Monthly Archives: September 2013

Instant Gratification: “To the Wonder” and four other good movies to watch on Netflix Instant

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Pick of the week: “To The Wonder“: Terrence Malick’s latest film (which UW-Cinematheque premiered in Madison) is an ethereal and elliptical take on lost love and found faith that turned off some of Malick’s usual supporters. For me, it is a little overwrought in places, but the visuals and the rapturous tone swept me up.

Woody of the week: “The Purple Rose of Cairo”: A movie hero walks off the screen and into the life of a lonely housewife in Woody Allen’s wistful fantasy, whose last shot is the most devastating take on cinephilia I can remember.

Indie of the week: “The New Year“: Filmmaker Brett Haley brought his lovely slice-of-life indie to the Wisconsin Film Festival a couple of years ago, an insightful tale of recent college graduate slumming it at her family’s bowling alley, waiting for life to begin.

Sci-fi movie of the week: “The Core”: Heaven help me, I really enjoy this 2003 riff on ’50s sci-fi films, in which a team of scientists head down to the center of the earth to jumpstart the earth’s core. Ridiculous, but pretty fun, with a great cast (Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, Delroy Lindo, and a hilarious Stanley Tucci) selling it far more than they needed to.

Comedy of the week: “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka”: I almost hate to recommmend this, since it begat “Scary Movie,” “A Haunted House” and all the other lame movie parodies from the Wayans clan. But Keenan Ivory Wayans loving spoof of blaxploitation movies is a genuine hoot.

Come join my post-show chat on “Stories We Tell” Tuesday at Sundance

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I feel a little guilty saying this, given the subject matter of the film, but the post-show chat I hosted after a screening of “Act of Killing” at Sundance Cinemas a couple of weeks ago was a lot of fun.

The movie itself, which delves into the psyche of government-sanctioned Indonesian mass murderers, is no fun. But it is brilliant and thought-provoking, and it made me so happy to see by far the largest turnout for a Sundance chat come out — we filled the Overflow Bar, and it was a great conversation, as people shared their reactions to the film, including a few people who lived in Indonesia.

But the next movie I’m doing a post-show discussion for, “Stories We Tell,” deals with somewhat lighter subject matter. The chat will take place after the 6:55 p.m. screening on Tuesday, Sept. 10 in the Overflow Bar, located on the first floor of the theater, right across from the box office. Everybody’s welcome.

Actress and filmmaker Sarah Polley (“Away From Her,” “Take This Waltz”) turns the camera back on her own family in “Stories We Tell,” interviewing family members and friends to discover the story of her late mother, a story that brings with it some truly surprising revelations. It’s a film about the fractured state of a family’s history, how everyone holds their own perspective on past events, knitting fact, rumor and opinion together into a narrative that suits them best. I think it’s one of the best films of the year.

It’s a film that will give us lots to talk about. I hope you can join me!

 

What’s playing in Madison theaters: Sept. 6-12, 2013

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All week

“Riddick” (Point, Eastgate, Star Cinema) — Vin Diesel somehow keeps his sci-fi franchise going along with “Fast & Furious,” as his super-charged ex-convict deals with aliens and baddies on a hostile planet. Really hoping he manages to pull of “Find Me Guilty 2.”

“Stories We Tell” (Sundance) — My full review is here. Better late than never for Sarah Polley’s wonderful documentary, in which she turns the camera back on her own family to learn some surprising secrets involving her late mother. I’m doing a post-show chat after the 6:55 p.m. Tuesday show at Sundance Cinemas — they’ll be lots to talk about.

“Adore” (Sundance) — My full review is here. Naomi Watts and Robin Wright play middle-aged moms who decide to start affairs with each others’ college-age sons, and if that premise hasn’t already turned you off, perhaps the self-serious boredom of Anne Fontaine’s film will.

“Shuddh Desi Romance” (Star Cinema) — This Bollywood musical comedy looks at the shifting sands of romance.

