In the gripping drama, Rieke (Susanne Wolff) is a woman who intends to pilot her sailboat on a solo voyage from Europe to Ascension Island off the coast of Africa. That’s one woman, all alone on her boat for 3,000 miles of open ocean.
Oozing matter of fact confidence, Rieke seems well-equipped for the adventure. She is fit, highly skilled, an experienced sailor and provisioned up with top quality gear and supplies. Rieke’s day job is as an emergency physician, and we see that no crisis situation seems to faze her.
In the first part of Styx, we think we’re watching a survival tale – woman against nature. But when a dramatic storm hits, we’re afraid for her but she’s not.
After the storm, she faces the first situation that she can’t handle on her own – one of life-and-death that has been spawned by a humanitarian crisis bigger than any individual. Frustratingly, she knows exactly what must be done, but she can’t do it herself; she must rely on civilized nations behaving according to expected norms. But are those expected norms available to everyone? And will it come?
Rieke’s persona is based on acting to solve every problem. But here, there are no good choices.
This is a German film about a German character, but almost all the dialogue is in English, the international language of navigation.
The second feature for director Wolfgang Fischer, Styx has won film festival awards, including at the Berlin International Film Festival. I saw Styx before its release at Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club. I’ll let you know when it becomes widely available.
Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind, finally completed and released thirty years after Welles’ death, centers on the fictional cinema auteur Jake Hannaford (John Huston). Not unlike Welles himself, Hannaford is widely recognized as brilliant and self-indulgent, as both a genius and impossible to work with, having a lifetime of relationship carnage strewn behind him. For the zillionth time, Hannaford is broke and needs to find money to finish his latest movie. He holds a screening party in hopes of snaring financial support from his now more successful protégé Brooks Otterlake (Peter Bogdanovich).
The backdrop is the sort of 1970s Hollywood hedonism where the party includes naked models, midgets (“The midgets broke into the wine cellar and got their tiny hands on the fireworks”) and female manikins for target practice. And, oh, they invited the mid-70s version of Dennis Hopper.
Peter Bogdanovich and John Huston in Orson Wells’ THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND
Hannaford is surrounded by his own posse of collaborators and hangers-on, and a cynical bunch they are. That rampant and matter-of-fact cynicism is very witty, and things are funniest when things go badly – the money pitch is prematurely exposed and the screening of an art film has to be re-located to a drive-in!
John Huston’s performance is wonderful, especially when Hannaford is not suffering fools gladly. Hannaford’s team of scoundrels is played by Mercedes McCambridge, Tonio Selwirt as the Baron, Gregory Sierra, Paul Stewart and Edmond O’Brien, with Lili Palmer as an ex and Susan Strasberg as a provocateur of the press. In fact, virtually every actor delivers an excellent performance, except for Cameron Mitchell with his odd, apparently Southern, accent.
I was surprised by brilliance of Norman Foster’s performance as Hannaford’s gofer Billy, loyal, weary and crapped-upon; Foster is known for 57 screen credits as a director, but he also acted, supporting Walter Huston in one of the first talkies in 1929.
Norman Foster in THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND
And then there’s the surreal film-within-the-film – the unfinished Hannaford movie that is being screened at the party. The star of that film is Welles’ real-life girlfriend, the Croatian actress Oja Kodar, who co-wrote The Other Side of the Wind. Kodar’s character strides around empty vistas naked and dominates the pretty boy leading man (Robert Random). This film is pure eye candy, with the most vivid colors and the most dramatic camera angles. Kodar’s almost silent performance is exceptional – she has the gaze of a predator, always direct and in command. She looks great naked, and her sex scene in a moving car is exceptionally erotic.
Some critical comment suggests that the film-within-the-film is Welles’ satire on European art films. But, to my eyes, it’s consistent with a good art film of the 1970s, too. Either way, you can’t stop watching it.
Oja Kodar in THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND
The Other Side of the Wind has been famous for decades as a Lost Film (and now as a recovered film). But it’s best viewed without that baggage – by just absorbing what’s up on the screen.
