The Second Mother

Val is a much put-upon live-in maid to a lazy and self-absorbed wealthy family in Sao Paulo.  She's the housekeeper, cleaner, cook, gardener and even pool boy, yet she's practically invisible to her employers Barbara and Carlos until they want something. Strangely enough she accepts their rather callous and off-hand treatment mainly because being there so long has allowed her to be de-facto mother for Fabinho the teenage son of the house who she has cared for since he was a very young boy.

There has however been a steep price to play as she had to leave her own daughter back home with her sister as she could not afford to raise her without this job.  In fact Val hasn't seen Jessica for ten years now so when she gets a phone call out of the blue from her daughter saying that she wants to go to University in Sao Paolo and live with her, she is overjoyed.  Jessica is not quite so thrilled though when she actually arrives to discover that she is expected to sleep on a mattress in her mother's small room in her employers house. She inveigles Carlos into letting her use the family guest room instead and is soon dining with them, eating up all of Fabinho's favorite ice-cream and even taking dips in the pool. Val is livid at this total disregard to the rules of how a servant should behave, and even Barbara who was all warmth and smiles at first, soon loses her patience when it is obvious that the young girl is taking liberties with them. 

Jessica is bright and well-educated (she gets accepted into University when Fabrinho doesn't) and she is not prepared to be treated any less than equal than the family and despairs of her mother's insistence at being subservient especially when it is obvious that her employers are taking advantage of her.  In fact Carlos who is a stay-at-home husband also wants to take advantage of Jessica too, but in a totally different way.

What makes this drama such a sheer joy is that the part of Val is played Regina Casé a veteran Brazilian TV star, who has such a delicious sense of comic timing as she tries to cajole and control her stubborn daughter whilst falling over backwards to try and keep her un-grateful employers happy. It's a wonderfully thrilling performance as Casé is masterful at being so mischievously funny with her re-actions to both the bad behavior of her daughter and the family.  She is a hard act to follow but newcomer Camila Márdila as Valerie can certainly hold her own and for her performance  she ended up sharing a Best Actress Award with Casé at Sundance for her efforts.

Written and directed by Anna Muylaert ('The Year My Parents Went on Vacation') who is shrewd enough to ensure that there is a happy ending to this tale as it is obvious that a woman as sharp as Val knows when it is time to stop being used.   She eventually will actually get on with the much delayed role of being a first mother and not just the second one she has put up with for all these years.

A captivating wee gem of a movie which is now Brazil's official submission for Best Foreign Picture Oscar.

★★★★★★★★

Before We Go

When you decide to double up and jump behind the camera for the first time as well as star in front of it, then you need a great deal more than charm to get by.  Sadly no-one told actor Chris Evans aka Captain America that and so he and his pretty and talented star Alice Eve try to make light of a dullish uninspired script that made heavy going on the night that they get trapped together in New York.

Evans plays Nick a trumpet player who, although on the edge of his big break, is busking in Grand Central Station when Brooke (played by Eve) almost trips over him as she rushes to try to catch the last train home.  She not only misses it but as it is now the early hours of the morning, the station is closing up and everyone is asked to leave.  She's lost her purse and broken her cellphone and he is penniless so when they do start talking to each the most they can offer to each other are words. There are plenty of them from this very talkative pair, except about what they are really up too and are very short on details, so  we have to spend a long night with them as they drip feed their stories to each other.

He was on his way to a friend's wedding reception but bailed as he didn't want to run into his ex girlfriend there as she had recently broke up with him when he tried to propose.  Brooke on the other hand is an art buyer who had just closed on a good deal and her husband is away on business but he had announced that he was heading home early and so may find the note she left for him that she now regrets writing.

They have a whole series of escapades that night like trying to recover her stolen purse from a rough Chinatown mob, going to visit a Psychic and even singing a duet together when they are mistaken as entertainers when they crash a wedding.   However mostly it is all leading up to the big $64 question i.e. will they end up together before sunrise.  Ninety minutes is a long time to wait for that especially when it seems like the whole thing is played out in real time, so frankly we really do not care that much one way or another by the end.

