In the documentary Starring Jerry as Himself, a Florida senior sees himself recruited as an operative by Chinese police. The story is told in a re-enactment with the subject playing himself. We later learn why the filmmakers chose re-enactment, and what could have been a conventional true crime exposé or a weeper, is illuminated by the subject family’s humanity.
Starring Jerry as Himself is the first feature for director Law Chen, who also edited, co-produced and shot some of the footage. Law Chen and his co-producer and subject Jonathan Hsu were responsible for the decision on how to structure the film. That decision turned what could have been a heartbreaking downer into an engaging and satisfying family story, albeit a cautionary one.
I highlighted Starring Jerry as Himself as a MUST SEE in my Slamdance: discovering new filmmakers, and it won Slamdance’s Documentary Feature Grand Jury Prize. It’s now available to stream at home from Amazon, AppleTV and YouTube.
Photo caption: Sabrina Jie-A-Fa and Louis Tomeo in EGGHEAD & TWINKIE. Credit: Olivia Wilson, Courtesy of CanBeDone Films and Orange Cat Films.
In the funny, sweet and genuine coming of age film Egghead & Twinkie, Twinkie (Sabrina Jie-A-Fa) is finishing high school and trying to navigate her sexual awakening as aa lesbian – and it’s not easy. Her lifelong bestie is the neighbor boy Egghead (Louis Tomei), and he’s now sweet on her; (Egghead and Twinkie are their nicknames for each other), Twinkie impulsively commandeers her dad’s car and heads out on a cross country road trip to join her Internet object of desire (Tik Tok star Ayden Lee). Egghead is so loyal, smitten and cluelessly hopeful that he comes along.
Along the way, they have their share of zany road trip experiences. Twinkie meets the girl (Asahi Hirano) who REALLY is perfect for her, but Twinkie is first destined to learn a cruel lesson about being infatuated with a player. It’s a hoot, and there’s not one false note. For all their kooky antics, the kids’ feelings are remarkably authentic.
The entire cast is very good. Sabrina Jie-A-Fa is a charming force of nature as Twinkie. She’s in every scene, and she’s a real talent.
Asahi Hirano and Sabrina Jie-A-Fa in EGGHEAD & TWINKIE. Credit: Olivia Wilson, Courtesy of CanBeDone Films and Orange Cat Films.
Egghead & Twinkie is the first feature for writer-director Sarah Kambe Holland, and it’s an impressive calling card. Egghead & Twinkie is perfectly paced, and Kambe Holland sprinkles in just enough animation to help leaven the angst with the whimsical. Kambe Holland says,
“The kernel of an idea that turned into EGGHEAD & TWINKIE was more of a question: Can I find humor in the coming out process? I was nineteen years old at the time, and I had just come out to my own parents a few months before. The stress of coming out was fresh in my mind, but so was the hilarious awkwardness of it all. I challenged myself to write a short film script about a teenage girl who comes out to her parents, but I was adamant that it wouldn’t be a drama. It would be a comedy, and the message would be one of hope and friendship.“
Of course, given Kambe Holland’s inspiration for the story, Twinkie just doesn’t HAPPEN to be gay or HAPPEN to be Asian-American, but the themes are universal, and Egghead & Twinkie is one of the best coming-of-age films of the decade.
I screened Egghead & Twinkie for its premiere at Cinequest.. After a strong festival run, Egghead & Twinkie is available on VOD, including Amazon, AppleTV and YouTube, beginning today.
Photo caption: Neil Young in COASTAL. Courtesy of SLO Film Fest.
This week on The Movie Gourmet – a new review of the British farce The Trouble with Jessica and extended coverage of the San Luis Obispo Film Festival – a film fest that punches above its weight:
Note that the delightful doc We Want the Funk is available for free on the PBS YouTube channel.
REMEMBRANCE
Val Kilmer in TOMBSTONE.
I’ve been on vacation, so this is my first chance to write about the late Val Kilmer. Kilmer applied his magnetism in unforgettable performances: Iceman in Top Gun, Jim Morrison in The Doors and Batman in Batman Forever. My favorite Val Kilmer turn was as an insouciant Doc Holliday in Tombstone.
