Cinema Club

GHOSTBOX COWBOY: a dim bulb tries to re-invent himself

by
GHOSTBOX COWBOY

In John Maringouin’s inventive satire Ghostbox Cowboy, we first meet Jimmy (David Zellner) in an American store, gazing at that aisle in every Walgreens or CVS that is filled entirely with crappy plastic gizmos made in China. We later learn that he’s thinking, “somebody is getting rich making this stuff and that person should be me.”

Wearing a cowboy hat for effect, Jimmy takes his small nest egg to the capitalist frontier of China and tries to re-invent himself as an entrepreneur. He has the prototype for an absolutely phony product, which he tries to pitch to young Chinese capitalists. Jimmy thinks that he can outsmart the locals because he is an American, but the joke is on him – he’s now the dumbest guy in China.

Jimmy doesn’t bother to learn any Mandarin, so he leans on or two shady, super-marginal ex-pats (Robert Longstreet – just great – and Specialist) to help him navigate the local scene. One of his “buddies” fleeces him, and Jimmy is hired by contemptuous Chinese when they need a Caucasian stand-in. As Jimmy is stranded near Mongolia, Ghostbox Cowboy gets mystical, and the cringe humor gives way to the surreal.

The filmmaking itself is a remarkable story. Ghostbox Cowboy was shot in the massive boomtowns around Dongguan, Guangzho and Shenzhen (each a city with a population between 8 and 15 million). Because the Chinese government frowns on critique cinema, Maringouin had to shoot on the sly, guerilla style. To photograph the illegal factories that manufacture knock-offs, he pretended to be a potential investor. Maringouin and his two SAG actors spent ten days in China, essentially pretending not to shoot a movie.

David Zellner in GHOSTBOX COWBOY

I saw Ghostbox Cowboy at Cinema Club Silicon Valley, with a Q&A with writer-director-camera operator John Maringouin. Bay Area filmmaker Maringouin wanted to focus on White entitlement, with a protagonist who adds no value of his own but imagines that he should still be “a participant” in China.

Ghostbox Cowboy was selected to play the Tribeca film festival and earned a NY Times Critic’s Pick. Ghostbox Cowboy can be streamed on Amazon (included with Prime).

MEETING GORBACHEV: uncritical but humanizing

by
Mikhail Gorbachev in MEETING GORBACHEV

Meeting Gorbachev is Werner Herzog’s admiring biodoc of Mikhail Gorbachev, unquestionably one of the 20th century’s most pivotal figures. Herzog filmed three conversations with the then 87-year-old Gorbachev in 2018.

Gorbachev is revered in Germany – particularly by Werner Herzog – for allowing the peaceful, and startlingly quick, reunification of Germany. This biodoc is, to a fault, uncritical. At one point, Herzog even tells Gorbachev, “I love you”.

As the leader of the USSR, Gorbachev’s concepts of Perestroika and Glasnost transformed the political, economic and foreign policy of the Cold War superpower. More than any other individual, Gorbachev can claim credit for ending the Cold War, abolishing and destroying mid-range and short-range nuclear weapons, and the unchallenged independence of the Iron Curtain countries.

Gorbachev is also a tragic figure of Shakespearean proportions. He was intending to reform the USSR, not to destroy it. A coup by fossilized communists knocked him out of power but couldn’t be sustained, spinning out of control and leading to a chaos taken advantage of by the strong man Putin,.

Herzog’s film is excellent in its well-researched and well-told story of the rise of Gorbachev from a modest agricultural backwater – a talented achiever on the rise. Herzog’s irreverent sense of humors, as always, peeks through in the state funerals of Gorbachev’s predecessors, each more absurdly funny than the last.

The greatest gift of Meeting Gorbachev is, as the title suggests, is the unfiltered Gorbachev himself – now a grandfatherly raconteur. We get to appreciate his intellectual curiosity and his clarity of thought and direction. His charm and charisma, even at 87, help us understand how he rose to world leadership.

Werner Herzog and Mikhail Gorbachev in MEETING GORBACHEV

Herzog was a charismatic and innovative leader of German New Cinema. Between 1972 and 1982, he created the art house hits Aguirre:The Wrath of God, Strozek Nosferatu the Vampyre, and Fitzcarraldo.

