Feel good movies are a universal language, a cinema lover’s comfort food whose formula crosses borders and language barriers.
I dare say “Kitchen Brigade” would amuse, tickle and touch in most any language. But the year’s first winner in this all-important genre is French. So of course, as the title promises, it’s about food and set in a restaurant.
But this bon bon from director and co-writer Louis-Julien Petit (“The Invisibles”) dips into competitive cooking reality TV, soccer, and multiculturalism, with migrant kids awaiting news on whether they’ll be accepted as immigrants or summarily deported back to Bangladesh, Ivory Coast, Morocco, Ethiopia, Congo or all points in between.
It’s smart and topical, touching and touchy. And it is, as the French would put it, un putain de délice — delightful, with an expletive added for emphasis.
Audrey Lamey, a regular on French TV, plays a frustrated and stubborn sous chef who opens our story by quitting her job with the arrogant but popular and ever-so-telegenic Chef Lyna (Chloé Astor), who should know better than to mess with Cathy Marie’s famed “beet organ” appetizer. That’s a dish of tube-shaped tuber slices, arranged like a pipe organ and served with just the right salad dressing.
Cathy Marie is proud, a woman with a reputation, which gets her offers to audition for “The Cook,” a cook-off challenge reality show. But she dismisses that. She will cook! She will save up for her own restaurant! Somebody give her a job!
Alas, the one place that makes an offer “embellished” their ad, just a mite. Lorenzo, played by that dashing EveryGaul François Cluzet, sheepishly admits this “charming” eatery with a “demanding clientele,” La Roptiere, is actually not a restaurant at all. It’s a youth hostel for migrants waiting to see if they qualify to get into French schools so that they can remain in France.
Cathy Marie’s struggling-actress pal (Fatou Kaba) nags her into taking the gig. But there’s this “nightmare” of a kitchen (mostly microwaves) and everything she’s to serve is canned.
“They love ravioli and soccer,” headmaster Lorenzo shrugs. We’ll soon see about that, starting with Cathy Marie opening the ravioli cans, dumping the canned sauce, washing and baking the individual raviolis and plating her dishes with a sauce she makes herself.
Voila!
It only takes a couple of extra hours to manage that, which will never do.
What she wants are “fresh ingredients,” and Lorenzo dismisses her with an “eight Euros a head” budget, he doesn’t care what she serves with that. What she needs is “commis,” kitchen assistants — help. And that’s how a dozen of the eager-to-assimilate newcomers, teenage boys, come to join her in the kitchen and learn at the feed of a queen a cuisine.
One of the reasons “feel good” movies are comfort food is the reassuring familiarity of their formula. The obstacles begin with the food, the nuisance matronly fangirl teacher (Chantal Neuwirth) and the working conditions and spread to that one African Muslim boy who won’t be bossed around, especially by a woman.
“No religion, and no misogyny” in my kitchen, Cathy Marie decrees.
There’s a bit of education for the non-restaurateur viewer and the migrant kids as our chef compares her kitchen “brigade” to a soccer team, from front-of-house (“Defense!”) to garnish (“Striker!”) to dishwasher, who is, of course, in goal.
The story arc has our haughty chef take an interest in others, for once, and the not-quite-as-desperate-as-is-warranted kids warming to her, to French cooking and the culture they fled conflict and poverty to escape to.
The four credited screenwriters cook up a seriously moving Big Obstacle, right on cue to start the third act. And they deliver a finale that involves something you might expect — reality TV — but that still manages to deliver a delightful twist that will touch your heart.
Lamey makes Cathy Marie’s journey almost as moving as those of her young charges, who again as you might expect, share their homeland cuisine with our jaded chef. Cluzet’s presence is a sturdy comfort, and among the kids, the youngest (Yannick Kalombo), the most talented cook (Amadou Bah) and the hardest nut to crack (Mamadou Koita) make the sharpest impressions.
They ensure that this is one feel good movie that won’t make you mind reading subtitles, and that will almost certainly whet your appetite for a little haute cuisine when you’re done.
Rating: unrated, some profanity
Cast: Audrey Lamey, François Cluzet, Fatou Kaba, Chantal Neuwirth, Yannick Kalombo, Amadou Bah and Mamadou Koita
Credits: Directed by Louis-Julien Petit, scripted by Louis-Julien Petit, Liza Benguigui, Sophie Bensadoun and Thomas Pujol. A Samuel Goldwyn release.
“Beautiful Beings” is a rough and harrowing coming-of-age drama in the tradition of “Kids,” “Thirteen” and “My Own Private Idaho.”
