Barbara Kopple made her reputation with hard-hitting, left-leaning documentaries like “Harlan County, U.S.A.” and “American Dream.”
But she also has a long history of music-themed films, including “Wild Man Blues” (Woody Allen’s Dixieland jazz band), “Shut Up & Sing” (the post-9/11 Dixie Chicks) and “Woodstock: Now & Then.”
“Miss Sharon Jones!” is about a musician, but it’s really not about music. Rather, Kopple uses her cameras to record singer Sharon Jones’ battle with pancreatic cancer.
Jones, who was once told by a recording exec that she was “too old, too fat, too short, and too black,” has recorded several albums, one of them Grammy-nominated. But her career rests on her heavy tour schedule with the Dap-Kings, her nine-member interracial backup band.
For Sharon Jones in action is a sight to behold. She swaggers, she sways, she gets funky, she dances, and she has a voice that absolutely shreds r&b and soul numbers. Continue Reading »
Nanni Moretti’s “Mia Madre” is like Fellini’s “8 1/2” melded with a dying mom movie.
It’s not always a graceful union, but since the film stars Margherita Buy (who makes middle age look impossibly attractive), we go along for the ride.
Margherita (Bay) is in the middle of directing a movie about economic upheaval, ruthless corporations and striking workers.
That would be enough to keep her plate full, but every evening after closing down the set she goes to a hospital where her mother, Ada (Giulia Lazzarini), a retired teacher, is awaiting the results of tests. It’s not looking good.
Margherita is torn between a demanding, often maddening profession and an abbreviated personal life. Divorced, she has no lovers and only rarely sees her teenage daughter (Beatrice Mancini). And while she may be a master of emotional nuance on the big screen, she struggles to connect in real life.
She feels particularly helpless and guilty about Ada. Thank heaven for her brother (writer/director Moretti), who has taken a leave of absence from his job to care for their mama…although this only makes Margherita feel even guiltier.
Moratti, who specializes in droll comedies (“We Have a Pope,” “Caro Diario”), is in a more sober mood this time around. A dying parent, after all, is a sobering topic.
But he nevertheless finds humor in the form of an American actor (John Turturro) who has been cast as a factory owner in Margherita’s movie and brings along a backpack of neuroses, bullshit anecdotes (he claims to have been a protege of Stanley Kubrick, though nobody can find his name in the credits of any Kubrick film), and the inability to remember his lines.
There are some surreal dream sequences (another nod to Fellini) as Margherita’s overtaxed psyche attempts to deal with all the chaos in her world
A lot of the on-set movie scenes are inside baseball, and will be far more amusing to viewers who’ve actually worked in the movies than to the average filmgoer.
The parts of the film dealing with Margherita and her mother,while fairly glum, certainly reflect a common parent/child dynamic.
Bottom line: “Madre Mia” is fine, but nothing to write home about.
The conflict between science and superstition (not to mention stubbornness and stupidity) is nothing new.
In Hugh Hudson’s “Finding Altamira” a 19th-century archaeologist sees his life and reputation reduced to tatters over his discovery of spectacular prehistoric cave paintings.
Marcelo Sanz de Sautolo (portrayed here by Antonio Banderas) was a wealthy Spaniard and gentleman of leisure. He was also an amateur scientist who loved getting his hands dirty digging up old things.
In 1879 Sautolo was excavating a cave discovered a few years earlier. His nine-year-old daughter Maria (Allegra Allen) wandered off from the entrance and stumbled upon a magnificent chamber decorated with drawings of animals — mostly massive bison — rendered in red ochre and black ash.
Sautolo concluded that this was the work of prehistoric man — but work of undreamed-of sophistication. As it turned out, that was the sticking point. No one — not even Europe’s most acclaimed archaeologists — believed primitive man capable of such efforts.
Sautolo was accused of forging the cave paintings to satisfy his own need for celebrity. Twenty years later he was vindicated posthumously after other such sites were discovered around southern Europe.
The screenplay by Olivia Hetreed and Jose Luis Lopez-Linages employs these historic facts as the backbone for a tale that takes on religion, professional pride and father-child relations.
“MISS PEREGRINE’S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN” My rating: C
127 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13
Filmmaker Tim Burton’s latest is pretty much par for the course: Two hours of great art direction in search of a movie.
This adaptation of “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” the first entry in the popular young adult series by novelist Ransom Riggs, might be classified as a goth version of the X-Men foundation story: Shunned children with supernatural powers are sheltered and trained in a special facility.
The main difference is that this story unfolds in semi-creepy Victorian circumstances that are right up Burton’s visual alley.
The film looks terrific — so dark and weird that even sunlit afternoons seem gloomy.
It’s got the ever-watchable Eva Green as the titular Miss Peregrine, a sort of witchy version of Mary Poppins who can transform herself into a falcon, and Terence Stamp as the occultist grandfather whose secrets launch the story.
What it hasn’t got is any sense of drama, forward motion or a central character interesting enough to warrant our attention.
