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Rent This Movie: RED

RED

In Red, a small thriller about a small town man seeking justice against three teenage boys who shot and killed his beloved dog, Brian Cox gives one of the year’s mightiest performances. This is the kind of movie that would have appealed to George C. Scott, and like Scott, Cox holds his emotions close to his chest, which makes the moment of revelation all the more moving. In mid-film, Cox’s character tells a new friend about the tragedy that ruined his family years ago. It’s a beautifully written speech (by Stephen Susco, from a novel by Jack Ketchum) that goes on for some six minutes, and when it’s over you’re likely to think, as I did, that Brian Cox has never had, and my never have again, six finer minutes of screen time. In small packages, great treasures sometimes lie. (Chuck Wilson)

Rent This Movie:LARS AND THE REAL GIRL

         

LARS AND THE REAL GIRL

       Lars Lindstrom (Ryan Gosling), 27, is so shy that when his pregnant sister-in-law, Karin (Emily Mortimer), knocks on his door to invite him to breakfast, he doesn’t greet her, he hides. Nervously, like a man avoiding a certified letter from the IRS, Lars stands at the edge of his front window, peeking out, clearly hoping she’ll give up and walk away. But Karin, who lives mere steps from the converted garage into which Lars moved when his older brother Gus (Paul Schneider) brought home his bride, knows that Lars is in there, so she holds her ground. Reluctantly, Lars goes to the door. He goes because he’s as polite as he is shy, and because he understands that Karin is the best person he (or Gus) will ever know. Like the mother who died when he was born, who lives on in his mind, Karin is full to bursting with loving hopes for Lars. It is Karin’s insistence that the Lindstrom brothers have fuller, better selves hiding within that drives this funny and wonderfully human new comedy.

     What happened to make Lars so people averse? One of the beauties of Nancy Oliver’s pitch perfect, Oscar-nominated screenplay — her first, after having written episodes of Six Feet Under — is that the sources of Lars’ pain are never explicitly explained. He doesn’t have a third act summing-up speech. His mother died, leaving Lars with a father who wasn’t so nice. Or maybe he was. Gus and Lars have differing opinions on that, a note of contention that feels true to how family stories play out; one son’s hero is another son’s adversary. Either way, Lars is wary of the world. It hurts him, literally, to be touched, a fact no one appears to know, and which may be why he’s so reluctant to open the door to Karin (she’s a hugger), or accept the attentions of Margo (Kelli Garner), the beautifully plain co-worker who keeps throwing herself at Lars, who goes online instead and buys himself a lover — a life-sized, anatomically correct doll (in hot pants) named Bianca.

Too proper to actually sleep with his new mate, Lars, who’s suddenly become quite verbose, asks Karin and Gus if Bianca can sleep in their spare room, a request they’re too stunned to deny. Bianca the blow-up doll moves in, Lars starts grinning, and on the advice of the local doctor (Patricia Clarkson) — who just happens to have a psychotherapy degree — Karin, Gus and eventually the entire town (a very small one) is playing along, pretending, for Lars sake, that Bianca is an actual person, one in need of patience, affection, and twice-daily wardrobe changes.

       If this were a Will Ferrell or Ben Stiller movie, Bianca might inspire American Pie style sexual antics, but director Craig Gillespie’s broadest comic stroke comes early on, when Lars abruptly disposes of a carnation he’s supposed to be giving to poor Margo, who looks dismayed but not surprised that her would-be lothario is clueless about girls and flowers. Once Bianca arrives, Gillespie relies for laughs on the disbelieving faces of those who meet her, particularly Gus, whose comic freak-out slowly turns to anger as he realizes that he’s being forced to go along with pure irrationality. Gradually, weirdness gives way to everyday routine — Bianca at the dinner table, Bianca being tucked in at night — and Gus’s dismay tilts toward sadness, one born of grief for his unhinged brother, and guilt at having failed him. Lars and the Real Girl is the story of Lars waking up to life’s possibilities, but I think the fuller and more interesting journey belongs to Gus, who is first amused and then haunted by a question Lars asks him in the kitchen one day, out of the blue: “How did you know you were a man?”

