Jessica Pare and Gabriel Byrne in DEATH OF A LADIES’ MAN, opening the 2921 Cinequest. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.
Make your plans now to attend the 2021 Cinequest, Silicon Valley’s own major film festival. This year’s fest will be online as Cinejoy, scheduled for April 20 through April 30. 75 of the features will be world or US premieres – be in the FIRST AUDIENCE to see these films. You can stream the vast majority of the premiering films for only $3.99 apiece.
Cinequest is a significant showcase for independent film, documentaries and world cinema. The 2021 program has features from from 50 countries, including Spain, Belgium, France, UK, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Iceland, Germany, Honduras, Israel, Taiwan, Iran, Korea, Kenya and South Africa.
IN THE SHADOWS from Turkey: North American premiere at Cinequest. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.
This year’s headline events include:
New movies with Dame Judy Dench, Viggo Mortensen, Sam Neil, Ed Helms, Julie Delpy, Eddie Izzard, Miranda Richardson, Gabriel Byrne,Jessica Pare and Brian Gleeson
New movies directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada (Blindspotting), Mortensen and Delpy.
See it here FIRST: Together Together and This Is Not a War Story are among the movies slated for widespread (and perhaps theatrical) release later this year.
This is the eleventh year that I’ve covered Cinequest. I’ll miss the in-person schmoozing with filmmakers at the Continental Lounge, being greeted by Nathan Louie in his Chinese imperial garb, the bubbly film introductions by volunteer Chris Marcoida, and the silent film at the vintage movie palace, the California Theatre, accompanied by Dennis James on the movie palace’s Mighty Wurlitzer. And the unofficial Cinequest cocktail (a shot of Tito’s chased by a cheese cube).
As usual, I’ll be covering Cinequest rigorously with features and movie recommendations. I usually screen (and write about) about thirty Cinequest films from around the world. Bookmark my CINEQUEST page, with links to all my coverage (links on the individual movies will start to go live on Thursday, March 18). Follow me on Twitter for the latest.
CARVER: world premiere at Cinequest, Photo courtesy of Select Films.
CARVER: world premiere at Cinequest. Photo courtesy of Select Films.
I’ve been absorbed in preparing for Cinequest’s Online Film Festival Cinejoy, which begins next Saturday, March 20. I’ve already screened over a dozen films from the program, and there are some winners in the program.
As usual, I’ll be publishing a festival preview with recommendations and writing about individual films. Here is my coverage of previous festivals: CINEQUEST. Follow me on Twitter for the very latest coverage.
Here’s a wistful note – the last movie that I watched in a movie theater was on March 5, 2020, at last year’s Cinequest, which had to be shut down mid-festival because of COVID. It was The Burnt Orange Heresy, and I sat, not yet masked, in a corner of the 1122-seat California Theatre, distanced about 20 feet away from other festival goers.
ON VIDEO
Nomadland: refusing to be defeated. THE YEAR’S BEST MOVIE. Hulu.
Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor in CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF
If you want drama, Tennessee Williams ladles it on thick in 1958’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which Turner Classic Movies presents on March 17. The movie version of Williams’ steamy Southern Pulitzer Prize-winning play stars Elizabeth Taylor in a slip and Paul Newman with a crutch and a drink. Taylor and Newman are great, but Burl Ives steals the movie as Big Daddy. Madeleine Sherwood is outstanding as the weaselly daughter-in-law Ida.
Okay, so they couldn’t explicitly mention homosexuality on screen in 1958, but that doesn’t tke away from the dramatic tension. And, think about this – let’s all forebear the course word bullshit and substitute mendacity.
Frances McDormand in NOMADLAND. Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
This week, make sure you see the year’s best movie, Nomadland. Plus a highly original first feature for a female writer-director and two strong recommendations on TCM.
ON VIDEO
Nomadland: The fierce authenticity of Frances McDormand’s performance and Chloé Zhao’s genius with nonprofessional actors illuminates this extraordinary film with humanity. It’s the year’s best movie. Streaming on Hulu.
Jumbo: A painfully shy girl, who is embarrassed by every human interaction,falls in love with a not-really-inanimate object. Jumbo is the first feature for writer-director Zoé Wittock, and it’s a helluva super-imaginative calling card. Ever bouncing between the sweet and the outre, Jumbo worked for me. Available to stream at Laemmle.
