Village Vidiot

  “Gravity,” May 25, 2014 (2013), DVD.  We both enjoyed this space thriller that would have played better in the theater than on our ‘tiny’ screen. A medical researcher (Sandra Bullock) and a mission pilot (George Clooney) are adrift and struggle to survive when their space vehicle and fellow crew members are wiped out by…

“The Funeral,” March 10, 2014 (1984), DVD.   This 1984 work was Juzo Itami’s first film as a director and writer He is better known for his comedies “Tampopo” and “A Taxing Woman”. I enjoyed the former and found the latter boring. Narrated by the son-in-law, the film follows the funeral of a curmudgeonly older man…

  “The Lion in Winter,” March 8, 2014 (1968), DVD.   I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I never saw this remarkable piece of film Despite their age differences, Peter O’Toole as Henry II (nominated for best actor) and Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine (she won the Oscar for best actress) play brilliantly together in…

“The Way, Way Back,” March 3, 2014, (2013) DVD.  I’m not entirely sure why this movie got the absolute rave reviews it did from most critics Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the film; but it is a bit less than I hope for from a really good film The movie chronicles the summer vacation…

  March 1, 2014, (2013) theater. We really enjoyed this look into America’s Abscam scandal. Excellent acting from everyone: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Renner, Jennifer Lawrence, Louis CK, with a wonderful uncredited bit from Robert DeNiro. They got the style (blech!), the music, and the faux glamour right in this story of…

  “The Act of Killing,” February 27, 2014 (2012), DVD, Director’s Cut.    This is a surreal, fascinating and horrifying look at the gangsters who murdered 25 million communists, dissidents, bystanders, and citizens of Chinese ancestry in Indonesia in 1965. Acting as paramilitaries, they slaughtered men, women, and children with impunity. But this documentary follows…

“Blue Jasmine,” February 26, 2014 (2013), DVD, home. Woody Allen’s best film in two decades. This “Streetcar” for our time chronicles the collapse of Jeannette/Jasmine—a brilliant, Oscar-worthy performance from Kate Blanchett–from N Y socialite to SF psychotic and homeless woman with the fall of her corrupt financier husband – Alec Baldwin. A fascinating flip on…

“And Everything is Going Fine,” February 21, 2014, DVD.  Spalding Gray was a storyteller; this is Steven Soderbergh’s thoughtful reconstruction of Spalding Gray’s life and self. It is a non-narrative, low-key, documentary bio that looks at his stage life, his family background, and his creation of a self built around theater and his semi-autobiographical, candid,…

  “Gueros,” February 15, 2016 (2014), DVD.    Tomas is the fair-skinned adolescent son of a single mother in Veracruz. That matters as in Mexico he is denounced as a pale one or “guero,” (although I can’t get the umlaut over the u), a slur that suggests he’s not a real Mexicano. She just can’t…

“Stories We Tell,” November 15, 2013, home DVD.  Sarah Polley (director of the fine “Away From Her”) choreographs and directs this look at her own family.  Interviews and memoir readings with  her father, interviews with her brothers and sisters, home movies of her late mother and her friends, and home movie-like reenactments filmed by Polley…

“Django Unchained,” September 15 2013, home DVD.  There are three movies in this Quentin Tarantino written/directed film about a freed slave (Jamie Foxx) who becomes a bounty-hunter along with his German liberator, Christoph Waltz in a brilliant turn. They work together killing white folk for the money and then go off to ‘rescue’ Django’s wife,…

“Take Out,” July 15, 2013, (2004), DVD (Montreal).   This is a slow and fascinating look at a Chinese delivery man who is desperate to raise money on one day to pay the man who smuggled him into the US. Very much a neo-realist film in the tradition of DiSica, it follows him as he pedals…

  “Intouchables,” July 15, 2013 (2011), DVD (Montreal).   We both really enjoyed this based-on-a-true-story of a quadriplegic French aristocrat and the street-wise African immigrant helper he hires as a personal aid. Warm, touching, funny, and only a little of the “Magic Negro”. In the end, much more about class and attitude than about race and…

