movie gourmet

Cinequest: Ida

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IdaThe Polish drama Ida is a gem – one of the best movies at this year’s Cinequest.  The title character is a novice nun who has been raised in a convent orphanage. Just before she is to take her vows in the early 1960s, she is told for the first time that she has an aunt.  She meets the aunt, and Ida learns that she is the survivor of a Jewish family killed in the Holocaust.  The aunt takes the novice on an odd couple road trip to trace the fate of their family.

The chain-smoking aunt (Agata Kulesza) is a judge and consumes vast quantities of vodka to self-medicate her own searing memories. But the most profound difference isn’t that the aunt is a hard ass and that the nun is prim and devout.  The most important contrast is between the worldly aunt (who has been around the block) and the utterly naive and inexperienced novice.  The young woman must make the choice between a future that follows her upbringing or one which her biological heritage opens to her.  As Ida unfolds, her family legacy makes her choice an informed one.

The novice Ida, played by newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska, is very quiet but anything but fragile.  Saying little, she takes in the world with a penetrating gaze and a just-under-the-surface magnetic strength.

Superbly photographed in black and white, each shot is exquisitely composed.  Watching shot after shot in Ida is like walking through a museum gazing at masterpiece paintings one after the other.  Ida was directed and co-written by Pawel Pawlikowski, who also recently directed the British coming of age story My Summer of Love (with Emily Blunt) and the French thriller The Woman in the Fifth (with Kristin Scott Thomas and Ethan Hawke).  He is an effective and economic story-teller, packing textured characters and a compelling story into an 80 minute film.

Ida is also successful in avoiding grimness. Pawlikowski has crafted a story which addresses the pain of the characters without being painful to watch.  There’s some pretty fun music from a touring pop/jazz combo and plenty of wicked sarcasm from the aunt.

Ida won the International Critics’ Award at the Toronto International Film Festival.  Ida plays just one more time at Cinequest (unless it makes the Encore Day program) – on this Sunday, March 9, at noon.

Cinequest: Finsterworld

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FinsterworldOK, here’s a movie like none you’ve seen before – not that this is always a good thing…The offbeat German film Finsterworld peels back the orderly veneer of German society to reveal odd subcultures (they have Furries and foot fetishists in Germany, too).   Finsterworld (the title presumably punned after its writer director Frauke Finsterwalder) begins and ends with Cat Stevens’ bubbly  The Wind and perks along like a quirky comedy, until it descends into a scathing and pessimistic assessment of German society.

The story follows a pedicurist, a documentation, a traffic cop, a forest hermit, some high school kids, a rich couple and a teacher who are revealed to be interconnected – and all deeply troubled under the surface.  Ranging from quirky to twisted to downright evil, the characters are cursed with collective guilt from You Know What (hint: 1933-1945).

I must point out that there is one unforgettable scene of (all things) cookie-baking – at once appalling, disgusting and very funny.

Finsterworld, which had its North American Premiere at Cinequest, has its moments and never drags.  But engaging with the film depends on whether you’re ready for a cynical and hopeless assessment of today’s Germans.

Cinequest: The Circle Within

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Circle Within

The Circle Within (Icimdeki Cember) is a Turkish fable that turns into a psychological drama. An old peddler trudges between isolated hamlets when a younger man knocks him senseless and draws a circle in the dirt around the fallen old man.  When he awakes, the old man refuses to leave the circle, which is not a surprise to the younger man.  Why is the younger man so cruel?  How the younger man know that the peddler won’t leave the circle?  Who is really trapped?  And why?

The power of the circle stems from the Kurdish religion of yezidism, a non-Islamic minority religion related to Zoroastrianism and Sufism.

Only 72 minutes long, The Circle Within is very slow, and I had trouble staying awake. The Circle Within is not a favorite of mine, but it provides a rare glimpse into yezidism, the Kurds and the Big Sky country of eastern Turkey. The Circle Within’s North American Premiere is March 5, and it plays at Cinequest on March 6, 7, and 10.

Cinequest: The Verdict

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VerdictThe Belgian drama The Verdict (Het Vonnis) won Best Director at the Montreal Film Festival.  A man’s family is destroyed by an especially senseless and brutal crime, and the monstrous perp is freed by an infuriatingly absurd legal technicality.  When he takes vigilante revenge, he is tried for the crime.  Any American jury would free this guy in about eleven seconds, but this is Belgium and the dead perp’s lawyer is passionate about the rule of law, and the cynical prosecutors need to convict the guy to cover up their own incompetence.  So we have a courtroom drama.  The Verdict advocates the political position that the Belgian justice system protects the rights of criminal defendants at the expense of victims – kind of like Dirty Harry (only in Dutch).

