Movies

Three more days to enjoy these films from SXSW – included with Amazon Prime

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FACE TO FACE TIME

This year’s SXSW Film Festival, set to play in March, was cancelled due to COVID-19, but SXSW and Amazon are teaming to showcase over thirty of the films through this Wednesday, May 6. I’ve seen six of them (five shorts and a feature) that I can recommend.

Fate to Face Time is a 7-minute comedy about how any date can lead to misadventure, even a remote one. She’s gone out with him twice and is looking to accelerate things with a surprise FaceTime call, but he may not be that much into her…

We’ve all over-invested in a certain date (and, since teenage years, we’ve all known better, but have done it anyway). Face to Face Time begins as a cringe comedy, but the finale is a howler.

Face to Face Time is written and directed by (and stars) Izzy Shill. As Shill herself notes in the intro, this short is especially timely while we are all sheltering at home and many are dating remotely.

Here are some some more recommendations from Prime’s SXSW 2020 Film Festival Collection:

  • Quilt Fever – an affectionate documentary abou the Olympics of quilting, held annually in Paducah, Kentucky (who knew? And who knew that there was a Quilting Channel?) (16 minutes.)
  • No Crying at the Dinner Table – Filmmaker Carol Nguyen recorded separate interviews with her mom, dad and adult sister about losses they have suffered but never talked about, and then shared all three interviews with all three family members. It’s authentic, and it’s a weeper. (16 minutes)
  • The Voice Inside Your Head – a bizarre comedy is which the inner voice that is stripping you of confidence and self worth is personified in a guy who follows you around all day. (12 minutes).
  • Daddio – Casey Wilson of SNL wrote, directed and stars in this comic short about how she and her zany dad (Michael McKean) navigated their grief after the death of her mom. (18 minutes.)
  • Selfie – This French feature film is a collection of astute parodies that comment on digital online culture, from obsession with view/likes on social media to Internet dating to security breaches. Some of the vignettes are smarter and funnier than others. I especially enjoyed the guy who is bragging about how his life is made better by targeted ads (the algorithms really get him!) until he receives a targeted ad for Viagra. (1 hour 48 minutes.)

Search on Amazon for the title of the film – or “SXSW” for the entire menu of 2020 SXSW films on Amazon Prime thru May 6. If you have Amazon Prime, they’re free.

CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: behind the one percent

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CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

Documentarian Justin Pemberton brings alive Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a critique of the concentration of wealth. There’s no more fundamentally important political topic than inequality, and this theme has resonated through the best of recent cinema, including Parasite and Knives Out.

Pinketty traces the economics of wealth from feudal times to the present, and Pemberton keeps all the economic history lively with plenty of eye candy. Capital in the Twenty-First Century covers a lot of ground – globalization and movable capital, deregulation and privatization, defanging of organized labor, China state capital, and the impact on today’s youngest generations.

Piketty’s proffered solutions are simple and intellectually sound (stopping off-shore tax dodges, taxing inheritance, incentivizing wealth to be invested in productive risk instead of moving around a closed-loop of financial instruments). But, given the political power of great wealth, this is a very heavy political lift.

CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century pops along fairly briskly, but, as an entertaining popularizer, it’s no The Big Short or An Inconvenient Truth. Still, about an hour in, there’s a jaw-dropping psych experiment in which people benefiting from pure luck believe and act as though they are entitled.

During its Bay Area virtual run at the Roxie, you can stream Capital in the Twenty-First Century at Roxie Virtual Cinema, or at distributoe Kino Lorber’s new virtual platform Kino Marquee.

PANDEMIC NOIR: too soon?

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Jack Palance in PANIC IN THE STREETS

Is it too soon for pandemic noir? Actually, these two movies from 1950 are about outbreaks and epidemics, not really pandemics. But heroic public health officers are central in both, just like in today’s COVID-19 pandemic. Both Panic in the Streets and The Killer that Stalked New York are among my Overlooked Noir.

