movie gourmet

LINOLEUM: highly original and sweet

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Jim Gaffigan and Rhea Seehorn in LINOLEUM. Courtesy of Blue Fox Entertainment.

Colin West’s Linoleum, a gentle story of a lovable loser with a nose-diving kid’s science TV show, is superficially about the guy’s eccentric attempt to build a real rocket in his garage; but it’s really three love stories – or are they one love story? Although West peppers some clues throughout, it’s not until the final act that the audience connects the dots about what is going on. Linoleum is hard to review – or even describe – without spoilers, but let’s just say that it is a highly original and sweet film.

Our TV host Cameron (Jim Gaffigan) is an astronomer who seems overqualified for his charmingly corny children’s show. He takes the science seriously, but not himself. Cameron is the kind of affable guy who always gets run over by the more self-interested among us.

Cameron is married to Erin (Rhea Seehorn) a smarty pants aeronautical engineer who is direcying programs at a provicial air and space museum. Like Cameron, she started out as a whiz kid and is wondering. Unlike Cameron, who is placidly content, she is wondering how she got stuck in the bush leagues. Erin’s dissatisfaction with her career, and with Cameron’s lack of ambition, is threatening their marriage.

The teenage girl in the story meets the new boy in high school, and they tentatively stumble into a guileless friendship. This thread in Linoleum is especially charming.

The comedian Jim Gaffigan has shown that he’s also a fine actor (Light from Light), and Rhea Seehorn (Better Call Saul, Veep) is one of our finest TV actors. Both are very good in Linoleum.

The first two acts of Linoleum are fairly easy-to-follow, with a couple small mysteries that could be imagined or hallucinated. The third act, which I will not spoil, becomes more confusing until West connects the threads of the story and we understand what we’ve been watching ll along. Viewers who need linear stories may be frustrated, but the payoff is splendid.

I saw Linoleum at the opening night of Cinequest, with Gaffigan and West in attendance.

The Movie Gourmet Is Back with Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Aubrey Plaza and Alison Brie in SPIN ME ROUND, Courtesy of IFC Films.

The Movie Gourmet is back – the site was down while my web host and I sorted out a spammer attack. Thanks for your concern.

Now I’ve got some catching up to do – watch for my belated Cinequest wrap-up and some other reviews. of new movies.

Note that two delightful comedies have moved from theaters to AppleTV: Spin Me Round and My Donkey, My Lover and I.

CURRENT MOVIES

WATCH AT HOME

The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:

THE GATEKEEPERS
  • The Gatekeepers: winning tactics make for a losing strategy. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • The Outfit: no one is just what they seem to be. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Colma: The Musical: a refreshing hoot. Amazon, Vudu, YouTube.
  • The Worst Person in the World: funny, poignant, original and profoundly authentic. Amazon, Apple, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Heartworn Highways: like desperados waitin’ for a train. AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, Showtime.
  • Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel: the artsy and the quirky. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Everything Everywhere All at Once: often indecipherable and mostly dazzling. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Jockey: he finally grapples with himself. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • The Visitor: self-isolation no longer. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • The East: how do we punish corporate crime? HBO, Amazon, AppleTV, redbox.
  • The Bra: Just your average silent Azerbaijani comedy. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Project Nim: a chimp learns the foibles of humans. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube.
  • Bombshell: The Hedy Lamar Story: the world’s most beautiful woman and her secrets. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, KINO Now.
  • Auggie: Who do you see when you put on the glasses? Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
Townes Van Zandt (right) with Sylvester Washington in HEARTWORN HIGHWAYS. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Heston Horwin and Jennifer Levinson (center) in TRUST. World premiere tonight at Cinequest. Courtesy of Menemsha Films.

This week, The Movie Gourmet focuses on Cinequest, Silicon Valley’s own major film festival – back in person and now underway.

There’s also a new review of The Outfit, a satisfying crime thriller from earlier this year and a reminder about the charming documentary The Automat, which is now available to stream.

