L.A. DINE-N-CLUB FAVORITE MOVIE PICKS
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VEGUCATED
(FilmBuff…Unrated…77 min)
If we are what we eat, then you’d think we’d take more time to examine exactly what it is that we stuff down our throats. I recently watched the award-winning documentary Vegucated, now available on DVD, and I have to confess it made me stop and think.
The fun yet informative documentary focuses on three life-long meat eaters in New York who take on the challenge to become vegan for six weeks. There’s Brian, the bacon-loving bachelor who eats out all the time; Ellen, the single mom who prefers comedy to cooking; and Tesla, the college student who avoids vegetables and bans beans. They have no idea that so much more than steak is at stake and that the fate of the world may fall on their plates. Ok, that sounds pretty pretentious, but the film lures with true tales of weight lost and health regained as eventually each subject begins to uncover hidden sides of animal agriculture and soon starts to wonder whether solutions offered in films like Food, Inc. go far enough. Before long, they find themselves risking everything to expose an industry they supported just weeks before.
Filmmaker Marisa Miller Wolfson has aptly crafted a laugh-out-loud funny, entertaining, and eye-opening film on the vegan lifestyle. Vegucated takes viewers on a revealing journey far beyond a few tofu food substitutions as her three daring participants share one common adventure and ultimately discover their own paths in creating a kinder, cleaner, greener world, one bite at a time.
“As a former meat lover who made the switch to veganism in my own life and experienced the benefits first hand, I am so thrilled to be able to share this life-changing information with more people around the country and help turn this movie into a movement,” said director Marisa Miller Wolfson.
Awarded the Best Documentary award at the Toronto Independent Film Festival 2011, Vegucated has gone on to win awards throughout the country all while educating audiences from coast to coast.
“To me, Vegucated is about the shift that happens when you sit at one side of the dinner table, looking at the vegan on the other side with amusement, envy, or perhaps, slight horror,” Wolfson pointed out. “Then you receive some information or inspiration and suddenly find yourself on the vegan’s side of the table, seeing the dinner in a whole new light.”
Inspired by Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me, Vegucated doesn’t take itself too serious when discussing a very serious subject. That was only one challenge the filmmaker had to overcome.
“My filmmaking challenges were: how to do it on very little money; how to convey the unpleasant sides of the animal agriculture industry without alienating people; how to convey urgency about environmental crises without sounding shrill; how to explain the science without putting people to sleep; how to offer solutions without being didactic and, instead, letting people come to their own conclusions, and how, in general, to address serious topics while keeping the film enjoyable and entertaining.”
Vegucated is an honest, entertaining and extremely informative film that manages to remain objective enough while providing relevant information on veganism. I can’t promise I’ll completely adopt a vegan lifestyle but I know I will be more careful about what I eat from now on, which is a step forward that the filmmaker is hoping audiences will make.
“My hope is that this film will further the conversation about our culture and our relationship to animals, our planet, and our bodies through our food. I hope people who have started down a plant-based path will share it with friends and family and create more peace and understanding at the dinner table. And, of course, I hope that people who are curious about vegan living will embark on their own delicious and fulfilling adventures.”
Click here to watch the Vegucated trailer.
Click here to buy Vegucated.
ARCHIVES
TABLOID
Sundance Selects • Rated R • 88 min
Sometimes it’s the true stories that are the hardest to believe. It seems people just can’t make kind of stuff up. From Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris (The Fog of War and The Thin Blue Line among other incredibly crafted films) comes Tabloid, which follows the sensationalistic and stranger-than-fiction adventures of Joyce McKinney, a former beauty queen with an IQ of 168 whose single-minded devotion to the man of her dreams leads her across the pond and onto the front pages of the British tabloids. Joyce’s crazed crusade, lead her through a surreal world of gunpoint abduction, manacled Mormons, oddball accomplices, bondage modeling, magic underwear and dreams of celestial unions. And don’t forget the cloned dogs.
“Tabloid is a return to my favorite genre, sick, sad and funny,” said Morris. “It is a meditation of how we are shaped by the media and even more powerfully, by ourselves, by the narratives we construct in our minds that may or may not have anything to do with reality. As a young woman, Joyce made a decision never to settle, to find true love at any cost, and that’s what makes her an enduring romantic heroine. She’s bound up in a dreamscape that she has created for herself, and very little can penetrate that protective bubble.”
Before there was Britney or Lindsay, at least in the UK in the ‘70s, there was Joyce McKinney. One can only imagine how this B-movie demented fairy tale would play out today in our mass consumer, 24-hour TMZ news cycle world. Campy, weird and crazy, this actually happened, and that’s the biggest shock of them all. Morris calls his film an “anti documentary” but you can call it a funny, good time.
Click here to watch the Tabloid trailer.
Tabloid is playing at Laemmle Sunset 5 Theatre in West Hollywood, Laemmle's Playhouse 7 in Pasadena, The Landmark in West Los Angeles, and Laemmle Town Center 5 in Encino.
