The psychological suspense movie Una revolves around two twisted people, one of whom has been damaged by trauma. Here’s what the audience can be confident really happened: at age 14, Una (Rooney Mara) was seduced by a much older man, Ray (Ben Mendelsohn); she became infatuated with Ray and they carried on a sexual relationship for three months until he was caught and imprisoned for four years. Upon leaving prison, he changed his name and started a new life. It’s now fifteen years after the original crime and Una has tracked him down.
We can tell that Una is obsessed with Ray. What we don’t know is whether Una is seeking vengeance or whether she is in love with him – or both. She’s so messed up that even she may not know.
Lolita was a novel with a famously unreliable narrator. Una presents us with TWO unreliable narrators. Almost every statement made by Ray COULD be true, but probably isn’t. He was in love with her, he came back for her, she was his only underage lover, he’s not “one of them”, he’s told his wife about his past – we just can’t know for sure. Ben Mendelsohn delivers a performance that tries to conceal whatever Ray is thinking and feeling but allows his desperation to leak out.
The excellent actor Riz Ahmed (Four Lions, The Reluctant Terrorist) is very good as Ray’s work buddy, who must deal with one totally unforeseeable surprise after another.
Una really relies on Rooney Mara to portray a wholly unpredictable character in every scene, and she succeeds in carrying the movie. Mara’s face is particularly well-suited when she plays a haunting and/or haunted character, and it serves her well here.
I originally saw Una at Cinequest. You can stream it from Netflix Instant, Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Amazing Grace is, at once, the recovery of a lost film, the document of an extraordinary live recording and an immersive, spiritual experience.
At the height of her popular success in 1972, Aretha Franklin recorded a live album of gospel music. She brought her producer Jerry Wexler and her band to New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, a large but modest church with a cheesy mural of Jesus emerging from the waters after his baptism by John the Baptist. Accompanied by James Cleveland and the Los Angeles Community Gospel Choir, she performed for two nights, and the recordings became Amazing Grace, the top-selling gospel album of all time.
The whole thing was filmed by director Sydney Pollack and his crew with five cameras. Having made his bones in live television, Pollack would seem to be a great choice, but he made a critical mistake – he neglected to use clappers, the equipment that allowed for synchronizing the filmed images with the recorded sound. Frustratingly worthless, the film sat in canisters until decades later when technology allowed the music to be synced to the 16mm film. Aretha, however, was notoriously prickly in business affairs, and the rights could not be secured until after her death. Alan Eliot is responsible for finding and assembling Pollack’s footage and turning it into a feature film that could be released for the rest of us to see; appropriately, Eliot’s credit is “Realized and produced by Alan Eliot”.
What brought Aretha get to this moment in 1972? Aretha had grown up in the Detroit church led by her formidable father, C.L. Franklin, immersed in gospel music until she launched a pop music career at age 18. When she was 25, she began working with Wexler, who “got” her, and she became a soul and crossover superstar with Respect, I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You), Do Right Woman, Do Right Man, Baby I Love You, (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman, Chain of Fools, Ain’t No Way, Think, I Say a Little Prayer and Rock Steady. At 30, Aretha commanded the field of R&B and looked to return to her gospel roots.
When Aretha enters the church, the atmosphere is electric, and Aretha is ready from her very first note of Wholy Holy. The church audience knows their gospel music, appreciates what they are witnessing and is, to a person, thrilled. The audience becomes more and more emotionally involved.
Aretha’s version of What a Friend We Have in Jesus is unrecognizable (in the very best way). On Precious Memories, Aretha’s humming is internally intense, and then her voice soars. Completely committed, Aretha produces a prodigious amount of sweat.
The high point of the film is Aretha’s closing song on the first night, Amazing Grace. It’s a very long version of the song, and the choir doesn’t sing until the very end. As Aretha’s instrument wrings every drop of emotion from that most familiar song, we watch the choir members’ reactions, which range from admiration to inspiration, many moved to tears. The moment is one of genius for Aretha and one of epiphany for the choir and for the film audience.
One of the great pleasures of Amazing Grace is watching the choir leader, Alexander Hamilton, lead his choir with an expressiveness that is both elegant and funky. If there is a co-star in Amazing Grace, it’s Alexander Hamilton.
There are pauses for technical issues, which bring out the authenticity of the moment and reinforce that this was a live event. It’s easy to spot Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts in the crowd on the second night.
Where does Amazing Grace fit in the concert film canon along with Monterey Pop, The Last Waltz, Stop Making Sense, Woodstock and The T.A.M.I. Show? It’s in the conversation.
