 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Forty years ago, when I was a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star, I followed a police dispatch call to a seedy midtown transient hotel. The bodies of an elderly couple had been found lying side by side on the bed in their cramped one-room apartment.

The cop in charge said it was either a murder-suicide or a double suicide. He’d been told that in recent weeks the wife had been seriously ill.

Back then I was too shallow and, well, scared to examine the implications of this sad tableau. But Michael Haneke’s “Amour” brought it all back to me.

Haneke is an Austrian auteur who makes seriously disturbing movies.

Movies like “Funny Games” in which a couple of young creeps imprison and torture a vacationing family. Haneke liked that one so much that he later made an English version that was almost frame-for-frame identical to the original.

Movies like “The Piano Teacher,” a psychosexual drama about a woman with buried pathologies and sado-masochistic tendencies, all wrapped up in an elegant environment.

Compared to those twisted tales “Amour,” might seem downright  humanistic. But there’s savagery  even here.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

“RUST AND BONE”: Are you okay?

Posted in Art house fare, tagged on January 18, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Rust 1“RUST AND BONE” My rating: B- (Opening Jan. 18 at the Glenwood Arts ????)

120 minutes | MPAA rating: R

As much as there is to enjoy in the lead performances of Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts, Jacques Audiard’s “Rust and Bone” labors under a surfeit of overkill.

At its core it’s a down-to-earth story.  A womanizing man uncomfortable with his role as a single father befriends a young woman disfigured in a terrible accident. Little by little he pulls her out of her shell of depression, while she helps him discover his paternal instincts and his less-selfish side.

Cue the violins.

But wait. That’s too simple. Too cut and dried.

How about this:  The guy becomes a champion of illegal underground gladiatorial combats. And the woman loses her legs to a killer whale.

Yeah, that’s much more believable.

So you see what I mean about overkill. And yet Audiard (maker of the epic prison drama “A Prophet”) and his stars have almost enough skill – almost – to sell “Rust and Bone’s” hyperbole. (more…)

Read Full Post »

“SISTER”: Sibling act

Posted in Art house fare, Uncategorized on January 11, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Kacey Mottet Klein and Lea Seydoux

Kacey Mottet Klein and Lea Seydoux

“SISTER”  My rating: B (Opens Jan. 18 at the Tivoli)

97 minutes | No MPAA rating.

What is it about French movies and children?

In film after film the French give us bare-bones, soberly non-manipulative portraits of children at risk who end up quietly breaking our hearts.

“Sister” isn’t French, but it’s Swiss, and that’s close enough. Ursula Meier’s unforced character study was Switzerland’s nomination for this year’s foreign language Oscar (it didn’t make the cut to the final five).

In this lean narrative, we meet young Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein) at a posh ski resort. Suited up for a downhill slalom and carrying a backpack and skis, this 12-year-old moves comfortably among the vacationing families and well-heeled snow bunnies (do they still call them that?), deftly picking out the most expensive equipment and walking off with it.

He hides these pilfered treasures beneath a building housing a restaurant and ski-lift machinery and, in mid-afternoon when the trams are empty, he descends the mountain to an ugly highrise apartment building where he resells his ill-gotten gains to the local kids. Sometimes he even stands beside a highway proffering his wares.

Simon lives with Louise (Lea Seydoux), whom he introduces as his older sister. Not that she takes care of him…quite the opposite, in fact.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

“ANY DAY NOW”: Gay soap opera

Posted in Art house fare, tagged , , on January 4, 2013| Leave a Comment »

any day now lede“ANY DAY NOW” My rating: C+ (Opening Jan. 4 at the Tivoli)

97 minutes | MPAA rating: R

As a showcase for the not-inconsiderable talents of Scottish actor Alan Cumming, “Any Day Now” is quite successful.

Travis Fine’s movie allows Cumming to wrap his tongue around an utterly convincing Queens accent, lets him sing several songs (including the Dylan standard “I Shall Be Released” that spawned the film’s title), and provides opportunities for him to dance it up as a female impersonator.

The film also lets  Cumming juggle just about every emotion known to humanity save, perhaps, the joy of childbirth. He’s falmboyant, giddy, hilarious, catty, sad, weepy, etc. etc. etc.

Problem is, his knockout perf is in the middle of a gay-themed soap opera that left me feeling emotionally used and abused.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »