Tom Hiddleston in HIGH-RISE. Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.
The dystopian sci-fi satire High-Rise, adapted from a J.G. Ballard novel, makes a droll and cynical comment on our species. Taking place in the near future, the very wealthy live on the top floors of a self-contained high-rise, just above the middle class. Human greed and jealousy creates scarcity for the residents – not Third World-type scarcity, but scarcity of amenities like swimming pool access and power brownouts. Class competition erupts and a morbid descent into murderous chaos ensues. We plunge into this complacent, and then hellish, world from the perspective of a young middle class striver (Tom Hiddleston).
The designer of the complex of high-rises (Jeremy Irons) lives in a luxurious penthouse with a staggeringly pastoral garden. The character’s name is Royal, but he’s not the ruler. (We actually come to wish that he were benignly in charge.) And despite his trappings, Royal is not the omnipotent Bond-type villain. The villain turns out instead to be an oligarchy of the One Percent, along with the darkest aspects of every character’s humanness.
Tom Hiddleston is fine, and the rest of the cast is solid. The two standouts are Jeremy Irons as Royal and Sienna Miller, dressed in Carnaby Street retro, as a deliciously voracious man-hunter. The wonderful Elisabeth Moss is wasted in a role where she just doesn’t have much to do.
I saw High-Rise at the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF). It opens in Bay Area theaters tomorrow.
David Oyelowo and Dianne Wiest in FIVE NIGHTS IN MAINE. Photo courtesy of San Francisco Film Society
An Atlanta man (David Oyeowlo) suddenly loses his wife to an auto accident and is completely shattered by the depth and the jarring abruptness of his loss. Pushed by his sister out of his paralysis, he drives up to Maine to visit his wife’s mother (Dianne Wiest). She is a person who is generally harsh, judgemental and irritating at all times, but is more so now that her own health is failing. His experience becomes the antithesis of the comfort and support that one would expect. As she probes and spars with him, the two are each driven to their own catharsis. The end of Five Nights in Maine also comes abruptly, leaving us to reflect on the lessons learned by the leading characters and how their grief is resolved.
Five Nights in Maine uses a handheld camera and LOTS of close=ups. This was a conscious choice by first-time writer-director Maris Curran, who sought a “closing in” effect because “grief is claustrophobic”.
Dianne Wiest’s performance is an awards-worthy tour de force. Flashing fiery looks and shooting piercing remarks from an invariably rigid posture, she commands our attention every moment that she is on-screen. As we would expect, Oyewolo is outstanding, especially in the early scenes where he collapses into shock. Rosie Perez, not as sassy, but every bit as appealing as usual, is rock solid in the supporting role as the mother’s nurse. As the sister, Tenoyah Parris (Chi-Raq, Dear White People, Mad Men) gives yet another flawless performance.
I saw Five Nights in Maine at the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF), where Director Maris Curran, producer Carly Hugo and actor David Oyelowo appeared at the screening. Curran said she was motivated to write a story about as her own marriage was falling apart; when the ground was pulled out from under her, she created a protagonist in that situation.
Aiming for a sensual look to an emotional film, Curran was able to snare Tunisian cinematographer Sofian El Fani, fresh from his exquisite work in from Blue Is the Warmest Color, for his first American film. Budgeted for a 19-day shoot,the crew finished in only 18.
Oyewolo, happily married for 18 years, found exploring the territory of losing his wife to be very uncomfortable. for him. Five Nights in Maine was shot right after Selma, so his exhaustion from Selma helped him find this “hollowed-out” character. Oyewolo sees Five Nights in Maine as a fish out of water story – not just geographically but emotionally (a man not used to or prepared for grief). Oyewolo prefers women directors “wants to be part of stories that are emotionally challenging”.
Fortunately, Curran leavens this dark-themed story with bits of sharp humor. It’s an emotionally affecting and authentic movie. The U.S. theatrical release of Five Nights in Maine is expected in late summer or early fall 2016.
Athina Rachel Tsangari, director of CHEVALIER. Photo courtesy of San Francisco Film Society
This year’s San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) includes movies from 50 women directors. Some are high-profile (by indie standards):
Academy Award-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple (Harlan County U.S.A.) brings Miss Sharon Jones!. Sure to be a festival crowd-pleaser, this doc chronicles the salty Dap Kings frontwoman and her fight against cancer.
Oscar-nominated Chris Hegedus (The War Room), with her directing partner D.A. Pennebaker, has the animal welfare doc Unlocking the Cage; and
Elyse Steinberg’s Weinerwas the top documentary hit at the most recent Sundance.
