The Names of Love (Le nom des gens - 2010)

Another great French movie, this is about a ditzy woman, proud of her middle-Eastern name Baya Benmahmoud, who feels the best way to convert right-wingers is to have sex with them. Then she meets a straight-laced guy with an ordinary name, Arthur Martin, and begins a romance. The part was re-written once Sara Forestier was cast as Baya, and it won her the César Award (French equivalent of the Oscar) for Best Actress and Michel Leclerc and Baya Kasmi won Best Original Screenplay. In the subtitles, by the way, the heroine's name is spelled Baya, like the screenwriter's. However, on imdb, it's spelled Bahia. Although I have definitely seen Forestier in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006) and Wild Grass, I don't remember those roles. Now I will remember her! Among other trivia, she asked that a nude scene be put back in after another actress had asked that it be removed. It's a funny scene (and not the only time we see her naked). Jacques Gamblin plays Arthur, and he is quite funny as well.

We saw this at a Jewish Film Festival, and were told before the movie began that Arthur Martin is the name of a type of washing machine in France, about which poor Arthur is frequently teased. And this time I knew the meaning of the actual movie title: Le nom des gens literally means the name of people. It showed only one night here, but is now available on netflix. Check it out. It's sexy and funny.

My Afternoons with Margueritte (La tête en friche - 2010)

Good fun! Mary, Bob, and I liked a lot this sweet tale of a barely literate man, teased and verbally abused his whole life, and his elderly friend who reads aloud to him from Camus and introduces him to the world of books. Starring Gérard Depardieu (last covered in Potiche) and 97-year-old Gisèle Casadesus and directed by Jean Becker, who, along with Jean-Loup Dabadie, adapted the novel by Marie-Sabine Roger (they are all experienced at their crafts, but new to me). The book won the Cezam Prix Litteraire Inter CE, one of the largest adjudicated readers' prizes in the world, in 1997 for Roger. And because I speak a little French and am interested, I looked up the meaning of the real title of the book and movie, La tête en friche. It means literally "the uncultivated [or fallow] head," which certainly does describe Depardieu's character Germain.

It closed here weeks ago, so save it to your netflix queue. Here is the trailer and a little of the music.

Take Shelter (2011)

Very well done, this story of a man going mad (or is he?) kept us riveted the whole time. Michael Shannon's (last covered in The Runaways) Curtis never has a moment's rest and his face shows it in every scene. As his wife Samantha, Jessica Chastain (The Debt) is outstanding, with a fully developed character to express. Jeff Nichols directed and wrote the script (his second), which is set and shot in northern Ohio, about 30 miles from Cleveland, and the little girl who plays their deaf daughter Hannah is a deaf girl from central Ohio named Tova Stewart who makes her acting debut here. I knew the guy who works with Curtis looked familiar, and then I watched the latest episode of Boardwalk Empire and realized he is Shea Whigham, who plays Sheriff Eli Thompson on that show, not so far sharing a scene with Shannon's Agent van Alden. Another face I recognized was Ray McKinnon, who has one scene as Curtis' brother Kyle--McKinnon was In O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) and The Blind Side, among others.

Spooky music (go to the amazon page and click Play all samples) by David Wingo (from the band Ola Podrida) is supplemented by a song by Ben Nichols (the band Lucero), the director's brother. I'm glad I decided to write this one up, before the other five (!) in draft mode, because I learned the Gotham Award nominees for independent film have been published. This was nominated for best picture and ensemble cast, and soon I will add it to my work-in-progress of nominations and winners sorted by title. Well, maybe not that soon, since I have the others to write up, and haven't stopped seeing new ones, nor my other work.

Anyway, this is a good one, and you should see this new movie.

Margin Call (2011)

