Indie Focus: Coming of age with 'Morris From America,' Frederick Wiseman and Jerry Lewis

By Mark Olsen

Aug. 21, 2016 12:05 AM PT

Hello! I’m Mark Olsen, and welcome to your weekly field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.

Last week we mentioned the movie “Hell or High Water,” and since then I published a piece looking at the film as a modern-day Western and how it fits within the context of the career of actor Jeff Bridges.

As Scottish-born director David Mackenzie said, “This felt like on the surface it’s a bank robbery movie, it’s a buddy movie, it’s a road movie, but beneath that surface it’s an examination of the passing of the Old West. It’s not really right for me to say so, because I’m a foreigner, but it also really felt to me like a snapshot of a nation.”

We had a terrific Q&A this past week with Clea DuVall for her new film “The Intervention.” Turned out she used to work in a coffee shop just downstairs from the theater we were in.

This week we’ll be showing “The Hollars” followed by a Q&A with its star and director, John Krasinski. Check events.latimes.com for more info.

‘Morris From America’

A fish-out-of-water, coming-of-age tale, “Morris From America” is the story of an African American teenager (Markees Christmas) who moves with his father (Craig Robinson) to a small town in Germany. There they have to navigate each other and everybody else. Written and directed by Chad Hartigan, the film is a sweet comedy with surprising emotional depth. Robinson won an acting prize at the Sundance Film Festival when the film premiered there earlier this year.

In The Times, Sheri Linden said the film puts “a fresh slant on adolescent growing pains without quite breaking new ground” and that both Robinson and Christmas “bring an engaging honesty to characters navigating new emotional territory, separately and together.”

Markees Christmas, left, and Craig Robinson of "Morris From America."

At Slate, Dana Stevens said of the film, “I wish there were more films every year like ‘Morris From America,’ the kind that surprise you by revealing a hidden side of something — an actor, a genre, a situation — you thought you had figured out.”

At Time Out, Joshua Rothkopf said, “A quiet, sneaky sense of dislocation vibrates through Chad Hartigan’s indie comedy, which contains so many ideas about race, child-rearing, fatherhood and accidental exoticism that to call it a mere coming-of-age movie would be a shame.”

And young Mr. Christmas spoke to M. Susie Schmank of The Times about how he got his start in acting and other matters.

‘Disorder’

The new film from French filmmaker Alice Winocour, “Disorder” is part crime thriller, part character study, with raw performances from Diane Kruger and Matthias Schoenaerts. In the film, Schoenaerts is a soldier just back from Afghanistan who takes what is supposed to be a relatively easy job as part of the security detail for a businessman and his family. As the soldier spends more time with the businessman’s wife (Kruger), they both begin to realize that things around the house may not be as they first seemed.

For The Times, Justin Chang said that “on a subtler level, ‘Disorder’ might also be an apt description of the structural confusion at the heart of this intriguing thriller from French writer-director Alice Winocour, who works in a jagged, restless filmmaking style that favors sensory immersion over dramatic clarity.”

At the New York Times, A.O. Scott called it “a tightly wound spring of a movie, a tour de force of sound design and sly editing that implies much more than it shows.”

In an interview in Film Comment, Winocour told Yonca Talu of the inspirations behind the film: “My essential concern was to capture this climate of fear and disarray in a world that is becoming more and more incomprehensible. I put all my fears in the film, my fear of the dark, of storms, etc., but also all the fears of contemporary life: the continuous flow of information, the fact that we have the impression of witnessing everything but at the same time of being completely powerless. Also a sort of sensation of collapse, of chaotic elements in chaotic times.”

The complete works of Frederick Wiseman

Frederick Wiseman is easily among the greatest documentary filmmakers of all time. That he has never been nominated for an Academy Award is at this point almost a badge of honor, as over the course of a career that now spans 50 years, he has never compromised his aesthetic ideas or clarity of vision. He is a national treasure.

Wiseman will soon be in Los Angeles for the launch of a 43-film retrospective at the Cinefamily, including a master class. Among this first group of shows will be the Los Angeles premieres of new 3-mm restorations of three of his early, seminal films, “Titicut Follies,” “High School” and “Hospital.”

As Richard Brody wrote in the New Yorker earlier this year, “Wiseman, who studied law and was a law-school professor, doesn’t so much film institutions as discover them. He goes to a place of concentrated and focused activity — a hospital, a school, a public-assistance office, a business, a university, even an entire neighborhood — and manages to reveal the abstractions, the rules and the exercise and negotiation of power, behind the surfaces of daily life.”

Jerry Lewis to the max

Can the world be split among those who get the genius of Jerry Lewis and those who don’t? Now 90 years old, the true Hollywood legend will soon see the release of “Max Rose,” his first starring role in many years. The Aero Theatre will have Lewis in person for a screening of the film and is showing a few of his classics.

A double feature of “The Nutty Professor” and “The Ladies Man” will showcase his skills as a filmmaker, while “The King of Comedy” and “Funny Bones” show the depths he was capable of as an actor.

But the real gem of the series may be a double feature of two of Lewis’ collaborations with Dean Martin and the director Frank Tashlin, 1955’s “Artists and Models” and 1956’s “Hollywood or Bust.” They are billed as playing in IB Technicolor 35-mm prints, which should make for a dazzling delight.

Email me if you have questions, comments or suggestions, and follow me on Twitter @IndieFocus.