Showing posts with label Nightcrawler. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nightcrawler. Show all posts

Friday, March 6, 2015

Reel Deal: Movies that matter Published Feb 1st; Timbuktu, Still Life, Mommy, 1971+ Sundance report, Oscar controversy ( Selma, Imitation Game, Nightcrawler)

I am writing this column from Park City, Utah home of the 26th SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL. Today there are actually two Sundances. The one you see on TV full of stars—Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Robert Redford, Iggy Azalea, Common and John Legend—partying on Main Street. The other Sundance, the one Robert Redford founded to celebrate and promote independent film, lives in the theaters, panel rooms and post screening Q&A with the directors, writers, actors and producers. This is the one I attend. I come to see movies that most people will never get to see in a theater because of the current state of commercial distribution, but these movies may eventually be available on VOD like the Sundance Doc Club (http://goo.gl/GRRtML).
This year 12,166 films were submitted, and 123 films and 60 shorts were selected and divided into the various categories. These films are screening from 8:30 AM to midnight each day. Every day. And all these movies are showing while the party folk are playing on Main Street. Each night there are music showcases and parties galore. Both ASCAP and BMI have panels on music that showcase their members. The choices are overwhelming.
Since I can’t see them all, I’ve set up a priority system. My criteria, in order, are US Documentaries, World Documentaries, World Features and US narratives in competition for Jury and public awards. I also sprinkle in NEXT (low budget, new tech) and the New Frontiers (technology and expanded cinema). I try to shoot and participate in as many of the first screening Q&A sessions as possible. I prefer to see films with a public audience over a press screening. Tickets are always in high demand, so mastering the art of getting in should be a college credit course. You can see my Q&A videos at youtube.com/reeldealmovies.
Among the films I have seen and really like were films about
And a wild collection of shorts that shout “looky here we are the future.” I also got to meetJeremy Hersh whose short film Actresses was one of the lucky 60 chosen. We talk to him at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUyiHxWeEHQ
I will review the best of the Sundance films when they become available in theaters or via VOD. You can look at the film selection here: http://www.sundance.org/festivals/sundance-film-festival/program
SUNDANCE 2015 is a return to the core values that motivated Redford, and John Cooper has reigned in the festival to respect those boundaries. Translation: 10 days of little sleep and a whole lot of time spent with strangers in dark rooms looking on light splashing on a screen telling a story.
Oscar Nomination Controversy
I do not advocate a quota system based on race for Oscar nominations, but I find it shocking that a number of performances by actors of color were ignored or overlooked. I have some additional thoughts on 3 films I would like to share with you.
1: Selma: The firestorm of criticism about LBJ’s portrayal in Selma was orchestrated in popular media and on twitter by former LBJ policy makers upset by what they thought was a challenge to the LBJ legacy. Even Maureen Dowd criticized how LBJ was drawn in a NY Times Op-Ed. The firestorm peaked during the last two weeks of the Oscar nominating period. Some of these critics very specifically called for Academy members NOT to nominate Selma.
This black woman directed, written, and produced film received only one nomination: Best Picture. The director, writer, actors, and a group of craft artists were all ignored and denied the nominations that, in my view, they deserved. I have to defend Selma as an important film that is not a documentary but a narrative film based on the humanness of the principals involved including King and LBJ as well as the extraordinary grouping of civil rights leaders and those politicians who opposed them. Selma also brought to the foreground—for the first time in 50 years—the role black women in partnership with black men played at the front lines of the ’60′s civil rights movement.
Ava DuVernay, the director and principal writer, tells an authentic story in narrative form. It was never meant to be a documentary. There is a difference. The attacks on the integrity of both the film and the director were caused by a windstorm of mostly white men. Please read this well thought out and documented defense of Selma by Mark Harris. It not only defends the film, but also explains the nature of narrative film making and how it differs from documentary film making. http://grantland.com/features/selma-oscars-academy-awards-historical-accuracy-controversy/
Go see SELMA and take your friends and kids or parents. You can watch the trailer here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6t7vVTxaic
2: The Imitation Game: I have known of Alan Turing and his history since the late ’60s. His brilliant brain was instrumental in ending WWII. The horrible story of the damage done to him because of his self-admitted homosexuality and his history of having to closet himself in order to work was one of the motivations that made me become an activist despite knowing how it would damage my own career goals.
When I saw the film, I was happy that at last more of the public would know of this gay hero and what happened to him because he was a homosexual. However, I did have an uncomfortable feeling in the bottom of my stomach when I left the theater. Not with the performance ofBenedict Cumberbatch, but with how his character was written and directed—it made me wonder if Turing’s character as directed was in fact a highly functioning person with Asperger syndrome, a form of autism, or simply a victim of having to closet himself in his daily life. When I attempted to broach this subject with gay or straight friends, I was met with unwelcome ears. So recently reading this piece in the Guardian by the always insightful and au contraire Alex Von Tunzelmann made me realize I was not alone in my questions. Read his article at:http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/20/the-imitation-game-invents-new-slander-to-insult-alan-turing-reel-history