As well-crafted as is The Verdict, I think that it will be difficult for American audiences to relate to the political morality play; The Verdict is more accessible as a psychological drama – the portrait of a man who has nothing left to lose, but still grasps for a glimmer of justice.

Cinequest: Class Enemy

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Class EnemyIn the gripping drama Class Enemy (Razredni sovraznik), a high school class is a pretty typical collection of teenagers – some more rebellious than others, some a little more mature – but generally a potent package of hormones and bad judgement.  One boy has just lost his mother and has anger issues, one artistic girl is very sensitive and another boy is just a smug punk.  The class gets a new foreign language teacher, and he is demanding, humorless, abrasive and insensitive.  The kids are already wary of him when they are rocked by a tragedy – and they explode.

Here’s what is special about Class Enemy.  The kids’ reactions vary, but are true to their individual personalities.  The reactions of the kids and adults are completely plausible, and not the least bit contrived.  And the filmmakers avoid taking the side of any kid or any adult – no character is completely correct.  This story could have been turned into a really trite Hollywood movie about kids united against a mean adult authority figure, but the filmmakers trust the audience to accept the nuance and ambiguity that we experience in real life.

Class Enemy, Slovenia’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, is an authentic and taut drama.

DVD/Stream of the Week: Fruitvale Station

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FRUITVALE STATION

Note:  You can see Fruitvale Station on the big screen this week at Cinequest.  It will be introduced by LA Times and NPR Morning Edition movie critic Kenneth Turan on Saturday, March 8 at the San Jose Rep.

Here’s number 8 on my Best Movies of 2013. The emotionally powerful Fruitvale Station explores the humanity behind the news. If, as I do, you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you know what happened to Oscar Grant. Returning to the East Bay after 2008 New Year’s Eve revelries in San Francisco, the unarmed 22-year-old was handcuffed and lying on his stomach when he was mortally wounded by a transit cop’s gunshot. Oscar Grant was African-American. The transit cop was white. Multiple cell phone videos of the incident went viral on New Year’s Day. Fruitvale Station opens with one of those shaky videos.

But the beauty and strength of this impressive film is that Fruitvale Station is not about the incident and its political fallout – it’s about the people involved, in their workaday and familial roles to which all of us can relate. It follows the fictionalized life of Oscar Grant as he lives out what he doesn’t know is his last day.

Writer-director Ryan Coogler’s Oscar Grant is a complete and textured character. Oscar is a charming guy, a loving father and the fun dad/uncle who children love roughhousing with. He’s remarkably unreliable as a boyfriend, son and employee. He’s done a stretch in San Quentin, and he’s got a temper. He’s capable of random acts of kindness. He’s a complete package of decency, fecklessness, irresponsibility and possibilities. Would he have turned his life around if he hadn’t been at Fruitvale Station that night? We’ll never know. And that’s the tragedy laid bare by Fruitvale Station.

Although it’s a tragedy with some heartbreaking moments, Fruitvale Station isn’t a downer – it’s too full of humanity for that. Neither is it a political screed; Coogler lets the facts speak for themselves and the audience to draw its conclusions.

The acting is first-rate, especially Michael B. Jordan as Oscar, Melonie Diaz as his girlfriend and the great Octavia Spencer as his mom. Equally, important, the supporting cast is just as authentic.

It’s a stunning debut feature for 27-year-old filmmaker Ryan Coogler, from whom much is now expected. (Coogler is also an African-American from the East Bay who is roughly the same age as Oscar Grant.)

Fruitvale Station was justifiably honored at both the Sundance and Cannes film festivals. Fruitvale Station is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon, Vudu, Google Play, YouTube and Xbox Video.

