Chris Messina shines (again); Marin Ireland, too, in Matt Ross' smart stunt film, 28 HOTEL ROOMS

As good as this movie is (and it is often very), you also must admit to yourself that its concept remains something of a stunt. Seeing two people -- even actors as hot-damn good as Chris Messina and Marin Ireland -- playing characters whom we see only during their many trysts in hotel rooms all over this country (and who knows where else) is a clever idea that allows for a lot of fun and games but not the chance to see this man and woman in other ways that might complete them. (But then, that's perhaps the whole point: Their own sense of each other as rounded human beings must be quite incomplete.) In its way, 28 HOTEL ROOMS reminds you of Same Time Next Year with people who've decided, Hell, why wait for next year?  It also may bring to mind the French film An Affair of Love (Une liaison pornographique), with its needy but skewed liaison.

The writer/director (who's much better known as an actor), Matt Ross, does a commendable job of pulling us in via short, sharp scenes that feature all kinds of lovemaking and dialog that is never more expository that the real thing might be. This helps keep us glued to the characters and what they'll let slip. There's little sense, going in, that they will want this odd affair to continue, and yet, as it does, we know that it will -- and must. Before too long, and as they grow more comfortable and even a little... maybe... bored, whoa: They're beginning to act like an old married couple!

Well, why not? They are married (eventually): Just not to each other. We learn a little about their significant others but a lot more about their careers. He's a successful writer (he met her on the book tour for his first hit novel); she's some kind of corporate "accountant" who takes her job a lot more seriously than he takes it. (The scene during which their biggest fight occurs has to do with their "work" and its respective importance.)

In film like this one, so very much depends on the quality of the performers, and I don't think you could ask for a better pair. TrustMovies has previously called Mr. Messina (above) a kind of versatile "everyman." He's capable of so much, though he often ends up in good ensemble movies, in which he fits like one of the fingers in the proverbial glove. Not since Ira & Abby has he had a role this good, this demanding, or this well-written, and he is terrific in it. His is a brave performance, at full throttle inwardly and outwardly, too. (For a change, there's as much full-frontal male nudity here as female, and yes, Messina looks as good unclothed as clothed.)

Ms Ireland (above, in tight close-up) matches in bravery her co-star word for word, action for action. She's always an interesting actress, making choices that are sometimes unexpected but that most often work. Delicate but steely when required, she creates a memorably caring, confused, anguished and angry character.

The movie tackles the thorny question of how we can love more than one person fully and successfully -- and what happens when we try. If I called the film a kind of stunt in my opening paragraph, it is one that is done so well that I don't think you'll mind. In the filmmaker's choice of what and what not to show us (as above), these odd and circumscribed lives open up slowly and sadly, with but an occasional flash of humor. And just about the time we're beginning to grow restive and thus realize that -- pace Mr Beckett -- This can't go on. This will go on, suddenly, quietly, the movie ends.

28 Hotel Rooms -- from Oscilloscope and running just 82 minutes -- is available to stream via Netflix and can also be seen via Amazon Instant Video and on DVD.

John Mulholland's COOPER & HEMINGWAY: THE TRUE GEN is a first-class, dual celebrity bio-doc

A DVD of the below film, which TrustMovies 

covered at the time of its theatrical release,

is now available -- with a Blu-ray in the offing soon.

So if you did not catch this one theatrically, take note!

Gary Cooper and Ernest Hemingway were best of friends? Who knew? I sure didn't. And prior to viewing this remarkably rich, detailed and moving documentary, I might have also added, Who cares? Not any more. Even if you were not the greatest fan of "Coop," one of, if not the most popular male American actors from the 1930s through the dawn of the 1960s, nor one of those who bow down to Hemingway as the be-all-and-end-all of American fiction, this movie will surprise you, and, I suspect, quickly win you over. If you are already big fans of these men, get ready for some prime catnip.

COOPER & HEMINGWAY: THE TRUE GEN begins like one of those old westerns many of us loved -- with the camera gliding gracefully over hills and canyons, and the opening credits rolling by in a lovely, old-time typeface. "The true gen," by the way refers to a phrase Hemingway coined to explain that something was real, as opposed to a phony. He undoubtedly used it about his friend Cooper, and I think you'll use it about this movie, too -- written and directed by John Mulholland. So full is the film of interesting anecdotes about the two men, along with interviews with friends, family, movie people, popular authors influenced by Hemingway and academics who appear to have spent their lives studying him -- all this accompanied by a treasure trove of visual material that works near-perfectly with the film's narration (well spoken in his reedy tenor voice by Sam Waterston) -- that the movie comes remarkably close to a "you-were-there" experience.

