“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.Continue Reading »
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.
“SPRING BREAKERS” My rating: C+ (Now playing wide)
93 minutes | MPAA rating: R
I’m going to give filmmaker Harmony Korine the benefit of the doubt and argue that his college-coeds-on-a-grand-Florida-debauch epic “Spring Breakers” is more than just exploitation, that behind its lurid face it has some serious stuff on its mind.
At least for now. That could change.
This spring break yarn, told with jittery methhead editing, blaring rap and a veritable cornucopia of pulsating navels and breasts, begins with four childhood friends – played by Disney Channel veterans Vanessa Hudgens and Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson (of ABC Family’s “Pretty Little Liars”) and Rachel Korine (the filmmaker’s wife) – sitting around their nearly empty college campus and grousing because they haven’t enough money to go on spring break to Florida.
(For the record, their campus has palm trees, so it’s not like they’re stuck in some icebound New England hellhole or anything.)
Three of these young women, whose names I never caught (names aren’t important here…nor is character development or common sense), decide to make a quick buck by disguising themselves in ski masks and matching pink sweatshirts and robbing a local all-night restaurant with realistic-looking squirtguns. They really get into the deception, threatening and abusing diners like veteran psychopaths.
Evidently all those first-person-shooter video games are paying off.
“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.
“HAPPY PEOPLE: A YEAR IN THE TAIGA ” My rating: B(Opening March 22 at the Tivoli)
95 minutes | No MPAA rating
In recent years filmmaker Werner Herzog has gravitated toward documentaries dealing with man’s relationship to nature: “Grizzly Man” about an eccentric eaten by the wild bears he adored, “Encounters at the End of the World” about the snowbound residents of an Antarctic research station…even “Cavern of Forgotten Dreams” about cave paintings left behind by Stone Age artists.
“Happy People: A Year in the Taiga” seems to fit nicely among those other titles, but in fact it’s a weird hybrid.
This 90-minute film about the residents of a remote Siberian village was fashioned by Herzog from a four-hour Russian TV documentary directed by Dmitry Vasyukov. With Vasyukov’s input Herzog wrote his own English narration and re-edited scenes without ever setting foot in Siberia.
How closely this film hews to the Russian original is anybody’s guess. At some later date scholars may have a heyday comparing the two to show how even documentary footage can be molded to serve a filmmaker’s intent.
Any way you slice it, though, it’s an effective example of the ethnology documentary.
“Happy People” focuses on Bakhta, a burg of 300 souls so remote it can be reached only by aircraft or (during the brief summer) river boat.
The film’s title notwithstanding, not everyone in Bakhta is happy. Certainly not the indigenous folk who must contend with widespread alcoholism and lives of menial labor. Continue Reading »
“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.
“A PLACE AT THE TABLE” My rating: B+ (Opening March 15 at the Tivoli)
84 minutes | MPAA rating: PG
How can one in six Americans not know where their next meal is coming from?
I mean, this is the land of plenty where supermarkets routinely throw out millions of dollars in perfectly edible food because they’re nearing their expiration dates or the produce is bruised.
Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush’s “A Place at the Table” provides an easy to understand (if not easy to stomach) overview of how we got to this sad state of affairs where even those who do have meal money often opt for high-calorie, low-nutrition foods.
This doc blends a reasoned approach (no indignant grandstanding) with extremely slick presentation (excellent cinematography, a killer score by T-Bone Burnett). The results aren’t exactly grab-you-by-the-lapels dramatic, but seeing this film pretty much guarantees you’ll never look at the American diet in the same way.
“Table” examines the crisis of “food insecurity” by focusing on families in both small towns and big cities.
The film traces the history of farm subsidies, created in the last century to preserve family farms. Of course, today farming is largely a corporate affair, but those agribusinesses still suck up subsidy money.
Jeff Bridges
Just as bad, most of that money is funneled into the production of certain crops (wheat, corn, rice), thus artificially depressing their prices. As a result, poor families can afford heavily processed fast food but not fresh produce, which is more expensive.
And there’s yet another problem: In many urban (and even rural) areas, there simply are no groceries offering fresh food. Everything available is out of a can, a box or a freezer. Eating unprocessed food on a few dollars a day is impossible.
The bigger story, of course, is that in our current economy families that thought themselves middle class now find themselves among the impoverished. (Even more insulting is the case of the hard-working mom who earned $2 too much to qualify for food assistance.)
“A Place at the Table” even boasts of a little star power, thanks to the presence of Oscar winner Jeff Bridges, who two decades ago created the End Hunger Network.
We’re due for a big national discussion of hunger. This is a good place to start.
“56 UP” My rating: A-(Opening March 8 at the Screenland Crown Center)
144 minutes | No MPAA rating
Every seven years for the last half-century, director Michael Apted has turned his camera on a group of former British schoolchildren he first encountered in 1964 when they were only seven years old and he was an assistant with the BBC.
The idea back then was to take a dozen or so kids from all sorts of social and economic backgrounds and follow them for…well, for as long as they would tolerate it. There undoubtedly were political/sociological gears turning behind the project — one suspects the creators of the “7 Up” series envisioned it becoming an indictment of the British class system.
But over time it has become something even more powerful…a study of the stages of life we all go through, of marriages and divorces, careers established and lost, of becoming parents and losing parents, of love and loneliness, wealth and poverty.
Now we have “56 Up,” with the 14 former children now on the brink of senior citizenship.
The infamous case of the West Memphis Three – teens convicted of the Satanic 1993 murders of three boys – has already been the subject of three first-rate documentaries by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky: “Paradise Lost: The child Murders at Robin hood Hills” (1996), “Paradise Lost 2: Revelations” (2000) and “Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory” (2011).
Amy Berg’s “West of Memphis” though, benefits from being the first film on the subject since the three accused murderers – Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, Jr. – were released last year after their lawyers successfully argued that new evidence (much of it disseminated through the Berlinger and Sinofsky docs) warranted an appeal in front of the Arkansas Supreme Court.
“West of Memphis” (produced by Hobbit-lord Peter Jackson) tries to be encyclopedic…and with a running time of 2 ½ hours it not only recycles well-known details of the case (sloppy investigative work, the prejudicial witch-hunt atmosphere during the trial) but takes side-trips into new revelations and accusations.
There’s some really fascinating stuff here, like an experiment using dead pigs to show that the marks on the bodies of the murder victims were not signs of ritual torture (as maintained by the prosecution) but rather were the results of turtle bites inflicted while the dead boys floated in a water-filled ditch.
“OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL” My rating: C+(Opening wide on March 8)
130 minutes | MPAA rating: PG
1939’s “The Wizard of Oz” was a movie for kids that – by virtue of its wit, music, and the universal emotions it evokes – has become a movie for everyone.
Seventy decades from now, “Oz the Great and Powerful” will remain just a movie for kids.
Providing it is remembered at all.
This non-musical 3-D prequel from Disney and director Sam Raimi (the “Spider-Man” franchise) has some terrific visuals and a few moments of effective humor, but overall it’s a letdown. And not just when compared to the Judy Garland classic.
The yarn centers on Oz (James Franco), a turn-of-the-century stage magician working the Kansas fair circuit. He’s a scrambilng, womanizing con artist who, blown by a tornado into the Land of Oz, finds himself hailed as the wizard who will free the realm from the depredations of an evil witch.
Think Han Solo undergoing a metamorphosis from selfish space smuggler to fervent revolutionary warrior.
Continue Reading »
Butler's Cinema Scene 