Among the foreign choices, the Must See is one of the funniest movies at the fest, the Greek comedy Chevalier from director Athina Rachel Tsangari. Obviously a keen observer of male behavior, Tsangari delivers a sly and pointed exploration of male competitiveness, with the moments of drollness and absurdity that we expect in the best of contemporary Greek cinema. This is Tsangari’s second visit to SFIFF – in 2011, she brought her hilariously offbeat Attenberg.
Other strong choices from women directors include:
NUTS! from director Penny Lane – a persistently hilarious (and finally poignant) documentary about the rise and fall of a medical and radio empire – all built on goat testicle “implantation” surgery in gullible humans.
Suite Armorcaine, the character-driven drama from French director Pascale Breton;
Five Nights in Maine, a showcase for David Oyelowo, Dianne Wiest and Rosie Perez from writer-director Maris Curran.
Here’s the complete list of women directors with entries at the 2016 San Francisco International Film Festival:
As I Open My Eyes, Leyla Bouzid, Tunisia/France/Belgium Audrie & Daisy, Bonni Cohen, Jon Shenk, USA Ayiti Mon Amour, Guetty Felin, Haiti/USA Between Us: Experimental Shorts (Rock, Clay, Sand, Straw, Wood, Something Between Us, Starfish Aorta, Winter Trees) Cameraperson, Kirsten Johnson, USA Check It, Dana Flor, Toby Oppenheimer, USA Chevalier, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Greece The Fits, Anna Rose Holmer, USA Five Nights in Maine, Maris Curran, USA Granny’s Dancing on the Table, Hanna Sköld, Sweden/Denmark haveababy, Amanda Micheli, USA The Innocents, Anne Fontaine, France/Poland Irving M. Levin Directing Award: An Afternoon with Mira Nair: Monsoon Wedding Maggie’s Plan, Rebecca Miller, USA Miss Sharon Jones!, Barbara Kopple, USA Mountain, Yaelle Kayam, Israel/Denmark National Bird, Sonia Kennebeck, USA No Home Movie, Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France NUTS!, Penny Lane, USA Operator, Logan Kibens, USA Our Kind of Traitor, Susanna White, UK The Return, Kelly Duane de la Vega, Katie Galloway, USA Shorts 1 (In Attla’s Tracks, Seide) Shorts 2 (Partners, The Send-Off) Shorts 3: Animation (Edmond, Glove) Shorts 4: New Visions (My Aleppo, False Start, Sept. – Oct. 2015, Cizre) Shorts 5: Family Films (Bunny New Girl, The Casebook of Nips & Porkington, Mother, Welcome to My Life) Shorts 6: Youth Works (Child for Sale, From My Head To Hers, I Don’t Belong Here Run, Run Away) Sonita, Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami, Germany/Switzerland/Iran Suite Armoricaine, Pascale Breton, France Thirst, Svetla Tsotsorkova, Bulgaria Under the Gun, Stephanie Soechtig, USA Unlocking the Cage, Chris Hegedus, D.A. Pennebaker, USA The Watermelon Woman, Cheryl Dunye, USA Weiner, Josh Kriegman, Elyse Steinberg, USA Wild, Nicolette Krebitz, German
CHEVALIER. Photo courtesy of Strand Releasing and San Francisco Film Society
There are plenty of high-profile movies at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) this weekend, including the surefire audience-pleaser Miss Sharon Jones! and an appearance by Monsoon Wedding’s Mira Nair. But some other gems are screening under the radar. Here are my picks:
The brilliant Greek comedy Chevalier is this weekend’s Must See and a contender for the festival’s funniest film. Obviously a keen observer of male behavior, from director Athina Rachel Tsangari delivers a sly and pointed exploration of male competitiveness, with the moments of drollness and absurdity that we expect in the best of contemporary Greek cinema. Chevalier screens at 8 PM on Saturday night at the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission ,and director Tsangari is expected to attend.
Dead Slow Ahead– a visually stunning and an often hypnotic film, shot on a massive freighter on its voyage across vast ocean expanses with its all-Filipino crew. Dead Slow Ahead plays the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission.on Saturday night at 9 PM.
Leaf Blower – a gentle Mexican slice-of-life comedy, with three young guys drifting though rudderless adolescence, doing what teenage males do – busting each others balls, wasting time, and achieving new heights of social awkwardness and sexual frustration. Leaf Blower screens on Sunday night at 9:45 at the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission and director Alejandro Iglesias Mendizábal is expected to attend.