Not everyone will like The Other Side of the Wind, especially those who like their movies to be linear. Is The Other Side of the Wind a mess, as some have described it? I don’t think so because the party scenes are SUPPOSED to be frenetic – Welles dips deeply into chaos and ambivalence and obscurity with intentionality.
The Other Side of the Wind is Welles’ unsparing glimpse into his own personality – a personality that self-sabotages his art and cruelly mistreats those closest and most necessary to him. The question he seems to ask himself is whether the self-created tumult is a REQUISITE for his art or an IMPEDIMENT?
In each of four decades Orson Welles produced unforgettable works of art. Citizen Kane is an undisputed masterpiece, and I consider A Touch of Evil and Chimes at Midnight to be great movies. The Other Side of the Wind is in that class. Thirty-three years after it’s creator’s death, it’s one of the best movies of 2018.
John Huston, Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich in THEY’LL LOVE ME WHEN I’M DEAD
The release of The Other Side of the Wind is accompanied by two documentaries on Orson Welles and his final movie: They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead and A Final Cut for Orson: Forty Years in the Making. And they’re both available to stream on Netflix.
They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead is a feature-length documentary. We hear from the two guys involved with The Other Side of the Wind during its forty-year journey. Producer Frank Marshall was one of the four-person crew during the four years of shooting, along with Orson Welles, co-writer and star Oja Kodar and cinematographer Gary Graver. Director Peter Bogdanovich began acting in one role and shifted to another during the shoot – and then played a pivotal off-camera role in the film’s completion.
Here’s what They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead helps you understand about The Other Side of the Wind:
How essential director of photography Gary Graver was to the project, one of the few non-porn flicks in his filmography.
Why impressionist Rich Little oddly shows up in the party in The Other Side of the Wind and what was his original role in the film;
How Welles treated his confidant Bogdanovich in real life, which gives a major insight into The Other Side of the Wind.
What The Other Side of the Wind insiders think is the intended meaning of the movie.
Just how charismatic and witty Welles was in real life – even more quick and refreshing than on his talk show appearances.
You can stream They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead on Netflix.
A Final Cut for Orson: Forty Years in the Making is a 38-minute “Making Of’ doc about the restoration and completion of The Other Side of the Wind. It’s a procedural that offers insight into all aspects of the final cut, including the editing and the music. A highlight is actor Danny Huston describing the looping of his father’s voice. The story of rescuing the actual cans of film is a helluva detective story in itself.
Netflix offers A Final Cut for Orson: Forty Years in the Making, but makes it unnecessarily tough to find. Instead of using the Netflix SEARCH feature, go right to The Other Side of the Wind and scroll down and click on MORE TRAILERS.
Frank Marshall, Oja Kodar and Orson Welles in A FINAL CUT FOR ORSON: FORTY YEARS IN THE MAKING
The protagonist of Zama is a colonial magistrate in the late 1700s, a low-level functionary of the Spanish crown in a remote backwater of South America. A pretty decent guy for a colonizer who enslaves other humans, Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez-Cacho) has been loyally performing his duties, and his sole ambition is to get a transfer and return to his family.
But his bosses just won’t give him that transfer, even when he performs a morally painful task. Worse than that, his life is an unending sequence of indignities. While de Zama can’t get relieved, the underling who has been fired for insubordination gets the assignment of his choice; de Zama lusts for the Spanish colonial woman who teases him, but she only will bed the same insubordinate underling. De Zama can’t even get his indigenous mistress to wash his shirt.
The Wiley Coyote of Spanish colonialism, De Zama is frustrated, humiliated – and finally, far worse. Zama’s descent leads to his final act of refusing to give what he sees as false hope to even his tormentors. As the indignities pile up on Zama, the absurdity becomes wry; I kept thinking of the Job-like misfortunes of the protagonist in the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, which is funny as hell, unlike Zama.
The finest screen actors are best when they are silently watching, observing and assessing their own situations. The Spanish-born Mexican actor Giménez-Cacho is particularly adept at this, and throughout the film we see “I am so screwed” in his eyes.
