Ricki & the Flash (12A)
As the Summer session draws to a close, we’ve another very busy week in the cinema. First up is Ricki and The Flash, a movie that reunites Meryl Streep and her daughter Mamie Gummer (sycophantic lawyer Nancy Crozier in The Good Wife), on screen together for the first time in 29 years (Gummer appeared as her real mother’s infant child in Heartburn in 1986).
Ricki is a middle-aged musician who left her family – businessman husband (Kevin Kline) and their three children – in Indianapolis some years before to pursue her ambitions of fame and fortune in California. But things haven’t worked out and when we meet her she is fronting a pub band called The Flash in Tarzana in the San Fernando Valley. Ricki lives in a tiny, ill-equipped apartment, and supplements her income by working as a check-out girl in a supermarket.
But she is forced to face what she has become – and return to some version of being a mother – when she gets a phone call from her ex-husband to say that their daughter’s marriage has broken up and that she has attempted suicide.
As a comedy, this is much closer to Rachel Getting Married in Jonathan Demme’s oeuvre than earlier titles like Howard & Melvin and Something Wild. It has a bittersweet quality, balancing awkwardly between real-life experiences and situations and comic set ups.
Streep and Gummer are effective in about six scenes together and Demme binds the various domestic dilemmas together with a theme about the curative effects of popular music (a group of characters are brought together by the sale of an electric guitar).
Demme garners solid performances from a game cast working off Diable 'Juno' Cody's script, but the film never really grabs a hold of the talent on offer here.
Me & Earl & the Dying Girl (12A)
Acquired by Fox Searchlight Pictures for $12m in an intense bidding war after it won the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Me & Earl &the Dying Girl is the sort of innovative independent production that Sundance was set up to discover and promote.
It basically takes the ingredients of young adult stories like The Fault in Our Stars and stands them on their head.
Lanky, awkward Thomas Mann – who is a genuine find – plays Greg, a Pittsburgh high school major who spends most of his time reworking classic movies in Claymation form with his friend Earl.
When the daughter of a neighbour is diagnosed with leukaemia, Greg is partly blackmailed by his own parents into befriending her and a fairly honest and open relationship about her illness develops – concluding with Greg and Earl making a film for her, and about her, before she dies.
Although it surrenders to a rash of loose-end tying in the final third, Me & Earl & the Dying Girl bristles with colour and personality, with a droll, offbeat style and a collection of lovely performances from a group of familiar adults – Jon Bernthal, Nick Offerman, Connie Britton, Molly Shannon – to support the lead trio of Mann, RJ Cyler, and Olivia Cooke – currently up for the starring role in Rian Johnson’s hotly anticipated Star Wars: Episode VIII.
The dialogue and sight gags are confidently paced and the animation is cleverly worked into the narrative. It is worth seeing.
Cartel Land (Club)
Most weeks now we get at least one significant documentary release in this country and the latest is Cartel Land, a vivid portrait of the narco-cartel wars along the Mexican/US border by director and cinematographer Matthew Heineman. Over the last three decades more than 100,000 people have been killed in this conflict and another 20,000 have gone missing, creating new standards in difficulty and danger for journalists and filmmakers trying to cover the story.
Heineman got round these difficulties by attaching himself to a vigilante group, the Autodefensas, which took a stand against one of the cartels, the romantically named Knights Templar in the western coastal state of Michoacán.
The Autodefensas came from all walks of life – the group filmed by Heineman was formed by a doctor – and they began to roll back territory against the cartel, village by village, town by town.
Cartel Land, which was exec-produced by Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow, shows how the Autodefensas uprising provided reporters with a chance to cover hidden terrain and how Heineman (who had never been a war reporter) stayed and stayed until he was face to face with the savage reality of the conflict.
This is absolutely riveting stuff, a graphic picture, painted without fear by a resourceful, determined and talented filmmaker.
No Escape (15A)
No Escape is Owen Wilson’s first non-comedy role in about 13 years (if you consider Inherent Vice a comedy) and it is part of Pierce Brosnan’s on-going attempt to stake out a character career, post Bond, for himself, here playing a greying, jowly, British Government operative with a Cockney accent – he says he based it on Cream drummer Ginger Baker.
Otherwise it is very much a ‘B-Movie’ thriller set in what is described as a “fourth world” country about an American engineer, who arrives with his wife (Lake Bell) and two children, to help set up a new clean water system. The locals object; they claim that Wilson’s multi-national employers are out to privatise the water and go on a rampage, slaughtering tourists, police and anyone who looks like they might have a connection to the local administration.
Originally titled The Coup, No Escape is a chase story that takes place over a period of 17 hours with no political, social or geographic context. We are not told where it is set – although it did upset the Cambodian censors so much, they
banned it on the evidence of the trailer. A lucky escape for them.
Also showing...
Also out this week are Closed Curtain (Club), a classically structured movie about the efforts of the persecuted Iranian director Jafar Panahai to find ways of expressing himself; American Ultra (16), which I haven’t seen yet, but which is an action comedy starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart; yet another coming of age comedy, Dope (16); and the latest, and probably the weakest – and that's saying something – entry in the Transporter franchise, Transporter Refuelled (15A).
