C.O.G.

Runs Fri., Sept. 20–Sun., Sept. 22 at 
SIFF Film Center. Rated R. 87 minutes.

The personal essays of David Sedaris are notoriously unverifiable. I think we’ve established that by now. His fame rests upon clever, vindictive rewritings of past humiliations and grievances. Yet those self-lacerating moments are true in spirit; it’s just how he looks back on them, polishes them for us chuckling readers of The New Yorker and his recent Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls that toes him over the line into fiction. C.O.G., adapted by director Kyle Patrick Alvarez from a story in Naked, casts the young, vulnerable David (Jonathan Groff) as an innocent yet mendacious young man who travels west to work on an Oregon apple farm “to get my hands dirty.” In fact, pay-phone calls home indicate, he’s escaping the judgment of his mother for being . . . well, that will have to wait. (We all know Sedaris is gay, but C.O.G. treats that like the big reveal it’s not.)

Alvarez is better with the texture than the uneven, episodic tone of his story. Certainly he doesn’t go easy on his unreliable, unlikable hero. David—who calls himself Samuel, because it sounds fancier—is petulant and petty, a snob who insists he studied Japanese at Yale. He’s also a sissy prone to gay panic when a kindly co-worker (Corey Stoll, forever Hemingway in Midnight in Paris) comes on to him. Put differently, he’s not yet a self-accepting gay man. Yet Alvarez wounds his hero with interesting thorns (Dean Stockwell, Denis O’Hare, etc.) and builds up scar tissue that toughens his hide.

Whether attempting to feed meat to cows or being forced to drag a propane tank for miles along a country road, David/Samuel has a gift for doing and saying the wrong thing. And for each faux pas he is punished, and then some, by the locals—who are not the yokels he first takes them to be. “Stop being so prideful,” says O’Hare’s itinerant street preacher Jon, who takes David/Samuel under his wing (though a charity case himself). If our hero seems a little old to be learning basic life skills on the road, he also acquires the humility to see his own faults. And accept them—because we’re all sinners in this world, whether you believe in God’s judgment or not. (Warning: This film uses clap-track audio segues that will drive you insane.) Brian Miller

Good Ol’ Freda

Runs Fri., Sept. 20–Thurs., Sept. 26 at Sundance Cinemas. Rated PG. 86 minutes.

To the person who mailed a pillowcase to the Beatles Fan Club in 1964 with the request that Ringo Starr sleep on the bedding and autograph it: Perhaps at some point in the past 50 years you have doubted that the signed pillowcase you received back ever really had spent a night beneath a moptop’s shaggy head. It seems unlikely. Surely the Beatles had better things to do; and probably someone was using a rubber stamp for the signatures by then. Well, dig that pillowcase out of its box, because Ringo really slept on it. He had no choice: Freda Kelly brought it to his mum’s house and told him to.

Who is Freda Kelly? Merely the Beatles’ secretary for 11 years during the glory days—actually, she was working for the band before Ringo joined. Her utterly darling story is told in Ryan White’s Good Ol’ Freda, another documentary shard in the saga of the best band ever. Freda’s never cashed in on her proximity to the band; and after all this time, she has some charming stories to tell. As a Liverpool teenager, she attended more than 100 Fab Four gigs at the Cavern Club, which led sharp-eyed Beatles manager Brian Epstein to hire her. (He must have seen that the starstruck 17-year-old also carried a no-nonsense manner that would serve everybody well during the mania to come.) And so Freda went about running the office, riding herd over thousands of pieces of fan mail and making sure the lads sat down with stacks of autograph books to sign. With a fierce Liverpudlian clannishness, she kept secrets and bonded with the Fab 
families: Ringo’s mother became a maternal figure for the motherless Freda; Paul’s dad taught her how to drink. More personal intimacies involving the boys will remain unspoken, as Freda remains protective of her former charges, even after 40 years of settling into a normal life.