Weiner – This hit from the Sundance and New Directors film festivals is an inside look at Anthony Weiner’s cringeworthy, self-immolating campaign for New York City Mayor;
Miss Sharon Jones! – Sure to be a festival crowd-pleaser, this doc chronicles the salty Dap Kings frontwoman and her fight against cancer. From Academy Award-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple (Harlan County U.S.A.);
Unlocking the Cage– an animal welfare doc from storied filmmakers Chris Hegedus (The War Room) and D.A. Pennebaker (Monterey Pop and The War Room); and
The Bandit, in the coveted slot as the festivals’ Closing Night film, documents the real life bromance between Burt Reynolds and iconic stuntman Hal Needham that led to Needham’s Smokey and the Bandit movies.
But some of the best docs in the fest are less well-known nuggets:
NUTS! – a persistently hilarious (and finally poignant) documentary about the rise and fall of a medical and radio empire – all built on goat testicle “implantation” surgery in gullible humans.
Dead Slow Ahead– a visually stunning and an often hypnotic film, shot on a massive freighter on its voyage across vast ocean expanses with its all-Filipino crew.
Under the Sun – a searing insight into totalitarian North Korean society, all from government-approved footage that tells a different story than the wackadoodle dictatorship intended.
NUTS! Photo courtesy of San Francisco Film Society
NUTS! is the persistently hilarious (and finally poignant) documentary about the rise and fall of a medical and radio empire – all built on goat testicle “implantation” surgery in gullible humans. Yes, a huckster named J.R. Brinkley really did surgically place goat testicles inside human scrota – and, more astonishingly, this actually became a craze in the 1920s. Now that’s enough of a forehead slapper, but there’s more, much more and that’s what makes NUTS! so fun. Its first screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) is on April 29.
Brinkley’s story is one that leads to celebrity mega wealth and a colossal miscalculation. Improbably, Brinkley’s wild ride touched Huey Long,William Jennings Bryan, Rudolph Valentino, Buster Keaton, June Carter Cash and Wolfman Jack. There’s a radio empire, a Gubernatorial election and a dramatic, climactic trial.
Director Penny Lane tells the story with animation (different animators for each chapter, but you can’t tell) seamlessly braided together with historical still photos, movies and a final heartbreaking recording. NUTS! tells a story that is too bizarre to be true – but really happened. It makes for a most entertaining movie.
LEAF BLOWER. Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.
Leaf Blower is an amiable Mexican slice-of-life comedy. Three young guys are drifting rudderless though their adolescences, doing what teenage males do – wasting time, busting each others balls and achieving new heights of social awkwardness and sexual frustration. Its first screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) is on April 24, and director Alejandro Iglesias Mendizábal is expected to attend.
In his promising first feature, director and co-writer Iglesias Mendizábal has created an entirely character-driven portrait of male teen friendship and restlessness. After all, the only real plot is whether they will find the keys that one of them dropped into a pile of leaves. But we want to keep watching these guys to see what happens to them, and it’s all pretty funny.
Ruben (Alejandro Guerrero) is too cool for school. He’s sure that he’s the only one in charge of his life – he just doesn’t know where he wants to go. So he masks his indecision and avoidance by brooding.
Lucas (Fabrizio Santini) is nervous and a little hyper, but his bossy girlfriend totally paralyzes him with dread. He’s always a day late and a peso short, the kind of guy who is stuck wearing his dirty soccer uniform to a funeral.
Emilio (Francisco Rueda) is constrained by his status as the fat kid (and I was a fat kid, so I relate). Self-isolated, he yearns to be more social, but then counterproductively comforts himself with more and more calories.
All three are sexually awakened but inept. Only Lucas has a girlfriend, and she causes him to sigh painfully every time his cellphone rings. Ruben and Emilio are so intimidated by females that they’re too scared to even borrow a rake from one.
Come to think about it, Leaf Blower is not a pure coming of age movie because its characters don’t seem to grow or change as a result of their experiences. It’s more of a “being-of-age” movie because they just are who they are. Perceptive and observational, Leaf Blower is pretty far away from the American Pie kind of teen comedy.
DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD: The Story of the National Lampoon takes us through an engaging and comprehensive history of the groundbreaking and seminal satirical magazine. For those of you who weren’t there, the National Lampoon – ever irreverent, raunchy and tasteless – was at the vanguard of the counter-culture in the early 1970s. Once reaching the rank of #2 news stand seller among all US magazines, it may be the most popularly accepted subversive art ever in the US (along with the wry Mad magazine during the Cold War).