This is all meant to show us the fundamental corruption of colonialism, and that colonialism ultimately destroys the colonizer as well as the colonized. (Yes, this really hasn’t been controversial for the past 50 years.)
This is a one-note movie. Zama has a score of 89 from Metacritic and is beloved by many admirable critics, including the great Manohla Dargis. But the repetitive tedium and the Message worn on its sleeve didn’t pay off for me. You can stream it if you insist.
Bitter Melon is H.P. Mendoza’s dark indie comedy on an issue that a Bay Area family must finally face. The dad has long abandoned the family, and it’s almost like he has moved to a different city (but he hasn’t). Two of the adult sons have moved to New York City and Philadelphia. The third son, Troy, lives in the mom’s family home with his wife and kid – and this guy is a nightmare. Troy (Patrick Epino) has a delusional self-image that he is somehow super-talented, even though he is unemployed and living off his wife and mom; worse, he has an anger management problem, and the entire family tiptoes around on eggshells – trying to avoid any disagreement with him.
It should be no surprise that Troy, who thinks he is entitled to his way all of the time, also beats his wife. The wife is too traumatized to seek help, Troy’s mom is in denial and the siblings, having put the family’s day-to-day life in their rearview mirrors, all combine to enable the abuse. When the two brothers return for the Christmas Holiday, the situation becomes unbearable and the family members decide that they must take an extreme step to deal with Troy.
I’ve just described a pretty grim story line, but Bitter Melon is very funny.
Bitter Melon invites us into a Filipino-American family, which is a welcome look at an underrepresented subject. But Bitter Melon is much more than cultural tourism – the characters and story here are universal, from the adult kids coming back to sleep in their childhood rooms for the holidays, the differences between first and second generation immigrants and the family issues of abuse and denial.
H.P. Mendoza is a Bay Area treasure, having written the screenplay and music for the rollicking and refreshing comedy Colma: The Musical and written and directed the genre-bending art film I Am a Ghost. I recommend the delightful Colma: The Musical for anyone, especially Bay Area residents; you can stream it from Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Bitter Melon begins a Bay Area theatrical run tomorrow.
The biodoc Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes provides insight into the life of the man who, by founding Fox News, created what was once entirely unthinkable, the defiling of the American body politic and our venerable nation’s descent into Trump’s America. Fox News has stripped from American civil society our shared acceptance of fact. You just can’t debate the goals and means of governing with people who devoutly believe things that just are not empirically accurate – that Obama founded Isis, that Hilary murdered Vince Foster and the like. That is the legacy and stain of Ailes and his Fox News.
Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes tells that story, and precedes it with some nuggets about Ailes’ childhood (including a significant medical condition), his ambitious clambering up the career ladder and his worship of Richard Nixon. The most surprising talking head (in terms of the content of his remarks) is Glenn Beck.
Of course, Ailes met his downfall when his decades-long sexual harassment was exposed. The disgustingly naked quid pro quo character of his serial sexual predation is startling – even among the worst we’ve seen in this #MeToo period.
Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes opens this week in Bay Area theaters.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is the Coen Brothers’ homage to the Western genre; it’s an anthology with SIX of their darkly funny stories. They clearly share Mark Twain’s cynically wry take on human nature, which they depict in Western situations of wagon trains, stagecoach rides, prospecting and hangings. The Coen brothers are not just making fun of Western clichés but also celebrating the genre, with beautiful vistas of New Mexico’s harshness and the spectacular Colorado high country.
The funniest is the opening vignette, with its over-the-top send up of Western conventions – white and black hats, saloon gambling, super fast gunplay and the rest, including nods to the “loquacious Western” subgenre. And it cements Tim Blake Nelson as having the funniest shit-eating grin in cinema.
The best performance is Harry Melling’s in the Meal Ticket segment. Melling is best known as Harry Potter’s Dudley Dursling. He plays an itinerant performer who only speaks during his performances; Melling is startlingly brilliant in those performances and even better when he silently and fatalistically regards his competition.
Harry Melling in THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS
By far the best story is the saddest, The Gal Who Got Rattled, about a sad-eyed young woman (Zoe Kazan) who is following her delusional brother west, to what we all know will be heartbreak. Untethered by her obligation to the brother, she gets the Old West’s opportunity to remake her destiny until the Old West’s cruel chance intervenes.