Any hint of “Stand by Me” romanticized boy bonding is smothered where we fear these unparented, impulsive 13-year-olds will end up, face down in a “Trainspotting” gutter on an island — Iceland — which has no trains, but lots of drugs, addicts, bad parents and Scandinavian depression.
Iceland’s submission for Best International Feature (foreign language film) has teen violence, teen smoking, teen drinking, sex and rape, and a bizarre touch of magical realism that gives the entire tale a dream quality.
It’s about three free range Reykjavik lads — played by Birgir Dagur Bjarkason, Viktor Benóný Benediktsson and Snorri Rafn Frímannsson — who hang together and find themselves dragged into the constant conflicts stirred up by the hulking, hotheaded Konni (Benediktsson). Addi (Bjarkason), the most “normal” and middle class of the lot, takes karate lessons, which is why he’s not shy about joining in whatever feud Konni has instigated.
But Addi is sensitive enough to show compassion for the mercilessly-bullied Baldur, or Balli (Áskell Einar Pálmason). Whatever the others’ living situation, Balli, picked on because he “smells,” downcast every step he takes through every miserable day of his life, has it worse.
His junky mother (Ísgerður Elfa Gunnarsdóttir) stopped cleaning the house when her abusive brute of a second husband was tossed in jail. His teen addict sister (Kristín Ísold Jóhannesdóttir) took that “anything to get out of this house” route and hooked up with the first guy with access to an apartment.
Addi takes pity on Balli after seeing him on TV after Balli’s latest beating put him in the hospital. And eventually Konni and Siggi (Frímannsson) accept the timid “gimp” into their smoking, trespassing and vandalizing “gang.”
Even not-quite-well-adjusted Addi has his issues at home. His alcoholic dad ditched him, and his mother is sure she’s clairvoyant, which infuriates him. But maybe he “senses” things, too.
As the opening scene is the boys, hooded up and armed headed to some sort of fateful confrontation, we can only wonder what Addi or his talks-to-herself-mother didn’t see.
“Beautiful Beings,” titled “Berdreymi” in Icelandic, is superb at capturing the universal problem of idle, unsupervised boys making bad choices, creating “Lord of the Flies” pecking orders and lashing out in violence because nobody’s taught them otherwise.
The second feature of writer-director Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson has, like his debut feature “Heartstone,” homoerotic strains in the affection among the boys, as well as a murky view of what is legally, pretty much any where on Earth, a rape scene.
There’s a clumsy shift in point-of-view in the film’s in media res opening, from our dreaming unidentified narrator to the bullied Balli. It wrong-foots the film, which takes a while to settle into being mostly from Addi’s point of view.
But Guðmundsson is quickly establishing himself as a talented, unblinking chronicler of his island homeland. “Beautiful Beings” is a most worthy film for the country’s film community to submit to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and I could certainly see it landing a nomination.
Rating: unrated, violence including rape, drug abuse, teen smoking, profanity
Cast: Birgir Dagur Bjarkason, Áskell Einar Pálmason, Viktor Benóný Benediktsson, Snorri Rafn Frímannsson, Ísgerður Elfa Gunnarsdóttir, Kristín Ísold Jóhannesdóttir and Anita Briem
Credits: Scripted and directed by Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson. An Altered Innocence release.
Once upon a time, at the tale end of the Golden Age of the Spaghetti Western, a couple of canny Italian producers and directors figured out that at home and abroad, a big chunk of the audience for those oddball sagebrush sagas was boys, and men who never grew out of “The Three Stooges.”
It wasn’t the iconic themes, the soaring score and the Italian take on (Spanish) Western vistas these folks showed up for. It was the fancy gunplay, the over-the-top brawls, silly characters and the nonsensical stories slapped together between “the cool parts.”
Slapstick was more important, and you can see traces of this even in Sergio Leone’s “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” But other pictures such as “Aces High,” “Boot Hill” and the “Trinity” films — “They Call Me Trinity,” “Trinity is Still My Name,” etc –went all in on the laughs. They were throwbacks to an earlier era in screen comedy, when “slap” fights were a big part of slapstick.
The stars of these films were often a Laurel and Hardy pair of Italian actors given English names, Terrence Hill and Bud Spencer — a thin, handsome chap teamed with the burly, ever-grumpy Big Man. They even made action comedies without horses. One of them was this goofy farce about a road race and a prize these two clowns could not decide how to fairly split up — a red dune buggy.
“Altrimenti ci arrabbiamo” this 1974 film was titled, “Watch Out, We’re Mad.” And in the world’s frantic search for that next pitch those content-craving suckers at Netflix will buy, it’s been revived for a new slap-happy slapstick farce, a reboot/sequel that’s as dated as a dune buggy, with only occasional flashes of the “Stooges” silliness that marked the original.
