Photo caption: Mike Veeck in THE SAINT OF SECOND CHANCES. Courtesy of Netflix.
The endearing documentary The Saint of Second Chances is about a guy who is both a character himself and the son of another character. Mike Veeck, the film’s subject, is the son of the legendary Bill Veeck, who was kind of the P.T. Barnum of baseball, known for the many gimmicks he used to draw paying fans into the ballpark. Unlike his father, Mike Veeck is not in the Hall of Fame, but he has earned his place in his self-described “family of baseball hustlers”.
This a movie about baseball people that really isn’t about baseball itself. It’s about Mike’s irrepressibility, ingenuity and audacity in conjuring up publicity stunt after publicity stunt. The story, cleverly divided into innings, traces Mike’s life through his very high highs and his very low lows. You may already know about his most famous low point – the Chicago White Sox’s “Disco Sucks Night” in 1979 that turned into a riot. That disaster drove Mike out of baseball, until, years later, he started promoting obscure minor league baseball teams with wacky novelties like the St. Paul Saints and their baseball-delivering pig, their nun masseuse and their blind radio broadcaster.
Like anyone’s life, Mike’s has had his share of heartaches, and The Saint of Second Chances‘ wistful moments are genuine and touching.
Photo caption: Anaita Wali Zada in FREMONT. Cortesy of Music Box Films.
Fremont is the absorbing and frequently droll portrait of a woman, having landed in a new place, who has paused her life and needs to find her path to self-discovery. Donya (Anaita Wali Zada), having worked as a translator for the US military in her native Afghanistan, has fled Kabul for her life. She is living in a stucco-box apartment in the Bay Area suburb of Fremont and is working for a San Francisco manufacturer of, absurdly, Chinese fortune cookies.
Her life is lonely and boring, and her social life is anything but what one would expect for an attractive Bay Area. single woman in her mid-20s. What’s holding her back? It’s not fear, shyness, the bounds of traditional Afghan culture or PTSD from the war. She could have landed an entry level job in Fremont and saved herself the 45-minute commute, but she has intentionally left the insular enclave of Afghan refugees for a job that exposes her to folks with other backgrounds. That clues us in to Donya’s curiosity and fearlessness.
Donya is quiet without being shy, engaging in conversations with her benevolently goofy boss, her know-it-all co-worker and her oddball psychiatrist, and indulging their need to explain things to her. It’s clear to us that she knows more than all of them except for the old owner of an Afghan café, whose life experience tells him what she needs to do with her life.
Donya is the only member of her family in the US precisely because she is the only one whose life has been expressly threatened by the Taliban. That presents her with a form of survivor’s guilt that she needs to confront.
Donya needs to pivot, and the spark is a fortune in a fortune cookie – a fortune written by Donya herself.
Fremont and the character of Donya are the creations of Iranian-born and Belgium-based director and co-writer Babak Jalali, a master of deadpan, absurdist humor. (I love his even more droll Radio Dreams, also set in a Bay Area immigrant community.) After all, what is more disposable or trivial than the fortune in a fortune cookie? I especially enjoyed the scenes where Donya listens implacably as her shrink earnestly (and, he thinks, therapeutically) reads her passages from Jack London’s White Fang.
Donya borrows her friend’s beater of a car for a quest to, of all places, Bakersfield. At a remote gas station along the way, she meets Daniel (Jeremy Allen White of The Bear), a kind and lonely mechanic, and very, tentatively and more than a bit awkwardly, a connection forms.
Jalali captures and distills the profound attraction between mutual soul mates. Donya’s and Daniel’s encounters are so spare, you wonder how much of our courtship rituals are superfluous.
In her screen debut, Anaita Wali Zada effectively inhabits the fresh and original character of Donya, whose reserve masks her strong will. Essentially all of the cast (including his leading lady) are first-time actors, except for Jeremy Allen White and Gregg Turkington, who plays the shrink. You gotta wonder what Jalali could do with trained actors.
Fremont has opened in LA at the Laemmle Nuart, Town Center and Glendale, and in the Bay Area at the Roxie, the Rafael, and, happily, in the Cine Lounge in Fremont. The more I think about Fremont, the more I like it.
Photo caption: THE LEAGUE, courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
The League is a comprehensive documentary on the history of Negro League baseball. As one would expect from a Sam Pollard doc, it’s well-sourced and reveals some less well known history:
Rube Foster, remembered as a pitching great and inventor of the screwball, was the impresario and strategic mind behind the first Negro League.
Effa Manley, the canny co-owner of the Newark Eagles, was a pioneering female AND African-American businesswoman with the spunk, if not the resources, to stand up to MLB.