Best Bets at Cinequest

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HEAVENLY SHIFT
HEAVENLY SHIFT

17 movies to watch for at Cinequest:

Most likely to be crowd pleasers:

  • The Grand Seduction: In Cinequest’s opening night film, Brendan Gleeson (In Bruges, The Guard, The General, Braveheart) and Gordon Pinsent (Away from Her) play isolated Canadians try to snooker a young doctor (Taylor Kitsch of Friday Night Lights) into settling in their podunk village.
  • Friended to Death: Bromantic comedy about a jerk who fakes his own death to see how many of his social media “friends” will attend his funeral.  Very funny.
  • Words and Pictures: Romantic comedy starring Clive Owen and the ever-radiant Juliette Binoche as sparring teachers.
  • Dom Hemingway: Jude Law and Richard E. Grant star as two cheesy British hoods in a reportedly funny and fast-paced crime caper. Opens widely in theaters in April.
  • Unforgiven: the Japanese remake of Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning Unforgiven  starring Ken Watanabe (Inception, The Last Samurai, Letters from Iwo Jima).   Since Clint’s career was boosted by a remake of Yojimbo (A Fistful of Dollars), it’s fitting that his Unforgiven is remade  as a samurai film.
  • Fruitvale Station: the masterpiece debut from Bay Area filmmaker Ryan Coogler, introduced by LA Times and NPR Morning Edition movie critic Kenneth Turan.

Most promising foreign entries:

  • Ida: This Polish story of a young nun who learns that she is the survivor of a Jewish family killed in the Holocaust won the International Critics’ Award at the Toronto International Film Festival.
  • The Verdict:  This Belgian drama won Best Director at the Montreal Film Festival.  I’ll be writing about The Verdict early this week.
  • The Illiterate:  Paulina Garcia, the star of the popular Gloria, stars in this metaphorical emotional Chilean drama.
  • Class Enemy: You’ll be rocked by this classroom drama, Slovenia’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.  I’ll be writing about Class Enemy early this week.
  • Heavenly Shift: A hilariously dark (very dark) Hungarian comedy about a rogue ambulance crew with a financial incentive to deliver its patients dead on arrival.  I howled at Heavenly Shift, and I’ll be writing about it early this week.
  • Zoran: My Nephew the Idiot: OK, this Italian comedy has a great title, and it was a hit at the Venice Film Festival.  I’ll be writing about Zoran before its US Premiere.

Documentaries:

  • Teenage: Great subject material: chronicling that 20th century American phenomenon – the evolution of “the teenager”.
  • Sex(ed): The Movie: Sampling Sex Ed instructional films from 1910 through today.  Should be a howl.  May be thoughtful, too.  World Premiere at Cinequest.

Something you haven’t seen before:

  • Happenings on the Eighth Day: This is a pure art film, juxtaposing the attempts to create art against forces seeking to censor or obliterate it.  Filmed in the Bay Area by Iranian filmmakers. World Premiere at Cinequest.
  • The Circle Within: A Turkish fable that turns into a psychological drama.  Not a favorite of mine, but it provides a rare glimpse into the Kurdish religion of yezidism.

Here’s the Cinequest program and ticket information.

Weighing in on the Oscars

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Jared Leto and Matthew McConaughey in DALLAS BUYERS CLUB
Jared Leto and Matthew McConaughey in DALLAS BUYERS CLUB

Yeesh, what a bore – and I used to LIVE for the annual Oscar show.

There were heartfelt and classy moments from Jared Leto, Lupita Nyong’o and Bill Murray.  Jamie Foxx added some unscripted foolery and Best Song winners Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez delivered a clever rhyming acceptance.  That was it – five worthwhile moments in a three-hour drudge through self-congratulation and scary cosmetic surgery.

How does one celebrate our most vivid, immediate and accessible art form and make our eyes glaze over?  Apparently, the most effective means is to devote a fifth of the telecast to live musical performances, mostly from the worthless Best Song category.  This show is supposed to be about cinema, not the mediocre songs that dot a few of the films.  Wasting yet more screen time with Twitter jokes didn’t help.  They’ve also sucked the pathos out of the In Memoriam montage, which has generally been my favorite part of the show.

As to the winners themselves? They all seemed deserving to me.  I would have preferred The Act of Killing to win Best Documentary and Before Midnight to win Best Original Screenplay, but there weren’t any forehead-slapping boners this year.  12 Years a Slave is undeniably a fine film, but I don’t know many folks who will actually ENJOY the two-and-a-half hours of unremitting brutality before Brad Pitt shows up in an Amish beard.

Bottom line: good year for the awards and bad year for the award show.

Cinequest’s Charlie Cockey: The Man Who Goes to Film Festivals

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Charlie Cockey (photo courtesy Around the World in 14 Films)
Charlie Cockey (photo courtesy Around the World in 14 Films)

Charlie Cockey is at a film festival.  (Actually, right now he’s probably traveling between the Berlin International Film Festival and Cinequest.)   But, whenever you read this, the odds are that he’s sampling cinema at a film fest somewhere.

