Mondo Cinema

Le Funny Business at MFAH, Kristen Stewart on the road and Gangham Style in Bollywood

They’re collectively billed as Five Funny French Films, raising expectations for a lot of “Ha! Ha! Ha!” along with the “Ooh La La!” (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) As they unspool this weekend at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, you can enjoy a wide variety of funny business with a lineup that includes:

All That Glitters (5 p.m. Friday, 3 p.m. Sunday) – Two sisters, tired of their dull lives in a suburb 10 minutes by train from Paris, go to amusing extremes to enjoy the good life in the big city.

Skylab (7 p.m. Friday, 9:15 p.m. Saturday) – Actress Julie Delpy once again tries her hand as a writer-director, this time for a semi-autobiographical comedy about a 1979 family gathering that may or may not be rudely interrupted by the threatened crash of a humongous space station.

Big is Beautiful (9:15 p.m. Friday, 1 p.m. Sunday) – Three full-figured ladies forge friendships and gain self-awareness during a weight-loss program at a clinic in the Alps.

My Worst Nightmare (7:15 p.m. Saturday) – French superstar Isabelle Huppert heads the cast of this farce about an icy art gallery owner who’s warmed just a smidge by her edgy yet erotically charged relationship with a uncouth carpenter doing remodeling work in her spacious apartment.

What’s in a Name? (5 p.m. Sunday) – An expectant father (Patrick Bruel) upsets his family with the wholly inappropriate name he has chosen for his soon-to-arrive offspring.

In addition to screening these five flicks, the MFAH Film Department is offering a bit of lagniappe: Le Grand Amour (5:30 p.m. Saturday), a 1969 comedy about a new husband with a wandering eye, starring Pierre Étaix, the French comic actor who’ll be the subject of a retrospective tribute at the museum in May.

Sundancing with cinema

Two new notable offerings are on tap this weekend at the Sundance Cinemas downtown.

After impressing international audiences with his acclaimed Certified Copy, a romantic drama starring Juliette Bincohe and British opera singer William Shimell as attracted opposites in Tuscany, Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami once again ventures far from his homeland – to Japan, to be precise – for Like Someone in Love, a teasingly ambiguous story about a sociology student (Rin Takanashi) who moonlights as a prostitute, and the elderly professor (Tadashi Okuno) who starts out as her client, but evolves into her mentor.

On the Road, the long-awaited filmization of Jack Kerouac’s classic novel, played in a handful of theaters late last year in the hope of copping critical hosannas and Academy Award nominations. But reviews were mixed and Oscar buzz was muted, so IFC Films opted to wait a little longer before giving the movie a wider release. Now it has arrived in H-Town, and you can decide for yourself if Brazilian director Walter Salles (Central Station, The Motorcycle Diaries) and lead players Garrett Hedlund, Sam Riley and Kristen Stewart have done justice to Kerouac’s story about free spirits in search of new experiences in late 1940s America.

Bollywood Madness

In Rangrezz (at AMC Studio 30), a Hindi-language film by the prolific Indian director known as Priyadarshan, three close friends literally risk life and limb (and long-term disability) to unite two star-crossed lovers. It may look like the usual Bollywood song and dance, but there’s at least one surprise in the soundtrack: According to published reports out of India, producer Vashu Bhagnani paid a hefty fee to use Psy’s monster hit “Gangham Style” in the movie, so his son Jackky Bhagnani, one of the film’s lead players, could dance to it on screen.

But wait, there’s more: Psy refused to sell the rights to his signature tune until he was certain Jackky had sufficient terpsichorean talent to… well, to really do it “Gangham Style.” So he took a look at the young performer’s dance moves in the Hindi movie F.A.L.T.U. – and only then granted his blessing.

Which only goes to show you: In Bollywood, there’s always a happy ending. As you can see here.

