Ida (***1/4)

A lot of filmmakers, after making a splash with an independent or small-budget hit, will move on to blockbuster fare, but Pawel Pawlikowski has done the opposite. Best known for the English romance My Summer of Love, Pawlikowski has returned to his native Poland and made a black-and-white drama about a young woman (Agata Trzebuchowska) on the verge of taking her vows as a Catholic nun. Having grown up in the convent, she is only now being told she has a living relative, an aunt (Agata Kulesza). The aunt she never knew tells her about the parents she never knew, who were Jews who died, or were killed, during World War II.

In the course of this concisely told tale, these very different women together try to find out what happened. The contrast of personalities is about the only thing Ida has in common with My Summer of Love. Asked if she’s ever had impure thoughts, Ida says yes, but not carnal ones. Too bad, the aunt says, because it’s not much of a sacrifice if you don’t know what you’re giving up. The sheltered girl and the hard-edged, hard-drinking aunt make a sort of good-cop, bad-cop pairing, though Pawlikowski does not use this to humorous effect, as another filmmaker might have.

Instead, the style is composed and steady; the unbeautiful views of rural and small-town Poland of the 1960s create a visual impression as strong as My Summer. The ending seems possibly headed for melodrama, but Pawlikowski reins it in, concluding the story in a way that may or may not be what the viewer will want to happen, but that seemed to make sense.

IMDb link

viewed 6/11/14 7:35 pm and posted 6/11/14

Nebraska (****)

Alexander Payne’s first two films were about young women, but since then he’s become a great chronicler of the difficult man. Probably Will Forte’s character, a mild-mannered stereo saleman, is the lead role here, but Bruce Dern’s grumpy old man dominates the story. And he’s so difficult that it becomes easier for his son to drive him from Billings, Montana, to Lincoln, Nebraska, than to convince him that he hasn’t really won a million-dollar prize like the piece of paper says. (Think Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes.) He’ll walk to Lincoln to claim his prize if necessary. If this sounds like a road movie, or a comedy, it is both, but it’s a lot more too.

If you are lucky, and paying attention, there will come a point in which you recognize your parents as autonomous individuals who had lives before you came along. This recognition is at the heart of the movie. Your parents may be nothing like the ones in this film, your life nothing like that of the son, and your home far from the Midwest, but there is a kind of universality in this story that is only set in relief by the non-universal, peculiar details.

 

As noted, Dern dominates the film, with the showy role of an ornery, bickery alcoholic, but equally good is June Squibb as his long-suffering wife, though she’s apt to strike most viewers as mean-spirited. Neither of them is especially likeable, but as the film goes on they become understandable, and Payne, collaborating with screenwriter Bob Nelson, elicits a compassion in the viewer. It’s a cliché to say that an old person feels the same inside, but you don’t see it often depicted on screen. For example, so often when you hear an old person talk about sex it’s supposed to be cute, but when Squibb’s character starts talking about the men who once fought over her, it’s not cute — though it’s funny — because you hear the way that experience remains with her.

Another of Payne’s trademarks is to set his films in places usually ignored on screen and to makes those places — the Hawaii of The Descendents, the California wine country of Sideways, key to the story. Nebraska most resembles About Schmidt, which also takes place, in part, in Payne’s native state, though the pace is a notch tighter.  An important part of the story takes place in a small town, and both because of the plot and because this town hasn’t changed much, the movie deeply evokes a forgotten past. It is a reminder that, whether we know about it or not, each of us is influenced by the people and places that have gone before us.

 

IMDb link

 

viewed 12/10/13 at 7:00 pm at Ritz 5; posted 1/9/14

Computer Chess (**1/2)

I like low-budget films that make a virtue of necessity, and this one does that. Setting his story almost entirely in a middle-budget hotel, Andrew Bujalski follows a group of computer programmers pitting their skills against each other in a machine-on-machine tournament. Also, it’s 1982, 15 years before IBM’s Deep Blue would defeat champion Garry Kasparov in a match, and around the same length of time before geek was used as a compliment. The lone female programmer is a novelty.

Bujalski used old video equipment to make the film in black and white and even includes what look like technical glitches. It somewhat resembles an old shot-on-video documentary, though without actual interview segments and with brief flashbacks and other things a documentary wouldn’t have. So, it’s a pretty clever film that vividly recalls the pre-Internet era of technology. Ostensibly, it’s a comedy, but it wasn’t funny enough that I heard laughter in the audience I saw it with. About the most chuckle-producing incident is a college kid’s awkward encounter with a middle-aged couple attending some kind of New Age-y spiritual retreat being held simultaneously with the tournament. When the wife says that the 64 squares on a chess board is so limiting, he points out that, actually, the number of possible plays it allows is more than 10 to the 120th power.

The college kid is perhaps the most prominent character, along with an older programmer who hasn’t reserved a room and spends his evenings trying to find somewhere to sleep. However, no character is on screen more than 25 minutes or so. (It’s doubtful you’ll recognize any of the actors either, which further helps this seem like an old film that someone found.) The movie is so faithful to its premise that in fact it seems only about as interesting as it would have been were it truly a 30-year-old documentary from an old convention. It’s of little consequence who wins the tournament and there are no other major storylines. So, while the movie was original, it left me wanting a little more.

