Eyes Wide Open, Heart on Hold

As we wilt from the summer heat, a cool autumn breeze flows through the cinematic community by way of the major film festivals that have announced the movies they will showcase. The 71st Venice International Film Festival takes place from August 27th to 6th September 2014; the 39th annual 2014 Toronto Film Festival takes place September 4 to the 14^th; and the 52nd New York Film Festival follows on September 26 to October 12th.

Michael Keaton in Birdman - Willem Dafoe in Pasolini - Isaac & Chastain in A Most Violent Year 

Just reading the titles, directors, actors and topics covered by the films showcased in these festival gives us film lovers the air we need to make it through the doldrums produced by the summer blockbusters!  The films are a little tilted towards parading famous late forty to early seventy year old male actors, but otherwise, there seems to be a bit every type of genre lover.  Here’s a taste of the goodies (we hope) to come:

Title	Director	Featuring	Plot
Big Eyes	Tim Burton	Amy Adams, Christopher Waltz, Jason Schwartzman	The story of painter Margaret Keane
Pasolini	Abel Ferrara	Willem Dafoe	A look at the final days of director Pier Paolo Pasolini
Inherent Vice	Paul Thomas Anderson	Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Benicio del Toro	The investigation of a former girlfriend.
Miss Julie	Liv Ullman	Colin Farrell and Jessica Chastain	Adaptation of the Strindberg play
The Equalizer	Antoine Fuqua	Denzel Washington	Kidnap drama
Birdman	Alejandro González Iñárritu	Michael Keaton	An actor who once played a superhero mounts a Broadway play
A Most Violent Year	JC Chandor	Oscar Isaacs, Jessica Chastain, David Oyelowo	Thriller set in NY in 1981.
A Little Chaos	Alan Rickman	Alan Rickman, Kate Winslet and Stanley Tucci	Period piece about King Louis XIV
The Reach	Jean-Baptiste Léonetti	Michael Douglas	A thriller about a ruthless businessman who tries to cover up a homicide while on safari
The Drop	Michaël R. Roskam	James Gandolfini, Tom Hardy and Noomi Rapace	A robbery gone awry and entwined with the past of a neighborhood
The Humbling	Barry Levinson	Al Pacino, Greta Gerwig	Relationship between an aged, suicidal actor and a younger woman
Time Out of Mind	Oren Moverman	Richard Gere	A homeless, drunken man tries to reconnect with his daughter
Love & Mercy	Bill Polhad	Paul Dano	A Beach Boys biopic
Good Kill	Andrew Niccol	Ethan Hawke, January Jones	A soldier questioning his work dispatching drones to Afghanistan
This Is Where I Leave You	Shawn Levi	Rose Byrne, Jason Bateman	A husband juggling bereavement and infidelity
The Judge	David Dobkin	Robert Downey Jr., Robert Duval	A man trying to clear his father of a homicide
Black and White	Mike Binder	Kevin Costner and Octavia Spencer	A custody battle over their grandson
Nightcrawler	Dan Gilroy	Jake Gyllenhaal	A crime drama set in LA
Pawn Sacrifice	Edward Zwick	Live Schreiber, Peter Sarsgaard, Tobey Maguire	A movie about chess master Bobby Fischer
While We’re Young	Noah Baumbach	Ben Stiller, Amanda Syefried	A documentary filmmaker and his wife who befriend a younger couple
The Theory of Everything	James Marsh	Eddie Redmayne	A Stephen Hawking biopic
The Imitation Game	Morten Tyldum	Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley	A biopic about enigma code breaker Alan Turin
Samba	Olivier Nakache	Charlotte Gainsbourgh	Senegal
Men, Women and Children	Jason Reitman	Adam Sandler and Emma Thompson	A sexually frustrated father
Still Alice	Richard Glatzer	Julianne Moore and Kristen Stewart	A movie dealing with early onset Alzheimer’s
Cake	Daniel Barnz	Anna Kendrick and Jennifer Aniston	A chronic pain support group
Mangelhorn	David Gordon Green	Al Pacino	A locksmith and love
Trash	Stephen Daldry	Martin Sheen, Rooney Mara	Set in the third world, three children discover something in a garbage dump.
Fury	David Ayer	Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf	World war II
Into the Woods	Rob Marshall	Johnny Depp, Emily Blunt	A witch
Unbroken	Angelina Jolie (written by Joel and Ethan Coen)	Jack O’Connell	Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner who was taken prisoner by Japanese forces during World War II.
Far from the Madding Crowd	Thomas Vinterberg	Thomas Hardy, David Nichols	Remake of 1967 movie
Gone Girl	David Fincher	Ben Affleck	Based on the best-selling crime novel

Pacino in The Humbling and Manglehorn

Endless Journey

It’s really not difficult to understand why movies that deal with abysmal social and economic inequalities take place in a dystopian future and are surrounded by fantasy. Would a billion dollar industry as happily question its own if this wasn't the case? And who would pay to see what is easily and increasingly visible in our own backyard?