Other current films:
Minari: who gets to decide on a family’s dream? Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play.
Sound of Metal: Seeking anything but stillness. Amazon (included with Prime).
Black Bear: Ever surprising. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play
On March 6 and 7, Turner Classic Movies will present one my Overlooked Noir, a young Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss; it will be on Noir Alley with an intro and outro by Eddie Muller. It doesn’t take long to realize that Killer’s Kiss is not a typical film noir – there’s Kubrick’s own bracing visual style, an interracial relationship and a comically absurd fight to the death. The cast matched a couple one-hit wonders with the pioneering African-American actor and civil rights activist Frank Silvera.
Harry Dean Stanton in PARIS, TEXAS
And on March 10, TCM will air Harry Dean Stanton’s masterpiece in Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas. In Paris Texas, Harry Dean plays Travis, a man so traumatized that he has disappeared and is found wandering across the desert and mistaken for a mute. As he is cared for by his brother (Dean Stockwell), he evolves from feral to erratic to troubled, but with a sense of tenderness and a determination to put things right. We see Travis as a madman who gains extraordinary lucidity about what wrong in his life and his own responsibility for it.
At the film’s climax, Travis speaks to Jane (Natassja Kinski) through a one-way mirror (she can’t see him). Spinning what at first seems like parable, Travis explains what happened to him – and to her – and why it happened. It’s a 20-minute monologue so captivating and touching that it rises to be recognized as one of the very greatest screen performances.
Well, the French coming of age comedy Jumbo is not one we have seen before. Jeanne (Noémie Merlant) is a painfully shy girl who is embarrassed by every human interaction, but especially by her single mother, who seems to be insisting “Have your sexual awakening, already!”. The mom encourages Jeanne to take a nighttime cleaning job at the amusement park on the outskirts of their provincial town, hoping that she’ll take up with a guy. The mom, who has very modest aspirations for her daughter’s romantic life, is thinking of someone like the supervisor Marc (Basten Bouillion), who is willing, but doesn’t ring Jeanne’s chimes.
Indeed, Jeanne does meet someone (or something) – the amusement ride Jumbo – and she falls in love with a not-really-inanimate object. Yes, here we have an unusual love that is passionate and obsessive, and, yes, consummated. (I told you that you haven’t seen this before.)
In the US, we know the titular amusement ride as the Tilt-a-whirl.
The director Emanuelle Bercot, who is so good in her occasional acting turns (Polisse, My King), plays Jeanne’s mom Margarette. Bercot’s Margarette is a voracious and vulgar force of nature – and she’s not familiar with social boundaries. Hilarious.
Jumbo is the first feature for writer-director Zoé Wittock, and it’s a helluva super-imaginative calling card. Ever bouncing between the sweet and the outre, Jumbo worked for me. I screened it at the 2020 Mill Valley Film Festival, and it’s now available to stream at Laemmle.
Frances McDormand in NOMADLAND. Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
This week: the best film of 2020, Nomadland, is streaming. Recenty catching up to Nomadland, Sound of Metal, Mayor and Black Bear allowed me to finalize my Best Movies of 2020.
ON VIDEO
Nomadland: The fierce authenticity of Frances McDormand’s performance and Chloé Zhao’s genius with nonprofessional actors illuminates this extraordinary film with humanity. Streaming on Hulu.
Minari: This autobiographical drama of family cohesion is set in the immigrant experience. Streaming from various VOD providers.
Other current films:
Sound of Metal: Seeking anything but stillness. Amazon (included with Prime).
Black Bear: Ever surprising. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play
Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon in DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES
On February 28, Turner Classic Movies airs Days of Wine and Roses, Blake Edwards’ unflinching exploration of alcoholism, featuring great performances by Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick (both nominated for Oscars) and Charles Bickford.
Frances McDormand in NOMADLAND. Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
Recently catching up with Nomadland, Sound of Metal, Mayor and Black Bear has allowed me to finalize my Best Movies of 2020. In the Year of Pandemic, I somehow managed to watch one hundred and fifteen 2020 movies (and another one hundred and forty-nine movies from earlier years). Here are the thirteen that I most admire and engage with.
To get on my year-end list, a movie has to be one that thrills me while I’m watching it and one that I’m still thinking about a couple of days later.
Chadwick Boseman in MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM. Photo courtesy of Netflix.
