Dom Hemingway (***)

The title character is not, as one might imagine, a wayward Italian cousin of Ernest Hemingway, but a wayward Cockney ex-con with anger issues and an oozing id. Not content to hunt down the man who took up with his wife while he was in prison, he also mouths off, hilariously, to the Russian crime boss who has the money he’s been owed for a dozen years. In the opening scene, spittle flows from his mouth as he spews a profane ode to his own member, and that is not the only scene in which that organ enters the plot. It’s a rather different role for Jude Law, who is entirely convincing as someone who might beat you if crossed. And, although he has a way with words — he’ll “gut you with a dull cheese knife and sing Gilbert and Sullivan while I do it” — he’s not really charming. Not unless it’s charming to compare one’s one face to an abortion, as Dom does after one of the scrapes he gets into in the course of the several days the film covers.
 

This not-so-charming personality and his well-crafted dialogue — courtesy of director Richard Shepherd (The Matador) — are the primary appeal of the film, which cannot quite be called a thriller. Dom’s attempts to reconcile with his understandably estranged daughter (Emilia Clarke) do not measurably humanize the character, and the plot overly relies on coincidence and, I think, one big plot hole, namely why Dom is not re-arrested for severely beating a man before numerous witnesses within half a day of being released. 

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viewed 4/8/14 7:30 pm at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and posted 4/10/14

Vic + Flo Saw a Bear (***) [screening]

Some people might call this movie quirky, like its title, but I think it’s merely unusual. First off, not many movies are about a 61-year-old woman, let alone one who’s an ex-convict like Vic(toria) (Pierrette Robitaille). Not many movies are set in rural Québec, where Vic has come to stay at a cabin owned by her now-paralyzed uncle. And writer-director Denis Côté brings a kind of deadpan sensibility to his film, composing the story as a series of vignettes, skipping forward a few days or a few minutes. Typical is the way we learn about Flo (Romane Bohringer), Vic’s younger girlfriend. After showing a lonely Vic crying, Côté cuts to a shot of a blanket on a bed. Behind the blanket we hear two voices, but don’t see either woman.

Maybe that’s a little quirky. But there’s a sincerity as well as we follow the two women trying to shed the past, but not necessarily with the same goals. The past follows them both; for Vic, it’s in the form of a parole officer who periodically visits. I didn’t like everything about this movie, including the left-turn ending, or how little we learn about Vic’s past. The presence of paralyzed uncle seems barely to fit with the rest of the story. But it was never boring.

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viewed 10/26/13 4:50 pm at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival screening]

Fruitvale Station (***1/4)

I’m never sure whether knowing that a story in a movie is true should change my evaluation of it. And it is true that Oscar Grant (Michael B. Jordan) was shot by a Bay Area Rapid Transit officer on New Year’s Day, 2009. That scene begins the movie, but this isn’t a docudrama; it summarizes the aftermath of the shooting (trial, riots, protests) in an on-screen crawl at the end. Most of the story takes place in the preceding 24 hours and tells not of a killing, but of a 22-year-old Oakland man in transition. He is a loving father to a four-year-old girl, whose mother (Melonie Diaz) he has thoughts of marrying, and a loving son to his mother (Octavia Spencer), whom he thoughtfully texts on her birthday. But he’s also cheated on her and sold drugs. The new year will be a chance to make a start, but it is chance that puts him in harm’s way.

A movie about a character trying to change can seem trite if the character succeeds. The movie can make it seem too easy. An unhappy ending can seem fatalistic. If the ending here were fiction, it might seem melodramatic. Race and class are an obvious subtext to the killing, and certainly were central to how it was perceived, but the movie doesn’t make any direct statement about that. Instead, it’s structured in the way a mystery might be. What saves the ending from seeming like too much is not that it is true, but the way the events in the movie lead to Grant’s being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And the solid characterization by the writer-director, Ryan Coogler, making his feature debut.

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viewed 9/4 7:20 pm at Ritz Bourse

The Angels’ Share (***1/4)

“Comedic” is not  a word one would generally apply to the films of Ken Loach, whose films spotlight the struggles of working-class Britain (or Los Angeles, in the case of 1999’s Bread and Roses). Like Sweet 16 (but with older teens), the setting here is (primarily) Glasgow, and, like that movie, it’s helpfully subtitled. The variety of English is both distinctively accented and filled with delightfully unfamiliar lingo, and that’s even before the plot’s oddest and most unique element, which is its central character’s newfound interest in high-end whiskey, comes up.

