Newsletter: Indie Focus: Kittens, action and transformation in ‘Keanu,’ ‘Viva’ and ‘Tale of Tales’
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen, and welcome to your weekly field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
“Mother’s Day” has turned into another of those movies that I would not recommend one to see, but you should definitely read the reviews, which have been a delight.
And so it makes a fitting welcome for our new L.A. Times film critic Justin Chang. Writing about the most recent in director Garry Marshall’s ongoing series of greeting card holiday-themed films, Chang wrote, “If you’ve seen any of these movies, you know how this one ends — not a minute too soon.”
And for anyone who didn’t catch “Purple Rain” last week, it’s still playing in theaters. I wrote this week about Prince’s relationship to cinema and his ongoing explorations of sound and image.
We’ve very excited about this week’s Indie Focus Screening Series event with the sun, sex and jealous tensions of “A Bigger Splash.” We’ll have screenwriter David Kajganich for a Q&A. Check events.latimes.com for more info.
Nonstop movies. Movies nonstop.
‘Keanu’
Fans of the TV show “Key & Peele” have been especially excited for “Keanu,” the big-screen effort from the comedy team of Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele. In the movie, they play a pair of mild, nerdy guys who, in trying to retrieve a missing kitten named Keanu, find themselves in a dangerous criminal underworld, passing themselves off as violent hitmen.
I spoke to Peter Atencio, director of “Keanu” and most of the “Key & Peele” skits, who talked about using actual cats for some of the pretty unbelievable shots in the film.
“I definitely knew from the beginning I wanted everything to be done real with the cats,” Atencio said. “I think part of being a director is asking for stuff that people tell you is impossible, and you’re like, ‘We really have to figure this out’ and then we all figure it out.”
At the Hollywood Reporter, Rebecca Ford wrote in more detail about the training of those cats. As Atencio told her, “Cuteness was definitely the biggest priority.”
Our own Amy Kaufman wrote about the set of circumstances that led to the participation of that other Keanu as part of “Keanu.”
The reviews for the film have been somewhat middling, but as Joanna Robinson wrote at Vanity Fair, “Whenever Key and Peele misses a beat, the titular Keanu is always there bouncing into frame, dodging bullets, and winning the hearts of everyone involved in the caper. If that cat can even melt a hardened gangster, what chance do the rest of us have to resist his charms?”
Reviewing the film for The Times, Michael Phillips added that “the movie is hit-and-miss in an unusually clear-cut way. It’s funny for 45 to 50 minutes. Then it’s strained and abrasive and entirely too devoted to action-movie tropes for 45 to 50 minutes, minus end credits. I can recommend the first half.”
‘Viva’
Kenneth Turan reviewed “Viva,” an Irish film set in Cuba that made the Oscar shortlist for foreign language film. Directed by Paddy Breathnach and set within a world of lip-syncing, the film is full of emotions and songs and emotional songs.
But as Turan noted, “Most essential of all, ‘Viva’ features excellent work by engaging Cuban actors little seen in this country, including Jorge Perugorría, best remembered in a very different context in 1993’s Oscar-nominated Cuban film ‘Strawberry and Chocolate.’”
Reviewing the film at last fall’s Telluride Film Festival for the Hollywood Reporter, Stephen Farber called it “a genuine crowd-pleaser likely to find an appreciative American audience. While this story of a gay young man’s reconciliation with his unsympathetic father is a familiar tale verging on the formulaic, the fresh setting and superb performances validate the audience’s rapture.”
The Times’ Tre’vell Anderson spoke with Breathnach when the film played the Palm Springs International Film Festival back in January. Breathnach talked of his first experiences of the drag scene in Cuba in the mid-1990s.
“It had this raw emotional energy to it,” Breathnach recalled. “I wouldn’t claim to be a world expert on drag, but from other areas I’ve seen drag, the drag queens in Cuba are very different.”
‘Tale of Tales’
Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone garnered a lot of attention with his 2008 film “Gamorrah,” which examined from top to bottom a society rife with crime. His latest “Tale of Tales” is an unexpected fantasy, though one smeared with blood and guts, and has an impressive international cast that includes Salma Hayek, John C. Reilly, Toby Jones, Vincent Cassel and Stacy Martin.
Justin Chang reviewed this film as well and wrote, “The steep price of enchantment is one of the crucial lessons of ‘Tale of Tales,’ albeit not in quite the way its makers intended. Diverting but rarely transporting, unpredictable yet strangely overdetermined, Garrone’s film never conjures the sustained, enveloping magic promised by its extravagant design and its agreeably unhinged story sense.”
In the New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis wrote, “Strip away the smatterings of sex and globs of gore, and children would really get a kick out of ‘Tale of Tales,’ Matteo Garrone’s colorful and kinky exploration of what women want. And what men will do to give it to them.
“So it’s a shame that, given the prevalence of blood and bosoms, the movie’s fairy-tale familiars (among them an imperiled princess, an ogre and two ugly sisters) are rendered off-limits to young eyes.”
Email me if you have questions, comments or suggestions, and follow me on Twitter @IndieFocus.
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