In the thought-provoking documentary We Believe in Dinosaurs, filmmakers Clayton Brown and Monica Long Ross introduce us to Ark Encounter, a Kentucky attraction with a full-size replica of Noah’s Ark. Explicitly pro-creationism and anti-evolution, Ark Encounter is filled with interpretive exhibits that illustrate the Biblical story of Noah as historical fact, kind of a fundamentalist, evangelical Smithsonian. Ark Encounter is 45 miles from its sister attraction, the Creation Museum.
There’s a lot to think about – and even marvel about – here. First of all, the Ark Encounter is an impressive spectacle. In Genesis, God directed Noah to build the ark to be 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high. That means that this thing is a football field-and-a-half long and over four stories high. We get to meet and observe the technicians and artists as they build the animatronic Noah family and the reproduced animals.
The bigger story here, though, is the massive investment in anti-science propaganda. To justify their literal acceptance of Biblical content that is inconsistent with scientific fact, these folks behind the Ark Encounter believe that they need to discredit science itself. And they’re not just defending the literal occurrence of every Bible story, but also the chronology of Bishop Ussher who, in the mid 1600s, calculated that the earth was created in 4004 B.C. That means that the Ark Encounter aggressively explains that the Earth and the human race, despite fossil evidence, are each 6,000 years old – and that dinosaurs lived alongside humans (and voyaged on the Ark). It also means that they seek to discredit the Theory of Evolution and the scientific method itself (while enjoying its byproducts – vaccines, for example).
When you distill their beliefs, these neo-creationists are essentially turbanless Taliban. Just for perspective, after suppressing Galileo’s 1615 discovery of the earth-centered solar system, the Catholic Church started backpedaling in 1718. That means that 300 years ago, even the reactionary Church decided not to double down on denying scientific discoveries.
And what about the scientists? And people of faith who accept science? We Believe in Dinosaurs brings us the perspectives of Ark Encounter opponents, most notably a geologist, and a former neo-creationist, both native Kentuckians. There’s also a local Baptist minister, who thinks that people of faith can also accept science.
One of the stunning aspects of We Believe in Dinosaurs is the unexpected David-and-Goliath story. We might expect the science-deniers to be outmatched. But the folks with most primitive beliefs are the creative masters. Anti creationists are the Goliath, supported by hordes of believers, massive private investment, capacity for technical wizardry and even state support. On the other hand, scientists are not often skilled in or equipped with tools for political persuasion and mass communications. The pro-science folks are, like John the Baptist, a lone voice in the wilderness, losing the optics battle.
Brown and Long Ross have a point of view (that science is good), but they don’t make the Ark Encounter people ridiculous. We directly hear the Ark Encounter leadership’s public pronouncements, and we meet the earnest and often sympathetic folks who are using their considerable talents to build and fill the attraction. Brown and Long Ross let us hear from both sides and let us connect our own dots. Watch the closing credits to the very end to get the subjects’ unfiltered view of the filmmakers. And wait for the film’s super-creepy money shot – that of an animatronic figure reflecting on the fate of others.
I saw We Believe in Dinosaurs at its world premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM). While We Believe in Dinosaurs is just starting out on the festival circuit, this film is too compelling and audience-friendly to go very long without a distributor; I expect that you’ll be able to see it, too, this year.
From L:R – Subjects Adam Gussow and Sterling “Mr. Satan” Magee in a still from SATAN & ADAM. Photo courtesy JFI
In the engaging documentary Satan & Adam, Adam, a young white Ivy Leaguer, takes a stroll through Harlem and encounters an older African-American street guitarist, who calls himself Mr. Satan. Adam, a talented amateur blues harmonica player sits in, and soon the odd couple are a busking team, a popular attraction at their regular sidewalk venue in Harlem.
“Mr. Satan” is an alias for an artist of note. Mr. Satan’s talent and the odd couple novelty allows the act to soar to totally unexpected heights. But Satan has emotional and medical issues, and Adam might be a better fit for a career in academia, so this is a story with plenty of unexpected twists and turns. Let’s just say that, over the past 23 years, there have been some significant detours on this journey.
The core of the film is about this unusual relationship and the peculiarities of these two guys, but it also traces the evolving race relations in NYC.
Satan & Adam is told primarily from Adam’s point of view, which is understandable because of Mr. Satan’s periodic unavailability and, when we see him unfiltered, his oft puzzling inscrutability.
I saw Satan & Adam at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF), a fest noted or its especially rich documentaries. It has finally been released in at least one Bay Area theater.