What Cooper & Hemingway does especially well is give us what seems like the "whole" of these men. While the film exhibits great appreciation and love for them and their work, it is not afraid to go into the darker areas. Mr. Mulholland has chosen his anecdotes supremely well to give us a growing sense of who these men were, together with some of the forces that made them this way. We learn a lot of about their marriages: several for Hemingway, only one for Cooper (although it seems he rarely met a leading lady he didn't fuck, but in the most gentlemanly fashion. Everyone evidently fell in love with this guy).

For all this, the movie never seems salacious. Theme-wise, it concentrates most on the idea of American manliness -- which both these icons would seem to represent. In the early 20th Century, along with the coming of industrialization and office work also appeared to arrive a more feminized male. Coop and Hem, in their images at least, kept this at bay, though it became clear that Hemingway's was more of a "front" than that of Cooper's, with his grew-up-on-a-ranch background. Still, the movie insists, both men's public image was a kind of shell game.

We learn something of their politics -- Coop was conservative, Hem more liberal -- and their women, too, especially Mary, Hemingway's last wife, and Cooper's "Rocky," who proved strong enough to withstand his assignations -- though his approaching-a-permanent one with Patricia Neal almost undid their marriage. We hear from some of the children, as well, several of whom have piquant tales to tell -- especially Cooper's daughter Maria and Hemingway's son Patrick.

Hemingway as a prevaricator is given full swing, too, though I wish the filmmaker had spent a little more time on just why, as he tells us, the writer came back from World War II so sick and unhealthy. Hemingway did not really see any action (he was considered by our government too valuable to waste in combat), though he is said to have invented certain of his WWII tales. Throughout, the writer comes off as supremely talented and pretty much an asshole as a person (the anecdote about how Cooper gets his friend to give a very necessary apology is succulent indeed).

We see how the wave of success crests and falls for both men, and how their comebacks -- The Old Man and the Sea, High Noon -- were almost simultaneous. As were their deaths: Hemingway's suicide followed Cooper's death from spreading prostate cancer by only weeks. Mr. Mulholland does not make this claim, but the viewer cannot help but wonder how much the loss of his best friend added to Hemingway's terrible depression.

The filmmaker must have worked on this project for quite a few years, as many of the people he interviewed are now dead -- from Ms Neal, Charlton Heston and Jack Hemingway, all long gone, to Elmore Leonard and Paramount's A.C Lyles, both recently departed. Overall, this movie made me even fonder of the work of Cooper (I'll want to see some of his movies again soon), while finally beginning to understand and better appreciate Hemingway, at least as a complicated personality.

Cooper & Hemingway: The True Gen -- from Transmultimedia Entertainment and running 143 minutes, not one of which I would have wanted to miss -- opened in October, 2013, in NewYork City, and then in Los Angeles that December.

Roy Chow Hin-Yeung's NIGHTFALL: What does a somewhat middling Hong Kong movie look like?

When I first saw NIGHTFALL appear on the list of new additions to Netflix' streaming service, I automatically thought it was a Korean film. The poster had that certain look, and the story --according to the short Netflix description -- had to do with a detective investigating the murder of a famous pianist, so that sounded properly dark and delving. But then, as we started watching and the opening scene was one of those uber-bloody and frenetic but perfectly choreographed action/fight scenes taking place in the shower room of a prison, I immediately realized, uh-oh: Hong Kong! (I've never been there, so the night-time cityscape on the poster above didn't ring any bells.)

And indeed this is a Hong Kong creation, though not up to the level of some of the better of the Johnnie To movies like Breaking News or Sparrow (click and scroll way down). In fact there are two major action sequences: that fine and fast opening and another in a glass-bottom cable car (plus a couple of good chase scenes, as well). But the major part of this off-key but reasonably fulfilling film from Roy Chow Hin-Yeung (shown at right) is devoted to the mystery of multiple deaths arriving a generation apart, and the detective bent on solving them, along with his -- this is near-de rigueur for current Asian thrillers -- pretty young female assistant. (Real feminism is coming but slowly to Asia, if its movies are any indication.)

The longing of families fractured by untimely death is a paramount theme here, and it's handled pretty well, mostly thanks to that wiry but highly muscled actor Nick Cheung (above) who manages to handle both action and emotional scenes with prodigious flair and feeling. The titular star of the film is Simon Yam (below) who plays the detective in charge of the case, who lost his wife to supposed suicide (he imagines something other) years before. Mr. Lam gives a perfectly OK, close-to-the-vest performance but his work pales against what is required of (and provided by) the amazing Mr. Cheung.

