Movies

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.

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.

HEARTWORN HIGHWAYS: like desperados waitin’ for a train

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Photo caption: Guy Clark in HEARTWORN HIGHWAYS. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

Heartworn Highways documents an early moment in the Outlaw Movement of country western music, with candid footage of Outlaw pioneers Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, David Allan Coe and Charlie Daniels, and also Clark’s very young mentees  Steve Earle and Rodney Crowell. (Earle was only 22 and Crowell was 25 – Heartworn Highways includes the first recordings of their songs.)

There are lesser-known artists, too, including Steve Young (who wrote Seven Bridges Road) and the storyteller Gamble Rogers. Larry Jon Wilson records one of his songs after a rough night (he was 35 and looked 55). Peggy Brooks contributes a risque barroom ditty.

Guy Clark, his painter/songwriter wife Susanna Clark, and Townes Van Zandt were the subjects of the fine 2021 documentary Without Getting Killed or Caught. The three held a salon in their Nashville home, and mentored the likes of Crowell and Earle. You can the flavor of the salon in Heartworn Highways.

Heartworn Highways begins with Clark’s anthem LA Freeway and ends with a group sing of O Holy Night.

Townes Van Zandt (right) with Sylvester Washington in HEARTWORN HIGHWAYS. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

One unforgettable moment is Townes Van Zandt’s rendition of his Waitin’ Round to Die, which brings 79-year-old horse shoer “Uncle” Seymour Washington to tears. Van Zandt did not survive his alcoholism, and there is also a now poignant clip of him very drunk.

Written and directed by James Szalapski, Heartworn Highways was filmed 1975 and 1976 but it didn’t find its way into theaters until 1981. What appear to be outtakes from the filming can be found on YouTube.

Heartworn Highways is just an assortment of cinéma vérité clips, with the only relation to each other being this cadre of musicians and their art, but it works. It is available to stream from AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Showtime.

DREAMING WALLS: INSIDE THE CHELSEA HOTEL: the artsy and the quirky

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Photo caption: DREAMING WALLS: INSIDE THE CHELSEA HOTEL. Credit: Merle Lister. Courtesy of ©Clindoeilfilms.

The documentary Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel is set inside an institution with a remarkable cultural history. Residents of New York City’s Chelsea Hotel have included:

  • writers Mark Twain, Arthur C. Clarke, Jack Kerouac and William C. Burroughs,
  • playwrights Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Sam Shepherd,
  • poets Dylan Thomas and Allen Ginzberg,
  • painters Diego Rivera, Willem de Kooning and Jasper Johns,
  • singer-songwriters Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and Tom Waits,
  • musicians Edith Piaf, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Cher, Iggy Pop and Madonna,
  • film directors Milos Forman and Stanley Kubrick,
  • actors Dennis Hopper, Elaine Stritch and Jane Fonda.

But that history is not what Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel is about – at least not directly. And neither is the now bedraggled hotel’s transition into yet another upscale Manhattan retreat for the wealthy. Writer-directors Maya Duverdier and Amalie van Elmbt have focused on the current residents, who embody the last remnants of the Chelsea’s quirky, artistic flavor.

Those tenants are ten years into a nightmare of a renovation, essentially living in a construction zone in their hallways, outside their windows and, sometimes, inside their own apartments.  Some of the tenants are very old and some are very, very, very old. There’s a clip of an interview with the painter Alphaeus Philemon Cole, who was the world’s oldest verified person when he died at the Chelsea at age 112.

And they are artsy. It’s the kind of place where one can turn the corner and be met with “Hey, we have a dance performance is underway”.  Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel is a cinéma vérité observation of these folks.

Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel braids them into the hotel’s storied history by splicing in visual bits of the famed artists and art that are the Chelsea’s legacy. It’s impressionistic and ghostly, and the editing by Alain Dessauvage and Julie Naas elevates Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel from the standard cinéma vérité doc.

How much you enjoy Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel depends on how much you enjoy the company of artists and whether you find their eccentricities and self-absorption charming or annoying.

The film includes a passage of Dylan Thomas”: Do not go gentle into that good night. Indeed, the long artistic period of the Chelsea is going into the good night, but certainly not gently.

Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel is streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and redbox.

SUPERCOOL: a teen comedy familiar, until it isn’t

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A scene from Teppo Airaksinen’s film SUPERCOOL, which played at SFFILM. Photo courtesy of SFFILM.

Supercool has the familiar arc of a teen comedy – until it doesn’t. We get the high school cafeteria lunch period, the adolescent social awkwardness, the bullies and the parents-away teen house party. And then there are some unexpected sparkles.

Our protagonists, Neil (Jake Short) and Gilbert (Miles J. Harvey) have a commonplace obsession for teen boys: they aspire to get SOME sexual experience with another person. And Neil worships a girl whom he is afraid to even talk to,

There’s a funny scene (glimpsed in the trailer below) where the guys fantasize a situation where girls would be attracted to them, unaware that Neil’s parents are hearing every word.

