Dirty jokes and cultural identity collide in ‘Joy Ride’
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
“Contempt” at 60 The recent 4K restoration of Jean-Godard’s “Contempt” opens in Los Angeles today at the Laemmle Royal in celebration of the film’s anniversary. The movie is hailed as one of the true masterworks in the groundbreaking career of Godard, who died last year at age 91.
Intertwining the personal and professional, “Contempt” follows a writer, Paul (Michel Piccoli), summoned to Rome to assist a crass American film producer (Jack Palance) with work on a Fritz Lang film. (Lang plays himself.) While in Italy, Paul and his wife, Camille (Brigitte Bardot), find their relationship pushed to a breaking point.
Writing about the film in 1997, Kenneth Turan called it a “meditation on the crumbling of two kinds of passion, one romantic, the other cinematic.” He noted, “Melancholy and sensual, ‘Contempt’ is the one Godard film it’s impossible to mistake for any other, and the director, perhaps sensing this, puckishly cast himself as Lang’s officious assistant director.”
Our new film editor Joshua Rothkopf had this to say on the film:
When Jean-Luc Godard, the movies’ mightiest iconoclast, died last September, critics fell over themselves celebrating his attitude: so many black-and-white provocations, so many jump cuts. Less mentioned (at least to these eyes) was the filmmaker’s voluptuously styled 1963 drama, as accessible a project as the director would ever make. (It begins with Brigitte Bardot in the buff.)
Paradoxically, for all its lush surface, “Contempt” is the film in which Godard’s anxieties were most exposed. If you love cinema as much as he did, you’ll know that it sometimes blinds you to the real people around you. Bardot’s stung, accusatory expression is a look that anyone who’s ignored their loved ones for yet another screening knows well.
Georges Delerue’s seesawing orchestral score is a soundtrack of sad obsession (even Scorsese copped it for “Casino”). And to watch a cameoing Fritz Lang take a dignified stroll along a Cinecittà back street — a man out of time, out of place — is to know the movie’s key theme is loneliness. Go to this one-week run and find your tribe with all the people who know “Contempt” is the Godard joint that hits hardest.
Victor Nuñez tribute The American Cinematheque is celebrating filmmaker Victor Nuñez this weekend, including the local premiere of his latest film, “Rachel Hendrix,” a portrait of grief and rebirth starring Lori Singer. Other films screening in the series include “Ruby in Paradise,” a Sundance grand prize winner; “Ulee’s Gold,” for which Peter Fonda earned an Oscar nomination; and “A Flash of Green.” On Sunday there will be a panel discussion with actors Singer, Ed Harris, Ashley Judd and Todd Field.
Field, Judd, Singer and Nuñez will be making appearances at screenings throughout the series, with the actors displaying a real dedication to the filmmaker’s work, the type of emotionally resonant, low-key naturalism that doesn’t really have a place in contemporary film culture. As Field wrote in a program note, “His work displays a remarkable consistency, an unadorned vision of an America viewed at eye-level, dispensing with any and all cinematic safety nets. This retrospective is a wonderful opportunity to revisit his work. For those unfamiliar with Nuñez, I envy you having this incredible introduction to such a singular artist.”
Ryuichi Sakamoto remembered The UCLA Film and Television Archive hosts a weekend-long salute to musician and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died in April at age 71. Known as a founder of the group Yellow Magic Orchestra, Sakamoto went on to win an Oscar for his score to Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1987 “The Last Emperor.” The tribute will open with Jun Ichikawa’s 2004 short “Tony Takitani” and John Maybury’s 1998 feature “Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon,” both of which Sakamoto scored. Saturday will include short films made as part of Sakamoto’s “async” project, including one directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, as well as a presentation of an immersive 5.1 stereo mix of “async surround” with images conceived by visual artist Shiro Takatani.
The series will end Sunday with a 35mm screening of Nagisa Ôshima’s 1983 feature “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” a drama set in a WWII Japanese prison camp that stars Sakamoto and David Bowie and features a score composed by Sakamoto.
