The San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILMFestival) – a Can’t Miss for Bay Area film fans – has just begun, and here’s my festival preview.
My DVD/Stream of the week is my favorite from last year’s San Francisco International Film Festival and one of the best films of the year, the Greek comedy Chevalier, a sly and pointed exploration of male competitiveness. Chevalier is now available to rent on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Netflix Instant, Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
In theaters this week:
I liked the gloriously pulpy revenge thriller The Assignmentwith Michelle Rodriguez, the toughest of the Tough Chicks, playing both the Before and After roles in a hostile gender re-assignment surgery. The Assignment opens nationally in theaters today – but very in few theaters. It’s available now on Ultra VOD and YouTube.
The little British drama The Sense of an Ending, with Jim Broadbent, Harriet Walter and Charlotte Rampling, is my current top choice.
Bev Powley is very good in the agreeable comedy Carrie Pilby.
If you’re looking for an unchallenging comedy, then The Last Word, with the force of nature named Shirley MacLaine, is for you.
Kristen Stewart is excellent in Personal Shopper, a murky mess of a movie; don’t bother.
On April 8, Turner Classic Movies presents what is perhaps the best of director Anthony Mann’s “psychological Westerns”, Winchester ’73(1950) with James Stewart. Winchester ’73 taps the quest and revenge genres, and it has the requisite Western Indian battle and climactic shootout. Westerns were oft about Good versus Bad, but Mann makes Jimmy Stewart’s character in Winchester ’73 much more complex and morally ambiguous – and he has what we now call “unresolved issues”. The bad guys are Dan Duryea at his oiliest and Stephen McNally at his most brutish. The 29-year-old Shelly Winters finds herself as the object of several characters’ desires. Millard Mitchell is perfect as Jimmy’s sidekick. One of my favorite character actors, Jay C. Flippen, shows up as a cavalry sergeant.
And here’s a wonderfully fun period romp: TCM airs Richard Lester’s hilariously broad The Three Musketeers on April 9.
Millard Mitchell and James Stewart in WINCHESTER ’73Stephen McNally, Shelly Winters and Dan Duryea in WINCHESTER ’73WINCHESTER ’73
In the gloriously pulpy revenge thriller The Assignment, a vengeful plastic surgeon (Sigourney Weaver) captures a hit man (Michelle Rodriguez) and performs sexual reassignment surgery on him, releasing a new hit woman (also Michelle Rodriguez) into the world – and lethal mayhem ensues.
The Assignment comes from the master of the genre thriller, director Walter Hill (The Warriors, The Long Riders, Southern Comfort, 48 Hrs.). Hill is a story-teller who enjoys a brisk pace, and The Assignment flies along its 95 minutes.
Michelle Rodriguez, the toughest of the Tough Chicks, nails the hit man/hit woman roles. She plays the male character very naturally (with a little CGI help in a glimpse of his naked frontside). When the protagonist becomes a woman, Rodriguez keeps her eyes very male – and very pissed off. Her performance at the moment of gender reveal is perfect.
Sigourney Weaver had the audience roaring at her character’s narcissism. Weaver and Tony Shaloub successfully pull of the highly stylized genre dialogue. Anthony LaPaglia is excellent as a mid-level gangster.
Don’t expect Brokeback Mountain for the trans set. This is, after all, an involuntary gender reassignment. The main character is a man who is turned biologically into a woman, while still identifying internally as a man. The gender reassignment is a plot device, and it is a hostile act, not a means of self-fulfillment.
75-year-old Walter Hill was present at the Cinequest screening. Costing only $2.8 million, The Assignment was shot in Vancouver over only 25 days. Hill said that he was “wanted to do a neo-noir comic booky kind of thing” (which well-describes The Assignment). The film was adapted from Hill’s graphic novel, which has been out in France since last year; it will be released in the US before the end of March. Hill expects a sequel to the graphic novel.
The Cinequest audience – by no means the usual action thriller crowd – reacted very favorably to The Assignment. Shown at Cinequest with the title (re)Assignment, this film is being released with the title The Assignment. It’s available now on Ultra VOD and YouTube. It will opens nationally tomorrow, but only on 30 screens. I’ll let you know when it becomes more widely available – because I enjoyed it!
This year’s San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILMFestival) – the 60th edition – opens on April 5 and runs through April 19. As always, it’s a Can’t Miss for Bay Area movie fans. This year’s program is especially loaded. Here are some enticing festival highlights:
The indie smash Patti Cake$, which rocked Sundance and SXSW.
A screening of Citizen Kane with William “Will” Randolph Hearst III discussing his family.
James Ivory (Remains of the Day, Howards End) will receive an award and present a 30th anniversary screening of his Maurice. (Ivory isn’t British, he was born in Berkeley – who knew?)
