Movie Nation

It’s a standing joke in the music industry, an artist, frustrated by the lack of success in North America, hearing the consolation prize from an agent or record producer.
“But you’re HUGE in Australia” or Korea or Brazil or wherever.
At least somebody, they figure, “gets you.”
But what if you never knew that. What if you gave up your career after two failed albums, went back to your old life, and never realized you were “as big as Dylan” in say, apartheid era South Africa? The 1970s Detroit folk-rocker Rodriguez bombed in the U.S., but in sold hundreds of thousands of LPs and CDs sold in South Africa, his edgy, rebelious songs inspiring generations of folk-rock fans living in a heavily-censored police state. And he never had a clue.
“Searching for Sugar Man” is about the efforts of intrepid South African fans of the elusive Rodriguez, their years-long search for this artist who wrote “lyrics that set us free.” Rodriguez may have gotten lost in the post-Dylan Golden Age of the singer-songwriter in the U.S., when John Prine, Bonnie Laura Nyro, James Taylor, Dan Fogelberg and Jimmy Buffett owned the airwaves. But his albums, lush productions of immaculately produced songs such as “I Wonder,” “Crucify Your Mind” and “The Sugar Man,” sold and sold in South Africa, even if they were never officially exported there.
South Africans Steve Segerman, nicknamed “Sugar Man” all his life, set out to figure out who this mysterious figure was. His albums had few clues. He wore sunglasses and came off as a man of mystery. Legend had it that he’d killed himself on stage, which may have lifted his reputation and driven sales even further in South Africa. With journalist  Craig Bartholomew-Strydrom, he spent years “Searching for Sugar Man.”
The film, gorgeously shot by Camilla Skagerström, adds intrigue upon intrigue as the man’s producers, Motown music vets, sing his praises and scratch their heads over why he didn’t catch on. Then, as the searchers “follow the money,” the mystery deepens. Where did all that cash go? The film finds a Motown villain.
And then it finds the truth.
Using animation, grainy concert footage and picturesque travelogue scenes, director Malik Bendjelloul recreates this story and unravels the mystery. Some of it. Without giving too much away, suffice it to say that this story has an uplifting arcthat suggests this isn’t the last we’ll hear of this forgotten hero of pop.
But there are frustrations in “Sugar Man,” and not all have to do with Rodriguez himself. The film’s  first glaring omission is the lack of testimonials from the man’s peers, singer-songwriters who might remember the records and have appreciated their brilliance and maybe wondered “What ever happened to Rodriguez?” But perhaps there simply aren’t any who do.
The South Africans interviewed rather glibly distance themselves from the white minority regime which they say they opposed. But it’s a movie almost devoid of black voices, here or there. Continue reading →

The heady Christmas Day opening of “Les Miserables” spiked it to a nice lead in the box office for the week, but Friday night — the night when fanboys and single guys hit the movies the movie — pushed “The Hobbit” back on top, headed to another weekend win. It could make over $30 million this weekend.

Friday also gave “Django Unchained” a temporary inside track on second place — headed for a $25 million plus weekend. “Les Mis” is running neck and neck with it, and came in third Friday night.

HOWEVER, Saturday is date date/night, and family movie-going day and night. So “Les Miz” could leapfrog the field, or at least “Django.” We’ll see.

“Parental Guidance,” having that family friendly thing all to itself, pretty much, is headed towards a comfy finish inside the top ten.

I’ve been counting the days until “Skyfall” passes the final “Twilight” film in overall US box office. They’re separated by about 2 million now. A decent weekend will take care of that gap.

Since I’m taking my wife to “Skyfall” later this afternoon, I figure I’ll be the tipping point, lifting Bond past Bella once and for all.

The odd, opportunistic and eccentric programming of Netflix streaming, the way the service lumps genres together and serves up possibilities, means that you’re always stumbling across something odd and old, or new and surprising — a movie you haven’t seen that you should have.
That’s a pretty neat trick for somebody who’s seen 500+  movies a year going back decades, like me.

I stumbled into “The Robber,” a German-Austrian thriller “inspired by a true story,” a prime piece of Euro-action worth remaking by Hollywood.
Andreas Lust stars as Johann, an Austrian loner whom we meet just as he’s finishing a stint in prison. He’s spent his time in stir doing lap after lap of the prison yard, perpetually training. He’s planning to pick up where he left off — running marathons — when he gets out. The authorities fret that he’s only focused on that, that marathoning isn’t a career, that a combination of financial need and an addiction to adrenalin rushes will see him tumble back into the practice that put him in prison in the first place — robbing banks.

Johann isn’t hearing it. He’s not making any promises. And sure enough, the minute he’s out, he starts vigorously prepping for marathons, obsessively monitoring his heart rate. Sure enough, he returns to the avocation that got him caught the last time — donning a mask and a hoodie, picking up a shotgun and hitting the hapless banks in this corner of Austria.
What co-writer/director Benjamin Heisenberg’s film does best is emphasize “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,” to reference an earlier film about the mindset involved here. Johann’s solitary lifestyle has him alone with his thoughts and his demons. When you don’t talk to anybody, keep to yourself, steal cars to get to the banks, then ditch the cars and sprint miles and miles to get home, nobody can connect the dots.
Or so it would seem. You’d think that a masked robber who is in unusually good shape would point right back to a guy who just got out of stir. But the Austrians in the movie don’t make the connection.
Everything Johann does is to feed his adrenalin addiction, his need to marathon. He robs, buys monitoring equipment, uses the robberies as an excuse to spike his heart rate, takes up with an old flame Erika

