Movie Nation

The opening night film at this year’s Florida Film Festival is the backup singers documentary, “Twenty Feet from Stardom,” and I caught up with filmmaker Morgan Neville and one of his stars, Merry Clayton, before they were off to be feted at the fest.
That’s Merry (right) posing with Darlene Love, another of the semi-anonymous voices who lent studio and onstage support to everyone from Diana Ross to Mick Jagger, Joe Cocker to Tina Turner.
Merry Clayton is a gregarious, prayerful singer and actress, 64, best known for backing up “Some Day, We’ll Be Together” for Ms. Ross, and for that killer solo break in The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.”
She talked about the “community” of singers — pros — who gathered in LA in the ’60s and worked until backup singers of their repute went out of fashion in the late 1980s. Neville, a music buff, marveled at her place within that small world, and complained that he had so many anecdotes and so much footage that he needed to do another film just to give them all their due. Clayton started with Ray Charles as “a Baby Raelette,” and sang on Joe Cocker’s “Feelin’ Alright,” Carole King’s “Tapestry” album (cutting tracks, she said, on her way out to dinner) and many a legendary recording of that era.

She worked with “my protege,” Tori Amos, and took the stage as the original Acid Queen in “Tommy.”
She sang “Yes” in “Dirty Dancing,” and her solo records will be re-released when the movie comes out to take advantage of its “coattails.”
The movie opens in June, but if you get the chance, catch them opening night here. She’s a hoot.

“Evil Dead” is the sole “new” release opening wide this weekend. It’s a horrific remake of a cult classic, the film that made Sam Raimi famous. Grueling to sit through, I thought. And from looking at the tomatomater, a lot of critics agree with me on this one. EArlier fanboy reviews were swooning, but then reality and common sense kicked in and it’s sitting in a low 60s approval range now, which seems about right.

But what sort of business will it do? Fanboys, and horror fanboys in particular, are a reliable audience, but not the most numerous one. Will it hit $25, as Box Office Mojo predicts?

Is $24 more within reach, which is the Guru’s prediction?

It’s on over 3000 screens, and it’ll make most of its money today, as Variety points out.

I figure it’ll be closer to $20.

“Jurassic Park” is back in 3D, on over 2700 screens, and advance ticket sales, Variety says, were strong. But if it does more than $17 (Mojo’s prediction), I’ll be shocked.

“Croods” will hold more audience than “G.I. Joe,” tho Joe isn’t dropping out of sight completely. They’ll both be in the $20 million range.

The Florida Film Festival is back, with movies shown this year at Maitland’s Enzian theater and the Regal Winter Park 20.

Over a hundred films, over a week of non-stop movie going.

You can by passes, or individual tickets to your picks, and you can do much of your searching and buying in advance online at their website.

Here are a few films worth catching (a lot of them have full reviews on this website — go to the search box on the right to find them by title, or type in “festival.”

Mud — Sort of Huck Finn meets Stand By Me — Matthew McConaughey is this hobo on the lam, living in an abandoned boat that got washed up into a tree, and two Arkansas teens meet him and start helping him fix the boat and find his way to his true love, Reese Witherspoon. Authentically Southern

Renoir — A French film about the last days of the great French painter, during world war I, in a house full of women devoted to him and sons who dread living in his shadow. One son, Jean Renoir, a veteran of the Great War, falls in love with dad’s hot new nude model.

Starbuck — A loser from Quebec comes to find out that all those sperm donations he made for spending money 20 years ago  created 533 children, who are suing to find his true identity. Sweet and funny, and Hollywood is already remaking it with Vince Vaughn. See it in French first!

The History of Future Folk — Screwy, eccentric comedy about a guy who plays bluegrass banjo in a Greenwich Village folk music bar, talking about his life as an alien from the planet Hondo between his spacey banjo tunes — and then, another alien shows up and they form a duet, singing in their space suits. Dizzy.

The Taiwan Oyster — in English — a sad romance about American expats teaching English in Taiwan who go on a  quest to bury a friend from their ranks who dies over there.

I rather liked the South African road-picture The Lost Kingdom,” and was underwhelmed by the likes of “This is Martin Bonner,” “Be Good” and “Lore.”

Putzel, an upper East Side Seinfeldian romance, isn’t half bad.

DOCS
20 Feet FromStardom — about the female backup singers who made records rock in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Merry Clayton, famous for doing that killer solo in the Rolling Stone’s “Gimme Shelter” — will be there tonight, with the filmmaker Morgan NEville

Year of the Living Dead — it’s about the year N ight of the Living Dead was made, and the making of it. Fun.

Seeking Asian Female — creepy loser who longs for an Asian wife gets more than he barganined for, as does the filmmaker. Surprisingly touching.

Big Joy, Marvelous Universe and Far Out Isn’t FAr Enough were pretty good, too. First Comes Love didn’t do much for me.

It’s Friday morning, time to chat with Mike Bianchi of “Open Mike” (740 AM, The Game) about the week’s new releases.

Today we’ll chew over “Evil Dead,” and revisit “Jurassic Park,” this time with our 3D Glasses.

The Florida Film Festival kicks off tonight, and I’ll go over some of my best bets for the fest. “Mud” and “Starbuck” and “The History of Future Folk” and “Renoir” among them.

And we’ll remember Roger Ebert, America’s most famous and beloved film critic, who died Thursday.