The Negro Leagues’ surprisingly brief lifespan and even briefer glory days.
Why the immensely talented, even Ruthian, Josh Gibson wasn’t put forward to integrate MLB (like Jackie Robinson was).
How MLB execs like Branch Rickey and Bill Veeck worked with the Negro Leagues (or not).
The painful trade-offs from the long-awaited integration of MLB.
The League is the work of filmmaker Sam Pollard, who directed the more compelling MLK/FBI. The League will appeal to those with interests in baseball and/or civil rights. The League is streaming on Amazon.
Photo caption: Harris Dickinson and Lola Campbell in Charlotte Regan’s SCRAPPER. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.
In the delightful coming of age dramedy Scrapper, Georgie, a precocious 12-year-old girl, thinks that she is independently living her best life, until the unexpected appearance of the dad she hasn’t known.
In her first feature, British writer-director Charlotte Regan has created a deliciously charming character, played to roguish perfection by Lola Campbell. Streetwise and mischievous, Georgie is able to outsmart the adults who might be expected to be providing more effective oversight.
Regan gradually reveals why Georgie is living alone, and the back story of her family. The screenplay, about loss, connection and second chances, is brimming with humanity.
Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness) is very good as the dad.
Scrapper won the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema/Dramatic at Sundance. I screened Scrapper for the SLO Film Fest, where it was my favorite film. Scrapper is playing Cinequest tonight, and opening in theaters this weekend.
Photo caption: Hélène Lambert and Juliette Binoche in BETWEEN TWO WORLDS. Courtesy of Cohen Media Group.
The workplace drama Between Two Worlds, starring Juliette Binoche, is based on a recent French bestseller that explores workers scrambling for precarious, crappy employment amid rampant job insecurity. It’s a harsh new reality in France, felt even more keenly in a nation where robust employment protections were the norm until recent “reforms”.
Binoche plays a character new in town, purportedly starting her life over from scratch after a bad break-up. She’s looking for a job – any job – and navigates the unwelcoming world of employment office job fairs to get a minimum wage gig with a cleaning company. That job goes so NOT well, that she ends up on everyone’s job of last resort – on the cleaning crew of the vehicle ferry between Ouistreham, France, and Portsmouth, England. (The movie’s French title is Ouistreham.)
This ferry job is acknowledged by everyone – even the supervisor – to be a hellish job. 230 en suite berths must be serviced, with bed linens changed and the toilets cleaned, in the 90 minutes between voyages. It’s physically taxing and disgusting drudgery – and it’s a race against the clock. Our protagonist is accepted and guided by more experienced local women on the crew and forms friendships.
At the beginning of the second act, there is a significant revelation, which explains some vibes we have picked up and adds another element of tension through the rest of the story, to its perfectly modulated ending.
I’ve been watching Juliette Binoche movies since The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Binoche is always glorious. That’s true here, too, in a role where she is often concealing her thoughts and feelings from the other characters.
Remarkably, director Emmanuel Carrère has surrounded Binoche with first-time actors who play her colleagues in the underclass; they are great, particularly Hélène Lambert, who is effectively the second lead, Léa Carne and Emily Madeleine.
Between Two Worlds is two movies in one – a political exposé and a relationship melodrama. At the ending, I couldn’t help thinking of the Pulp song Common People (and the William Shatner/Joe Jackson version is my fave).
The US release of Between Two Worlds is rolling out; it’s opening at San Francisco’s Opera Plaza this weekend.
Jakki Jandrell and Phillip Andre Botello in FALLEN DRIVE. Courtesy of Cinequest.
The neo-noir thriller Fallen Drive begins with some 20-somethings congregating in a suburban Airbnb ranch house, having returned to their hometown for a high school reunion. It looks like the successful Liam is really more interested in reuniting with his mysteriously estranged younger brother Dustin. Tightly wound Charlie (Jakki Jandrell) and her boyfriend Reese (Phillip Andre Botello) arrive, and it’s apparent that they have an agenda that could be more grim than drinking with high school buddies.
Soon we are enmeshed in revenge noir, in a variation of the perfect crime film. Things get more intense – and more unpredictable – as the story evolves. There are Hitchcockian touches – he suspects us.
Fallen Drive is written and directed by Nick Cassidy (who also plays Liam) and David Rice; it’s the first feature for both. A very strong screenplay elevates Fallen Drive from the paint-by-numbers thriller we see so often. Here Cassidy and Rice have made the characters complicated and added some ambiguity to the back story. There are subtle hints about the relationships of Liam and Dustin and of Reese and Charlie, and the audience is asked to fill in the blanks. You’ll never guess the two characters driving off together at the end.
