Peter Weir’s original film — mid-70s mysterious, sensual, creepy, launched Australian cinema in the mid-70s. You simply cannot overstate the importance of this classic import, with its many overtones and subtexts, the first time the world saw actresses like Rachel Roberts and Jacki Weaver.
In the new “limited series,” Natalie Dormer of “Captain America” and “The Tudors” and “Game of Thrones” is the martinet of a teacher who loses some of her girls’ school students at an Australian landmark.
A little stoner “America absorbs Canadian Culture” comedy.
Among the guest stars, Brian Cox, Lynda Carter,, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Rob Lowe, Jim Gaffigan, Fred Savage. As the original was like visiting the church of a strange religion (Stonertology) without imbibing in the rites (weed), well, low expectations.
Older farts doing stoner comedy? How’ll that work? Guess we’ll find “oot” in a tick.
Streaming cinema fans in search of the silly, the sexual, the satiric and the subtitled should definitely take a gander at “I Am Not an Easy Man,” a French sex farce about seeing the world from the other gender’s side.
It’s “What Women Want” or more exactly, the old Ellen Barkin/Jimmy Smits body-switch comedy “Switch” — going further, into funnier places in a post #timesup take on the gender wars.
We meet Damien, played by Vincent Elbaz of “The Hundred Foot Journey,” at the office, pitching a horrifically sexist phone app, the “Bone-o-Meter,” an idea hilariously endorsed by one and all in a conference room full of men.
Save for one. The only woman there is appalled.
Chuckling later, he strolls with all the swagger his entitlement can give him, swapping come-ons with assorted female shop owners and casual acquaintances who suggest “friends with benefits” arrangements. He goes to his pal Christophe’s book-signing and comes-on, aggressively and obnoxiously, to Christophe’s champagne-serving assistant, Alexandra (Marie-Sophie Ferdane). He even has a favorite pick-up line.
“Do you know what champagne and orange juice is?”
“A mimosa!”
“Your mouth looks pretty when you say it.”
Say good-bye, Damien.
“And when will I see you again?”
“In another life!”
It’s the walk home with Christophe (Pierre Benezit) that changes Damien’s life. He blindly strolls into a street sign so hard he knocks himself out. When he wakes up, the paramedic (a woman) is checking him out. Christophe is worried.
And the sign, directing us to the famous Paris Pere Lachaise (Father Lachaise) Cemetery? It’s now called Mere (Mother) Lachaise. Women, brazenly and uninvited, flirt from their cars. And when he wakes up in the morning, there’s nothing in his closet but colorful, revealing and suggestive shorts, shirts, “too tight” pants and sweatpants.
Before the morning is done, he’s realized that the one woman in that conference room at work is now the boss, that women are in ALL the decision-making positions at his ad agency. That boss has crudely come-on to him, asking for oral sex. And when he’s bristled and lashed out at this “parallel world” he finds himself in, he’s fired.
Christophe is no longer the author. He’s the author’s assistant. Alexandra the assistant is now the star writer, aggressive, assertive and entitled — sure that her Jaguar convertible will impress the boys.
Co-writer/director Eleonore Pourriat is also an actress, and she was even on the Louis C.K. series “Louis.” So yeah, you can guess she’s got stories to tell, and a point of view.
“I Am Not an Easy Man” –the title uses “easy” in that “Easy A” or “Earth Girls are Easy” sense — gives Damien and the viewer comic whiplash, dropping him into a world where women call the shots and have since time immemorial. Their clothing is masculinized, their aggression and assertiveness is built into their thinking. Even the aged and the homely figure they’ve got the right and indeed the obligation to “make the first move.”
Just. Like. Men.
Damien hooks up with one of those friends-with-benefits, who rejects him because he’s got too much body hair down there, “like a monkey.” Time for the boys (Christophe) to get together for a waxing session.
Men endure belittlement, discrimination, intellectual dismissal, brutish/selfish/dominating sex, ogling, catcalls and harassment and strip clubs where lithe, athletic men are the pole dancers. Boys headed off to high school wear belly-baring shirts and short shorts, lads objectified since birth.