Snowpiercer is a movie that joins a growing number of sci-fi films that address the power and privilege of the extremely wealthy at the expense of the many lost in a day-to-day struggle for survival within their grim and violent lives. It is more Elysium, Brazil or Soylent Green in its darkness and graphic violence than The Hunger Games, but the story is the same: the “revolutionary” born of despair and deprivation, in this case Curtis, surprisingly well played by an unrecognizable Chris Evans (none other than he who played Captain America) and his quest for social justice. In most cases, the anti-hero is overpowered by the inhumane system, unless it is a PG13 movie in which case the heroine succeeds, but still at an enormous cost.

Chris Evans, Luke Pasqualino, Ah-sung Ko in Snowpiercer

They may be science fiction, but these are cautionary tales for those willing to listen. Snowpiercer takes it one step further because it adds the environmental warning to that of social injustice. In our despair to address global warming, the film tells us, humans have engineered a planetary catastrophe that creates a second ice age and the only human survivors that aren't frozen to death are trapped on a train that has also been engineered to never stop moving.

The fact that this implausible story grasps our attention and creates an enormous amount of breath-holding tension is due to the very skilled directing of Bong Joon-ho. This is the South Korean director’s first English language film, but he is known to American audiences for two of his eleven films, The Host and Mother. A light director he is not.

The movie is based on a French graphic novel called Le Transperceneige. The human survivors on the train are divided according to class, with the very poor living in nightmarish squalor and violence in the back of the train and, many, many carriages away, in the front live the privileged few in all their wealthy excess.

The amazing set design is part of what glues us to the screen, but only because we are also held there by the actors in this film. Chris Evans, we've already mentioned, holds his own as he purposefully leads the charge to take the engine room, carriage by bloody carriage. He is joined by a remarkable Tilda Swinton, the spokesperson for the very wealthy, who to the teeth and accent reminds us of another voice of the rich, Dame Margaret Thatcher.  Interesting to note that in Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium the “keeper of the rich” is also a woman, Delacourt, played by Jodie Foster. Evans and Swinton are joined by John Hurt, Jamie Bell, Ed Harris, Go Ah-sung, Kang-ho Sung, Octavia Spencer, all noteworthy actors who take us for the nightmarish ride on this ghastly train.

Tilda Swinton - Jodie Foster

I sometimes find it hard to recommend such a movie as this because it is not a pleasant film to watch, in this case also because of the violence, but, as always, more so because we are able to recognize that we are seeing a thinly veiled representation, masked in science fiction, of a very real and growing global divide between the very wealthy and the despairing poor. This movie is not easy to walk away from untouched. Neither was Terry Gillliam’s Brazil in 1985, Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green back in 1973, or Fritz Lang’s Metropolis way back in 1927. Are we forever trapped in this never ending tale of woe?

 

Brazil - Metropolis

So Far from Heaven

Summer can be wearing at times. The heat, the humidity, the days that linger bright into night and, to the chagrin of a movie lover, blockbuster season at the theatres. Because movies are both art and industry, there is no season like summer for the tumultuous special effects, pounding scores and repetitive plots of blockbusters to drown out the best of the seventh art. Fortunately and almost magically we come across a film like Ida at the three-dollar-Thursday show at our small local theatre. Ida’s quiet beauty is like a fresh breath of air in the muggy summer heat, it’s a film that reminds us why we love this art form.

Agata Kulesza and Agata Trzebuchowska

Ida is shot in beautiful grey, black and white by Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski, with two women actors, a generation apart, both Agatas by name that are simply amazing in their art. This is a movie that is both a simple and straightforward narrative, while constituting one of the most painful and comprehensive examinations of Polish history of the previous century that one can find.

The film is set in 1962 and the recreation of the time period is so wonderful in its detail, in the frames and color used, that it feels like a film made that year. It is the story of Anna, a young woman raised in a Catholic orphanage and convent who decides to take her vows. Before she does, she is told she has a living relative, an aunt, whom she is sent to meet before becoming a nun. It is thus that she meets Wanda, a high ranking member of the communist party. The two women are apparent polar opposites in every way possible, but joined by a past that they journey towards together. Anna discovers not only that she is Jewish, but she also comes into contact with basically the worst and the best the world outside the convent holds.