In the family drama Minari, the father (Steven Tuen) in a Korean immigrant family moves them all to rural Arkansas to realize his dream of becoming a landed farmer. But, does everyone share the same dream? Is everyone willing to make the tradeoffs necessary to achieve it?
He’s been working in California for ten years at an industrial hatchery as a lowly paid chicken sexer (yep, ya always learn something at the movies). This is the moment when he can finally afford his own 50 acres, and, upon arriving at his own property, he is triumphant. His wife (Yeri Han), taking the measure of the remote setting and the manufactured-home-on-wheels, doesn’t see it that way.
To make things more tolerable, she moves her spirited mom (Yuh-jung Youn) into the household. (Spoiler: don’t let dotty grandma operate the incinerator.) The family faces the challenges of entrepreneurship and the new surroundings.
Although the story is set in the immigrant experience, I don’t see the film as about immigration. It’s more universal than that. Far from bewildered and exploited, the dad here is confident and dismissive of the locals’ superstitions. He believes and acts as if he were the master of his own fate.
Minari is more about whether the family is a team, cohesively committed to the same goal. Just what is redemption supposed to look like here? The story of Minari is autobiographical – drawn from the childhood of its writer-director Lee Isaac Chung. Chung’s film is well-crafted, but not thrilling.
The prolific character actor Will Patton excels in a fine part as a good-hearted Pentecostal Arkansan, who is determined to build a friendship with the farmer dad.
Alan S. Kim is especially good as the youngest child, the surrogate for director Chung at age seven. Yuh-jung Youn is also stellar as the grandma.
Yuen is a superb actor with an uncanny gift for showing up in really good movies: I Origins, Okja, Sorry to Bother You, Burning. Here, he’s good in a less challenging role than he’s used to.
I saw Minari at an A24 screening accessible to SFFILM members. It releases more widely on VOD this weekend.
Frances McDormand in NOMADLAND. Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
Nomadland is an extraordinary film, illuminated with a profound humanity. That humanity stems from the fierce authenticity of Frances McDormand’s performance and Chloé Zhao’s genius with nonprofessional actors.
McDormand plays Fern, a widow who lost her lifestyle when her longtime husband died and when the closing of the gypsum mine killed their hometown – to the extent that even the zip code for Empire, Nevada, was discontinued. Without the means to afford to live in her own house or apartment, she lives in her van and travels between seasonal jobs – at Amazon’s warehouse in Fernley, Nevada, during the holiday crush and at tourist campgrounds during the summer.
Fern is not alone. She finds a community of nomads – Americans her age, who travel the West in their RV homes between subsistence jobs. One of them, Bob Wells, organizes nomad round ups outside of Quartzsite, Arizona.
Zhao deploys these real people as characters in Nomadland and incorporates their real stories into the story that she is telling. Indeed, these nomad perspectives give us two of Nomadand’s most powerful moments – a monologue by a woman named Swankie about her acceptance of her mortality and Bob’s comments on the loss of his son.
McDormand’s Fern misses the life she had with her husband, but she has moved on to another chapter – one in which she has traded convenience and material amenities for independence. She may have to poop in a bucket, but (except when she needs her sister’s help to repair her van) she’s not obligated to anyone or anything. Another nomad, Dave (David Straithern), is attracted to her, but she warily and firmly regards Dave’s sweet bumbling attentions.
Is Nomadland a portrait of victims? Is it a political statement? There’s no question that the American political and socioeconomic systems have failed these people. But the nomads are not people who accept defeat.
McDormand’s flinty performance is a tour de force. Her Fern is as immortal as her Marge Gunderson in Fargo or her Mildred in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
They say that acting is reacting, and McDormand’s engaged listening magnifies the impact of Swankie’s and Bob’s speeches. Her increasingly purposeful stroll through the Badlands, at first solitary and then observed by Dave, expresses the value she places on her independence. McDormand has almost no dialogue in two of most powerful and indelible scenes – in the Badlands and on the Mendocino Coast.
McDormand, Straithern and Melissa Smith, who plays Fern’s sister Molly, are the only professional actors in Nomadland. Smith is conservatory director and head of acting in the MFA program at the American Conservatory Theater (ACT), but has never before acted for the screen. (As a child, musician Tay Straithern, son of David, appeared in two of his dad’s movies.)
Zhao’s screenplay is based on Jessica Bruder’s nonfiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-first Century, and some of the folks interviewed by Bruder are featured in the film.
