In director and co-writer Rodrigo Reyes’ highly original docu-fable 499, one of Hernán Cortés’ soldiers (Eduardo San Juan Breñais) is transported centuries into the future and plunged into contemporary Mexico. The movie’s title reflects a moment 499 years after Cortés’ conquest of the Aztecs in 1520; the conquistador and the audience discover that the dehumanization inherent in colonialism has persisted to plague modern Mexico.
I’m calling Reyes’ medium a “docu-fable” because it is all as real as real can be (the documentary), except for the fictional, 500-year-old conquistador (the fable).
Cast upon a Veracruz beach after a shipwreck (but 500 years later), he conquistador is terribly disoriented, and retraces Cortés’ march from Veracruz to Tenochtitlan/Mexico City. Seeing everything with a 500 year old lens, he is initially disgusted that the Indians that he conquered are now running things.
Soon he finds a Mexico reeling from narco terror. He meets Mexicans who have been victimized by the cruel outrages of the drug cartels, those risking their lives to hop a northbound train, and those in prison. In the emotional apex of 499, one mother’s account of a monstrous atrocity, clinical detail by clinical detail, is intentionally unbearable.
Reyes wants the audience to connect the dots from Mexico’s Original Sin – a colonialism that was premised on devaluing an entire people and their culture. Will the conquistador find his way to contrition?
499, with its camera sometimes static, sometimes slowly panning, is contemplative. Cinematographer: Alejandro Mejía’s work won Best Cinematography at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival.
499 releases into theaters on August 20, and will play San Francisco’s Roxie in early September, before its national rollout.
Photo caption: ROADRUNNER: A FILM ABOUT ANTHONY BOURDAIN
This week – a contemporary Australian bodice-ripper on video and a whole mess of great television recommendations. The best two movies in theaters are still Summer of Soul and Roadrunner.
About Endlessness: Damned if I know. Streaming on Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Brewmance: barley, hops, yeast and underdogs. Amazon (included with Prime), AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Louder Than Bombs: An intricately constructed family drama. Amazon (included with Prime), Vudu and YouTube.
That Guy Dick Miller: Putting the “character” in “character actor:” Amazon (included with Prime).
Sword of Trust: comedy and so, so much more. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Run Lola Run: you’ll never see a more kinetic movie. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
ON TV
Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Brenda Blethen in SECRETS & LIES
Well, here we are in the August doldrums and Turner Classic Movies is turning up the heat with some great choices.
First, on August 1, there’s Secrets & Lies, which I considered the very best movie of 1996. Written and directed by Mike Leigh (Life Is Sweet, Naked, Topsy-Turvy, All or Nothing, Vera Drake, Another Year), this is Leigh’s masterpiece and his most acessible film.
Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is an accomplished young British woman who has been raised by middle-class adoptive parents. She decides to track down her birth mother, who turns out to be the working class hot mess Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn). This triggers Cynthia’s emotional damage from giving up baby Hortense, her panic at explaining this to her family – with the complicating factor that Hortense is Black. All kinds of family complications ensue. Cynthia’s underachieving daughter (Claire Rushbrook) is not at all comfortable with the emergence of an over-achieving sibling. Cynthia’s sister-in-law (Penelope Logan) faces this through her own child-related anguish. And Cynthia’s brother (Timothy Spall), who has clawed his way to respectability, has to juggle these developments.
There’s a searing emotional authenticity to Secrets & Lies, but there’s plenty of humor, too. (The montage of the brother’s portrait photography clients is hilarious.)
This is a career-topping performance by Brenda Blethens (TV’s Vera) and she was Oscar-nominated.
Blethyn’s fine performance is the showiest, but this is the movie where I recognized the greatness of Timothy Spall (Mr. Turner and Wormtail in the Harry Potter franchise),
The rest of the cast is brilliant, too, including Logan (Lovejoy and Mrs. Hughes in Downton Abbey) and Leslie Manville. Claire Rushbrook is especially good as the gobsmacked daughter.
Secrets & Lies, Leigh, Blethyn and Jean-Baptiste were all nominated for Academy Awards (and this was a little British indie back when they only nominated 5 movies for Best Picture). Secrets & Lies and Fargo lost the Best Picture Oscar to The English Patient (only because The English Patient was far, far more pretentious). This is a film of uncommon humanity and one of my Greatest Movies of All Time.