Robert De Niro and Vincent Gardenia in BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY.
On April 29, Turner Classic Movies plays the Bang the Drum Slowly from 1973. A worldly MLB pitcher (Michael Moriarity) helps his slow-witted catcher (Robert De Niro), afflicted with aterminal illness, finish the season. It’s a weeper, but a very genuine one. This was the performance that got De Niro noticed. His next three movie roles were Johnny Boy in Mean Streets, Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II and Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver.
Photo caption: Shirley Henderson in THE TROUBLE WITH JESSICA. Courtesy of Music Box Films.
In the dark British farce The Trouble with Jessica, the most despicable, unwelcome guest at a dinner party dies by suicide in the back yard, and the other four diners must dispose of the inconvenient corpse to prevent financial ruin of the hosts. As one might expect, the foursome must run a gauntlet of nosy neighbors, earnest police and horny drunks.
Five very able veteran actors (Shirley Henderson, Alan Tudyk, Olivia Williams, Rupert Sewell and Indira Varma) keep the laughs coming. Henderson, so good in Intermission and the Harry Potter franchise, brilliantly pivots her character from hand-wringing to ruthlessness. Varma does well with the most delicious role, an attractive, talented and successful person who is personally despicable in every way.
Indira Varma in THE TROUBLE WITH JESSICA. Courtesy of Music Box Films.
The story in The Trouble with Jessica follows a familiar premise, and the arc is predictable. But the acting is so vivid that it works as a light diversion.
The Trouble with Jessica was directed by Matt Winn, who co-wrote the screenplay with James Handel.
The Trouble with Jessica is opening this weekend, including at the Laemmle Royal in LA. I screened The Trouble With Jessica for the 2024 Cinequest.
Photo caption: The Gaelic thriller AONTAS. Courtesy of SLO Film Fest.
The 2025 SLO Film Fest opens tomorrow. I’ve screened over a dozen of the features, and here are four that you shouldn’t miss:
Aontas: This clever Irish thriller opens with three women donning balaclavas, brandishing guns and bursting into a credit union, a heist going wrong. Who are they? Who are they to each other? What is their plan? This is not techie Dublin. They are in a Gaelic-speaking western village, already on hard times when a smug sociopath loots the town by closing its last economic engine. In his second narrative feature, director and co-writer Damian McCann brilliantly unspools the story in a reverse chronology. Carrie Crowley and Brid Brennan are excellent as two estranged sisters with a shared horror in their past.
Made in Ethiopia: Businesswoman Motto is the face of a huge, new Chinese industrial park in Ethiopia. How huge? A factory with 3,000 workers is just one of its 130 businesses – and Motto is working on an 18,000-acre expansion. Motto is smart, zealous, charismatic and utterly non-ironic. Along with the other Chinese, she has drunk the Koo-Aid and sees the park as entirely benevolent – bringing large scale employment and investment to a poor and neglected society. A visiting Chinese official exclaims, “it’s just like China used to be!“. All of the workers are Ethiopian, who earn $50 per month in what is essentially a clean and gleaming sweatshop. All of the supervisors are Chinese who have left their families behind in China. The local farmers feel ripped off by their government, and an armed rebellion may be brewing. Apart from a global pandemic, what could possibly go wrong? In their first feature, directors Xinyan Yu and Max Duncan have created a brilliant exploration of clashing cultures and economic imperialism.
The Cigarette Surfboard: To raise consciousness about the environmental impact of cigarette butts (which is really, really bad), an activist builds and displays a functioning surfboard made out of 10,000 discarded cigarette butts picked up on the beach. Backed by a community of surfers, scientists and surfer-scientists, he tours the world, seeking a ban on cigarette filters. Impressively, the Ciggy Board even survives Mavericks. The butt-gathering, surfboard building and local politics happens in Santa Cruz. This doc has racked up awards at many film festivals (even at one in Bulgaria).
