Category: Review

Escaping When You Can’t – ‘Mid-August Lunch’ works well at a laid-back, improvised pace

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Gianni Di Gregorio, foreground, and clockwise from his left: Valeria De Franciscis, Maria Cal?, Luigi Marchetti, Marina Cacciotti and Grazia Cesarini Sforza, star in "Mid-August Lunch." Courtesy photo
Gianni Di Gregorio, foreground, and clockwise from his left: Valeria De Franciscis, Maria Cal?, Luigi Marchetti, Marina Cacciotti and Grazia Cesarini Sforza, star in “Mid-August Lunch.”
Courtesy photo

Pranzo di Ferragosto, which has been translated into the title “Mid-August Lunch,” is the Italian holiday where almost everything shuts down, people leave the city and have a good meal. Imagine being too poor to leave and too devoted to an aging mother to do much of anything. That’s the setup in the short, minimal and enjoyable Italian film from director and writer Gianni Di Gregorio.

The story could not be farther from the gangster-driven “Gomorra” that he wrote with Maurizio Braucci, Matteo Garrone and others, but turns out to be based on his own time looking after his widowed mother. In debt and living at home with his mom, Gianni accepts a reduction in his tab by looking after the mother and aunt of his landlord. Sensing an opportunity, his doctor also pushes his mother onto him, and suddenly the stuffy Rome apartment is filled with four old ladies, one in her 90s, the others in their 80s. And they proceed to run him ragged, at first because they can’t get along, then later because they become close friends.

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Selfish Improvement – Only star power saves ‘Multiple Sarcasms’ from dullsville

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Timothy Hutton, left, and Laila Robins share a scene in the mid-life-self-discovery-themed rom-com "Multiple Sarcasms." Jessica Miglio photo

Timothy Hutton, left, and Laila Robins share a scene in the mid-life-self-discovery-themed rom-com “Multiple Sarcasms.”
Jessica Miglio photo

“Multiple Sarcasms” tips its hat early to the kind of film it wants to be when it reveals its protagonist, a depressed architect played by Timothy Hutton, has been going to see the film “Starting Over” several times. That 1979 Burt Reynolds-Jill Clayburgh-Candice Bergen romantic comedy was the kind of mainstream film that, by no means a classic, looks like Ingmar Bergman compared to the rom-coms that Hollywood now squeezes out.

A first feature written and directed by industry veteran Brooks Branch, “Multiple Sarcasms” sounds like a comedy from the title but is a drama interlaced with just enough comic moments to keep it interesting. For a bit.

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Showdown in Jutland : Half noir, half Western, all Danish, ‘Terribly Happy’ is a bitter, twisting ode

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Limitless horizons, flatlands, cowboy hats and lonesome saloons. The icons tell us we should be in the Midwest, but instead, in “Terribly Happy,” the landscape belongs to Jutland, Denmark’s nowhereland of floodplains, bogs and marshes. But what better place to set a thriller that borrows unabashedly from Westerns and film noir?

“Terribly Happy,” a new film by director Henrik Ruben Genz, based on the droll novel by Erling Jepsen, finds among its bogs the ingredients it needs to make an impressive feature that tips its Stetson to a history of 20th-century American film, but stakes out its own territory.

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Biggers than Most — The ever-expanding world of Sanford Biggers

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SANFORD BIGGERS
SANFORD BIGGERS

Sanford Biggers, "Constellation," 2009, Steel, Plexiglas, LED\u@019s, Zoopoxy, cotton quilt, original printed cotton tile. Dimensions variable, Installation at Harvard University. Courtesy the Artist and Michael Klein Arts, New York, N.Y.
Sanford Biggers, “Constellation,” 2009, Steel, Plexiglas, LED\u@019s, Zoopoxy, cotton quilt, original printed cotton tile. Dimensions variable, Installation at Harvard University. Courtesy the Artist and Michael Klein Arts, New York, N.Y.
Sanford Biggers, "Smirk," 2009 Aluminum, plexiglas, LEDs, timer. 30 x 26.5 x 10.5 in. Ed. 3 + AP. Courtesy the Artist and Michael Klein Arts, New York, N.Y.
Sanford Biggers, “Smirk,” 2009 Aluminum, plexiglas, LEDs, timer. 30 x 26.5 x 10.5 in. Ed. 3 + AP. Courtesy the Artist and Michael Klein Arts, New York, N.Y.
Quiet and thoughtful in tone, multidisciplinary artist Sanford Biggers says a lot in his sit-down interview, but even more in his art. Large trees sprout from disco floors and through pianos. Huge mandalas quoting Buddhism double as floors for break-dancing competitions. This is what Biggers loves to do — take culturally loaded objects (lawn jockeys, Buddhas) and “bling” them out in a similar way.

