I attended a pre-release screening of Take Me to the River at the Camera Cinema Club, followed by a Skype interview by Tim Sika with writer-director Matt Sobel. Here are some nuggets from that interview.
Like me, Sobel is a San Jose guy who has often visited family in rural Nebraska. Sobel actually likes Nebraska, and pointed out the cultural differences are more complicated than “we Californians are open minded and right”. That being said, he acknowledged that Take Me to the River is about that Midwestern resistance to talking about anything unpleasant, which can lead to “a conspiracy of silence”.
Sobel described Take Me to the River as a “movie about suspicion and fear” and pointed out the shame that adults put on kids for innocent behavior that can lead to later tragedy.
As a filmmaker, Sobel is comfortable with the Big Action happening outside the frame so the audience must figure it out most of it and live with some ambiguity.
SPOILER ALERT: Sobel says that, in Take Me to the River , Keith has taught his daughter the “chicken fighting” game that made his own mother think that he was a pervert.
SPOILER ALERT: Take Me to the River contains some sexual behavior by a child which is very uncomfortable for the audience. Sobel was careful to work with the child actress Ursula Parker to make her acting experience on the set be a non-sexual game. This scene is central to the story and, thanks to Sobel, non-exploitative. Ursula Parker plays the youngest daughter on Louie.
You can stream Take Me to the River on Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play or rent the DVD from Netflix.
NUTS! is the persistently hilarious (and finally poignant) documentary about the rise and fall of a medical and radio empire – all built on goat testicle “implantation” surgery in gullible humans. Yes, a huckster named J.R. Brinkley really did surgically place goat testicles inside human scrota – and, more astonishingly, this actually became a craze in the 1920s. Now that’s enough of a forehead slapper, but there’s more, much more and that’s what makes NUTS! so fun.
Brinkley’s story is one that leads to celebrity mega wealth and a colossal miscalculation. Improbably, Brinkley’s wild ride touched Huey Long,William Jennings Bryan, Rudolph Valentino, Buster Keaton, June Carter Cash and Wolfman Jack. There’s a radio empire, a Gubernatorial election and a dramatic, climactic trial.
“Dr.” Brinkley at work in NUTS!
Director Penny Lane tells the story with animation (different animators for each chapter, but you can’t tell) seamlessly braided together with historical still photos, movies and a final heartbreaking recording. NUTS! tells a story that is too bizarre to be true – but really happened. It makes for a most entertaining movie.
I saw NUTS! earlier this year at the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF). It opens in Bay Area theaters today.
The important and absorbing documentary Zero Days traces the story of an incredibly successful cyber attack by two nation states upon another – and its implications. In Iran’s nuclear weapons development program, the centrifuges used to enrich uranium began destroying themselves in 2010. It turned out that these machines were instructed to self-destruct by a computer worm devised by American and Israeli intelligence.
No doubt – this was an amazing technological triumph. Zero Days takes us through a thrilling whodunit non-geek audience. We learn how a network that is completely disconnected from the Internet can still be infected. And how cybersecurity experts track down viruses. It’s all accessible and fascinating.
But, strategically, was this really a cyberwarfare victory? We learn just what parts of our lives can be attacked and frozen by computer attacks (Spoiler: pretty much everything). And we learn that this attack has greenlighted cyberwarfare by other nations – including hostile and potentially hostile ones. Zero Days makes a persuasive case that we need to have a public debate – as we have had on nuclear, biological and chemical weapons – on the use of this new kind of weaponry.
Director Alex Gibney is one our very, very best documentarians. He won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, and he made the superb Casino Jack: The United States of Money, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Elliot Spitzer,Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God,Going Clear: The Prison of Beliefand Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine.
Gibney’s specialty is getting sources on-camera that have the most intimate knowledge of his topic. In Zero Days, he pulls out a crew of cybersecurity experts, the top journalist covering cyberwarfare, leaders of both Israeli and American intelligence and even someone who can explain the Iranian perspective. Most impressively, Gibney has found insiders from the NSA who actually worked on this cyber attack (and prepared others).
Zero Days opens tomorrow in theaters and will also be available to stream on Amazon, iTunes, Vusu, YouTube, Google Play, Xbox and various PPV platforms, including DirecTV.
