Have we got a pair of slumdog millionaires for you! In Rudo y Cursi, Y tu mamá también co-stars Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal reunite as two hardscrabble soccer fans whisked from the drudgery of small-town banana picking for a shot at the big time. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón’s kid brother Carlos Cuarón, the movie shares many of the charms of that earlier collaboration (Carlos co-wrote Y tu mamá, as well as Alfonso’s Sólo con tu pareja) but suggests a very different dynamic between the two characters.
This time, Luna and Bernal play half-brothers, named Beto and Tato, mutually loyal to their common mother and, to a lesser degree, one another. When they aren’t toiling away in the fields, they spend most of their time on the soccer field. Beto plays goalie, aggressive enough in his manner that his teammates call him “Rudo” (or “rough”), while Tato is such a show-offy forward, his fancy tricks earn him the nickname “Cursi” (“prissy,” in English) — monikers that confuse the fact that each is simultaneously macho and sensitive.
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When the Golden Globe nominations were announced last week, there was one glaring omission from the Best Supporting Actor category: a nod for Milk. Actually, there were four glaring omissions, because Milk still does not have a definite forerunner among its quartet of campaigned-for supporting actors, which includes Josh Brolin, James Franco, Emile Hirsch and Diego Luna. Did the Hollywood Foreign Press Association truly snub the film, as has been suggested, or could the organization simply not decide which actor to nominate? Perhaps the two favorites, Brolin and Franco, cancelled each other out. If so, the Academy needs to ensure that such a thing doesn’t happen with its Oscar nominations. And the best way to do this is to get behind Diego Luna for Best Supporting Actor.
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Gus Van Sant’s best-known films (which are not the same as his best films) have historically involved a certain grappling with What Hollywood Does. Hollywood saves a poor-but-smart kid from his environment (and himself) with the help of a bearded, platitude-spouting Robin Williams. Hollywood saves a poor-but-smart kid from his environment (and himself) with the help of a bearded, laughable slang-spouting Sean Connery. Hollywood flatters its flavors of the month by shoe-horning them into paint-by-numbers remakes of aged cinematic game changers. Etc. Anyone cognizant of Van Sant’s turn-of-the-century Hollywood period shouldn’t be surprised by his willing ability to play it straight.
To say that Van Sant continues to “play it straight” with Milk isn’t meant as a pun regarding sexuality, exactly, but said pun wouldn’t be entirely off the mark. If his Hollywood trilogy was what Van Sant needed to get from his early meditations on the emotional lives of low-lifes to his much-vaunted Death Trilogy, then that most recent career phase may be what Van Sant needed to work through in order to merge the first two modes of his career. Milk takes the defining moments of a subculture once perceived by the mainstream as deviant, and runs it through the mill of What Hollywood Does, thereby sanitizing its hero for mainstream martyrhood. Van Sant’s laundering of an outsider hero through the very inside mechanism of the Hollywood biopic has been variously described as heroic and distasteful. As of press time, I think it’s somewhere in between.
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Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely, about a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) who falls for a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) and follows her to a commune full of celebrity impersonators based out of a Scottish castle, would make an incredible double-feature paired with Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness. Both films deal with people who have fled to the Highlands in denial of real-world mundaneity and in exploration of an escapist fiction. Korine’s long-awaited comeback feature may be a bit more on the nose about the desperate things we do in the name of absolving our lonely fates, but like Build a Ship, it rides the line between pure shtick and genuine emotion to a degree of success that, when it works, can be truly thrilling. Both are patchworky and imperfect, but both are among my favorite films I’ve seen this year.
Korine has always been a filmmaker who plugs story in the gaps around visual one-liners, and while Mister Lonely is a more traditional shot-reverse shot narrative than anything he has done before, from the opening shot the director confirms that, in some sense, he’s up to his old tricks. Luna’s Michael Jackson, decked out in familiar sunglasses, black armband, and standard issue surgical face mask, rides through the streets of Paris on a kiddie motorcycle with a toy monkey tied to the rear. Shot in slow motion, set to Bobby Vinton’s rendition of the title song, this opening scene is both punchline and four-dimensional painting. Lonely is wall-to-wall full of comparable sequences which, though maybe only a step or two away or above the kinds of cultural regurgitations that litter YouTube––Marilyn Monroe, her hair in curlers, comes to Michael Jackson’s room and seduces him by feeding him a strawberry; Abe Lincoln, lit only by strobe light, recites the Gettysburg Address whilst spinning a basketball on his finger––together add up to surprisingly poignant portrait of the willful abandonment of reality in favor of pop cultural oblivion.
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Via Filmmaker Magazine, The House Next Door, and a typically bratty excoriation from Reverse Shot (”America\’s favorite dunderkind is back. And this time financed, inexplicably, by fashion magnate Agn
Open up your “Movies I Want to See” list at Spout and get ready to add these–indieWIRE’s top 10 from Tribeca. (If you were lucky enough to catch them at Tribeca or another festival, you can write some reviews and let us know if you agree with indieWIRE’s assessment.) Here are the films, and you can read the whole article here. The Reeler also reviewed many of these films for Spout, so check out the links.
1. We Are Together (directed by Paul Taylor)
2. The Gates (directed by Antonio Ferrera and Albert Maysles)
3. 2 Days in Paris (directed by Julie Delpy)
4. Shotgun Stories (directed by Jeff Nichols)
5. In Search of a Midnight Kiss (directed by Alex Holdridge)
6. Rebirth of a Nation (by DJ Spooky)
7. Chavez (directed by Diego Luna)
8. I Am an American Soldier: One Year in Iraq With the 101st Airborne (directed by John Laurence)
9. Half Moon (directed by Bahman Ghobadi)
10. Times and Winds (directed by Reha Erdem)
