Tag Archives: movies based on books

“Nuts!”

Nuts: a pejorative term indicating insanity; a slang word for testicles. In the case of “Nuts!”, it’s both.

nuts-documentary-1 J.R. Brinkley was a doctor in small town Kansas who, through the grace of his revolutionary goat-testicle transplant surgery, cured many men of impotence and infertility while bringing vitality and prosperity to the town. Brinkley had to build hospitals just to deal with the growing demand, and almost accidentally became a radio pioneer simultaneously, broadcasting ads for his services and answering write-in medical questions between blasts of good ole country music. Despite exponential interest and a horde of faithful followers, the American Medical Association accused Brinkley of “quackery.” Just as they set out to discredit him, he came out with an elixir just as 3suknzs_7ZdkkSzSTUmjXyzJGnOxJrFPD4GX9-ypnY4 (1) effective as the goat-testicle procedure but with much less risk. And then he ran for governor, with a slogan borrowed from a laxative commercial. True story.

How have you never before heard of this broadcasting maven and trailblazing doctor? Whatever the answer, Nuts! director Penny Lane will make sure you never forget him. Her mixed-media documentary uses his official biography as a jumping-off point, and whatever archival footage and modern day interviews can’t cover is brilliantly animated. And I do mean brilliantly: not only is the animation a perfect match for this strange and whimsical tale, it’s also impeccably timed and used judiciously. Different animators are nuts.0.0 used for each segment, but there’s a uniform style that injects a lot of kinetic energy into a story hilariously but dryly narrated. You won’t believe how quaint goat fucking can look.

Eventually the film moves from eyebrow-raising to downright subversive, with enough old-timey euphemisms for erections (or the lack thereof) to keep you in patter for your next hundred dinner parties. Lane has already shown herself to be a thoughtful and engaging filmmaker (Our Nixon) but with Nuts! she proves herself worthy of a Brinkley-esque empire. You can’t help but admire the way she weaves the story together; she examines what amounts to an American folk tale but she does it with modern tools that turn the story on its head. Penny Lane is her own brand of documentarian, and quite possibly on to becoming this generation’s best. Nuts! is not to be missed.

This post was first published over at Cinema Axis, where you can find lots more great Hot Docs coverage.

Tribeca: High-Rise

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High-Rise is the cinematic equivalent of a raisin muffin: it’s okay as long as you weren’t expecting chocolate chip. But why not have chocolate chip to begin with?

High-Rise-1-Glamour-16Mar16-pr_b The film’s biggest problem is that it took 40 years to convert J.G. Ballard’s novel of the same name into a movie. In the meantime, Snowpiercer happened and was a way more awesome movie than High-Rise, or really anything else ever.

It’s not just that Snowpiercer had better acting, writing or directing than High-Rise (though it did). High-Rise looks good but has a structural problem. Call me an optimist but I couldn’t accept High-Rise’s premise of an isolated lawless world developing inside a skyscraper, not when the outside world remained completely accessible to the building’s inhabitants. There’s no apocalypse event in High-Rise. The building’s main doors aren’t ever blocked. Mid-movie, a cop even pokes his head in to check whether things in the building are okay. But for reasons that aren’t at all clear, instead of calling 911 to report any of the murders, suicides or sanitation issues inside the building, the residents all choose to stay inside, ignore the dead bodies 2016_11_high_rise and garbage bags that line the halls, and scavenge for dog meat rather than drive to the nearest supermarket for hot dogs. That’s something that was impossible for me to swallow.

It’s too bad that conceptual problem is baked into High-Rise. I wanted to like the movie but I just couldn’t. Am I naive in thinking that people would take a bit of time between drunken orgies to leave the building and restock their snacks? I hope not, though the numerous food references in this review tell me I’m very hungry, yet instead of going upstairs to our kitchen I’m still here typing…

High-Rise is not a bad movie, but if you’ve seen Snowpiercer then High-Rise feels like a pale imitation. And if you haven’t seen Snowpiercer, what are you waiting for?