Is this a revelatory documentary? Not at all. The firsthand recollections of what the pre-stardom Beatles were like at the Cavern are great, and Freda makes for an amiable character study in this likable, modest enterprise. The movie also features a handful of Beatles songs on its soundtrack, which a tiny indie like this could not possibly afford to license. It would seem that somebody up there still likes Freda. Robert Horton

Ip Man: The Final Fight

Runs Fri., Sept. 20–Thurs., Sept. 26 at 
Grand Illusion. Rated PG-13. 102 minutes.

The flurry of films chronicling the exploits of legendary martial-arts master Ip Man (1893–1972) suggests that the subtitle here is misleading. The Final Fight? Not likely, not if this icon of coolness and nostalgia continues to sell tickets. It’s been a full three weeks since Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster was released, so to recap for the uninitiated: Ip Man changed the world of kung fu with his Wing Chun style, living long enough to send forth an army of followers and teachers, among them Bruce Lee. The Final Fight begins halfway through the story (director Herman Yau already surveyed his younger years in 2010’s The Legend Is Born: Ip Man), as the man (now played by Anthony Wong) arrives in Hong Kong in 1949 after the communist takeover of mainland China. He sets up a humble school in a rooftop studio, shrugs off rivals, and establishes a curious relationship with a loyal singer (Zhou Chuchu) whose loyalty to him seems to have sprung out of a 1950s Douglas Sirk picture. Which is not a bad thing.

The movie haphazardly tosses out a series of chewy scenes: Ip Man schooling his hazily sketched students, settling the occasional fight with a thug, and—in the film’s irresistible centerpiece—engaging another grandmaster (jovial Eric Tsang) in a showdown that becomes a mutual-admiration session. The Grandmaster’s
loftier aspirations are nowhere to be seen here, but Yau’s storytelling beats turn out to be perfectly enjoyable on their own terms. The climactic stretch of kung fu is set up with the broadly drawn motivations you want in this kind of exercise.

In the lead role, Wong doesn’t have the fighting chops of someone like Donnie Yen, who played Ip Man in two action-oriented biopics, but that turns out to be all right. If anything, Wong’s propensity for just standing there stone-faced while fending off his opponents’ blows only adds to the mysterioso effect of Wing Chun. And the saturnine Wong is a real actor, a veteran of the Infernal Affairs trilogy and Jonnie To’s glorious Exiled. Fast hands are important in a martial-arts picture, but so are expressive eyes. Wong’s got them. Robert Horton

PThe Patience Stone

Opens Fri., Sept. 20 at Sundance Cinemas. Rated R. 102 minutes.

There is war, and there is war. The more intimate variety plays out against the global kind in The Patience Stone, a film with an unspecified location but a painfully recognizable set of conflicts.

On the smaller front, we find a wife and (unnamed) mother trying to keep it together in the midst of chaos. The family home is in a battle zone where Taliban-like fighters regularly rake through the neighborhood. What’s particularly alarming is that the woman’s husband—an older man she was forced to marry 10 years earlier—has been comatose for two weeks, having sustained an injury in the conflict. He might wake up; he might not. As she feeds him through a tube, she begins talking to him—an outpouring that becomes the movie’s dominant drama, dwarfing even the combat going on outside. It becomes clear that the wife has never been encouraged or allowed to speak her mind in this marriage, so there is a great deal of catching up to do. Many of her revelations would have serious consequences in this traditional religious culture—if they were heard by men. But in the meantime, survival issues surround this one-sided conversation. The woman scrambles to feed her children and survive the threat of assault from soldiers. She also steps out for money and worldly wisdom from a scandalous aunt who works as a madam.