In 1997, Herzog switched gears with the underrated documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly and followed it with great docs like Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World. Most remarkably, Herzog has also become one of the greatest narrators of English language documentaries; somehow, his German-accented narrations are hypnotic. (In 2007, Herzog slipped in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans with Nicholas Cage in the Klaus Kinski wild man role and cinema’s funniest iguana hallucination.)

Meeting Gorbachev played at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM). I saw Meeting Gorbachev at Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club.

Stream of the Week: PROSPECT – a girl’s battle of wits in outer space

by

PROSPECT

The ingeniously original Prospect is a frontier coming of age movie. It’s just set in space, not in the Old West. The teenage girl Cee (Sophie Thatcher) accompanies her dad (Jay Duplass) as he pilots their tired spaceship from planet to planet, seeking to extract something precious (hence the title Prospect as in prospectors). It’s an enterprise for misfits and hustlers. She has grown into an able assistant. He is a skilled pilot and prospector, but is very erratic in his judgment.

Sure, this is a future version of our world, but these characters live in a bottom-feeding sub-culture; their space travel hardware comes from the surplus store and has the look of NASA’s Mercury program – far less sleekly hi tech than the dashboard of a 2013 Prius. It’s a choice by co-writer and co-directors Christopher Caldwell and Zeek Earl to reinforce that we’re dealing with folks living on the margins.

Isolated by circumstance on a planet that is only populated by a few other sketchy transients and some disturbing settlers, Cee is thrown into a series of life-and-death situations. She must depend on her wits to survive a sequence of that can only be resolved through negotiation. I saw Prospect before its release at Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club. In the screening’s Q&A, co-writer filmmakers Caldwell and Earl affirmed that the story is centered on negotiation and that they drew from that under-recognized subgenre, the “loquacious Western”.

Pedro Pascal and Sophie Thatcher in PROSPECT

A key character that Cee must deal with is another rogue prospector Ezra (Pedo Pascal), a man of wit, charm, lethality and devoted self-interest. Pascal (Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones) makes Ezra one of the most compelling and funniest movie characters of the year.

Someone has labeled Prospect at “True Grit in space”, which isn’t far off. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is also evoked. A consistently unpredictable plot and superb performances by Pascal and young Ms. Thatcher make Prospect well worth streaming on Amazon, Vudu, YouTube or Google Play.

Who is this guy Don McGahn?

by
former FEC Commissioner Don McGahn

The Mueller Report has brought former White Counsel Don McGahn into semi-celebrity. McGahn was a major source for the Mueller Report, which portrays McGahn as one of the Trump Administration officials who, by disobeying and thwarting Trump’s orders, saved Trump from criminal charges of obstruction of justice. McGahn was the VILLAIN in last year’s
gripping documentary Dark Money, an expose of our new political environment, with unlimited secret money unleashed by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling.

The Mueller Report recounts an episode where Trump advised a note-taking McGahn that Trump’s lawyers never take notes; McGahn memorably replied “But I’m a real lawyer.” But McGahn worked his way up as a Republican Party operative, and was a GOP appointee to the Federal Elections Commission (when he wore longish preppy hair). In one particularly nasty segment of Dark Money, we witness Commissioner McGahn unashamedly grinding the FEC’s gears of enforcement to a stop.  After the FEC, McGahn went on to serve as the Trump White House Counsel, with major responsibility for the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanagh.

Dark Money’s writer-director Kimberly Reed takes us to her native Montana as conservative (but independent) Republican legislators find themselves deluged by massive and monstrous attacks from some even more conservative out-of-state sources. Intrepid small-town reporter John S. Adams and the understaffed state regulators follow the money and try to hunt down who is pulling the strings.

As the mystery unfolds, Dark Money also takes us to Wisconsin, where dark money has assaulted an unexpected branch of government. And we go to Washington, DC, to the Federal Elections Commission, where Ann Ravel, the Obama-appointed chair of the FEC, has resigned in disgust after Republican commissioners have blocked all enforcement of federal campaign finance regulation. (Disclosure: I have worked with Silicon Valley native Ravel in my day job.)