he will have a place to stash his cash, all feeding his marathon habit. Even when he starts entering and winning marathons, bursting on the scene from out of nowhere, that’s not enough. It’s not winning that he’s in it for.
Heisenberger stages “”Point Break” styled getaways — long, desperate sprints through narrow streets, parking garages , through parks and alleys, emphasizing how easy it might be for someone with speed and epic stamina to outmatch and outwit legions of cops. In the right urban environment, Johann has advantages that the robbers of “The Town” could only dream of.
The film wastes no time on casing the banks, Johann’s apparent prep work. It limits itself to his (and Erka’s) point of view. So we have no idea why the cops haven’t pieced together this “We just let a marathon runner/bank robber out of prison, and this new robber seems to run like the wind” puzzle.
“The Robber” is bleak and yet exciting, a fascinating character study built around a pretty unpleasant “hero.” If Hollywood could find a star willing to get in spectacular cardio-vascular shape, a lean-mean running machine, I could certainly see a remake of this hitting it big.
“The Robber,” made in 2010, is currently available on Netflix streaming, and deserves a spot in your “to watch” list right after the

superb French thriller “Point Blank,” in your “foreign language thrillers” queue.

It’s not really fashionable to label a film “mumblecore,” that much-scorned non-genre name used for no-budget indie fare that relied on attractive indie actors emoting, romancing and talking talking talking to tell its stories.

But even though it has big names — Emily Blunt and Rosemarie DeWitt are the half-sisters drawn to mumblecore icon Mark Duplass — “Your Sister’s Sister” is all about the chat, an improvised pseudo-farce that tumbles into melodrama — in between all the long, heart-to-heart talks.

We meet Iris (Blunt) and Jack (Duplass) at an awkward memorial service for Jack’s late, beloved brother. Jack drunkenly sets the other mourners straight about his flawed but still lovable sibling, who died a year before. And Iris, who once dated the dead Tom, feels the need for an intervention.

Get on your bike, she tells him. Go stay at my family’s cottage on an island off the Washington coast. Get through this grief.

“You just need some head space,” she tells her best friend.

The self-pitying Jack takes her up on it. Which is how he stumbles into Hannah, played with fetching vulnerability by Rosemarie DeWitt.

Unbeknownst to Iris, Hannah is already staying at the cottage. She’s a little weepy, and on a bit of a binge. She’s just split up with her longtime lover. And even though she’s a lesbian and even though Jack is an unemployed lump, the tequila starts talking.

“I haven’t been on that bicycle for quite some time,” she jokes, as the awkward, drunken hook-up gets off and running.

And then Iris shows up. Not in the middle of things, but the next morning.

Jack is all manic about Iris finding out.

“She’s your sister and she’s my best friend and it’s weird.”

So Hannah goes along. And as the weekend progresses, the half-sisters bond and Iris confesses her feelings for Jack and things get more complicated.

Writer-director Lynn Shelton (“Humpday””) had the makings of a conventional farce here. And while one respects her decision to not go that way, the clumsiness of the film makes you wonder if she didn’t because she couldn’t.

She attracted big name talent (DeWitt broke out with “Mad Men” and “Rachel Getting Married”) and then sicced them on — with all due respect, this guy? It’s not that Duplass, who is transitioning from indie fare (“Safety Not Guaranteed”) to studio pictures, usually as a supporting player, is nobody’s idea of a matinee idol. The character he’s playing has nothing to offer either of these women  — dumpy, no job, no ambition, lost in grief, a dash of charm, but sexually opportunistic. And he’s the brother of Iris’s dead ex-boyfriend. That’s a strange attraction.

The one-on-one exchanges have a rough, in-the-moment improvised feel. But the situations are arch and artificial, the romantic connections inorganic in the extreme. Shelton can’t manage the tension, the secrets and the big reveals with anything approaching a light touch.

So if we must bury “mumblecore” as a genre, let’s acknowledge that “Your Sister’s Sister” is all of its shortcomings in a nutshell — good actors and bursts of realistic dialogue need situations that aren’t sitcom ready, clumsy Playwriting 101 exercises.

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An artist, the old saying goes, is someone who pound the same nails, over and over again.

For the great Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar, those nails include the boundaries of sexual identity and sexual perversion, and his “mommy issues.” All are touched on and one gets quite the going over in “The Skin I Live In,” a rare unpleasant evening at the movies from the director of “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and “Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down.” It’s as disquieting as it is unsatisfying, a slog through gender issues, surgery and violence — sexual and otherwise.

Antonio Banderas plays a brilliant plastic surgeon and scientist with “issues” all his own. He has developed a way of growing artificial skin that threatens to cross the lines of medical ethics. But in his suburban Toledo mansion, he has his own lab where he can experiment far away from the prying eyes of his peers. That’s where he keeps his greatest creation, Vera (Elena Anaya) under what resembles house arrest. There appears to be an intense attraction between them. No, he’s not at home when his thuggish half-brother drops by and rapes her. But the attraction is discomfitingly still there in Almodovar’s world.

In a long flashback, Almodovar, adapting a Thierry Jonquet novel, tells us the Gothic story of how this bizarre situation came to be, of the tragedies in the doctor’s past, the first time he crossed paths with Vera. It’s a real eye-roller of a personal history.

In the present, Vera flirts with the doctor with “I’m made to measure for you,” while the housekeeper (Marisa Paredes) casts dark warnings — “If you don’t kill her, she will kill herself.”

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“Happy Feet Two” is to 2006’s “Happy Feet” what “Babe: Pig in the City” was to “Babe,” a clever and adorable original film remade with most of the charm wrung out of it.

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