July 2016 – The Movie Gourmet

Ronan Farrow’s unique perspective on Woody Allen and the media

July 31, 2016 by movie gourmet

Tomorrow, I’ll be writing about Woody Allen’s latest, Café Society. I put aside the creep factor when I watch Woody Allen’s movies. What’s important to me is what’s up on the screen. A movie can be a masterpiece (or crap) even if it’s made by someone to which you don’t relate, someone you find detestable or even to be a monster. For example, I admire most of Roman Polanski’s movies, even though he committed a despicable and criminal act in the 1970s.

I know that other folks have other sensibilities and approaches that are completely justified. For example, The Wife will not watch movies that feature certain actors with domestic violence histories. Unlike me, she doesn’t compartmentalize, and she knows that she would be thinking about the real-life domestic violence during the movie. I respect her principle and her self-awareness.

Of course, I do not live under a rock, so I am aware of the distasteful 1992 episode when Mia Farrow booted Woody upon learning about his relationship with her then 21-year-old daughter Soon-yi. (Soon-yi and Woody have been together ever since and married in 1996.) And, much more disturbingly, Woody’s own daughter Dylan Farrow recently accused him of molesting her when she was little, an accusation which he denies.

Ronan Farrow is Woody Allen’s son and Dylan’s brother. He is also a serious and accomplished journalist. Recently, he wrote a guest column in The Hollywood Reporter entitled My Father, Woody Allen, and the Danger of Questions Unasked. In it, he shares his perspective on the Dylan Farrow/Woody Allen situation.

Ronan Farrow also makes a broader critique of the media, how it treats both accusers and the celebrity accused. He focuses on the relative power of the accuser and the accused, and it’s an especially thought-provoking and valuable essay. (His column was written before the recent Roger Ailes sexual harassment scandal but I found it to be relevant and instructive in absorbing that story as well.)

I will continue to watch Woody Allen’s movies and to write about them. But from now on, I’ll be including a link to Ronan Farrow’s My Father, Woody Allen, and the Danger of Questions Unasked.

Movies to See Right Now

July 29, 2016 by movie gourmet

THE LAST LAUGH at the 36th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival

Here are my top picks at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF36), underway right now throughout the Bay Area. The romance Fever at Dawn plays in Palo Alto tonight. This weekend, the festival hosts the West Coast premiere of the documentary The Last Laugh, which explores (gasp) humor and the Holocaust.

In theaters right now:

The Japanese domestic drama Our Little Sister is remarkably uplifting. I would seek it out because it’s unlikely to remain in theaters for more than two or three weeks.
Zero Days is a documentary on a jaw-dropping hacker mystery – who and how was able to get Iranian military computers to destroy the hardware for their own nuclear weapons program.
Opening today in San Francisco, the subversive documentary Under the Sun is a searing insight into totalitarian North Korean society, all from government-approved filming that tells a different story than the wackadoodle dictatorship intended.
Finding Dory doesn’t have the breakthrough animation or the depth of story that we expect from Pixar, but it won’t be painful to watch a zillion times with your kids.
I’m not writing about Ghostbusters, but I’ve seen it, and it’s not terrible. Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy are brilliant talents, and they produce some laughs in Ghostbusters.

My DVD/Stream of the week is the harrowing thriller ’71, about a nail-biting 24 hours in Northern Ireland’s Troubles. ’71 is now available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

Tomorrow night, Turner Classic Movies presents one of my favorite film noirs, The Lineup (1958), with its dazzling San Francisco locations.

UNDER THE SUN: a wackadoodle regime subverts its own propaganda

July 29, 2016 by movie gourmet

A scene from Vitaly Mansky's UNDER THE SUN, playing at the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival, on April 21 - May 5, 2016. — UNDER THE SUN. Photo courtesy of San Francisco Film Society.

The subversive documentary Under the Sun is a searing insight into totalitarian North Korean society, all from government-approved filming that tells a different story than the wackadoodle dictatorship intended.

The North Korean regime gave filmmaker Vitaly Mansky permission to film the story of a young girl who is training to take part in one of North Korea’s ritualized propaganda spectacles – when children “join” the Korean Children’s Union on the birthday of the current Supreme Leader’s father. The script and the filming locations were all assigned by the North Korean regime and all film reviewed by their censors. But Mansky was able to conceal and preserve the outtakes – and those moments are devastatingly revelatory about life on North Korea.

