In honor of the recently concluded Cinequest, here’s a nugget from the 2013 fest: The Sapphires is a triumph of a Feel Good Movie. Set in the 1960s, a singing group from an Australian Aboriginal family faces racial obstacles at home, but blossoms when the girls learn Motown hits to entertain US troops in Vietnam. Remarkably, Tony Briggs based the screenplay on his mother’s real experience – make sure you stay for the Where Are They Now end credits.
The ever amiable Chris O’Dowd (one of the best things about Bridesmaids) is funny and charming as the girls’ dissolute manager. Jessica Mauboy, who plays the lead singer, has a great voice for soul music. A surprisingly beautiful song by the girls’ mom, played by veteran actress Kylie Belling, is an especially touching moment.
The Sapphires is not a deep movie, but it is a satisfying one. It’s predictable and manipulative, but I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t enjoy it. The Sapphires is a guaranteed good time at the movies.
The Sapphires is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and to stream from Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, GooglePlay and Flixster.
Andrew Jenkins in Chris Scheuerman’s brilliant debut LOST SOLACE
We’ve completed a strong Cinequest 2016, and I’ve seen 36 feature films. All of my features on this year’s fest , along with recommendations on over twenty Cinequest 2016 films are on my CINEQUEST page. Here are the festival highlights (and lowlights).
PERSONAL FAVORITE: I loved writer-director Chris Scheuerman’s brilliant debut – the highly original psychological thriller Lost Solace.
THE MEMORY OF WATER
BEST OF THE FEST: The Memory of Water: This Chilean drama explores grief, its process and its impact and was the most masterful filmmaking achievement at Cinequest 2016. Exquisite.
BIG MOVIES: The selection of this year’s Spotlight Films, the prime-time movies shown at the California Theatre, may have been Cinequest’s most successful ever. Cinequest programmers led off with a home run with the Opening Night rouser Eye in the Sky, the thriller-meets-thinker from Oscar-winning director Gavin Hood. The screening was preceded by Cinequest co-founder Halfdan Hussey’s interview of Hood, which was probably also the best ever on-stage interview in festival history.
The Cinequest audience also loved the next Spotlight Film, the Norwegian disaster movie The Wave. Arnaud Desplechin’s affecting coming of age film My Golden Days was also popular. I liked James Franco and loved Ed Harris in The Adderall Diaries. Cinequest’s Closing Night feature, the Australian drama The Daughter, packed a powerfully emotional punch.
Alan Rickman in EYE IN THE SKY
BIGGEST SENSATION: The hard-hitting and often excruciating Love Is All You Need?, the exploration of homophobic bullying and hate crimes, will be the Cinequest film that gets the most national attention.
MOST IMPRESSIVE DEBUT: Along with Lost Solace, I was also impressed by Chris Brown’s The Other Kids and Lori Stoll’s Heaven’s Floor.
BEST FOREIGN FILM: Along with The Memory of Water, I most admired Magallanes, a Peruvian psychological drama about those wrongs that cannot be righted. Magallanes won the jury award for international cinema. I also enjoyed the sex, intrigue and murder in the operatic Hungarian period drama Demimonde.
COMEDY: There really wasn’t a Can’t Miss comedy this year, but fans of absurdist deadpan comedy had The Modern Project and Lost in Munich. My Guilty Pleasure was the deliciously low brow A Beginner’s Guide to Snuff.
BEST ROMANCE: We don’t always have an extremely strong romance at the festival, but the Hungarian Fever at Dawn was just that – an urgent period romance between Holocaust survivors, with an unexpected nugget at the end.
WORST OF THE FEST: Thankfully, there were not many stinkers at this year’s fest, but Remember Me was a disappointing clunker and The Blackcoat’s Daughter was utterly wretched.
Cinequest Closing Night’s headliner is the tragic Australian drama The Daughter, which is emotionally powerful and ultimately devastating. Paul Schrader along with a passel of Aussie stars like Geoffrey Rush and Sam Neill portray characters entangled by a family secret that only some of them know. As the secret is revealed to the rest…(well, no spoilers here).
The characters that we first think are the most important recede in favor of seemingly secondary characters. as The Daughter drives toward its climax. As the characters evolve in prominence, our sympathies change, too. The Daughter is adapted from Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck and is so completely modernized that you’d never know that the source material is a century old.
The cast is superb, but the standouts are Anna Torn and Ewen Leslie, whose performances are absolutely heartbreaking. The Daughter is gripping and profoundly moving.
The first love depicted in Arnaud Desplechin’s coming of age film My Golden Daysis completely evocative. That first love is inevitable even if the young lovers don’t know it yet, and then filled with passion, importance, obsession, angst, conflict, breakups and makeups. And then it runs its course.
The performance of Lou Roy-Lecollinet as the unpredictable object of the young protagonist’s affection really elevates My Golden Days. Roy-Lecollinet has looks which won’t attract every guy, but would be irresistible to some. She’s able to convincingly play a girl with a devastating combination of confidence, forthrightness, charm, wit, impulsivity and a wandering eye.
That story makes up the core of My Golden Days, a flashback bookended by the contemporary, middle-aged version of the protagonist (Mathieu Amalric). The story of young romance is perfect – one that we can all recognize. But, in the epilogue, the Amalric character (who has lived a full and eventful life in the 15-20 years since) is oddly still fervently bitter about what happened years before; with that distance, most of us would look back with nostalgia or, at least, a wistful acknowledgement of lessons learned. I was a bit put off.