REMEMBRANCES

Director Wolfgang Peterson made a harrowing submarine masterpiece, Das Boot, one of the great war (and anti-war) movies. Then got to make lots of big Hollywood action epics, none of which were as good as Das Boot.

Actor Roger E. Mosley is best known for his 158 episodes as the helicopter pilot on Magnum, P.I. and over 50 guest appearances in tv series. As the title character in Leadbelly and in many TV shows, he paved the way for more positive and empathetic depictions of African-American characters. He also worked in one of best-ever TV movies, The Jericho Mile, in one of the best sports movies, Semi-Tough, and as Sonny Liston (with Muhammad Ali himself) in The Greatest.  

Although her body of work was overshadowed by her off-screen personal life, actor Anne Heche was superb in Wag the Dog. That was one of a remarkable string of Big Movies in 1997 and 1998: Donnie Brasco, Volcano, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Six Days Seven Nights, Return to Paradise and Brian De Palma’s Psycho.

CURRENT MOVIES

Wes Studi and Dale Dickey in A LOVE SONG. Courtesy of Bleecker Street.

WATCH AT HOME

L.A. Renigen in COLMA : THE MUSICAL. Courtesy of Greenrocksolid.

The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:

  • Colma: The Musical: a refreshing hoot. Amazon, Vudu, YouTube.
  • The Outfit: no one is just what they seem to be. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • The Worst Person in the World: funny, poignant, original and profoundly authentic. Amazon, Apple, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Heartworn Highways: like desperados waitin’ for a train. AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, Showtime.
  • Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel: the artsy and the quirky. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • The Worst Person in the World: funny, poignant, original and profoundly authentic. Amazon, Apple, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Heartworn Highways: like desperados waitin’ for a train. AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, Showtime.
  • Everything Everywhere All at Once: often indecipherable and mostly dazzling. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Jockey: he finally grapples with himself. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • The Visitor: self-isolation no longer. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • The Bra: Just your average silent Azerbaijani comedy. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • The East: how do we punish corporate crime? HBO, Amazon, AppleTV, redbox.
  • Project Nim: a chimp learns the foibles of humans. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube.
  • Bombshell: The Hedy Lamar Story: the world’s most beautiful woman and her secrets. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, KINO Now.
  • The Gatekeepers: winning tactics make for a losing strategy. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Auggie: Who do you see when you put on the glasses? Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.

SPIN ME ROUND: unpretentious and delightful

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Aubrey Plaza and Alison Brie in SPIN ME ROUND, Courtesy of IFC Films.

In the unpretentious and delightful comedy Spin Me Round, Alison Brie plays the assistant manager of an Italian chain restaurant who wins a corporate junket – a week at the CEO’s villa in Tuscany. She arrives in Italy with a cadre of peers, misfits all, to discover that they aren’t exactly at the villa and the corporate retreat isn’t exactly what it seems. The charismatic zillionaire CEO (Alessandro Nivola) seems to be grooming them – but not for corporate advancement. Many laughs ensue.

Alison Brie, so good as Trudy Campbell in Mad Men, has proven to have a wonderful gift for comedy. She ably works her Girl Next Door quality to reflect the more overtly zany characters around her. Brie co-wrote Spin Me Round’s screenplay with director Jeff Baena. Baena and Brie had worked together on The Little Hours and Horse Girl (which they also co-wrote).

Spin Me Round is a showcase for comic actors:

  • If you can’t get enough of Zach Woods’s Silicon Valley character, he returns with his naive, overly nice, worshipful devotee – with the capacity for a massive meltdown.
  • Aubrey Plaza (director Baena’s wife) plays archly cynical and dangerously edgy better than anyone.
  • Molly Shannon can convincingly play a deranged, over-the-top character because she just commits so entirely.
  • Fred Armisen is as we rarely, if ever, see him – as a macho, oily Silvio Berlusconi type.
  • Nivola, known mainly for his dramatic roles (The Many Saints of Newark), can be very funny.
  • Ego Nwodin, in the tiniest of roles as Brie’s Skypeing roommate, is just perfect.