Bette Davis and Warren William in SATAN MET A LADY
On August 2, TCM airs Satan Met a Lady, an earlier version of the 1941 The Maltese Falcon. I’ve written about all three versions in Three faces of the Maltese Falcon. This 1936 version is more of a screwball comedy than a whodunit, and the ensemble acting is magnificent..
Finally, on August 4 , TCM plays Pushover, one of my Overlooked Noir. Tracking a notorious criminal, the cop (Fred MacMurray) follows – and then dates – the gangster’s girlfriend (“Introducing Kim Novak”). It starts out as part of the job, but then he falls for her himself. He decides that, if he can double cross BOTH the cops and the criminal, he can wind up with the loot AND Kim Novak. (This is a film noir, so we know he’s not destined for a tropical beach with an umbrella drink.)
Garrett Hedlund and in Kelly MacDonald in DIRT MUSIC. Photo courtesy of Blue Finch Film Releasing.
Dirt Music is a contemporary bodice-ripper set on the wild West Coast of Australia. Georgie (Kelly Macdonald) has become increasingly dissatisfied in her lot as the second wife of Jim (David Wenham), the local commercial fishing baron. Taking some personal time out on the beach, she happens upon Lu, a recluse who ekes out his subsidence from midnight poaching; it turns out that Lu has been emotionally scarred by tragedy in his family.
Georgie and Lu are soulmates and soon become passionate bedmates. Jim, pissed off about Lu’s poaching and REALLY pissed that he is screwing his wife, drives Lu out of town. Georgia goes on a quest to find Lu, who has become even more reclusive, becoming a needle in an endless haystack of tiny coastal islands. At this point, there’s a very unexpected plot twist that is justified later by a dark secret about the earlier tragedy,
During Georgie’s search, the landscapes and seascapes of Western Australia, become even more spectacular.
Will Georgie reunite with Lu or will she have to live only with his tragic memory? The WTF ending wants to have it both ways. As I said, WTF?
Dirt Music is based on the award-winning novel by Australian writer Tim Winton, (and I am assuming that a substantial percentage of the Australian movie audience had previously read the novel). In fact, this is one of those stories that might be better told as a novel.
Kelly MacDonald in DIRT MUSIC. Photo courtesy of Blue Finch Film Releasing.
Kelly Macdonald has been a compelling screen presence since her debut in Trainspotting. She’s brought her intelligent watchfulness to roles in Gosford Park, Intermission, Finding Neverland, No Country for Old Men, Boardwalk Empire and Puzzle. Macdonald’s performance elevates this material, which could have been completely silly with a lesser actress.
Garrett Hedlund is appropriately moody and hunky as Lu; he plays most of the movie with his shirt off and the rest with his shirt unbuttoned. David Wenham is very good as the unsympathetic husband. It’s always a treat for me to watch a movie with Aaron Pederson, so great as detective Jay Swan in the movies Mystery Road and Goldstone and the more recent miniseries Mystery Road; here, Pederson has a small part as Jim’s indigenous factotum Beaver.
Dirt Music has an abysmal Metacritic score of 35 because critics have uniformly opined that its corniness outweighs the gorgeousness. I could tell this was going to be a chick flick from the trailer; that usually means that I’m not the ideal audience for it, but I really admire Kelly Macdonald, and took a flyer in case some family members might enjoy it.
Those who can swallow the ending might enjoy this romantic melodrama in a visually spectacular setting. Dirt Music can be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV and YouTube.
Photo caption: ROADRUNNER: A FILM ABOUT ANTHONY BOURDAIN
This week – my first stab at the Best Movies of 2021 – So Far– and you can see two of them in theaters right now and stream another. Plus the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF) opens, and here’s my SFJFF preview.
PERSIAN LESSONS, opening the SFJFF toinight. Photo courtesy of JFI.
IN THEATERS
Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain: An unusually profound, revealing and unsentimental biodoc of a complicated man – a shy bad ass, an outwardly cynical romantic, a brooding humorist. A triumph for director Morgan Neville, Oscar-winner for 20 Feet from Stardom.
About Endlessness: Damned if I know. Streaming on Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Brewmance: barley, hops, yeast and underdogs. Amazon (included with Prime), AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Hamlet/Horatio: More tragedy, less angst. Amazon, AppleTV, Google Play.
Louder Than Bombs: An intricately constructed family drama. Amazon (included with Prime), Vudu and YouTube.
That Guy Dick Miller: Putting the “character” in “character actor:” Amazon (included with Prime).