First, there’s irector Elia Kazan’s noirish thriller Panic in the Streets This Kazan’s OTHER movie set in a gritty waterfront, and he shot it on location in New Orleans. In his screen debut, Jack Palance plays a hoodlum who commits a murder and unknowingly becomes infected with pneumonic plague. Richard Widmark plays the public health expert who is trying to prevent an epidemic by tracking down Patient Zero (Palance) without causing a panic in the city. Of course, the cops are trying to solve the murder, and the man hunt for the murderer will lead them to the same target. Jack Palance was nothing if not intense, and he brings the right combination of vicious thuggery and escalating desperation to his performance.

Evelyn Keyes in THE KILLER THAT STALKED NEW YORK

You might have difficulty imagining a movie procedural of Public Health officers quelling an epidemic being described as “lurid”, but then there’s The Killer that Stalked New York.  The star is Evelyn Keyes, who plays Sheila, a Typhoid Mary of smallpox.  Sheila has made a very bad choice in boyfriends – a guy for whom she has taken one fall already and is now helping with a delivery of stolen jewelry.  She’s on the run from the cops until she can deliver the loot – and bad boyfriend (Charles Korvin) wants that loot right away, too.  And she’s not feeling well…

Sheila has smallpox, so she’s zipping furtively around NYC infecting people.  So the Public Health Department is also tracking her down as Patent Zero.  The Killer that Stalked New York is about these two overlaid ticking bombs – the jewelry caper and the smallpox – all while Sheila is getting sicker and sicker.  Fortunately, a dreamy Public Health doc (William Bishop) is drawn to save her.

Evelyn Keyes is the best thing about the movie, although she has to play a pretty overwrought role.  And she is made up to look worse and worse in the course of the plot, getting really sweaty and finally sporting pustules.

Visit my posts on Panic in the Streets and The Killer that Stalked New York for more discussion, images and a trailer. The Killer That Stalked New York has played on Turner Classic Movies. It’s not currently available to stream, but the DVD is available to purchase. The better movie, Panic in the Streets, plays frequently on Turner Classic Movies and can be streamed from iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Richard Widmark and Paul Douglas in PANIC IN THE STREETS

THE WHISTLERS: walking a tightrope of treachery

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Catrinel Marlon and Vlad Ivanov in THE WHISTLERS

In the absorbing crime thriller The Whistlers, Cristi (Vlad Ivanov) is a shady Romanian cop who is lured into a dangerous plot by the rapturously sexy Gilda (Catrinel Marlon) and the promise of a fortune. A lethal Spanish mafia is planning a Perfect Crime to recover the loot stolen by Gilda and her Romanian partner, Zsolt. Only Zslot knows where the treasure is, and he’s been jailed by Cristi’s colleagues. To beat the omnipresent surveillance of Romanian state security, Cristi is sent to La Gomera, an island in the Spanish Canary Islands to learn a whistling language.

A whistling language? Indeed, residents of La Gomera can communicate by whistling in code. The language is called Silbo Gomera and it was already being used in ancient Roman times. The whistling can be heard for up to two miles, which allows the locals to communicate across the impassable ravines on the mountainous island.

The plan to spring Zsolt depends on Cristi learning Silbo Gomera and then implementing an intricate plan in which nothing can go wrong. Even if the plan goes right, Cristi and Gilda run the very real risk of being killed by the pitiless Spanish mafia or by the corrupt and unaccountable Romanian cops. Cristi and Gilda are walking a tightrope of treachery.

Vlad Ivanov in THE WHISTLERS

The Whistlers is written and directed by Corneliu Porumboiu, who is a master of the deadpan. Two of his earlier films became art house hits in the US, 12:08 East of Bucharest and Police, Adjective. Both of those films explored fundamental corruption in Romanian society as a legacy of the communist era..

Cristi is played by Romanian actor Vlad Ivanov. Ivanov is best known for the Romanian masterpiece 4 Days, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, in which he played one of cinema’s most repellent characters – Mr. Bebe, the sexual harassing abortionist. American audiences have also seen Ivanov’s performances in Police, Adjective and Snowpiercer.

Ivanov excels in playing Everyman piñatas, which serves him well in The Whistlers. Ivanov delivered a tour de force in the 2019 Cinequest film Hier, as a man more and more consumed by puzzles, and increasingly perplexed, dogged, battered and exhausted.

