Movies

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.

THUNDERBIRD: unoriginal and, finally, insipid

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This is a two-second shot in THUNDERBIRD which has nothing much to do with the plot. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.

In the unremarkable Canadian mystery Thunderbird, a city detective visits a backwoods hamlet to unspool a mystery involving damaged young adults from a local tragic family. Thunderbird has the feel of a typical TV whodunit procedural with a trippy supernatural angle slapped on.

If you’ve ever watched a TV or movie drama, you will have already heard every line of dialogue in Thunderbird.  

There’s also an insufferable dose of noble indigenous spiritualism.

I thought I was watching an especially insipid ending, but then was surprised with the real ending, even more insipid.

Cinequest hosted the US premiere of Thunderbird.

TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS: party, party, party, angst

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TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.

In the comedy Twelve Days of Christmas, high school friends reunite when they’re home for their first college Christmas break. They all get down to some serious partying, but two of them must deal with a serious issue.

These characters act like they are refugees from some mythical colleges that are devoid of booze and drugs. The partying is so purposeful, it brought to my mind the Joe Ely song Everybody Got Hammered. The one blow-out party is very impressive, especially compared to my own first-college-break experience: Round Table pizza, cans of beers and a bottle of rum.

The core of the story is the angst of unrequited love; one character has obviously been in love with his best friend, who hasn’t noticed his yearning for her. And that’s the weakness of Twelve Days of Christmas. Although this guy is fun, witty, loyal and dependable, she knows that he is kinda weak-willed, so it’s evident that she could never see him has a partner.

Most of the cast is very good, although I never got away from being distracted by all the actors seeming at least 4-5 years older than the 19-year-old characters.

Director Michael Boyle and editor Carter Feuerhelm have enough faith in their audience and skill to drop in some split-second gags, all the more effective without lingering on them.

Cinequest hosted the world premiere of Twelve Days of Christmas.

THE MIMIC: surreal battle of wits

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Jake Robinson and Thomas Sadoski in THE MIMIC. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.

In the offbeat and cerebral comedy The Mimic, a widowed screenwriter (Thomas Sadoski) becomes obsessed with his own sociopathic character – and the a person JUST LIKE the character (Jake Robinson) materializes in his life. The two embark on a surreal battle of wits.

Is the new acquaintance a real person, or is he the character in the screenplay? Is the sociopathic character miming the writer? Or is the writer exploring his own sociopathy?

The Mimic is an intellectual exercise, with more knowing chuckles than knee-slappers. Ultimately, it is more clever than it is engaging or entertaining.

The Mimic is basically a two-hander, but it’s rich in cameos. There’s a priceless turn by Gina Gershon as a cougar bar fly. M. Emmet Walsh, Marilu Henner and Jessica Walter show up, too, along with the always-welcome Austin Pendleton (whom I’ve enjoyed since his Francis Larabee in What’s Up, Doc?).

Cinequest hosted the world premiere of The Mimic.

SMALL TIME: innocence among the addicted

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Audrey Grace Marshall in Niav Conty’s SMALL TIME, premiering at Cinequest. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.

Filmmaker Niav Cinty explores rural America’s opioid crisis through its impact on one little girl in Small Time. Emma (Audrey Grace Marshall) is growing up among damaged and ill-prepared adults who are modeling the worst possible lessons about drug use, parental responsiblity, handling firearms, choice of language and taking things that belong to someone else. This is an opioid-ravaged world in which the one character who actually saves two lives is the local abusive drug dealer. Emma sees things that no child should see.

Emma is spirited, smart and has a child’s pureness of heart.  Amidst the adult chaos, she’s baking cookies and thinking about the tooth fairy. But we have to ask, what is the shelf life of innocence? When will her environment take its toll?

Nobody is comfortable watching a child in bad situations, so why isn’t Small Time unwatchable? Writer-director Conty has mastered the tone by making Emma such a spirited, hopefully indomitable protagonist. And Conty embeds just enough humor in scenes with the local lunkheads playing the board game Risk and Emma turning the doctrinal tables on a priest, forcing him to resort to bluster.

The child actress Audrey Grace Marshall is very good. Conty shot Small Time over three years as Audrey ranged from seven to ten. Small Time was filmed on location in north central Pennsylvania.

Cinequest hosts the world premiere of Small Time.