It's a shame as they are both talented actors, and cute to boot too, but it ends up as bad date movie for anyone wanting to have a bad date.

★★★

Mississippi Grind

Curtis is a mystery and sort of remains one right to the very end of this intriguing road-movie about two inveterate gamblers. When we first meet this rather handsome and charismatic 30-something-year-old he turns up in a dingy casino in Dubuque, Iowa and very noisily crashes into a poker game in full swing.  At the other end of the table he spots Gerry a rather haggard looking man in his mid-forties trying to bluff his hand as cool as he can, and Curtis makes a big fuss about sending him a drink of fancy bourbon.  

The two men soon bond and apart from the fact that they both love gambling and booze and have pasts that they are not in a hurry to share, they have very little in common but nevertheless they become almost inseparable very quickly.  When Gerry is not gambling he is a very reluctant Real Estate Broker but he has no luck with that either as we soon see him meeting up with a Loan Shark who is trying to get him to pay back the massive debts he has built up.

Curtis on the other hand is a real drifter whose entire possessions fit into one small holdall and he lives of his charm and his good looks. We are never sure why he had drifted into Iowa in the first place, but he is already keen to keep moving on, so when Gerry suggests that the two of them gamble their way along the Mississippi River and eventually go to New Orleans where there is big poker game with a hefty $25,000 buy-in, he jumps at the chance. Gerry feels that Curtis is a actually a lucky omen as since the two met, he has actually been winning for a change.

First stop for them is St Louis where it appears that Curtis has a sort-of girlfriend who gives the men a change of clothes and puts them up. It is she who reveals that Curtis has befriended a stranger before and part bank-rolled their gambling habit and who repaid him by robbing him blind, thus planting a doubt into whether this relationship which started on nothing more than a pure whim with Gerry, will also end up badly too.

What we do know about Gerry is that when he is gambling he simply never ever knows when to stop, and so when they arrive in Memphis and he plays poker without Curtis he loses all the money, and more, that they have accumulated so far.  A fact he doesn't share with Curtis, but instead he asks that they do a detour to Little Rock to see an ex-wife he suddenly reveals he has.  He claims it is to try and win her back, but in reality it is to try and steal her savings he knows she keeps in the house to replace the money he has lost.  At this point it seems like he really is at rock bottom. 

All throughout the journey both Curtis and Gerry deceive each other at different points to get the upper hand and constantly changing the balance of their relationship,  but even through the roughest patches there is this remarkable genuine affection that keeps them together. Like the poker players that they are, neither men are ever easy to read.  Gerry who pointlessly listens to tapes in his car on how to stop gambling only shows real emotion when he gets wildly excited about going 'all in', and Curtis uses his affability and his eagerness to please to cover up what is his own melancholy.

One of the real joys of this engaging and compelling movie is that the story is completely unpredictable, and filmmakers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have cleverly ensured that keeping us in suspense as to the ultimate outcome, we will be engaged right up until the last frame.  They were helped by their faultless casting choices with both Ryan Reynolds as Curtis and the Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn as Gerry who were pitch perfect.  Reynold's Curtis just simply oozes charm and confidence but he is at his best when he shows his vulnerability, whilst Mendelsohn ensures that even when Gerry sinks as low as he can, we still empathize and never stop rooting for him.

Three standout supporting roles that really need mentioning too. Alfe Woodward as the Loan Shark was on the screen for too brief a moment; great performance from Sienna Miller as Curtis's girlfriend; and a scene-stealing turn from Robin Weigart for her brief role as Gerry's ex wife.

This low-budget rather absorbing indie movie that started its journey at Sundance was a excellent gamble that paid off perfectly and it deserves to win itself the audience it so deserves.