Here are some of Dark Money’s most disturbing revelations:

  • While it’s bad enough that we don’t know the extent of wealthy Americans like the Koch Brothers trying to buy elections, neither do we know about the secret election participation of FOREIGN players.
  • Dark Money sources are not stopping at trying to buy legislators and governors, but are also trying to take over state supreme courts!

And just when we need MORE scrutiny of the attempts to buy the legislative and judicial branches of state governments, we are witnessing the death of statehouse journalism.

Dark Money keeps us on the edges of our seats throughout and culminates in a real-life courtroom drama

I attended the sold-out Bay Area premiere of Dark Money, co-sponsored by Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club and by Santa Clara County. Both Ann Ravel and John S. Adams appeared at the post-screening Q&A. You can stream Dark Money from Amazon (free with Prime), iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

The Movie Gourmet joins the world of podcasts

by

Sara and I disagreed about THE LAST MOVIE with Dennis Hopper

The folks at Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club have dragged The Movie Gourmet into the Age of Podcast. In our podcast, Cinema Club co-director Sara Vizacarrondo and I reviewed the Cinema Club’s 2018 season and its two special events, the Bay Area premieres of Dark Money and The Last Movie.

Sara is a film teacher and film writer. We agreed (and twice disagreed) about Outside In, American Animals, We the Animals, Custody, Rodents of Unusual Size, Prospect and Styx, all of which I’ve written about. It was a very cool experience, and here’s our 42-minute podcast.

and we agreed about RODENTS OF UNUSUAL SIZE

STYX: a confident woman with no good choices

by

Susanne Wolff in STYX

In the gripping drama, Rieke (Susanne Wolff) is a woman who intends to pilot her sailboat on a solo voyage from Europe to Ascension Island off the coast of Africa. That’s one woman, all alone on her boat for 3,000 miles of open ocean.

Oozing matter of fact confidence, Rieke seems well-equipped for the adventure. She is fit, highly skilled, an experienced sailor and provisioned up with top quality gear and supplies. Rieke’s day job is as an emergency physician, and we see that no crisis situation seems to faze her.

In the first part of Styx, we think we’re watching a survival tale – woman against nature. But when a dramatic storm hits, we’re afraid for her but she’s not.

After the storm, she faces the first situation that she can’t handle on her own – one of life-and-death that has been spawned by a humanitarian crisis bigger than any individual. Frustratingly, she knows exactly what must be done, but she can’t do it herself; she must rely on civilized nations behaving according to expected norms. But are those expected norms available to everyone? And will it come?

Rieke’s persona is based on acting to solve every problem. But here, there are no good choices.

This is a German film about a German character, but almost all the dialogue is in English, the international language of navigation.

The second feature for director Wolfgang Fischer, Styx has won film festival awards, including at the Berlin International Film Festival. I saw Styx before its release at Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club. I’ll let you know when it becomes widely available.

PROSPECT: a girl’s battle of wits in outer space

by

PROSPECT

The ingeniously original Prospect is a frontier coming of age movie.  It’s just set in space, not in the Old West. The teenage girl Cee (Sophie Thatcher) accompanies her dad (Jay Duplass) as he pilots their tired spaceship from planet to planet, seeking to extract something precious (hence the title Prospect as in prospectors).  It’s an enterprise for misfits and hustlers.  She has grown into an able assistant.  He is a skilled pilot and prospector, but is very erratic in his judgment.

Sure, this is a future version of our world, but these characters live in a bottom-feeding sub-culture; their space travel hardware comes from the surplus store and has the look of NASA’s Mercury program – far less sleekly hi tech than the dashboard of a 2013 Prius. It’s a choice by co-writer and co-directors Christopher Caldwell and Zeek Earl to reinforce that we’re dealing with folks living on the margins.

Isolated by circumstance on a planet that is only populated by a few other sketchy transients and some disturbing settlers, Cee is thrown into a series of life-and-death situations.  She must depend on her wits to survive a sequence of that can only be resolved through negotiation. I saw Prospect before its release at Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club. In the screening’s Q&A, co-writer filmmakers Caldwell and Earl affirmed that the story is centered on negotiation and that they drew from that under-recognized subgenre, the “loquacious Western”.