The Chaperone is a pleasing period tale of self-discovery in 1921 America. Louise Brooks (Haley Lu Richardson) is not yet the silent movie sex symbol that she would become; she’s a 15-year-old from Wichita who has a wonderful opportunity – she can attend a cutting edge NYC dance school, if only she can get a chaperone. Local Wichita matron Norma (Elizabeth McGovern) volunteers to be that chaperone. Highly spirited and supremely confident, Louise is a Wild Child who can shock Norma’s sensibilities. But we learn that Norma has a secret reason for leaving Wichita and another secret reason to visit New York City…
This could have been a standard Odd Couple-type romp, but it’s surprisingly deeper. That’s because it centers on the adult character of Norma and benefits from McGovern’s performance. She has a sense of decorum, but she’s not a garden-variety prude. She doesn’t really appreciate her own inner strength and what that strength has helped her survive already. Now, for the first time, she reflects on what it would take to achieve happiness for herself.
Of course, adoptees longing to find out about their biological parents, child sexual abuse, closeted homosexuality and passionless marriages all existed in 1921, but American society was ill-equipped to deal with (or even acknowledge) them. Those are the pivot points in this screenplay written by Downton Abbey’s Julian Fellowes.
Richardson’s persona as Louise does not resemble the sensuous adult Brooks, but she captures the youthful exuberance and confidence of the role. This is only the second American film for Hungarian actor Géza Röhri (from the brilliant but impossibly grim Son of Saul). Röhri is able to project a fundamental decency that is very appealing.
The Chaperone is a satisfying and easy watch, which I would expect to end up on PBS after its theatrical run. The Chaperone played at Cinequest in March.
In the appealing Teen Spirit, Elle Fanning plays a Polish working class girl on the Isle of Wight who competes in a fictional British version of American Idol. Even though she is immensely talented, she is not one of the popular kids. And, recognizable as a teenager – she is bored and she resents being bored. Seemingly a hopeless underdog, she finds a mentor in the local barfly Vlad (Zlatko Buric), a former opera singer fallen on hard times.
Yes, Teen Spirit is firmly in the underdog competition genre – and we know that the story will climax in the Big Game, the Big Match or – as here – the Big Sing-off. As with any genre, one of these movies can be an empty, cliche-ridden formula or a masterpiece (Rocky) or something in between. Teen Spirit may not be a Rocky, but, thanks to writer-director Max Minghella, it is well-crafted and has a heart.
It should be noted that Elle Fanning actually does the singing in Teen Spirit – and sings very well. Given that Rami Malek just won an Oscar for lip-syncing, we should bestow a Nobel upon Fanning. She has an ethereal voice and has shown herself to be a fine actress who can carry a more challenging story than this. Both she and Buric are excellent.
First time director Minghella paces the film very well and delivers some flashy movie making, with fast cuts and pounding soundtrack, sometimes giving the effect of being inside a disco ball. All for the good. To his credit, Minghella also follows Billy Wilder’s screenwriting advice – when your story is finished, don’t hang around.
I saw Teen Spirit at Cinequest, and Elle Fanning appeared for a post-screening interview. Teen Spirit opens this weekend in the Bay Area.
Peter Sarsgaard in Michael Tyburski’s THE SOUND OF SILENCE, playing at the San Francisco International Film Festival April 10-23. Courtesy of SFFILM
In the engrossing character study The Sound of Silence, Peter Lucian (Peter Sarsgaard) is obsessed with the musical tonality of the built environment. Having assigned each area of Manhattan its own distinct musical key, Lucian prowls the city, tuning forks in hand, to map its sounds.
Lucian pays the bills as a house tuner, bringing well-heeled apartment-owners a kind of auditory feng shui. Lucian is sought after to isolate the hum of a problem refrigerator or toaster that can make a living space depression-inducing. He’s even been profiled in The New Yorker.
But we sense that Peter Lucian is a little too confident in his expertise. He is disdainful of the corporate suits trying to monetize his discoveries. “This is about universal constance, not commerce.” In a mistake of hubris, Lucian takes on a research assistant (Tony Revolori – Zero the bell boy in The Grand Budapest Hotel). Lucian is jarred by corporate espionage, and starts to unravel when a respected scientist views him as a crank. Can he recover?
Peter Sarsgaard is a marvelous choice to play a cool obsessive who seems, at time, both blissfully above validation and desperate for it. In spite of his handsome, regular features, Sargaard’s gift for uncanny stillness helps him play creepy. Sarsgaard’s Lucian has the unintended capacity of reassuring other characters, but making then even more uncomfortable.