And what’s with the lame title My Golden Days, which makes this sound like the story set in a retirement home? The original title is Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse which I think translates into Three Memories of My Youth – that would be better and there’s gotta be plenty of more appealing and descriptive titles.
My Golden Days, which I saw at Cinequest, is a movie that anyone who is decades removed from first love should see.
Thriller meets thinker in Eye in the Sky, a parable from modern drone warfare. Eye in the Sky poses this question: is it acceptable to neutralize the very worst evil in the world when it requires the simultaneous taking of the most innocent life?
If we are to pursue drone warfare as a morally acceptable military option, we must see what happens on the ground so we understand it. Eye in the Sky asks if we can stomach it once we’ve seen it.
Is the choice framed too simplistically in Eye in the Sky? No, the starkness of the choice in this film brings clarity to the question that we must ponder. Star Helen Mirren and director Gavin Hood have said in interviews that they expected married couples to argue different points of view after seeing this movie.
As Eye in the Sky’s star, Mirren commands the screen as few can and is especially fierce here. Jeremy Northam excels as the chief ditherer. Barkhad Abdi (Oscar-nominated as the Somali pirate in Captain Phillips) delivers another charismatic performance.
But this is Alan Rickman’s movie. In one of his final performances, Rickman plays the military commander who understands how difficult the choice is – because he’s already made it. Now he must navigate through all the other characters as they behave with varying degrees of belligerence, ambivalence and avoidance. It’s a supremely textured performance, layered with his wry humor, contained frustration and quiet determination.
At its Cinequest screening, director Gavin Hood said that he is as proud of Eye in the Sky as he is of his earliest films, A Reasonable Man and the Oscar-winning Tsotsi. He should be.
In the paranoid Romanian drama Why Me?, an able young prosecutor is assigned to bring down a corrupt kingpin, but is frustrated at every turn. Is the system fixed? This is Romania, so you tell me. This is based on real events. However, there are much more entertaining examples of paranoid, cynical mysteries – and much, much better examples of Romanian cinema.
I was looking forward to the horror film The Blackcoat’s Daughter (recently retitled from February) because it stars Kiernan Shipka, whose work on Mad Men I admire. Unfortunately, it soon became clear that the wooden dialogue and the plodding, contrived story reminded of the worst drive-in cinema of the early 1970s. Easily the worst film at Cinequest 2016. I walked out.
The Other Kids 11 AM Hammer Theatre Center
A completely fresh and authentic coming of age film – and a triumphant directorial debut.
Love Is All You Need? 1 PM California Theatre
This is the Cinequest film that will be the most talked-about across the nation. It’s a vivid and sometimes excruciating examination of the impacts of homophobic bullying, hate speech and hate crimes.
The Promised Band 4 PM Camera 12 – Screen 10
This documentary is a successful exploration of the effects of mutual isolation and a very explicit snapshot of the barriers to travel and social integration between Israelis and Palestinians.
This emotionally powerful Australian drama is Cinequest’s Closing Night film. Top-rate Aussie cast includes Geoffrey Rush and Sam Neill.
OR
Magallanes 6:45 M Camera 12 – Screen 10
This Peruvian psychological drama seems to start out as a lovable loser heist film, but turns out to be an exploration of PTSD. Mexican actor Damian Alcázar brings home the jarring climax. emotionally powerful. Along with The Memory of Water, the best foreign film at Cinequest 2016.
The hardhitting drama Love Is All You Need? has been the biggest sensation at Cinequest, and is sure to be the Cinequest film most talked-about nationally. It’s a powerful and often excruciating examination of the impacts of homophobic bullying, hate speech and hate crimes.
Writer-director K. Rocco Shields uses the novel approach of inverting gender and sexual preference roles, so the world of Love Is All You Need? is 90% homosexual, with the heterosexuals as the despised minority. Shield has expanded her 20-minute short of the same name by adding additional story threads. At the Cinequest debut, Shields said that teachers have been disciplined for showing the short in their classes.
The story is set in a Midwestern college town dominated by a conservative evangelical Christian pastor. A 12-year-old girl is questioning her sexuality, and male and female college students are exploring their own sexuality. None of them are treated well in the local community. Shields has taken actual hate speech from sermons from the despicable Westboro Baptist Church and put them in the mouth of homosexuals trashing heterosexuals. (I don’t the word “gay” in this post because in Love Is All You Need? it’s used by homosexuals to describe heterosexuals, along with various homophobic epithets.)
The emotional and physical brutality keeps piling on itself, right up to a reenactment of the Matthew Shepherd murder. It’s unrelenting to the point that the audience is battered and exhausted, not unlike 12 Years a Slave. Because it’s such a grim film-going experience, I’m not seeing Love Is All You Need? as a hit with general audiences, but I do expect it to become a cultural sensation. It’s uniformly well-acted, and young actress Kyla Kenedy is particularly convincing. It’s quite an achievement by K. Rocco Shields, and well worth watching.
The entirely fresh coming of age movie The Other Kidstraces ten kids who are about to graduate from high school in Sonora, California. The problems that these kids face, how they think about themselves, how they communicate with their parents is remarkably realistic – so much that sometimes it looks like a documentary. The fact that it was shot on a very low budget on location in the decidedly unposh Gold Country town of Sonora contributes to a cinema verite flavor. The young cast is also excellent, and there’s nary a false moment. It’s triumphant debut for writer-director Chris Brown.
Since I saw The Other Kids, I’ve considered this recurring question: Why do I like this movie so much when I don’t even like teenagers? It’s got to be Brown’s masterful story-telling and the authenticity of the characters.