Other screens, other cinema

Rob Schneider, Michelle Rodriguez, Lindsay Lohan and Oscar-winner Adrien Brody star in… Wait a minute, that doesn’t look right. Let me double check… Yeah, Brody actually is in InAPPropriate Comedy (various locations), an indie flick that, based on its trailer, appears to be the sort of thing actors do only when they owe a favor to a friend, a payment on a mortgage, or a fee to their legal team.

In New World (AMC Studio 30), South Korean filmmaker Park Hoon-jung (who wrote the script for Kim Ji-woon’s notorious I Saw the Devil ) wrings suspense from the conflicting loyalties of an undercover cop (Lee Jung-jae) who’s begun to take his role as right-hand man to a crime lord a bit too seriously.

A Resurrection (at Edwards Marq*E) is a horror thriller about a high-schooler who returns from the dead to seek revenge on the bullies who killed him, but it’ll likely earn a footnote in film history books primarily because it’s one of the final films completed by the late Michael Clarke Duncan.

Jackky Bhagnani grooves Gangnam Style for Rangrezz

CineGoer.com

Jackky Bhagnani grooves Gangnam Style for Rangrezz

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Movie Review

New comedy I Want Your Sex saddles an all-star cast with a dull story

Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

Cooper Hoffman and Olivia Wilde in I Want Your Sex.

Writer/director Gregg Araki has been making provocative movies for nearly 40 years, releasing his debut — Three Bewildered People in the Night — in 1987. Most of them have had plotlines that revolved around sex in one way or another, and for his latest — his first film in 12 years — he’s putting it right there in the title, I Want Your Sex.

Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) is an aimless twenty-something who can’t even afford the rent for his apartment with best friend, Apple (Chase Sui Wonders). Thankfully, he finds a job at the gallery of artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), who is open with her sexuality both in her artwork and in her day-to-day life. That soon includes Elliot, whom she convinces to enter into a dominant-submissive relationship with her, with sessions taking place both at work and her home.

Elliot, who’s in a going-nowhere coupling with Minerva (Charli XCX), is more than willing to participate, both because it lets him feel something he doesn’t get normally and because Erika offers a perspective on sex that’s much different from people of his generation. But as he gets in deeper with her, he starts to lose a sense of himself, going down a path in which he finds himself talking to police detectives Zem (Johnny Knoxville) and Zola (Margaret Cho).

Araki does his level best to make I Want Your Sex into a broad comedy, and early on it seems as if he might succeed. The deadpan way that sexual objects appear in the film (a penis-shaped rug in Elliot and Apple’s apartment, a vagina artwork with chewed gum as the medium) make for amusing sight gags. He also makes Elliot the bewildered other in multiple twosomes, with Minerva being the funniest, as she’s way more interested in studying than his ham-fisted attempts at sex.

It’s clear that Araki wants the film to be a commentary on the generational differences about sex, but he fumbles his own idea. It starts with an on-the-nose conversation between Erika and Elliot, and continues with the various dalliances, which seem to be more about making Elliot look and feel ridiculous than giving true insight. Their encounters certainly open his mind about what sex can be, but their one-note nature makes them repetitive and frankly boring, odd considering the acts in which the two engage.

The uninspired storytelling makes the 90-minute film drag way more than it should. Araki includes a few other characters to try to vary the tone of the film, including gallery workers Zap (Mason Gooding) and Vikktor (Daveed Diggs), but their early promise yields little results. The framing device of Elliot’s interview with the detectives never works, especially because Araki completely neuters the personalities of Cho and Knoxville for seemingly no good reason.

The cast as a whole goes to waste. Hoffman is showing the promise of his late father (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and even though he’s appealing here, the material pulls him down. Wilde just made her own provocative movie about sex (The Invite), and this one pales in comparison despite her heightened performance. Wonders, Charli XCX, and Gooding are all young stars who deserve to be showcased much better than they are in this film.

A film called I Want Your Sex is announcing itself as daring and alluring, but this film contains almost none of those qualities. Instead, it’s a slog that only occasionally has something interesting to show or say, mostly relying on the power of its actors to hold viewers’ attention — and failing at even that.

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I Want Your Sex is now playing in select theaters.