Critic’s Pick

Critic’s Pick: ‘Nebraska’

November 26, 2013 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Dern, Forte in black and white (Photo Credit Paramount Pictures)

In Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska,” Bruce Dern reveals flesh, bone, even DNA, and the kind of screen wisdom built on years of experience, good and bad. It’s a performance that may very well pit him against another sage actor of the same age come Oscar time.

At the center of Bob Nelson’s subtle, funny-sad script is Woody Grant (Dern), a disappointing and disappointed Midwestern father on a quixotic mission to redeem a dubious lottery ticket. The septuagenarian travels from Montana to the Cornhusker State despite the disapproval of his bristly wife Kate (a tartly perfect June Squibb), and with his reluctant son David at the wheel. Along the way, in dribs and drabs, switchbacks and a lost set of dentures, Woody reclaims his dignity and reaffirms the core values of America without waving a single flag.

Dern, At 77, born during the Great Depression in the same year as “All is Lost’s” rugged Robert Redford, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was reelected president, gives the transcendent performance of a very long career that began with playing an uncredited local in Elia Kazan’s Montgomery Clift drama “Wild River.” The man has been around — and won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival last Spring for playing Woody.

It’s as if everything Dern has ever seen, every lesson he’s ever learned (or unlearned), and all the guidance of Payne, who told the actor “don’t show us anything, Bruce, let us find it,” has culminated in this performance, this comic Cornhusker Don Quixote. At his side is Forte, who has flipped the switch from comedy to drama with a still, soulful-eyed performance. And Squibb creates the signature moment of her career when Kate visits her hometown cemetery and lifts her skirt in front of a long-dead high school suitor to show she still has game.

In iconic black and white, the brilliant, empathetic Payne (“Sideways”) delivers another fully realized road movie – and Oscar contender. It’s a homecoming for the Omaha native that drives deep into America’s heartland, and the heart of a single fly-over family, the Grants. The funny-sad film starts shaggy as Woody wanders along the blistered side of a Montana highway on a ridiculous odyssey to his home state, then achieves a deeply moving finish with the realization that sometimes what we want is small potatoes, not millions, a newish truck, and the look of respect, even love, in the eyes of an estranged son.

Bottom Line: Visit “Nebraska” and the great state of Alexander Payne

Critic’s Pick: ‘Ain’t Them Bodies Saints’

August 27, 2013 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Mara, Affleck: they’re no superheroes

Must-See Movies Beyond the Blockbusters

Like a bastard love child of Terrence Malick and Robert Altman, David Lowery’s crime drama shuffles to its own drummer. Either you dance to it or you can skip away, but the latter would be a mistake in an era of cookie cutter genre pics.

The story could easily be framed in a Country ballad or a Bruce Springsteen song: Ruth (Rooney Mara) and Bob (Casey Affleck) have known each other since their youth, and loved each other for nearly ever. When their armed robbery gets messy, Bob takes the rap, goes to prison and misses their first child’s birth. Now he’ll do anything to reunite – even break out of prison – but there’s a soft-spoken sheriff, Patrick (Ben Foster), sitting lovelorn at Ruth’s front door to keep that from happening.

A love triangle wrapped in a backwoods thriller set in 1970’s Texas, “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” is beautiful to look at in every frame (that’s the Malick golden light, swaying grain influence). The characters are American iconoclasts (cue Altman) chewing their way toward a fate that’s nearly predestined. And, combining both, “Saints” takes its sweet time to hits its genre beats because getting there is everything the movie is about.

Until “Saints,” I never understood Mara. Everything about her was miscast for “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” except for her slim form. Here, she has the beauty of Ali McGraw, and a stubborn shyness that pulls away from the camera, forcing it to follow her. She’s almost always looking down, away, out of the frame, something that makes her both ethereal and at odds with contemporary look-at-me reality show culture. We want to see more because she shows so little.

On the other hand, I’ve always gotten Casey Affleck with his little brother bad boy act and he keeps the faith here. Between himself and Ben, Casey never had the matinee idol looks or the need to carry a tent pole. And so he’s spent his career seeking out some very interesting material: “Gone Baby Gone” with Ben directing, and the epic “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.” Affleck is wiry, and his voice squeaks and tightens with emotions, but he’s completely convincing.

Foster brings a burning intensity to everything he does, but the standout, we-could-watch-him forever is lanky Altman alum Keith Carradine (“Nashville”). The taut scene between Carradine’s foster father figure and jail-breaker Bob, where the older man warns the younger to stay away from Ruth has a standalone quality. Both actors are so in the moment that the world outside the theater falls away.

Sure, the title is just awful and should have been tossed – it has a pretentious, twangy sound that just doesn’t stick. But what’s memorable is the movie’s sense of grace for its star-crossed characters scratching the dirt for a bit of redemption, and shelter from the brewing storm.

Bottom Line: ‘Ain’t Them Bodies Saints?’ Yes!
Watch the trailer:

Critic’s Pick: ‘Only God Forgives’

July 19, 2013 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Must-See Movies Beyond the Blockbusters

We’ve all heard the stories of the Cannes Film Festival audience booing the premiere of “Only God Forgives,” Nicolas Winding Refn’s first film after “Drive” with Ryan Gosling back front and center. Not very forgiving, huh?

Those who are less judgmental, or less enamored of the sentimentality of “Drive” — and “Bronson” die-hards — will know to lower their expectations and see what strange, stylized crime drama the Danish director is serving up this time.