Sword of Trust: comedy and so, so much more. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Run Lola Run: you’ll never see a more kinetic movie. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
ON TV
John Heard in CUTTER’S WAY
Tonight, Turner Classic Movies will present Cutter’s Way, which I recommended earlier this week. A paranoid thriller framed by post-Vietnam War disillusionment, it features early Jeff Bridges and career-best performances by John Heard and Lisa Eichhorn.
Here’s a choice to complement Summer of Soul. On July 27, TCM will air Monterey Pop (1968). The two music festivals took place within a year of each other – one with a Black audience and one with a mostly White one. The Monterey Pop audience was unfamiliar with – and blown away by Otis Redding’s epic performance.
This is one of the few DVDs that I still own, for the performances by Redding, the Mamas and the Papas, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Canned Heat, Simon and Garfunkle, Jefferson Airplane, Eric Burdon and the Animals, Country Joe and the Fish and The Who.
It’s okay with me if you fast forward over Ravi Shankar. Don’t miss the reaction of Mama Cass Elliot, sitting in the audience, to Janis Joplin. Pete Townsend and Jimi Hendrix had a guitar-destroying competition, which Hendrix, aided by lighter fluid, undeniably won.
Every year, I keep a running list of the best movies I’ve seen this year. By the end of the year, I usually end up with a Top Ten and another 5-15 mentions. Here are my Best Movies of 2020 and Best Movies of 2019 lists.
To get on my year-end list, a movie has to be one that thrills me while I’m watching it and one that I’m still thinking about a couple of days later.
THE BEST OF THE YEAR
Here’s the running list as of mid-July:
Riders of Justice: A character-driven comedy thriller, embedded with deeper stuff. Marvelous. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.
Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised): Questlove’s magnificent revelation of the long-overlooked 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival – glorious musical performances at an important moment in our history and culture. In theaters and streaming on Hulu.
Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain: An unusually profound, revealing and unsentimental biodoc of a complicated man – a shy bad ass, an outwardly cynical romantic, a brooding humorist. A triumph for director Morgan Neville, Oscar-winner for 20 Feet from Stardom.
About Endlessness: The master of the droll, deadpan and absurd probes the meaning of life. One of the best movies of the year, but NOT FOR EVERYONE. Streaming on Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Slow Machine: An incomprehensible art film that is surprisingly engrossing.
Special mention: Lune: This Canadian indie, the Must See at this year’s Cinequest, is an astonishingly authentic exploration of bipolar disorder. A mother and teen daughter must navigate the impacts of the mom’s illness. Played by writer and co-director Aviva Armour-Ostroff, the mom Miriam is the most singular movie character I’ve seen recently. Miriam’s streams of manic speech have the rhythm of poetry. On the festival circuit and not yet available to stream.
Note that you see Summer of Soul and Roadrunner in theaters this week, and you can stream Summer of Soul and Riders of Justice at home.
There’s still plenty of room for more excellent 2021 movies. I’m especially eager to see the new works from directors Sean Baker, Asgar Farhadi, Joachim Trier, Hong Sang-soo, Todd Haynes, Joanna Hogg, Pedro Almodovar, Jacques Audiard, Emmanuelle Bercot, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Arnaud Deplechin, Leos Carax, Francois Ozon, Paul Verhoeven, Ruben Ostlund and Valdimar Johannson. Stay tuned.
Mavis Staples and Mahalia Jackson in SUMMER OF SOUL (…OR, WHEN THE REVOLUTION COULD NOT BE TELEVISED)
Dedication of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia
C.J. Hunt, in his insightful and thought-provoking documentary The Neutral Ground, explores the lie of the Lost Cause, which is still embraced by many White Southerners and is the rationale for preserving Confederate monuments. That myth is that that the Civil War was about a principle of “States Rights” somehow divorced from slavery, and that the Southern cause in the Civil War was romantically heroic.
At one point, Hunt observes,
“The founding documents of the Confederacy talk so obsessively about slavery, the real mystery is how so many people came to believe that Confederate symbols have nothing to do with it.”
Not only is Hunt dead right, but you can read the actualdeclarations of the causes of secession yourselves. The truth is inescapable – the South fought the Civil War PRIMARILY to continue slavery.
The SECOND SENTENCE of Mississippi’s declaration is “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery”.
Texas identified this grievance against the Northern States:
“based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color– a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.”
One of South Carolina’s grievances against the northern states was, without irony, “They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes.”