One of the funniest threads in Spin Me Round is the send-up of The Olive Garden, the restaurant chain so obviously parodied here, The chain’s managers know shockingly little about Italian cuisine. And you may never eat alfredo sauce again.

In real life, wild pigs are not funny; here, they are very, very funny.

I saw Spin Me Round, before its release, at a well-attended screening at Cinequest, where the crowd loved it. It opens this weekend in LA, but I haven’t located a screen in the Bay Area.

THE AUTOMAT: nickels in, memories out

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Photo caption: THE AUTOMAT: Actress Audrey Hepburn photographed by Howard Fried in New York City as part of a multi-day photo shoot for Esquire magazine, 1951. Courtesy of A Slice of Pie Productions.

The charming documentary The Automat traces the fascinating seven-decade run of the marble-floored food palaces where one could put nickels in a slot and be rewarded with a meal. The story of the automat is essentially a business history of Holt & Hardart, which pioneered the automat concept in Philadelphia and New York, and dominated the market for years, at one point the nation’s largest restaurant chain. Mel Brooks, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Colin Powell speak to how the automat touched their lives, and Starbucks founder Howard Schulz credits the automat as his inspiration; (Mel Brooks even wrote and performed a song for the film).

The Automat is the first film for director Lisa Hurvitz, who spent eight years on the project. Along with the celebrities, Hurvitz has sourced her film with longtime Holt & Hardart employees, members of the founding families and even the guy who titled his Ph.D. dissertation, Trapped Behind the Automat: Technological Systems and the American Restaurant, 1902-1991.

The Automat is filled with unexpected nuggets, including:

  • The New Orleans origin of Holt & Hardart’s signature coffee.
  • The astounding percentage of the NYC and Philly populations once fed by Holt & Hardart.
  • The devastating impact of a nickel price increase.

Above all, The Automat features the automat as a democratic institution – a place and an activity enjoyed by a diverse collection of customers from all classes, genders and races.

The Automat gives voice to those nostalgic about the automat, but it is clear-eyed about why it didn’t survive – a business model based on volume when the volume of customers moved to the suburbs, along with social changes in post-war America.

The Automat had a blink-and-you-missed-it theatrical run in March, but now you can stream it from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and KinoNow.

THE OUTFIT: no one is just what they seem to be

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Photo caption: Mark Rylance in THE OUTFIT. Courtesy of Focus Features.

The Outfit is a satisfying period crime thriller with some big surprises. We’re in 1956 Chicago, and the accomplished actor Mark Rylance plays a very proper British maker of bespoke men’s suits, who allows local gangsters to have a secret drop box in the back of his modest shop. He and his assistant (Zoey Deutch), a young woman from the neighborhood, ask no questions.

Astonishingly polite, he does insist that everyone knows that he has been a Savile Row cutter, the more skilled artisan who cuts the fabric for men’s suits, not a tailor, who sews on the buttons.

The gangsters who own the drop box, however, come under a triple threat – the FBI, a competing mob and an inside rat. There’s an incriminating audiotape out there somewhere, which becomes the Macguffin in this story. Circumstances converge to trap our hero and his young assistant in the shop, where murderous gangsters are certain to do them in.

But, no one is just what they seem to be, and major plot twists tumble forth.

This is the directing debut for co-writer Graham Moore, who won a screenwriting Oscar for The Imitation Game, which starred Benedict Cumberbatch as mathematical genius Kenneth Turing. This time, Moore sets the entire film, every single shot, inside the same interior location; that makes for economic filmmaking, and the claustrophobia heightens the tension.

Mark Rylance is perfect as the very contained and ever civil craftsman plunged. into a desperate situation. Rylance, one of Britain’s seemingly endless stream of superb actors, came to broad attention (and to mine) in 2015 with the Thomas Cromwell historical series Wolf Hall and Bridge of Spies wth Tom Hanks. Since then, he’s starred in Dunkirk, The Trial of the Chicago 7 and Don’t Look Up.