Coastal: This film documents Neil Young’s most recent tour, a bus trip down and up the California coast for outdoor concerts in LA, San Diego and Berkeley. Young performs almost all new material, alone onstage except for his guitars, harmonica and a series of ancient pianos and an organ, each with its own back story. But the time on the bus is the most fun, featuring the banter between a wry, comfortable Young (with none of his renowned prickliness) and bus driver/raconteur Jerry Don Borden. This is director Daryl Hannah’s third Neil Young doc, and it’s an unusually intimate and authentic film. Neil Young and Daryl Hannah are expected to appear at the fest’s closing night screening at the Fremont Theater.
Neil Young in COASTAL. Courtesy of SLO Film Fest.
And here are two that I haven’t yet seen yet, but I think they’re pretty good bets:
The Baltimorons: A cracked tooth sends a guy to an emergency dentist and launches a nighttime adventure through Baltimore that could result in romance. We’re expecting The Baltimorons to reflect the sharp comic sensibility of writer-director Jay Duplass, who will appear to receive an award and present this film at the Fremont Theater. With his brother Mark, Duplass wrote and directed Baghead, Cyrus and Jeff Who Lives at Home, and has been busy directing/producing in television and acting (Transparent, Lynn Shelton’s Outside In). This is the first feature he has directed since 2012. At its world premiere just weeks ago, The Baltimorons won the Best Narrative Feature award at SXSW.
Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion: If ever a fashion designer dominated the Hollywood red carpet, it is Bob Mackie. Cher, Carol Burnett, Bernadette Peters, RuPaul and Tom Ford are all featured in this biodoc. After Monday’s screening at the Palm, Bob Mackie will appear to receive the festival’s King Vidor Award at the Hotel San Luis Obispo.
There are plenty more experiences at the fest, including features, workshops and six programs of shorts. Peruse the program and get your tickets at SLO Film Fest. Here are the trailers for Made in Ethiopia and The Cigarette Surfboard.
Photo caption: Surf Nite in SLO. Courtesy of the SLO Film Fest.
This year’s SLO Film Fest, opening April 24, once again presents the richest Surf/Skate program that I’ve ever seen at a mainstream film festival. In fact, the SLO Film Festival dedicates its Friday night and Saturday night showcase screenings at the Fremont Theater to Surf/Skate events – that’s respect. Here are the highlights.
The always popular Surf Nitein SLO features three surfing short films with gnarly waves. Expect the Fremont Theater to be packed again with surfers enjoying drinks in the lobby and the Riff Tide surf band before the screening. The films are:
Making Waves: The Lakey Peterson Story profiles 805-native Lakey Peterson and her experiences on the World Surf League Championship Tour.
Creatures of Habit explores extreme cold water surfing,
NØ WAY involves even colder water and is described as “an antithesis to The Endless Summer“. It follows a band of surfers in the Barents Sea, which is between the northernmost coasts of Norway, Finland and Russia and the Arctic Ocean
Leandre Sanders in SKATEGOAT. Courtesy of SLO Film Fest.
For the second year, SLO Film Fest celebrates the culture and cinema of skateboarding with its Community of Skate program:
The feature film Skategoat profiles Leandre Sanders, whose passion for skateboarding led him to escape a crime-ridden and impoverished environment to become an international skateboarding superstar. Sanders will appear personally, along with the director, Van Alpert.
The short film Against the Current airs the reflections of skate icon and filmmaker Stacy Peralta on his own artistic journey. A surfer and one of the pioneers of modern skateboarding, Peralta, directed Dogtown and Z-boys and Riding Giants, wrote Lords of Dogtown, and founded the Powell Peralta skateboard product company.
A post-screening panel with pro skaters Leandre Sanders and Chico Brenes, skate film director Aaron Meza, and Skategoat director Van Alpert.
An exhibition of skateboard designs and live-screen printing by the San Luis Obispo High School Advanced Graphic Design class.
Photo caption: Jack Johnson in THE CIGARETTE SURFBOARD. Courtesy of SLO Film Fest.
The fest’s program also includes the enviro documentary feature The Cigarette Surfboard. To raise consciousness about the environmental impact of cigarette butts (which is really, really bad), an activist builds and displays a functioning surfboard made out of 10,000 discarded cigarette butts picked up on the beach. Backed by a community of surfers, scientists and surfer-scientists, he tours the world, seeking a ban on cigarette filters. Impressively, the Ciggy Board even survives Mavericks. The butt-gathering, surfboard building and local politics happens in Santa Cruz. This doc has racked up awards at many film festivals (even at one in Bulgaria).