Friday

“iron Man 3″ (6 p.m. and 9:15 p.m., Union South Marquee Theatre) — I wrote some about the summer’s first blockbuster here, but this film gets right everything that “Iron Man 2” got wrong — it’s much funnier and more surprising, and not afraid to do something unexpected, like keep Robert Downey Jr. out of the suit and send him to Rose Hill, Tennessee for the second act. FREE!

“Eraserhead” (7 p.m. UW Cinematheque, 4070 Vilas Hall) — I was not aware until this week that Jack Nance, who played avuncular types in several later David Lynch projects (he was “She’s dead — wrapped in plastic”), had the title role in Lynch’s 1978 debut, about an unnerving man unnerved by his encounters with the opposite sex. Cinematheque has a newly struck 35mm print to show off. FREE!

“The Room” (midnight, Union South Marquee Theatre) — Tommy Wiseau’s midnight-movie classic is a master class in bad acting, uncomfortable plotting, and random football tossing. FREE!

Saturday

“The United States of Football” (12:30 p.m., Point Cinemas) — Marcus Theatres is starting a new Theatre Entertainment Network that dedicates one screen at Point and Eastgate Cinemas to indie films, classics, live specials and other programming, all for $5. It kicks off with this documentary about the effect of head trauma in football from kids to professionals.

“iron Man 3” (6 p.m., Union South Marquee Theatre) — See Friday listing.

“Le Doulos” (7 p.m., UW Cinematheque, 4070 Vilas Hall) — Is Jean-Paul Belmondo the squealer? He keeps both the cops and his fellow criminals guessing in this stylish thriller from Jean-Pierre Melville. FREE!

“The Place Beyond the Pines” (9:15 p.m., Union South Marquee Theatre) — The lives of a small-time thief (Ryan Gosling), a rookie cop (Bradley Cooper) and their sons intertwine in Derek Cianfrance’s ambitious drama. FREE!

“The Room” (midnight, Union South Marquee Theatre) — See Friday listing.

Sunday

“Contempt” (2 p.m., Chazen Museum of Art, 800 University Ave.) — A Cinematheque at the Chazen series of Cinemascope films kicks off with Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 classic about the moral corruption of modern cinema, as a writer is lured by a gauche American producer (Jack Palance) to work on a big-budget epic. FREE!

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“Iron Man 3” (3 p.m., Union South Marquee Theatre) — See Friday listing. FREE!

Monday

“Animal House” (4;30 p.m., Point and Eastgate) — With the return of college comes the return of the ultimate college comedy, as the Delta bros drink, drink and be merry.

“LOL Short Film Festival” (12, 2:15 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. Eastgate, 9:30 p.m. Point) — The annual series of comic short films returns.

“Starbuck” (7 p.m., Point and Eastgate Cinemas) — My full review is here. n this French-Canadian comedy (which will be remade this fall as “The Delivery Man” with Vince Vaughn), a fortysomething layabout discovers that he has fathered hundreds of children as a sperm donor, and decides to help his offspring out behind the scenes.

Tuesday

“LOL Short Film Festival” (12, 2:15, 4:30 p.m. Eastgate, 9:30 p.m. Point) — See Monday listing.

“Animal House” (7 p.m., Point and Eastgate) — See Monday listing.

“Starbuck” (9:30 p.m. Point and Eastgate) — See Monday listing.

Wednesday 

“LOL Short Film Festival” (12, 2:15, 7 p.m. Eastgate, 7 p.m. Point) — See Monday listing

“Some Like It Hot” (1:25 p.m. and 6:45 p.m, Sundance) — Billy Wilder’s riotous comedy with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as cross-dressing musicians hiding out from the mob with Marilyn Monroe’s all-girl band is one of the great comedies of all time.

“Starbuck” (4:30 p.m., Point and Eastgate) — See Monday listing.

“Frances Ha” (7 p.m., Union South Marquee Theatre) — My full review is here. Greta Gerwig absolutely sparkles in Noah Baumbach’s New Wave-inspired comedy about a New York dancer finally moving into adulthood. FREE!