“Risky Business” at 40 With the latest “Mission: Impossible” opening next week, it’s fun to think back to one of Tom Cruise’s earliest starring roles in 1983’s “Risky Business.” Cruise plays a suburban high schooler who unexpectedly finds himself running a brothel out of his parents’ house while they are away on a trip. The film casts a cynical side-eye at the acquisitive ethos of the Reagan ’80s, told with a hypnotic sense of style. Imagine if Michael Mann’s follow-up to “Thief” was a teen sex comedy, completed by Tangerine Dream’s now-iconic song “Love on a Real Train.”
The Laemmle Royal is having a 40th-anniversary screening on Wednesday, July 12, with actors Rebecca De Mornay, Curtis Armstong, Raphael Sbarge and Bronson Pinchot, producer Jon Avnet and writer-director Paul Brickman appearing for a Q&A.
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‘Joy Ride’
With a lively cast that includes Stephanie Hsu, Sabrina Wu, Sherry Cola and Ashley Park, “Joy Ride” is a raunchy road-trip comedy that is also about self-discovery and cultural identity. The directing debut from Adele Lim, a co-writer on “Crazy Rich Asians,” the film follows Audrey (Park), a Chinese American lawyer who was raised by white adoptive parents, as she takes a trip to her birth country for the first time. Joined by her childhood best friend, a cousin and a college friend living in China, Audrey’s journey becomes a platform for wild humor and a knowing look at clashing sensibilities. The film is in theaters now
For The Times, Justin Chang called the film “an amusingly rude and high-spirited romp.” He added that it “has a way of turning predictable story beats into spiky, revealing cultural distinctions. You’ve seen a lot of straitlaced overachievers learn to lighten up and cut loose on-screen. You’ve seen fewer like Audrey, who was adopted in China and raised in America by white parents, and who’s now visiting her birth country for the first time with friends who are more laid-back, in part, because they’re better versed in the culture and language than she is. (‘I’m just a garbage American who only speaks English,’ Audrey admits in a moment of drunken confession.) And so the group dynamics are rooted in the usual differences of temperament and personality, yes, but also in nuances of personal upbringing and diasporic experience. This journey really does take Audrey on a journey.”
Jen Yamato spoke to the cast. As Hsu said to her, “I think our movie is funny, but it’s not lost on us that it is the first of its kind, and it is revolutionary in that it is the four of us in this hard-R comedy. Even within the Asian American community there are tropes and stereotypes, and we break them even further.”
‘Amanda’
The debut from Italian writer-director Carolina Cavalli, “Amanda” marks both the filmmaker and her star, Benedetta Porcaroli, as talents to keep an eye out for in the future. Porcaroli plays the title role of a disaffected recent college graduate who is pushed by her family to make some new friends, a task she throws herself into with unexpected determination, in a story told with a sharp sense of style and deadpan humor. The film is in theaters now.
For The Times, Carlos Aguilar drew comparisons to such films as “Amélie” and “Ghost World,” while noting, “Cavalli shoots her lead actor in sun-drenched wide shots walking from one small-town location to the next with the determination of a righteous warrior alone against the world: a potent stride and a blank face. There’s an equally amusing and infuriating self-importance to Porcaroli’s stellar performance that we ultimately understand as Amanda masking fissures in her corrosive personality. … It’s in the pointed care the director puts in every bizarre interaction that the film finds its footing.”
‘Biosphere’
In the directing debut of longtime producer Mel Eslyn, who co-wrote the screenplay with Mark Duplass, “Biosphere” tells the story of two men, Ray (Sterling K. Brown) and Billy (Duplass), who are stuck together in a small dome after an apocalypse. When their food supply is threatened, they both go to extremes to save themselves. The film is playing now in Los Angeles at the Landmark Nuart.
For The Times, Katie Walsh wrote, “This high-concept setting is also a chance to comment on contemporary culture, including our shifting understanding of gender and sexuality. It’s an interesting premise, and Brown and Duplass hold the screen well when together and apart. But a good idea and good actors don’t necessarily make for a truly compelling feature film. All the elements are there — writing, performance, themes — but there’s not enough plot to sustain a nearly two-hour feature, and as the situation escalates, it becomes clear that they don’t quite know where or how to end things, and it lands with a thud. A fascinating curio that speaks to many contemporary issues, ‘Biosphere’ feels like a rough draft, as it hasn’t been honed to a degree that allows it to fully penetrate.”
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