In a few short years, the Lampoon rose from nowhere (well, actually from the Harvard Lampoon) to a humor empire with the magazine, records, a radio show and a traveling revue. And, yes, the title DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD does encapsulate the arc of the Lampoon’s story.
Documentarian Douglas Tirola tells the story so successfully because he persuaded almost all the surviving key participants to talk. We meet co-founder Henry Beard, publisher Matty Simmons, Art Director Michael Gross and other Lampoon staff including P.J. O’Rourke and Christopher Buckley. You’ll recognize the first editor, Tony Hendra, from his performance as the harried band manager in This Is Spinal Tap. We see clips of two Lampoon originals who haven’t survived, co-founder Doug Kenney and resident iconoclast Michael O’Donoghue.
The National Lampoon’s live performance revue featured John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Brian Doyle Murray, Gilda Radner and Harold Ramis. When Lorne Michaels hired the whole crew for Saturday Night Live, the hit television show instantly surpassed the magazine in cultural penetration. “The Lampoon lost its exceptionalism”, says one observer.
But the Lampoon made its mark on the movies by launching the entire genre of raunchy comedies with Animal House and spawning the careers of filmmakers John Landis and Harold Ramis, as well as the SNL performers. We also see a clip of Christopher Guest in an early Lampoon performance. On the other hand, I hadn’t remembered a less successful Lampoon project from its later era, Disco Beaver from Outer Space.
This is all, of course, major nostalgia for Baby Boomers. Before seeing DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD, I thought, yeah, I’ll enjoy the Blast From The Past, but will younger audience viewers dismiss this humor as quaint? After all, the Lampoon’s success came from puncturing the boundaries of taste, and it’s hard to imagine anything today that would be shockingly raunchy. But, after watching DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD, I have to say that the humor stands up today as very sharp-edged. After all, an image of a baby in a blender with Satan’s finger poised to press the “puree” button is pretty transgressive no matter when it’s published. The sole exception is the Lampoon’s over-fixation on women’s breasts, which comes off today as pathetically sophomoric – or even adolescent.
DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD: The Story of the National Lampoon has also vaulted on to my list of Longest Movie Titles.
I saw DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD at the San Francisco International Film Festival. This is an important cultural story, well-told and it deserves a wide audience. You can stream it from iTunes or the Showtime VOD service (and you can catch it on the Showtime channel).
Deenis O’Keefe and Ann Sheridan in WOMAN ON THE RUN
My favorite movie-going experiences in 2015:
San Francisco’s Noir City film fest, with the double feature Woman on the Run and Born to Be Bad.
Cinequest, especially seeing the raucously funny Wild Tales with The Wife and friends at a packed California Theatre and seeing the exquisite and lyrical Georgian drama Corn Island on the recommendation of international film programmer Charlie Cockey.
Turner Classic Movies’ Summer of Darkness, program of film noir, which allowed me to discover two new noir favorites: 99 River Street and Witness to Murder.
The wonderful surprise of the very funny and family centric documentary Meet the Patels at a Camera Cinema Club, complete with a Skype interview with the Patel family itself.
A particularly strong program at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where I saw The End of the Tour, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, The Look of Silence, Listen to Me Marlon, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead and Very Semi-serious.
The Wife taking me to a luxurious screening of Spectre at the Los Gatos Theater with its black leather sofas and ottomans.
Happening to be in Spain during the first weekend of the Sevilla European Film Festival, and getting to catch Mustang with The Wife and my niece Maeve.
If you’re like me and you worship the cartoons in The New Yorker, then the documentary Very Semi-Serious is a Must See. Very Semi-Serious takes us inside The New Yorker for a glimpse inside the process of creating and selecting the cartoons, chiefly from the perspective of cartoonist and currently Cartoon Editor Bob Mankoff. You will know Mankoff from his cartoon with the caption, “How about never? Is never good for you?”.
We also meet rick star cartoonists that include Roz Chast and George Booth, along with The New Yorker Editor David Remnick and some aspiring cartoonist newcomers. We are boggled by the tens of cartoons each cartoonist pitches each week and the hundreds that Mankoff must review. Rejection is a major part of the cartoon life.
We also learn how Mankoff scientifically studies the eye movements of readers to see how/when/if we “get” the jokes. And we get to laugh again at HUNDREDS of cartoons.
I saw Very Semi-Serious in May at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and now you can see it beginning tonight on HBO. Set your DVRs.