Naturally, they organize. The women don’t have much patience for their “Masculist Groups,” and Alexandra’s next book pitch was going to be about “the myth of female dominance.” Until she takes up with Damien and her publisher thinks his “men in charge” delusion would make for hilarious reading.
For women.
I laughed and laughed at this thing, a film of wry, knowing giggles whose director knows where to stick the knife. As it’s on Netflix, you don’t have to read subtitles. It’s available as dubbed into English (check your audio settings).
But in any language, “I Am Not an Easy Man” works, an over-reaching satire that gets at the horrors women face in a world where they don’t have equality or the entitled initiative to succeed and a film that suggests God help us if the shoe is ever on the other foot.
MPAA Rating: unrated, with sex scenes, a fist fight
Cast: Vincent Elbaz, Marie-Sophie Ferdane, Pierre Benezit, Blanche Gardin
Credits:Directed by Eleonore Pourriat, script by Ariane Fert and Eleonore Pourriat. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:38
Alex Pettyfer is the reporter chasing down the “suicides” behind Soviet Russia’s World War II Polish mass murders in “The Last Witness.” Michael Gambon is among those assuring him “There’s no STORY here.”
This one opens in Poland this month, limited release elsewhere over the summer. Looks a bit malnourished, I have to say.
OK, he’s not the star. Nor is James Caan. Not Ving Rhames or Talia Shire or Armand Assante, either.
Justin Baldoni plays hustler/millionaire Barry Minkow in this “true story” con and crash bio-pic, about the “carpet restoration king” who morphed into…a preacher. Make your own titular jokes about that, as I’m above it. “Con Man” was due out in March, but the trailer’s new, so…
The actor and director Stanley Tucci read journalist/essayist and biographer James Lord’s account of “sitting” for acclaimed sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti and saw a movie in it, a simple “two-hander” in the parlance of pictures, a comic war of wills and dueling vanities.
“Final Portrait” is the film he gleaned from that biography, a tale of mismatched equals bantering and wrestling over something both of them desperately want. The famous artist wants to paint the pretty, pretty man. The pretty pretty man wants yet ANOTHER famous artist to immortalize him on canvas.
Geoffrey Rush plays Giacometti as a shambling slouch of a genius — cavalier about the cash raining down on him for his clay sculptures and abstract paintings. It’s 1964, and the Italian-Swiss artist is at the peak of his fame, one of the few people Picasso would call a “peer.” But outside of the art world of the day, outside of Paris, who knows him? He never achieved Pablo’s notoriety.
But Lord (Armie Hammer), a dashing gay swain with published travel writings and artist profiles, appreciates the master. He has, as he would title a later memoir (one of many), “A Gift for Admiration.” And as Giacometti would like to repay that flattery with a portrait, and promises “two, three hours, an afternoon at most” for Lord to collect another vision of himself as seen by a great artist, why not?
It’s only when sitting for the great artist that his future biographer gets a taste of the “real” Giacometti. He dabs a bit on the canvas, and CURSES. He dabs a bit more, and wanders over to admire, criticize or tinker with a clay sculpture in progress. He drops the brush and suggests “Lunch?”
“It is impossible to to ever finish a portrait,” the old man grumbles.
“So what we’re doing is meaningless?”
Lord listens to the comical expletives, the grousing insecurities, and has the effrontery to ask, “Have you ALWAYS been like this?” He answers each Giacometti “That’s a start,” signalling the end of the work for the day, with “I was supposed to leave tomorrow.” He watches Giacometti toss an inferior sculpture on the floor, shattering it, with “What a ham!”
“What?”
“I thought you were WITHOUT affectation!”
Tucci has read this memoir and picked up on Lord’s own inflated self-regard, the filter of the egotistical author remembering his younger self as an equal to the great artist and carrying and comporting himself as such. Hammer, sharing his scenes with an accomplished Oscar winner, holds his own as well. His patrician physical perfection decked out in the lounging classes’ dapper shirt, tie, blue sport coat and chinos, he endures Rush’s closer-than-close-up examination of his physical features with a stifled grin.