Why, it’s just like Sideways, if instead of California wine snobs the central characters were a Scottish trying-to-reform teen thug and his “community payback”-serving friends. He has a family vendetta against him, a newborn son, and a scar on his face that further dims his job prospects, yet this film is indeed a comedy. Its sympathies lie, as always with Loach, with the underdogs, and he has collaborated with his frequent screenwriting partner Paul Laverty (who also wrote Sweet Sixteen), yet the approach is a touch lighter, more likely to appeal to a mainstream sensibility, especially the second half, wherein the group of friends embarks on an unlikely caper. And, yes, some of it is pretty funny.

IMDb link

viewed 3/21/2013 7:30 pm at Gershman Y [PFS screening] and reviewed 3/22–4/28/13

The Intouchables (***)

Americans may see European films as rather arty by nature, but that’s probably because we don’t get to see many of the mainstream ones, and mainstream moviegoers wouldn’t watch them if we did. Which is too bad, in this case, because this is a pretty good mainstream film. Sure, any story about a poor black kid bonding with a rich white dude, a handicapped one yet, is already bordering on cliché, and is ripe for emotional manipulation, even if it’s set in Paris, and even, or especially, if it’s a true story. (Kind of—the actually poor kid was Algerian, although, in the context of France, it doesn’t matter that much.)

 

Driss (Omar Sy) is the poor kid, an ex-con who’s only applying for a job so he’ll be able to collect public assistance. Phillippe (François Cluzet) is the paralyzed aristocrat in need of someone to help dress and bath him. When Driss says his references are Kool and the Gang and Earth, Wind, and Fire, Phillippe misses the joke. When Phillippe refers to the composer Berlioz, Driss only knows it as the name of a housing project. But he likes that Driss won’t treat him like damaged goods. And so, Driss gets to stay, and slowly ingratiates himself into the household, though not into the undergarments of Phillipe’s redheaded assistant. And, of course, becomes a better person.

 

Was the real Driss hired without the barest of background checks or even discussion? I don’t know, but suspect not. Some of the other events seem telegraphed, but the characters seem genuine. The humor does too. It’s a formulaic picture (though not a tearjerker, as one might expect), but one well executed. At least, French audiences, who made it the second most popular domestic release of all time, thought so. Pity it will never play in the multiplexes where, were it in English, it might find a ready audience looking for a feel-good comedy-drama.

IMDb link

viewed 4/26/12 7:30 at Rtiz east [PFS screening] and reviewed 4/27/12 and 6/3/12

A Somewhat Gentle Man (**3/4)

The story of an ex-con is usually the one about whether he’s going to go straight or not, but there’s a lot of ways to tell it. This Norwegian one tells it as a lightly humorous, low-key drama, with the versatile Stellan Skarsgård as the title character. He is a changed—yes, gentler—man after 12 years in prison, and only a few scenes even suggest that the change was a struggle. But his old crime boss tells him they’ve found “him,” and something must be done. Meanwhile, the boss—a big asshole with a mistreated flunky sidekick rather than a Godfather-type crime lord—gets him a place to live, and a job at an auto body place. He tries to reconnect with a son who hasn’t seen him in many years.

There’s a lot to like about the storytelling here, but not a lot of dramatic tension. There’s something too easy about the way the plot all falls into place, like the convenient relationship with the chubby landlady, complete with one of the most comically awkward seduction scenes you’ll have seen. Or the receptionist at the garage says she hates ex-cons so emphatically that it’s obvious she’ll change her mind. The ending is reasonably satisfying. This is Skarsgård’s third collaboration with its director, Hans Peter Moland. The last one was a better English-language film, Aberdeen.

IMDB link

viewed 2/8/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/9–14/11

Night Catches Us (***)

Ang Lee’s brilliant film The Ice Storm eyed the osmotic flow of counterculture values into suburban America, and Sidney Lumet’s Running on Empty followed 1960s radicals still on the run almost 20 years later. Tanya Hamilton’s film, set in 1976, revolves around former Black Panther Marcus (Anthony Mackie), who returns to his former home in West Philadelphia when his father dies. There he finds varying reactions—a brother resenting his disappearance, a fellow Panther calling him “snitch,” and a friend and lawyer (Kerry Washington) offering to assist. Washington’s character, who defends Panthers but seems no longer to have her heart in the movement, is a widow who deflects her daughter’s questions about the past.

The best thing about the film is its portrayal of the era, although clearly the low budget prevented better known songs from being used. (The Roots contribute a score, however.) The Panther movement as portrayed has devolved into a vestige of itself, its leaders imprisoned, as Marcus was, or mellowed out, as he is, its remaining followers without an agenda other than nihilism. Mostly white cops patrol the middle-class neighborhood with little attempt to integrate themselves into its fabric. It is an era of decline in old cities like Philadelphia.

