A traveling man (Mathieu Amairic) is stopped in customs and recounts his life. Paul tells a short story about a strange trip to Russia that involved a bit of espionage, and that story segues into his college years and Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet), the love of his life. Quentin Dolmaire plays Paul for the majority of the film, a charming, somewhat hazy love story based on an older man’s memories and perhaps laced with idealistic remembrances.

The love story, set to a soundtrack of eighties music and filmed authentically by director Arnaud Desplechin, is a good one. The framing device seems a little hokey at first, but upon reflection, actually works well. Dolmaire and Roy-Lecollinet make for a convincing young, unsure couple whose courtship is interrupted by youthful dalliances and long trips apart. It’s all a little confusing at times, but the two performers make it all very worthwhile.

Amairic has little screen time, but he makes the most of it, especially in a scene near the end when he confronts an old friend about complications involving Esther. Is Paul just a crazy guy remembering a girl that didn’t love him as much as he loved her? Is he just blowing things up in his mind now that he’s had distance from her over the years? What’s that beginning scene between him and a woman all about?

It’s one of those movies that doesn’t answer all of the questions for you. You just make of it what you will. 

While I assume you're spending the weekend drinking locally brewed beer and eating fried food at the fair, I always think it's a good idea to reserve a few hours for snuggling up on the couch with a good movie. 

Make like a meerkat and grab some popcorn while you're deciding what to watch this weekend. Here's your list of the most-rented movies from Casa Video last week. 

1. Star Wars 7: The Force Awakens

Jon Favreau’s delightful and funny take on the Rudyard Kipling’s tale of a boy raised by wolves is an all around winner. Kids and adults will love the talking and sporadically singing animals, while adults and some of the cooler kids will like the movie references and clever Easter eggs.

The story is pretty simple: A young boy raised in the jungle is pursued by a pissed off tiger (Idris Elba) who had his face burned by a human when he was young (shades of Darth Vader). When plans to leave for a human village are rudely interrupted, Mowgli (newcomer Neel Sethi) winds up staying in the jungle longer than he planned, and he must keep wearing the same pair of red baggy shorts. He encounters Kaa (Scarlett Johansson), an evil temptress snake, and other perils while building a special friendship with a big bear.

And, as far as I could see, he never stops to wash those red shorts. A swim in the river doesn’t count. You need detergent.

Bill Murray is, indeed, a masterstroke of vocal casting as Baloo, the big bear who befriends Mowgli on his extended jungle trek. Casting Christopher Walken as King Louie, the Kong-sized master of all apes in the jungle, actually tops the Murray casting feat. It gives Favreau’s film an opportunity to become truly weird, very funny, and even a little scary.

While not a bona fide musical, Favreau does find some clever ways to mix musical performance into the movie. Baloo and Mowgli happily sing a part of “The Bare Necessities” together while floating down a river, accompanied by a full orchestra led by John Debney. It’s great, but it’s not the film’s musical highlight. The highlight comes when Walken’s King Louie, portrayed with undertones of Brando’s Colonel Kurtz, suddenly busts out “I Wanna Be Like You.” Walken is perfect for the song and perfect for the character, making the scene an instant classic. The special effects are topnotch.

The story is in service of some incredible special effects that seamlessly mesh live animals, motion capture work, and puppetry. The talking animals actually look like they are really talking as opposed to animals with cartoon mouths yapping away.

Yes, this is another one of those hitman comedies. There are many, too many to recount here, so I’ll just get to the point.

This one is pretty good because it has Sam Rockwell and Anna Kendrick in it. Actually, it’s only good because it has Rockwell and Kendrick in it. Kendrick plays a woman just out of a relationship after catching her boyfriend cheating (she has a drunk-closet scene that is very funny). Rockwell plays a hitman who wears a clown nose, dances when he kills, and likes to kill those who hire him to kill because killing is wrong. The two meet in a store and start an unorthodox relationship. They like the same sort of things and both have the ability to catch knives thrown at their face. She finds out he kills people and that sort of complicates things but they still give it a go.

It’s all stupid, well-worn territory, but the leads are good and they pull the material through. Kendrick, who is in a million movies lately (actually, six this year not counting this one), has solid comedic chops and she should be a bigger star than she is. She also brings a bit of the crazy, and it’s convincing. Rockwell is Rockwell and I can think of nobody better to play a dancing hitman. Tim Roth shows up as the guy who trained him. I have no idea what kind of accent Roth is doing at first. It’s sort of a Texan Christopher Walken kind of thing and it sounds pretty annoying. He actually winds up having a pretty good reason for the weird accent, so it’s forgivable. Anson Mount plays a crime lord with anger issues, and he’s one of the funnier things in the movie. It’s all kind of forgettable, but mildly enjoyable while it’s going on. (Available for rent on iTunes and Amazon.com during limited theatrical release).

Dinner parties tend to suck, don’t they? You bring a stupid bottle of wine nobody will like. You have no small talk for others gathering at the table other than the weather and your stinky feet problem. Your hosts may or may not be trying to kill you.

Will (Logan Marshall-Green) is visiting his ex-wife Gina (Michelle Krusiec) for a dinner party. Gina has been away for some time, and she’s gotten all smiley in the wake of a tragedy she and Will suffered. Her new boyfriend David (Michiel Huisman) is a bit of a weirdo, all happy and perhaps a bit too pleasant. In contrast to his pleasant demeanor, he shows the party a video of a woman, surrounded by members of some cult, dying by choice. That puts a strange damper on the party, but they all eventually make it to the dinner table, where things get even weirder.