“5 Broken Cameras,” May 17/18, 2013, DVD [2012]. Before writing this I should note that I have opposed the occupation of the West Bank since 1972, when I began to pay attention to those issues. I have opposed the settlements since they began. I still do. Emad Burnat is a Palestinian farmer whose West Bank…

    “The Bourne Legacy,” May 10, 2013, DVD [2012].   Tony Gilroy’s (director/writer) follow-up to the Bourne series, this one concentrates on the lone survivor of the CIA’s parallel, simultaneous operations designed to build “better” operatives but undone in part by Bourne’s survival. It takes Aaron Cross, a soldier modified virally to be s more…

“Flight,” April 26/29, 2013, DVD.  Tense and often painful story of a pilot, Whip Whitaker (very well-played by Denzel Washington-Oscar nomination), with some major substance abuse problems who saves the vast majority of his flight in a terrible crash but must nonetheless answer questions about his ‘condition’. Excellent supporting work from John Goodman (his drug…

  “Even the Rain,” (Spanish with subtitles), April 13, 2013 (2010), DVD.  We really liked this disturbing 2010 pairing of colonialism/neo-colonialism. A Spanish film crew comes to Bolivia (!) to make a movie about Columbus, the abuse of the indigenous peoples, their resistance, and the emergence of opponents among the guilty Spanish clerics. They go…

  “Amour,” March 17, 2013, theater.  We both really loved this Best Foreign Film Oscar winner from Michael Haneke (“The White Ribbon,”. “Cache”). What are the limits of love?. When is what we call love wrong and destructive?. Amazing acting from Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, Isabelle Huppert follows the crisis of love in action after…

March 8, 2013, DVD, home.  Yes, Jennifer Lawrence rocks as Tiffany and Bradley Cooper’s character. Pat starts well as the recently released, bi-polar dude off his meds but the rest of the film is less credible and it left me unsatisfied. The dark tension of the first hour evaporates into well done OCD tics from…

  “Ilo Ilo,” March 22, 2015 (2013), DVD.    This Singaporian film (Anthony Chen’s debut feature), is the first from that nation to win an award at Cannes (Camera D’Or). It is a lovely, unsentimental—but not cold—look at the relationship between a difficult 10-year old boy whose hardworking parents are not home (the Chinese title,…

  “Identity Thief,” February 16, 2013 , theater.  There is nothing remotely believable about this Justin Bateman-Melissa McCarthy comedy about a boring middle class accountant, Bateman, (the only accountant in the country paid 50k) whose identity is stolen by wacko sociopath, shopaholic McCarthy. He runs off to Florida to save his career in a cockamamie…

“Stranger Than Paradise,” February 10, 2013, DVD.  The 2004 sequel to the 1995 “Before Sunrise” about a young American man (Ethan Hawke) and French woman (Juliette Delpy) who meet in Vienna and spend one long day and night together before she has to leave. He’s now a successful author on a book took in Paris…

“Cowboys and Aliens,” January 12, 2013 (2011), DVD.  Mixed iconography, wonderful computer graphics, great special effects and stunts in this 2011 Spielbergian drama with Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford. I really liked it, despite myself. In the end, the Apache are right, the white man’s lust for gold brought the aliens, but they all join…

  “Tower Heist,” December 29, 2012 (2011), on demand.  We enjoyed this comedy with Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, Matthew Broderick,. Casey Affleck, and Alan Alda about a group of workers and former workers in a NYC apartment who work to get their money back after Alda’s Charles Shaw steals their life savings in a Ponzi…

“Monsieur Lazhar,” 26 October 2012 (2011), DVD (in French with subtitles.)  Based on a one-man stage play, this movie by Phillipe Falardieu (director and writer) places a grieving man at the center of a class trying to cope with the terrible death of their teacher. Bachir Lazhar, an Algerian refugee, arrives with his own history…