Fall 2010 Films

Ojai Playhouse
Sundays, 4:30 pm
All Fundraiser Tickets: $10

I Am Love

Sept. 12, 2010

2009  Italy  (2 hrs)  Rated R

Director Luca Guardagnino’s visually stunning third film, I Am Love, is a tragic love story set in Milan at the turn of the millennium. Its epic grandiosity in telling the story about the fall of a wealthy bourgeoisie family recalls some of the iconic work done by Italian master Luchino Visconti (The Leopard, A Death in Venice) and Douglas Sirk’s (Magnificent Obsession) post-war melodramas.
    Tilda Swinton turns in another remarkable performance as Emma Recchi, the love-torn Russian wife of an Italian patrician played by a highly mannered Pippo Delbono. Increasingly alienated by her matronly role as wife, hostess and mother of three adult children, Emma’s repressed passions find their focus when her eldest son’s chef friend is brought to the family home to prepare a holiday dinner. Emma’s lust is fully unleashed after he prepares a plate of his famous prawns with ratatouille and the consequences unfold with tragic force.
    With its spare dialogue and plot, the emotional core of the film is held together by cinematographer Yorick Le Saux’s sumptuous photography, John Adams’ gloriously melodramatic score and the always luminous Tilda Swinton, who learned to speak Italian with a Russian accent for the role.
    “I Am Love is an amazing film. It is deep, rich, human. It is not about rich and poor, but about old and new. It is about the ancient war between tradition and feeling.”—Roger Ebert

Winter’s Bone  

Sept. 19, 2010

2010   USA   (1 hr., 40 min.)   Rated R

Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is only 17 when she finds herself the head of the family. Her father has put up the family home in the Missouri Ozarks as security for bail, but then disappears. Ree knows that if she can’t find him she and her younger brother and sister will soon be homeless. What she doesn’t know is that there are forces at work in this isolated mountain community that will turn her search for her father into a dangerous quest.

    Ree is willing to risk everything for her brother and sister, and the spirit of this resilient and resourceful young woman has been perfectly captured by Lawrence. Director Debra Granik has chosen the rest of the cast with equal care. All of the characters, from Ree’s edgy, hard-bitten uncle to the community matriarch, who could be channeling Lady Macbeth, are vivid and authentic screen creations.

    Along with Granik’s impressive casting is the equally impressive way she portrays this small and forgotten corner of America. In many ways the cold and brooding location is almost a character in the film. It is a tribal culture where meth has replaced moonshine, rusting cars and appliances defile the mountain landscape and violence always simmers below the surface. Part Grapes of Wrath and part film noir, Winter’s Bone, winner of the 2009 Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Drama, is a true original.

The publishing phenomenon, Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy has sold 40 million copies worldwide. The first film in the series, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, has grossed over $100 million worldwide, an astounding accomplishment for a Swedish-language film. While both the books and the films have many merits, none are more compelling than one of crime fiction’s most original creations–Lisbeth Salander, the twenty-something, bisexual, Goth-clad, black belt computer genius.

    As we left her in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Salander had used her hacking skills to empty out a corporate criminal’s offshore accounts of tens of millions of dollars. Her financial future is assured, but her past catches up with her when she finds herself accused of killing a journalist and his girlfriend who were working on an expose of the Swedish sex trade.

    In The Girl Who Played with Fire we see Salander literally come back from the grave. We learn why she spent much of her youth in a mental hospital, why her Russian-born father wants her killed, and the connection between her father and the Swedish Secret Service. Along the way she has to elude the police, a motorcycle gang that has her in its sights and a blond giant immune to pain who is a perfect killing machine. Watching Salander outwit them all as she dispenses her own special brand of justice is pure satisfaction.

Bazil, played by popular French comedian Dany Boon, the hero of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s new film Micmacs, is a mild-mannered fellow with a big grudge. As a child he lost his father to a land mine in the Moroccan desert. The orphaned Bazil grows up to be an obsessive movie buff. While working the night shift at a video store and reciting Humphrey Bogart’s French-dubbed dialog in The Big Sleep by heart, a stray bullet pierces his forehead nearly killing him.

    Once out of the hospital, Bazil is befriended by a crew of misfit junk collectors―the Micmacs of the title. Bazil has traced the land mine and the bullet to rival armaments companies whose offices sit across from each other in an industrial zone on the fringe of Paris. He and his wacky friends set out on a vengeance quest to monkey-wrench the merchants of death, embarking on a David and Goliath campaign of sabotage and humiliation that is at once whimsically prankish and deeply earnest.