Tribeca: Hunt for the Wilderpeople

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Taika Waititi.

1449603737890 If you don’t know that name yet, stay right here while I get a nice wooden baseball bat to beat you over the head with. Don’t move, I’ll be right back.

Seriously, I talk obsessively about Waititi and his movies because I just adore them. He’s remained mostly under the radar with offbeat, cult hits like Boy and Eagle Vs Shark, which have made him famous in his native New Zealand but all but undiscovered over here in North America. WHICH IS A FRICKIN CRIME. ai_28310_aimedium

Last year his vampire mockumentary What We Do In The Shadows was a modest breakthrough that earned him some well-deserved and super duper overdue attention. It will also help that he’s had a hand in writing Disney’s upcoming animated film Moana and will direct Thor: Ragnarok, which will be his first budget exceeding $12.

But back to Hunt for the Wilderpeople, perhaps the best thing I saw at the Tribeca Film Festival and maybe the best thing Waititi’s done to date. He adapted it for the screen himself and as the film opens up, you immediately get the sense that it is a labour of love. The beautiful, lush New Zeala ai_28434_aimedium nd bush is on proud display in soaring shots that will give you serious travel envy. Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison) is a boy who’s had a run of bad luck with foster homes, and his child welfare worker is quick to give a laundry list of his transgressions. This doesn’t deter his determined newest foster mum Aunt Bella (Rima Te Wiata) but Uncle Hec (Sam Neill) is a lot more reticent and gruff. Their primitive way of life is a bit of a shock to gangster-wannabe Ricky, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg because soon events will have him and Uncle Hec running from the law and hiding out in the bush as an intensive manhunt for them is underway.

The movie becomes an odd-couple adventure with Waititi’s niche sensibility and loads of mass appeal. Seriously – who on this green earth could fail to be charmed by this movie? 506332228 For such an endearingly quirky comedy, it has no right being even half as beautifully shot as it is. There’s a gloss to the film thanks to some real cinematography that’s been missing from his previous work. A lot of care has gone into this film and the casting is just one easy example of how diligently the thing is put together. Sam Neill is an interesting choice and brings the right mix of gravelly loner bluntness and a secret longing for connection. But it’s Julian Dennison who will leave the largest impression. A kid actor can make or break your movie when he’s in a central role, but Dennison is a professional, easy and natural in front 1453595660563 of the camera. There’s pain behind his farcical behaviour, and in allowing us to see both, there’s real depth and emotional investment in the characters. Waititi, Rachel House, and Rhys Darby provide excellent supporting roles that’ll leave you cramped from laughter. Positively bruised from chuckling. It’s a new personal best for Waititi and a new sentimental favourite for me, but one that deserves its place among the very best movies of the year, period.

Tribeca: A Hologram for the King

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I have been on the Dave Eggers train since A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (it’s exactly that – you should read it) but over the years he’s proven he writes fiction just as well as non, a 13722902 nd so of course this book was immediately on my nightstand and then devoured into my brain and then shelved politely to await its fate. Little did it, or I, know that just a few years later it would be turned into a movie, prompting Sean to finally give it a read as well (don’t judge him too harshly, he’s mostly literate).

A Hologram for the King tells the story of Alan, a washed-up American businessman in Saudi Arabia trying to make a pitch to the king. This contract will save him from untold embarrassment; back home he has debt everywhere, a resume full of failures, and an oblivious daughter in an expensive college, with tuition due. But the king’s not biting. In fact, the king’s not even around, and this supercity he’s building is languishing in the desert. And poor Alan has nothing better to do, and no choice really, but to sit around and wait.

When Sean was done reading it, I decided to give it a re-read myself, because we both maxresdefault struggled to picture Hanks as Alan Clay. Alan is a loser. He’s beaten down by life, but not in Hanks’s usual sad-sack way. He was too pathetic. But Tom Hanks is not only starring, he’s producing, which means he really likes this project, and he knew what he was getting into.