3: Nightcrawler: I think Nightcrawler is the best American made feature of the year, with Oscar worthy performances from Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed and Rene Russo. Set in theMichael Mann L.A. landscape, all glistening like a newly plated gold Oscar, it is storytelling at its highest form in popular cinema. Using the world of tabloid television news “journalism” as a backdrop, it evokes the desperation of everyday life in a world dominated by the triumph of capital. There is not a character written that is not desperate to either hold on to their job or willing to do anything to get or keep it.
Like the Mexican film Miss Bala, Dan Gilroy has constructed a film that takes a hard look at whether any moral compass is still at work in TV news reporting, and how the demand for high ratings stomps on whatever traditional ethics are left. Gyllenhaal was robbed. Rather than having a historical figure to bring to life, he has to create a modern day Sammy Glick who sees winning as the only motivation for success and survival.
Gilroy has studied the lessons of Wall Street, and Nightcrawler is a wake-up call in the same wayThe Wolf of Wall Street was. Now on VOD.
Watch the trailer at: http://youtu.be/X8kYDQan8bw
LET’S GO TO THE MOVIES
MoMA’s annual Documentary series Documentary Fortnight is the best place in NYC to discover what is going on in the documentary world. Here is a list of the films with trailers:https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfYVzk0sNiGHqXHhBr2gTSOy0VMXZ2So3
The Film Society of Lincoln Center is presenting Tell it Like It Is: Black Independents in New York 1968-1986
Feb 6th – 19.
1971, director Johanna Hamilton
On March 8th, 1971, eight ordinary citizens broke into an FBI office in Media, PA. Calling themselves The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, they removed every file in the office. They then proceeded to anonymously mail these documents to the mainstream media.
The most significant revelation was COINTELPRO, a controversial, secret, illegal surveillance program overseen by lifelong bureau director J. Edgar Hoover. Before wiki-leaks and the internet, these ordinary citizens stood up and took moral actions to expose the US government as a war was waged both in Vietnam and here at home against radicals fighting for racial justice and against the war.
Never caught, despite years of intense investigation, they now have surfaced to tell the story of how and why they took this action, and how they avoided detection for over 40 years. Ordinary citizens taking extraordinary actions. Now on VOD! Trailerhttp://youtu.be/VVsEBric-94
Still Life, director Uberto Pasolini
Every so often a little film with a big heart opens in a small theater and people who go to see it pick up their cells, post on Facebook, or shout from their roof tops. I LOVE Still Life. It was a joy to behold. Eddie Marsan plays John May. Marsan is a character actor whose name you probably do not know, but you will instantly recognize him from the many films he has appeared in.
Marsan plays a lonely worker whose job at the South London city morgue is to locate the next of kin of a person who has died with no know survivors. He is methodical and dedicated to his job. We see him track down those next of kin. In the process, we learn about the life of the unknown DOA. When he is told his job has become redundant, he finishes up his last case and, while doing so, finds love.
If you like Mike Leigh or Kelly Reichardt films do see Still Life. I will shout it from the roof tops! It is a Tribeca Release film. If you can’t find it in theaters, it is now on VOD!
Watch the trailer at: http://youtu.be/Gt9CsXrlO8Y
Mommy, director Xavier Dolan
Dolan is the L’Enfant terrible of indie film. Canadian born and based, his film How I Killed My Mother was the sensation of the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. He’s well known in Montreal as the French-dubbed voice of South Park’s Stan.
Mommy stars Anne Dorval as Diane Després, a widowed mother who is overwhelmed by the difficulty of raising her son while working full time to support him. The sometimes violent teenage son Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) appears to be the “bad seed” child—until your realize he loves his mother. She is desperate—
working hard and long to make ends meet and still trying to have an active emotional and sex life. The son is out of control most of the time, and his school offers them little help.
Mommy is really about how to survive and keep family together when low paying work and everyday needs overwhelm even the best intentions. Mommy deservedly won the Jury prize at Cannes 2014, and Anne Dorval would give any of the Oscar nominated actresses a run for their money if the film had been released in time for consideration. See it. Trailerhttp://youtu.be/OJw4ZZ_BWSU
Timbuktu, director Abderrahmane Sissako
Engaged, Paris-based African director Sissako, best known for Bamako, returns with a visually stunning film set in Mali. In the film, fundamentalist Muslims (ISIS like) are destroying the culture of a Muslim country by suppressing indigenous culture, mostly music and ritual that integrates pleasure with spirituality. Rather than the rigorous and formal intellectual debate of BANAKO, here Sissako concentrates on one Bedouin family and their encounters with the fundamentalist army, allowing the landscape to underline the film. Beautiful and sad, most importantly, the film humanizes all sides. Please be kind to your spirit and go! Watch the trailer at: http://youtu.be/CspcDYQ-SiY
and yes Fifty Shades of Grey is opening too. Try to resist it … trust me.
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Sunday, December 7, 2014