It isn’t quite a one-woman show, but Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani’s performance is a tour de force nonetheless. Sweet-featured and heavy-browed (she’s already gotten Hollywood’s attention, in 2008’s Body of Lies), Farahani is stunning in every sense, and her gutsy performance carries The Patience Stone through its overstated moments—though to be fair to the movie, nuance has never played particularly well to fundamentalists. (As though to underscore the point, Farahani’s prior work with moviemaking infidels got her banned from returning to Iran; she now lives in Paris.) Kabul native Atiq Rahimi directs, having adapted his own novel with the help of the incredibly well-traveled screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, an expert in the business of making tricky material find a compelling flow.

Early in the film our heroine prepares to leave the house. “I have to go out,” she tells her unconscious husband. “Is that all right?” It takes another beat for her to wonder why she is still asking permission—but old dogma dies hard. Robert Horton

Populaire

Runs Fri., Sept. 20–Thurs., Sept. 26 at Varsity. Rated R. 111 minutes.

They tried a decade ago to spoof the old Rock Hudson/Doris Day no-sex comedies in Down With Love, set in the early ’60s, with Ewan McGregor and Renee Zellweger trading a knowing leer for Hudson and Day’s subtle wink. The movie half-worked; then Mad Men came along, taking ownership of our postwar nostalgia with sex, alcoholism, and neurosis added to the impeccable sets and costumes.

The French Populaire, set in the late ’50s, arrives unsteadily between those poles of cotton-candy innocence and bourbon-soaked experience. Director Regis Roinsard loves the period details, perhaps too much to lampoon them. In a provincial village, Rose (Deborah Francois), a humble shop owner’s daughter, hopes to land a modern new secretarial job with an insurance broker in the nearest town. Rose thinks herself very nicely attired when she arrives to interview, finding a room full of women who’ve studied the fashion magazines far more closely than she. Some even wear fake eyeglasses to compound smart with chic, but Rose is as guileless as a daisy. Until she starts typing to impress her prospective boss Louis (Romain Duris), when it turns out Rose is a demon at the keys.

What ensues in their predictable Pygmalion romance, as Louis trains Rose to become the speed-typing champ of France, certainly looks great. The nightclubs and suburban kitchens have a slightly unreal sheen, like postcards printed too bright. Duris, of Heartbreaker and The Beat That My Heart Skipped, wears his slim-cut suits with a tiger’s predatory grace. Francois flounces around in her country frocks until Rose’s success graduates her to cover-girl glamour, accessorized with pink typewriter. The cars, furniture, and even the food appear as if from family photo albums taken during the de Gaulle era.

So why isn’t Populaire more fun? Unforgivably, for a movie about speed, it’s way too long and slow for a romantic comedy. The training montages and typing contests drag on redundantly; and Louis’ realization that, yes, Rose is the girl for him is obvious midway through the story. Again, it feels as though Roinsard can’t let go of the old family album; he wants us to study every page and photo. Populaire’s chief pleasures lie in its grace notes: smug Louis’ comic look of vexation; his American pal Bob’s broad Ohio-French accent; Rose staring daggers at her adversaries while swatting the carriage return with a boxer’s right hook. In this conventional love story with a conventional ending, there’s something unexpressed and almost angry within Rose—that the world isn’t treating her fairly. She learns to type by copying the classics of the French canon, all of them written by men. Brian Miller

A Single Shot

Opens Fri., Sept. 20 at Pacific Place. 
Rated R. 116 minutes.

Sam Rockwell finally got the love he deserves in The Way, Way Back, dominating that slight summer coming-of-age flick with his charming rascalry. He’s played plenty of hicks and nuts (see The Green Mile, Seven Psychopaths), but he seldom gets to play the sympathetic lead. This adaptation of a sparse crime novel gives him that chance. John Moon is broke and unemployed in rural West Virginia; his wife has left him (taking their small son); then he makes a horrible 
mistake while poaching deer to stock his freezer—shooting an unknown young woman hiding in the forest. In a panic, he returns the body to her makeshift camp, there discovering a box full of cash. (Here let’s state that Matthew F. Jones’ 1996 book came out before A Simple Plan, which shares its windfall-in-the-woods plot.)