It is clear from reading the official actions of the Southern states AT THE TIME that the only relevance of “States Rights” was to continue and expand slavery. Baby Boomers recall that “States Rights” was code for “racial segregation” in the 1950s and 1960s. Same thing.
The Neutral Ground also documents that, after the subversion of Reconstruction in the last quarter of the 19th Century, Confederate statues were intentionally placed to impose terror and demonstrate White supremacist power. See the photo (above) of the dedication of the Charlottesville, Virginia, statue of Robert E. Lee during this period. The dedication is ringed by robed and hooded Ku Klux Klan members. Everybody AT THE TIME knew what was going on,
Unfortunately, Southern Whites have lived in a Lost Cause echo chamber for a century. It has become more offensive to tell them that the Civil War was about slavery than to suggest that Jesus was not the son of God.
The German people embraced a “stab in the back” lie to explain their defeat in WWI. That, of course, led to the Nazi regime, a second world war, mass genocide and the destruction of Germany itself. Today’s Germans know that they can be proud of their contributions to world culture, industry and science and still accept that following Hitler was a grievous mistake. Good luck finding a contemporary German who will say, “Hey, none of us actually believed all that stuff about a Master Race”.
Photo caption: C.J. Hunt in NEUTRAL GROUND. Photo courtesy of PBS POV.
In the pointed documentary The Neutral Ground, C.J. Hunt explores the continuing legacy of Confederate monuments in America. Finding the backlash against removing New Orleans’ Confederate monuments so absurd, Hunt, a producer for The Daily Show, started out to make a snarky YouTube video. But he found himself drawn more deeply into the history of Confederate monuments, so intentionally braided with white supremacy.
In my view (and C.J. Hunt’s), it’s a no-brainer to remove monuments that should never have been erected in the first place. After all, these monuments celebrate men who led a traitorous insurrection against their own country, who sought to keep other human beings enslaved and who lost a disastrous war. Traitors. Slavers. Losers.
But Hunt is fascinated by the chorus of White Southerners advocating for the preservation of Confederate monuments to maintain pride in (White) Southern heritage. All of them claim that the Civil War was not about slavery. And none of them would say that they are White supremacists or that slavery was acceptable. Hunt notes a disconnect with historical fact:
“The founding documents of the Confederacy talk so obsessively about slavery, the real mystery is how so many people came to believe that Confederate symbols have nothing to do with it.”
Hunt is very funny. To a woman who wants to keep all the statues in their prominent places with plaques for context, he suggests this wording: “Hi, I’m Robert E. Lee. A long time ago, I turned on my country and led over 200,000 Southern sons to their graves, so we could keep our basic right to own human beings as property. #SorryI’mNotSorry“.
After meeting a round of genteel “as long as you stay in your place” racists, Hunt is unnerved by encounters with the “I want to kill you” variety of racists.
For me, the highlights of The Neutral Ground were Hunt’s sparring with his own African-American father. His dad, moving about his kitchen in an Aunt Jemima apron, critically recounts the evolution of C.J.’s own racial awareness and imparts his own unblinking view of institutional racism in America. This repartee sets the stage for The Neutral Ground to become even more personally-focused for C.J. Hunt.
I watched The Neutral Ground on PBS’ POV; it’s now streaming on PBS.
Photo caption: John Heard and Jeff Bridges in CUTTER’S WAY
This Friday, July 23, Turner Classic Movies brings us the overlooked 1981 neo-noir Cutter’s Way. A paranoid thriller framed by post-Vietnam War disillusionment, it features an early Jeff Bridges and career-best performances by John Heard and Lisa Eichhorn.
Bridges plays Bone, an aimless and hedonist slacker, bumming around the Santa Barbara yacht harbor. Bone’s buddie Cutter (Heard), a disabled Vietnam War vet, and Cutter’s wife Mo (Eichhorn) are decidedly not Yacht Club material. Cutter has been physically and emotionally scarred by the war, and Mo is damaged by what Cutter has become (a bitter drunk).
Lisa Eichorn and John Heard in CUTTER’S WAY
One night, Bone thinks he has witnessed the dumping of a murder victim. As he pokes around, he finds himself framed for the murder.
Bone becomes understandably engrossed and comes to a conspiracy theory, but then the stakes keep going up and up. Bone is a witness and then a suspect; Cutter is a kibitzer and then a victim. Cutter becomes even more obsessed than is Bone.