What we see is a grim society, virtually devoid of vibrancy and joy. Families are posed briefly mechanically and unsmilingly for ritual family photos in front of flower-bedecked giant portraits of the Leaders. The streets are drab and empty of vehicle traffic even at rush hour. Mansky shows us surreptitious glimpses of his minders and even of boys raiding garbage cans. There’s a lot of regimentation depicted in Under the Sun and lots of people drearily filing to and fro. Sometimes it gets tiresome – but that’s the point.

Everyone is conscripted to perform and watch phony staged spectacles of the grandest scale. The rapturous crowds shown on TV contrast with the stoic crowds forced to view the televised events. North Korea must have the world’s most professional event planners per capita.

Most chillingly, we see a class where 6-year-olds are taught to hate Japanese and Americans. This appears to be a scene that the North Koreans INTENTIONALLY included in the movie.

The beautiful irony of Under the Sun is that, in trying to tell a story about the best of their society, the North Koreans actually reveal their worst. I saw Under the Sun earlier this year at the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival. Under the Sun opens July 29 at the Lee 4-Star in San Francisco.

OUR LITTLE SISTER: remarkably tender

June 30, 2020July 28, 2016 by movie gourmet

The remarkably uplifting Japanese domestic drama Our Little Sister centers on three 20-something sisters whose father left them over fifteen years ago and whose flighty, selfish mom was never much of a factor in their lives. The sisters are single and live together when their estranged dad dies and they travel to his funeral. They meet their 15-year-old half-sister, and rescue her from her step-mom, the father’s third wife. Now the household contains four siblings, all with different personalities, but all dealing with some sense of parental loss.

The four go about their daily lives, working, going to school, eating at a diner, watching fireworks. Now here’s the beauty of Our Little Sister, although there’s essentially no action and very little overt conflict, we learn a lot about these women. And we begin to care for them. And we become engaged in their journeys of self-discovery.

Writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda was introduced to American fans of indie cinema in 1996 with Maborosi, and I listed his Still Walking on my Best Movies of 2009. It’s a privilege to spend two hours with Kore-eda’s characters in Our Little Sister. It’s impossible to leave Our Little Sister without being touched by its tenderness (and I’m a pretty cynical and hard-boiled viewer).

THE LINEUP: cool killer, volcanic killer, careening thru San Francisco

July 27, 2016July 27, 2016 by movie gourmet

The 1958 film noir The Lineup plays this Saturday, July 30, on Turner Classic Movies. The villains and the final chase scene are unforgettable, as are the movie’s iconic San Francisco locations. It’s one of my Overlooked Noirs.

Two gangsters are smuggling heroin into San Francisco, hidden in the bags of unsuspecting cruise ship passengers. When a shipment isn’t where it’s supposed to be (in a girl’s doll), the gangsters take the doll’s owner (Cindy Calloway) and her mother (Mary LaRoche) hostage and then try to hunt down the contraband in San Francisco’s underground. Will the crooks find the junk? Will they harm the hostages? Will the cops find them first? The suspense builds until the man hunt turns into a spectacular chase through San Francisco.

Richard Jaeckel and Robert Keith in THE LINEUP

The bad guys, Julian (Robert Keith) and Dancer (Eli Wallach), really set The Lineup apart from other crime dramas of the period. Julian is ruthless, but always controlled and strategic. One of the most self-aware villains in cinema history, Julian says things like, “Crying’s aggressive and so’s the law. Ordinary people of your class, you don’t understand the criminal’s need for violence.” He describes his partner Dancer as “a wonderful, pure pathological study. He’s a psychopath with no inhibitions.”

Robert Keith’s son, Brian Keith, became a much bigger star in the TV series Family Affair and a host of Disney productions. But Robert Keith was himself a fine actor, especially as a PTSD-addled colonel in Men in War (1957). The role of Julian, with its unusual combination of cool smarts and calculated malevolence, became one of Robert Keith’s finest performances.

Julian’s biggest challenge is operating with a psychotic partner (Wallach’s Dancer) who is ready to explode in violence at any moment. Wallach was a great movie character actor who had the gift of packing maximum entertainment value into any role. Movie fans will probably best remember him for two bandito bad guys – Cavela in The Magnificent Seven and Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. But here he is, just three years after his feature film debut in Baby Doll, and Wallach is seething with intensity as he gives pychopathy an especially bad name.