Cockey, the international film programmer for San Jose’s Cinequest, attends twelve or more international film festivals each year.  He never misses the great Berlin and Venice fests, and also makes the rounds of the European national film showcases in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and other countries.

Cockey is Cinequest’s film scout extraordinaire and responsible for the most singular films on Cinequest’s program, the movies unlike any you have seen before.   In my recent Why Cinequest is essential, I highlighted three of his gems from last year’s Cinequest:  the German dark comedy Oh Boy (the debut from talented writer-director Jan Ole Gerster), the absurdist Czech comedy Polski Film and the offbeat The Dead Man and Being Happy, with its gloriously wacky road trip through the backwaters of Argentina.  (My favorite Charlie Cockey selection is the unsettling 2011 Slovak Visible World – which is creepy even for a voyeur film.)  Cockey found 12 of the films in last year’s Cinequest, and has brought as many as 17.

Cockey, who lives in the Czech Republic’s second city Brno, speaks English, Czech, German, French, Italian and Romanian.  That’s helpful, but the national film festivals usually have English-subtitled “festival version” screenings for distributors and festival programmers (plus non-subtitled screenings for the local public).

How did an American guy come to live in Brno?  “A Czech woman tied my shoelaces together,” Cockey replies.  Before he had acquired his Czech language fluency, he was sitting in a darkened Czech theater and was surprised to see no subtitles on the film.  Needing to ask the woman next to him for help with the translation, he touched her hand and sparks flew, or at least one literal spark from static electricity.  Fourteen years later, the two are still partners.

What are Charlie Cockey’s tips for sampling movies at a festival? Like any festival-goer, he chooses screenings based on the buzz, the director and sometimes a gut feeling.  He doesn’t mind bad movies because “if a film’s not working, I leave”.  He adds, “The mediocre ones are tough because you need to stick it out”.

First and foremost, Charlie Cockey is a man who devours culture in any form – books, music, cinema, food – with a voracious but discerning appetite.  Cockey’s journey brought him from the East Coast and Idaho to 1960s San Francisco as a musician and as a road manager for a band.  He opened San Francisco’s first science fiction bookstore (Fantasy, Etc) and ran it for the last quarter of the 20th Century.  “There are no accidents,” he says.  “Only surprises.”

Extremely generous with his knowledge and taste, Cockey loves to share the most precisely individual recommendations of books and movies.  He relishes the memory of helping a boy – dragged into Fantasy, Etc by his parents – discover a genre of literature (in this case fantasy) that spawned a new love of reading.  And he couldn’t resist quizzing me about my interests and then recommending an extremely obscure collection of letters from a German intelligence official in WWII – a book that I NEVER would have otherwise considered but which turned out to be a great read.

Here’s how to experience Cinequest the Charlie Cockey way: “Find films as you live life – by being open, prepared, ready, flexible and friendly”.

Follow The Movie Gourmet on Twitter for my continuing coverage of the 2014 Cinequest.

Movies to See Right Now

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GLORIA
GLORIA

The Chilean drama Gloria is about an especially resilient 58-year-old woman.  The Palestinian Omar is a heartbreaking romance inside a tense thriller; Omar is nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.

My DVD/Stream of the Week is the flawless true story thriller Captain Phillips, my choice as the best Hollywood movie of the year. It’s now available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

In theaters, you can still find Oscar nominees Nebraska, American Hustle and Her, which all made my Best Movies of 2013. I also strongly recommend Best Picture nominees The Wolf of Wall Street and Philomena.  Dallas Buyers Club, with its splendid performances by Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto, is formulaic but still a pretty good watch.

I saw this year’s Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts and was disappointed.  There was nothing to match recent gems like The God of Love or Curfew.  I liked the British short about a particularly bored and malevolent God masquerading as a convict, but that 13 minutes didn’t justify the two hours that I had invested.  A 30-minute Spanish film about child soldiers in Africa was to excruciatingly brutal to justify the trite attempt at a redemptive payoff.  (I haven’t seen the Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts, but I have heard good things about that program.)

Check out my first post on Cinequest – and follow me on Twitter for my Cinequest coverage.

I love 31 Days of Oscar, Turner Classic Movies magical month of Oscar-nominated films. On March 1, TCM is showing all five Best Picture nominees from 1967: The winner was In the Heat of the Night, which I can’t imagine holds up as well today as The Graduate or the groundbreaking Bonnie and Clyde. The other nominees were Doctor Doolittle and the now embarrassingly dated Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.