★★★★★★★★

Brand : A Second Coming

Russell Brand is not an easy person to like. The 40-year-old British comic and recovering drug addict and a former Mr Katy Perry is an obnoxious, loud-mouth, narcissistic, vain, self-serving, hedonistic irritating man.  He is however side-splittingly funny when he is on stage performing and that is the saving grace of both Brand himself and this intriguing and compelling documentary which serves as another excuse for the man to behave very badly knowing that he has an audience that will probably lap it all up.

There are no redeeming features of Brand's story that even make him even remotely likable.  It starts with his childhood and his 

indulgent mother who has to focus of her re-occuring bouts of cancer and his absent father who could only ever focus on himself. Whatever lucky breaks young Russell got he ended up by blowing, like his Drama School Scholarship that he wasted to fuel his growing addiction and that ended up with him getting expelled.

When his stand -up comedy gigs started getting him noticed, his obsession with fame and celebrity and all the trappings it gave really kicked in, and even when he eventually seemed to achieve it all, and way beyond his wildest dreams,  it never ever was enough for him.  When he was a 'star' in the UK, he was bitter that he was still unknown in America, and then when his career took off in the US plus he married singing superstar which rocketed him into celebrity overload, Brand seemed to be more un-fulfilled than ever.

When his short-lived marriage collapsed and his bizarrely erratic behavior made him completely unemployable, Brand's English manager persuaded the star to commit to rehab before his excessive intake of drugs actually killed him.  The treatment worked as far as the fact that he became and remained sober, but it failed to dent his persistent perception that he was the brightest and most wonderful man in the world who deserved so much more than he had.

The latter part of the movie deals with Brand creating his new comedy show which had the same title as this documentary.  The comedian somewhat brilliantly and extremely hilariously compared himself with not only Jesus Christ but other saint-like historical figures such as Gandhi, Malcolm X &  Che Guevara. The only disturbing aspect was that there is more than a fine line of doubt about Brand actually believing he is a second Messiah.  

It leads him to wanting to change the world a la Brand.  However, when he goes on to take to the airwaves of the world to preach revolution he is very passionate about his principles, but always very light on detail and relies on his quick wit to dismiss anyone who dares to question his reality.

This documentary profile is credited to writer/director Ondi Timoner, but she was in fact the 6th filmmaker to try and film this very unruly subject (even the great Albert Maysles had been on board at one time).  It does explain why there are several really odd segments that don't fit in with the rest and are obviously pieces Timoner inherited such as Brand interviewing people like David Lynch and Mike Tyson (!) about spirituality.  By the time filming was wrapping up, Brand had a such a large falling out with Timoner by the end that he tried to get the movie withdrawn from the SWSX Festival where it had been scheduled to premiere.

Brand's legions of fans are in the millions according to the hits he gets with his online presence and they will no doubt lap up every single minute of this movie, but there are others who will be like Jeremy Paxman the distinguished British TV Journalist who just simply questioned why anybody would want to listen to this 'very silly man'.

★★★★★★

Mission To Lars

Tom Spicer is a 40 year old man who suffers from Fragile X.  This is a genetic condition you may not have heard off but it is apparently not that rare as it affects 1 in 4000 men (and 1 in every 6000 women).  In Tom's particular case it manifests itself in serious impaired learning and single-minded obsessions which his sister Kate describes as 'autism with knobs on'.

Tom has lived in a special residential care home in the English countryside for the past twenty years and seems fiercely happy in his daily routine that even includes a job recycling newspapers.  He does however have one very passionate ambition and that is to meet Lars Ulrich the drummer of his beloved Metallica the world's most successful heavy rock band. He repeats 'Must meet Lars' over and over again with such dogged determination that his two siblings decide to actually see if they could actually make it happen.

Kate Spicer is a London Journalist and her brother Will is a filmmaker and as both of them have let their relationships with Tom slide somewhat they look on this project as a way of being able to bond again as a family and provide a central focus that they could then all share as a memory going forward.  After pitching the idea to TV networks and being turned down flat, the two still decided to press on alone filming every step of the way for this documentary even though they are clearly out of their depth simply coping with their brother's moods, and with the enormity of the ambitious task.