There’s also a minor character who still parties too much, who could have been written merely for comic relief; but Cassidy and Rice make it clear that his alcoholism has left him immature – that’s why he behaves like a jerk.
The performances are strong. Jandrell is superb as the coiled Charlie. Donald Clark Jr. is also excellent as Dustin, who the others have always found creepy. Cassidy makes for a sufficiently smirky Liam.
An uncommonly textured revenge thriller, Fallen Drive should be a crowd-pleaser. Cinequest is hosting the world premiere of Fallen Drive.
Chelsea Bo and Ava Acres in NO RIGHT WAY. Courtesy of Cinequest.
In Chelsea Bo’s affecting family drama No Right Way, Harper (played by Bo herself) is a 27-year-old go-getter in LA. She gets a call from child protective services in Las Vegas, informing her that her 13-year-old half-sister Georgie (Ava Acres)can no longer stay with her mother. Because their father is away on a work assignment, Harper drives to Vegas to pick up Georgie herself.
Harper finds that Georgie’s mother Tiffany (Eliza Coupe of Happy Endings) is a hot mess. There may be no one right way to raise a child, but there are wrong ways, for which Tiffany is the poster girl. Addled by a serious drug addiction, Tiffany runs with scary men and can’t even manage to kep the electricity on; as a result, Georgie, very smart with a big personality, is essentially feral.
A fundamentally decent person, Harper is appalled by Tiffany’s failure to provide Georgie with guidance and stability, let alone a safe environment. The dad is comfortable with his current hands-off parenting and gun shy of engaging with Tiffany, so Harper sees herself as Georgie’s last chance and tries to get custody of Georgie from Tiffany.
But Harper is out of her depth dealing with an addict’s denial and sociopathy, and doesn’t reckon that Tiffany, who has no boundaries at all, will explode in manipulative drama and involve Georgie herself in the vortex. Harper makes a mistake that keeps her from gaining control of the situation, and soon Harper is getting a big dose of no good deed goes unpunished. Even neglected kids often prefer to stay with the parent they know, and teenagers relish the freedom of an unengaged guardian.
Chelsea Bo wrote and directed No Right Way, and the exceptionally smart screenplay indicates that she is a perceptive observer of human nature, and her characters are authentically complicated.
Harper is responsible, but she’s naïve and a little judgy. When she observes the untidy household of Tiffany’s friend Amy, we can see Harper aghast at both red flags (the littlest kid is encamped in a closet) and Amy not meeting middle-class norms (we can see her thinking OMG she’s smoking in front of the kids!); but Amy’s teenagers happily play games with the family after dinner – an accomplishment most American parents would envy.
Amy (Sufe Bradshaw of Veep) naturally relates more to Tiffany than to the privileged Harper. But Amy has seen some bullshit in her day, and her sympathy to Tiffany is tempered by a focus on Georgie’s welfare.
Coupe is brilliantly twitchy and volatile as Tiffany, who, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, erupts to make everything someone else’s fault.
Both lead actors – Bo and Ava Acres – are believable and relatable. Acres, who already has 57 screen credits on IMDb, is a force of nature as Georgie.
No Right Way is compelling without any tinge of soapiness. A scene where the dad reams out Harper on the phone as disfunction swirls around her is especially strong. This is a remarkably promising debut feature for Chelsea Bo. I screened No Right Way for its world premiere at Cinequest.
Kaymak follows the relationships of two couples in the same apartment building in teeming Skopje, North Macedonia. Eva (Kamka Tocinovski), a rich banker, lives in the penthouse with her husband Metodi (Filip Trajkovic), who wants a child; Eva, not a candidate for Mother of Year, doesn’t want her life disrupted by the bother of pregnancy and childbirth, so she plucks a young relative, Dosta (Sara Klimoska), from the countryside to serve as a surrogate. Dosta is developmentally disabled and lives with her family in an impoverished, backward village. Soon, Eva and Metodi are getting more than they expected and more than they can handle.
The other couple lives in a modest ground floor apartment. Caramba (Aleksandar Mikic ) is a goofy security guard; Danche (Simona Spirovska) is always exhausted from pulling double shifts at a bakery. Day to day drudgery has drained their relationship of passion, and Caramba is always on Danche’s very last nerve. When Caramba meets the comely and oversexed cheese vendor Violetka (Ana Stojanovska), their lives, too, are upended.
The characters have lots of sex, both joyously kinky and cringingly transgressive. It gets very funny, and Manchevski even drops in a delicious nod to the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone.
Ana Stojanovska and Simona Spirovska in KAYMAK. Courtesy of Kaymak.