    Jeunet, still best known in this country for Amélie, achieves a ruefully comical, elegant and humanistic film in the tradition of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati. The film has the air of a fable and an out-of-time patina with Max Steiner music from The Big Sleep and other early musical scores. The complete French title, Micmacs à tire-larigot is slang for “nonstop madness.” And it is.

Writer-director Nicole Holofcener (Friends with Money, 2006) cleverly keeps the emotions gurgling in this delightful film. Please Give is a slice-of-life kind of movie that looks at how we constantly must adjust ourselves as we relate to the people around us.

    Catherine Keener plays Kate, an antiques dealer feeling increasingly guilty about her vocation: buying up furniture from relatives of the recently deceased and selling it for a large profit to New York's status-obsessed upper-middle class. Her feelings of unease at her own comfortable existence are amplified every time she runs into Rebecca (Rebecca Hall), a radiology technician whose acid-tongued 90-year-old grandmother Andra lives next door. Kate and her business partner/husband Alex (Oliver Platt) own the flat with a view to expanding their home once granny passes on. Adding to her guilt is that she enjoys “having” but is affected by the “have-nots” sleeping on the street outside her door.

    Please Give, the official selection at both the Sundance and Berlin film festivals, is a gently humorous, warm film with well-written and well-acted characters. Holofcener creates some of the most interesting female characters in film today and Keener (in her fourth Holofcener film role), who embodies the director’s ideal woman, has become her artistic alter ego.

    “With her new film, the poignant and funny Please Give, Holofcener is at the top of her game.”―Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

There is something startling about Mia Hansen-Love’s second feature film about a self-styled independent film producer whose life is slowly and inexorably coming apart. While The Father of My Children is ostensibly about an independent film producer attempting to maintain his fiscal solvency, it is not a film about the film industry or even art. It’s about love, self-definition and a terrible choice made in a moment of quiet despair that changes everyone’s life forever.

    Gregoire Canvel, played by Louis-Dominique de Lencquesaing with casual charm and understated charisma, is a man with a wife who loves him, three daughters who pine for him, employees who admire him and creditors who are closing in on him. Hansen-Love’s deft direction of the family scenes is one of the minor miracles of the film. Their response to the unimaginable tragedy when it unfolds is so under-played, so gentle and terrifying, and ultimately so real that it stays with you long after you have left the theater. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 2009, this is an involving drama about the banality of tragedy and the surprising resilience of life.

    “The Father of My Children is a subtle work on an exceedingly difficult subject. It’s painful – and the pain is a type not often explored on film with this delicacy, or quite this calm.”—Amy Biancolli, San Francisco Chronicle

Nic and Jules, impeccably played by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, are a lesbian couple with two teenage children whose lives take an abrupt turn when the children, Joni and Laser, throw a very large rock into the familial pond. Curious about their sperm-donor father, they locate Paul (Mark Ruffalo.) Paul charms them with his slacker sensibilities and before long they have invited him home for dinner. To Nic’s dismay Paul quickly ingratiates himself with Jules and the children and becomes the catalyst for a family crisis.

    Given the controversy over gay marriage, it’s revealing to view the stresses and strains of marriage and child rearing through the lens of two gay parents. Nic and Jules bicker, the children strain at the parental leash and there are speed bumps on the road of life which Nic and Jules handle with varying degrees of success. Life in their suburban home is no different than home life anywhere else.

    All of the performances in the film are beyond reproach, from Bening’s take on Nic’s steely personality to Ruffalo’s portrayal of Paul’s shambling and counterfeit charm. The Kids Are All Right is an artfully woven tale of the ups and downs of family life in which both the comedy and drama owe as much to real life as the screenwriter’s pen.

    “Witty, urbane and thoroughly entertaining.”—Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work covers a year in the life of the tireless comedian at age 75. Don’t be surprised if you walk out of the theater exhausted by all she fits into that time frame. You’ll also walk out entertained, enlightened and just a little sore from laughing.

    This documentary reveals the rewards and costs of compulsive celebrity. On stage Rivers is one of the funniest, most daring, dirtiest and most vulnerable standup comics ever. Off stage she tells the truth as she sees it, even if it reveals tawdry insights into her personal life. But she is totally lacking in self-pity. She discovered that her husband, Edgar, who produced her Fox TV show, stole from her. He committed suicide. She never forgave him — for the suicide, not the stealing.

    One of the most arresting aspects of the film is her physical transformation over the years through plastic surgery. Her surgery bills must rival Michael Jackson’s. And she’s far from through.

    Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work is the portrait of a woman who will not accept defeat, will not slow down―someone who must constantly prove herself. What makes Joan run? Bernard Shaw called it the “Life Force.” Whatever it is, night after night she faces audiences that know her age, her problems―eye her plastic surgery―and she wins them over because she’s so darn funny.