Young Jake (Asa Butterfield) is a moderately miserable Florida teen (his clueless parents are portrayed by Chris O’Dowd and Kim Dickens, both wasted) who witnesses the death of his beloved grandfather under mysterious and alarming circumstances.
The child psychologist (Allison Janney) who subsequently treats the traumatized teen suggests that Jake go to Wales to confront the reality of Grandpa’s wild tales of the “peculiar children” who were his boyhood friends. Once Jake sees that it was all in the old man’s head, says the shrink, everything will be fine.
Or not.
Jake discovers that Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is a rotting shell, flattened by a German bomb back in 1943. And then, magically, he finds himself transported back to the day of the disaster.
Not only is the school restored to its former gingerbread grandeur, but Jake meets Miss Peregrine and her oddly talented wards. Like the lighter-than-air girl (Ella Purnell) who must wear leaden boots lest she float away. Or the teen (Lauren McCrostie) who can start fires with her fingertips. Continue Reading »
Suffused with somber wisdom and and delicate emotions, Ira Sachs’ “Little Men” is a terrific movie about boyhood friendship.
It’s also about conflicts in the adult world that can destroy that innocent and easygoing intimacy.
Thirteen-year-old Jake (Theo Taplitz) is initially dismayed when his parents move from glamorous Manhattan to pedestrian Brooklyn and the building long owned by his recently deceased grandfather. Yeah, there’s more room in the rent-free second-floor apartment where Grandpa lived…but it’s Brooklyn.
He undergoes an attitude adjustment after meeting Tony (Michael Barbieri), whose mother Leonor (Paulina Garcia) operates a dress shop on the ground floor.
The kids complement each other nicely. Jake is quiet and thoughtful; Tony is brash and confidant (and very, very bright). Moreover, they share a love not only of video games but of the arts. Jake is a promising painter and Tony has set his goal on becoming an actor.
Over time they set in motion plans to get into an arts-themed high school.
The boys are so tuned in to each other’s emotions and intellects (there’s just the slightest suggestion that Jake might be gay, but the matter is left hanging) that they’re late in realizing the conflicts developing in the adult world around them.
Jake’s parents — his psychoanalyst mother Kathy (Jennifer Ehle) and struggling actor father Brian (Greg Kenner) — discover that Leonor has been paying Grandpa a fraction of what should be the going rent on her storefront shop in this rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.
Leonor maintains that she and the old man were very close (just how close is a matter for speculation) and that he wanted her to have the space more or less in perpetuity. Furthermore, she maintains she was more of a family to him than his flesh and blood across the East River.
So many stories, moods and contradictory elements are swirling around in Jocelyn Moorhouse’s “The Dressmaker” that it’s no wonder it never settles down into a coherent whole.
Parts of this Down Under oddity, though, are delightfully memorable.
Adapting Rosalie Hamm’s novel with her husband, filmmaker P.J. Hogan (“Peter Pan,” “Muriel’s Wedding”), Moorhouse has given this period piece a distinct visual look and no shortage of eccentric characters.
And almost everywhere you look, “The Dressmaker” is paying homage to other films and literary works.
There is, for starters, the film’s basic setup: A woman returns to the provincial town of her childhood, not so much to be reacquainted with old friends as to explore her tormented past and perhaps take revenge on those who made her youth a living hell. That, combined with its blend of absurdist humor and angry drama, makes “The Dressmaker” a sort of modern-day clone of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s often-revived 1956 tragicomedy “The Visit.”
At the same time “Dressmaker” borrows freely from the spaghetti Western tradition. Though it’s in Australia, the town to which our heroine returns looks like nothing so much as a barren Wild West burg, complete with dirt main street, weird rock formations, ramshackle buildings and a few leafless dead trees.
David Hirschfelder’s musical score is heavy on ersatz Ennio Morricone, right down to the electric guitars, pounding tympani and clanging chimes.
It’s 1951 and after an absence of nearly 20 years Tilly Dunnage (Kate Winslet) has returned to dusty Dungatar (emphasis on the “dung”). She moves back in with her half-cracked mother Molly (Judy Davis), who lives in bag-lady squalor in a crumbling hovel overlooking the town.
Tilly reintroduces herself by attending a local football match in a flaming red evening gown that must be the brightest object within 100 square miles.
In the years she was away Tilly worked in the fashion industry in London, Paris and Milan and she relishes the opportunity to rub the townspeoples’ faces in her sophistication.
Some locals aren’t buying this vision in their midst. As a child Tilly was suspected of murdering a classmate and was shipped off to a boarding school in Melbourne for her own safety. She’s not exactly everyone’s favorite person.
But others, mostly long-put-upon women, see her arrival as a godsend. Especially after Tilly uses her dressmaking and makeup skills to transform a drudge of a shopgirl (Sarah Snook) into a glamorous fashion plate capable of luring and hooking the wealthiest young man in town.
“EVA HESSE” My rating: B- (Opens Sept. 23 at the Tivoli)
108 minutes | No MPAA rating
“Eva Hesse” is a pedestrian documentary about a major artistic figure.
Go for the information, not for the telling.