Check out the program and get your tickets at SLO Film Fest. Here are the trailers for Skategoat and The Cigarette Surfboard.
CHEVALIER. Photo courtesy of Strand Releasing and SFFILM.
This week on The Movie Gourmet – The 2025 SFFILM is beginning, so here are my recommendations in Under the Radar at SFFILM. Plus, here are two great choices to watch at home: the engrossing 2002 French drama Man on the Train(Amazon, AppleTV, Fandango, YouTube) and Athina Rachel Tsangari’s sly and pointed exploration of male competitiveness, Chevalier (Amazon, AppleTV, Fandango, YouTube).
Easter always triggers television networks to pull out their Biblical epics. If you’re going to watch just one Sword-and-Sandal classic, I recommend going full tilt with Barrabas, broadcast by Turner Classic Movies on April 20. This 1961 cornball stars Anthony Quinn as the Zelig-like title character.
The story begins with the thief Barabbas avoiding crucifixion when Pontius Pilate swaps him out for Jesus (this part is actually in the Bible). Because the Crucifixion isn’t enough action for a two-hour 17-minute movie, Barabbas is soon sent off as a slave to the salt mines, where he is rescued by a miraculously timely earthquake. He then joins the Roman gladiators, complete with a javelin-firing squad, gets lost in the catacombs and emerges to the Burning of Rome. He has encounters with the Emperor Nero and the Apostle Peter before he converts to Christianity – just in time for the mass crucifixion. Watch for an uncredited Sharon Tate as a patrician in the arena.
Photo caption: Marina Fois in MAGMA. Courtesy of SFFILM.
This year’s San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM) opens on Thursday and runs through April 27. There are plenty of big events, including the opening night Rebuilding starring Josh O’Connor (Challengers, La Chimera,The Crown) and Andre Holland appearing to receive an award and present his latest film Love, Brooklyn. However, don’t overlook the international cinema at SFFILM – here are three gems.
Magma: Marina Fois plays the leader of the scientific team that monitors the active volcano on Guadeloupe. She is seasoned, confident and not prone to panic. The government relies on her to counsel whether and when an upcoming eruption will force evacuation of island residents – and the politicians are not comfortable interpreting her probabilities. While no one wants to endanger lives, everyone remembers an evacuation that went horribly wrong in 1976. So, the stakes are high, and she is the public face of the decision to evacuate or not. When the government overreacts, her job gets much tougher. The clock ticks and the pressure builds in this taut 82-minute thrill ride, as director Cypriot Vial, who co-wrote, unspools the action. The performances by Fois and Theo Christine as her grad student assistant are fantastic. Magma won the SFFILM award for depicting science in a narrative film.
Triumph: Looking for a new role after the fall of communism, Bulgarian army leaders follow a psychic’s advice to burrow into the earth in search of a portal to a space alien’s mothership. If this seems farfetched, look up the historical event called “The Tsarichina Hole” (illustrated in the closing credits). Following the East European filmmaking tradition of exposing the absurdities in communist bureaucracy, directors and co-writers Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov pile on layers of droll hilarity. The psychic gets everyone to adopt pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo like “deactimation“. The army commander in charge brings his disturbed teen daughter (Maria Bakalova of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm), who has her own awakenings and begins to out-psychic the psychic.
Rains Over Babel: In her stunning debut feature, writer-director Gala del Sol takes us into an imagined world of Cali, Columbia, bars connected to the Underworld (not the just criminal underworld), ruled by a sexy loan shark who is the Grim Reaper. Among the denizens are a sleek and smarmy bartender, a prudish preacher, a gangland enforcer who’s been dead for twenty years, a talking salamander and more drag queens than you can shake a stick at. The story, fraught with desperation and Faustian bargains, flies by. Del Sol says she marries magic realism with gritty realism, and Rains Over Babel is visually orgiastic. The intricate production designs of the interiors could be by a demented Wes Anderson. The sound design is jarring and totally original. As an auteur, Gala del Sol is thinking so far outside of the box that you can’t tell that there’s a box.