Pedro Pascal and Sophie Thatcher in PROSPECT

A key character that Cee must deal with is another rogue prospector Ezra (Pedo Pascal), a man of wit, charm, lethality and devoted self-interest. Pascal (Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones) makes Ezra one of the most compelling and funniest movie characters of the year.

Someone has labeled Prospect at “True Grit in space”, which isn’t far off. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is also evoked. A consistently unpredictable plot and superb performances by Pascal and young Ms. Thatcher make Prospect well worth seeking out. It’s currently in a one-week run at San Jose’s 3Below.

CINEMA CLUB: a must for Silicon Valley movie fans

by

Jennifer Lawrence breaks through in WINTER'S BONE, featured at the Camera Cinema Club
Jennifer Lawrence breaks through in WINTER’S BONE, featured at Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club

An absolute MUST for Silicon Valley film lovers, the Cinema Club is wrapping up its 22nd season this weekend and looking forward to 2019. A 2019 Club membership can also be a treasured Holiday gift.

It’s your chance to see ten as-yet-unreleased films for $160. There’s usually an post-screening Q&A with a filmmaker, either live or via Skype. It’s like seeing ten movies at a film festival – except it’s a manageable one per month instead of all at once.

Here’s how it works. The club meets monthly on Sundays (you can choose between the morning or afternoon screenings) in downtown San Jose’s 3Below. The house lights go off and a movie appears on the screen. Until this moment, we don’t know which movie it is. The mystery is part of the club’s appeal, and, as a result, I’ve seen some wonderful films that I otherwise never would have chosen to see. Afterwards, there’s a discussion about the film – almost always with at least one of the filmmakers.

The movies range from indie gems to Oscar Bait and are selected by Alejandro Adams and Sara Vizcarrondo. Alejandro is a noted filmmaker (scroll down this NYT article). Sara is a film writer and film professor.

I first saw my pick for the top movie of 2010, Winter’s Bone (four Oscar nominations, including for Jennifer Lawrence’s breakthrough performance), at the Cinema Club. Here are some other Cinema Club films that have made my Best of the Year lists:

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, I’ll See You in My Dreams, Two Days One Night, Alive Inside, Bernie, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Rabbit Hole, Project Nim, The Messenger, The Tillman Story, Wendy and Lucy, Goodbye Solo, Taxi to the Dark Side, Shotgun Stories, American Splendor, Maria Full of Grace.

Cinema Club members get to see (before their release):

  • Crowd pleasers like Meet the Patels, Cloudburst, Once and Mad Hot Ballroom;
  • Challenging cinematic ground breakers like Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color and Gus Van Zant’s Last Days;
  • Unknown gems like The Grief of Others and In the Family by the as yet undiscovered genius Patrick Wang, the hitherto forgotten neo-noir The Woman Chaser and the delightful Bay Area indie Colma: The Musical.

And I have to admit that, otherwise, I never would have seen The September Issue (I have no interest in the fashion world) or The Tillman Story (I thought I already knew the whole story). Both were rewarding movie experiences.

Cinema Club members also get invited to special previews and events. This year, Alejandro and Sara curated:

  • The Bay Area premiere of the documentary Dark Money featuring appearances by two of the film’s subjects – Obama-appointed Chair of the Federal Elections Commissions Ann Ravel and journalist John S. Adams; and
  • A double feature of Dennis Hopper’s lost film The Last Movie and the Hopper documentary Along for the Ride with a panel of critics and the doc’s director.

In a rare revival showing, the Cinema Club also screened an almost lost film, the 1981 They All Laughed – and I found myself sitting next to its director, the legendary Peter Bogdanovich!

Alejandro and Sara are building on the work of previous club programmer Tim Sika, host and producer of the movie magazine radio show Celluloid Dreams, movie reviewer for KGO radio and recent president of the San Francisco Film Critics Circle.

I’ve been a Club member since its 2003-04 season. If you love movies and live in Silicon Valley, you need to be in the Cinema Club. Sign up for the new season here.

Edie Falco in OUTSIDE IN, screened in the 2018 Cinema Club program

Stream of the Week: CUSTODY: the searing essence of domestic violence

by

Thomas Gioria in CUSTODY. Courtesy Kino Lorber.