       This may be a question brothers never stop asking one another — brothers are forever on the seesaw together — and watching Gus process Lars’ query really got to me. All things revolve around Lars, but Gus is the secret heart of this movie. He's low-key and ordinary — a rarity in movies — and deeply in love with his wife. If Gus were the exact same guy at the end of this movie as he’d been at the film’s beginning, well, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. But he isn’t. The presence of Lars presses Gus to think about their father, and though this is never stated outright, he's thinking too about the kind of father he himself will soon be. “How did you know you were a man?” Lars asked, and trying to figure out his own answer to that question triggers a momentary fissure in Gus. He breaks, and then — in the loving space provided by Karin, who saw the moment coming — he reconfigures himself, as brother, husband, and father-to-be. In a film that’s all about people taking small turns toward grace, Gus’ internal shift forward is the sweetest of all. (Chuck Wilson)

for Jordan   

RENT THIS MOVIE: "The Matador"

THE MATADOR

In a Mexico City hotel bar, killer-for-hire Julian Noble (Pierce Brosnan), who’s better at whacking strangers than talking to them, offends and later charms business traveler Danny Wright (Greg Kinnear), a decent man whose smile doesn’t quite mask the pain he feels over the death of his son. At the bullfights the next day, the two men share a mini-adventure, then Danny heads home to Denver to tell his wife (Hope Davis, transplendent, as ever) about the crazy hit man he met, only to have Julian knock on their door a few months later. “I need your help in facilitating a fatality,” Julian admits, and what follows is a long, beautifully played night of booze and stories—one of my favorite scenes in recent film—as Julian cinches Danny’s help in one last, crazy hit. As imagined by writer-director Richard Shepard, Julian is James Bond gone awry — crude, drunken, freaked — and Brosnan, who has, as both producer and actor (he’s both here), a keen eye for a great script (last year's Seraphim Falls is superb), grabs hold of the character like a man who’s glimpsed divinity. Yet, charms aside, Julian remains a cold-blooded killer; if we care about him, it’s because Danny cares. And maybe Brosnan is so shockingly good in this film because Kinnear gives him the sounding board and safety net that the actor never had in his sadly solitary spy flick duties. Destined to forever be regarded as the nice guy, the underrated Kinnear proves himself a great listener — an all-too-rare acting skill that rarely earns awards or blurbs. He’d make a great bartender. (Chuck Wilson)

RENT THIS MOVIE: "Brothers of the Head" (2005)

              

BROTHERS OF THE HEAD

In the mid 1970s, British twin brothers Tom and Barry Howe, who were born conjoined at mid-torso, became unlikely punk stars after being discovered by an impresario in need of a new gimmick. Drugs, debauchery and tragedy followed, but if the Howes’ tale doesn’t sound familiar, that’s because it never happened. Yes, this is another faux rock documentary, but one so dramatically and visually textured that it reinvents that decidedly worn genre. Co-directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, who made Lost in La Mancha, the terrific documentary about filmmaker Terry Gilliam, have joined with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (28 Days Later) and art director Patrick Rolfe to create richly detailed “found” footage, shot in the ratty English country house where the Howe boys (played by gifted newcomers — and real-life brothers — Harry and Luke Treadaway) were groomed for stardom by a motley group of handlers. A quarter century later, those who knew the guys back then are looking back, trying to fathom the moment when the brothers became authentic, fury-fueled artists. Although screenwriter Tony Grisoni is working from a 1977 novel by sci-fi master Brian Aldiss (who has a cameo), Brothers of the Head seems at first to be a wink-wink movie joke, with legendary director Ken Russell (Women in Love) appearing as himself to discuss the never-completed feature he tried to make about the Howes, full scenes from which are actually  included here. But gradually, as Tom Howe falls in love with a visiting woman journalist, the film's tone shifts, and the psycho-sexual dynamics between the brothers grows dense and dark and complicated and also disturbingly resonant, as one realizes that Tom and Barry’s central dilemma isn't their conjoined limbs but the horrible inescapabiliy of blood ties. Family kills faster than the body. This is a great film, strange and sexy and funny and three years after release, completely haunting. If ever a movie deserved a cult film resurrection, it's Brothers of the Head. (CW)

RENT THIS MOVIE: "Spring Forward"

                         