The day before the three of them are actually due to fly to the USA to track down the Band, Tom throws a wobbly and totally disappears, and when he eventually re-appears announces that he no longer wants to go.  The only person that he will respond too when he withdraws into one of his moods is his step-mother Jane and in this instance she does finally persuade him to go on with the planned trip.  

Even though it his dream that they are trying to fulfill Kate and Will are never sure if Tom will ever go along with them no matter how successful they are in actually obtaining an audience with Lars himself.  They take advice from the US's leading expert on the Fragile X syndrome and she warns that even though Tom loves listening to heavy metal rock at home, the reality is that what he hears is the equivalent of ten times louder than we hear, so he may not simply be able to bear going to a live concert.  He does actually refuse point blank to attend the Band's Las Vegas Shows and the ones in San Diego, and it looks very seriously that he will also miss out on their last chance at their final appearance at Anaheim, but in the end he relents and goes.

The Spicers, and their co-director James Moore, keep the tension building as even when Kate and Tom arrive at the Stadium clutching the precious All Access Back Stages she has managed to persuade Lar's people to give them, there is never any guarantee that they will actually ever meet the great drummer himself. Surprisingly they do and he is remarkably warm and generous which gives a very big heart-warming finish to this wee highly-personal and completely engaging tale.

The whole journey is tough on all three Spicers.  It's hard to completely comprehend the effect it has on Tom himself as although it's easy to spot when he is really happy,  he is extremely difficult to read when he wants no part of what's going on around him.  His siblings are stretched in ways they never imagined and although we are party to some scenes of their sheer frustration of trying to copy, they are careful not to ever share how this mission has really impacted them personally.

Why this movie took over three years to go from UK screens to ours in the USA is a mystery as this compelling compassionate tale will resonate with American audiences very well.   Plus it also shows that heavy metal rock stars can also be real sweethearts too.

★★★★★★★★

Chatty Catties

For his debut feature film L.A. based artist and writer Pablo Valencia used his rather deranged imagination to risk making an extraordinary innovative black comedy that he almost manages to pull off.   

This story is of an aspiring filmmaker called Shelby who has more than her fair share of emotional issues and substance abuse and who talks her ‘issues’ through with her cat. Luckily for her, Leonard can not only talk back, but he’s got a much better grasp of reality than she has.  When Shelby has the unexpected good fortune to date a cute young man called Nate, Leonard does everything he can to make the relationship work, for when Nate is around life is so much better for him.  However it will take much more than this clever cat to stop Shelby eventually pushing the self-destruct button like she does on everything good that happens to her.

Her relationship with Leonard has always been strained as she forces him into being the subject of the rather dire home movies she insists on making, and he is both embarrassed and annoyed beyond belief when she forces his/her new friend Nate to watch them.

There are other plot diversions with clips of random cats talking to their owners which are very funny even though they sit rather awkwardly alongside the main story.

Valencia,  who co-wrote the story,  very acutely makes the cats the real stars of the piece as in some cases they are much better actors than the humans. The fact that their voices are lent by a talented team of deaf and hard-of-hearing performers (led by John Autry II who's an excellent Leonard) adds an intriguing dimension to this very likable quirky movie.  

As exasperated as one feels (just like Leonard) about the sheer silliness of this film, it's hard not to be taken with its ingenuity and it is so full of such promise that it will be interesting to discover as to what its creator will come up with next. 

★★★★★★

A Ballerina's Tale

Documentarians could not possibly wish for better luck than that which befell on Nelson George when he was recently finishing up his profile on the ballerina Misty Copeland and it was announced that she was to become the first African-American soloist with the prestigious American Ballet Theater in over two decades. It’s a perfect ending to a fairy tale story and is one of the highlights of George’s otherwise rather patchy movie.

