New Releases for the Week of June 19, 2015

INSIDE OUT

(Disney*Pixar) Starring the Voices Of Amy Poehler, Bill Hader, Louis Black, Mindy Kaling, Richard Kind, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan, Paula Poundstone. Directed by Pete Docter and Ronaldo del Carmen

When a family moves to San Francisco, 11-year-old Riley is bummed to the max. Her parents don’t understand her, mainly because the emotions that live inside her head – Joy, Anger, Fear, Disgust and Sadness – have accidentally gone amuck inside her head. The emotions are conflicting over how to handle all the things going on in her life – a new city, a new school, new friends, a new life, and the loss of everything familiar. Battle stations – things are about to get a little heated in Headquarters…

See the trailer, interviews, a promo, a clip and B-roll video here.
For more on the movie this is the website .
Release Formats: Standard, 3D (opens Thursday)
Genre: Animated Feature
Now Playing: Wide Release
Rating: PG (for mild thematic elements and some action)

5 Flights Up

(Focus World) Morgan Freeman, Diane Keaton, Carrie Preston, Josh Pais. An elderly couple in Brooklyn have lived in the same apartment since they were young, never dreaming that their Williamsburg neighborhood would become gentrified and one of the most sought-after addresses in the city. Now having trouble mounting the five flights of stairs to get to their apartment, they reluctantly decide to put their apartment on the market. An unlikely sequence of events, combined with overeager realtors and snotty bargain hunters combine to make them wonder if they wouldn’t be better off just walking away.

See the trailer here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Comedy
Now Playing: AMC Downtown Disney
Rating: PG-13 (for language and some nude images)

ABCD 2

(UTV) Varun Dhawan, Shradda Kapoor, Prabhu Deva, Dharmesh Yelande. An Indian dance troupe with three outstanding choreographers head to Vegas for an international hip-hop dance championship. However, internal pressures threaten to tear the team apart.

See the trailer here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard, 3D
Genre: Bollywood Musical
Now Playing: AMC West Oaks, Touchstar Southchase
Rating: NR

Anarchy Parlor

(Gravitas) Robert LaSardo, Sara Fabel, Jordan James Smith, Tiffany DeMarco. A group of college friends traveling in Lithuania go to a tattoo parlor to commemorate their travels in ink. Instead, they are captured and tortured by the Artist who has more sinister ideas as to what to do with them.

See the trailer here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Horror
Now Playing: AMC Altamonte Mall
Rating: NR

Dope

(Open Road) Shameik Moore, Zoe Kravitz, Forest Whitaker, Kimberly Elise. Malcolm is treading a fine line in navigating life in a brutally tough neighborhood in Los Angeles, looking to escape by going to college. However, a chance encounter at a party leads him along a different path. Set in the 1990s with a classic hip-hop score, this was a critical hit at Sundance.

See the trailer and clips here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard (opens Thursday)
Genre: Urban Crime Drama
Now Playing: Wide Release
Rating: R (for language, drug content, sexuality/nudity and some violence, all involving teens)

Felix and Meira

(Oscilloscope Laboratories) Martin Dubreuil, Hadas Yaron, Luzer Twersky, Anne-Elisabeth Bosse. A Hassidic Jewish wife and mother in Montreal is lost in a highly structured life. She meets a Secular young man, mourning the death of his estranged father, in a bakery. The two begin an innocent friendship which in turn becomes something more which forces her to make a choice between the life she’s always known, or being with the man she loves.

See the trailer and a clip here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Romantic Drama
Now Playing: Regal Winter Park Village

Rating: R (for a scene of sexuality/nudity)

Gemma Bovery

(Music Box) Gemma Arterton, Fabrice Luchini, Jason Flemyng, Isabelle Candelier.  A rural French village and in particular its baker find their lives transformed by the arrival of a British couple whose name reflects the heroine of a classic Flaubert novel that was written in that very village. When her life begins to mirror that of the heroine of that novel, the baker tries to prevent her from meeting the same tragic end as Madame Bovary. This was a big hit at the recent Florida Film Festival and you can read my review of the movie here.

See the trailer here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Romance
Now Playing: Enzian Theater
Rating: R (for sexuality/nudity and language)

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The Happy Poet

Paul Gordon ponders the difficulty in attracting a crowd to a quality product.