Jim Fouratt's REEL DEAL: Movies that Matter, December 2014. Nightcrawler, Foxy Merrkins,




Jim Fouratt's REEL DEAL: Movies that Matter, December 2014.
It is snowing big pictures and stunning performances this month. Yikes. But first I would like you to take part in our REEL DEAL: Movies that Matter Readers Poll - Best Films of 2014. I would love to know what you liked! Please participate: here is a link to your own personal ballot: REEL REAL READERS BALLOT 2014   OR copy, clip and paste into browser:  http://Google/forms/kovTln53xg The poll is open 12/1-12/20.
LETS GO TO THE MOVIES


NIGHTCRAWLER - Director Dan Gilroy

Dan Gilroy's debut film should grab the gold come award time. His Michael Mann- inspired look at Los Angeles, and how tabloid journalism, first invented by the supermarket rag The National Enquirer, has drenched television news reporting,  re-channeling it as an ugly aesthetic, is a stunner from start to finish. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Lou Bloom, an updated version of Sammy Glick who, desperate for a job and to make his mark, loses all sense of a moral compass in his willingness to be first on a criminal scene and/or horrible accident, filming it regardless of the circumstances so he can get it to the a local TV station in a ratings battle. 


 His TV news contact is a former TV actress who segued into an on camera reporter job till she reached an age where a fresher younger face was wanted, and then segued into production. Played by a still stunning Rene Russo, she too is desperate to keep her job. It’s TMZ time, except the focus is crime not celebrity. But it is a paparazzi ethic that challenges and saturates the film. Just as the Mexican drama Miss Bala showed how drug cartel money was destroying the moral and social fabric that underlie Mexican traditional values, Nightcrawler takes the same hard look at how sensationalized news has blunted the moral compass of the consumer, and upended professional news standards and professional ethics. Gyllenhaal is simply brilliant in his portrayal of the ends-justify-the-means performance. He lost over 30 lbs. to capture the praying mantis-in-heat bug-eyed look of Lou Bloom. Also outstanding is Rez Ahmed (Reluctant Fundamentalist) who captures the inner conflict of what I assumed is an undocumented worker in desperate need of a job, who Bloom pushes to the max when his inner instincts tell him to stop. Don't miss this film!
Foxy Merkins - Director Madeleine Olnek