Noted film historian David Thomson will discuss what really frightens him in that San Francisco treat, Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
Speaking of Hitchcock, there’s also the new documentary 78/52on the 78 set ups and the 52 cuts in Psycho’s iconic shower scene. Talk about a Deep Dive…
Ethan Hawke gets an award and presents his new film, Maudie.
Prolific writer John Ridley (12 Years a Slave and a multitude of TV show) introduces his new miniseries Guerilla.
Amir Bar-Lev (the Tillman Story) will present his documentary on the Grateful Dead Long Strange Trip (but, just like a Dead concert, it’s four hours long).
That roguish 72-year-old sex symbol Sam Elliott will attend a screening of his new movie, The Hero.
A critical favorite, director James Gray (The Lovers, The Immigrant, The Yards) will attend the screening of his newest film, The Lost City of Z.
The new film from the Dardennes brothers (The Son, The Kid with a Bike, Two Days One Night), The Unknown Woman.
The world premiere of the experimental film Discreet from Bay Area writer-director Travis Mathews. I’ve seen it, and it’s strangely compelling.
The latest from Oscar-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple (Harlan County USA, Miss Sharon Jones!) – This Is Everything: Gigi Gorgeous.
Sieranevada, the latest from Romanian director Cristi Puilu (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu).
PATTI CAKE$ photo courtesy of SFFILM
The calendar of this year’s festival includes a rich program of indies, documentaries and foreign films. Among the foreign choices, I liked the little Irish self-discovery movie A Date for Mad Mary.
And, I don’t know anything about this film, but my favorite movie title in the fest is Donkeyote.
The 60th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILMFestival) opens this Wednesday. Here’s SFFILMFestival’s information on the program, the calendar and tickets and passes.
Throughout SFFILMFestival, I’ll be linking more festival coverage to my SFFILMFestival 2017 page, including both features and movie recommendations. Follow me on Twitter for the very latest coverage.
The San Francisco International Film Festival opens tomorrow night, so this week’s video pick is my favorite film from the 2016 SFIFF. One of the best films of the year, Chevalier is 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 is also now the Most Overlooked Movie of 2016, and I’m hoping that its popularity explodes now that it’s available on video.
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.
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 – So Far.
I saw Chevalier at the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF), where I pegged it as the Must See of the fest. (In 2011, Tsangari brought her hilariously offbeat Attenberg to SFIFF.) Unfortunately, in the Bay Area, Chevalier only got a blink-and-you’ve-missed-it release in June. Chevalier is now available to rent on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Netflix Instant, Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Athina Rachel Tsangari, director of CHEVALIER . Photo courtesy of San Francisco Film Society
I’m getting ready to cover the San Francisco International Film Festival, which opens this coming Wednesday, April 5 and running through April 19. I expect to publish my festival preview on Sunday. In the mean time:
The little British drama The Sense of an Ending, with Jim Broadbent, Harriet Walter and Charlotte Rampling, is my current top choice.
Bev Powley is very good in the agreeable comedy Carrie Pilby.
If you’re looking for an unchallenging comedy, then The Last Word, with the force of nature named Shirley MacLaine, is for you.
Kristen Stewart is excellent in Personal Shopper, a murky mess of a movie; don’t bother.
By all means, avoid the epically bad epic The Ottoman Lieutenant, so bad that it provokes unintended audience giggles and guffaws.
My DVD/Stream pick of the past two weeks has been the emotionally devastating Manchester by the Sea, which won Oscars for Casey Affleck (Best Actor) and by Kenneth Lonergan (Best Original Screenplay). Manchester by the Sea is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
On April 2 on Turner Classic Movies: The Blue Gardeniapresents a 1953 view of date rape, with lecherous Raymond Burr getting Anne Baxter likkered up into a blackout drunk with Polynesian Pearl Divers. There’s a very nice twist on the whodunit: when she wakes up, she doesn’t remember killing him, but he sure is dead. There’s even a cameo performance by Nat King Cole. Also on April 2, TCM brings us The 400 Blows, François Truffaut’s 1959 explosion into leadership of the French New Wave. The main character is modeled after Truffaut’s own teenage years. It’s a great film, and the final freeze-frame is iconic.
The title character in the agreeable misfit comedy Carrie Pilby (Bel Powley) is literally a genius, a girl with such high intelligence that she enrolled at Harvard at age 14. That experience proved to be better for her intellectual development than for her emotional development. Now she’s 19, a year out of college and holed up in her Manhattan apartment pretending that she’s anti-social because no one is smart enough to engage with her. She emerges only to see her therapist (Nathan Lane), who assigns her some tasks to draw her out, and comic adventures ensue.