SPRING FORWARD

Conversation may be a dying art, but you can’t tell it from Murph (Ned Beatty) and Paul (Liev Schreiber), who never shut up. Paul keeps cussing, which pisses Murph off, though he’s more patient with Paul’s immaturity than most men would be. They’ve been partnered up as workmen for the Parks and Recreation Department of a small Connecticut town, which means they pick up overturned trash in the park and repair the rusting manger of the town’s Christmas Nativity scene. Truthfully, they don’t seem to do much work at all; they mostly just talk. About sex and death and what God wants and whether Wal-Mart is a good thing or a bad thing and about the new notions of what it is to be a man that Paul is picking up from male-empowerment books. While Paul is beginning his life again after a short prison stint, Murph is nearing retirement, so writer-director Tom Gilroy, making his film debut, has structured the movie to play against the changing seasons of Murph’s last year as a workingman. Remarkably, Spring Forward was shot in sequence over the course of an entire year, all of it taking place outdoors in the parks and woods Murph and Paul tend. In one marvelous scene, the guys sit at a park table and share a joint, and as their talk gains the silly profundity of a good high, the sunlight on their faces grows dark and then light again as the clouds above, heedless of the film being shot below, pass in front of the sun, temporarily blocking the light. Another director might have re-shot, but Gilroy and cinematographer Terry Stacey were probably thrilled that nature was adding its own texture. And somewhere in that picnic table exchange, the men pause in their talk, and Murph scrunches his chin into his hand and takes a deep breath, gazing up into the trees, where the wind is rustling autumn leaves. With that pause, Gilroy allows the film itself to breathe a little too, as do those of us watching, and then the conversation resumes. Because in real life, but not so often in movies, people don’t talk all the time. Sometimes — and Ned Beatty is the absolute master of this — people stop talking and stare at their feet or stare out at nothing in particular and consider what they’ve been hearing or let their mind travel to some distant point in the past that’s been re-ignited by conversation. Great actors tend to say in interviews that good acting is all about listening, which must be true, for rarely have two actors listened to each other as intently as Beatty and Schreiber. Spending a year acting opposite and listening to Ned Beatty must have been an astonishing experience for Liev Schreiber, and it’s that sense of parallel learning — of Schreiber coming into his own as an actor beside Beatty, just as Paul grows into a man while standing alongside Murph — that gives Spring Forward a resonance that is moving beyond all measure. (Chuck Wilson)

                

Rent This Movie: "Jump Tomorrow" (2001)

                            

In writer-director Joel Hopkins’ terrific 2001 comedy, Jump Tomorrow, Nigerian-born George (Tunde Adebimpe) is on the road to Niagara Falls where he is to marry his childhood sweetheart, a marriage arranged by their two families long ago. Along the way George meets and falls instantly in love with Alicia (Natalia Verbeke), a beautiful young woman of Spanish descent, who is also engaged to another. The two do not speak the same language, literally, and one of the running jokes of the film becomes that George’s Spanish language skills keep improving, credit for which must go not to the Learn-While-U-Drive language tapes he recites in the car, but to love itself. George is so smitten, so besotted with thoughts of Alicia that by film’s end he is fluent in her native tongue, as if the sight, sound and proximity of her has loosened a knot inside him, an energy which finds release in the rounded sensuality of that most delicious of languages.

That’s as much plot as you need to figure out how this story will resolve itself, yet even those practiced in the ways of romantic comedy won’t be prepared for the vitality and inventiveness Hopkins brings to the genre. Maybe the mistake we humans make in our real-life pursuit of love is in concentrating so much on plot and not on sensibility. Gifted movie directors—and there are as few of them as there are gifted lovers—bring a definitive, yet indefinable something to their work, a way of observing the world and interpreting it that has more to do with feeling than intellect. Jump Tomorrow asks:  How should a love story feel? Today’s pre-fab studio comedies teach us that a great love must make sense in the end, but Hopkins seems content to let it be stand as a wry and ultimately puzzling state of being, and why not, for where’s the fun in solving life’s best mystery?

George’s head keeps vibrating from left to right, as if there’s a marble rolling around in there he can’t quite catch. His head moves but his body doesn't. It resists. George, who is wonderfully tall, is bound up in a nice gray suit, his tie well knotted, his cuffs straight; he’s the perfect potential son-in-law, dutiful, kind, half-asleep. Eventually, the tie comes off and George, who’s been secretly practicing in front of mirrors, willing his body to loosen up, dances with Alicia, and as with his burgeoning Spanish language skills, he moves with her instinctively, matching his curves to hers, his body having finally found its voice.

But what of Alicia? At first, she appears to be one of those man-changing movie women who know everything there is to know about life and love, if only the poor dumb lug would realize it. Alicia is engaged to Nathan (James Wilby), who's a bit of an ass (the director falters here; his film would more tougher and more compelling if Alicia were being forced to choose between two equally interesting men). Still, she could marry Nathan and not necessarily be miserable. After all, most love stories, in life and in movies, aren’t love stories at all, they’re tales of accommodation and compromise. In other words, people settle, and that’s not always a sad story. The world must move along, and let’s face it, few of us bump into a stranger on the street and hear bells.

Alicia’s bell sounds only once, and thankfully, she takes heed. As the movie gods have preordained, she and George do end up together, standing, literally, side by side, and one of the things I love about this film is that they’re sort of frozen at the end. Having at last arrived in the same moment, they don’t have any idea what to do next. One or the other will have to make the first move, and chances are, like the great comic lovers of old, they’ll both make the same move at the very same time. And so it will go, on and on, until, hopefully, they’ll reach that vast accumulation of moments we all come to, there to find that they’ve lived full, felt lives. Maybe that’s what great lovers do, onscreen and off — they keep each other awake; a nudge here, a nudge there, one small gesture following another. 

-Chuck Wilson