Hamilton paces the film deliberately, holding back on revealing the circumstances by which Marcus wound up in prison, and how his former colleague was killed. Meanwhile, the presence of Marcus forces the young mother into her own kind of self-examination. I might have wished for there to be more about the Panther movement and what it meant to these characters and what it meant to the United States. Nonetheless, I appreciated the movie’s lack of an agenda in depicting this fading bit of history.

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viewed 12/24/10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 12/27/10

I've Loved You So Long (***1/2)

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10th and Wolf (**3/4)

? A mobster’s son (James Marsden), dishonorably discharged from the Marines, is forced by circumstances to re-enter the world he’d tried to escape. Brian Dennehy plays a Philly cop who offers him a chance to avoid jail and protect his brother (Brad Renfro) and cousin (Giovanni Ribisi), who’s angling to control the local sin trade. The story largely revolves around this struggle for control and Marsden’s efforts to get his cousin’s rival on tape for the cops.

+ The brisk-moving story has a couple of surprises and kept me interested. Renfro is effective as Marsden’s loyal, simple brother, and Piper Perabo is all right as a childhood friend with whom Marsden gets reacquainted.

- This was the follow-up to Crash for its co-writer, Bobby Moresco, who makes his directorial debut here. But if Crash arguably suffered from an excess of self-importance, this could use some of that Oscar-winning film’s heft. Once the plot has placed the main character back on the street, Moresco mostly forgets about what made him want to escape that lifestyle. You expect the flashback scenes to explain some of this, but they really don’t. The film hits all the usual mob film touchstones—there’s misguided loyalty, there’s a trigger-happy nut (Ribisi), there a big showdown, and so forth. But it never coalesces into something richer like Goodfellas or The Godfather. Leslie Ann Warren’s character, the mother/aunt of the principals, is mostly superfluous. And if you’re going to have PT Transit buses obviously visible and have pivotal scenes take place at Wholey’s seafood market in Pittsburgh’s Strip District, why not just set the film there? The movie has the feel of being set in a somewhat smaller city, anyway. Watching this, I had the idea that the whole Philadelphia mob consisted of about half a dozen guys. (It’d be nice if that were true.)

= **3/4 If you’ve seen other mob movies, there’s nothing you haven’t seen before. But if you like mob movies, the lack of originality might not bother you.

IMDb link

After Innocence (**3/4)

A documentary focusing on men who’ve been wrongfully imprisoned. Shot as a series of human-interest stories, it might have been more involving with a sharper focus on the process that led to the unfortunate outcomes.

This is one of four limited-release documentaries (counting the performance film Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic) that opened on the same weekend in Philadelphia. The second favorite film in April’s Philadelphia Film Festival (another documentary, Mad Hot Ballroom, beat it by a step), it tells the story of several “exonerees,” wrongly convicted men who spent years or even decades in prison before new DNA evidence (or in one case, a confession) led to their being freed. Given the title, it makes sense it that it’s mostly the men talking about their adjustment after prison. (There’s no narration.) Still, getting sent to prison for crimes—mostly involving rape, which yields DNA evidence—they didn’t commit is probably the most interesting thing that will ever happen to any of them. I couldn’t help but wish there was more detail about the crimes themselves and the legal process that led to the unfortunate outcomes. A more in-depth focus on a few of the men might have yielded more insights into how things like this happen, and what practical steps can be taken to improve things. I’d also have wanted more screen time for Innocence Project founders Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, who pinpoint misidentification by witnesses as the common element in most of these cases. There is a Philly angle to this film, as two of those profiled are local, and a proposed bill to compensate Pennsylvania exonerees and expunge their records is given some attention. [As of 2009, it does not appear that the bill was passed.]

IMDB link

viewed at 12/?/05 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 12/5/05

Ushpizin (***)

This has the apparent distinction of being the first feature made in Israel’s extreme Orthodox (Hasidic) community. In one sense, this semi-comic tale’s no more about Hasidic Jews than The Legend of Zorro is “about” 1850s Californians. However, the unfamiliarity of the setting will make it a primer on this culture for most viewers. The actual (mostly true) story is about a holiday that brings a poor Hasidic couple both a seemingly miraculous gift and some ex-convict houseguests who test their faith. [The Q&A with director Giddi Dar after the screening I saw was as interesting as the film. Star Shuli Rand, who also wrote the script, had been a well-known actor who’d retired upon becoming Ultra-Orthodox and only agreed to act again because the story could be filmed where he lived using community members as the cast, and his actual wife playing that role in the movie. As the essence of the story is universal, it became a big hit in Israel with both secular and religious audiences, with the Hasidim resorting to bootleg DVDs, since they would not go to ordinary, non-sex-segregated theaters.]

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circulated via email 11/3/05 and posted 10/18/13

Tough Guys (***)

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