“Only God Forgives” is not “Drive 2” even if America’s sexiest curmudgeon stars. Gosling may don the wife-beater and bloody his fists — and the spoken language is most frequently English — but this is definitely a foreign film.

The plot could hardly be simpler: Gosling plays Julian, a Bangkok black-marketeer. One steamy night, after a hard day working in the underworld, Julian’s older brother Billy (Englishman Tom Burke) picks up a hooker, then brutally murders her in a tawdry hotel room.

Enter slice-n-dice policeman Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), not one to let white devils pull this crap on his turf. Chang ensures Billy won’t pull that stunt again. Ever.

Before long, the boys’ bloody mama, Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas) arrives. The dead-ringer for Donatella Versace has traveled 8,000 miles from the U.S. to retrieve her elder son’s body and avenge his death, while inflaming Julian’s Oedipus Complex.

This can’t end well. And it doesn’t.

In a mad turn of casting against type, Scott Thomas electrifies, trash talking with a broad American accent in the kind of mean matriarch role that delivered Jacki Weaver an Oscar nomination for “Animal Kingdom.” Gosling does his very, very, very slow burn – and then pops. And Pansringarm’s cop, who occasionally pauses the action to sing, lounge style, to his colleagues, is a standout for the actor’s quietly coiled coolness.

Punctuated with raw humor and rancid violence, “Only God Forgives” presents an atmospheric Asian crime tableau bursting with of arresting set pieces. In one torture scene set in a fancy bordello where Chang uses an associate of Billy and Julian for a pin cushion, it’s the images of the elegant prostitutes with their perfect make-up and hair closing their eyes to the violence at Chang’s insistence that tattoo themselves on the viewers retinas. Plot, what plot?

Cannes audiences may be less forgiving than God, but Refn’s divisive martial arts movie digs in to its own stylish groove abetted by a killer performance from the queen of British period restraint, Scott Thomas.

Bottom Line: Refn and Gosling “Drive” off a genre cliff and Scott Thomas is there to catch them

Critic’s Pick: ‘The Bling Ring’

July 11, 2013 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Must-See Movies Beyond the Blockbusters
Emma Watson in 'The Bling Ring'

Love her or hate her, Sofia Coppola has cornered the market on the world of privilege and its discontents. And so it goes with the writer-director’s latest movie, “The Bling Ring,” based on a Vanity Fair true-crime-in-the-Hollywood-Hills article. The film, in limited release this weekend focuses on a celebrity-obsessed Bonnie and Bonnie and Bonnie and Bonnie and Clyde gang that robs from the rich – Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Orlando Bloom – and lines their own Prada pockets.

Led by relative newcomers Katie Chung and lush-lipped Israel Broussard, the high school heist comedy benefits from low expectations. Think a dark teen comedy in the tradition of “Mean Girls” and “Heathers.” Both Broussard and Chung are delightfully decent as ringleaders Marc and Rebecca, but the film’s focus frequently shifts to supporting player Emma Watson. In micro-minis, her head bobbling on her slender neck, Watson plays La-La lost girl Nicki, a child of divorce incompletely healed by the New Age platitudes of her mother (Leslie Mann). [Read more…]

Critic’s Pick: ‘A Hijacking’

July 9, 2013 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Must-See Movies Beyond the Blockbusters

Given the title is “A Hijacking,” when the film opens with a bearded teddy bear of a ship’s cook calling his wife and daughter back home in Denmark to say he’ll see them in a few days, we know Daddy’s not returning any time soon. And, faster than you can say three-egg omelet, Somali pirates with automatic weapons board the Danish cargo vessel in the Indian Ocean bound for Mumbai and hold it for ransom.

The initial strain lies in the crew’s fear and discomfort, as the captain succumbs to illness, the sanitary conditions deteriorate and Mikkel, the chef, (Pilou Asbaek) must learn to cook with a rifle pointed at his neck. The majority of the pirates speak neither Danish nor English, so the possibility of deadly miscommunication is tangible.

While up-and-coming Danish writer-director Tobias Lindhom (“R”) cranks up the tensions on board the MV Rozen, the hostage talks drive the narrative forward in intentionally frustrating fits and starts. The Somali negotiator Omar (Abdihakin Asgar) demands a $12 million ransom from the corporate owners. Meanwhile, back at HQ in Copenhagen, a hot-shot CEO named Peter (Soren Malling), high off a successful negotiation with the Japanese, steps in to dicker with the Somalis against the advice of specialists in the field. Peter makes an initial offer of $250,000.

While the drama functions with a thriller’s intensity, a cat-and-mouse game played with dollars and automatic weapons, it’s really a study in contrasts. On one end of the world in Scandinavia, stands the antiseptic cleanliness of the corporate offices. Peter is a control freak accustomed to knowing the rules of business negotiation – but when human capital is at stake he, too, begins to lose his grip. While the pirates can’t drag Peter physically out of his comfort zone of starched shirts and submissive underlings, they ultimately pull the legs out from under him psychologically.

As claustrophobic and chaotic as life on the ship becomes for the sympathetic Mikkel and the crew as days turn into weeks, weeks to months, the contrast between West and East becomes starker; between a world of economic abundance where seams are tidy and loose ends knitted, and the unstable impoverished society that spawned the pirates.

On one hand, this is a painstaking thriller about what happens when an act of piracy on a distant sea upsets the balance between East and West. On a larger level, as it shifts between the wealth evident in Denmark and the desperation reflected in the pirates’ behavior, “A Hijacking” raises the provocative question: Who is hijacking who?

Bottom Line: An intense true-life tale of piracy with no jolly Johnny Depp in sight.