Movie Nation

He’s one of the most distinct character actor presences in movies, which is why we see that doggoned Jeff Goldblum in so many of them — two at once, as of this weekend.

He’s the solicitor whose will-reading runs afoul of nefariously-inclined heirs in “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” Wes Anderson’s latest. And he’s the published author and former college classmate of Jim Broadbent in the corrosive marriage-going-wrong-in-Paris drama “Le Week-End,” a burst of bubbly, Goldblummy fresh air in the film’s third act.

And then there’s the TV. Oh yes, the TV. Sorry, you write about Goldblum you start imitating his cadences, the distinctive rhythms of his speech. He’s the bespectacled, whimsical counterpart of Christopher Walken. Impressionists love him.

Questions for JG? Please post them in the comments below, and thanks for the help.

It’s heartening to see that even at 70, Catherine Deneuve still warrants tailor-made star vehicles in the French cinema. It’s even more amazing that this striking actress can still command the screen in a film comprised mostly of close-ups of her gorgeous face.
“On My Way” is a breezy little romance, an overlong “French Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” that has Deneuve playing a one-time beauty queen on the run from her troubles on the lovely back roads criss-crossing rural Brittany.
Bettie is a widow who has a small restaurant in the town where she grew up. She fusses over customers and keeps her staff on its toes. But when she goes home, we see she lives with her aged mother. We learn that her longtime paramour, a married man, has finally left his wife — but for another woman, not her. She’s being hassled by the Miss France beauty pageant organizers to come to a reunion, forced to revisit her better looking past.
And it’s all just a bit too much. If nothing else, she needs a cigarette. But in this corner of convenience-store-free France, on a Sunday, that’s a problem. Bettie takes off in her aged Mercedes station wagon on a cross-France odyssey, looking for smokes, stumbling into bars (and a drunken one-night stand who exclaims, “You must’ve been stunning!”), dodging some failures and finally facing up to others.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” a singer croons from the radio, in English. “I don’t know where I’m going.” If Bettie speaks English (the film is in French,with English subtitles), she knows just what he means.
The rambling trek picks up a passenger when her highly strung daughter (Camille) fobs Bettie’s grandson on her to deliver to the boy’s paternal grandfather. Charly (Nemo Schiffman) is as mercurial as his mom (and maybe grandmom). He is alternately charming and rude, comforting and manic. He’s just the lad to have along when you’re out of cash, your cell phone keeps dying as you call and call the man who left you in the lurch, and you keep taking wrong turns on the way from here to there.
The script fills us in on Bettie’s romantic background as she tells bits of her back-story (interwoven affairs, going back decades) to random strangers, her troubled relationship with her daughter is touched on and her credit card is maxed out.
Deneuve suggests the self-absorption of the beautiful, coping with the petty insults of age, making Bettie a bundle of nerves wrestling with a complicated past and an increasingly frazzled present.
See it for her performance, and a lovely slice of French scenery, on the backgrounds of a French summer, when the flowers are in bloom and no one but no one will sell you a cigarette.
　
MPAA Rating: unrated, with adult situations, sensuality, smoking
Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Nemo Schiffman, Gérard Garouste
Credits: Directed by Emmanuelle Bercot, written by Emmanuelle Bercot and Jérôme Tonnerre. A Cohen Media release.
Running time: 1:54