    “A convulsively funny movie.”―New York Times

The Ojai Film Festival, now in its 11th year, continues its commitment to presenting the best new independent films from around the globe.

In addition to three days of screenings, the festival will feature seminars on the art of filmmaking and a Gala Awards Presentation. As in the past, Thursday's opening night event will be a free community screening.

The Ojai Film Festival is proud to highlight America's rich cinematic heritage, while also providing a showcase for today's most innovative and talented independent filmmakers. Included in this year's program will be a wide variety of distinguished films in many styles and genres, some from well-known filmmakers, others from young artists just beginning their careers. What they will have in common is the capacity to entertain and educate, move you to tears and fill you with laughter, stimulate you to think and perhaps, inspire you to action.

For information or to purchase tickets and passes, please call (805) 640-1947 or visit us on the Web at www.ojaifilmfestival.com Volunteers and donations are welcome.

The Tillman Story

Nov. 14, 2010

USA  2010 (1 hr., 34 min.) Rated R

The old axiom that “the first casualty in war is truth” is only the starting point in this fine documentary about the famed NFL safety who repudiated his seven-figure football salary for the killing fields of Afghanistan. While most people know about the Army’s collusion in obscuring the true circumstances of Pat Tillman’s friendly-fire death, the brazen and bold-faced lies are clear and startling.

    On one level it may not surprise anyone that the U.S. military and political leadership did not want to give up its top recruiting story for the “War on Terror.” But the collusion of the press in propagating government lies is more difficult to understand and in many ways more disturbing.

    Politics aside, director Amir Bar-Lev paints a more complete and complex portrait of Pat Tillman than any of us have ever seen. Tillman’s reading list ranged from Noam Chomsky to the Book of Mormon and his opinions changed as his experience grew. What emerges is a man who is intelligent and open to new ideas, not just a mouthpiece of mindless patriotic fervor. The Tillman family’s heroic persistence with the military is the only real reason the truth was ever revealed – heroism worthy of Pat’s sacrifice.

    “This documentary succeeds triumphantly on so many levels that its full impact doesn't hit you until you have time to register its aftershocks.”—Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

Mademoiselle Chambon

Nov. 21, 2010

France 2009 (1 hr., 41 min.) Not Rated

Little does Jean (Vincent Lindon) know when he accepts Veronique Chambon’s invitation to speak to her class that his life is about to change. But it’s no secret to us as we watch Veronique’s face while Jean stands before the class. We know feelings are beginning to stir within her, but it will take some time before Jean will feel the same emotional pull.

    Veronique, in an exquisite performance by Sandrine Kimberlain, is a solitary woman who believes life has passed her by. Jean’s marriage has faded into a comfortable habit, but he is a family man and is not looking for an affair. However, he can’t get Veronique out of his mind and his feelings for her crystallize in one lyrical moment as he watches her play the violin. Transfixed by both Veronique and the music, Jean is soon wrestling with an insoluble dilemma: What is he willing to lose—his family or the opportunity to experience a great love?

    If this year’s I Am Love is romance as grand opera, Mademoiselle Chambon is romance as chamber music. The film resists the temptation to hurry the story along as it builds slowly into a rueful and powerful tale of love that never strikes a false note. This is a film to savor.

    “Made with the kind of sensitivity and nuance that’s become an almost lost art.”—Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

Get Low

Nov. 28, 2010

USA 2010 (1 hr., 43 min.) Rated PG-13

Get Low is a genuine, often hilarious period piece based on a real-life legend who threw himself a funeral party while still alive. Three pros: Robert Duvall, Bill Murray and Sissy Spacek spin pure gold from the Depression-era folk tale set in the Tennessee backwoods. Director Aaron Schneider is firmly in control as the story toggles between solemnity and whimsy, as any good front-porch yarn should. Previously a cinematographer, Schneider lights the film like a master.

    Duvall is Felix Bush, a backwoods hermit with a long scruffy beard who has spent 38 years alone on his farm in self-imposed exile with his secrets. Time is catching up to him though and he feels it in his chest. Felix makes a rare visit to town with a wad of cash in his pocket to visit Frank Quinn (Bill Murray), the funeral director. He explains to the undertaker just how he wants to “get low” (slang for get buried.) He wants to go out with a bang by having a send-off party while still alive. When the big day arrives secrets are revealed and old wounds are healed.

    Get Low is not so much about death as it is about finding peace. Some wonderful humor comes forth in the process, topped off by Murray, who gets some of the best laughs. Duvall keeps getting better with age and could easily garner his seventh Oscar nomination for his role.

NOTE: All dialog in films from non-English speaking countries will be presented in its original language accompanied by English subtitles.