The family that gives the plot its goosing is made up of a servile mom (Yu On-on), that pianist dad (Michael Wong, in a pretty scary, "Hey, listen to me revert to English!" performance) and put-upon daughter (the lovely Janice Man). Each is up to snuff, with Mr. Wong particularly memorable in a nasty way.

Enjoyable enough and somewhat mysterious (though I guessed the characters' connections awhile before the movie revealed them), Nightfall never rises much about the level of "just so-so." Despite all the back-and-forth, past-and-present time-frame changes, the film is not at all hard to follow. In fact, it's a little simple minded in its plodding manner, and the detective work on display is pretty paltry, too. Not to mention the coincidences that abound. I suspect that, had this been a Korean film after all (see initial paragraph), it would have made a better movie -- though perhaps with not quite such good action sequences.

(On the subject of "just so-so" (in the paragraph above): This was a rating level that Netflix, early in the game, used to offer its viewers, before it realized that forcing folk into either liking or not liking a movie was a much better marketing strategy because most of the time, viewers will, if they have mixed feelings about a film, opt for liked it over didn't like it. Little wonder, once Netflix dropped the so-so rating, so many movies seemed to become so much more popular. Rotten Tomatoes does the same thing. You either like or don't like a film. A mixed review cannot exist. This is, of course, bullshit. But this is also the hail-the-god-of-marketing times in which we live.)

Nightfall (a rather much-used title) in this case probably refers to the beautiful shot above -- in which sea, sky, cliffs and moon are actually the background for some very ugly goings-on. The film is available now via Netflix steaming.

An Alex Karpovsky mini-fest, as RUBBERNECK and RED FLAG appear on Netflix streaming

Maybe Alex Karpovsky (shown at right) is an acquired taste. If so, because he's been viewing the guy's acting work for quite some time now, TrustMovies suspects he has definitely acquired that taste. Just knowing Karpovsky will appear in a new film is an inducement to viewing it. And now that the actor has branched out into writing, producing and directing, there's even more reason to get to know his output. Since Cry Funny Happy in 2003, that memorably odd Karpovsky face -- on which, from just below the prominent nose on downward, nothing quite comes together and thus makes the face even more memorable -- has adorned a number of good to so-so movies that were almost always made more interesting by this fellow's appearance in them. Now, with two of his newest films -- written, directed and starring Karpovsky -- simultaneously appearing on Netflix streaming, here's an opportunity to sink your teeth and revel a bit in this guy's work as a filmmaker (which is every bit as odd but pleasurable as his acting).

If you had to place RUBBERNECK into a genre (it jumps a couple, actually), it would be that of the character study. And then the thriller. Yet the first thing you'll probably notice is that you're seeing Karpovsky -- whose acting roles have tended toward the dark and somewhat nasty -- playing a nice guy/schlub. What a surprise. Even better is how very well he handles this. He pulls you easily and a little sadly into his character of Paul Harris, a shy loner with only a sister and nephew for family, who works in a laboratory in the Boston area. One evening, at the company Christmas party, he finds himself engaged in conversation with a very pretty co-worker (lovely job by Jaime Ray Newman, below). Their conversation leads to, well, everything else that happens in this quietly jolting little movie.

According to what Karpovsky has said to the press, he had cast another actor in the leading role, but the guy dropped out suddenly and Karpovsky stepped in for reasons of time and practicality. I'm glad this happened, as the movie shows us more of the actor's versatility than we've heretofore experienced.

Karpovsky's storytelling skills are good (he co-wrote the film with Garth Donovan); he's able to convey a lot through a little. Where the movie goes -- how far and how fast -- is unexpected but well done. The filmmaker seems to have a fine visual sense, too, alternating consistently interesting shots in close-up, medium range and long distance (his cinematographer is Beecher Cotton and Karpovsky and Mr. Donovan collaborated on the film editing). Composition is excellent, too, as is the use of color. You really don't want to look away from the screen.

The filmmaker, shooting in the Boston area, used a cast made up of mostly local actors, each well-chosen and turning in a good performance. Despite all that happens here, and there is quite a lot of "event," Rubberneck ends up more of a character study than anything else -- a very good, and a very sad one, too.

With RED FLAG, Mr. Karpovsky is back to something closer to his "normal" screen self: a narcissistic, budding filmmaker up to his ears in road-trip personal-appearances and a problematic love life. Here he plays a filmmaker named Alex (I'm sure that's just a coincidence) who is doing a series of Q&As at one-time-only showings in some of our southern states for his documentary film Woodpecker (the title of a movie Mr. K. did indeed direct and co-write back in 2008), after just being given the boot by his girlfriend of several years (he says 4-1/2; she claims 7).