Dissolute, strung-out and in revolt against adulthood — those screen traits are right in Sam Rockwell’s comic character actor wheelhouse. Yes, he can play it straight and yes he has range. But muss his hair, redden his eyes and hide his razor and you’ve got a poster boy for wasted days and wasted nights.
“Better Living Through Chemistry” has Rockwell playing a pharmacist lured into “getting high on his own supply” by the unhappy trophy wife of a customer played by OIivia Wilde. Since Wilde has made her reputation as temptation incarnate, we get it.
But Doug (Rockwell) has reasons far beyond the Wilde Child’s goodies. He’s in an unhappy marriage with an exercise-aholic harpy (Michelle Monaghan), raising an insolent 12 year-old son (Harrison Holzer) and fending off an overbearing father-in-law (Ken Howard) who just sold him the pharmacy where Doug has put in his time, but who refuses to let Doug change the name of the place from the old man’s name to his.
“Doug had gotten very good at hiding disappointment over the years,” Jane Fonda, as Jane Fonda, narrates.
And that’s where “Better Living” starts to go wrong. Put-upon Doug may revolt, may start a torrid affair with rich, spoiled Elizabeth (Wilde) and start raiding the “candy store” that is his pharmacy, mixing up his chemicals in aid to his virility, his stamina and his efforts to have the life he wants. But this edgy comedy utterly abandons its edge, time and again, through a cloying, self-aware narration written for Fonda, sort of a part-time resident/observer and narrator of Doug’s sad story.
“Anyone can take a pill,” Fonda purrs, “but only a pharmacist knows how to make one.”
Fair enough, but when Jane as Jane starts to comment on Doug’s wife Kara and her mania for cycling and exercise classes, watch out.
“I know a thing or two about working out,” Fonda cracks, and the winking script becomes a painful facial tic.
Every emasculating moment with Kara is balanced with a heated romp with Elizabeth, so that before long Doug and his paramour are talking about solving their mutual “problems” through chemistry. Might Elizabeth’s absentee husband (Ray Liotta) just…go away?
First-time co-writer/directors Geoff Moore and David Posamentier deliver several laugh out loud moments and the odd delicious twist — vandalism as a way of father-son bonding, and performance enhancing drugs played for athletic laughs.

Casting the towering/hulking Ken Howard opposite Rockwell makes the younger actor seem to shrink into a shrimp in their scenes together.
But the cloying narration and the inclusion of Fonda are just warnings for that moment, 70 minutes in, when this comic chemical train goes completely off the rails. Rockwell, Wilde, Monaghan are worth the price of admission, but “Better Living” would have been better off with more chemistry and less cutesy.
　
MPAA Rating: Unrated, with drug and alcohol abuse, sex, vandalism and profanity worthy of an R.
Cast: Sam Rockwell, Olivia Wilde, Michelle Monaghan, Ken Howard, Ray Liotta
Credits: Written and directed by Geoff Moore and David Posamentier. A Samuel Goldwyn release.
Running time: 1:31

The third break out star from “Breaking Bad,” Aaron Paul is the only one young enough to have a marquee-topping movie career within his reach. His first big screen star vehicle is “Need for Speed,” which opens Friday.

He plays a car-customizer and illegal street racer who goes to prison for a wreck he didn’t cause, and gets out seeking revenge on the driver who did. The film boasts real cars, real stunts. No digital trickery (well, I’m guessing the flames in a couple of scenes are digitized).

Questions for Aaron P? Maybe not ones about his connection, during his child star days, to Michael Jackson (He’s told stories about doing shots with MJ on some of the late night chat shows)?

Comment below.