Carrie sequentially encounters three dreamy-looking guys and all of the male characters except one are very sensitive. But Carrie Pilby isn’t one of those Chick Flicks that men won’t enjoy.
Powley is very good at making the audience relate to someone by definition very unlike us. She has mastered the comic take and has excellent timing.
I watched Carrie Pilby at a Cinequest screening with director Susan Johnson. Johnson says that the source material, a popular novel, “was about not judging a book by its cover”. She continued, “Think about your own journey and not judging others – that’s kind of deep for a comedy”. Johnson, who shot the film in only 20 days, said that her favorite scene was the prayer scene.
Carrie Pilby is an enjoyable comedy. It opens theatrically on March 31, on VOD on April 4 and will be on Netflix in September.
Kristen Stewart’s brilliant performance isn’t enough to save Olivier Assaya’s murky French drama Personal Shopper. Stewart plays a woman who is working as a personal shopper for an obnoxious celebrity, but she really identifies as a medium. She is grieving her twin brother, who died a few months before. He was also a medium, and the two had resolved that the first to die would contact the survivor from Beyond. As Personal Shopper opens, she is walking around her brother’s house and muttering his name without turning on any lights. Does she find him? Does she find something even scarier? Do we care?
Assayas takes Personal Shopper bouncing along between movie genres – from Ghost Story to a moment of Horror, then to Mystery Thriller and finally Ghost Story again. Some critics have credited him with a highly original approach to an exploration of grief. But, no, Personal Shopper is just a mess. Grief has shocked the main character into a malaise, but Personal Shopper keeps changing its focus to her fears and her sexuality. If you want to see a good movie about grief, try Manchester by the Sea, Five Nights in Maine or Rabbit Hole.
Near the beginning of Personal Shopper, there’s some very clumsy exposition – as if a character were reading from the Wikipedia page on spiritualism. The big mystery in Personal Shopper is who is sending her texts, and that question is never resolved. I’m usually OK with ambiguous movie endings, but this would have bothered me if I had cared.
Nonetheless, Kristin Stewart is superb. Stewart seems completely natural when her character feels deep terror, grief or fascination and also when her emotions are stunted or repressed and her affect is blunted. There’s a moment of auto-eroticism that is very, well, erotic. Stewart holds our attention in every scene. She’s so damned watchable that we always want to know what her character is thinking and about to do.
Stewart may be good, but Personal Shopper is not worth 105 minutes of anyone’s life.
Casey Affleck and Lucas Hedges in MANCHESTER BY THE SEA
The powerfully affecting drama Manchester by the Seacenters on the New England janitor Lee (Casey Affleck), who must take over care of his dead brother’s teenage son Patrick (Lucas Hedges). The searing performance by Affleck and the masterful story-telling by writer-director Kenneth Lonergan combine to make Manchester by the Sea a Must See and one the year’s very best films.
As the movie opens, we see Lee dealing with a series of apartment tenants, and we learn that he is emotionally isolated, and extremely reluctant to become entangled in any human relationships, even with willing females. Underneath, he is a witty guy, but he masks that with a stoic veneer. We also see that he is suppressing a rage that occasionally erupts.
Why is he like this? It’s hinted that there has been a tragedy for which he feels guilty. Mid-movie, that tragedy is depicted, and it’s hard to imagine a worse one. This is a man who, faced with an event that cannot be undone, has been disabled by grief and guilt. It becomes clear why he is so reluctant to take over the role as his nephew’s guardian.
Patrick has all the typical willfulness and teenage thirst for independence – all while expecting Lee to chauffeur him around his rich teen social life. Any teen is disaffected to some extent, but Patrick’s troubled mother has not been in the picture, and now his father has died. Lee is Patrick’s favorite uncle, and he is hurt and confused by Lee’s reaction, and he doesn’t understand why Lee is unwilling to drop everything to parent Patrick.
The friction between the two is remarkably realistic. Both Patrick and Lee have quick, sarcastic tongues, which make their scenes pretty funny, too. In fact, Manchester by the Sea is filled with humorous moments. There’s that awkwardness: how are you supposed to act when there is a death in the family – and yet something funny happens? Lonergan has an eye for the little things that go wrong in life: when the decedent’s last effects are misplaced, when the gurney won’t fold down to fit into the ambulance, when the cell phone buzzes in the funeral. And when the most horrible tragedy is marked by a forlorn plastic bag of junk food and beer.
A family death is naturally dramatic, and Lonergan uses this event to explore intense feelings of grief, guilt, responsibility and resentment. Absolutely every character acts like people do in real life. The result is a remarkable sense of authenticity.
