movie gourmet

Cinequest: THE GREAT SASUKE

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THE GREAT SASUKE
THE GREAT SASUKE

Mikiko Sasaki’s ever surprising The Great Sasuke starts out with the most essential element of a documentary – a compelling subject.  Here it’s a Japanese pro wrestler who achieved stardom after bringing a Lucha Libre mask (and a wife) from his training days in Mexico.  Between 1992 and 2006, The Great Sasuke won championships and filled large Tokyo arenas.  He especially thrilled audiences with his aerial moves (that’s when he climbs up on the turnbuckles and jumps off on to the hapless opponent). But all that combat has taken a toll on his body, and now he is headquartered in his obscure hometown 300 miles north of Tokyo, performing in front of a couple hundred on folding chairs or floor mats.  So far we have the familiar story of an athlete aging out of fame and success, but two aspects of The Great Sasuke make this story much more interesting.

First, this guy NEVER takes off his mask.  We see him striding down the sidewalk in a business suit, briefcase in hand – fully masked.  And we see him eating breakfast with his kids, vacuuming the floor, driving, brushing his teeth – all in his mask.  He’s even developed a technique for changing between his everyday mask and his performance mask – all in a way that doesn’t let anyone glimpse his face.  (At the Cinequest screening, director Sasaki said that The Great Sasuke’s wife insisted that she would not be married to a guy who didn’t take the mask off in the bedroom, and The Great Sasuke’s kids have seen his face, too.)

Second, he’s a quirky guy who plunges himself in to offbeat (and doomed) schemes to set up business enterprises and even run for political office.  He is completely sincere and just couldn’t work any harder, but he won’t listen to anyone tell him that his plans are completely half-baked.  He may be a force of nature, but it’s pretty hard to sway voters when you’re campaigning on street corners in a wrestling mask.  It all adds up to a good movie experience.

 

Cinequest: STAYING ALIVE

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STAYING ALIVE
STAYING ALIVE

The Swedish comedy Staying Alive treads the now familiar ground of An Unmarried Woman – a woman’s husband has traded her in for a newer model, leaving her to address the challenges of self-identity, parenting, sexuality and economic survival in an post-marriage environment.  Staying Alive has two things going for it – an appealing performance by its lead actress, Agnes Kittelsen, and some bawdy, broad humor from her bestie.

Staying Alive is mildly enjoyable entertainment, but there’s really no other reason for this film to have been made.

 

Cinequest: REMEMBER ME

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Remember Me_Still

Remember Me is an odd couple comedy about two mismatched cousins who visit their grandparents just as the old man dies so they have to take grandma (the great Rita Moreno) off on a road trip to the old folks home. Remember Me is written and directed by Steve Goldbloom, who also stars as the more professionally successful and reserved cousin; Joel Kelly Dauten plays the wild man cousin, banging around between failed fantasies. Both guys are emotionally stunted in their own ways.

The dead grandpa situation is very funny, and there’s a witty joke about the Goldbloom character’s day job as a guy who reads news stories about wars in the Third World for NPR (without ever leaving the US to cover a story). But these two immature thirty-year-olds just aren’t interesting enough to carry a feature film.

Rita Moreno is very good, but this is a one of those man-child-coming-of-age movies.  That subgenre is getting tiresome, as was Remember Me.

Cinequest: MAN UNDERGROUND

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MAN UNDERGROUND
MAN UNDERGROUND

The sci-fi comedy Man Underground is centered around the entirely humorless Willem (George Basil), who is emotionally scarred by a failed relationship and an occurrence that he believes was an encounter with space aliens.  Unburdened by any lack of confidence, Willem makes his way as a lecturer and Internet personality specializing in paranoid theories of government cover-ups.  He decides to make his own biopic, assisted by oddball acolytes Todd (Andy Rocco) and Flossie (Pamela Fila).

Most of Man Underground fills out the portrait of the deeply troubled and absurdly misguided Willem.  But, even with cringe humor, it’s hard to watch Willem when it turns out that the really interesting characters are Todd and Flossie.  Todd and Flossie finally get their due, but too much of Man Underground is about Willem.

Movies to See Right Now

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THE WAVE
THE WAVE

I really liked the gripping Norwegian disaster movie The Wave, with its ticking clock tension and cool disaster effects. I saw The Wave last week at Cinequest, and it opens in theaters this weekend.  I also liked Cinequest’s Eye in the Sky, with Helen Mirren, and I’ll be writing about that by next week before it opens widely in the Bay Area.

I remain completely absorbed with Silicon Valley’s own film festival, Cinequest. Check out my up-to-the-moment coverage both on my Cinequest page and follow me on Twitter for the latest.  I especially recommend the exquisite Chilean contemplation of grief The Memory of Water, which plays Cinequest tomorrow evening; I’ve seen 25 Cinequest movies so far, and this is the best one. Tomorrow night, I’ll be checking out two movies I haven’t seen yet:  The Adderall Diaries with James Franco, Ed Harris and Amber Heard, Christian Slater and Cynthia Nixon and February, a horror flick with Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka.