Tom Tykwer wrote the screenplay and directed the movie, and he made some disappointing choices (he’s also responsible for both Cloud Atlas and Run Lola Run, so you decide whether the man’s a genius or a sadist). I’m too fond of the source material, and every time the film swerved away from it, I grimaced. And some of those edits were undoubtedly good. I just couldn’t give it a fair shake. Would I have enjoyed the movie more had I not read the book?

Tom Hanks is lovely here. This is maybe not as complex a character as his best work usually involves, and that’s kind of true of the movie as a whole: it’s just a little superficial. He plays an everyman – except Alan is actually supposed to be more of a tragic hero a la Death of a Salesman; this version of Alan feels watered down. And he’s supposed A-Hologram-for-the-King-6-600x422 to be a fish out of water – not just the cliched culture clash crap of an American abroad, but of an aging salesman with an old bag of tricks in a newfangled world of young, tech-minded colleagues. The world is shrinking, and moving quickly, and Alan is getting left behind. Movie Alan has more verve than Book Alan, which sounds like a strange thing to complain about, but the truth is, the world already had enough of these Alans. For a movie that could have been refreshingly unHollywood, it sure made some safe choices and went for the audience-friendly ending that smacks of missed opportunity.

Verdict: See it for Hanks, eventually, but you can probably skip the cinema.

Catch Me If You Can

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My first encounter with the life of Frank W. Abagnale, Jr. was accidental. I was about 5 or 6, poking around the house, when I came across a book cover that instantly imprinted on me: Catch Me

I didn’t read it then, because I couldn’t read a 50 page book before my short little attention span made me want to “look at” ants through a magnifying glass or something similarly fun. And I never ended up reading it at any time in the next three decades. It’s probably still sitting in my parents’ bookshelf, and as a kid I would have read it ten times over if I had just read a different page every time I picked it up instead of just looking at the creepy faceless man on the cover over and over again. But really, the cover was enough for me to draw my own conclusions about how this “amazing true story” turned out. And it was not until this week that I learned how wrong I was all these years.

My biggest mistake was thinking that this story centred around the fact that this guy actually had no face and that’s why he needed the pilot mask. Symbolism was lost on me then (and probably still is to this day). It turns out that this guy had a normal face, wrote a lot of bad cheques, and for some reason the key to his scheme was pretending to be a pilot.

I found that part of the story absolutely amazing. Most of all because I feel like it’s probably true. Pilots in the 1960s were gods among men. They were the paragon of success and reliability. So much so that a pilot’s uniform changed Frank Jr.’s cheque scams from fruitless endeavours to an avalanche of other peoples’ money. Can you imagine this happening today? It seems as likely as an apparently successful model taking a cheque in exchange for turning tricks. Which, as I learned, also happened in this true story.

Incidentally, that successful model was played by Jennifer Garner. Catch Me If You Can is full of soon-to-be-stars making cameos, including Amy Adams, Elizabeth Banks and Ellen Pompeo. Add Christopher Walken, Tom Hanks, Martin Sheen, and Leonardo DiCaprio, and you’ve got a pretty impressive cast. And the director, Steven Spielberg, is no slouch either.

Maybe all these young faces are the reason that watching Catch Me If You Can felt doubly nostalgic. As only a movie set in the good old days can, the movie puts a bright sunny face on $2.5 million worth of cheque fraud, where if you go big enough then inevitably the FBI will negotiate your release from prison so they can offer you a job. And those good old days now seem to be either the 1960s, when this movie is set, or the early 2000s, pre-financial crisis, when this movie was made.

Catch Me If You Can is an entertaining movie that remains enjoyable mainly because it fully embraces its ludicrous premise. If it took itself more seriously, it may still have worked in those good old days but by now probably would have lost its luster, as I think we are now too jaded to be charmed by ultra-rich assholes who think the rules don’t apply to them (with Donald Trump being an obvious and unfortunate exception).