In his searing French thriller Custody, writer-director Xavier Legrand paints the most elemental and realistic depiction of domestic violence that I’ve seen.  Custody begins with a child custody hearing over an almost 18-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old son.  Neither kids wants anything to do with the dad, and there’s more than a hint of spousal abuse in their past, but the court awards the father weekend visits with his son.

The father (Denis Ménochet) is acting very reasonably at the custody hearing, of course, but we soon see signs of the need for domination and control that is the core of domestic violence.  He can’t bear not knowing where his ex-wife (Léa Drucker) lives.  He needs to be the “winner” in every transaction.  With naked entitlement, he says “I get an extra hour because I picked you up an hour late”.   Too vile even for his own parents, the father is an insistent stalker.

Especially through the eyes of the son (Thomas Gioria in a miraculous performance),  Legrand helps the audience understand the traumatization of family violence.  Every family member lives with dread of the father surprising them like a bogeyman.  The boy takes on responsibility to protect his mom and sister by keeping the dad away from them – it’s an emotionally wracking burden that no child should bear.  The mom is not a hero or a feminist icon – she just wants to survive and not be a victim.

Intimate partner violence is about power and control.  In Custody, the father doesn’t react physically until the movie’s midpoint, and he doesn’t touch another character until almost the end.  But, without hitting anyone, he is successful in terrorizing the family.  By buzzing the mom’s doorbell in the middle of night, he proves that he really is a terrorist.  And his lethality emerges in the thriller ending.  LeGrand says that the thriller aspect of Custody comes organically from fear.

Léa Drucker and Denis Ménochet, in CUSTODY. Courtesy Kino Lorber.

Every performance is excellent, and Menochet’s has received plaudits.  But the child actor Thomas Gloria goes places you don’t expect a child to go; his performance is stunning.  Menochet discusses his performance and Gioria’s in this Inside Picturehouse interview on YouTube.

As the sister, Mathilde Auneveux delivers a mesmerizing performance of Proud Mary at her birthday party.  She is clearly distracted by at least one event in her life, but which is it?

In Custody, Legrand has also filmed the most perfectly shot pregnancy test scene ever.

Custody is the remarkable first feature from Xavier Lagrand.  The story grew out of his Oscar-winning short film with the same actors, Just Before Losing Everything.  Custody won Legrand the Silver Lion (Best Director) at the Venice film festival.  I saw it at Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club months before its release.

Custody can be streamed from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

DARK MONEY: following secret money

by

John S. Adams in DARK MONEY

The gripping documentary Dark Money exposes our new political environment, with unlimited secret money unleashed by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. Writer-director Kimberly Reed takes us to her native Montana as conservative (but independent) Republican legislators find themselves deluged by massive and monstrous attacks from some even more conservative out-of-state sources. Intrepid small-town reporter John S. Adams and the understaffed state regulators follow the money and try to hunt down who is pulling the strings.

As the mystery unfolds, Dark Money also takes us to Wisconsin, where dark money has assaulted an unexpected branch of government. And we go to Washington, DC, to the Federal Elections Commission, where Ann Ravel, the Obama-appointed chair of the FEC, has resigned in disgust after Republican commissioners have blocked all enforcement of federal campaign finance regulation. (Disclosure: I have worked with Silicon Valley native Ravel in my day job.)

Here are some of Dark Money’s most disturbing revelations:

  • While it’s bad enough that we don’t know the extent of wealthy Americans like the Koch Brothers trying to buy elections, neither do we know about the secret election participation of FOREIGN players.
  • Dark Money sources are not stopping at trying to buy legislators and governors, but are also trying to take over state supreme courts!

And just when we need MORE scrutiny of the attempts to buy the legislative and judicial branches of state governments, we are witnessing the death of statehouse journalism.

In one particularly nasty nugget, we witness GOP FEC Commissioner Don McGahn unashamedly grinding the FEC’s gears of enforcement to a stop.  Today, McGahn is the Trump White House Counsel, with major responsibility for the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanagh.

Dark Money keeps us on the edges of our seats throughout and culminates in a real-life courtroom drama.

I attended the sold-out Bay Area premiere of Dark Money, co-sponsored by Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club and by Santa Clara County. Both Ann Ravel and John S. Adams appeared at the post-screening Q&A.