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“Animal House” (9:30 p.m., Point and Eastgate Cinemas) — See Monday listing.

Thursday

“LOL Short Film Festival” (12, 2:15, 7 p.m. Eastgate, 7 p.m. Point) — See Monday listing

“Starbuck” (4:30 p.m., Point and Eastgate) — See Monday listing.

“The Great Gatsby” (6:30 p.m., Union South Marquee Theatre) — My full review is here. Baz Luhrmann’s attempt to jazz up the Jazz Age classic with hip-hop and 3D didn’t work, although Leonardo DiCaprio is perfectly at ease in the title role. FREE!

“Frances Ha” (9:30 p.m., Union South Marquee Theatre) — See Wednesday listing.

“Animal House” (9:30 p.m., Point and Eastgate Cinemas) — See Monday listing.

“Adore”: This Australian film is a total MILF (Melodrama I’d Like to Forget)

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“Adore” opens Friday at Sundance Cinemas. R, 1:49, two stars out of four.

There’s no question that “Adore” would be unbearably skeevy if the gender roles were reversed, and it was about two older men having affairs with each others’ college-age daughters. But Anne Fontaine’s drama is about two middle-aged women (Naomi Watts and Robin Wright) playing sexual criss-cross with each other’s hunky sons is still plenty icky.

And the problem is that “Adore,” based on a novella by the late Doris Lessing, is all about the premise, giving the charactes little room to maneuver outside its weird sexual arrangement. Worse, Fontaine and screenwriter Christopher Hampton dig into what this relationship actually is — is it morally twisted and a prelude to disaster, or a legitimate alternatve arrangement? For a film with dicey subject matter and somewhat explicit sex scenes, “Adore” is awfully polite when it comes to the emotions, substituting deadly seriousness for actual insight.

Roz (Wright) and Lil (Watts) are lifelong friends who live in an idyllic community on the coast of Australia, their families growing up side by side. When Lil’s husband dies, and Roz’s (Ben Mendelsohn) accepts a job at a Sydney university that will keep him away for most of the year, the women get bored. One night, without preamble, Lil’s son Ian (Xavier Samuel) makes a movie on Roz, and she barely puts up a fight. Roz’s son Tom (James Frecheville) witnesses this, and immediately goes over to bed Lil. And so it begins. “What have we done?” Roz asks the next morning. “Crossed a line,” Lil responds. Ya think?

Under the sun-dappled beauty of the Australian coast (brought to life in gorgeous 35mm Cinemascope), the foursome hang out, although the balance isn’t perfect. Ian is consumed with puppy love for Roz, while Lil and Ian’s relationship seems to be based on a more immediate sexual connection. Eventually, the boys’ romantic attentions start to wander, and they move on with their lives. But the attraction lingers.

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Watts and Wright are terrific actresses, and they work hard to imbue their characters with a mix of carnal lust and maternal guilt. But when the script doesn’t know how to explain their behavior, it leaves the actresses at sea as well. The presence of an unsuitable older suitor seems to suggest that Lil has few romantic options left in her life, but please. The idea that these women are past their prime and unable to find loving partners whose diapers they haven’t changed at one point is ludicrous, and borderline offensive to women over 40 in general.

It doesn’t help that Samuel and Frecheville (who was really good in “Animal Kingdom”) are such handsome blanks, giving Watts and Wright nothing to play off of except their tanned, toned bodies. Which might be enough for a tawdry beach novel, but enough for a drama starring two of our finest actresses.

“Stories We Tell”: Sarah Polley turns the camera on her own family

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“Stories We Tell” opens Friday at Sundance Cinemas, and is also available to rent or buy on ITunes and other VOD services. PG-13, 1:49, four stars out of four. I’ll be doing a post-show chat at Sundance Cinemas after the 6:55 p.m. Tuesday show in the theater’s Overflow Bar.

From the beginning, Sarah Polley opens the hood of her documentary “Stories We Tell” and shows the machinery whirring inside. The film begins with her and her father entering a recording studio, and a montage of Polley and her crew setting up cameras and lighting for the film’s interview subjects.