Director Karyn Kusama (Jennifer’s Body, Girlfight) does nice work within the scary cult genre, getting good performances from Marshall-Green and John Caroll Lynch as a friend with a sketchy past. There’s a good mystery at play here, with a final act that delivers on the build up. It’s a good ensemble cast in service of a decent script and effective director.

Marshall-Green, best known for a supporting role in Prometheus and a couple of TV shows, should find himself getting some decent future work in this one. He’s got some major chops. 

Ethan Hawke plays legendary jazz musician Chet Baker in this gritty documentary about the man’s trumpet playing comeback after taking a severe beating to the face.

Hawke just keeps adding to his list of great performances, and this one might be his most ambitious. He learned how to play trumpet for the movie, impressively miming to the music on the soundtrack. He also captures the essence of a man addicted to a dangerous drug, basically a good man who is slowly killing himself. Carmen Ejogo plays Jane, a combo-character of women in Baker’s life. She does a nice job of showing the kind of patience required to deal with an addict. The movie also contains some of the best, contentious scenes between a father and son I have seen in recent years.

Stephen McHattie has just a couple of scenes as Baker’s dad but, man, are they memorably nasty. Miles Davis (Kedar Brown) was a devastating presence in Baker’s life, effectively depicted here. I play the trumpet, and have played for many years. It’s a complex instrument, and director Robert Budreau and Hawke do a nice job of portraying those difficulties. I had a big gap in my teeth when I was younger, and it made playing the instrument hard. Baker had a missing tooth in his heyday, and dentures in his latter career. He still sounded cooler than most.

Much of the film (like the recent Miles Davis biopic Miles Ahead) is fictitious, but no matter. There’s a spirit to this movie that is very real. 

Grab your corn nuts and head over to the Loft (3233 E. Speedway Blvd.) this Sunday because Heathers is showing and I can't imagine why anyone would want to miss that unless they had a brain tumor for breakfast. 

Welcome to the jungle of Westerburg High, where the eager-to-fit-in Veronica (‘80s goth dream girl Winona Ryder) is beginning to tire of her membership in the powerful yet cruel clique of “Heathers” – comprised of three popular girls, all named Heather – who rule the school with their mean girl tactics and well-placed hair scrunchies. Looking to teach the nasty Heathers a lesson and bring an end to their social tyranny, Veronica enlists the help of the mysterious new dreamboat / rebel with a cause Jason Dean (Christian Slater), and their mutual dislike for the Heathers quickly escalates into a savage cycle of murder, suicide and Slushies. Now that her teenage angst has a body count, are Veronica and JD headed for the prom … or hell? Driven by a cleverly venomous script by Daniel Waters that’s literally bursting with quotable dialogue (including “I love my dead gay son!” and the eternal classic, “F**k me gently with a chainsaw!”) and a shockingly bad attitude that lays waste to all goody-goody teen movie clichés, Heathers is the hilarious, so very cult classic that paved the way for the success of the similar, albeit much less vicious, 2004 comedy Mean Girls. (Dir. by Michael Lehmann, 1988, USA, 103 mins., Rated R)

How very.

The show is April 17 at 7:30 p.m. and tickets are $6, $5 for Loft members. 

Maybe next we can get someone to put on Heathers the Musical. 

Don Cheadle makes an impressive directorial debut with this crazy biopic that is mostly fiction but all fun.

Cheadle plays jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, hibernating from public life in the late seventies when a Rolling Stone reporter (Ewan McGregor) shows up at his door looking for a comeback story. The film then turns part comedy thriller as Davis tries to track down a missing tape from his latest sessions, something that never really happened.

It’s all just an excuse to use Miles Davis in a goofy story, and somehow it all works. Cheadle is pure awesome as Davis, even doing some impressive trumpet miming to boot (Cheadle, like Ethan Hawke in the recent Chet Baker biopic Born to Be Blue, learned how to play trumpet for the part).

The film switches between Miles in the seventies and Miles in the sixties dealing with relationship struggles. No, the movie doesn’t really focus much on the actual music. It’s more of a weird trip inspired by the music.

Michael Stuhlbarg is good as a shady record producer, and McGregor has a lot of fun as the shifty reporter who will do anything for a scoop. Cheadle has made a good looking, and sounding, movie to go with his strong performance. It’s not going to win any awards for accuracy, but it’s a fun movie with a Cheadle performance well worth any music lover’s time. 

Tucson, if this gorgeous rain-adjacent weather keeps up, you're going to need to promise me you'll spend some time outside this weekend.

When you've done that for a few hours, you can go pick up some movies. Here's your list of the Top 10 most rented DVDs at Casa Video last week.  

1. The Hateful Eight

Let’s get something out of the way before delving into this particular film.

Director Terrence Malick will always be one of the greatest, most innovative directors to have ever made a movie. He has achieved legendary status with four masterpieces (Badlands, The Thin Red Line, The New World, The Tree of Life) and has made one very good movie (Days of Heaven) along with one absolute clunker (To the Wonder).

As for his latest starring Christian Bale and a host of great actresses like Natalie Portman and Cate Blanchett? I’m afraid it’s closer to being another clunker than a masterpiece.

The film follows a Hollywood writer (Bale) as he suffers a crisis of conscience through multiple relationships and job circumstances. The film has no script to speak of, and the performers were all basically given notes on which to improvise.