Rants and Ruminations

Every year, I keep a running list of the best movies I’ve seen this year.  By the end of the year, I usually end up with a Top Ten and another 5-15 mentions. Here are my Best Movies of 2021 and Best Movies of 2020 lists.

To get on my year-end list, a movie has to be one that thrills me while I’m watching it and one that I’m still thinking about a couple of days later.

Unfortunately, most of these films have come and gone in theaters and won’t be accessible again until they stream this summer.

THE BEST OF 2022 – So Far

Montana Story: a family secret simmers, then explodes. Theatrical run has finished; expect it to stream this summer.

Compartment No. 6: a surprising journey to connection. Theatrical run has finished; expect it to stream this summer.

Poser: personal plagiarism. (Opens in theaters on July 8; review will go live on July 5.)

The Tale of King Crab: storytelling at its best. Had a blink-and-you-missed-it theatrical run; I’ll let you know when it streams.

12 Months: an authentic relationship evolves. Premiered at Cinequest’s online fest in March and may play the in-person Cinequest in August.

Norman Y. Mineta, a remarkable American statesman and the most distinguished of my mentors, has died at age 90. An American Story: Norman Mineta and His Legacy traces his life and times, in which he amassed a startling number of “firsts” and other distinctions in America history:

• The first Asian-American mayor of a major U.S. city.
• The first Japanese-American member of Congress elected from the 48 Continental states.
• A Cabinet Secretary in both Democratic and Republican Administrations.
• The nation’s longest-serving Transportation Secretary.

The achievements were even more remarkable given that, as a child, Mineta was imprisoned by his own US government in a WW II internment camp. And given that his political base had, during his career, an Asian-American population of far less than ten percent.

This didn’t happen by accident.  Norm Mineta was a driven man. At the same time, his ambition and will was tempered by his buoyancy and ebullience.

Documentarians Dianne Fukumi (director and co-producer) and Debra Nakatomi (co-producer) embed the story of Japanese-Americans, from immigration through internment, and on to reparations.

The defining event for Mineta’s Nissei generation was the WW II internment of 120,000 Americans by their own government. The central thread in the Mineta story is that the injustice of Mineta’s internment informed George W. Bush’s resistance to treating American Muslims that same way in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

The film’s most delightful moment may be the octogenarian Mineta sunnily taking his luggage through security at Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport.

I have known Norm since I served in his 1974 primary campaign and interned for him on Capitol Hill in the mid 70s. One of my proudest moments was when my wife noted Norm’s delight in encountering me again in 2018. I last talked with him on the phone when he was sheltering at home in August 2020, barber-free, bragging about his “COVID ponytail”.

I saw An American Story: Norman Mineta and His Legacy at an October 2018 friends and family screening with Norm Mineta, Fukumi and Nakatomi in San Jose. It has since played on PBS. You can stream it at An American Story: Norman Mineta and His Legacy.

Every year, The Wife and I watch the Oscars while enjoying a meal inspired by the Best Picture nominees. This year, our lives are in chaos because we are moving; since we didn’t have time to actually prepare every dish from scratch, we looked to a menu that could be out-sourced.

• Gummy worm centerpiece from Dune: The Wife is celebrating the giant sandworms in culinary art. (Gummy worms from 7-11.)
• Cocktail from Nightmare Alley: We passed on the obvious carny chow to reference Stan’s (Bradley Cooper) nightclub act and how well Lilith (Cate Blanchett) pulls off holding a cocktail glass. There are no geeks at The Movie Gourmet, so no live chickens were involved tonight. This particular cocktail is one of The Movie Gourmet’s favorites – Bulleit Rye, Averna and Aperol, chilled and served up with an orange twist and a floater of homemade Strega.
• Tea from Belfast: Tea is sipped throughout. (Tea from our pantry.)
• Snacks from Don’t Look Up: One of the funniest bits is that Kate (Jennifer Lawrence) can’t stop obsessing about General Themes (Paul Guilfoyle) and his scam with White House snacks. (From Rotten Robbie.)
• Cod and chips from CODA: The family catches cod. and they eat cod. (This also works for Belfast.) (From City Fish and Chips.)
• Bulgogi, banchan and rice from Drive My Car: The theater organizer and his Korean wife host Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and Oto (Tôko Miura) with a memorable Korean repast. (From HOM Korean Kitchen.)
• Fried chicken and mashed potatoes from The Power of the Dog: We’re thinking of the meal served by Rose Gordon (Kristin Dunst) at her inn. (From KFC.)
• Hamburger and fries from King Richard; Richard takes the family for fastfood burgers in Compton before his intended showdown with a local thug. (From In-N-Out Burger.)
• Pernil from West Side Story: The Puerto Rican gangbangers certainly visit their abuelas for this roast pork comfort food. (Actually made this – leftover from a family meal earlier this week.)
• Licorice Pizza from Licorice Pizza: Although no one eats this in the movie, it IS the title, for gosh sakes. BTW, the licorice and the pizza are each better when not eaten with the other. (My go-to pizza joints, A Slice of New York and Bibo’s New York, would be horrified at the thought, so I made this myself.) Important: the pizza and the licorice are much better when eaten separately.