Peggy told me I would like this thriller about a big investment firm at the beginning of the 2008 financial crisis and she was right. Written and directed by J.C. Chandor in his feature debut, it has a star-laden cast portraying people at all levels of the game, and it will keep you involved. Stanley Tucci's (after I wrote about him in Julie & Julia and The Lovely Bones he was in Burlesque and Captain America: The First Avenger) character is fired within minutes of the opening credits but his findings are key to the plot, which is explained clearly over the course of time. Then Zachary Quinto's (Spock in Star Trek) financial analyst runs with it, followed by his sidekick Penn Badgley (a regular on Gossip Girl, which I haven't watched). The hierarchy moves up to Paul Bettany (last covered in Creation), Kevin Spacey (Casino Jack), Simon Baker (good in Something New (2006) and The Devil Wears Prada (2006), I haven't watched The Mentalist), and finally Jeremy Irons (won his Oscar for Reversal of Fortune (1990), my other favorites include Dead Ringers (1988) in which he played twins, Damage (1992), The House of the Spirits (1993) in which he was among the mostly Anglo actors who played Chileans for the Danish director who adapted Isabel Allende's novel, Stealing Beauty (1996), Chinese Box (1997), Lolita (1997), and Being Julia (2004)) as the head honcho, with Demi Moore (The Joneses) and Aasif Mandvi (It's Kind of a Funny Story) thrown in for a smattering of diversity, speaking of House of the Spirits. Mary McDonnell (Oscar-nominated for Passion Fish (1992) and Dances with Wolves (1990), both of which I intend to see at some point, and I loved Grand Canyon (1991) and loved her part) must have had a good contract to get top billing with the others, as she has only one scene as Spacey's wife.

The tense music is by Nathan Larson (covered in Our Idiot Brother). I've been listening to it as I type, from a loop on the movie's official site. With 19 producers, including Quinto, this does not win the Producers Plethora prize, still held by Get Low with 23.

This time I can't tell you what Jack thought because he couldn't make it, but I liked it very much.

Contagion (2011)

Scary! This bio-thriller about a killer virus gone world-wide epidemic is packed with stars and kept us on the edge of our seats, thinking about all the doors and hands we had touched. Director Steven Soderbergh (I wrote about him in The Informant!) is working again with writer Scott Z. Burns (I forgot to mention that Burns adapted the novel for the Informant! and co-adapted The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)), and this time takes credit in his own name as cinematographer (in all his previous work, Soderbergh uses the pseudonym Peter Andrews as cinematographer).

When Valentine's Day came out, Jack said, "Just tell us who isn't in it," and this bears some resemblance to that, with Gwyneth Paltrow (last mentioned in these pages in Country Strong), Matt Damon (Adjustment Bureau), Laurence Fishburne (Oscar-nominated for playing Ike Turner in What's Love Got to Do With It (1993), also good in Apocalypse Now (1979), Rumble Fish (1983), The Cotton Club (1984), The Color Purple (1985), Higher Learning (1995), Bobby (2006), 21 (2008), and many more), John Hawkes (Higher Ground) playing someone non-creepy for a change, Jude Law (Sherlock Holmes), Marion Cotillard (Midnight in Paris), Kate Winslet (my favorites: Sense and Sensibility (1995), the love story part of Titanic (1997), Hideous Kinky (1998), Holy Smoke (1999), Iris (2001), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Little Children (2006), her scenes in Romance & Cigarettes, the mini-series Mildred Pierce (2011), and her Oscar-winning performance in The Reader, which was predicted by Ricky Gervais in the episode of Extras where Winslet played a foul-mouthed version of herself who said the Holocaust wins Oscars), Jennifer Ehle (The Ides of March), Demetri Martin (Taking Woodstock), Elliott Gould (my personal faves are the TV movie Once Upon a Mattress (1964), Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) for which he was Oscar-nominated, M*A*S*H (1970), California Split (1974), Bugsy (1991), and Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven (2001), Twelve (2004), and Thirteen (2007), among his 162 acting credits), Bryan Cranston (Drive), Sanaa Lathan (Love & Basketball (2000), Something New (2006), a series arc on Nip/Tuck), and Dr. Sanjay Gupta as himself among the 68 actors credited with 78 more uncredited, which may be a precedent.

Shooting locations are listed as Atlanta, San Francisco, Hong Kong, and various places in Illinois, but it looks like we travel around the world with very high production values. Master composer Cliff Martinez (also covered in Drive) keeps up the tension with his high energy score, of which all twenty tracks are posted on youtube and is available from iTunes, amazon, etc.

My favorite line apparently is someone else's, as it's been posted on imdb: Gould's scientist says to Law's blogger, "Blogging is not writing. It's just graffiti with punctuation."

Playing in only one house here, this has a predicted DVD release date of January. Don't watch the movie right before you go to sleep if you're prone to nightmares. But it's good.