However, Manchevski imbues Kaymak with more meaning than a mere sex romp, exploring both the imperative to parent and the elastic strictures of of monogamy. There’s tragedy (and apparent tragedy) here, amid all the absurdity. Manchevski told A Good Movie to Watch, “People usually want their films to have a consistent and predictable tone. Now, my preference as a film viewer, but also as a filmmaker, is more adventurous. I don’t mind disruption. On the contrary, I cherish it.“
All the characters, rich or not, enjoy kaymak, a versatile creamy milk reduction used in the Balkans as an appetizer, a condiment and a fast food breakfast.
Manchevski was Oscar-nominated for his acclaimed 1994 Macedonian feature Before the Rain. That Manchevski debut won the Golden Lion at Venice and was singled out as a masterpiece by Roger Ebert and The New York Times. Since then, Manchevski has been teaching in New York and directed an episode of The Wire.
Kaymak is his third film to play Cinequest, after Bikini Moon, my choice as the best film of the 2017 Cinequest, and Willow, a triptych that plumbs the heartaches and joys of having children. Kaymak is the raunchiest and most overtly comedic of the Manchevski films I’ve seen
The performances in Kaymak are all excellent. (Klimoska bears a passing resemblance to Kristin Stewart.)
Cinequest is hosting the US premiere of Kaymak. Find the trailer on the Cinequest Kaymak page.
Taylor Joree Scorse in UNDER THE INFLUENCER. Courtesy of Cinequest.
The comedy Under the Influencer is a fable of identity. Tori (Taylor Joree Scorse) is a YouTuber who has built an immense following by appealing to the most frivolous interests of 13-year-old girls. But she’s becoming stale to that audience, and her popularity is tenuous. Having achieved so much success by selling a version of herself, Tori has become very invested, perhaps melded, with her screen persona. Tori is bratty, despite the shallow silliness that she trades in, and she’s ripe for a comeuppance.
Tori seeks to pivot her brand, but her audience is fickle, and she is ambushed by the treachery of two other social media stars. Since her self-confidence rises and falls with the toxicity of on-line comments, she’s at risk of implosion.
This is a glimpse into a professional social media world unknown to some of us, but writer-director Alex Haughey, having spent a year producing for a major YouTuber, knows the scene.
It looks like we’re in for a savage mockumentary until there’s major change in tone when Tori is forced to come to terms with how her own identity is so wrapped up in the validation of views and instant likes or dislikes. It turns out that Tori may not be a ditz after all – she’s just been playing one on YouTube. There’s a revelatory flashback showing how the 13-year-old Tori first dipped her toes into social media (after we have already seen what she’s become).
Taylor Joree Scorse explodes with energy as Tori, completely believable as both the superficial and the more reflective versions of Tori. Spencer Vaughn Kelly is very good as an almost mystically charismatic stranger Tori encounters.
This is the second film by Alex Haughey, whose debut Prodigy, a psychological thriller with paranormal elements, was one of the top films at the 2017 Cinequest.
Under the Influencer is topical, funny and, ultimately, sweet and hopeful. Cinequest is hosting the world premiere of Under the Influencer.
Photo caption: Molly Gordon and Ben Platt in THEATER CAMP. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
The good-hearted and relentlessly funny Theater Camp sends up the world of drama nerds without a hint of meanness. When the beloved founder (Amy Sedaris) of a summer theater camp for kids falls into a coma, the camp staff must run the summer program themselves. One challenge is that the founder’s son Troy (Jimmy Tatro) is now in charge, and he is a bozo brimming with misplaced confidence, one of those guys whose every instinct is enthusiastically wrong.
Because the camp staff are show people and the campers are show people in the making, there’s plenty of grist for comedy. The kids are budding prima donnas and the staff are flamboyant, temperamental and eccentric.
It’s an affectionate skewering by filmmakers who know the subculture well. Theater Camp was written by Molly Gordon, Ben Platt, Noah Galvin and Nick Lieberman. Gordon and Lieberman directed, and Gordon, Platt and Galvin play major roles as the camp’s faculty.
An avalanche of funny bits bury the audience as directors Gordon and Lieberman and editor Jon Philpot keep the laughs coming at a madcap pace. There are big jokes and little jokes; I found it very funny that Gordon’s character is named Rebecca-Diane.
The Big Show at the end, a tribute to their comatose founder titled Joan Still, is destined to surpass Springtime for Hitler in The Producers as the worst musical-within-a-movie until it is rescued by an unexpected tour de force by Noah Galvin.
Galvin’s performance is the showiest, but everyone in the cast is excellent, particularly Gordon and Platt. Patti Harrison is very good as a corporate predator with Troy in her sights, and Owen Thiele sparkles as the camp’s most flamboyant teacher.
And where did they find these kids? Some of the kids who play the campers are unbelievably talented.