Zoey Deutch is likewise excellent as the saucy shopgirl with her own secrets. She was the best thing in the raucous comedy Zombieland: Double Tap, in which she practically reinvents the Dumb Blonde.

The rest of the cast is good, too. Simon Russell Beale, known for playing erudite Englishmen, gets to play a mid-century Chicago hood.

Don’t confuse this film with the 1974 neo-noir The Outfit with Robert Duvall, Linda Black and Joe Don Baker (which is also good). The 2022 The Outfit is streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and redbox.

Best of Cinequest

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Photo caption: Jennifer Levinson in TRUST. World premiere at Cinequest. Courtesy of Menemsha Films.

After a pandemic-driven hiatus, Cinequest returns in-person for the first time since March 2020. Beginning on August 16, this year’s festival will be live at downtown San Jose’s California Theatre, Hammer Theater and 3Below. On August 25, the program moves to Campbell’s Pruneyard Cinemas through August 29.

I’ve already seen almost twenty offerings from Cinequest 2020, and here are my initial recommendations. As usual, I focus on the world and US premieres. Follow the links for full reviews, images and trailers. I’ve also included some tips for making the most of the Cinequest experience under “Hacking Cinequest”.

MUST SEE

This year’s festival Must Sees are the first features from three female filmmakers: writer/actor/producer Jennifer Levinson with Trust, documentarian Nira Burstein with Charm Circle and co-writer/actor Elizabeth Hirsch-Tauber with 12 Months.

  • Trust: Writer-actor Jennifer Levinson’s absorbing exploration of family betrayal must be the best screenplay at Cinequest. Kate (Levinson) is rocking her college experience when her mother unexpectedly dies. Kate returns to her hometown for the funeral, and apprehensively re-engages with her estranged family. They just might cringe their way through the funeral until an estate planning blunder explodes. Often darkly hilarious, Trust is elevated by Levinson’s textured characters. Kate’s strait-laced, conflict-averse brother is clinging onto functionality by his fingernails. The oldest sister is a flamboyant hot mess, but her astonishingly bad behavior seems to stem from some undiagnosed disorder. Their nogoodnik of a father hides a profound weakness and desperation behind his sleazy gloss. Kate herself has the decency that evades her nuclear family, but she’s immature and too prickly. How will Kate find closure when she has no control over the motives of the others? World premiere. Trailer at bottom of this post.
  • Charm Circle: You think YOUR family has issues? In this superbly structured film, writer-director Nira Burstein exquisitely unspools the story of her own bizarre family, a cautionary and ever-surprising chronicle of mental illness. Bay Area premiere.
  • 12 Months: This uncommonly authentic film traces the year-long span of a romance, using vignettes that are snapshots of the relationship’s evolution. Just like a real life relationship, 12 Months has moments that are playful and moments that are searing. 12 Months is entirely improvised by its director and its stars, who are extremely keen and perceptive observers of relationship behavior, and they don’t hit a single wrong note. World premiere.

INTERNATIONAL CINEMA

Lidia Vitale and Ludovica Mancini in Gabriele Fabbro’s THE GRAND BOLERO at Cinequest. Courtesy of Cinequest.
  • The Grand Bolero: Early in COVID’s devastating assault on Northern Italy, a middle-aged organ restorer is locked down in a centuries-old church; a salty curmudgeon, she cruelly resists the assistant forced upon her – a runaway young mute woman with no place else to shelter. But the young woman’s unexpected musical gift unlocks passion in the older woman. Passion evolves into obsession, propelling the story to an operatic finale. The Grand Bolero is the most visually beautiful film that I’ve seen in some time, and the music is powerfully evocative. It’s a remarkable first feature for director, co-writer and editor Gabriele Fabbro and his cinematographer Jessica La Malfa. Bay Area premiere.