Lars Von Trier, the cinemas greatest provocateur, dips his toe in porn with “Nymphomaniac: Vol. 1.” Dull, carnal, and explicitly so in both regards, it’s a slow-moving slog through one crushed soul as she relates the empty, passionless pursuits of her youth.
We meet Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourgh) as the kindly Steligman (Stellan Skarsgard) does, battered and bloodied in an alley. As he takes her in, she confesses, “I’m just a bad human being.”
“I’ve never met” one, he says.
“You have now.”
She proceeds to relate her sexual history, from childhood games of discovery and gym class rope-climbing “sensations” to the perfunctory way she proposes to lose her virginity, to a motor-scooter buff played by Shia LaBeouf. There are carnal contests with a pal on trains, where they see how many men, young and old, they can seduce and service in the restrooms, to tedious monologues about the logistics on managing 8-10 sex sessions a day while supposedly supporting herself with a real job and juggling the occasional real boyfriend.
Steligman, an avid fly fisherman and Bach enthusiast, interrupts her from time to time, comparing her gamesmanship to fly fishing tactics, “reading the river” as she hunts her prey, and her amorality to that moment in music called “The Devil’s Interval.”
Joe confesses that she “used and hurt others for my own satisfaction,” but Steligman refuses to judge. He just likes hearing dirty stories from a beautiful (but battered) woman.
“If you have wings, why not fly?”
The story is broken into chapters, a curse of Von Trier’s dullest films — “Chapter Four: Delirium” and the like. The  framework plays like the “Let me tell you a dirty story” of the earliest bawdy novels, like “Tom Jones” or “Tristran Shandy,” but rendered humorless and bland thanks to Gainsbourgh’s flat delivery and the poker-faced performance of Stacy Martin as the young Joe. The entire enterprise has a whiff of homage to the Golden Age of Arty Porn, the ’70s, when pretentious life narrations interrupted the assorted exotic sexual encounters of “Emmanuelle” or “The Story of O.” It’s “The Story of Joe.”
When the older Joe asks, plaintively, “Am I boring you?”, we smile in agreement, even as Seligman and Von Trier (a long way from “Breaking the Waves”) are urging her on and on.
The one explosion in the film is its best scene, a shattered, embittered wife (Uma Thurman, brilliant) shows up at Joe’s apartment where she has finally talked a lover into leaving that wife. In half a dozen searing moments, she weeps her way into rage as she tells her smll to remember this confrontation with the father whose lives he (and Joe) have destroyed.
“It’ll stand you in good stead when you’re in therapy.”

But even that line reads as if it should be read, not performed aloud.
The sex scenes, and LaBeouf’s character turns up several times over the course of Joe’s narrative, leave little doubt at their authenticity. But the object lesson in this, fornication without feeling is lust without love, merits a “Well, duh” in every world but Von Trier’s.
I’d call “Nymphomaniac” his first horror film, the scariest part being the “Volume 1” in the title.

MPAA Rating:Unrated, with explicit sex scenes, profanity
Cast: Charlotte Gainsbourgh, Stellan Skarsgard, Stacy Martin, Shia LaBeouf
Credits: Written and directed by Lars Von Trier. A Magnolia release.
Running time: 1:57

The finest preserved art deco movie palace in America is in Fargo, North Dakota, believe it or not. Since I got my start reviewing just up the road in Grand Forks, I accepted an invitation to come to Fargo’s 14th Film Festival, set in my favorite theater in America. My friend and former colleague Matt Olien is one of the founders of it and helps run it when he isn’t hosting, doing interviews for and producing documentaries for Prairie Public TV up here. Snow, for a change, makes a great climate for movie bingeing, which I plan to do here in the REAL “Fargo,” you betcha, for a few days. 

There’s a huge, scary gap between “piano lessons as a kid” and playing “the
most gifted concert pianist of his era” in a movie. But these days, Elijah Wood
lives for fear. One thing “Grand Piano” was sure to do was scare him.
“It was super intense and the learning curve was EXTREMELY steep,” Wood says
of his preparations for the thriller — weeks of refresher lessons in Los
Angeles, more weeks of rehearsals in Barcelona, where the movie was made.
“Grand Piano” lets us see Wood, as concert pianist Tom Selznick, play the
pieces he is supposed to have mastered. In a thriller where a pianist has a
sniper in the rafters, laser-sight trained on him, ready to shoot the moment he
makes a mistake, “it’s important to be as accurate as possible,” Wood says. “You
have to believe this guy can play. That said, it’s extraordinarily daunting.
“The thing that was very helpful, was that for 75 percent of the film was me
on stage and cut to a very strict timeline and time-coded to the music. I had a
very specific road map of which shots you’d see me, my hands and my face as I
played, at the same time. I had a limited portion of each piece of music to
learn. I didn’t have to focus on all of it. That made the job easier. But not
much.”