Santa Barbara Founder’s Day parade in CUTTER’S WAY
The marginalized trio finds itself in the tony Spanish-style clubs and posh haunts of Santa Barbara’s rich elite. From its beginning at the yacht harbor and the Founder’s Day Parade, Santa Barbara is a core ingredient in Cutter’s Way, and it’s still the best film set in Santa Barbara.
Cutter’s Way perfectly captures the post-Viet Nam cynicism that was an ideal petri dish for escalating paranoia. The screenplay was adapted by Jeffrey Alan Fishkin from a novel by Newton Thornburg.
Director Ivan Passer came out of the Czech New Wave (Intimate Lighting) to work in the US (fifteen features including award-winning Haunted Summer and Robert Duvall’s Stalin). My favorite Passer film is Cutter’s Way.
TCM will air Cutter’s Way on Friday in its July neo-noir series, hosted by Eddie Muller and Ben Mankiewicz.
I watched it again recently and it still holds up; you can stream it from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Photo caption: Nahuel Pérez Biscayart in PERSIAN LESSONS,opening the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. Photo courtesy of JFI.
One of the Bay Area’s top cinema events is back – the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF) runs from July 22 to August 1. This year’s festival is a hybrid, including both movies to stream-at-home and in-person screenings at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre. The SFJFF is the world’s oldest and largest Jewish film festival, and the program offers over 50 films from over 20 countries.
The opening night film at the Castro, Persian Lessons, is especially strong. A Belgian Jew is sent to a German concentration camp and seeks to avoid death by claiming to be Persian, not anticipating that a Nazi officer will demand to be taught Farsi. To stay alive, the protagonist must invent an entire faux Farsi language, word-by-word, and remember it. All the while he’s sweating out the possibility that his ruse will be discovered. Persian Lessons walks a tightrope, and the ending is very emotionally powerful.
One of the strengths of recent SFJFF festivals has been its promotion of films that explore aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This year, Kings of Capitol Hill is one of seven films in the SFJFF program, both documentary and narrative, that touch on this topic.
I was also intrigued by the stylish Canadian indie narrative Sin la Habana, which braided together the yearnings of an Afro-Cuban couple and a Jewish-Iranian woman in Montreal.
You can peruse the festival’s program and schedule at SFJFF.
Yonah Acosta Gonzalez in SIN LA HABANA. Photo courtesy of JFI.
Yonah Acosta Gonzalez in SIN LA HABANA. Photo courtesy of JFI.
The stylish Canadian indie Sin la Habana braids together the yearnings of an Afro-Cuban couple and a Jewish-Iranian woman.
Leonardo (Yonah Acosta Gonzalez) is a Havana ballet dancer frustrated by what he sees as racist favoritism in his company. It doesn’t help that he is an impulsive hothead. His beautiful and canny girlfriend Sara (Evelyn Castroda O’Farrill) is a lawyer. In the socialist paradise of Cuba, their incomes consign them to a cramped, squalid apartment. They want out.
Sara concocts a plan – Leonardo will seduce a foreign tourist who can invite him to leave Cuba; once legally ensconced in the first world, Leonardo will send for Sara.
Evelyn Castroda O’Farrill and Yonah Acosta Gonzalez in SIN LA HABANA. Photo courtesy of JFI.
The cynical scheme begins to work. Leonardo gives salsa lessons (and more) to a Canadian visitor, Nasim (Aki Yaghoubi). Nasim, who is Jewish-Iranian, brings Leonardo back to Montreal.
But then stuff happens. Leonardo is not welcomed as the ballet star that he sees himself to be, and it’s unexpectedly more difficult for him to get the job that will bring him legal residence. And Nasim turns out to be far less of a dupe than first apparent.
The ending is well-crafted and authentic.
Sin la Habana is visually arresting from the very first shot, a closeup of a rooster’s red eye soon followed by arty shots of ballet practice. Havana feels steamy and Montreal feels frigid.
Aki Yaghoubi in SIN LA HABANA. Photo courtesy of JFI.
It’s pretty clear that writer-director Kaveh Nabatian, cinematographer Juan Pablo Ramírez and editor Sophie Leblond know how to tell a story with cinema. There are a couple too many flashbacks of Santería rituals, but Sin la Habana is otherwise well-paced.
I screened Sin la Habana for this year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, which opens on Friday. You can peruse the festival’s program and schedule at SFJFF, and here’s my own SFJFF preview. Here’s where you can stream Sin la Habana.