DOCUMENTARY

Charlie Morgan in OUT IN THE RING. Courtesy of Ryan Bruce Levey.
  • Out in the Ring is Ryan Bruce Levey’s encyclopedic yet irresistible history of LGBTQ professional wrestlers. Out in the Ring chronicles straight wrestlers like Gorgeous George who pretended to be gay, and the many gay wrestling stars like Pat Patterson who were forced to stay in the closet. It’s also a showcase for today’s panoply of queer wrestling stars. Both unflinching and uplifting. World premiere.
  • Tell Me a Memory is a simple, yet engrossing, LGBTQ+ oral history. One or two at a time, individuals from Memphis (did you know they call themselves Memphians?) tell their own stories. The subjects are impressively diverse – in age, gender, race and identity. Coming Out in the Bible Belt is a common thread. This is a gentle and emotionally powerful film. World premiere.

AND TWO I HAVEN’T YET SEEN

Jim Gaffigan and Rhea Seehorn in LINOLEUM. Courtesy of Blue Fox Entertainment.

Of the Cinequest films that I haven’t been able to screen yet, the most favorable buzz comes from Linoleum, the Jim Gaffigan science comedy that opens the festival, and the political satire Land of Dreams. Both have distributors – they’ll be in theaters, but you can see them early at Cinequest.

HACKING CINEQUEST

Cinequest recovers its Downtown San Jose vibe, with concurrent screenings at the 1122-seat California, the 550-seat Hammer and the 257-seat 3Below – all within 1600 feet of each other. This year’s beer garden is across the street from the California.

At Cinequest, you can get a festival pass for as little as $179, and you can get individual tickets as well. Take a look at the entire program, the schedule and the passes and tickets.

As usual, I’ll be covering Cinequest rigorously with features and movie recommendations. I usually screen (and write about) over thirty films from around the world. Bookmark my CINEQUEST page, with links to all my coverage.  Follow me on Twitter for the latest. And here’s the trailer for Trust.

Laughs at Cinequest

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Peter S. Kim, Ally Maki and Hayden Szeto in DEALING WITH DAD. Courtesy of Cinequest.

Comedies abound at this year’s Cinequest. Here are four:

  • Dealing with Dad is a topical family comedy with an Asian-American cast. Three adult siblings – the super-achiever oldest sister, the passive middle brother and the infantilized youngest brother, a gaming slacker – meet at their parents’ home. The dad, whose harsh and never-bending expectations battered them as kids, has become paralyzed (and defanged) by severe depression. Their differences spawn lots of laughs, but Dealing with Dad addresses both depression and the issues that many second-generation Asian-Americans face because of their immigrant parents’ parenting styles. Cinequest audiences will appreciate that Dealing with Dad is set in MILPITAS.
  • 18 1/2 is a dark comedy that sends up the paranoid thriller genre. A low-level government clerical worker (an excellent Willa Fitzgerald) finds herself in possession of the infamous 18 1/2 minute gap in the Watergate Tapes. Of course, co-writers Daniel Moya and Dan Mirvish had to devise a way to get this MacGuffin in her hands; given the paranoia, deviousness and clumsiness of the Nixon White House, their solution is surprisingly plausible. Double crosses and red herrings escalate, as does the dark, dark humor. Richard Kind and Vondie Curtis-Hall sparkle in supporting roles.
  • Sweet Disaster, from Germany, is driven by the protagonist’s ever-unleashed impulsiveness and utter lack of boundaries. Frida (Friederike Kempter) encounters and falls for an airline pilot and audaciously charms him into a relationship; their affair lasts just long enough for her to become impregnated and for him to abandon her for his ex. Consumed by the urge to win him back, Frida throws propriety to the winds. Frida’s zany roller coaster is tempered by sweet relationships with her apartment neighbors, a precocious teenage neighbor and a Greek Chorus of card-playing older women.
  • Alpha Male, from Poland, is another dark comedy. A feckless young man has been dispatched by his girlfriend to a smoking cessation self-help group. Given the chaos of the community center, he ends up in the wrong room, among a men’s support group headed by a charismatic instructor. He hangs around anyway – and even returns – because this group has better food. The group focuses on their resentment of women, which seems silly and harmless at first, but descends into a paranoid fixation on an imagined organization of women seeking to emasculate them. Both the misogyny and their submissiveness to their bullying leader are taken to absurd levels.