But Spielberg and DiCaprio didn’t ask me to like Abagnale. Instead, they gave me a kid who figured out how to do one thing really well but who was terrible at every other aspect of life, a guy I almost felt sorry for, and that was a brilliant choice. Add Tom Hanks as an opponent/father figure who by the end of the movie sees right through Abagnale, and you get a movie I should have watched long before now, especially when it has been sitting on our DVD shelf since Jay and I moved in together. Things might have been different if the DVD cover had a man with no face – because then I would undoubtedly have picked it up long ago. That was Dreamworks’ one misstep.

Catch Me If You Can gets a score of nine giddy stewardesses out of ten.

O Brother Where Art Thou?

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Did you know that O Brother Where Art Thou? is an homage to/rip off of Homer’s Odyssey? Probably. Did you know that neither of the Coen brothers read the Odyssey before writing this movie? Probably not. Having not read the Odyssey myself, I can’t say how accurate the movie is, but when the songs are so toe-tappingly great (in a depression-era sort of way), any lingering concerns about literary accuracy quickly fade.

If you read our site even a little bit, you probably know we are big fans of the Coens. O Brother is the third Coen brothers film I ever saw (Barton Fink was the first, thoroughly confusing a o-brother-where-art-thou nd terrifying me at age 14, and Fargo was the second, and at age 20 I was not quite ready to embrace the weird mix of funny accents and wood-chipper gore). I remember finding O Brother much less creepy than Barton Fink and much easier to digest than Fargo (while also noticing that funny accents were featured in all three). In fact, I would give this movie most of the credit for making me track down other Coen brothers movies instead of writing them off as more of the same from the guys who were responsible for John Goodman and Peter Stormare stalking me in my nightmares. So thanks, O Brother, for being my gateway drug to The Big Lebowski, No Country for Old Men, Inside Llewyn Davis, Hail Caesar, and so many more!

Basically, if you haven’t seen O Brother, you should. It’s not necessarily a classic, and for my money it’s lingering somewhere in the o-brother middle of the pack for the Coens, but it’s a great appetizer for their other stuff. It’s also a fun standalone movie that has a fantastic soundtrack and a bunch of crazy characters doing strange things. And if you have seen it, why not see it again, if only to notice for the first time (like I just did) that frequent Coen collaborator John Turturro is one of O Brother’s main characters. Either way, you can’t lose!

O Brother gets a score of eight soggy bottoms out of ten.

Testament of Youth

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See Alicia Vikander before she was famous, Dominic West in his authentic accent, and Emily Watson being stellar as always in increasingly diminished roles.

Vera Brittain was a real-life independent spirit. She vied for and won a spot at Oxford and vowed “never to marry”, even if those sounded like famous last word when uttered just as a very cute boy enters the picture. Turns out, he has Testament-of-Youth_3141581k a thing for sharp and feisty young women, and the two are a love match and plan to be at Oxford at the same time (unchaperoned, even). But every great love story needs an obstacle and feminism wasn’t enough, so along came The Great War to shake things up.

Tag line: Divided by war. United by love. Did you just puke a little in your mouth? la-et-mn-testament-of-youth-review-20150605

Luckily the tagline writer was an aberration and the film itself is quite good. Vera’s mind expands and excels at Oxford, and no one is less grateful for her education than she. Women still have to prove themselves worthy of degrees and now she’s feeling left behind again, when her brother, her friends, and her love are all leaving for the front. But Vera’s not one to take a back seat – soon she’s giving up her beloved sc Alicia-Vikander-as_3141524b hool to become a nurse.

Vikander (who replaced Saoirse Ronan) is every bit the revelation that Ex Machina proved she was. She’s poised and luminous, and while the movie doesn’t contribute much that is new to the war genre, Vikander makes it more than worth a look.

Her The Danish Girl co-star, Eddie Redmayne, also starred in his own WW1 eddie epic, called Birdsong (based on the Faulks of the same name). He plays a young man who goes off to war remembering the affair he had with his French (married) sweetheart. Clemence Poesy is beautiful as ever, but this one may leave you feeling faintly unsatisfied.