It’s an introduction that’s tantamount to a magician’s “nothing-up-my-sleeve” insistence, because Polley has something far more interesting and unusual in mind that the typical nuts-and-bolts documentary. “Stories We Tell” is a powerful and very personal story from Polley, but she’s also constantly mindful that it’s a “story,” a mixture of facts and opinions shaped into a narrative, and as such isn’t entirely to be trusted.

And this is, in a very literal sense, Polley’s story. The film digs deep into the lives of her parents, Mick and Diane Polley, who met on the Toronto theatrical scene. Mick cut a dashing figure onstage, while Diane was beautiful and vivacious, the sort of woman who “make the record skip” when she walked into a room in more ways than one.

Diane was so dazzled by Mick’s onstage persona that she missed what an ordinary guy he really was. As Mick settled into kind of a middle-aged fog, Diane grew frustrated at middle-class Canadian life, and took an acting job in Montreal in 1978, leaving home for a couple of months. What happens next, the viewer should discover from the film, as Polley digs through layers after layers of reminiscences and rumors, interviewing her four siblings and friends of the family.

As the audience uncovers the revelations of the story — and there are some doozies, expertly revealed by Polley as she shifts from perspective from perspective — we’re also becoming aware of how each account differs. Some people have the facts a little off, others just view the same facts differently than others. One man, who seems to be just a supporting character in the drama, insists that his account and only  his is the truth, and all the others are just noise.

The closest the film has to an authority is Mick, who reads from his writing about the family history in plummy, theatrical tones throughout the film. But even he doesn’t have the full picture of his own family.

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The perspective that is largely missing, ironically, is Polley’s — although we see B-roll footage of her about to be interviewed, it never appears in the film. Instead, she seems to be getting at the truth of her life the way a submarine uses sonar, pinging off the other people in her life until she finds a spot that overlaps. This could be potentially an unbearable exercise in post-modern cleverness, but instead Polley makes it a fascinating process, and Polley (an actress turned acclaimed director of the dramas “Away From Her” and “Take This Waltz”) blends the different voices expertly until a bigger picture emerges.

The film also weaves in Super 8 home movie footage of Diane and the family, although it turns out that the way Polley is telling the story contains as many secrets as the story itself. Put it this way; critics who like their documentaries the way Joe Friday likes his witnesses — “Just the facts, ma’am” — are going to have a big problem with this movie.

For me, it’s a brilliant film that manages to be both one family’s shared history and all families’ shared histories. Would “Stories We Tell” have been as compelling if Polley didn’t add all the post-modern devices to it? On the level of pure storytelling, probably. But the way she tells the story takes it beyond “What happened?” and forces us to examine the too-tidy narratives of the stories we tell ourselves.

Blu-ray review: “Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie”

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It could be the plot to some cheesy sci-fi movie that Mike and the ‘bots would make fun of on “Mystery Science Theater 3000” — two identical alternate universe, one where everything is happy and cheery, the other where we see those exact same events through a much darker and more sinister lens.

Those two universes, as it happens, are the two “making-of” featurettes that appear on the Shout! Factory DVD/Blu-ray release of “Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie,” which just came out this week after a long, long wait from fans. Taken together, the extras provide an instructive lesson in dabbling with potent forces of evil — in this case, a major motion picture studio.

The movie came out in 1996, somewhat bridging the gap between the cult TV show’s Comedy Central and Sci-Fi Channel years. Universal Pictures thought they could turn the TV show into a cheap but profitable franchise for themselves, while the creators of the show thought that successful live “riffs” of the show before audiences proved that it could work in a group theater setting.

The first featurette, released at the time of the film’s release, shows a Satellite of Love crew happily working on the film. The second, made for this Blu-ray release, delves into the constant struggle that the MSTies had with Universal executives to make the film. Having signed onto the film, Universal insisted on having input into seemingly every decision, including approving or vetoing individual jokes (a Bootsy Collins reference was changed, bizarrely, to a Leona Helmsley reference) and test-screening rough drafts of the film to death. (It’s grimly ironic that the movie trailer touts that the MST3K crew “can make jokes without a censor” in the film, since the meddling from Universal was much more pervasive than anything the show had gotten from Comedy Central or Sci-Fi.)

