Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter (***1/2)

Everyone knows people they see all the time, often at work, but don’t know much about. What do those people do with their spare time? In the case of Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi, who has had roles in Babel, 47 Ronin, and Pacific Rim), a 29-year-old Tokyo office assistant, she spends much of time alone, watching an old videotape of the movie Fargo. Her curiosity is not idle, because she believes she has pinpointed the location of a suitcase full of money that the Steve Buscemi character has buried in the film. This perhaps does not seem like a promising idea for a feature film, but David and Nathan Zellner (brothers, like Fargo filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen) make it work. Lars and the Real Girl seems roughly comparable.

Kumiko is a fish out of water in America, where she barely speaks the language, but also in Japan, where she lives a solitary existence. Kikuchi is in every scene of the movie and creates a character who remains enormously sympathetic even as her interactions with Japanese and Americans are sometimes very funny, even as she behaves deceitfully. There are a couple of nits I could pick with the plot, but the character is always believable. Besides the unique story, I enjoyed this film for its portrayals of infrequent film subjects: naiveté, language barrier, and snowy northern Minnesota. Only the ending was a letdown, but maybe because I wanted to keep watching Kumiko (and Kikuchi).


IMDb link

viewed 10/25/14 7:15 pm at Roxy [PFS Film Festival] and posted 10/25/14

Sweet Land (***)

? Suspicion and confusion greet a German mail-order bride (Elizabeth Reaser) who arrives at the end of World War I in a Minnesota farm community. Her nationality, combined with her lack of English skills, delays the wedding.

+ This is a quiet, subtle movie that’s partly about a young woman adapting to a new setting while not speaking the language, partly about a young couple’s halting courtship, and partly about what it might have been like to live in that time and place. I can’t think of another film that shows the process of learning language so well. The heroine knows no English at first (but for one comic phrase), and we watch, bit by bit, as she becomes more conversant. Reaser has to do a lot without speaking much, and she should garner some attention with her performance. The movie is beautifully shot on location in the stark Minnesota landscape.

- I’m a big fan of subtlety, but this might be too minimalist for my taste. Unless I missed it, you never really learn what led the main character to emigrate or why she became a socialist, for example. The film’s flashback structure adds little. And I thought it was a little unnatural how much the other characters speak to someone they know only speaks German.

= *** I found this story an absorbing collection of mostly small moments, but it might bore some people.

A Prairie Home Companion (**)

Director Robert Altman’s last movie sets Garrison Keillor’s long-running public radio program in an alternate universe in which it’s the fragile property of one station called WLT. Someone has purchased the St. Paul auditorium in which the show is performed, and there is one last show to perform before it is to be torn down. The real show features skits and stories in addition to old-timey music, but for whatever reason Keillor (who co-wrote the script) and Altman have made the fictional version a musical revue, though one still sponsored by the fictional likes of Powdermilk Biscuits. So, no monologues, no listener letters, no wry tales of Lake Wobegon. Detective Guy Noir does appear, not as a character in the radio show, but as the show’s security chief (Kevin Kline).

The drama, such as it is, comes from the performers backstage. Meryl Streep is the beatific half of a sister act (Lilly Tomlin is the crankier half), with Lindsay Lohan as her daughter, who writes songs and poetry about suicide. Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly appear as Dusty and Lefty, a duo favoring comical songs such as the clever, Keillor-penned “Bad Jokes.” There is also a mystery woman (Virginia Madsen) who lurks about with an unclear purpose. Her character fits in with Guy Noir, but otherwise doesn’t make much sense. Altman goes back and forth between the show and the scene backstage, sometimes cutting into the on-stage performances in favor of rehearsals or impromptu harmonizing going on concurrently. This is is anything but an ego trip, as “GK” is more or less a supporting character in his own movie. The biggest drama is about whether the show’s demise will be mentioned on the air, but there are few plot points of note. Altman is more or less trying to capture the feel of this semi-fictional family. I wouldn’t imagine this will hold much interest to people who aren’t already fans of Keillor’s work, and even then, the emphasis on the gentle sounds of pre-electric country and folk music may disappoint those who prefer the skits and stories. Besides the comic segments (including one showcasing the sound-effects man), Lohan provides the most uptempo moment with a spirited version of a song of which I won’t mention the title, lest I give away what is one of the few bits of suspense in a work I found kind of dull.

IMDB link

reviewed 9/30/07