Rashida Jones plays Ellen, a Lucian client who is not just garden-variety neurotic, but has been so rocked by a tragedy that she remains profoundly unsettled. Jones is so talented as a comic actress, a voice artist, a documentarian and the writer of that rarest of things, a smart romantic comedy (Celeste and Jess Forever). Here, she shows her dramatic chops with a character who starts the movie adrift, but grows able to offer emotional safe harbor.
There’s even a welcome appearance by Austin Pendleton as a Lucian mentor of uncertain reliability. I’ve loved Pendleton since his turn in 1972’s What’s Up, Doc?. (Come to think of it, that movie had a musicologist obsessed with the inherent tonal qualities of igneous rocks.)
The Sound of Silence is the first feature for director and co-writer Michael Tyburski, and it’s a promising debut. Despite using an understated color palette, Tyburski delivers some stirring cinema with his use of sound. As Lucian looks over the city early in the morning, we hear a few musical notes, and then a full orchestra tuning up as the city awakens into its workday. When Lucian takes Ellen for a drink, it is to the quietest possible venue – a club with a decibel level somewhere between a library and a morgue; afterwards, Lucian emerges into urban cacophony. When an academic treats him like a crackpot, we all hear ringing, not just Lucian.
As one would hope, the sound design of The Sound of Silence is remarkable, and the score works very well. The April 14 San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM Festival) screening is at the Dolby Cinema, which should be a real treat.
The Sound of Silence premiered at Sundance, has distribution through Sony Pictures, and screens twice at the 2019 SFFILM.
Steve Bannon in THE BRINK, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
The Brinkis documentarian Alison Klayman’s up-close-and-personal portrait of Steve Bannon, the outsized personality who founded Breitbart as a “platform for the alt right” and who encouraged Donald Trump’s race-baiting right into the White House.
But even Trump is not shameless enough to keep Bannon around – as The Brink opens, Bannon has just been fired from the Trump Administration in the wake of the wake of the Charlottesville disgrace (“very fine people on both sides“). Bannon is now embarking on a campaign of uniting the European populist Right around a common racist/ white supremicist/anti-immigration message.
Bannon, of course, is a genius at political messaging, and his major outcome was the once unthinkable re-emergence of public white supremicism – voicing those who lived under the dark, damp underside of rocks and logs with the other creepy-crawlies, and making them feel like they can walk the earth erect like other vertebrates.
Bannon is a major ham, and all too happy to let the world watch him in action. Bannon, of all people, is savvy enough to understand that Klayman is hostile to his beliefs and career,yet he granted her intimate access. His ego must not have allowed him to resist a movie about himself – or he learned from Trump that no publicity is bad publicity.
For her part, Alison Klayman (Ai Wei-wei: Never Sorry) is clever enough to let Bannon himself reveal his flaws. As he thinks he is showing us his skills, he is also showing himself to be an attention-craving blowhard. The horror isn’t that Bannon is some invincible evil mastermind but it’s in the masses (only glimpsed) that are so consumed by the fear and hatred that he peddles.
In the riveting opening sequence, Bannon describes how German technocrats designed the Birkenau death camp to be masterfully efficient. The banality of evil is not an original thought, but Bannon’s insights are more than a little scary (and his appreciation of Nazi efficiency is uncomfortable).
I found The Brink to be irresistible and watched with fascination. To those who have had their fill of the propagandists of the Right in Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes and Get Me Roger Stone(with Paul Manafort as bonus, I say that The Brink still offers insights – and more satisfaction. Bannon wants his political skill to be validated, but The Brink reveals how pathetically he craves relevance.
Right: Juli Jakab as Írisz in SUNSET. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
For the first hour-and-a-half of Sunset, I was convinced that I was watching the best movie of the year. Sunset is a visual masterpiece but the story’s coherence and pacing slips away in the final act.
Set only months before the outbreak of World War I, anarchy is erupting as a response to corrupt, senile empires. The young woman Írisz Leiter (Juli Jakab), who was sent to Trieste at age two when her parents died, returns to Budapest and to her parents’ prestigious millinery store. That store – still hatmaker to the elite of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – is now owned by Oszkár Brill (Vlad Ivanov), who is threatened by her reappearance.
Írisz is determined to find out more about what happened to her parents, but she becomes entangled by one more mystery after another. She encounters a former family retainer who is mad, and an aristocratic widow who may be mad; they and some sympathetic milliners leak the shocking snippets. Soon she is surprised to learn that she has a sibling – but can she find him? Then she finds out about a notorious murder – but what really happened and why? She stumbles upon an anarchist plot – but against whom and when? And an upcoming royal visit has a decidedly sinister side.