For The Whistlers to work, Catrinel Marlon must make Gilda quick-thinking and gutsy, and she pulls it off. She is very good, as is Rodica Lazar as Cristi’s coldly ruthless boss Magda.

This is a Romanian film with dialogue in Romanian, English, Spanish and, of course, whistling. The Whistlers, a top notch crime thriller, can be streamed from Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

BE NATURAL: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ALICE GUY-BLACHE: every cinephile should know this

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The documentary Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blache pulls us out of ignorance about one of the most important pioneers of cinema. Alice Guy was one of the first movie directors, one of the first producers and one of the first studio heads. She was one of the inventors of movie comedy, use of color, special effects and a host of other aspects of filmmaking that we take for granted today. She worked in all three centers of early filmmaking – Paris, Fort Lee, New Jersey and Hollywood. And she was a woman.

Alice Guy had been almost erased from history precisely because – and only because – she was a woman. But if we don’t know about Alice Guy, we are as ignorant as if we didn’t know about the Lumieres and D.W. Griffith. This is essential movie history.

Fortunately, more and more of her films are being rediscovered – found, properly credited and preserved. At the bottom of this post, you can watch one of her films, The Consequences of Feminism. I didn’t even know that the word “feminism” was extant 114 years ago, but the film still has #MeToo topicality. It’s a withering parody of gender roles and male entitlement. In the film, men and women have taken each others’ conventional gender roles. Men perform the thankless household drudgery while the women smoke, drink and play pool. Throughout, the women are outrageously sexually harassing the men, kind of like Mad Men in reverse. Of course, the men finally rebel at all the mistreatment.

Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blache is currently free on WATCH TCM and can be streamed from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Here’s the entire seven minute film from 1906: The Consequences of Feminism:

RECORDER: THE MARION STOKES PROJECT: it seemed crazy at the time…

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. Marion Stokes in RECORDER: THE MARION STOKES PROJECT, directed by Matt Wolf. Photo credit: Eileen Emond and courtesy of Zeitgeist Films.

The excellent documentary Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, is about an eccentric woman who did something that seemed crazy, but turned out to be be important. For over 30 years, 24 hours per day, on multiple channels, Marion Stokes everything that was on TV – local news, commercials, network shows – the whole enchilada. She left a collection of 70,000 videotapes, Recorder explains the How and the Why.

It turns out that, before digital technology, TV stations did not preserve what they broadcast. So, what Stokes compiled is essential and irreplaceable – a unique archive of broadcasting and of American culture as it has been reflected by television.

Now, this was – and had to be – the project of an obsessive. Stokes’ son sagely observes that the difference between collecting and hoarding is the perceived value of the objects.

Stokes was one of those people whose cause was so important to them that it is prioritized above, for example, family relationships. I found the testimony from Stokes’ household staff – essentially her chosen family – most insightful and touching.

It’s a fascinating story. Stokes was that rare radical activist who both understood the power of media and had the financial means of recording and storing all of these broadcasts. She was an early adopter (her first tapings were on Betamax!), and became an Apple enthusiast.

Director Matt Wolf unspools this story perfectly. He is the son of Cinequest documentary screener Sandy Wolf; in this recent profile of Sandy, I also highlight Matt Wolf’s career (scroll down).

Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project is streamable on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

THE WILD GOOSE LAKE: vivid nights in the underworld

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THE WILD GOOSE LAKE. Photo courtesy of Film Movement.

In the atmospheric neo-noir The Wild Goose Lake, Zenong Zhou (Ge Hu) is a small time hood who unintentionally kills a cop. He goes on the run in a downscale lakeside resort known as a lawless no mans zone. Not only is he hunted by hundreds of police, the local criminal gangs are chasing him, too, to collect the price on his head. A mysterious woman, Aiai Liu (Lun-mei Kwei), shows up and purports that she has been sent by his gang to help him escape.

As the double crosses mount, and Aiai Liu confesses that she has really been assigned to betray him, we wonder if she will. The two of them slink around the resort area, trying to lay low, until the gangs and the police converge for a climactic scene just before the satisfying epilogue.

THE WILD GOOSE LAKE. Photo courtesy of Film Movement.