A child of refugees from Naziism, Eva Hesse in her brief life more or less created the post minimal art movement by incorporating into her pieces mass-produced objects in plastic, latex, fiberglass and other nontraditional (for art, anyway) materials.
Her goal, according to one admirer, was “to make art on the borderline of uncontrollability.”
Eva’s private life was a mess (“There’s not been one normal thing in my life. Not one.”) and she died of cancer in 1970, when she was only 33. Yet she opened up untold possibilities for her fellow artists.
Ironically, the unconventional materials she employed now pose big headaches for museums that display her work. Many of her pieces are literally decaying before our eyes — a conservatorial nightmare that she seems to have foreseen and approved of.
“She didn’t just manipulate materials, she was the material,” an admirer says. That philosophy extends to the temporary nature of her art. Here today, gone tomorrow. Continue Reading »
The rest of “Klown Forever,” a sequel to the 2010 “Klown,” is a bit of a hit-or-miss affair. Those who loved the first movie (or the original Danish TV series, which has been called a Scandinavian “Curb Your Enthusiasm”) will undoubtedly be primed for more rude, absurdist, man-centric humor.
Once again our heroes are Casper (Casper Christensen) and Frank (Frank Hvam), whose show-biz partnership reminds a bit of that of Rob Bryden and Steve Coogan in “The Trip” films. Apparently the two are partners in some sort of comedy undertaking, although we never see them at work.
Mostly they’re getting into trouble.
Casper is a bachelor horn dog who cannot think past his pecker. Frank is a husband and father who is always being led astray by his priapic best bud.
The plot centers on Casper’s decision to go it alone, looking for new career opportunities in Los Angeles. Left behind, Frank is bereft…and of course ends up following his pal to LaLa Land where new opportunities for misbehavior are always presenting themselves.
They rub elbows with some celebrities (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Isla Fisher and Adam Levine, playing themselves), get picked up by some ladies of questionable repute, and have a falling out over Casper’s sexually active daughter (Simone Colling). Meanwhile Frank’s long-suffering wife (Mia Lyhne), must decide whether to forgive her hubby’s trespasses or leave his stupid ass.
The moral of the “Klown” universe is that boys will be boys and men will be even worse. If you can get behind that world view, then this might be right up your alley.
John Krasicki’s strengths as an actor — a sly sense of humor, emotional openess, a charitable view toward his own and other actors’ characters — are also on display in his feature film directing debut.
But despite a cast to die for and some heartfelt sentiment, “The Hollars” is a near miss, a movie in which everything seems just a degree or two out of whack.
Jim Strauss’s screenplay is yet another dysfunctional family dramedy.
Illness in the family brings NYC office drone John Hollar (Krasinksi) back to his middle American hometown. He leaves behind his pregnant girlfriend Rebecca (Anna Kendrick) and a dead-end job — what he really wants to do is write and illustrate graphic novels.
Ma Hollar (Margo Martindale) has been diagnosed with a brain tumor. Even with that against her she shows more common sense than the menfolk of her clan, who are more or less eccentric idiots.
Dad Hollar (Richard Jenkins) lives in an emotional bubble of denial. Whenever he steps out of that bubble he collapses in tears. And he’s run the family’s plumbing business into the ground, forcing him to fire his oldest son Ron (Shallot Copley), who now lives in the basement.
Ron is a near-moron who is stalking the ex-wife with whom he has two little girls. And he harbors some absurd notions about minorities (he assumes that his mother’s surgeon, an Asian American, must be a master of at least one martial art).
The story of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was practically made for Oliver Stone.
Government overreach, conspiracy and corruption, plus a hero who acts alone in defiance of hopeless odds — they’re all the elements of a typical Stone film (“Wall Street,” “Platoon,” “Salvador,” “JFK,” “Born on the Fourth of July”).
And with age has come a certain mellowing of the Stone approach. It’s not like he’s any less radically left — it’s just that now he can make his case without the hysteria and hyperbole that often marred his earlier work.
And in Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Stone has a leading man seemingly at the peak of his powers.
Those whose minds are not already made up when it comes to l’affaire Snowden will find Stone’s new film “Snowden” largely convincing. Even if you’re inclined to brand Snowden as a traitor worthy of death, the film will remain troubling.
(OK, time out. Let me say up front that while “Snowden” is a good film, it pales in comparison with “Citizenfour,” the Oscar-winning documentary from 2015 in which the real Snowden, a newly-minted international fugitive hiding in a Hong Kong hotel room, is interrogated by the journalists who would leak his most inflammatory revelations to the awaiting world. Everyone should see “Citizenfour.” But most people dislike documentaries, and so the fictional Stone version will be the one most people will see and remember. Fact of life.)
Most of ”Snowden” is one long flashback. In the present we’re in that hotel room with filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) and reporters Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson).
Tell us about yourself, one of the journalists says, and the next thing we know we’re at an Army training camp where young Edward Snowden is preparing to take on the terrorists who leveled the World Trade Center. Continue Reading »
Butler's Cinema Scene 