Mahershala Ali and Matthew McConaughey in FREE STATE OF JONES
Free State of Jones is the compelling story of resistance to the Confederacy and to white supremacy by Southerners during and after the Civil War. Matthew McConaughey stars as Newton Knight, an overlooked but quite singular figure in American history. It is little-known, but the Confederacy actually lost control of some Mississippi counties to poor white farmers who tired of fighting a war to benefit the rich slave-holders.
I am a pretty serious Civil War history buff, and I was planning to skip Free State of Jones entirely until I found out about writer-director Gary Ross’ commitment to taking the history seriously. In fact, Ross has posted a very impressive website which outlines the historical events and figures depicted in the movie and even links the primary historical source material. I’ve never seen such a credible effort by a filmmaker to explain how he got the history right. Here’s a New York Tines article about the movie, Ross and his website.
In the second act of his career, McConaughey has delivered brilliant performances in excellent movies (Mud, Bernie, The Paperboy, Killer Joe, The Wolf of Wall Street, Dallas Buyers Club,True Detective). Here, he positively sizzles as the intensely principled and determined Newt Knight. The rest of the cast is excellent, too, especially Mahershala Ali (House of Cards) as an escaped slave turned Reconstruction political organizer.
Free State of Jones effectively combines the elements of political drama, romance and war movies into an absorbing drama, one which connects the dots between the 19th Century and the 20th and beyond.
Naomie Harris and Ewan McGregor in OUR KIND OF TRAITOR. Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.
Our Kind of Traitor is a robust globe-trotting thriller, enlivened by a lusty Stellan Skarsgård and played out in a series of stunning set pieces. A meek Everyman (Ewan McGregor) is a tag-along on his high-powered wife’s trip to Cairo. Nursing a drink after a tiff with said wife (the sleek Naomie Harris from 28 Days Later… and a couple of Bond films), he is inveigled into joining a crew of partying Russians and becomes entangled in an intrigue that puts entire families at stake – including his own.
It turns out that our protagonist has been randomly plucked from the humdrum by Dima (Skarsgård), the top money launderer for the Russian Mafia, who is trying to get British intelligence to help his family escape from his murderous colleagues. The story having been adapted from a John le Carré novel, the dour British spy (Damian Lewis from Homeland) on the case is being hindered at every turn by a thoroughly corrupt British law enforcement and intelligence bureaucracy, with the rot reaching up to Cabinet level.
The very best thing about Our Kind of Traitor is Stellan Skarsgård’s performance. Dima is loud, flamboyant and profoundly course. Skarsgård has filled his career with brooding roles, but here he gets to play the life of the party, and he is hilarious – and steals the movie.
Our Kind of Traitor also looks great as it takes us from Russia (shot in Finland) to Cairo (Morocco) to Switzerland to London to Paris. Director Susanna White is a veteran (21 directing credits on IMDb), but Our Kind of Traitor is her first big budget action movie. The success of the film revolves around a series of spectacular set pieces, and White pulls it off masterfully.
Our Kind of Traitor isn’t as good as the best of his work (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, for instance), but it’s damn entertaining. I saw the final four plot twists coming, but by then I was hooked, so I still enjoyed the film. And, adapting to the post-Cold War world, le Carré may have become even more cynical.
I saw Our Kind of Traitor earlier this year at the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival at a screening with director Susanna White. If you’re looking for an intelligent summer thriller for adults, this is your movie.
Finding Dory, the latest animated Pixar film, is built on characters from Finding Nemo. The memory-challenged fish Dory (Ellen DeGeneris) goes on a quest, aided by Nemo’s Dad Marlon (Albert Brooks). Pixar is exceptional for bringing depth of story to animated films, and the story here just isn’t up to snuff. It’s that tired trope about finding one’s parents, augmented with a nice message about acknowledging and overcoming one’s disabilities.
The cleverest part of Finding Dory is the new octopus character of Hank (voiced by Ed O’Neill of Modern Family). Hank is able to help Dory with his ability to change his coloring for camouflage, to fit through and into virtually every opening and to clasp objects in his tentacles. That allows for Dory to get thru a lot more plot devices and supplies lots of comic situations.
There’s also a very funny running joke involving Sigourney Weaver and another one with three sea lions on a rock. The dialogue and voicework are very good.
The animation in Finding Dory is high quality, but it’s not the Great Leap Forward animation that sometimes thrills us at Pixar films. The bottom line on Finding Dory is that it may not be a Must See, but it won’t be painful to sit thru twenty times with your small kids .