Moon hopes to use the cash for a lawyer (William H. Macy) to stave off the divorce threatened by his wife (Kelly Reilly of Flight). Then, having seen his own parents’ farm lost to foreclosure, maybe he can buy a better patch of land. But since Moon is poor and near-friendless, and because his wife is likely better off without him, and with the stolen money’s wrongful owners on his trail, nothing will go according to Moon’s plan. Nor does it help that he’s surrounded by drunks (cue Jeffrey Wright) and violent idiots (hello, Joe Anderson). With no evidence of the law in sight, Macy’s lawyer tells Moon, “There are so many overlapping interests in a small town.” His secret isn’t secret. Threats and violence gather around Moon like flies—so maybe he should make a deal with those interested parties? But Moon is stubborn. “I want my family back,” he insists.

Among the writers who admire Jones is David Woodrell, whose Winter’s Bone shares a certain backwoods, meth-inflected code of justice with this story. Moon keeps trying to repair his great wrong, but there’s no decency behind any door he knocks on for help. Rockwell tamps down his usual buoyancy, sagging palpably with each letdown and betrayal. “I’m tired, real tired,” says Moon, but it also seems the world around him is suffering from moral exhaustion, too. The damp, gray mists fill the forest, where Moon even begins to see ghosts.

A Single Shot never quite gets beyond genre, and the Appalachian mumbling can be hard to follow. Good actors appear for short scenes, then frustratingly disappear. Still, Rockwell holds the piece together with the concentration of a man who knows he’s losing but never quite grasps why he’s losing. Brian Miller

Thanks for Sharing

Opens Fri., Sept. 20 at Guild 45th. 
Rated R. 112 minutes.

Gwyneth Paltrow as a defensive, “healthy” anorexic, Mark Ruffalo as a smoothie with a penchant for hookers—they seem like a perfect couple. She does triathlons, he does three-ways. Both get their cardio, so what’s the problem? Given that Thanks for Sharing is set in the prosperous, secular blocks of New York, the budding romance between Phoebe and Adam would seem comparatively normal and, simultaneously, dysfunctional. As long as their careers and mortgages are solid, who’s to criticize? Also on the same track is pudgy young doctor Neil (Josh Gad), who had no time to develop social skills while cramming for his bar mitzvah and MCATs, so he just rubs up against random women for subway frottage. And if that fails him, there’s always the Internet back home.

Directed by Stuart Blumberg, who co-wrote The Kids Are Alright, this is a film that ought to make you more uncomfortable than it dares. Sad, lonely men masturbating in front of computers—there’s a modern, universal sight, a symptom of our age. But Blumberg’s main intent is therapy and recovery. Which, with Paltrow’s premium brand presence, is an easier sell. Adam and Neil are in the same 12-step group for sex addicts, led by the serene, long-married Mike (Tim Robbins), who has an aphorism for every crisis. Mike is mentoring Adam, who in turn coaches newbie Neil (sent by court order, if not his own sense of guilt). Rounding out the multiplex demo is Dede, played by the pop star Pink (billed as Alecia Moore) with considerable sincerity if less craft.

Blumberg shies away from the nastiness and degradation of sex pathologies, save for one brief scene. He’s looking for the third-act path out of the pit, not to remain there for long. By splitting his story among three couples (Mike has a wife, played by Joely Richardson), Blumberg might be hoping for one of those Richard Curtis ensemble comedies, only the jokes aren’t there. (Neil complains, “I haven’t jerked off in week—I feel like a giant blue ball!”)

Ruffalo makes an appealing couple with Paltrow—and it’s hard to believe she, 14 years past her Shakespeare in Love Oscar, has been mostly reduced to Iron Man cameos. She still has that glowing, quizzical presence, a kind of skepticism about her gifts and good fortune. Someone needs to write better parts for her, someone better than Blumberg. Brian Miller

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