Affleck has produced some of the greatest recent screen acting performances, in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Gone Baby Gone and Ain’t Those Bodies Saints. This performance is a career topper, a surefire Oscar-winner that will lead his obit. Just note how Affleck’s Lee answers a bad news phone call and the way he wordlessly eyeballs his ex-wife’s new husband.
Young Lucas Hedges steps up to play against Affleck, and Hedges makes his Patrick completely compelling and believable. Hedge’s Patrick is smart, wounded, insecure, needy, prideful and a smart mouth that we like being around.
As befits a Lonergan movie, all of the acting in Manchester By the Sea is top rate. The final scene between Michelle Williams and Affleck is utterly heartbreaking. I particularly liked C.J. Wilson as the family’s partner in their fishing boat.
As good as it is, Manchester by the Sea is not for everyone. The Wife and her sister had a meh reaction because they weren’t absorbed by Lee’s lack of apparent affect and didn’t think that the story’s arc paid off.
This is the third movie directed by the major American playwright Kenneth Lornergan. who has directed three movies. The first was another actor’s showcase, the excellent 2000 drama You Can Count on Me with Laura Linney as a well-grounded single mom and Mark Ruffalo as her reliably unreliable brother.
Lonergan made his second film, the near-masterpiece Margaret, in 2007. The studio fought with Lonergan over the film’s editing, cut it over his objection, and issued it to theaters in a blink-and-you’ve-missed-it release in 2011. In 2012, a DVD was released with both the studio’s 150-minutes version and with Lonergan’s preferred 186-minute cut. I own the DVD, and have seen the director’s cut. It’s an amazing film, and there’s an even better (shorter) one in there.
You Can Count on Me addresses responsibility, and Margaret deals with the consequences of an act that can’t be undone. Manchester by the Sea deals with these themes even more successfully and evocatively.
Manchester by the Sea is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Michelle Williams and Casey Affleck in MANCHESTER BY THE SEA
Charlotte Rampling and Jim Broadbent in THE SENSE OF AN ENDING
Okay, I’m exhausted from Cinequest, and the Oscar movies have drifted out of the theaters for the most part, so here we go:
The little British drama The Sense of an Ending, with Jim Broadbent, Harriet Walter and Charlotte Rampling, is the best movie opening this week.
If you’re looking for an unchallenging comedy, then The Last Word, with the force of nature named Shirley MacLaine, is for you.
By all means, avoid the epically bad epic The Ottoman Lieutenant, so bad that it provokes unintended audience giggles and guffaws.
The landmark 1967 US Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia overturned state laws that banned interracial marriage. My DVD/Stream of the week, Lovingis the story of the real couple behind that ruling, and it’s a satisfying love story of two modest people who would rather not have been forced to make history. You can watch it on DVD from Netflix and Redbox or stream it from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Turner Classic Movies presents the political suspense drama Seven Days in May and Samuel Fuller’s gloriously pulpy psych ward expose, Shock Corridor, on March 18 and the Orson Welles film noir classic Touch of Evil on March 22.
The veteran actor Jim Broadbent paints a remarkable portrait of Tony, the main character in the British drama The Sense of an Ending, and he makes it look easy. Retired and long-divorced, Tony is entirely comfortable is a solitary life that he has chosen, perhaps not voluntarily, by being so damn selfish and curmudgeonly. In some very funny moments, we learn that he does not suffer fools. An incident revives a brief period of passion in his youth, and he can’t let it go (although we know that he really should). As he plunges on, he unpeels the mystery, layer by layer, and discovers more emotional turmoil than he is prepared to deal with. He learns that we cannot always find closure, especially if it depends on the feelings of others and acts and words with cannot be undone.
As good as Broadbent is, the best scenes are with Tony’s ex-wife (Harriet Walker – who really shines in this film) and the romantic interest of his youth (the irreplaceable Charlotte Rampling).
You are forgiven if, after reading a capsule or watching the trailer, you think that The Sense of an Ending is another 45 Years; after all both focus on a retired British gentleman whose life is rocked by an unexpected call or letter and both feature stunning performances by Charlotte Rampling. But it is not. 45 Years meditates on the power and durability of memories and then shifts into a study of relationships; we see intimacy without the sharing of all truths, and see how the truth can be toxic and destructive. In contrast, The Sense of an Ending explores how emotional detachment is very protective, and what happens when one ventures into emotional vulnerability. 45 Years was Charlotte Rampling’s movie, while she has only a couple of brief, although hard-hitting, scenes in The Sense of an Ending.
The Sense of an Ending played at Cinequest before its theatrical release and was well-received by the audience. I like The Sense of an Ending more than does the critical consensus, perhaps because it’s the best new movie widely released in the Bay Area this week.