However, one of joys of Pixar is that they precede their features with short films, many of which (For the Birds, La Luna, The Blue Umbrella, Lava) are at least as good as the features. The short shown with Finding Dory is Piper, a tale about a young seabird’s first lesson in finding food in the surf. The animation in Piper is just exquisite; watch for the grains of sand, the feathers and down on the little bird and the above- and below-the-surf shots. Piper’s story is sweet, uplifting and funny and worth watching on its own.
I only saw Maggie’s Plan because The Wife DRAGGED me to it, but I was surprisingly entertained by this amiable romantic comedy. A typically floundering mumblecore Millennial (Greta Gerwig) finds herself in an affair with an older man (Ethan Hawke). When she awakens to his relationship-killing self-absorption, she decides the ease the breakup by handing him back to his overachieving ex-wife (Julianne Moore).
Hawke, of course, excels in playing the unreliable man (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Boyhood, Born to Be Blue). Gerwig (the reason I didn’t want to see this movie) is not nearly as annoying and tiresome as she has been to date in her career. But it’s Julianne Moore who really elevates Maggie’s Plan, along with Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph, who are hilarious in supporting roles. Aussie Travis Flimmer shows much promise in a very minor, but eye-catching role.
It all adds up to an amiable and satisfying rom com with a fresh twist.
WEINER. Photo courtesy of San Francisco Film Society.
Don’t miss the political documentary Weiner, probably the best documentary of the year. It also provokes some reflection on the media in this age.
You may remember Anthony Weiner as the politician forced out of Congress in a sexting scandal. A couple of years later, he tried to make a comeback by running for mayor of New York City. Weiner is the inside story of that campaign, which self-immolated when the sexting scandal popped up again. Weiner is a marvelously entertaining chronicle of the campaign, a character study of Anthony Weiner himself and an almost voyeuristic peek into Weiner’s marriage to another political star, Huma Abedin.
Co-director Josh Kriegman served as Weiner’s Congressional chief of staff and left politics for filmmaking. When Weiner was contemplating the run for mayor, Kriegman asked to shadow him in the campaign, and Weiner agreed. Kriegman and co-director Elyse Steinberg shot 400 hours of backstage footage and caught some searing moments of human folly, triumph and angst.
In office, eight-term New York Congressman Anthony Weiner was a firebrand, pugnacious and a master debater with a vicious sense of humor, always eager to mix it up. He is married to Huma Abedin, a close Hilary Clinton advisor often described as “Hilary’s other daughter”. Huma is as reserved as Anthony is ebullient, and her own distinguished career in politics has been behind the scenes. He lives for the limelight, but she is uncomfortable in it.
Anthony begins his comeback with brutally painful media launch. The press is in a complete feeding frenzy – all revisiting the scandal and nothing else. One of the highlights of Weiner is a montage of talking heads reviling Weiner, including Donald Trump, who bellows, “We don’t want any perverts in New York City”.
But when Anthony goes on the campaign trail, the electorate begins to really respond to his passion and feistiness. Weiner unexpectedly surges into the lead 10 weeks to go. We are treated to a first-class procedural and see what only political pros see – the banal opening of a campaign office, rehearsing speeches, shooting commercials, dialing for dollars.
But then the scandal re-opens when a publicity-seeking bimbo releases a photo of Anthony’s penis that Weiner had texted her. We see his Communications Director as the new scandal unfolds in real-time, her eyes becoming lifeless; my day job for the last thirty years has been in politics, and I have gotten some bad news, but nothing like this.
Amazingly, we see Anthony calling Huma and telling her. When the screenshot of Anthony’s penis shot goes viral, we watch as Hums see it for the first time on the Internet, and her anger builds into rage. Anthony finally kicks out the camera.
Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin in WEINER
New York Post prints headlines like “Weiner: I’ll Stick It Out” and “Obama Beats Weiner”. Anthony tells his shell-shocked and pissed off staff “nobody died”, but nobody’s buying it. Anthony has masterfully redefined himself to be more than the punchline once, but the second set of revelations make him indelibly a punchline – and no one can come back from that. From behind the camera, Kriegman plaintively asks Weiner.”Why did you let me film this?”.
Anthony’s pollster gives him the bad news: “There’s no path anymore to get to a runoff” and “So this is a solo flight”. The smell of death is about the campaign at the end, but Anthony is in “never quit” phase.