Here’s the Cinequest program, the schedule and the passes and tickets. My CINEQUEST page links to all my coverage. 

Vondie Curtis-Hall, John Magaro, Willa Fitzgerald and Catharine Curtin in 18 1/2. Credit Elle Schneider (c)2021, Waterbug Eater Films, LLC.

OUT IN THE RING: macho and flamboyant, wrestling is also queer

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Charlie Morgan in OUT IN THE RING. Courtesy of Ryan Bruce Levey.

Out in the Ring is Ryan Bruce Levey’s encyclopedic yet irresistible documentary history of LGBTQ professional wrestlers. There is no sports entertainment that is more macho than pro wrestling. Or more flamboyant. Or, as it turns out, more queer.

Out in the Ring takes us back to the 1940s, when the straight journeyman wrestler Gorgeous George became a star and transformed wrestling by affecting a gay pose as his gimmick. George was just the first to do so, and Out in the Ring traces the many straight wrestlers who have pretended to be gay.

At the same time, many of wrestling’s best performers were closeted, notably the great Pat Patterson. Out in the Ring focuses on Patterson’s career and personal life, and how he grew into an important executive in the business. Out in the Ring surveys a long list of LGBTQ wrestlers who were forced to stay in the closet, like Patterson and Susan Tex Green.

[Personal note: The Movie Gourmet is a Boomer who, as a child, was glued to the TV for KTVU’s Saturday pro wrestling broadcasts, announced by Walt Harris. (Harris also called also roller derby.) In that era, Pat Patterson was a dominant presence in Bay Area pro wrestling.]

Out in the Ring showcases the panoply of today’s Out wrestling stars, led by Charlie Morgan and Mike Parrow. The variety is astounding: gay men, lesbians, bisexual women and men, transsexual men and transsexual women, asexual and nonbinary. There are those who make their queerness a signature of their act and those that don’t. They tell us about the homophobia that they have faced and their relief and joy from coming out.

Ry Levey has brought many films to Cinequest as a publicist, especially Canadian indies. The exquisitely sourced Out in the Ring is his first feature as a director.

I screened Out in the Ring for its US premiere at Cinequest. Both unflinching and uplifting, it’s a documentary as fun to watch as pro wrestling.

CHARM CIRCLE: you think YOUR family has issues?

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Raya Burstein and Uri Burstein in CHARM CIRCLE. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.

In the superbly structured documentary Charm Circle, writer-director Nira Burstein exquisitely unspools the story of her own bizarre family. At first, we meet Burstein’s father, a sour character who inexplicably is about to lose his rented house, which has become unkempt, even filthy. He is mean to Burstein’s apparently sweet and extraordinarily passive mother, and the scene just seems unpleasant.

But then, Nira Burstein brings out twenty-year-old videos that show her dad as witty, talented and functional. We learn a key fact about the mom, and then about each of the director’s two sisters.

Some of the publicity about Charm Circle describes the family as eccentric, but only one daughter is a little odd – three family members are clinically diagnosable. Charm Circle is a cautionary story of untreated mental illness and the consequences of failing to reach out for help.

This is Nira Burstein’s first feature, and she has two things going for her: unlimited access to the subjects and a remarkable gift for storytelling. Charm Circle works so well because of how Burstein sequences the rollout of each family member’s story.

I attended a screening of Charm Circle, with a Nira Burstein Q&A at the Nashville Film Festival. In July and August, it will play both the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival and Cinequest.