The opening scenes show some grainy home videos of a teenage Copeland dancing with her local ballet troupe in California and you can see already that this skinny young girl, who didn’t even take up ballet until she was 13 years old, is remarkably gifted. By the time she is 15 years she is already local star and then from there she transitions to New York where she becomes the only African/American in ABT’s company of some 80 dancers.  George’s emphasis here, as earlier, is very much of the cultural significance of Copeland’s breakthrough and sadly we learn very little about the young girl herself or anything of her family background or roots at all.

Copeland is not only an exceptional talent in pointe shoes but she is also a stunning beautifully and simply lights up the screen whenever we see her performing at the Metropolitan Opera House, or in a dress rehearsal when she is learning a new part. There is a rather lengthy section when she discovers a leg injury after dancing Firebird that is hinted maybe the end of her career but after successful surgery and rest she recovers fully in time to land her first leading role.  After that she becomes the cultural face of the ‘Under Armour’ label and when the video of their advert goes viral, there is even more talk of Copeland’s position of being one of the leading ballet dancers of her generation attracting much more diversified audience to the somewhat privileged airs that still surrounds the whole ballet culture.

Nelson’s film beautifully shows us an extraordinary ballerina  …. watching her star as Odette/Odile in Swan Lake is a sheer joy ….but  it’s just a pity he didn’t let us discover the woman too.

★★★★★★

Breathe

17 year old Charlene (who goes by Charlie) just cannot wait to get to school so that she can escape the constant bickering of her parents.  She may love her father but she doesn't like the way her mother allows him to ride rough shod over her and be so indiscreet about his dalliances with other women. They live in a small characterless house in an equally small French provincial town, so the arrival of Sarah a rather vivacious new addition to her school class who makes a beeline for her, is a very welcome breath of fresh air for shy and quiet Charlie.

Chain-smoking Sarah is a newcomer to town and regales her new best friend with tales of an exotic life she led with her mother who works in Nigeria and who had to reluctantly send her back to France to live with an Aunt when the political climate suddenly got very unstable. The two girls quickly become the best of friends and develop a very close relationship that just stops short of getting physical intimate, and so Charlie invites Sarah to join her family and friends on vacation at the seaside.

From the moment they arrive Sarah practically abandons Charlie as she flirts outrageously with Esteban who is considerably older, although he prefers Charlie's mother anyway.  Not to be outdone she just as quickly turns her attention to a handsome young pilot who she practically throws herself at.  As quickly as Charlie realises that Sarah is revealing herself to be far from the perfect best friend that she desperately wanted her to be, she also discovers the truth about Sarah's real family circumstances which are far removed from the glamorous picture that she had painted.

Once Sarah is aware that Charlie knows the truth she does everything in her power to ensure that she will not spill the beans to anyone else. The love that they both shared now quickly turns to sheer hate, at least on the part of Sarah, who never was quite as committed to their relationship as Charlie was. The lengths that she will go too are extraordinarily pernicious and when other classmates see this malignant behaviour go unchecked they express their concern to a rather distraught Charlie who still refuses to fight back. That is, until she is pushed just too far.

This sophomore movie directed by actress Mélanie Laurent is a melodrama about how passion is harmful when it becomes an obsession as so helpfully pointed out by Charlie's teacher in one of the early scenes. This however falls on deaf ears in this case as this teenager with such an unhappy home life is desperate to grasp any possibility of love especially when it seems to have turned up in shape of her new best friend.  As much as she berates her mother for her co-dependency on her wayward father she does exactly the same with Sarah even though she must be aware that it cannot possible end well.

Laurent cast two exceptionally talented young actress Joséphine Japy and Lou de Laâge who give very naturalistic performances, particular Japy who is pitch perfect as the asthmatic downtrodden Charlie.  They add a very definite sexual frisson to the piece which adds to the uncertainty and the expectations of how this teenage relationship will play out.  It is certainly not one that can be predicted but somehow this climax seems the perfect way to end.

★★★★★★★