The legacy of intelligence, wit and humanity that have always been the touchstones of the very funny films of Woody Allen is present in Foxy Merkins, invading the creativity of director Madeleine Olnek. Allen took for granted the universality of his story telling located in the secular Jewish, educated conclave of Upper West Side academics and professionals. Olnek too takes for granted the ordinariness of her characters and the universality of their experiences, while situating her stories in a Sapphic-centric world of downtown New Yorkers. This is serious fun that has a desperate human identity crisis at root. And like Allen it’s usually neurotic, and yet hilarious frame after frame after frame. Olnek seems to have watched a lot of Frank Capra films, resonating with his interest in “ordinary “ people. She has also learned well the John Waters low budget ethic of how to charm an audience. She appears to want to break out of cult status, but on her own terms. She is a Sundance returning artist. Her last film Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same would have been huge on the adventurous midnight movie circuit of my youth, but those date-night palaces have disappeared like all the indie movie houses that held the weekly midnight ritual. A merkin is a covering for female genitalia to protect and keep warm in cold weather. (And no, I had never heard of a merkin before either.)  Olnek uses a company of actors many of whom come out of the WOW and Split Britches theater community. In Foxy Merkins it is the actor and co-writer Lisa Haas, a most unlikely looking movie star, who we follow. Haas has a body somewhere between Marie Dressler and Kate Smith and the innocence and sense of wonder of “the little tramp” mixed with the spunk of Jean Arthur and the pathos of Giulietta Masina .  Haas is about as far away from the bully energy of Melissa McCarthy as one full-bodied woman can be. This is the story of how this lesbian is taught the tricks of survival in a cruel city, with increased economic pressures, by a straight woman (the comedic actor Jackie Monahan (a mash up of Sandra Bernhard and Candy Bergen ) who she meets and bonds with in a 14th Street diner.  Sisterhood is indeed powerful. She educates Haas as well as the audience to dumpster diving, the 42nd St Port Authority as a sleep over spot, shoplifting as a celebratory act of survival and Talbots (the clothing store) of all places. The Talbots' sidewalk is the pick up place for their sex work (women only) that helps keep them in food and cosmetics. Haas may be the bravest actress working in indie films today. Her no shame willingness to let us see and know her character is breathtaking.  Oh, and did I mention hilarious? Cinephiles alert: the references are seeded through out the film ...and extra treat for those who care about such things. Let me just say once "GUS"! Yes, Olnek takes an incisive look at how bodies are commodified and sex becomes commerce, where the ends justify the means, with a refined casualness and a smart and wicked smile. . And it’s very very funny!



FORCE MAJEURE  Director Ruben Astound


From Sweden comes this sophisticated look at a typical successful nuclear family on a ski vacation where an absent “dad” can be present for his two children and a “wife” can get the amorous attention she has been craving, but lacking, from her career-driven husband. It’s sort of middle class normal until a close encounter with an avalanche at breakfast leaves each emotional and traumatized.  Nothing is the same after the disruption exposes the inner life of the husband and wife that had been repressed. Whew! What happens to them is both a very serious look at marriage as an identity and a subtle total send up of the myth of marriage. A film for a married couple but not a date night flick.
The Circle - Director Stefan Haupt


The Circle is the kind of documentary I love. I learned something I did not know. In 1934 a group of gay men in Zurich formed a private social club to break their isolation and to publish a journal that would be in three languages. This club continued to meet despite the outside world of the 30's and 40's.  In 1948 the Das Kreis rented a pub in Zurich to house a club in which “homophiles“ from all over Switzerland could meet, exchange ideas and get to know one another.  The film focuses on a couple, Ernst Ostertag and Röb Röbi, who met at the club in the 1950’s and are still in a same sex relationship now institutionalized as marriage. Director Stefan Haupt mixed current footage of the couple, while recreating in a narrative form the club's history and the period when these two men met. The journal was read worldwide.  George Platt Lynes and Harry Hay both appeared in the pages. A complete set of the journal is in the US at Yale.  The Circle is not only a love story but also a discovery of how gay and lesbian people found ways to build community when homosexuality was a crime, as with the Matching Society in the US.  This is a remarkable story whose appeal is more than just historical. A couple who have been together for 58 years has something to say to couples of all ages and sexual orientation. What the film lacks in craft (which is minor,) is overcome by the actual history reclaimed.