Then there are the Oscar winners and contenders, whose theatrical runs are winding down but still out in theaters:

  • Spotlight – a riveting, edge-of-your-seat drama with some especially compelling performances.
  • The Revenant, an awesome and authentic survival tale that must be seen on the BIG SCREEN. I predict that The Revenant will be the biggest winner at the Oscars.
  • The Irish romantic drama Brooklyn, an audience-pleaser with a superb performance by Saoirse Ronan.
  • The deserved Oscar winner for Screenplay, The Big Short – a supremely entertaining thriller – both funny and anger-provoking.

The Italian drama My Mother is a deeply personal film about loss with some comedic highlights from John Turturro. The Coen Brothers’ disappointingly empty comedy Hail, Caesar contains some cool Hollywood parodies.

In honor of Cinequest, my Stream of the Week is the delightful dark comedy Gemma Bovery from last year’s festival.  Gemma Bovery is available to stream from Amazon Video (free with Amazon Prime), iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

This week, watch for two wonderfully fun gender-crossing comedies on Turner Classic Movies on March 13: Victor/Victoria and Tootsie. TCM is playing Blow-up on March 17. Set in the Mod London of the mid-60s, a fashion photographer (David Hemmings) is living a fun but shallow life filled with sports cars, discos and and scoring with supermodels (think Jane Birkin, Sarah Miles and Verushka). Then he discovers that his random photograph of a landscape may contain a clue in a murder and meets a mystery woman (Vanessa Redgrave). After taking us into a vivid depiction of the Mod world, director Michelangelo Antonioni brilliantly turns the story into a suspenseful story of spiraling obsession. His L’Avventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse made Antonioni an icon of cinema, but Blow-up is his most accessible and enjoyable masterwork. There’s also a cameo performance by the Jeff Beck/Jimmy Page version of the Yardbirds and a quick sighting of Michael Palin in a nightclub.

BLOW-UP
BLOW-UP

MY MOTHER: deeply personal and about loss

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John Turturro in MY MOTHER
Margherita Buy and John Turturro in MY MOTHER

So let’s get one thing straight right up front – My Mother is NOT a dramedy.  It’s an Italian drama that is leavened with bits of comedy.  Writer-director Nanni Moretti has constructed a deeply personal portrait of a person in mid-career and mid-life who is losing her aged parent.  There’s never a convenient moment to go through this experience, and Moretti’s protagonist, a movie director (Margherita Buy), is juggling her job and her relationships with her teen daughter, her ex-husband and her brother (played by Moretti).  It’s all very complicated – just like it is in real life, and Moretti brings authenticity to the story.

All of this is pretty somber, but our heroine is making a movie, and she has cast an astonishingly pompous American star (John Turturro) who claims to speak more Italian that he really does and who can’t remember his lines.  Every scene with Turturro is hilarious as he bumbles through the filmmaking with shameless bravado.

Nanni Moretti is a gifted filmmaker who has been successful in varied genres. I really enjoyed his comedy We Have a Pope, about a newly elected pope who suffers a panic attack and flees the Vatican. This is more serious stuff. The Wife, who liked it less than I did, refers to it as the “depressing Italian dying mother movie”. I found it very affecting, especially the emotionally satisfying ending.

I saw My Mother at the Mill Valley Film Festival in October 2015, but its theatrical release is now expected in March 2016.

Stream of the Week: GEMMA BOVERY

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Fabrice Luchini and Gemma Arterton in GEMMA BOVERY
Fabrice Luchini and Gemma Arterton in GEMMA BOVERY

In honor of Cinequest, here’s a highlight from last year’s fest. In the delightful dark comedy Gemma Bovery, Fabrice Luchini plays a guy who has left his Type A job in Paris to take over his father’s bakery in a sleepy village in Normandy. He gets new neighbors when a young British couple named Bovery moves in. The young British woman (played by the delectable Gemma Arterton) is named Gemma Bovery, and only the baker notices the similarity to Emma Bovary. But, like the protagonist of Madame Bovary, the young British woman is also married to a Charles, becomes bored and restless and develops a wandering eye. The baker rapidly becomes obsessed with the Flaubert novel being re-enacted before his eyes and soon jumps into the plot himself. Gemma Bovery, which I saw at Cinequest 2015, is a French movie that is mostly in English.

Fabrice Luchini is a treasure of world cinema. No screen actor can deliver a funnier reaction than Luchini, and he’s the master of squeezing laughs out of an awkward moment. For me, his signature role is in the 2004 French Intimate Strangers, in which he plays a tax lawyer with a practice in a Parisian professional office building. A beautiful woman (Sandrine Bonnaire), mistakes Luchini’s office for that of her new shrink, plops herself down and, before he can interrupt, starts unloading her sexual issues. It quickly becomes awkward for him to tell her of the error, and he’s completely entranced with her revelations, so he keeps impersonating her shrink. As they move from appointment to appointment, their relationship takes some unusual twists. It’s a very funny movie, and a great performance.

Gemma Bovery is directed and co-written by Anne Fontaine (The Girl from Monaco, Coco Before Chanel). Fontaine has a taste for offbeat takes on female sexuality, which she aired in the very trashy Adore (Naomi Watts and Robin Wright as Australian cougars who take on each other’s sons as lovers) and the much better Nathalie (wife pays prostitute to seduce her cheating hubby and report back on the details).