As Írisz insinuates herself in Brill’s squad of young female milliners, she plays detective, unspooling the web of mysteries. While the story is focused on Írisz’ family secrets, Sunset is gripping. When the story grows wider, into a royal perversion and an anarchist upheaval it gets less coherent and less compelling.
Sunset was written and directed by László Nemes, who burst into world cinema with the gripping, innovative and impossibly grim Son of Saul. That film won the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar. Sunset’s cinematographer Mátyás Erdély won the American Society of Cinematographers Spotlight Award for Son of Saul.
From the painting of Budapest in the opening titles. Sunset is a feast for the eyes. I haven’t seen a film since Ida in which every frame is composed to be a stand alone piece of art. The color palette of the daytime scenes conjures a time that we know from sepia-tinged photos. The chiaroscuro in the nighttime scenes lit by early electricity and open flames is magnificent.
Right: Juli Jakab as Irisz Leiter in SUNSET. Courtesy of Sony Pictures ClassicsCenter: Evelin Dobos as Zelma, Vlad Ivanov as Oszkar Brill in SUNSET. Courtesy of Sony Pictures ClassicsCenter: Evelin Dobos as Zelma in SUN.SET. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
Some have noted that the part of the always intense Írisz doesn’t offer much range for Juli Jakab. But Jakab is able to carry this film in which she’s in every scene, and I admired her performance.
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 sexually harrassing abortionist. American audiences have also seen Ivanov’s performances in Police, Adjective and Snowpiercer. Hopefully, Ivanov’s star turn in Hier, which I reviewed for Cinequest, will get an American release.
Nemes, in partnership with his cinematographer Erdély is a peerless filmmaker, but he is not yet a peerless storyteller. I still recommend Sunset, even with its flaws, for its uncommon artistry.
. Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski in TRANSIT. Courtesy of Music Box Films
In Christian Petzold’s puzzling thriller Transit, George (Franz Rogowski) flees Paris for his life, just ahead of the invading Nazis. He assumes the identity of a dead author, which comes with a ticket from Marseilles to the safety of the Western Hemisphere. Trouble is, the ship won’t leave for weeks, so he must wait it out in Marseilles as the Nazis get closer and closer. He finds himself in a community of other refugees – all forlornly hoping for a ticket, a visa, a letter of transit so they can get out, too. Completely at the disposal of impenetrable bureaucracies, their situation is Kafkaesque. It’s a puddle of human desperation, and the clock is ticking.
Georg glimpses a mysterious beauty, Marie (Paula Beer). She turns out to be the widow of the man that Georg is impersonating, but she doesn’t know that her husband is dead. What Georg knows is that he also has papers for her to join him on the escape ship. While waiting for her husband to appear in Marseilles, she has taken up with the altruistic doctor Richard (Godehard Giese).
So, we have European refugees holed up, trying to get letters of transit to escape the Nazis. Our protagonist is in love with a woman, who is with a selfless idealist. Yes, this story does have its similarities to Casablanca – there’s even a dramatic sacrifice at the end. But the impeccably plotted Casablanca is easy to follow, and Transit has its surreal aspects. Casablanca is of its time – when individuals subsumed their interests to a great, global cause: “I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Set in the same wartime period, Transit is of our time – focused on the micro-plight of individuals.
I’m trying to think how to explain this – it’s a period story shot in modern times. So, the characters wear 1940s clothes and use 1940s typewriters. But the environs are modern Paris and Marseilles, so the storm troopers are modern French SWAT teams and the police vehicles are modern French cop cars with their Euro sirens. It may sound weird, but it worked for me. I just became absorbed in figuring out what was going on.
Franz Rogowski and Lilien Batman in TRANSIT. Courtesy of Music Box Films
There is a sweet and effective subplot involving Georg and a boy with a disability. Their relationship is the most relatable part of Transit.
Franz Rogowski (so good as Boxer in Victoria) has an intensity that pays off in his portrayal of Georg, who is either escaping or, when he has a moment, seeking. Beer captures Marie’s unreliability and fragility; she makes us understand why Georg’s would be so attracted to Marie – and why that might not work out for him.
At some point in Marseilles, Transit lost me. I still was engaged in the intellectual execise of figuring out the puzzles, but I stopped caring about Georg and Marie. Christian Petzold’s previous films Barbara and Phoenix prove that he is an exceptional filmmaker. Transit, for all its originality just isn’t Petzold’s best.