WHITE MATERIAL
IFC Films – 102 min;
French with English Subtitles
An evocative drama set in Africa, White Material follows a woman fighting to save her family plantation and way of life in the face of rising civil unrest. From filmmaker Claire Denis (Chocolat), the film is quite powerful as tensions are high during a highly volatile transition of power in an unnamed African village where white people, called "white material," the local term for colonials, find themselves in peril.
Director Claire Denis says of her film: [It’s] “the conduit of primitive, visceral obsession: fortitude struggling against lassitude, against slackness.”
A standout at the Venice, Toronto, New York and Los Angeles film festivals, White Material stars Isabelle Huppert (The Piano Teacher) and Christophe Lambert (Highlander) and is visually stunning. A very political drama, that doesn’t define the film as it plays more about one extremely determined woman who refuses to give up her coffee plantation because going back home to France is simply not an option even amidst the local ruthless and bloodthirsty child soldiers roaming about. For fans of good drama with a political slant.
Click here to watch the White Material trailer.
Now playing at Laemmle Royal in West L.A., Laemmle Town Center 5 in Encino, and Laemmle's Playhouse 7 in Pasadena.
http://whitematerial-lefilm.com/
WAITING FOR ‘SUPERMAN’
(Paramount Vantage – 102min) Rated PG
The tagline for this stirring documentary is “the fate of our country won't be decided on a battlefield, it will be determined in a classroom.” Winner of the Audience Award for Best Documentary at 2010 Sundance Film Festival, Waiting for ‘Superman’ follows a handful of promising kids through a system that inhibits, rather than encourages, academic growth.
Directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim (who won the Academy Award for the Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth, as well as the dynamic guitar-god film It Might Get Loud), this film really picks up where the director left off with his 2001 doc The First Year where he followed the lives of several public school teachers and students for a whole year. Now that Guggenheim has his own children, he notes that he drives by several public schools (which he championed in The First Year) as he takes his own kids to their private school.
The film undertakes an exhaustive review of public education, surveying "drop-out factories" and "academic sinkholes," methodically dissecting the system and its seemingly intractable problems. Unfortunately, it tries to cover too much ground, including the powerful schoolteachers’ union and its stranglehold on retaining poor teachers, as well as the lottery system in place to get kids into proven charter schools, without really doing either complete justice. Nevertheless, this if a powerful documentary that highlights the dilemma parents now find themselves in when it comes to their children’s education. This is the first time in America that a generation will be less literate than the one before it, and apparently there will be no ‘Superman’ to the rescue.
Click here to watch the Waiting for ‘Superman’ trailer.
THE EXPENDABLES
(Lionsgate – 103 min) Rated R
NOW PLAYING EVERYWHERE
When you look at the names of the principles involved in The Expendables, Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin, Randy Couture, and Mickey Rourke to name a few, you pretty much know what to expect, unrelenting action with plenty of testosterone-fueled fights and explosions. And that is exactly what you get.
A simple story with simple acting, it’s the ‘pows’ and ‘kabooms’ that people want to see. However, that being said, the film, co-written and directed by Stallone, often finds itself without all the main guys involved. For a while even I forgot anyone other than Stallone was in the film, but then the guys reunite and bloody carnage ensues.
A hard-hitting action flick about mercenaries hired to infiltrate a South American country and overthrow (i.e. ‘take out’) its ruthless dictator, the film isn’t quite as brutal as Stallone’s last Rambo film which probably set a new record for most kills, but The Expendables definitely holds its own, and Terry Crews as Hail Caesar has some of the funniest lines and is responsible for the most eye-popping body count stats.
“I set out to make one of those films that comes along once in a while by taking an old formula and making it contemporary,” Stallone points out. “I think you’re going to see a real kick-ass film with soul.”
While the girls may be checking out the new Julia Roberts film, the guys will be lining up to see this one.
Click here to watch the trailer of The Expendables.
http://expendablesthemovie.com/
RESTREPO
SPEND A 94-MINUTE DEPLOYMENT WITH OUR TROOPS IN OVERSEAS
(National Geographic Entertainment – 94 min) Rated R
There have been a lot of movies made about the war in Afghanistan, most recently Brothers with Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal, and of course Oscar winner The Hurt Locker about troops in Iraq, but Restrepo is an in-your-face documentary about a year in the life of our troops in the Korengal Valley, at one time called the “deadliest place of earth.”
Directed by acclaimed journalists Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, in Afghanistan while on assignment for Vanity Fair and ABC News, the two first time filmmakers aptly chronicle the deployment of a platoon of U.S. soldiers focusing on a remote 15-man outpost named “Restrepo” named after a platoon medic who was killed in action.
According to the filmmakers: The war in Afghanistan has become highly politicized, but soldiers rarely take part in that discussion. Our intention was to capture the experience of combat, boredom and fear through the eyes of the soldiers themselves. Their lives were our lives: we did not sit down with their families, we did not interview Afghans; we did not explore geopolitical debates. Soldiers are living and fighting and dying at remote outposts in Afghanistan in conditions that few Americans back home can imagine. Their experiences are important to understand, regardless of one’s political beliefs. Beliefs can be a way to avoid looking at reality. This is reality.”