Edoardo Pesce and Alessandro Roja are the new Spencer and Hill, mercifully not given “Hollywood” names, cast as the sons of the two oafs back in ’74, who as kids took the dune buggy out and promptly lost it to a couple of bikers.
Now, “some years later” (Don’t do the math.), the former 13 year-olds are lured into a new “Road Rally” involving matched Beemer beaters on an offroad course, a race in which they finish in a tie. And damned if that 1974 dune buggy doesn’t become the bone of contention for a new generation and a pawn in a new game involving a rich, scummy developer (Christian De Sica), his dense, no-good-at-racing son (Francesco Bruni), the developer’s on-payroll motorcycle gang led by the a biker (Massimiliano Rossi) and a circus parked on land that the developer covets.
Torsillo is the man who orders his son to steal the dune buggy, which the rich man put up as a prize for a “rally” race that no one came to watch.
“It’s more fun to get something when you don’t deserve it.”
The endangered circus features a fetching tiger-tamer (Alessandra Mastronardi), and assorted clowns, sideshow characters (dwarves, et al) and a not-that-sharp strong man (Michael Schermi).
It took five credited screenwriters to back engineer this tale of the town or Tortuga into a new movie, and that aptly-named director Younuts of the teen comedy “Under the Riccione Sun” was parked behind the camera.
What works is what always worked, the slap contests and slap fights. Any fan of action cinema will spot how funny the stage punches all are when they’re open-hand slaps and obviously fake “stage punches” turned into “stage slaps.
There are a couple of decent brawls that precede a grand finale which is kind of funny. But even in that bust-up-the-developers’ big “launch party” scene, even bigger laughs are missed or simply blown because five screenwriters and Younuts notwithstanding, none of these pasta di giornos is an undiscovered comic genius.
The leads are passable, with Pesce summoning up memories of the late Bud Spencer and his fellow Italian slapstick “Big Man,” Israeli-born Paul L. Smith, who played Bluto in Robert Altman’s “Popeye.”
But even when you’re remaking junk, you’ve got to bring more to the table than look-alikes and faded memories of a movie that you’re remaking.
Rating: TV-14, constant fisticuffs
Cast: Edoardo Pesce, Alessandro Roja, Alessandra Mastronardi, Christian De Sica, Francesco Bruni, Michael Schermi and Massimiliano Rossi
Credits: Directed by Younuts, scripted by Vincenzo Alfieri, Giancarlo Fontana, Tommaso Renzoni, Guiseppe Stasi and Andrea Sperandio, based on the 1974 film. A Netflix release.
Actor turned writer-director Jesse Eisenberg‘s feature directing debut turns out to be just the sort of film you’d expect from the “Social Network/Now You See Me” star.
“When You Finish Saving the World” is smart and articulate. It’s flippant. There’s a hint of idealism, a heavy dose of “not fitting in,” and an earnest desire to do right clashing with some self-mocking narcissism.
Sweet, but brittle. Deep, but kind of twee. You can pick up on that just from the title. And it works, because Eisenberg has a good ear, a good eye and good intentions.
In Ziggy Katz, whose tale Eisenberg originally wrote as an Audible audio drama, Eisenberg has scripted an ambitious, over-compensating, insecure but exhibitionistic teen and thrown him into conflict with his idealistic, “woke” do-gooder mother, a social worker/counselor who runs the local women’s shelter.
It’s a “skips a generation” parable, a kid rejecting the values of his parents, exploiting them to live the way he wants. And it’s a send-up of “Mother Knows Best,” because Mom needs to be paying attention for that to be the case.
Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard) is growing up in a liberal household in a college town — Bloomington, Indiana. He’s got this online “business,” writing “classic folk rock” for this compensated musical vlog that has a whiff of “Fan’s Only” about it. Fans all around the world subscribe and tune in to Ziggy Kills, which he figures is his ticket to fame and glory.
“I’m going to be rich and you’re going to be poor,” he taunts his mother, Evelyn (Oscar winner Julianne Moore).
Ziggy’s self-absorbed and self-delusional. He’s not really picked-up on the mix of introverted teen girls and uh, adults who log into his Zoom meeting style presentations. They might be more interested in the model-cheekboned mop-top sharing a little face time with them.
His parents are tuned-out. Dad’s apparently a retired professor who reads, shops and cooks and frets about “living with two narcissists.” Mom keeps her responses locked on “empathy without emotion” and her face an impassive blank. She’s dealing with trauma and sad stories from women and children in crisis all day long, and a city reluctant to keep her “business” funded. So she’s wrapped up in her own world, too.
