Review: ‘Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter’

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Based on an urban legend about a lady who froze to death looking for the money buried in the snow in the 1996 Coen Brothers’ movie “Fargo” and centered on a fantastic performance in a sweet but ultimately sad movie, “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter” is a great movie about loneliness, ambition and not believing everything you read or see.

Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi, Pacific Rim) is a depressed 30-something year old living in Japan, working a menial job for an obnoxious boss, living by herself and generally being very unhappy. Her coworkers insult her, her mother berates her for not being married, and she just has a shit life at this point. So when she comes across an old, damaged VHS copy of “Fargo,” she watches it and takes solace from it. As a matter of fact she sees the text at the beginning of the movie claiming it was based on a true story (which it was not), so she decides that she needs to go to Fargo, North Dakota to find the suitcase of money buried in the snow by one of that film’s characters. She watches this money burying scene over and over in order to gather clues as to its exact whereabouts and so she can make a map of the area to help her find the buried loot. And finally she sets out of her conquest, hustling her way to North Dakota so she can become rich.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Ex Machina’

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As humans we have been obsessed with the idea of artificial intelligence for a very long time, and we are closer now to true artificial intelligence than we have ever been, to the point where some of our top minds have felt the need to warn everyone about the dangerous pitfalls of a future in which we are ruled by our robot overlords. This has been shown in our art, as we have seen movies about robots with A.I. that are both benevolent and malevolent, but with “Ex Machina,” it is not the intent of the A.I. that is at question but that of the creator.

Caleb (Dohmnall Gleeson, son of Brendan) wins a contest in which he is allowed to work side by side for one week with his company’s boss, who is this fella named Nathan (Oscar Isaac, Inside Llewyn Davis). Nathan is a weird one; having invented a Google-like search engine at the age of 13 that has gone on to be the number one used search engine in the world, Nathan became a billionaire and has chosen to live in isolation, hundreds of miles from anyone else, in a state of art home that also acts as his private research facility. When Caleb shows up, Nathan tells him that he is there to give a Turing test to one of Nathan’s creations, which is to say, a robot with artificial intelligence.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night’

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“A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night” is the kind of movie that comes around every now and then and reminds us that original movies can still be made within the confines of well-worn genres. Vampire movies have been made for about 100 years now, so what can be done with the genre now that has not been done already? Well, how about an Iranian vampire movie shot in black and white, with a feminist slant and a dope “sad synth pop” soundtrack, and influenced in equal parts by 1960’s Italian-made westerns and 1980’s American indies? Because that is what we have here, and it is pretty damn cool.

This story takes place in Bad City, a desolate, dusty and depressed Iranian town which seems to be populated by maybe a dozen or so people, almost all of whom are either dirt bags or criminals in one way, shape or form. There is the local pimp (who doubles as a drug dealer), the town’s seemingly only prostitute, a vapid rich girl only interested in partying, a junkie widower, and the junkie’s son, who seems to be a normal, straight laced dude for the most part until he comes across a stash of drugs that he decides to sell for himself to make some money on the side. This last fella is Arash (Arash Mirandi) and despite selling some pills, he comes across as the most honest person in town.Continue Reading …

FFF 2015 Movie Review: ‘Billy Mize & the Bakersfield Sound’

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Billy Mize is a singer-songwriter who enjoys legendary status among those in the know in the country music world, having written a number of hits for other artists and promoting people on his own television shows who would themselves go on to be gigantic stars. “Billy Mize & the Bakersfield Sound” explores the question of why the very talented Mize never became the household name that he probably should have become.

Even though everyone knows that Nashville is country music mecca, for a short while there Bakersfield, California was actually cranking out the best country music in the country. Buck Owens and Merle Haggard became hugely successful and popular by getting into this genre of country that was a little rougher and a little funkier than the slick country music from Tennessee and just cranking it out, along with a whole slew of other acts that came up in that scene and took it around the country one club at a time. And all of these musicians, along with legends like Willie Nelson, profess that their favorite artist is Billy Mize.Continue Reading …

FFF 2015 Movie Review: ‘Imperial Dreams’

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The thing that makes a piece of art resonate is truth. Whether it is wholly true or just based on a nugget of truth, art becomes important when it reflects something that is real, even if in a small way. This is why “Imperial Dreams” feels like an emotionally strong and vital movie because it is obvious that the folks who made this know exactly what they are talking about – this may be “just a movie” with a made up story and characters, but in the end it is all too real.