To make their situation even edgier, Julian and Dancer have hired a local getaway driver (the ever reliable character actor Richard Jaeckel) who is a raging alcoholic.

There isn’t any lineup of note in The Lineup, which was a theatrical feature seeking to exploit a police procedural TV series of the same name, hence the reference to “30 million fans” in the trailer. Warner Anderson co-starred in the series and plays the cop in the movie. The real juice in this movie, however, comes from the criminals that he is chasing.

The Lineup was brilliantly directed by the grievously underrated Don Siegel. Siegel was a master of crime movies (and was the primary filmmaking mentor to Clint Eastwood). I particularly love Siegel’s 1973 neo-noir Charley Varrick, the guilty pleasure Two Mules for Sister Sara and John Wayne’s goodbye: The Shootist. The Lineup is right up there with Siegel’s best.

The biggest star of The Lineup, however, is the San Francisco of the late 1950s. The Lineup starts on the waterfront and ends in a chase that careens from the Cliff House all across the city to the then unfinished Embarcadero Freeway (now itself torn down decades ago). The story also takes us to the old Embarcadero YMCA, the Golden Gate Bridge, War Memorial Opera House, US Custom House, Nob Hill, Russian Hill, Legion of Honor, the old DeYoung Museum and the Mark Hopkins Hotel. There’s even a critical scene in the Sutro Baths – which had become an ice skating rink when the movie was filmed.

Richard Jaeckel, Mary LaRoche, Cindy Calloway, Eli Wallach and Robert Keith in THE LINEUP (the Bay Bridge and Yerba Buena Island in the background)

The unfinished Embarcadero Freeway in THE LINEUP

The Lineup (one of the few DVDs that I still own) plays occasionally on Turner Classic Movies and is available to rent on DVD from Netflix.

DVD/Stream of the Week: ’71 – keeping the thrill in thriller

July 26, 2016 by movie gourmet

The title of the harrowing thriller ’71 refers to the tumultuous year 1971 in Northern Ireland’s Troubles. An ill-prepared unit of British soldiers gets their first taste of action in Belfast, and the rookie Private Gary Hook (Jack O’Connell) gets inadvertently left behind in hostile territory. Private Hook races around an unfamiliar and dangerous city at night. He is being hunted by his own regular troops, a shadowy and sketchy military intelligence unit, the regular IRA, the hotheaded Provisional IRA and Ulster paramilitaries – all with their own conflicting agendas. Any civilian who helps him will be at direct and lethal risk from the partisans.

In their feature debuts, director Jann Demange and cinematographer Tat Ratcliffe take us on a Wild Ride, with just a couple of chances for the audience to catch its collective breath. Importantly, the way Private Hook gets left behind amid the escalating chaos is very believable. Then there’s an exhilarating footrace through the alleys and over brick walls. Every encounter with another person is fraught with tension. Finally, there’s a long and thrilling climactic set piece in a Belfast apartment block.

O’Connell is in 90% of the shots and carries it off very well. All of the acting in ’71 is excellent. Corey McKinley is special as the toughest and most confident ten-year-old you’ll ever meet. Barry Keoghan takes the impassive stone face to a new level. And I always enjoy David Wilmot (so hilarious in The Guard).

I thank the casting and the direction for making it easy for us to tell all of these pale, ginger characters apart. To the credit of writer Gregory Burke, the beginning of the film economically sets up Private Hook as having the fitness and stamina to survive what befalls him throughout the night.

With all the different sides playing each other, the action (and the action is compelling) is set in an especially treacherous version of three-dimensional chess. Some of the double- and triple-crossing at the end is breathtaking. But what ’71 does best is putting the thrill in a thriller – keeping the audience on the edge of our seats for all 99 minutes.