She has no idea what she’s walking in on when she ducks her head into Ziggy’s room. He has little interest in her life and work. She’s just a daily SmartCar ride to school, as far as he’s concerned.
But then he finds a new crush, the activist/le-ist Lila (Alisha Boe). Maybe he’s been a little hasty in rejecting his mother’s picket-lines-and-passion-for-causes upbring. Or maybe he’s not self-aware enough to see how needy, self-promoting and shallow he comes off when he brags to Lila about subscribers, ratings and his online “certified” status.
Mother Evelyn is also facing a crisis of confidence. There’s a new teen (Billy Byrk) staying with his mother in her shelter. He is sensitive, studious and possesses “a special heart,” she assures him. Maybe, she thinks, she can alter his life’s path in ways that foul-mouthed backtalker Ziggy never took to. The fact that he’s good-looking may figure into that.
Eisenberg and his stars do a grand job of creating conversational duologues. Neither parent nor child really knows where the other is coming from because they’re talking and not listening. He’s looking for ways to learn to be more tuned-in, and she’s judging this shallow capitalist she barely recognizes for trying to “take a shortcut” to get the attention of a cute leftist “Union Maid.”
He could take the one piece of advice she offers, “listen” and pay attention to the world. She could recognize that she doesn’t need a “guide my son to share my values” do-over. The one living under her roof is still malleable, if she’d just see it.
Eisenberg writes some funny scenes, lightly mocking the leftist club Lila goes to where she can perform her environmental protest poems, see civil rights puppet shows and hear labor movement classics like “The Internationale” sung, a cappella. Ziggy cannot read a room for the life of him.
And the Evelyn/Kyle scenes come right up to the edge of troubling, letting us question motives and wonder just how deep into an R-rating this slight, breezy and yet thoughtful film will go.
The major shortcoming of “When You Finish Saving the World” is its own incompleteness. It feels unfinished. No one life is examined in any real depth. Evelyn’s marriage, Ziggy’s afterthought of a friend-at-school, Kyle’s unwillingness to judge his abusive father, all add up to meat that would flesh out this gentle stor into something more insightful and consequential.
It’s still a promising directing debut from an actor we always assumed was sitting on sets, wide-eyed watching and listening and taking notes between scenes, even when he was just starting out.
Rating: R, for profanity, discussions of spousal abuse
Cast: Julianne Moore, Finn Wolfhard, Alisha Boe, Billy Bryk and Jay O. Sanders.
Credits:Scripted and directed by Jesse Eisenberg. An A24 release.
I’ve reviewed scores of these “Man…is the most DANGEROUS game” to hunt thrillers. And I’m wholly prepared to call this heartless, pulse-free corpse about creating corpses “The Stalking Fields” the worst of the lot.
Let me cut to the chase to save you all of the “What the hell is this all about?” muddling and muttering I had to do trying to make sense of the scatterbrained, nonsensical opening act.
There’s this company, AmaCorp, that’s going out, researching and kidnapping Americans with police records or bad tendencies, and then setting them loose to be hunted by disturbed government killers of the SEAL/Special Forces variety.
Cut the doomed loose in “The Stalking Fields,” send a team out to lead our mentally broken (PTSD) assassins back into the fold by generating an easy “kill” or two.
The one mass shooter/super-soldier (Sean Crampton) is a guy the government really wants back.
“Doing good doesn’t feel good any more,” he confesses. But let the Col. in the field (Richard O. Ryan) and the amoral Israeli designer of the program (Rachael Markarian) have a go at him. Round up some not-quite-randoms.
Kill some not-so-innocent “innocents” and he’ll Woodman will be as good as new.
The plot points are common to the modern version of this century-old genre. Yes, the victims are trapped in a fixed “game.”
The sets are a forest, and plastic-sheets hung on walls meant to simulate the “base” all this murderous nonsense is planned from. There are middling murders and a cliched flashback or two.
Terrible movie, dull and heartless and drably-acted by actors whose agents have no souls, the proof being they “booked” the poor players for this unthrilling thriller about hunting humans, “the most dangerous game.”
Rating: unrated, violence, profanity
Cast: Sean Crampton, Taylor Kalupa, Rachael Markarian, Adam J. Harrington, Ryan Marsico, Kevin Pasdon, Richard O. Ryan, Nora Garrett
Credits: Directed by Ric Maddox, scripted by Sean Crampton, Jordan Wiseley. A Gravitas release.
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