Meet the subjects in a impromptu interview :
Foxcatcher - Director Bennett Miller

With a Stanley Kubrick eye for landscape and a Harold Pinter ear for the absurdist language of nightmares, Miller is back. Best known for Capote he ups his game and takes one harsh and scrumptious look at the rich and how they are different from the rest of us. They know they own the world and act on it. No, this is not about the Koch family but about the DuPonts. Adapting a best seller, Miller makes a dark gothic comedy of the machinations of suppressed desire and visions of grandeur only the wealthy can truly harbor.  The Dupont heir, a Little Lord Fauntleroy at 50, is delusional. He decides he will coach the US Olympic wrestling team. Accustomed to getting what his wealth can buy, he sets up shop on the family estate and gets the team and plays coach. Two brothers, gold medalists, are convinced to come, played in a remarkable career-turning performance by Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo, always a pitch perfect actor. Steve Carell is almost unrecognizable as the Dupont heir. Miller slowly fills the screen until we see a game of psychotic power being played out by Carell to salve his repressed sexual desires and to please his Mommy Dearest, the formidable Vanessa Redgrave. Although not central to the plot, a serious question is raised about the Olympic men of gold who are one day heroes and then are remembered only as statistics.


SHE IS BEAUTIFUL WHEN SHE IS ANGRY Director Mary More


The 60's were a tremulous time and one of the most explosive issues with world wide impact started in Westchester NY when a middle aged white woman married and living the supposed perfect suburban life woke up one morning and decided she was mad and did not know why . She spent time asking her self "why" and spoke to other housewives in her community and they realized they felt invisible and not recognized for their intelligence and creativity. Her name was Betty Freidan.
In 1963 she published The Feminine Mystique. 43 years after the suffragettes movement had gotten he 19th Amendment to the US Constitution passed .It gave women the r right to vote.  A second wave of feminism was born in Betty Freidan's kitchen.In 1966 she formed NOW (The National Organization of Women). it was basically a white middle class movement until 1968 the year of political change. Women's Liberation exploded in the radical movements in the streets. Much of the initial organizing of this now called Women's Liberation was birthed right here in NYC with the formation of groups like Red Stocking  Feminism caught fire and not just with white,  middle class heterosexual women. SHE IS BEAUTIFUL WHEN SHE IS ANGRY documents the time. While the complicated issues of who were the leaders and what did they want would take multiple hours of presentation, Director Mary Dore has created an important documentary that gives an overview to how they revolution in identity happened in the US. She puts in documentary form a wonderful introductory study guide to how feminism changed how women saw themselves and each other and their role in the world. Ideas spread like a pair fire across the US and later the rest of the world.  Through clips we meet some of the women who thought hard  and fought against sexism, shared information about oppression through a tool they developed called consciousness raising and published books about woman's bodies and health as well as sexism in the work place. Dore and her editor, Nancy Kennedy  have produced a visual timeline that indexes how a movement grew as a visual history.  Some may quibble about who and  what is not included .. and yes I thought about things like the Woman's Music Community and how it brought women together to organize around common feelings and the desire for change in how women saw themselves and their place in the workforce, political life and the family. But there can e and should be more films etc.. Bravo I say for this introductory lesson. Post-Modern education has often failed to tell just how the radical idea that all women in all cultures have the right to control their own bodies  and not the State, the Church, the Boss or their husbands. A perfect intergenerational film that mothers and daughters should see together as well as with their partners and their sons



(CC) Jim Fouratt 11/27/2014     
jimfourattsreedealmovies.blogspot.com
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