The guys also have two misadventures that put them in hilariously uncomfortable sexual situations.

Neil has a helluva imagination and creates graphic novels that picture how he hopes to eventually woo his beloved. Fortunately, he is sweet on a girl who turns out to have an awesome sense of humor.

I must note that Supercool does contain the best-ever movie use of the (only?) Haddaway song What Is Love.

I screened Supercool for its world premiere at SFFILM in April 2021. Supercool can now be streamed from Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and redbox.

MY OLD SCHOOL: how could this happen? and why?

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Alan Cumming in MY OLD SCHOOL, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

The absorbing documentary My Old School is about a guy who fooled his Scottish high school classmates and, notably, the school authorities, into believing that he was not who he really was. The impersonation was extreme, audacious and more than a little creepy, and resulted in a scandal well-known in the British Isles.

Writer-director Jono McLeod was one of those classmates, and he has been able to garner more than a handful of the kids and teachers who were eyewitnesses. And he secured over five hours of audio from the impersonator himself, which are brilliantly lip-synced by actor Alan Cummings (kind of the opposite of voiced by).

MY OLD SCHOOL, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

If that weren’t creative enough, McLeod uses animation to illustrate key moments in the story. And, surprisingly, there comes a video clip of a high school performance of the musical South Pacific, a performance that would be excruciatingly mundane – except for what the audience knows.

In telling My Old School, McLeod reveals the deception itself right away and then gradually unspools a series of more shockers, about how the ruse was executed, with whose help and the motivation. It’s quite the story.

My Old School opens in theaters this weekend, including at the Opera Plaza in San Francisco.

MRS. HARRIS GOES TO PARIS: nothing wrong with a dose of sentimentality once in a while

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Photo caption: Alba Baptista and Lesley Manville in MRS. HARRIS GOES TO PARIS. Courtesy of Focus Features / © 2021 Ada Films Ltd – Harris Squared Kft.

In the goodhearted Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, Lesley Manville plays the titular character, a war widow who cleans houses in 1957 London. Although there is nothing in her hardscrabble circumstance that seems to justify her bubbly hopefulness, we in the audience know that everything is going to work out. This is an unabashed Feel Good movie.

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is an unchallenging, fluffy film and doesn’t pretend to be anything else. It is well-crafted and well-acted, especially by Manville.

Lesley Manville has amassed a distinguished body of work in Mike Leigh films alone: Secrets & Lies, Topsy-Turvy, High Hopes, All or Nothing, Vera Drake, and, most brilliantly, in Another Year. She was Oscar-nominated for Phantom Thread.

The great Isabelle Huppert plays the sourpuss role that Lesley Manville often plays in Mike Leigh films. I’m always glad to see Isabelle Huppert and Nathalie Baye, even in the one-dimensional roles they’ve gotten in the past two years.

The one singular segment of Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is a depiction of the opening for the 1957 Dior collection. I have little (maybe no) interest in fashion, but I was riveted.

I wasn’t planning to see this movie, but The Wife really felt like sitting in a movie theater, which I always encourage. Although I had predicted the the ending within 30 minutes, it wasn’t a painful experience.

Nothing wrong with a dose of sentimentality once in a while. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is in theaters.

THE FAITHFUL: THE KING, THE POPE, THE PRINCESS: are there limits to devotion?

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Photo caption: THE FAITHFUL: THE KING, THE POPE, THE PRINCESS. Courtesy of Annie Berman.

In the documentary The Faithful: The King The Pope The Princess, filmmaker Annie Berman follows the people who are devoted to iconic celebrities, both dead (Elvis Presley and Princess Diana) and alive (the Pope du jour). I don’t mean “fans”, I mean “devoted”, as in those who make annual pilgrimages and who decorate shrines.

At first, Berman wryly observes the endless variety of cheesy Elvis souvenirs, and the possibly cheesier panoply of Pope souvenirs. She archly interviews a Papal spokesman about the Vatican’s commercial licensing of the Pope’s image. We see what are purported to be Pope lollipops, but when they are unwrapped, the Pope’s image turns out to be on a paper cover, so no tongues actually commit the sacrilege of licking the papal face.

But Berman – herself returning yearly to Graceland and Elvis’ Tupelo birthplace, a London Princess Di shrine and the Vatican – focuses on the faithful. She lets them talk about their obsessions, and how someone they never met “touched their lives”. Berman is remarkably nonjudgmental with these people and their sincere devotion and chooses not to mock them.

THE FAITHFUL: THE KING, THE POPE, THE PRINCESS. Courtesy of Annie Berman.

Finally, Berman has to ask herself whether she herself is too obsessed with this project on obsession.

Berman’s narration takes us on a journey that sometimes amusing, sometimes appalling, but fundamentally meditative.