The movie addresses many themes. Like life, there is no one issue facing these women. Tormented by her past, Wanda a former “believer”, in her case in the religion that can be a political ideology, has drugged herself into not feeling only to be awakened by the vision of her niece who, as a young woman, resembles her lost sister. Anna, sheltered by the life in the convent and held together by her religious beliefs, also awakens to life, a family, a history and the enigmatic presence of her aunt.

Pawlikowski was born in Poland and lived there until he was 14, so he has the memories of life in communist Poland, which is something clearly reflected in this film, although since he’s lived abroad and settled in Britain. He began as a documentary filmmaker and this is probably why his style has a lot of the observer in it, while containing so much emotionality. He has won awards for his documentary films From Moscow to Pietushki about Russian writer Venedikt Erofeev,  Dostoevsky's Travels about the only living descendant of Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the more successful  Serbian Epics, made at the height of the Bosnian War, among others. He has moved on to fiction and is the director of Last Resort, My Summer of Love and The Woman in the Fifth, starring Kristin Scott Thomas. Ida has already won many awards, including the Best Film Award at the London Film Festival and the International Critics Award at the Toronto International Film Festival.

It is certainly exciting to see a film that like poetry, says so much without speaking a lot. Like with Wes Anderson’s Film The Grand Budapest Hotel (commented on earlier in this blog, see The Amazing Wes Anderson), we find another filmmaker that creatively experiments with his frames, sets and shots; and, while with less flair than Anderson, has us glued to every image. Unlike Anderson, however, Pawlikowski fills us with the feeling of his characters, their horror, their grief, their unmitigated pain. So the artistic experience is complete. We walk out of the quietness that has filled the screen, somewhat changed by the coldness that has chilled our hearts back into the bright and hot daylight of a summer night.

Bon Appétit!

There is a delicious movie out there called Chef by the ever more vital director Jon Favreau. The movie is much more than just another comedy. It’s one of those increasingly rare movies that really has a heart to it. The plot is simple enough, a chef in search of his creative independence who, in the process of finding it, also discovers the significance of his relationships. But it is told with gusto and vitality.

Favreau is showing that he is a multi-faceted director with quite an interesting voice all his own. He is the director behind two of the Iron Man movies (in which he also plays the part of Happy Hogan), as well as the director of two younger children’s films that have quite a following: Zathura: A Space Adventure, and the delightful comedy on its way to becoming a Christmas classic Elf. His is an enticing voice, always youthful and humorous, but, as he shows in this movie more than in the previous ones he’s directed, a voice that connects with the everyday person and is capable of communicating depth of feeling very well.

Jon Favreau and Emjay Anthony in Chef

The movie, though, will probably also remain in your mind for the amazing and scrumptiously well photographed food it presents. During the movie one only wishes that instead of popcorn and a diet soda, we held a Cubano and a cerveza! Thus Chef joins some very fascinating films that make food a central character to the film, a key element of the plot and constitute a friendly reminder that food can and should be a celebration, a part of life and connections; something of an art and also something of a passion.

Two other films come to mind that fold food into the story in this way: Babette’s Feast and Eat, Drink, Man, Woman. There certainly are others, including Julie and Julia, Mostly Martha (remade in the US as No Reservations), Big Night, Chocolat, Ratatouille, Like Water for Chocolate, but none as majestic and well-made as the two I want to write about.

Babette's Feast

Babette’s Feast was made in 1987 by Danish director Gabriel Axel. It is the story of a small and very austere protestant community in Denmark of the 19^th century, where Babette, a Catholic and a foreigner, is taken in as a servant by two sisters that have devoted all their lives to caring for their father. Babette comes upon some good fortune and decides to prepare a dinner for members of the church, who are re-awakened to a world of pleasures, friendship and connections through food.

Eat, Drink, Man, Woman

Yin shi nan nu or Eat, Drink, Man, Woman in English, comes from a vastly different culture and deals with very different time period and subject matter. This film was made in 1994 by the now very famous Taiwanese director Ang Lee, who has gone on to win many awards for his great films, like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain, The Ice Storm, The Life of Pi and others. This one is a little more like Chef in that it deals with a senior chef in a famous Taiwanese restaurant, a widower who lives with his three grown daughters. It is through the elaborate Sunday dinners that he cooks for his girls that he feels he can connect to them and hopes he can hold on to them, only to have to face the changes that come with a new generation and young women at a moment when they are blossoming.

All three films are beautifully shot and the food presented in them is truly mouthwatering.  But what connects the three is that they present unambitious yet complex plots about real and profound relations (none of them romantic, really) in which food takes on the special role that it has in many cultures and families.

It is easy to forget that our relationships, like good food, take time, passion and a loving hand to cultivate, more so in this our fast-food world of social-media-deep acquaintances. Thank heavens for these beautiful, unambitious yet deliciously good films that remind us what life and living is really all about!