Red Flag is as light as Rubberneck is dark; both run well under 90 minutes and so do not outstay their welcome. Karpovsky has cast this film wonderfully well, too: with Jennifer Prediger (at left on poster, above, and below, right, much more fun here than she was in Swanberg's Uncle Kent) as an "amour" of our filmmaker,

and Onur Tukel (above, center, and below, right, of Septien), simply hilarious as the one friend who shows up to accompany our non-hero on his sojourn. (Tukel's riff on Shel Silverstein is classic.)

As Alex's ex-girlfriend, Caroline White (below, right) proves the most stable influence in the film, and also the most ill-used character. (Karpovsky's work will improve, I think, once he learns to better use and deepen his females characters.)

Also here in smaller roles are the likes of Keith Poulson, recently seen in Somebody Up There Likes Me, and filmmaker/actor Dustin Guy Defa (Bad Fever).  Karpovsky has stocked his movie with so much that the ideas and humor fall over each other tumbling out: back pain, reflexology, cliteridectomy, one-night-stands, stalkers, children's books They're all here. But, sorry: No late check-outs. Oh--and a splendid actress named Evonne Walton all but steals the movie with a single final scene that includes maybe two minutes of screen time but provides the best ending I've seen all year.

You can catch both these interesting films -- distributed by Tribeca Film -- via Netflix Streaming, as well as several others in which Mr. K acts but does not direct nor write. He and his work are worth knowing. (And now that I consider that photo just above, doesn't he also look a tad like a younger version of Italy's Roberto Benigni?)

Photo of Mr. Karpovsky, top, courtesy of 

Chris Tinkham and Under the Radar --

which has an excellent interview  

with the actor/filmmaker.

In LAURENCE ANYWAYS Xavier Dolan continues his lengthy examination of the Canadian "other"

Now that we've seen three of French-Canadian actor/director/
writer Xavier Dolan's full-length films, one thing -- in addition to the main character's "otherness" as a homosexual or would-be trans-gender -- does stand out. Shorter is definitely better, as M. Dolan appears to have some trouble staying focused. His first film (which remains his best), I Killed My Mother (J'ai tué ma mère), all about a fraught mom/son relation-ship, ran only 96 minutes but still began to ramble toward the finale; his follow-up, Heartbeats (Les amours imaginaires) extended to 101 minutes and tracked a kind of doomed threesome/would-be love affair with the focus and point alternately sharp and woozy; now, with LAURENCE ANYWAYS, that focus is on a seemingly happy, if a little wild, male school teacher who one day, quite out of the blue, confesses to his girl his raging need to become a woman. This one lasts two hours and 48 minutes.

Perhaps TrustMovies was expecting too much from this film -- something like a real and at least somewhat deep look into the why and how of the transgender experience. Instead we get a very lengthy movie about this "odd couple" that -- despite all the ability that the very fine actor Melvil Poupaud musters here (it's a lot) and the terrific actress Suzanne Clément (who matches Poupaud moment for moment) -- fuck and fight and split, then do it all over, again and again, throughout this oddly "surface" film. Neither as writer nor director, even with as able performers as he has here, can M. Dolan (shown above) manage to delve to any depth. By the end of the film, we know about as much as we did going in. If the filmmaker's intent is to keep the mystery of transgender desire ever mysterious, he has succeeded in spades. I am not even certain that you could call Laurence at any point in the film actually transgendered, as he seems to have a quite a bit of trouble parting with his penis. (And if you've ever seen M. Poupaud's, you'll immediately understand why.)

Because of this inability to connect thoughtful dialog to interesting visuals, what we mostly get are views like the above and below, in which M. Poupaud appears to be, uh, ill at ease, or maybe just pensive, or perhaps too hot or too cold. It is asking an awful lot of this good actor to fill in so many blanks. (To view M. Poupaud in one of his finest roles, watch him in Ozon's Time to Leave.)

Ditto Ms Clement, shown below, who has a whopping good scene with a waitress over brunch in a restaurant. It's fierce and funny and nasty and real. But then it goes on long enough to make you realize that, by this time, one of the other diners would have picked up Ms Clement bodily and thrown her out of the place. Dolan doesn't always know, simply for the sake of believability, when to call a halt to a scene.

Our hero is so very self-involved (a trait possessed by all of the Dolan's leading characters, and in fact most of his characters in general) that he becomes something of a pain in the ass. I suppose that anyone this unhappy with his gender identity would indeed be self-involved. How could he not? Still, we'd like to experience him a little more fully. So the choice of where he goes and what he does and whom he sees and so forth determines how fully we get to view and understand him. M. Dolan is far too circumspect in what he allows his character to negotiate.

