St. Vincent (***)

This is part of the subgenre in which a grouchy adult gets saddled with an unwanted kid. In the case of Vincent (Bill Murray, sporting a Brooklyn accent), the kid is not entirely unwanted, since he’s charging the boy’s mom (Melissa McCarthy, in a subdued performance) twelve bucks an hour for after-school babysitting, and Vincent needs the money. In addition to grouchiness, Vincent comes with a full complement of vices — drunk driving, smoking, gambling (on horses), petty theft, a poor fashion sense, and an ongoing acquaintanceship with what he describes to the boy as a “lady of the night” (Naomi Watts, sporting a Russian accent). The boy, perhaps ten, is a typically precocious movie kid whose trademark is calling adults “sir,” though he appears to have grown up in New York.

With this kind of movie is that the plot is always going to be about the kid bringing out the grouchy adult’s humanity, so the trick is to this without getting all sappy or making the adult into an entirely new person. Writer-director Theodore Melfi mostly does this right until the too-clean ending. The money problems conveniently disappear (or seem to) and the whole thing seems calculated to sentimentalize Vincent (see title) and make the audience cheer. Entertaining characters — grouches usually are in movies — save the day, as do good performances, including always ingratiating Chris O’Dowd as a Catholic School teacher. The Brazilian movie Central Station remains a standard-bearer for the grouch-unwanted kid film, or, for a more comedic example, Kikujiro.

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viewed 10/29/14 7:30 pm at Ritz 5; posted 10/29/14

Watchtower (***1/2) [played at screening only]

This intriguing Turkish drama brings two self-exiled characters together. A quiet man in a quiet place (in a quiet movie), Nihat (Olgun Simsek) has taken a job manning a mountaintop guardhouse. Seher (Nilay Erdonmez), the other main character is a college student who has left school to take a job as an onboard “hostess” for a struggling bus company. Part of her story becomes apparent when she suddenly becomes sick during a trip, but the first half of the movie is largely a careful set-up for the inevitable part where their stories intertwine.

However, what could devolve into a predictable storyline, in which two lonely souls find each other, is instead handled with subtlety and complexity, though with ambiguity that may frustrate some. For most of the movie, these are not talkative characters; there is no music to telegraph what we are meant to feel. Further, writer-director Pelin Esmer, a former documentary filmmaker, favors long takes where we simply watch the characters behave. So the movie is apt to frustrate those who favor quicker pacing or clear resolutions. On the other hand, those who appreciate character-driven stories will find a thoughtful drama that sheds light on the changing roles of women in Turkish society (but in a conservative region).

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viewed 9/18/13 7:30 pm at Gershman [PFS screening] and posted 9/18/13

Short Term 12 (***1/2)

A group home for troubled teens is the primary setting for this unsensationalized drama. It tells the story of the staff members, not many years older than those they supervise, but concentrates most on two, Grace (Brie Larson) and Mason (John Gallagher Jr.), who have a relationship outside of work. And it tells the stories of a few of the teens, but mostly an anti-social girl (Kaitlyn Dever) who’s just arrived.

This is a bit of a tearjerker at times, but is optimistic in its view that difficult childhoods can be overcome. This is the view that Grace, who is senior among the supervisors, takes. She speaks with the compassion of someone who’s been there, as indeed she has. Yet she still struggles to overcome her own difficult past as she also deals with an unplanned pregnancy.

Short Term 12 shares its title and setting with a 2008 short by its writer-director, Destin Cretton. He tells the story like someone who, like Grace, has been there.

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viewed 9/25/13 7:15 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 9/25/13

Win Win (***1/2)

Thomas McCarthy’s thing seems to be scooping together unlikely strangers. In The Station Agent it was the loner title character, a gregarious hot dog vendor, and a depressed artist. In The Visitor, it was a depressed professor and a pair of illegal immigrants. Here, it’s Paul Giamatti and a runaway teenager. Giamatti’s character here is not depressed. He’s just been getting panic attacks lately, due no doubt to a struggling legal practice. He specializes in poor elderly clients. He and his wife (Amy Ryan) have a family to support.

And it’s these circumstances that lead him into some shaky ethical territory as well as into the path of the young man who might also be able to help out with the inept high school wrestling team he also coaches. (Jeffrey Tambor plays his assistant.) In his other two films, McCarthy carves paths of connection for his lonely male main characters. This one, on the other hand, plays out the main character’s internal struggles, not only about his treatment of a client with mild dementia (Burt Young) but also about how to deal with the unexpected arrival of the man’s grandson.

McCarthy handles this with a lot of humor, deft plotting, and a minimum of preachiness. Anyone who liked his other movies should like this one too, but the pacing is probably a little faster. It has strong characters and good acting—wrestler-turned-actor (Alex Shaffer) gives off a nice laid-back vibe as the young man who quietly seethes with anger toward the mother he ran away from. Bobby Cannavale, The Station Agent’s extroverted snack-cart vendor, plays a more suburbanized version of the same character. The men get most of the screen time, but Melanie Lynskey’s fairly brief role as the mother allows her a lot of range. Yet the film is not as self-conscious a character study as The Station Agent or The Visitor, and so might appeal to a wider audience.