The Big Year (2011)

We rather liked this comedy with Jack Black, Steve Martin, and Owen Wilson as competitive birdwatchers, even though reviews were awful (40% critics/54% audiences on rottentomatoes). There's a robust supporting cast, including Dianne Wiest and Brian Dennehy as Black's parents, JoBeth Williams as Martin's wife, Rosamund Pike as Wilson's wife, Rashida Jones and Andrew Wilson (Owen and Luke's brother) as fellow birders, Kevin Pollak and Joel McHale as Martin's business associates, and cameos by Anjelica Huston, Tim Blake Nelson, Jim Parsons...the list goes on, and Jack correctly identified a voiceover as John Cleese of Monty Python fame. I don't remember Black's film debut in Bob Roberts (1992), though the movie was great, but did like him in a number of pictures, including High Fidelity (2000),  Shallow Hal (2001), The School of Rock (2003), King Kong (2005), Margot at the Wedding (2007), and Tropic Thunder. I wrote about my favorite Owen Wilson roles in Midnight in Paris and Steve Martin in It's Complicated, and all three are believable as the obsessive birders.

Directed by David Frankel (Miami Rhapsody (1995), The Devil Wears Prada (2006), Marley & Me (2008, I didn't see it), and some TV) from a script adapted by Howard Franklin (The Name of the Rose (1986), Someone to Watch Over Me (1987), more) from the book The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession by Mark Obmascik, the movie features great locations (mostly Canada, plus some Atlanta), wonderful sets, and, of course, beautiful photography of birds by Lawrence Sher (Kissing Jessica Stein (2001), Garden State (2004), Dan in Real Life (2007), The Hangover, The Hangover Part II, among others).

The music is also good, with eight songs, including Black's ringtone, listed here, and if you scroll down on that link, you can hear samples (click on the little arrows next to $0.99) of the excellent soundtrack composed by Theodore Shapiro, who scored State and Main (2000), Old School (2003), Prada, Tropic Thunder, and Dinner for Schmucks, among his 50 credits.

If you see only one movie a month, perhaps you should pick another, but if you like birds or any of the cast members, check this one out, still playing in very limited showtimes here, with a possible DVD release set for February.

The Way (2010)

Poignant, lovely, and even funny at times, this story of a father undertaking the spiritual journey his son died before completing is just wonderful. It's the seventh collaboration between Emilio Estevez (director/writer/supporting) and his father Martin Sheen (starring) and is based in part on selected stories from Off the Road: a Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim's Route by Jack Hitt (the movie's website credits him so I submitted the correction to imdb and it will appear after a while, Hitt's first hit on imdb). The journey is the walk from St. Jean Pied de Port in southwestern France to Santiago de Compostela, which is in the northwest corner of Spain, about 500 miles (I spent a week in Santiago de Compostela in 1997--it's a fascinating medieval city with stone streets and Gaelic music--but didn't learn much about the Pilgrim's Route). The prolific Sheen (born Ramon Estevez) has 226 acting credits, and my favorites include Catch-22 (1970) (I'm showing my age here!), Apocalypse Now (1979), The Dead Zone (1983--one of my top twenty of all time), Wall Street (1987), Da (1988), Bobby (see below), Talk to Me (2007), and, of course, 154 episodes of the West Wing--I watched a couple of seasons but Jack has seen them all multiple times). Here Sheen is a master of manly introversion--recently I heard someone on a screen, big or small, say, "We men can talk about our feelings, we'd just rather not," which sums up Sheen's Tom Avery. Estevez, now 41, has been acting since he was 18 (my faves: The Outsiders (1983), Repo Man (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985)), got his first screenplay produced at 23, and began directing five years later (of his five features I've seen only Bobby (2006), a great ensemble piece about the people at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, the night of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination). We see his Daniel Avery as a ghost who occasionally walks and talks with his father along The Way.

The excellent supporting cast includes Deborah Kara Unger (coincidentally my favorite of her many credits, Crash (1996) (not the 2004 Oscar winner), was directed by David Cronenberg, who directed Sheen in The Dead Zone) as angry Canadian Sarah, Yorick van Wageningen as jovial Dutchman Joost (pronounced yost, rhymes with toast), James Nesbitt (Waking Ned Devine (1998), Millions) as intense Irishman Jack, and Tchéky Karyo (I recognized his name and face but his credits aren't all that familiar to me) as Zen-like Frenchman Captain Henri.

The movie was shot on location on the actual trek and the images are quite lovely. The music by Tyler Bates is pretty, with nice guitar riffs. To hear two tracks, go to this page and select playlist 2 (I also enjoyed hearing the first track on playlist 1: the theme to the Showtime series Californication). Most of his other work has been much more agitated than this, which you'll discover if you listen to the rest of the tracks. In addition there are good songs, listed here.

This is still playing in our town and Jack and I highly recommend it. I have to add that when I heard Tom describe Daniel, in both the trailer and the movie, as "my only son," I thought about messed up Charlie Sheen, and who wouldn't want to distance himself?