Her previous film, The Rider, with a nonprofessional actor as the protagonist, made me into a huge Chloé Zhao fan. Next up for Zhao is a Marvel franchise movie with big stars, she deserves the payday.
I’m annoyed that IMDb and some other sources describe Chloé Zhao as a “Chinese director”. Although she was born in Beijing, I consider Zhao an American filmmaker. As a child, she left China for a London boarding school and finished high school in LA; she graduated from college and film school in the US, and has made all of her movies in America. Besides, what other filmmaker has set her last three movies in South Dakota, for chrissakes?
The reflective nature of Nomadland is enhanced by the vast landscapes that swallow the characters, beautifully shot by cinematographer Joshua James Richards. Richards, Zhao’s partner and the DP on her two previous films, has a gift for celebrating the panoramas and Big Skies of the Mountain West. He seems to specialize in dramatic clouds, multi-hued sunsets and sparks from campfires lifting into the night.
NOMADLAND. Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.NOMADLAND. Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
The understated music of composer Ludovico Einaudi is perfect for Zhao’s story. Einaudi’s music is often featured on Radio Paradise., the blogging soundtrack of The Movie Gourmet.
Nomadland is the critical consensus choice as the year’s best film and tops my Best Movies of 2020. It is streaming on Hulu.
Tonight Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland with Frances McDormand can be streamed. I haven’t seen it yet, but, after The Rider, I’m a huge Chloé Zhao fan, so I’ll be watching and writing about it soon. Nomadland is the critical consensus choice as the year’s best film.
Here’s my remembrance of the late cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno with some of his images and a link to a brilliant video essay.
ON VIDEO
Sound of Metal: This psychological pressure-cooker is super intense ride, but there’s a satisfying payoff. Both Riz Ahmed’s performance and the sound design are Oscar-worthy. Amazon (included with Prime).
Black Bear: Making full use of Aubrey Plaza’s unique gifts, this dark comedy is edge-of-the-seat movie and a cauldron of surprises. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play.
Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You: The reflections of the Boss bring poignancy without melancholy to this musical documentary. We glimpse creative collaboration in the recording studio and get a range of songs, from the heartbreaking to the exhilarating. AppleTV.
More current films:
Mayor: potholes and tear gas, all in a day’s work. Roxie.
MLK/FBI: about America then and about America today. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Thanks to the unique gifts of Aubrey Plaza, writer-director Lawrence Michael Levine’s dark comedy Black Bear is a cauldron of surprises. This is an edge-of-the-seat movie where you cannot predict what is going to happen next – or at least how it is going to happen.
At first, Black Bear seems like a dark comedy of manners. And then there’s a complete reset. In a movie-within-a-movie, the tone goes from broadly comic to nail-biting, with a satisfying final payoff about the creative process. I’m not going to spoil the story by getting anymore explicit about the its construction – but the audience needs to be a bit nimble.
As Levine unspools his story, reels it back in and unspools it again, Black Bear is a roller coaster. As Sheila O’Malley writes, “This is a disturbing film, and much of it is unpleasant, but it’s also very, very funny.“
Plaza plays Allison, a film writer-director who becomes the only guest at a woodsy lakeside B&B owned by (Gabe) Christopher Abbott and (Blair) Sarah Gadon. Allison is isolating to work on writer’s block, but she soon becomes absorbed by Gabe and Blair, a couple whose unnecessary bickering signals that they are on each other’s very last nerve. Two of the characters tell significant lies, and why they lie is revealing about each of them.
As to Allison, from her first kinda-flirty-but-with-sharper-elbows banter, you can tell she’s trouble. Plaza excels in playing a character who is hiding her acidly judgy thoughts with a mask of deadpan social almost-appropriateness. Mick LaSalle describes Plaza thusly: “This is someone who has made her name in comedies, but whose distinct quality — a certain unknowability, a certain watchfulness, a certain suggestion of some underlying hostility — always seemed like it would lend itself to drama, at least theoretically.”
Blair (exasperated): You’re really hard to read.
Allison (brightly): I get that a lot.
The playwright Paola Lázaro is especially good as the harried AD trying to hold it together as shooting the last scene of the film-within-the-film becomes ever more imperiled. There’s also a very funny running joke about script supervisor who doesn’t grasp the concept of you have one job.
When you watch Black Bear, keep one thing in mind – Allison is trying to devise a story for her next film.
Black Bear is streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