Tune in to 740AM at 745 AM for all that, and maybe me picking on Bianchi for how bad the Magic are in that new arena he made us buy them.

He was the first movie critic most of us ever heard of, the Critic Next Door/Everyman with Everyman’s Tastes who shared a TV set with the seemingly snobbier Gene Siskel in the Golden Age of Film Reviewing. Roger Ebert turned his Chicago Sun-Times platform into a bully pulpit, arguing for better movies, better subtitling, better Oscar shows, and later in life, a better America and more civil debate.

Ebert, longtime Sun Times critic and one-time “At the Movies/Sneak Previews/Siskel & Ebert”co-host has died. The cancer that took away his voice and some of his face and throat some years ago returned. He was 70. Here’s his Chicago Sun-Times obituary.

There are about 120-150 people who review movies for a living here in the US, and I dare say 90% of them got into this because of how fun he made this job seem.

I think I have a letter I got from him from more than 20 years ago that I’ve kept in every briefcase I ever had in this business. I’d reviewed one of his collections, and found a bunch of errors. (Newspapers, we make boo boos. Who knew?) And he wanted page numbers so that he could correct them for the next edition. Which I sent and which he used. A very lovable guy in a profession that doesn’t produce or reward lovable guys.

I didn’t agree with him much in recent years. He seemed happy to be alive (here’s a piece he wrote about his impending death), and saw the good in a lot of films I thought were crap. But we all gave him a pass for that. A Pulitzer Prize winner, he’d earned it. I fondly remember his review of a Ben Kingsley/Glenda Jackson comedy, “Turtle Diary” from decades ago because of the imagery, the way he found to connect his own experience to the one portrayed in this gentle comedy about English apartment dwellers scheming to release a captive sea turtle.

RIP Mr. Ebert. We’re still saving you the aisle seat.

“Renoir” aims to do for the great Auguste Renoir what “The Last Station” did for Leo Tolstoy. It’s a lovely, painterly period piece that mimics the colors of Renoir’s art, but one that never manages to find the warm, beating heart of the man.

His paintings inspired passion in art galleries and museums, and in those who surrounded him and tended to his needs as he soldiered on, ravaged by old age, hell-bent on capturing more “beauty” at the expense of all else in his life.
Renoir (Michel Bouquet) spent his last years on the French Riviera, newly widowed, but surrounded by women — ex-models, ex-lovers. One embittered teen son, Claude or “Coco” (Thomas Doret) lives at home, and Renoir mourns the others off fighting World War I. He’s a national treasure, a simple craftsman who learned his art painting porcelein dishes — piece work. Now, his hands gnarled by arthritis, he spends every waking moment — and some sleeping ones — at the easel, tended to by half a dozen female cooks, maids, nurses and helpers.
That’s the world Andrée Heuschling (Christa Theret), a stunning young redhead discovers when she shows up to model for him. She is poor, but with the haughty arrogance of beauty. She longs to sing, to act in the cinema. She’ll model here to get the money to go to Paris and do that.
Coco dutifully, grumpily whitewashes and mounts fresh canvases, and old August starts studying his latest muse, whose “velvety” skin — all of it — is great inspiration.
Then another son, Jean (Vincent Rottier) comes home, wounded at the front. And he tries to fight his yearning for Andree even as she’s brazenly sizing him up as her ticket out of there.
Bouqet’s Renoir is old and single-minded about his art, and little else. It’s not a twinkling, grandfatherly interpretation, nor is this an “artist as ogre,” the way Picasso is typically portrayed. He’s just this bland old working class man in a rush to capture beauty.
The chief interest held by the romance is the knowledge that the smitten Jean Renoir would watch flickering silent movie serials with Andree and the others and go on to become one of the giants of the French cinema. Rottier delivers a guarded, vulnerable performance, and Theret gives Andree a pouty sullenness that suits someone who expects to get by on beauty and has no notion that it won’t last forever.
Filmmaker Giles Bourdos gets an absorbing movie out of this by delving into the elder Renoir’s method, his solo sketch studies leading to great paintings, even when he was in pain. The sight of old Auguste carried, in his chair, by four or more women as he ventured to this setting or that one (a creekside picnic, for instance) is both comical and inspiring. All these people dedicated to helping this old master fulfill his artistic destiny.
“Renoir” isn’t a great film, robbed as it is of an artist with the bigger-than-life dimensions of a Van Gogh, Picasso or Gauguin. But it holds our interest with the ways Bourdos gets across the vision and mania for capturing all the beauty left to him that Renoir had, and the ways his passed his artistic ambitions and work habits on to those around him, right up to the end.

MPAA Rating:  R for sequences of art-related nudity and brief language
Cast: Michel Bouquet, Christa Theret, Vincent Rottier
Credits: Directed by Gilles Bourdos, based on a book by Jacques Renoir. A Samuel L. Goldwyn release.
Running time: 1:51

(Tickets? Showtimes? Floridafilmfestival.com)

A violent man in a violent underworld of Thai fight clubs in Thailand. The director of “Drive” is behind the camera (Nicolas Winding Refn), with Gosling as his existential lead, Kristen Scott Thomas playing the femme fatale mom.

“Only God Forgives” looks downright lurid, but has a “Drive” vibe about it. Meditative bits, explosions of violence, sex.