Wood was drawn to the piano-centric film “because although I’m around music
(he is dance DJ Frodo, and apparently pretty good at it) and have had
instruments my whole life, I’ve never put the time into one that the instrument
deserves.” He loved the idea of a Hitchockian thriller told in real-time, with
much of what happens in it unfolding during a single concert — piano, with
orchestra.
“And really, I couldn’t fathom what it would be like to be so technically
good with an instrument that even as this guy is hearing threats and seeing the
little red dot of the killer’s laser sight on his fingers, he can still take
care of business, musically, trying not to panic as he figures this out.”</P>
This “piano wire-taut thriller” (Austin Chronicle) owes its existence to
Wood’s varied interests, a decade past his “Lord of the Rings” heyday. He’s a
founder of SpectreVision, a production company that specializes in indie horror
films, and he will forever be in demand at as guest at fan-oriented film and
comic book festivals such as Fantastic Fest, in Austin, Texas.
“That’s where I met (“Grand Piano” director) Eugenio Mira,” Wood says. They
became friends and Wood signed on to a project that would co-star John Cusack,
as the mostly unseen, but heard through a radio earpiece, sniper.
Wood’s many trips to hip, festival-rich Austin convinced him to pull up
stakes, sell his place in Santa Monica, California and move to Texas. He was
drawn to the informality of the place, the creative environment.
“You break down that separation between filmmakers and regular people and
genuine relationships occur. Fantastic Fest is like that, and Austin is a great
place for that kind of connection.”
Reviews for “Grand Piano” have been enthusiastic, with Wood singled out as
being “ideal” for the part (The Playlist) because “he commands our empathy and
manages to remain professional and make his fingers do his bidding” (Austin
Chronicle). But it is, like many Wood projects since “Lord of the Rings” (the
cable TV comedy “Wilfred” is another) a work with modest expectations. That
suits Wood, too. But he laughs at the notion that his Hobbit money has put him
in the position of never “having” to work again.
“I am fortunate to still have many opportunities, and I don’t take that for
granted.  But I’ve always been an actor who would rather not work than work on
something I’m not fully, whole-heartedly committed to.”
And if he was always working, when would he have time for the piano?
“Oh, I’ve got one in the house, now. Not a Bosendorfer (the high-end model in
the movie). But I spending more time with it. I promise.”

Last weekend didn’t produce any film that earned widespread acclaim from North America’s working critics. But the arrival of March has turned the corner on that as a number of pretty good wide releases chase “Pompeii”, “Son of God” and “Non-Stop” away.

“Mr. Peabody & Sherman” is a lot funnier and sweeter than the many laugh-free trailers would suggest. Grandparents and parents can watch it with nostalgia, not a bad rendition of the ’60s cartoon that was part of “The Bullwinkle Show” or “Rocky & Friends” or “Rocky & Bullwinkle.” And adults can chuckle at the puns, the fun riffs on historical figures, etc.

Kids will like the poop and fart and “You said booby” jokes.

“300: Rise of an Empire” isn’t the pithy, profound and swaggering martial romp through digitized Ancient Greece that “300” was. But the digital fleets of war galleys, the heat of the villainous Eva Green and the blood and guts are there. Passable reviews overall, for this one. Most critics were right on the fence with it.

Wes Anderson’s gloriously fun “The Grand Budapest Hotel” opens i limited release this weekend, and it’s darker and more twee than most any film he’s ever made. His rep company returns, but it’s Ralph Fiennes’ picture, with F. Murray Abraham and Saoirse Ronan in strong support and Adrien Brody and Willem Dafoe making fine villains. Mostly rapturous reviews for this one.

And Elijah Wood stars in these surprisingly thrilling thriller “Grand Piano,” a movie that takes great liberties with what actually goes on at a classical music concert, with where the pianist sits for the concerto, and what he does while performing it. Namely, stay on stage between movements. Pretty good reviews, overall, for this one.