It was a perfect storm. Lots of important movies were opening where I live. The Wife was out-of-town. And my buddy Kiefer was game to join me. It was time for the all-you-can-eat buffet of movie-going – five movies in 48 hours!
We started on Friday night by catching Super 8 at San Jose’s Camera 12. We were both impressed with authenticity of the coming of age story embedded in the sci-fi thriller. Good start!
Saturday morning, we drove to San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center Cinema for the noon show of Beginners. Home run! We both loved this smart and original comedy by Mike Mills. Christopher Plummer will certainly get an Oscar nod. I rated it as one of the year’s best.
We jumped in a cab to make the 2:30 show of Le Quattro Volte at the Lumiere. The cabbie knows most of the San Francisco Giants – and even two of their moms; he keeps a box of baseballs in the front seat for autographs.
We settled in for Le Quattro, the Italian goatherd movie and a critical fave. An aged goatherd moves his goats up and down a hill, coughing as he goes. The next day, he does the same, only coughing more. Suddenly, a young goat is born, starts to grow up and gets lost. Here’s where Kiefer fell asleep. Then the villagers cut down a tall tree for a festival. After the festival, it is added to a pile of wood that becomes charcoal. I get that it is intended to comment on The Circle of Life, but I found it less a tranquil and profound reflection than an eye-glazing bore. After the screening, other patrons were asking who voted this Best of Europe?
Okay – back to the Embarcadero for an early dinner at San Francisco’s oldest restaurant The Tadich Grill. Cioppino still awesome!
Now we needed to drive back to San Jose for the 7:15 PM show of The Tree of Life. We got stuck in San Francisco Giants traffic, and we’d never make it to San Jose in time. Never fear, some Blackberry surfing in the car revealed a 7:15 show in Palo Alto that we COULD make.
So we got to the Palo Alto Square CineArts in time for The Tree of Life. This screening was packed. We were both stunned, and most of the crowd stumbled out mumbling something like “What the hell was THAT?”. Kiefer and I were laughing – even after we had mentally cut out all of the Sean Penn scenes, we were still trying to figure out whether Tree of Life was worse than the Italian goatherd movie.
Sunday morning, we have breakfast and amble into my 10:30 AM Camera Cinema Club at The Camera 7 in Campbell. This month’s Club selection was Turkey Bowl, a delightful indie comedy set in a group of friends’ annual touch football game. It is a mere 62 minutes, but loaded with laughs. After the screening, we heard writer-director Kyle Smith tell how he financed the film with $25,000 that he earned from a reality TV show, and shot it over ten days in an East LA city park.
So, all-in-all, we had a very rich film experience sampling indies, art films, a mini-blockbuster, foreign cinema, the most accessible movies and the most obtuse. Doesn’t get any better.