IMDB link

viewed 4/27/11 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 5/3/11

Breakfast with Scot (***)

You could program an interesting film festival centered around stories of people getting saddled with other people’s unwanted children and learning to love them. They come as arty as Central Station and as mainstream as kid comedy The Game Plan. This movie comes in arty trappings—it’s about two gay guys, and it’s Canadian—but is actually pretty mainstream, and broadly comedic. The star is Tom Cavanaugh, onetime star of TV’s Ed, here playing a onetime Toronto Maple Leafs star who plays down his sexuality. He’s what the personal ads call “straight acting.”

The eleven-year-old orphan he ends up with (a creditable Noah Bernett), on the other hand, is more the get-beat-up-on the schoolyard sort of gay. He likes make-up and clothes, not so much hockey. He’s so gay that you wonder exactly why he hasn’t already learned to tone it down just for self-preservation. Even in liberal Toronto, trying to kiss your male classmate doesn’t fly. The sexuality of Cavanaugh’s character, on the other hand, is so toned down that you can hardly believe he actually, you know, sleeps with men. (Costar Ben Shenkman doesn’t have much to do, since there’s no focus on their relationship.) Still, his niche in the gay world—out, but as quietly as possible—is common enough. He is actually a perfect stand-in for straight people watching the movie, and much of the humor comes from this. The reaction to his new ward is exactly what I’d expect from most straight parents—embarrassment followed by attempts at reform (of the boy, not the parent).

The drama is about when the boy’s ne’er-do-well guardian will come to get him, and what will happen then, and everything there’s what you’d expect. If the subject matter (handled extremely chastely) and overly earnest ending aren’t deterrents, this actually makes a decent family film.

IMDB link

viewed 7/18/08 at at Prince Music Theater (Philadelphia Gay and Lesbian Film Festival) and reviewed 7/19/08

Jellyfish (***)

This is one of those films with several storylines that intersect in small ways, united in this case by a wedding in Tel Aviv. Despite the Israeli setting, the movie is neither political nor, for the most part, particular to its setting. One character is a struggling waitress working for a caterer and living in an apartment with a leaking roof. Having lost a boyfriend, she finds a lost child by the sea. Another story concerns newlyweds who seem to be on different wavelengths, which could be the theme of all the stories. The third plotline is about a Philippine home health aide whose communication problems are quite literal. (She speaks English, but very little Hebrew.)

I enjoyed this while I was watching it, but it seemed wispy and insubstantial, kind of an indie version of a feel-good movie, with a sort of poetic ending.

IMDB link

viewed 6/19/08 (Ritz Bourse); reviewed 6/23/08

The Game Plan (***)

A narcissistic football star learns to love someone else when a bright-eyed eight-year-old shows up at his door and says she’s his daughter. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson follows the path of other action heroes by trying to broaden his audience with a family comedy. He’s Joe “The King” Kingman, who fancies himself the Elvis of football and keeps a self-portrait on the wall. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop, or Vin Deisel in (ugh) The Pacifier, the King is a reluctant caretaker. Obviously, that will change, but meanwhile, at least, the fart jokes are kept to a minimum and the characters are recognizably human. Joe actually knows hows how to cook and appears to have seen children before, although he’d just as soon not. Meanwhile, the daughter (Disney Channel star Madison Pettis) is as precocious as every other movie child, but quite often seems like a real one. (Johnson is also a better actor than his mesomorphic brethren.)

The ending gets treacly, for sure, but the kids won’t mind. This may not be a movie adults will seek out on their own, but it’s at least one they can take the kids to without feeling embarrassed, bored, or ripped off.

IMDB link

reviewed 9/30/07

Tsotsi (***1/4)

This year’s foreign-language Oscar-winner is a gritty, realistic urban story of a thug who finds himself with someone else’s baby.

This is only the second of the foreign-language Oscar nominees to open in Philadelphia. (Two others will shortly follow.) With its win last Sunday, the release is rather timely. Tsotsi (translated as “thug” in the movie) is based on the only novel by celebrated South African playwright Athol Fugard. Writer-director Gavin Hood has deftly reset the novel, written during apartheid’s rise, in modern Soweto and Johannesburg. Presley Chweneyagae has the title role of a gangster who finds himself taking care of someone else’s baby. The movie doesn’t shy away from showing Tsotsi’s brutal side, or the environment that hardened him. As Hood has pointed out, the essence of the story, the gangsta with a heart of gold, could have been set in Philadelphia, or the Rio of City of God, or almost any large city. Even so, two particularly South African things stand out. One is the music, mostly an African rap hybrid with songs by Zola, who has a supporting role as a rival gang leader in the film. The other is the language. Even though you’ll need the subtitles, the dialect is a fascinating mélange of tribal languages and English. If there’s a flaw, it’s that the change we see in Tsotsi happens too fast. Even so, the portrayals by Chweneyagae and the other actors (especially those who play the baby’s parents) are first rate, and Hood renders Fugard’s story with subtlety and precision.

IMDb link

posted 9/10/13