’71, which I saw at Cinequest, made my list of the Best Movies of 2015. It’s now available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

Movies to See Right Now

July 22, 2016 by movie gourmet

My running list of Best Movies of 2016 – So Far is out. For movies in theaters right now:

Our Kind of Traitor is a robust espionage thriller with a funny yet powerful performance by Stellan Skarsgård.
Free State of Jones effectively combines the elements of political drama, romance and war movies into an absorbing Civil War drama, one which connects the dots between the 19th Century and the 20th and beyond. With a sizzling Matthew McConaughey.
Zero Days is a documentary on a jaw-dropping hacker mystery – who and how was able to get Iranian military computers to destroy the hardware for their own nuclear weapons program.
All the Way is a thrilling political docudrama with a stellar performance. It’s the story of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, warts and all, ending official racial segregation in America with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Bryan Cranston brings LBJ alive as no actor has before. All the Way is still playing on HBO.
Finding Dory doesn’t have the breakthrough animation or the depth of story that we expect from Pixar, but it won’t be painful to watch a zillion times with your kids.
I’m not writing about Ghostbusters, but I’ve seen it, and it’s not terrible. Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy are brilliant talents, and they produce some laughs in Ghostbusters.

Here are my top picks at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF36), underway right now throughout the Bay Area.

My DVD/Stream for the next two weeks is one of my Best Movies of 2016 – So Far. San Jose native Matt Sobel’s impressive directorial debut Take Me To the River is entirely fresh. Not one thing happens in Take Me to the River that you can predict, and it keeps the audience off-balance and completely engaged. You can stream Take Me to the River on Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play or rent the DVD from Netflix.

On July 26, Turner Classic Movies presents the still-powerful 1943 The Ox-Bow Incident, a parable about mobs acting rashly on the basis of fear and prejudice (which certainly resonates in today’s political environment). Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan lead an excellent period cast with Dana Andrews, Anthony Quinn and Jane Darwell, along with Frank Conroy and Harry Davenport, whose performances are perfect little gems. Which character most resembles Donald Trump?

On July 27, TCM airs Heaven’s Gate, a movie that I reviled when I saw it in a theater in 1980 and again in 2013 when it garnered some wholly undeserved revisionist praise. The second time around, I still found Heaven’s Gate to be a brutal, if occasionally unintentionally humorous, viewing experience. Its director, Michael Cimino, died last week, and it’s a good time to honor him by watching his masterpiece The Deer Hunter.

Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan in THE OX-BOW INCIDENT

San Francisco Jewish Film Festival – the top picks

July 20, 2016 by movie gourmet

Here’s a preview of the 36th annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF36), which opens tomorrow, July 21, and runs through August 7 at five locations throughout the Bay Area. The festival offers a broad range of film experiences:

51 features (33 Documentaries, 18 Narratives) from 13 countries (but mostly from the US and Israel).
2 programs of short films (Jews in Shorts), a web series and first two episodes of the miniseries False Flag.
14 world, North American or US premieres.
celebrity appearances by Norman Lear, Robert Klein, Adam (s0n of Leonard) Nimoy and a passel of filmmakers.

Here are my four top recommendations:

The documentary The Last Laugh explores humor and the Holocaust. Is there anything funny about Nazis or about the Holocaust itself? When is humor acceptable, therapeutic, transgressive or even taboo? How has the passage of time affected what is funny? And does it matter who tells the joke? We hear from Mel Brooks, Sarah Silverman, Rob and Carl Reiner, Joan Rivers, concentration camp survivor and Hogan’s Heroes star Robert Clary and, most unforgettably, Holocaust survivor Renee Firestone.
An addictive taste of the Israeli miniseries False Flag, a character-driven thriller with elements of the whodunit, the paranoid thriller, the perfect crime movie and the espionage procedural.
The world premiere of Wrestling Jerusalem, an imaginative examination of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the perspectives of seventeen distinct characters, both Jew and Arab, in a one-man play.
Fever at Dawn – an epic romance with both an exploration of identity and a moral choice.

One of the most appealing features of the SFJFF is that, wherever you live in the Bay Area, the fest comes to you. SFJFF will present 27-51 films at each of the main venues – the Castro in San Francisco, CineArts in Palo Alto and the Roda Theater at the Berkeley Rep. The festival will also screen at least 14 movies at both the Rafael in San Rafael and the Piedmont in Oakland.

Of my top picks, False Flag and Wrestling Jerusalem will screen in San Francisco, Berkeley, Palo Alto and San Rafael. The Last Laugh will be playing at the Castro and the Roda. Fever at Dawn will screen in San Francisco, Berkeley and Palo Alto.

You can peruse the entire program and buy tickets and passes at San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. The fest also offers a handy iPhone app available from the App Store: sjff36. You can follow the Festival on Twitter at @SFJewish Film; and, of course, you can follow my coverage at @themoviegourmet.