“From the front,” Giacometti, who looked a lot like Geoffrey Rush, grouses “you look like a brute. From the SIDE, you look like a DEGENERATE!”
Tucci’s “Big Night” muse, Tony Shalhoub, plays another brother figure here, the artist’s wry, indulgent assistant, a man who builds the frames the sculptures are molded onto, who stretches canvases and boxes them up when finished.
“I’m reading a good book.”
“Is it one of mine?” Again, Lord’s ego.
“No, it is ‘The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.'”
“What’s it about?”
“A spy. Who comes in…from the cold.”
Lord observes the long-suffering former muse (Sylvia Testud) who shares her life with Giacometti, and the giddy, spendthrift prostitute (Clemence Poesy) who has his attentions now. And he sits. And waits.
“Don’t SCRATCH your nose.”
“It itches.”
“Don’t ITCH.”
“Final Portrait” is a slight little nothing of a story, but I delighted in its wordplay, its depiction of a Paris as imagined in the mottled greys and dull browns of Giacometti’s art. Tucci’s production designer creates a drab ruin of a studio, all mud spattered floors and walls, grey light coming in from above.
Tucci uses his camera as the artist’s eye, exploring in tight close-up the tiny details of Hammer’s perfectly sculpted face just as Giacometti/Rush leans in to get a feel for his subject. The painting, starting with the eyes and working outward, gives us a new appreciation for the artist and his technique.
And “Final Portrait,” coming close on the heels of all the Oscar attention for “Call Me By Your Name,” lifts Hammer out of the league of lightweights he’s been trapped in.
Or anoints him their king. Either way, a delicious pas de deux for these two.
MPAA Rating: R for language, some sexual references and nudity
Cast: Armie Hammer, Geoffrey Rush, Tony Shalhoub, Clémence Poésy, Sylvia Testud
Credits:Written and directed by Stanley Tucci, adapted from James Lord’s memoir, ” “A Giacometti Portrait.” A Sony Pictures Classics release.
Running time: 1:30
Saturday turned into the make or break day for the incredibly violent, laughably stupid “Rampage,” which looks as if it will hit that magical $34 million mark it was projected to achieve pre-release.
Can’t bet against The Rock.
“A Quiet Place” only owned the top spot for one weekend, but it will finish a very-respectable second, with over $32 million. That’s a VERY impressive 35% drop on its second weekend.
Speaking of horror, the inferior coeds-get-killed-off “Truth or Dare” did a dazzling not-quite-$20 million. For a horror movie not built on a franchise, that’s the sweet spot.
“Isle of Dogs” reached its peak screen count this weekend, which wasn’t enough to lift it over $5 million. Wes Anderson’s movie now stands at over $18, and won’t reach $35 by the time it’s done.
“Beirut” has about half as many screens, is one of the better pictures of the weekend, but Jon Hamm’s best big screen outing won’t make him a movie star. Didn’t come close to the top ten. The per screen average bears out a crack I made in my review of it — “Bleecker Street (the distributor) couldn’t market merlot to a wino.”
“Chappaquiddick” added a bunch of screens, and still lost 50% of its audience, but cracked the top ten.
“I Can Only Imagine” is now over $75, “Ready Player One” fell short of a big third weekend and is running out of gas at $114, “Black Panther” is finally losing screens and fading. It won’t quite reach $700 million domestic. Not that anybody at Marvel is crying over that.
He won two Oscars, for directing “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Amadeus.”
He acted, on occasion, too. Remember “Heartburn?”
Milos Forman, Czech child of World War II, famed director of 19 films, “A Walk Worthwhile” was the lastest, has died. He was 86.
“Taking Off” was his early English language hit (Thanks, Buck Henry). Even “Ragtime,” bloated as it seemed at the time, holds up.
A larger-than-life figure, gregarious as many of his characters, he didn’t work much (“Valmont” and “Goya’s Ghosts” were later credits), but when he did, invariably it was a big deal.
Alice Eve? We get it.
Three brothers, separated at birth, who find each other in college.
It’s a feel good miracle of a story! Or IS it? WHO separated them?
Neon has its hands on a winner, here.
Movie Nation 