(2010) Comedy (Self-Released) Paul Gordon, Jonny Mars, Chris Doubek, Liz Fisher, Amy Myers Martin, Richard Lerma, Sam Wainwright Douglas, Carlos Trevino, Anita Kunik, Paul Famighetti, Jordan Strassner, Matt Joyner, James Jensen. Directed by Paul Gordon

Dreams come in all sizes, big and small. Some people dream of changing the world, others are happy at merely changing their own lives. Some want to do great things – some just great things for the world.

Bill (Gordon) doesn’t have a grand agenda. He just wants to serve good, healthy food from a food cart in his hometown of Austin, Texas. However, he is drowning in debt, mostly due to student loans accrued as a creative writing major at the University of Texas. When he goes to a bank to see about getting a loan to start up his business, he is met with a nearly laughable offer of $750.

He accepts it and sets out to buy provisions and find himself a cart, which he does – an aging hot dog cart from a suspicious guy who has a thing about hot dogs. While Bill isn’t particularly against hot dogs per se, they are not exactly in his immediate business model.

He finds himself a spot in an Austin park and promptly has a truly awful day. Most of the business he gets is from people looking for hot dogs and who aren’t particularly interested in something healthy and organic. He can’t even give the stuff away – he gives one person an eggless egg salad sandwich as a free sample and the guy takes one bite and throws it away. Eventually he meets Curtis (Doubek), a guy who hangs out in the park most of the day who genuinely likes his food. That gives Bill the incentive to come back the next day.

He meets Donnie (Mars), a cheerful self-promoting dope dealer who thinks that Bill’s idea is a good one. He sets up a delivery service and hands out flyers. Curtis even comes up with a name for Bill’s cart – the Happy Poet. Business begins to pick up.

Bill becomes infatuated with Agnes (Fisher), a pretty cubicle drone who finds his lunch cart and she begins to come by regularly. With Bill a bit too clueless to ask her out (despite Donnie’s threats to ask her out himself if Bill doesn’t), Agnes finally asks him if he wants to go bowling with her. The night eventually ends up at Bill’s place where he reads her some of his poetry – an excruciatingly bad vaguely sexual monstrosity called “Chasm.”

However things begin to go south. Despite the good business Bill is getting, he is giving away far too much product to people like Curtis and even to Agnes. He also has payments due on the cart and he is pricing his food too low for him to make sufficient profit. He soon runs out of money and is forced to sell hot dogs, much to the chagrin of his customers.

He also discovers that much of the success of his delivery is due to Donnie’s sideline of delivering pot with the food. The betrayal sends him into a downward spiral of self-doubt and depression. Donnie feels bad about it and when it is discovered that Curtis has a little secret he’s been keeping from his friends, change is in the wind.

This is the kind of movie that doesn’t have to shout to be heard. It is low-key and quiet, getting under your skin rather than in your face. Director/writer/actor/editor/sandwich maker/truck unloader/generally in charge of a lot of things guy Gordon delivers his lines in a flat Midwestern monotone, a cross between Steven Wright and Bob Newhart. This really helps with the development of the character as a bit of a doormat. In fact, the title is very ironic since Bill is neither happy nor much of a poet (which he, in a moment of self-awareness, confesses to Curtis).

Donnie is very much the anti-Bill in the movie; loud where Bill is quiet, aggressive where Bill is passive and self-aggrandizing where Bill is self-effacing. In that sense, Mars and Gordon make a really good team, near-opposites that help create quite a unit. Doubek also does some pretty good work as the enigmatic Curtis.

Fisher does a great job as Agnes. She’s like so many young women out there; decent, giving but having to navigate a relationship that is a bit weird. There is a sweetness to the relationship between Agnes and Bill that flavors the whole movie with a subtle but intoxicating spice.

Austin is a good location for the movie. It’s an arts-favorable city with a hip, sophisticated young citizenry (many involved with the university or state government) and a thriving music scene. It’s a great place to live and the movie showcases that aspect of it.

I’m not really big on vegan and vegetarian food but I found myself kinda hungry for it afterwards; I’m not sure whether that’s attributable to Gordon’s skills as a filmmaker or a chef (I’m more inclined towards the former though). I also really appreciated the movie’s charm, slow pace and understated humor. The Happy Poet is not necessarily for those who limit their comedies to things like The Hangover or Judd Apatow’s movies (and their many clones) but for those who appreciate a quiet, reflective chuckle it is quite ideal. Do I get the free veggie chips with that?

REASONS TO GO: Gordon’s deadpan delivery contrasts nicely with Mars’ frenetic one. Charming story and a cast whose performances are as organic as the food.

REASONS TO STAY: Might be too low-key for some who like their humor broad and raunchy.