IMDb link

viewed 7/31/13 7:15 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 7/31/13

Blancanieves (***1/4)

Did seeing The Artist make you wish for another black-and-white homage to silent film? Look no further than this Spanish effort. Where The Artist tweaks silent-film conventions, this one plays it just about straight. Though still playful, if not quite comedic, at times, it’s mostly an old-fashioned melodrama, beginning with twin tragedies, continuing with a wicked stepmother, and winding up with (mostly) good-natured dwarves. As the title‘s translation suggests, it’s infused with fairy-tale elements…and bullfighting.

The key character, the long-suffering Carmen, is played by the appealing Sofía Oria as a girl and by Macarena García as a young woman. (Maribel Verdú, of Y tu mamá también and Pan’s Labyrinth, has a prominent role. This kind of slightly unreal story, set in the 1920s, is the perfect kind of story for a silent film. It’s didn’t grab me as immediately as The Artist (though in time), but it was almost as lovely to look at, with scenes set in a lush mansion, enormous arenas, and the open landscape. The score by Alfonso de Vilallonga is tremendously varied and truly carries the film along, and the ending, while not to every taste, is slightly mysterious, mostly surprising, and entirely fitting.

IMDb link

viewed at Ritz 5 7:35 pm 5/8/13 and reviewed 5/8/13

Tetro (**3/4)

Right from the getgo, this movie gets your attention with black-and-white credits that look like something out of the French new wave. Only it takes place in Buenos Aires. Not what you expect from Francis Ford Coppola, the director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, to say nothing of the 1996 Robin Williams dramedy Jack. Vincent Gallo, who once wrote, directed, and starred in the very entertaining Buffalo ’66 (as well as 2003’s notorious Brown Bunny), returns from near oblivion to star as the would-of-been writer sought out by a teenager (Alden Ehrenreich) looking for his brother. But the writer—now an underemployed lighting technician—wants nothing to do with any of his family, especially the father, a genius conductor played by Klaus Maria Brandauer in color flashbacks. (Coppola’s own father was conductor/composer Carmine Coppola.)

After 1997’s The Rainmaker, Coppola made no movies until 2007’s less-commercial Youth Without Youth, and this one is clearly also directed toward an art-house crowd. Even so, what starts out as a small sort of movie with three characters—the third being the live-in girlfriend, who insists on taking in the teenager—develops into a full-scale melodrama, complete with a scenery-chewing Ehrenreich nearly burning down an auditorium. Despite this, or maybe because of it, the big family-history revelations don’t pack the emotional punch intended. But the variation in moods, including light comedy at times, and the cinematic sweep of the end is not without its charms. It could be worth a look for those looking for something different.

IMDB link

viewed 7/1/09 at Ritz East (Landmark Theatres screening) and reviewed 7/9/09

13 Tzameti (***1/2)

? A broke handyman overhears mysterious conversations by his employer that seem to involve a money-making scheme. He heads for a secret assignation in the employer’s stead, not knowing what awaits. The story moves from a hazy beginning to an all-too-clear conclusion. The French-Georgian film won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

+ The black-and-white movie makes a virtue of deliberate minimalism. Some creepy music and sound effects set the mood. The structure is reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’s famous story “The Lottery,” which seems to describe an ordinary ritual and only becomes horrifying as the reader realizes the pointless cruelty being described. The main character is basically an audience stand-in. He’s an ordinary guy who faces extreme danger the way most people do. They try to escape. You learn just enough about him and the other characters as is necessary to understand the story. There is relatively little dialogue.

- Alfred Hitchcock would seem one obvious inspiration for first-time writer-director Géla Babluani, but the movie lacks much of a psychological dimension. Then again, the film is trying to make you feel like you’re in the situation rather than think about the characters, and it does that expertly.

= ***1/2 I’m being deliberately vague about the plot, since knowing as little as possible is helpful. For people who don’t mind a story that’s somewhat disturbing, but not graphic, this is well worth an hour and a half.

IMDb link

Duck Season (***1/2)

This deceptively simple, black and white charmer follows two 14-year-old boys as they spend a Sunday afternoon in a modest apartment, playing video games, ordering pizza, and revealing something about themselves in the process.

This deceptively simple little charmer follows two 14-year-old Mexican boys as they spend a Sunday afternoon in a modest apartment. The poster for the movie (a feature debut for director Fernando Eimbcke) announces it as “presented by” one of its producers Alfonso Cuarón, who directed the most recent Harry Potter movie as well as Y Tu Mamá También. This didn’t blow me away like Y Tu Mamá También, but it similarly takes a basic story about two pals hanging out and slowly fills in little pieces of the characters’ lives and how their relationship to each other is likely to change. There’s also the older woman, in this case the 16-year-old next door. This movie probably isn’t everyone’s cup of tequila, and not just because it’s in black and white. Eimbcke favors long takes with a static camera, somewhat reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise, Broken Flowers). The most overtly dramatic events in the movie are whether the pizza man will make it in under 30 minutes, and who will win the big video soccer match. (Both of those end up being the subject of major debate and major plot points.) But I really like a movie that can take a slice of life, use it to tell something beyond the immediate scope of the story, and make us care about ordinary people.

IMDb link

posted 9/5/13