“Imperial Dreams” is the story of Bambi (John Boyega, Attack the Block and Star…something…Star Wars? Does that sound right?), a young man just getting out of prison, heading back home to the projects in Watts, Los Angeles. We quickly discover why he ended up in prison in the first place, as we see the home life he returns to – his mother is an addict and a drunk, and he finds her passed out on the floor, and his very young son Day is all by himself with no one looking after him. Day’s mom is in jail awaiting trial for some theft charges, and Bambi’s uncle, Uncle Shrimp (the always great Glenn Plummer) may be nice enough to allow Bambi’s mother and his son to stay with him, but as soon as he sees Bambi, he starts asking him to do jobs for him. And we aren’t talking about jobs at a company that pay an hourly wage, we are talking about highly illegal shit that could get Bambi thrown back in prison for a very, very long time.Continue Reading …

FFF 2015 Movie Review: ‘Wildlike’

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“Wildlike” is an interesting coming-of-age movie about a teenage girl, one that goes to some unexpected and tough places, and I am not just talking about the Alaskan frontier. Most movies of this ilk that try to tell the story of a young girl usually involve cliques at school, or boy problems, or dealing with a schoolyard bully, something along those lines, usually very unoriginal and not very thoughtful. But “Wildlike” takes a different approach and tells a unique story and it has a nice emotional impact because of it.

“Wildlike” starts with Mackenzie (Ella Purnell) being shipped off to Alaska to stay with her uncle for the summer while her mother checks into a rehab center. With an addict mother and a recently dead father, Mackenzie is feeling isolated and alone, and going to Alaska does not alleviate those feelings at all.

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FFF 2015 Movie Review: ‘Body’

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Not all movies at film festivals need to strive for profundity or need to embrace some sort of cause. Sometimes movies are just movies and they are just supposed to be fun diversions for a short while, and “Body” is a film that fits that description. A sort of Hitchcockian thriller, “Body” is a wild little movie about an accidental death, the subsequent cover up, and what seemingly normal, every day people would be willing to do to save their own hides.

Holly, Cali and Mel (Helen Rogers, Alexandra Turshen and Lauren Molina, respectively) are three college age friends hanging out on the night before Christmas Eve (“eve eve?”), and Cali suggests a night time activity for the three of them in order to stave off boredom. So they hop into her car and drive way out of the way to an unoccupied mansion that Cali knows about, and they let themselves in and have a nice time, drinking booze, driving golf carts and just enjoying the big ole house. But then someone shows up, which results in a dead body, and the rest of the movie consists of the three ladies desperately trying to figure out how to get out of this mess.Continue Reading …

FFF 2015 Movie Review: ‘Homeless’

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Sometimes movies are made for pure escapist entertainment, involving crazy sci-fi ideas or caped and masked superheroes or bank heists or ridiculous and unbelievable love stories, and these movies are designed to pull you out of your world and to enjoy basking in a different one, an artificial one, for a couple of hours, allowing the audience to forget about their bills and their medical problems and their family issues. But then sometimes movies are made not to help you escape from the real world but instead to help bring the real world into stark focus, to show you something that you would otherwise not know about, to challenge your worldviews and to make you do the unthinkable, which is to actually empathize with someone whom you might not have anything in common.Continue Reading …

FFF 2015 Movie Review: ‘Results’

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“Results” is the kind of romantic comedy that doesn’t get made often enough, in that it doesn’t just focus on the differences between genders, it doesn’t devolve into some stupid “war of the sexes,” and it doesn’t revolve around some sort of fake tome or list of rules dictating how dating life should be or how relationships are supposed to work. This is just a story about some people and how romantic entanglements can be real and messy and can lead to some problems between otherwise well meaning people.

In this case, the well meaning people are Trevor (Guy Pearce), the upbeat trainer and gym owner who is totally business-minded at this point, one of his trainers named Kat (Cobie Smulders) and the rich client who shows up one day and kind of slowly changes their lives. That rich client is Danny (Kevin Corrigan) and the movie starts out actually centering on him, as the story starts with him being dumped by his wife, and then jump cuts to his arrival in Austin, Texas, where he rents a large house and wanders around it bored out of his mind.Continue Reading …

FFF 2015 Movie Review: ‘Uncle John’

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The cop from “Beverly Hills Cop” that’s not Eddie Murphy or Judge Reinhold is “Uncle John,” a real salt of the earth kind of guy, who leads a simple life doing some carpentry work and getting coffee with the boys at the local diner out in the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin, and is it his fault that’s he’s also a murderer? Cause he’s a nice guy, no reason to paint him with this broad brush because of this one thing, amiright America?

The movie starts with the murder of a guy named Dutch, and we see that the murderer is John (a fantastic John Ashton). Thinking on his feet, he disposes of the body and does a pretty damn good job actually. And for the rest of the movie there’s an Edgar Allen Poe “The Tell Tale Heart” kind of vibe, as his friends speculate about the fella’s disappearance and possible death and he has to pretend that he hasn’t even seen the guy in years. And due to past history, Dutch’s grieving brother Danny (Ronnie Gene Blevins, doing his best sweaty Peter Sarsgaard) thinks (correctly) that John has something to do with Dutch’s disappearance, and that just lays a whole other layer of menace on top of everything for John.Continue Reading …