Gemma Bovery isn’t as Out There as Nathalie, but it’s just as good. The absurdity of the coincidences in Gemma Bovery makes for a funny situation, which Luchini elevates into a very funny movie. Gemma Bovery is available to stream from Amazon Video (free with Amazon Prime), iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Cinequest at mid-festival

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LOVE IS ALL YOU NEED?
LOVE IS ALL YOU NEED?

We’re halfway through Cinequest 2016. What are the biggest hits and the most delightful surprises?

BIG MOVIES

Cinequest programmers hit 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 the best ever on-stage interview in festival history (at least that I have seen).

The Cinequest audience also loved another Spotlight Film, the Norwegian disaster movie The Wave.

 

INDIES

Film festivals are very important to first-time directors, and Cinequest 2016 has hosted some world premieres of two wonderful debuts:

  • Love Is All You Need?: The hard hitting exploration of homophobic bullying and hate crimes is the most sensational film at Cinequest.  COme to think of it, “hard hitting” is an understatement.
  • Lost Solace: Highly original psychological thriller and a brilliant directorial debut – my personal favorite so far at this years festival.
  • Heaven’s Floor: Absorbing and character-driven autobiographical drama about a most complicated woman and the choices that indelibly affect several lives.

 

WORLD CINEMA

As usual, Cinequest is screening some real gems from other nations. The best have been:

  • The Memory of Water: This Chilean drama explores grief, its process and its impact and might just be most masterful filmmaking achievement at Cinequest 2016. Exquisite.  Probbly the best cinematic achievement at this year’s Cinequest.
  • Demimonde: Sex, intrigue and murder in this operatic Hungarian period drama.
  • Magallanes: A Peruvian psychological drama about those wrongs that cannot be righted.
  • Fever at Dawn: Urgent period romance between Holocaust survivors, with an unexpected nugget at the end.

 

DOCUMENTARIES

The usual solid batch of Cinequest docs:

  • Chuck Norris vs. Communism: The subversive impact of movies (ANY movies) on a culture-starved society.
  • Dan and Margot: A very personal look at schizophrenia from the schizophrenic’s point of view.
  • The Promised Band: A group of Israeli and Palestinian women seek to fight through the cultural, legal, political, military and security barriers between them by forming a girl band.
  • The Brainwashing of My Dad: Personalizes the effects of right-wing media on mood and personality as well as on the political culture.
  • Gordon Getty: There Will Be Music: Insights into the quiet passion and creative process of a most unusual classical composer.

WOMEN FILMMAKERS

This year, Cinequest presents the world or US premieres of sixty features and sixty-nine shorts. And of these 129 premieres, 64 were directed by women! These include Love Is All You Need?, Heaven’s Floor, The Brainwashing of My Dad, Dan and Margot and The Promised Band.

STILL TO COME

I’ve only seen The Daughter so far, but these upcoming films look promising:

  • February (Shipka Kiernan from Mad Men, Emma Roberts) March 12; and
  • The Adderall Diaries (James Franco, who will be making a personal appearance) March 12;
  • The Little Prince (already spoken of as a contender for the 2017 Animated Feature Oscar) March 13.
  • The Daughter: Based on an Ibsen play, this Australian drama is Cinequest’s Closing Night film and packs a powerfully emotional punch. March 13.

Bookmark my Cinequest 2016 page, with links to all my coverage. Follow me on Twitter for the latest.

THE MEMORY OF WATER
THE MEMORY OF WATER

Cinequest: FRIENDS EFFING FRIENDS EFFING FRIENDS

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FRIENDS EFFING FRIENDS EFFING FRIENDS
FRIENDS EFFING FRIENDS EFFING FRIENDS

In the sex comedy Friends Effing Friends Effing Friends,  several twenty-somethings start hooking up with each other in random combinations, even though some are in relationships.  The sexual entanglements predictably lead to both comic situations and hurt feelings.

Happily, sometimes there is Truth in Advertising, and there is a lots of Effing in Friends Effing Friends Effing Friends.  There’s so much sex that, although it has a real plot and much better acting, it wouldn’t be totally out-of-place on late night Showtime.

The cast is young, appealing and able, and Friends Effing Friends Effing Friends works as  a trifle (and there’s nothing wrong with that).  Its world premiere was at Cinequest.

Cinequest: SEARCH ENGINES

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SEARCH ENGINES
SEARCH ENGINES

The contemporary and topical comedy Search Engines takes on our obsession with   We see an extended family Thanksgiving – and everyone is bowing into that screen-gazing posture.  All the characters are preoccupied by their smart phones as they text, video, read recipes and blog away.  Suddenly, something blocks their coverage, and we see what happens when all the screens go dark.

Search Engines has a promising cast (Daphne Zuniga, Joely Fisher, Natasha Gregson Wagner and even Connie Stevens!), and they all perform well.  The strongest part of Search Engines is its topicality, but as mildly amusing as it is, it just ain’t a knee slapper.