FAMILY VALUES: A good deal of drug humor and some drug use, mild sexuality and a little bit of language.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The eggless egg salad is an actual sandwich filling used at the filmmaker’s favorite organic food market sandwich counter in Austin.

HOME OR THEATER: Worth seeking out on DVD.

FINAL RATING: 7/10

TOMORROW: Made in India

RocknRolla

The Defiant Ones, these ain't.

(2008) Crime Drama (Warner Brothers) Gerard Butler, Tom Wilkinson, Thandie Newton, Mark Strong, Idris Elba, Tom Hardy, Toby Kebbell, Jeremy Piven, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Karel Roden, Gemma Arterton. Directed by Guy Ritchie

Few directors do crime movies as well as Guy Ritchie. Movies like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch are highly entertaining, highly stylized British gangster pictures. He’d taken a brief break from the genre with the somewhat cerebral Revolver but fans of his first two movies rejoiced at his return to the genre in this movie. Was there reason to cheer?

One Two (Butler) is a mid-level criminal who leads a loose bunch of associates dubbed “The Wild Bunch,” with Mumbles (Elba) his right hand man and Handsome Bob (Hardy). He is in a real estate deal with Lenny (Wilkinson), the kingpin of London crime, an old school boss whose grip on the throne is slowly slipping away. Lenny screws over One Two, keeping both the land and the money that One Two gives him. To add insult to injury, he insists that One Two owes him two million pounds, which One Two doesn’t have – because Lenny stole his stash.

So One Two sets out to get two million pounds and figure out a way to get Lenny back while avoiding Archy (Strong), Lenny’s right hand muscle. That will involve a Russian mobster (Roden) who has lent Lenny his lucky painting, a sexy bookkeeper (Newton) in stilettos who’s smart and greedy, a dead junkie rock star (Kebbell) who is rather far from deceased, and a pair of American music promoters (Piven and Bridges).

I’ve tried to give you an idea about the plot; quite frankly, it’s so convoluted that trying to sum it up in any more detail will be not only futile but unnecessarily confusing. Therein lies one of the problems here; there are so many threads going on that at times your brain threatens to explode. While Ritchie is known for weaving multiple threads through his storyline, here it doesn’t work as well as it does in his other films. While I’m not against complex plots per se, I am against overly complicated plots. There’s a difference – and this one falls into the latter category.

That doesn’t mean all the threads don’t work though. There are some pretty good acting performances here, particularly from the always charming Butler, Elba and Strong, who does double duty as the narrator. Wilkinson is a terrific actor who makes Lenny thoroughly reprehensible. In fact, nearly every role is well-acted.

There are plenty of excellent action sequences as well. Ritchie has a flair for them and for that sudden violence that takes the audience by surprise (there are a few gotcha scenes here that I thoroughly enjoyed). He also has a flair for the language and the flow of the words – few movies sound as good as a Guy Ritchie movie in that regard, even if we Americans can’t understand everything that’s being said at all times. To my admittedly uneducated ear, it all sounds authentic.

There are also some positively funny moments here. Some of the laughs are of the kind you feel guilty about later for having laughed; those are the kind that takes you by surprise. Yeah, I know it’s wrong but I laughed anyway – is that so wrong?

No, it’s not. While this isn’t up to Ritchie’s previous output, it’s still solidly entertaining. If you haven’t seen his first two films, by all means start there. If you’re a Gerard Butler fan, by all means start here. Either way, Ritchie has carved a nice niche out for himself. While he has gone on to the Sherlock Holmes movies (with a new one coming out in December), these may be the kinds of movies that define his career as a filmmaker and if so, not a bad tombstone to leave behind.

WHY RENT THIS: Guy Ritchie doing what he does best. Funny and violent where it needs to be.

WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: Not up to his best stuff. Too many plot lines going on at once.

FAMILY VALUES: The language is rough and pervasive; there’s also a good deal of violence and drug use. There is a little bit of sex as well.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: According to director Guy Ritchie, this is the first film in a trilogy starring the Wild Bunch. However, there are no plans at this time to film the sequel anytime soon.

NOTABLE DVD EXTRAS: There’s a featurette called “Guy’s Town” which looks at the locations in London where the movie was filmed and commentary from Ritchie about how the face of London has changed over the past ten years.

BOX OFFICE PERFORMANCE: $25.7M on an unreported production budget; the movie broke even at best but more likely lost money.

FINAL RATING: 5.5/10

TOMORROW: True Grit (2010)