The movie peters out in the ghostly last story, The Mortal Remains, despite Saul Rubinek’s delicious portrayal of a Frenchman in the Old West.
I don’t recommend The Ballad of Buster Scruggs for general audiences, but Westernphiles and fans of the Coen Brothers dark, dark humor will find it worthwhile viewing; it doesn’t rise anywhere near the level of the Coen’s best: Blood Simple, Fargo, A Simple Man, No Country for Old Men or True Grit. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is playing in a few theaters and streaming from Netflix.
Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper in THE AMERICAN FRIEND
Dennis Hopper, in his Wild Man phase, brings electricity to the 1977 neo-noir The American Friend, an adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel Ripley’s Game. Highsmith, of course, wrote the source material for Strangers on a Train along with a series of novels centered on the charming but amoral sociopath Tom Ripley; her gimlet-eyed view of human nature was perfectly suited for noir.
German director Wim Wenders had yet to direct his art house hit Wings of Desire, his American debut Hammett or his masterpiece Paris, Texas. He had directed seven European features when he traveled to ask Highsmith in person for filming rights to a Ripley story.
In The American Friend, Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz) is a craftsman who makes frames for paintings; he dabbles in the shady world of art fraud, making antique-appearing frames for art forgeries. Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper) entangles him in something far more consequential – a murder-for-hire.
As befits a neo-noir, Zimmermann finds himself amid a pack of underworld figures, all set to double-cross each other with lethal finality. In very sly casting by Wenders, all the criminals are played by movie directors: Sam Fuller, Nick Ray, Peter Lilienthal, Daniel Schmid, Gérard Blain, Rudolf Schündler, Jean Eustache. Nick Ray is especially dissolute-looking with his rakish eye-patch. Sam Fuller, in his mid-60s, insisted on performing his own stunt, with a camera attached to his body on a dramatic fall.
Bruno Ganz in THE AMERICAN FRIEND
As the murder scheme unfolds, there is a tense and thrilling set piece on a train, worthy of The Narrow Margin. Other set pieces include a white-knuckle break-in and the ambush of an ambulance.
Here’s one singular sequence. After a meeting with Ray, Hopper walks away from the camera along an elevated highway. Then Hopper is shown, still on the highway, in long shot from what turns out to be Fuller’s apartment, where Fuller interrupts the filming of a skin flick to deny having a guy shot on the Paris Metro. Then we see Hopper on an airplane, and then Ganz on a train. Finally, Ganz returns to a seedy neighborhood by the docks. It’s excellent story-telling – at once economical and showy and ultra-noirish .
Dennis Hopper and Nick Ray in THE AMERICAN FRIEND
Cinematographer Robby Müller pioneered use of fluorescent lighting in The American Friend. The nighttime interiors have a queasy eeriness that matches the story perfectly. Müller, who died in 2018, was endlessly groundbreaking. He made the vast spaces of the Texas Big Bend country iconic in Paris, Texas. He was also responsible for the one-way mirror effect in Paris, Texas’ pivotal peepshow scene. For better or worse, he jerked the handheld camera in Breaking the Waves, spawning a legion of lesser copycats. Müller gave a unique look to indie movies from Repo Man to Ghost Dog; The Way of the Samurai.
Dennis Hopper in THE AMERICAN FRIENDDennis Hopper in THE AMERICAN FRIEND
The American Friend was shot in 1977, in the midst of Dennis Hopper’s tumultuous drug abuse phase. He had just directed his notorious Lost Film The Last Movie and arrived in Europe from the Philippines set of Apocalypse Now!, where he was famously drug-addled and out of control. After getting Hopper’s substance abuse distilled down to only one or two drugs of choice, Wenders gave Hopper carte blanche to take chances in his performance, The American Friend being the only movie Tom Ridley in a cowboy hat. It paid off in a brilliant scene in which Hopper lies on a pool table, snapping selfies with a Polaroid camera; it’s a brilliant imagining of a sociopath in solitary, with no one to manipulate. John Malkovich, Matt Damon and even Alain Delon have played some version of Tom Ripley. Hopper’s is as menacing as any Ripley, and – by a long shot the most tormented. Courtesy of the Criterion Collection, here is Wenders on Hopper.