Director Yi’nan Dian has delivered a beautifully and inventively shot film. We first see the femme fatale thru a plastic umbrella. Much of the action is at night, and the colors in those nighttime scenes are vivid, even sometimes breathtaking. I especially liked a brief shot of the locals line dancing with glow-in-the-dark shoes.

Visually, The Wild Goose Lake reminded me of Long Day’s Journey into Night, a Chinese film that made my Best Movies of 2019 along with Ash Is Purest White. Overall, The Wild Goose Lake‘s screenplay and performances keep it from being as good as those films, but its cinematography by Jingsong Dong matches up.

Liao Fan (Ash is Purest White) plays the cop commanding the man hunt. Fan doesn’t have much to do for most of the film except to calmly issue orders, but we’re glad he’s around for the final scene.

Even before the hunters close in on their prey, The Wild Goose Lake contains some very effective set pieces, including an in-service training for gang members on how to steal motorbikes and then a contest billed as the “Olympic games of theft“.

More of an art movie than a crime thriller, The Wild Goose Lake is a beautifully shot fable from China’s underworld. You can support San Francisco’s Roxie Theater by buying a ticket to stream The Wild Goose Lake from the Roxie Virtual Cinema.

A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD: Mr. Rogers pries open a soul

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Matthew Rhys and Tom Hanks in A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

The Wife and I finally got around to streaming the pleasantly entertaining A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, with Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers. I had already seen the recent documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, which I’ll touch on a few paragraphs later.

In A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the investigative journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) is a notch-on-his-belt guy, who revels in bringing down the famous. When the subjects of his profiles read his articles about them, it’s the worst day of their lives. Despite his professional success, a smart and sexy wife (Susan Kelechi Watson) and a new baby, he’s profoundly unhappy. We learn that much of this stems from unresolved anger at his father (Chris Cooper).

To his disgust, Vogel is assigned to write a brief puff piece on that icon of niceness, Mr. Rogers. The movie is about Mr. Rogers trying to disarm Vogel’s cynicism by excavating Vogel’s daddy issues.

As written, Vogel’s emotional journey is a little too predictable for A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood to be a great movie, but it’s emotionally satisfying.

Of course, Tom Hanks is a perfect Mr. Rogers. Rhys is okay.

If you want to appreciate a great actor’s work, watch the very first time we see Chris Cooper. He signals that he is intoxicated with a slightly unsteady step backwards, and goes on to a perfectly realistic drunk performance, without ever lapsing into a Foster Brooks broadness,

Susan Kelechi Watson is very winning as Vogel’s wife, not a particularly complex part, but her charisma makes me want to see more of her.

This is the best work so far from director Marielle Heller (Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me?). She adds just the perfect dashes of magical realism (dropping Vogel into the sets and among the characters of the TV show), which is a difficult thing to get right.

We get to meet the real Fred Rogers in the recent biodoc Won’t You Be My Neighbor? What is so surprising is that Rogers’ sometimes laughably gentle affect sprang from such internal ferocity. It turns that Rogers was a man who hated, hated, hated the moral emptiness and materialism of commercial children’s television.

In theaters, Won’t You Be My Neighbor submerged audiences in their hankies. I did choke up three times during A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, but Won’t You Be My Neighbor? was pretty much one long ugly cry for me.

Streaming Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is included with subscriptions to HBO and DirecTV, and the stream can be purchased for $14.99 from all major streaming platforms. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is available to stream from all the usual outlets; I paid Amazon $2.99.

St. Paddy’s Day – THE COMMITMENTS

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THE COMMITMENTS

There’s a rich assortment of movies about Ireland that you can watch on St. Patrick’s Day: Waking Ned Devine, Brooklyn, Finian’s Rainbow, Once, Ryan’s Daughter, Widow’s Peak and The Guard. (Or you can go dark and pick from my Best Films About the Troubles.)

But my choice is the warmly funny The Commitments (1991), the affectionate tale of an unlikely aspiration and an unnecessary fiasco. Not content to wallow in generational poverty, a young lad, Jimmy Rabbitte (Robert Arkins) decides to gather a motley crew of his fellow North Dublin young folks and to form them into a soul band.