His re-appropriations aren’t obscure, and the commonplace nature of many objects in his art provokes and amuses upon first sight. A chance to sample Biggers’ most recent work is happening this month, with a new exhibition already open at Contemporary Arts Forum, part of a series of events stretching into April that intend to introduce the artist to a larger audience.

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Into the Woods — ‘Rashomon,’ now in a sterling 35-mm print, is still a classic

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Toshiro Mifune stars in Akira Kurosawa's seminal samurai film "Rashomon." Courtesy photos
Toshiro Mifune stars in Akira Kurosawa’s seminal samurai film “Rashomon.”
Courtesy photos

Four retellings of an incident resulting in a dead husband and a raped wife … four perceptions of a reality in which each teller confesses to a crime instead of hiding it. All are plausible, and all seem understandable for the characters. What to do?

If you’ve seen “Rashomon” before, it’s worth seeing again (and again). If you’ve never seen it, the time is long overdue to enjoy a classic that still stands up as such. Either way, a brand new 35 mm print of the film comes to UCSB this Tuesday evening.

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Moving on, Moving out — ’35 Shots of Rum’ demands a close watch

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Mati Diop, left, and Alex Descas, right, star in Claire Denis' "35 Shots of Rum."
Mati Diop, left, and Alex Descas, right, star in Claire Denis’ “35 Shots of Rum.”
Claire Denis’ “35 Shots of Rum” is a movie of quiet, subtle gestures, of gazes, looks and glimpses. It’s also a movie about life slowly changing and the inevitability of people moving on. Set among the varied African communities of Paris, Denis presents a tale about a quartet of people who have known each other for a long time and about the period of time where everything has changed.

Viewers have to figure out a lot of these relationships themselves and become like the characters in the film, closely examining body language and eyes. Denis makes us work more than other filmmakers, and a lot of “35 Shots of Rum” is like being at a party for new friends and trying to figure out how everybody is related.

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THE BIG SCENE : Oliver Stone visits with Hugo Chavez and other Latin American leaders in new doc at SBIFF

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Director Oliver Stone during an interview with the President of Paraguay, Fernando Lugo.
Director Oliver Stone during an interview with the President of Paraguay, Fernando Lugo.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez rides a bicycle in his grandmother's backyard in the Oliver Stone documentary "South of the Border."
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez rides a bicycle in his grandmother’s backyard in the Oliver Stone documentary “South of the Border.”
Film director Oliver Stone first dealt with South and Central America in 1986, with his breakthrough political drama “Salvador.” He didn’t return to the region as a subject until recently, with two documentaries on Fidel Castro (2003’s “Comandante” and 2004’s “Looking for Fidel”). Now he’s taken on another American bugaboo, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, in “South of the Border,” playing this weekend at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Stone’s thesis is that Chavez has been demonized in the American press because he hasn’t gone along with business interests, especially when Chavez nationalized the oil industry.

The film then uses Chavez’ success as an opportunity to discuss other socialist revolutions that have followed in Chavez’ wake — in Bolivia, Argentina and Ecuador. The short doc may lack in nuance, but it will introduce many to the leaders in the region, and to countries that never turn up on the nightly news.

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Time of the Wolf — Unflinching Red Riding a stunning crime drama

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The buzz preceding the “Red Riding” trilogy came via film journals and British TV blogs, and the eventual screening across one long but tense afternoon lived up to expectations. Based on a quartet of novels by David Peace (one was not filmed), “Red Riding” is an exceptional crime drama, a sprawling narrative that in the UK was primetime viewing but in the States is being released theatrically.

Set in the grimy industrial north of Yorkshire, and the West Riding district, the trilogy follows a secret history of corruption, big business and serial killing. This is the dark, depressed North of the Moors murders and the Yorkshire Ripper (who makes an appearance in the middle film), but also of ex-mining towns, destitute backwater towns, and wounded and angry male psyches.

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It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, etc. World — ‘In the Loop’ introduces one of Britain’s best satirists

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Armando Iannucci’s bitter and barbed satire “In the Loop” presents global politics — in particular Washington and some pokey little failed empire called Britain — as a continuation of high school culture. There are bullies, cliques, pranks, bad behavior, badder behavior and worse behavior. There are egos to be stroked and personalities to be torpedoed. By the end, we come to feel that while Iannucci’s vision may be jaded, he may be closest to the truth.

He’s also a deft and clever wordsmith, and “In the Loop” — which features some of the characters in his BBC series “The Thick of It” — is zipitty-spit 90 minutes of hilarious and profane dialogue. This film will probably be many Americans’ first exposure to the Scotsman’s writing, but since the early 1990s, Iannucci has penned some of the UK’s greatest television and radio comedy, starting with “On the Hour” and “The Day Today,” precursors in tone and style to the sharp satire of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” on this side of the pond.

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