Michael J. Nelson, Trace Beaulieu and Kevin Murphy, along with showrunner (and UW-Madison grad)  Jim Mallon, complain openly about the arduous process, and it’s clear that they regard the finished product as a compromised thing. “The joy of doing this was strained terribly through this odd, arbitrary process.” Mallon said.

That said, the movie itself comes off, as Murphy puts it, as a “better-than-average” episode of the TV show, with significantly better production values given to the host segments, which were shot on a much bigger studio space. The movie that the guys riff on, “This Island Earth,” is actually a pretty good scifi movie, and overall the image pops on Blu-ray in a way most episodes of the TV show just wouldn’t. The release also includes deleted scenes (axed by the studio, naturally) and you get a taste of the cover version of the MST3K theme song done for the movie by Dave Alvin.

In the end, I’ll bet the experience of making the movie was so painful for Mike and the gang that I doubt they’ll ever pop in a copy of the Blu-ray release. But for fans, its an essential part of the collection, and a surprisingly revealing look at the hazards of letting outsiders into your strange little world in the hopes of achieving mainstream success. Better to stay on your own Satellite of Love, unreachable by the mad scientists down below, doing it on your own terms.

Instant Gratification: “Filly Brown” and four other good movies to watch on Netflix Instant

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Pick of the week: “FIlly Brown” — It’s the eternal showbiz cautionary tale, as a female Latino rapper must choose between her art and selling out to be successful. But the music is great, the perspective of a female in hip-hop is fresh, and Gina Rodriguez shines in the title role.

Drama of the week: “There Will Be Blood” — My full review is here. Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic deconstruction of the American myth — the self-made man — is like “Citizen Kane” drenched in blood and oil and left to bake in the California sun. Daniel Day Lewis is mesmerizing as the self-made man who chases financial success and moral ruin.

Documentary of the week: “A Place at the Table” — My full review is here. This thoughtful documentary looks at the state of hunger in America, where 51 people don’t get enough to eat, from the inner city to bucolic small towns and everywhere in between. It could be the start, finally, of an honest conversation of what poverty really looks like.

Comedy of the week: “Zoolander” — Incredibly, Ben Stiller hasn’t directed a film since this 2001 comedy, and his upcoming “Walter Mitty” doesn’t look nearly as funny as this bizarre and riotous send-up of the fashion world. Blue Steel lives.

Sci-fi of the week: “WarGames” — Young hacker Matthew Broderick accidentally tricks a supercomputer into thinking World War III is coming, and must undo the damage in this fun and thoughtful 1983 film.

Charles Bradley film in Madison? Let’s make it happen

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One of the most electrifying of today’s soul performers is Charles Bradley, who I saw open for Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings at the Barrymore Theatre a few years ago. Originally a James Brown impersonator, the 64-year-old Bradley has gone beyond impersonation and become an authentic and exciting soul singer.

And, as Andy Downing’s great interview for 77 Square last February showed, that road to the spotlight has been long and hard for Bradley, and he has a lot of heartache to draw from when he performs. All of which is to say that Bradley would make a great subject for a movie, and he did — the documentary “Charles Bradley: Soul of America.”

Some Madison folks are using Tugg (like Kickstarter for movies) to set up a screening of “Soul of America” on Wednesday, Sept. 18 at Star Cinema, and they need your help. The way Tugg works is that a certain number of people have to pledge to see the film. If enough pledge, then it happens. Right now, with nine days to go until the deadline, the organizers need another 47 people to reserve tickets via the website.

To sweeten the deal, True Endeavors will be raffling off four tickets to Bradley’s December 4 show at the High Noon Saloon, and Strictly Discs will also be giving away a prize package to a lucky audience member. Even without that’, it’s a worthy chance to support a great artist and a local grassroots effort to bring something different to the big screen.