Wherever he goes, home to dad and mom (interesting work from Nathalie Baye), to his girl, to a bar, our hero seem to get into a fight -- verbal or otherwise. Finally, it's refreshing, if annoying, to see him with a new girl with whom he simply goes into heavy withdrawal. Overall, the character comes off as a something of an entitled twat. Which is not, I suspect, the kind of "woman" he wanted to become.

The filmmaker's ending, by the way -- taking us back to how this couple first met -- is just lovely. Or it would be in more of a old-fashioned, sentimental love story that tugs the heart strings. At this point, you begin to wonder if that is indeed what Dolan meant his movie to be. In any case, Laurence Anyways (the title get its last-minute moment, in a verbal manner, similar to the way in which Frances Ha got hers, visually), from Breaking Glass Pictures, makes its DVD and Blu-ray debut today.

BOOKER'S PLACE: The new Raymond De Felitta documentary about his dad's 1965 doc -- and a little-known man who gave his life for the cause

With any film from Raymond De Felitta (shown below) you always get more than you expect. Whether the man is making a documentary ('Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris) or a narrative film (Two Family House and City Island), you can count on something richer and deeper than first glance might suggest. BOOKER'S PLACE: A Mississippi Story -- his new documentary about the titular Booker and the little restaurant he owned back in the 1960s in Greenwood, Mississippi (shown two photos below) -- is another stealth missile that takes us into a time and place we'd forgotten (or hardly knew in the first place) and lays bare the attitudes and actions that made the struggle for civil rights in the south so daunting and often so deadly.

From what we see in this fine documentary, although the actions in the south have changed (some), the attitudes unfortunately remain much the same. Too many southern whites. as we see in this film, are still making excuses for their actions. ("We were caught in a system that was flawed," notes one woman. OK: But who created that system and very happily kept it going for a century or two?) Yet the beating heart of this thrilling documentary also hits one of the most important questions documentarians (good ones, anyway) always ask themselves: "OK: I've filmed this. But what might happen if it is shown to the public?" According to the filmmaker's own father, Frank De Felitta, who made the landmark documentary for NBC News back in 1965, around which the present film is based, "When you film living people, you take on a huge responsibility." At the end of his life, and in this particular case, the senior De Felitta was not sure he had done the right thing.

After you've finished the watching this film, along with most other viewers, you will probably disagree with the original filmmaker -- as do, I think, his son and the living relatives of Booker Wright (below), the man at the center of it all. Mr. Wright and his early history of seeming abandonment make up a portion of the film, and that story alone would be enough to fill up most movies.

Yet it is Booker's personality (he was a man very well-liked by his black peers, and even, for most of his life, by his white overseers) that takes on even greater importance in the film. The unusual character of the man leads to the remarkably honest speech shown on network television throughout the USA that arguably was one of the major incidents in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The film begins with this speech but then circles around to make us fully understand what it meant to the world -- and to the man who made it.

You have to hear and see this amazing speech, as we do several times during the film, for it to sink in fully. What it says and what effect it had on Booker, his family, the white community in which he worked, and now down two generations of the Black community is telling in so many ways.

The movie also has a lot to say about the documentary film-making process, and about Frank De Felitta (shown above, and below, with his son) and why he was so intent on making this documentary newscast from Mississippi in the first place. We learn Frank's history in World War II and what the Holocaust meant to him and to his sense of justice, and how he began to equate what has happened to the Jews with what had and was continuing to happen to American Blacks.

As Raymond weaves all this together -- his father's history and that of the original film; his own situation as the son of the filmmaker; Booker's story and that of his family, particularly his granddaughter, Yvette Johnson (below, with one of Booker's contemporaries) who becomes one of the driving forces in making this movie -- he creates an indelible portrait of everything from black life on the plantation (and after) to the particular and peculiar affect blacks had to take with their white "betters."

All this is shown in a way that puts even further to shame a piece of "movie-movie" action crap like Django Unchained. Here is reality offered up quietly, shockingly, artfully, with humor, discipline and grace. What a legacy Booker has left us. What a legacy Frank and Raymond De Felitta have also given us via their films. What a movie this is!

Available now on Netflix streaming, Booker's Place -- via Tribeca Film and running 92 minutes -- is, all by itself, worth an entire year of the Netflix digital service. Certainly among the best of last year's documentaries, its subjects, together with the events it covers, place it in a class all its own.

The photo of Raymond De Felitta, second from top, 

is by Larry Busacca and comes courtesy of Getty Images.