Anthony’s best moment is when he is obligated to face a hostile neighborhood meeting in the Bronx neighborhood of City Island. He knows that he is doing poorly there, and there aren’t many voters out there anyway, but he keeps his head high and delivers a courageous effort.
Anthony’s worst moment may be when he is re-watching himself in a mutual evisceration of a TV host on YouTube. He is relishing the combat, but Huma, behind him, is appalled by Anthony’s Pyrrhic victory. He smugly thinks that’s he won the verbal firefight, but Huma just says, “It’s bad”. She’s right.
I saw Weiner at the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) at a screening with co-directors Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg. Kriegman said that he “intended to show the humanity behind the headline – the nuance that is Anthony”. Steinberg noted that “the most exposed are the least revealed”. As of the SFIFF screening on April 23, Anthony Weiner had to date declined to watch Weiner. In Weiner, Anthony looks back after the campaign and ruefully sums it up, “I lied and I had a funny name”.
Weiner has more than its share of forehead-slapping moments and is often funny and always captivating. It’s almost certainly the year’s best documentary and one of best films of 2016, period.
The Lobster, which is supposed to be a dark comedy, won the Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, along with acclaim at the Toronto and Sundance fests, so I had been eagerly awaiting it for just over twelve months. I had liked Director Yorgos Lanthimos’ Greek absurdist film Dogtooth. Unfortunately, The Lobster is a disagreeable misfire, which makes it the biggest movie disappointment of the year.
The Lobster takes place in an imagined world that looks like ours, but where being single is the worst status possible. Single people go to a woodsy resort hotel, where they are under a time limit to find a partner or be turned into the animal of their choice. After all, in the city, they are challenged by law enforcement to produce their most important form of identification – the certificate that proves they are in a couple. Guests at the resort go on daily hunts in the forest, where they shoot escaped single people – the Loners – with tranquilizer darts. (The Loners have their own monstrous leader (Lea Seydoux) and harsh rules.)
If a guest finds a partner, they enjoy a double room for two weeks and then a holiday on a yacht. The hotel manager (Olivia Colman) drily announces, that if the new relationship becomes troubled, “We will assign you children. That always helps.”
It’s all very deadpan. As the cast earnestly complies with ever more absurd rules at the hotel, The Lobster is darkly funny.
But then, The Lobster runs off its rails. We lose the drollery and find our way in a survivalist love story with Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz, and then, into a what is essentially a horror ending. Inside all this mess is an allegory about society putting obstacles in the way of our reaching happiness through a love match. But it stops being funny, and starts becoming tedious and uncomfortable.
Colin Farrell leads a fine cast with Weisz, Colman, Seydoux and James C. Reilly. The failings of The Lobster are not their fault.
The first third of the The Lobster is amusing, and I hung hopefully with the second third. The final third is dark, without much, if any, leavening humor, and the last fifteen minutes is almost unwatchable. Stay away.
Here’s a delightful movie that you haven’t seen – the grievously overlooked romantic comedy Man Up. The British Man Up had a very brief US theatrical run last November that did not even reach the Bay Area. I suspect that’s because it doesn’t have any big name American stars. But it’s better than any other romantic comedy from 2015.
Nancy (Lake Bell) is on a four-year dating drought and has given up all hope when she inadvertently stumbles into a blind date meant for another woman. She’s intrigued with what she sees in Jack (Simon Pegg from Shaun of the Dead) and decides to impersonate his real date. As they get more and more into each other, the elephant in the room is when she will be exposed.
Like many of the best recent romantic comedies, Man Up was written by a woman, the British television writer Tess Morris. Again and again in Man Up, Morris authentically captures dating behaviors and female and male insecurities. Nervous at meeting Nancy, Jack just can’t stop talking; in a later date with someone who he’s not so much into, he checks off the same conversation points in a fraction of the time. Everyone who has dated will recognize himself or herself at some moment in this film.
The very talented Lake Bell wrote/directed/starred in the American indie comedy In the World…, which I really, really liked. Simon Pegg is a comedy star, and he’s very appealing here, but Bell has seriously good comedic chops.
Rory Kinnear, who you might remember as persistent but sensitive detective in The Imitation Game and as Tanner in the James Bond movies, plays an outrageously inappropriate admirer from Nancy’s youth.
Man Up is available to stream from Netflix Instant, Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Flixster.