Now, North Dublin may be the most melanin-deprived place on the planet. So, why soul music? Jimmy, a natural leader, says:

“Do you not get it, lads? The Irish are the blacks of Europe. And Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland. And the Northside Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin. So say it once, say it loud: I’m black and I’m proud. ”

With the guidance of an older musician who has worked in the US, they improve, and even start to catch on. Unfortunately, these folks have never experienced success and are totally ill-equipped to handle it. Soon, the band is hanging together by a thread. If only Wilson Pickett, touring across town, can show up and help them with publicity…

The Commitments is adapted from a Roddy Doyle novel steeped in working class Irish verisimilitude. Director Alan Parker looked to local Dublin musicians and came up with a cast of first-time actors. Ironically, the one experienced actor and non-musician in the cast was Johnny Murphy as Joey “The Lips” Fagan.

The cast performed a 20-year reunion show. What have they been doing since they made this movie?

  • Andrew Strong, who played the immensely gifted but thuggish lead singer Deco Cuffe, has spent decades as a rock singer within Europe, mostly with his band the Bone Yard Boys.
  • Angeline Ball, who played the big-haired tart, Imelda Quirke, swept the Irish equivalent of Oscar/Emmy for best actress in a film and best actress in a TV drama in the same year, 2003.
  • Maria Doyle Kennedy, another backup singer, went on to a significant musical career in Ireland where she is a renowned singer-songwriter. She also played Catherine of Aragon in The Tudors and Vera Bates in Downton Abbey.
  • Glen Hansard, who played the busking guitarist, had some recording success as a solo artist and with his band The Frames. He also starred in an even better movie than The Commitments – the singer-songwriter romance Once.
  • Colm Meany, who played the Elvis-worshiping dad, went on to a career in major films ranging from The Last of the Mohicans to Star Trek: The Next Generation. Meany also starred in two more movies stories based on Roddy Doyle stories The Snapper and The Van; neither film was bad, but neither was as magical as The Commitments.

Alan Parker also directed the musicals Fame and Pink Floyd: The Wall. He was nominated for the best directing Oscar for Midnight Express and Mississippi Burning. (The Academy overlooked his lurid and trashy Angel Heart.)

The Commitments can be streamed from Amazon, iTunes, YouTube and Google Play, usually for less than the cost of a pint of Guinness.

THE BURNT ORANGE HERESY: old dogs Jagger and Sutherland light up a talky neo-noir

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Klaes Bang and Elizabeth Debicki in THE BURNT ORANGE HERESY. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.

In the neo-noir The Burnt Orange Heresy, a shady art critic (Klaes Bang) picks up an adventuresome hottie (Elizabeth Debicki) and is enlisted by a menacing zillionaire (Mick Jagger) to scheme out a painting from a reclusive painter (Donald Sutherland). This being a neo-noir, things don’t go as the critic has planned and it takes him too long to realize that he is the sap in the story.

Klaes Bang (The Square) is just made to play that handsome charmer who is just Up To No Good, the kind of role that would have gone to Zachary Scott in the 1940s. But in The Burnt Orange Heresy, Debicki, Sutherland and Jagger are each so compelling, and their characters are so rich, that they completely overshadow Bang’s critic.

This is also a very talky movie, too much so. All the yakking and Bang’s unrelatability drag down The Burnt Orange Heresy and keep it from engaging the audience. relatibility

Sutherland has such a sparkle as the mischievous painter, and it may be easier to spot it now in the aged actor than forty years ago in MASH or Animal House.

Mick Jagger in THE BURNT ORANGE HERESY

The real surprise here is Mick Jagger. This character, a rich and utterly masterful string-puller, is well within Jagger’s acting range and he nails it. After all, as an actor in fictional narratives, he is best known for two of the very worst movies of 1970: Ned Kelly and Performance. But here, Jagger employs his unmatched worldliness to inform this performance (and he makes great use of his trademark sneer and predatory smile, too). Jagger and Sutherland are probably the two best reasons to see this movie.

I saw The Burnt Orange Heresy at Cinequest. I expect it to be released theatrically in the Bay Area in the next few weeks.