Maria Bakalova in TRIUMPH. Courtesy of SFFILM and Bankside Films.
.The menu at SFFILM Festival includes 150 films from more than 50 countries. Peruse the program and buy tickets at SFFILM. Here’s the teaser for Rains Over Babel.
Photo caption: Jean Rochefort and Johnny Hallyday in MAN ON THE TRAIN.
The engrossing 2002 French drama Man on the Train centers on portraits of two very different men, and, ultimately, an unexpected male bonding. There’s a thriller ending because each man has been moving to his separate pivotal, life-or-death moment.
The titular character (Johnny Hallyday), whose name we come to learn is Milan, arrives in a small provincial town, and his accommodations fall through. The local literature teacher Manesquier (Jean Rochefort) insists on putting him up for the night. Milan, a very private man of fewer than few words, accepts the favor only reluctantly. He’s a solitary guy anyway, and he’s keeping a low profile because his local business matter is illegal. Manesquier, who lives a lonely bachelor existence, has a lot to say and no one to say it to. He is delighted to have someone to share company, and he is even more fascinated when he discovers that Milan is a career criminal.
Driven by Manesquier’s curiosity, and against Milan’s initial wishes, the two get to know each other. We know that the clock is ticking for one man, but we don’t appreciate that it my be ticking for both.
Man on the Train works so well because of the casting and the performances.
Jean Rochefort was a chameleonic fixture in French cinema. Man on the Train was Rochefort’s 130th movie at age 72, and he would go on to make 36 more. I recently wrote of Rochefort’s performance forty years before as a particularly amoral character with a reptilian smugness in Symphony for a Massacre.
Johnny Hallyday, in contrast, was not most well-known as a screen actor, but as a pop singer, the French Elvis. Ironically, Hallyday’s first film was as a child in the suspense classic Diabolique, which also was his best film; like Elvis Presley, Hallyday dabbled in an indifferent movie career. Halliday made 78 music videos with Johnny Hallyday in the title. He was known as a hard-living tabloid celebrity. When he made Man on the Train, Hallyday was 59 and had some serious mileage on him. Yet, his magnetism is compelling in Man on the Train.
Man on the Train was directed by Patrice Leconte (Monsieur Hire, The Widow of St. Pierre, The Suicide Shop).
Man on a Train can be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV, Fandango and YouTube.
CHEVALIER. Photo courtesy of Strand Releasing and SFFILM.
To celebrate this week’s opening of SFFILM, here’s a gem from the 2016 SFFILM, Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Chevalier, 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. Tsangari is bringing her newest film Harvest, starring Caleb Landry Jones and Harry Melling, to to the 2025 SFFILM.
In Chevalier, six guys are taking a holiday week on a yacht in the Aegean Sea. Each has his own stateroom, and the crew includes a chef. They spend their days scuba diving, jet skiing and the like. After a post-dinner game of charades, one suggests that they play Chevalier, a game about “Who is best overall?”. Of course, men tend to be competitive, and their egos are now at stake. The six guys began appraising each other, and their criteria get more and more absurd. “How many fillings do you have?”
In one especially inspired set piece, the guys race each other to construct IKEA bookcases, which results in five phallic towers on the boat’s deck (and one drooping failure). Naturally, some of the guys are obsessed with their own erections, too.
Athina Rachel Tsangari, director of CHEVALIER . Photo courtesy of SFFILM.
Director Athina Rachel Tsangari is obviously a keen observer of male behavior. Both men and women will enjoy laughing at male behavior taken to extreme. I sure did. Chevalier is perhaps the funniest movie of 2016, and it’s on my list of Best Movies of 2016.
I saw Chevalier at the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM), where I pegged it as the Must See of the fest. (In 2011, Tsangari brought her hilariously offbeat Attenberg to SFFILM.)
Make sure you get the 2015 Greek Chevalier, not the 2023 Hollywood bodice-ripper.
Unfortunately, in the Bay Area, Chevalier only got a blink-and-you’ve-missed-it release in 2016. Chevalier is now available to stream from Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube and Fandango.