How To Be Single

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The best thing about this movie was New York City. I love that city. I love it so much I can’t quite justify why I don’t live there, except then I couldn’t visit. 12339563_1534849863502185_4845266985900591715_o And boy do I visit. I hit that city like a hurricane of cash and I only leave when I’ve spent myself out. It sparkled in every nearly scene of this movie, which is more than I can say about the leads – Alison Brie, a total snore; Dakota Johnson, devoid of personality; Rebel Wilson against whom I am loathe to say a bad word except she’s working a shtick that’s tired and offensive (dear Hollywood producers, including Drew Barrymore, the name behind this particular mess: I have it on very good authority that it IS possible for a female to be fat and NOT obnoxious. I promise you it’s true!). I didn’t have a problem with Leslie Mann, resident old lady (seriously, it’s great that she’s game to play the crone opposite young actresses all the time, but let’s not put her in a box!), so of course she’s the Leslie-Mann-How-To-Be-Single-Movie-Poster least used of the four.

I think this is supposed to be a feminist rom-com, only without the rom, or the com. There’s nothing new here, and the notion that the feminist choice is between one boyfriend or many, is pretty insulting. The lesson taken from How To Be Single (besides consumerism and alcoholism) is either a) be rich enough to not need a man (and\or fat enough not to land one) or b) sleep with people you know you shouldn’t while pining over the guy YOU rejected and wallowing in self-pity and a bad haircut. Because how else will we women ever hang a picture or program our PVRs? I cannot recall laughing a single time during this movie, but I do 12370750_1534849806835524_1592610361207727068_o remember wincing in several spots – like when it quietly referenced a better movie about female empowerment. If this was an attempt to be ‘different’ it was a very, very conservative effort while still relying on heaps of familiar tropes and situations (ie, how did all the guys I’m sleeping with end up at the same party???).

And it’s too bad. Because in the time I was briefly single, I felt happy and alive. And maybe some of that was leaving a bad marriage, but the free Alison-Brie-How-To-Be-Single-Movie-Poster dom tasted sweet and the possibilities felt truly exhilarating. I was tingly feeling genuinely awake and I embraced being happy on my own. And I was. Very. And then I met Sean and became very happy with him. In fact, he made me unsingle five years ago this Saturday and I am plump with satisfaction. It is extremely gratifying to go through life with someone who gets you and wants the best for you. But I was happy being on my own, truly happy, and I wasn’t missing anything. And I certainly wasn’t missing this movie in my life, and neither are you. Not even a little.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl

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The eponymous teenage girl (Bel Powley), aka Minnie, loses her virginity to her mother’s boyfriend, Monroe (Kristen Wiig/Alexander Skarsgard) – don’t worry, they “aren’t possessive.” Obviously that should not have been the only obstacle, and she knows this isn’t ideal, but in her words, she’s ugly, and who knows how many offers will come her way.

So this isn’t one of those easily watchable movies, it’s not “enjoyable” or “comfortable.” It’s awkward in the ‘He only sleeps with my Mom or she’d suspect something’ kind of way that rings true for those of us who put up with our mother’s creepy boyfriends in our own childhoods, but true in the way that we’ve buried way down deep and aren’t anxious to revisit.

Don’t worry, the awkwardness doesn’t end there – anyone for random cartoon penises? Our heroine isn’t exactly likeable – relatable, maybe, but self-involved like any teenager, won’t stop talking about herself, only we don’t have the luxury of sending her to her room. And in a movie about a young girl being bedded by her mother’s boyfriend, she shouldn’t be the villain. And, okay, she’s not: Skarsgard’s 1970s mustache is, but my sympathy for her ran short.

Don’t get me wrong – on the whole, I’m still liking this film. It’s bold and unconventional, frank and non-judgemental, which, given the topic, is refreshing. Bel Powley is self-possessed, mixing sexual, spiritual and artistic awakening confidently. Kristen Wiig shows a lot of restraint in her role from the back seat. And writer\director Marielle Heller bravely bears witness without passing judgment – but it’ll make you squirm.