Thanks again to The Wife, who has been the primary driver of the Oscar Dinner in recent years, and the genius behind masterpieces like the Severed Hands Ice Sculpture for Winter’s Bone and the Black Bean Alien Signal from Arrival.

Every year, The Wife and I watch the Oscars while enjoying a meal inspired by the Best Picture nominees. For example, we had sushi for Lost in Translation, cowboy campfire beans for Brokeback Mountain and Grandma Ethel’s Brisket for A Serious Man – you get the idea. The high point has been the Severed Hands Ice Sculpture in 2011 for 127 Hours and Winter’s Bone (photo above). Here’s our most recent pre-COVID menu, centered on the family’s meal at a beach resort in Roma.

Here is our menu for tomorrow night.

• Gummy worm centerpiece from Dune: The Wife is celebrating the giant sandworms in culinary art.
• Cocktail from Nightmare Alley: We passed on the obvious carny chow to reference Stan’s (Bradley Cooper) nightclub act and how well Lilith (Cate Blanchett) pulls off holding a cocktail glass. There are no geeks at The Movie Gourmet, so no live chickens are involved tonight.
• Tea from Belfast: Tea is sipped throughout.
• Snacks from Don’t Look Up: One of the funniest bits is that Kate (Jennifer Lawrence) can’t stop obsessing about General Themes (Paul Guilfoyle) and his scam with White House snacks.
• Cod and chips from CODA: The family catches cod. and they eat cod. (This also works for Belfast.)
• Korean food from Drive My Car: The theater organizer and his Korean wife host Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and Oto (Tôko Miura) with a memorable Korean repast.
• Fried chicken and mashed potatoes from The Power of the Dog: We’re thinking of the meal served by Rose Gordon (Kristin Dunst) at her inn.
• Hamburger and fries from King Richard; Richard takes the family for fastfood burgers in Compton before his intended showdown with a local thug.
• Pernil from West Side Story: The Puerto Rican gangbangers certainly visit their abuelas for this roast pork comfort food.
• Licorice Pizza from Licorice Pizza: Although no one eats this in the movie, it IS the title, for gosh sakes.

I was the only patron at a 1 PM Thursday screening of Sundown at the Aquarius in Palo Alto, a solo screening experience that I usually relish, since it had only happened twice in the thirty years before 2021. Given the fragile state of Bay Area cinemas, it’s now problematic. This was my third solo screening in the past four months; (the others were screenings of The Souvenir Part II at San Francisco’s Landmark Embarcadero and Benedetta at Berkeley’s Landmark Shattuck).

I guessing that this current trend is, at least mainly, a COVID-influenced hesitancy to gather indoors. Indeed, vax’d and boosted as I am, I’m not ready to sit in a crowded weekend screening of a popcorn movie. But an art house screening at 10% capacity in the Bay Area, where cinephiles, from the oldest and most well-educated cohorts, are almost 100% vax’d, should be pretty low-risk.

No one can say for sure if the cinemas that present independent, international and documentary films will recover from the pandemic. At all. Ever. It’s especially worrisome that Landmark’s Embarcadero has now closed permanently, right on the heels of the Castro’s purchase by live entertainment promoters.

In particular, the high quality cinemas have been completely devastated in Silicon Valley. CIneArts’ Palo Alto Square has closed, following Downtown San Jose’s Camera 12. Campbell’s Camera 7 has transitioned into the Pruneyard Dine-in, which still offers some good fare, but the new business model has squeezed out the art films. Camera 3 has been turned into 3Below, whose flaky and buffoonish operators have essentially gutted it as a serious venue for cinema. Landmark’s Guild in Menlo Park closed for the pandemic and hasn’t reopened. Fortunately, the AMC and CInemark/Century theaters are still devoting a few screens to the very best major studio films (Belfast, Nightmare Alley, Don’t Look Up, etc.). The bottom line, though: there was no place in Silicon Valley to see the year’s best film, Drive My Car, when it was released (although it has just popped up at two AMC theaters since it was Oscar-nominated).

Indeed, Landmark’s Shattuck and the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission remain alive, along with the smattering of 1-2 screen venues like the Roxie, Balboa, Vogue and 4-Star in San Francisco, the Rafael in San Rafael, the Aquarius in Palo Alto and the New Parkway in Oakland. But, over the past decade, the Bay Area has lost about half of our art house screens, and Silicon Valley art house cinema has been essentially wiped out.

There’s a been a harsh domino effect on Bay Area film culture itself. The film festivals that I cover – Cinequest, SFFILM, Mill Valley, Frameline, Noir City and the SF Jewish Film Festival – had to go virtual during the pandemic, a real body blow. As they re-emerge to in-person festivals, their recovery is uncertain.

The Castro will still host SFFILM and Frameline in 2022, perhaps for the last time. But the first post-pandemic Noir City had to be relocated to another vintage movie palace much smaller than the Castro. When COVID hit us, Cinequest was still adapting to the loss of Camera 12.

It’s all sobering, but there it is.