Movie Recommendations, Rants and Ruminations
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.
My picks for Encore Day, Sunday, March 13:
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.
The Daughter 6:45 PM California Theatre
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 Kids traces 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.