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

Fool's Gold (**1/2)

Fool’s Gold, starring Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson, mines the same adventure-comedy territory that stranded McConaughey in the desert in the misbegotten Sahara. The story here is just about as unlikely, but more entertaining.

Reteamed from How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days, the stars are engaging as a soon-to-be-divorced couple who wind up on a treasure hunt at sea, thanks to a cache of jewels secretly hidden and/or lost by Spanish royalty. I wasn’t really interested enough to try to follow all the clues that tell them where to look for everything (mostly around the Florida Keys), but there are some fun scenes as they try to evade some mob types he’s gotten in trouble with, beat rivals to the treasure, and get assistance from a wealthy sailor (Donald Sutherland) whose shallow daughter winds up in deep water with everyone else. I wouldn’t call it a romantic comedy, but there are some aspects of that in the plot and some scenes. It will probably appeal to people who enjoyed the mixture of genres in National Treasure, although in terms of quality it’s only about as good as the sequel.

IMDB link

viewed 2/9/08; reviewed 2/14/08