That’s the point, I guess. The diary of any teenage girl would make you squirm. I kept a diary myself – luckily not as a teenager (that was my poetry writing period, which, believe me, is worse) but as a little girl. It’s silver and has a unicorn on the front and stickers of Joey McIntyre from The New Kids on the Block, aka, my former future husband, littering the inside covers. The sickly-sweet pink pages feature lots of my extra-large loopy handwriting talking about boys, recess, how wonderful I was, and what a rotten cook my mother was, and would always be. Cringe-worthy stuff. Reminds me of a documentary I watched a while back called Mortified Nation – a series of events across North America where people stand at a microphone and read embarrassing excerpts from childhood diaries. Audiences laugh warmly along with the reader, who through some form of catharsis realizes that whatever mortifying inner thoughts we had as a tortured teenager, most were pretty commonly shared. And in a way it’s nice to look back on a time when we were young and innocent and everything was fresh and exciting, and we were self-absorbed enough to wallow in it, and to write it down for posterity, as if anyone would care.

Did you keep a diary in your youth? Is it filled with sexual transgressions? Does it tell of a wild and misspent youth? Are you embarrassed? Would you stand up and read it aloud to a room full of strangers?

…

Would you print an excerpt from it in the comments?

I Smile Back

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I Smile Back is tough to watch from the start, and it only gets worse. It tells the story of Laney (Sarah Silverman), a housewife struggling with “drugs and daddy issues”, whose primary question of her therapist is, “which do you want to talk about first?” Laney is married with two young children, so her apparent drug and sex addictions are significant problems for a whole number of reasons.

I am by far the least qualified asshole to diagnose Laney, being the only one who’s not a mental health professional. But since Jay’s in a pain and morphine-induced haze right now, and Matt hasn’t seen the movie, you get stuck with me as your tour guide! So here we go.

First, the easy part. Silverman is excellent in the lead role, and is well-deserving of the acclaim she has received so far (nominated for a SAG Award for Best Actress). I found her very believable as a woman who loves her family and truly wants to be part of it despite struggling with all sorts of stuff. That Silverman is so good makes the movie all that more difficult to watch.

Beyond that, it gets much tougher. Because of how difficult the movie is to watch, looking at I Smile Back critically is very hard for me. I did not like watching it but I know I was never supposed to. Nothing that happens in Laney’s life gives us a lot of hope that things are going to get better, and the movie does not end on a happy note (in fact, at the end things are at their very bleakest). Silverman has made us care about Laney by then. I wanted Laney to get better and repair her relationship with her husband Bruce (Josh Charles), so I was hoping for a typical Hollywood ending.

Suffice to say, I did not get a happy ending, and after reflection I think that was the right decision by writers Paige Dylan and Amy Koppelman (the latter of whom wrote the book on which the movie is based). But something still was missing, and after staring at this computer screen for a while, I think I have put my finger on it. In a meta sense, the movie is worthwhile because it gives Silverman the chance to show a whole other dimension to her acting. But within the movie itself, I Smile Back didn’t give me anything meaningful.

The only meaning I can find within the movie is that anyone may be struggling with mental health and it’s not easy to recover even if he or she really wants to. And while that’s something I agree with, it’s something I already felt coming in and the story in I Smile Back really didn’t go beyond that basic notion. Everything in the movie was consistent with that idea but it felt like we were on a fixed path because of it. Looking back, almost all the characters we meet other than Laney are primarily plot devices to give Laney a chance to make another bad decision, and she rarely misses the opportunity. The opportunity that feels missed is on the part of the writers, who rather than fleshing out characters or situations, just keep things moving by giving Laney more chances to do bad things. Because of that, I never felt that seeing these awful things happen onscreen was worth the pain. I never felt any payoff for my discomfort within the movie and I needed there to be something.

Overall, this movie was worth checking out for Silverman’s performance but it’s really not great otherwise. I give it a score of six out of ten.