As professional journalists, Hetherington and Junger report, they do not comment and Restrepo is no different. There are no politics or opinions about the war, this is just a jaw-dropping fly-on-the-wall look into the young men we send overseas to protect our freedoms, some come back, some don’t, just as the directors say, “this is reality.”
Some people may want diversion in their entertainment and I don’t know whether we really owe it to the troops to see every war movie that is made, but this can be a powerful exception as we get to see the unedited good, bad and ugly that’s going on.
Watch the Restrepo trailer here.
Restrepo is playing exclusively at the The Landmark at 10850 West Pico at Westwood Blvd.
SOLITARY MAN
(Anchor Bay Films – 90min) Rated R
http://www.solitarymanmovie.com/
With a stellar cast and solid performances, Solitary Man,starring Michael Douglas, Susan Sarandon, Jenna Fischer, Jesse Eisenberg, Mary-Louise Parker, Imogen Poots (of the phenomenal upcoming Centurion) and Danny DeVito, tells the razor-sharp story of a 50-something womanizing New Yorker who can’t help but turn his own life upside down.
A story about the allure of power, the film is really Douglas’ vehicle and he truly delivers a standout performance. “What I love about the film’s story is what I love about life,” Douglas explains, “you laugh one minute, it’s emotional the next, it’s full of quirky characters and its got a lot of heart.”
Douglas plays a fast-talking, optimistic, go-for-broke businessman who never stops (looking for his next sexual conquest or next business deal), and when he learns he has a heart condition he takes things into overdrive, even if that means that his life crumbles around him.
Fine performances and a good storyline make Solitary Man a very enjoyable film. Even with such a big cast it comes across as a fine independent film and is a welcome relief from the big studio popcorn movies out right now.
Solitary Man is playing at the ArcLight Cinemas Hollywood.
Click here to watch the Solitary Man trailer.
THE SQUARE
opens in NY and LA on April 9th and nationwide in May
A stylish, twist-filled film noir, THE SQUARE centers on an adulterous couple whose scheming leads to arson, blackmail and murder. Escaping the monotony of a loveless marriage, Raymond becomes entangled in an affair with the beautiful and troubled Carla. Ray’s moral limits are tested when Carla presents him with the proceeds of her controlling husband’s latest crime. This is their chance: Take the money and run. If only it were that simple...
The seed is planted and Ray, fearing he will lose his love, engineers the plan. Hiring a professional arsonist becomes a fatal error, and the plan goes horribly wrong. Alarm bells sound and suspicions are raised, but miraculously, the dust looks to settle. After all...Nobody knows. Then the first blackmail note arrives. The couple’s nerves are tested as both Carla’s husband and the mystery author threaten to throw open their secret. With the blackmailer’s deadline approaching they are going to find out just how far they are willing to go for love.
THE SQUARE is the first feature film from Australian stuntman-turned-director Nash Edgerton and his brother Joel (who co-wrote and stars in the film). Joel Edgerton recently starred in "A Streetcar Named Desire" opposite Cate Blanchett in Sydney and at BAM in New York City and is currently in production on "The Thing", a prequel to John Carpenter's 1982 film. Nash Edgerton recently coordinated the stunts for Sofia Coppola's upcoming "Somewhere" and James Mangold's upcoming "Knight and Day" starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz.
THE SQUARE is produced by Nash Edgerton, Joel Edgerton and Matthew Dabner and stars David Roberts, Claire van der Bloom, Anthony Hayes and Joel Edgerton.
IN THEATRES NOW
(Lionsgate – 92 minutes)
Fans of Jackie Chan, there are a lot of us out there, and action movies, note The Spy Next Door is necessarily for you, unless you have kids, are a kid, or just don’t know any better.
This is the kind of film where a cool star, in this case Jackie Chan, decides to cash in his cool points (or credibility chips) and cash in for a big payday with a family film, think Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson with the upcoming Tooth Fairy. For the non Disney Channel types you probably already know better than to get sucked into this.
Chan plays a master spy on loan to the CIA who just finished his last assignment and now he’s ready to start a family with his next-door neighbor girlfriend. While she has to go away due to a family emergency he volunteers to babysit her kids so he can spend some quality time with the bunch. Of course terrorists come after him wrecking havoc in a suburban neighborhood forcing him protect the kinds during their bonding time.
With a cast that also includes Billy Ray Cyrus and George Lopez, there is no reason while single hipsters of drinking age would want to bother with this film, unless you want to score points with that single parent you’re hot for. But this does make for good family time at the movies.
It is fun to marvel at Chan doing his own stunts. And the gag reel during the closing credits (a Chan movie tradition) is always worth sticking around for. But otherwise, wait for video.
See The Spy Next Door Trailer
— Jose Martinez