WRESTLING JERUSALEM: it’s complicated

July 20, 2016 by movie gourmet

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has inspired both documentary and narrative movies, but none is more imaginative than Wrestling Jerusalem. This year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SJFF36) will host Wrestling Jerusalem’s world premiere.

Wrestling Jerusalem is a one-man play written and performed by Aaron Davidman, who creates seventeen different characters, both Jews and Arabs, who each relate their own experiences of the conflict. Davidman portrays his characters without benefit of costume; he varies the accents, but mostly we can tell the characters apart from the content of their stories. Davidman’s performance is vivid and startlingly personal.

Davidman launches Wrestling Jerusalem with a montage of his characters explaining “It’s complicated” – a defining truth that most would accept. Then the characters continue by disagreeing about the conflict’s start (1946, 1947, 1967, 1973, the Hebron massacre – both of the massacres) and who is to blame for its continuation (Abbas, the settlers, the Orthodox, the terror attacks, Bibi, etc.). Then each character unspools his or her own perspective. Over a crisp 90 minutes, it’s absorbing stuff.

Thankfully, with one just guy on-screen for the entire film, the filmmakers keep Wrestling Jerusalem from being too stagey. They place Davidman in two locations, a solitary theatrical stage and in the desert (looks like Israel/Palestine, but it’s the California Mojave). It’s an impressive job by director Dylan Kussman, editor Erik C. Andersen and cinematographer Nicole Hirsch Whitaker.

Davidman has a point of view, but was careful not to make Wrestling Jerusalem into a screed. Instead, he’s careful to let his audience connect the dots in our own minds. Near the end, one of his characters says, “You are Israel, for you have struggled with God and with men” from Genesis 32:28, but does not does not finish the quote with “and have prevailed”.

You can experience Wrestling Jerusalem at its world premiere at this year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SJFF36), where you can see it at San Francisco’s Castro on July 27, at the Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theater on July 30, at CineArts in Palo Alto on July 28 and at the Rafael in San Rafael on August 7

https://vimeo.com/161142093

FALSE FLAG: holy moley, what a page-turner!

July 20, 2016 by movie gourmet

False Flag is an absolutely riveting Israeli miniseries that we’ll get to see in the US at some point. The miniseries has 8 episodes (each a taut 45 minutes). The first two episodes are playing together as one ninety-minute program at this year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SJFF36).

As False Flag opens, Israeli television news reports that five Israeli citizens were responsible for the kidnapping of an Iranian diplomat out of his Moscow hotel. We see four of the five – each appearing totally shocked by the revelation and denying any involvement to their families and friends. They don’t seem to know each other, and the only connection seems to be that they each have dual citizenship and a second passport. We first question whether this was a covert operation by Israeli intelligence forces for which they were framed? But we soon learn that the Mossad wasn’t involved either, and Israeli security forces are soon hunting down the five to find out what really happened.

But then we start to learn that some of the five may be connected. Their alibis have holes. And some of the five are not what they seem. Are they involved? Who commissioned the kidnapping? Who is going to find out and how? And what is going to happen to each of the five? False Flag evolves into a superb thriller that spans, at once, the genres of the whodunit, the paranoid thriller, the perfect crime movie and the espionage procedural.

The five protagonists have very different personalities, which makes False Flag a successful character-driven thriller. The three women are a tough cookie, a party girl and a low-self esteemed shoulder-slumper. The two men are a bewildered regular guy and an international man of mystery. The acting from Ishai Golan, Magi Azarzar, Orna Salinger, Ania Bukstein, and Angel Bonnani is first-rate.

False Flag (titled Kfulim in Hebrew) was broadcast last fall in Israel, and was the first non-English language series to be acquired by Fox International Channels. It’s expected sometime in the next year on American TV. The release of the first two episodes at SFJFF36 will help build buzz for the US release.

The Joke was on The Movie Gourmet. When I was going through my screeners for the SFJFF36, I neglected to read anything about False Flag except for “thriller”, so I was expecting that the entire story was contained in the 90 minutes. When what is really Episode 2 ended, I was on the edge of my seat braying, “Oh no! What happens next?”.

You can get your own addicting taste of False Flag at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, where you can see it at CineArts in Palo Alto on July 23, at San Francisco’s Castro on July 30, at the Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theater on July 31, and the Rafael in San Rafael on August 6.