The American Friend is not a great movie. Zimmermann is motivated by a grave health issue, but too much screen time is wasted on that element, causing the movie to drag in spots. Movie auctions come with built-in excitement, but The American Friend’s art auction is pretty ordinary. And, other than Fuller, Ray and Blain, the directors are not that good as actors.
Still, the unpredictability in the high wire Dennis Hopper performance, the look of the film and the action set pieces warrant a look.
The American Friend can be streamed from Amazon, iTunes and Vudu. The late great FilmStruck offered some exceptional features, including a 38-minute interview with Wenders (excerpted above).
Ando Sakura, Sasaki Miyu, Jyo Kairi, Lily Franky, Matsuoka Mayu and Kiki Kirin in SHOPLIFTERS, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
Shoplifters is a witty, and finally heartbreaking, look at a family that lives on the margins – and then is revealed to be not what it seems. Everyone in this contemporary Japanese family – dad, mom, teen girl and even grandma – has some shady job or outright scam. The dad has taught the 10-year-old boy to become a skilled shoplifter and tells him that he isn’t sent to school because he’s too smart. The dad and son rescue a lost and neglected four-year-old girl from a harsh winter night; the family decides to adopt her into the family. Of course, we wonder if the little girl’s biological parents will report her missing and whether the authorities will track her down.
Other than informally adding a child, not much seems to happen as the family goes on with its daily life – “work”, “shopping”, meal prep, bedtime and the rest, even a beach excursion. These lovable scoundrels are a hoot, and Shoplifters is very funny.
Writer-director Hirokazu Koreeda reveals – character by character – how each came into the family. Eventually that becomes critically important to the family’s survival – and leads to an emotionally powerful ending. The closest families are chosen by each other.
Lily Franky and Jyo Kairi in SHOPLIFTERS, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
Shoplifters features a magnificent performance by Sakura Andô as the family’s mother figure – pretty understated until she gets to a knock-your-socks-off seduction scene. Her two jailhouse interviews at the end of the film are heartbreaking.
Jyo Kairi, with one of the best child performances of the year, is also superb as the boy.
Shoplifters just won the Palm d’Or, the top award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Koreeda is known for the 1995 art house hit Maborosi, one of the best movies of 2008, Still Walking and this year’s The Third Murder. I saw Shoplifters in early October at the Mill Valley Film Festival.
The fine Lynn Shelton drama Outside In begins when a man (Jay Duplass of Transparent) returns to his small town community after 20 years in prison. Having been incarcerated since he was a teenager, he’s a bit emotionally stunted; he was a good kid who is now trying to be a good man. He tries to negotiate his way among his not-so-supportive family, some former friends who share a secret and suspicious townspeople.
He’s free only because of a persistent campaign for justice by one of his high school teachers (Edie Falco). The case has been an obsession for the teacher, much to annoyance of her blue-collar husband. Now that the campaign has ended, the teacher must fill that vacuum with another passion.
There isn’t much passion in her marriage. Shelton brilliantly depicts a husband who has expectations of their relationship and their future – he just doesn’t communicate them to his wife, or check to see if those expectations are shared. He’s not a terrible person, and the relationship isn’t abusive – it’s just lapsed into staleness.
The freed convict and the teacher are comforted by each other. There are several ways that this story could go, several of them trite. Let’s just say that Shelton takes us in some unpredictable directions, while maintaining authenticity.
Outside In is a story of self-discovery. The teacher must assess what will make her happy and make some hard choices. In a tour de force, Falco takes us through her confusion, dissatisfaction, longing, passion and, finally, determination.
Kaitlin Dever (Justified) is also excellent as the teacher’s teen daughter. Outside In is an acting showcase for Falco, Duplass and Dever. Falco’s performance, however, is stunning.
I saw Outside In before its release at Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club. It can be streamed on Netflix, Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
