Rants and Ruminations

CINEMA CLUB: a must for Silicon Valley movie fans

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Jennifer Lawrence breaks through in WINTER'S BONE, featured at the Camera Cinema Club
Jennifer Lawrence breaks through in WINTER’S BONE, featured at Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club

An absolute MUST for Silicon Valley film lovers, the Cinema Club is wrapping up its 22nd season this weekend and looking forward to 2019. A 2019 Club membership can also be a treasured Holiday gift.

It’s your chance to see ten as-yet-unreleased films for $160. There’s usually an post-screening Q&A with a filmmaker, either live or via Skype. It’s like seeing ten movies at a film festival – except it’s a manageable one per month instead of all at once.

Here’s how it works. The club meets monthly on Sundays (you can choose between the morning or afternoon screenings) in downtown San Jose’s 3Below. The house lights go off and a movie appears on the screen. Until this moment, we don’t know which movie it is. The mystery is part of the club’s appeal, and, as a result, I’ve seen some wonderful films that I otherwise never would have chosen to see. Afterwards, there’s a discussion about the film – almost always with at least one of the filmmakers.

The movies range from indie gems to Oscar Bait and are selected by Alejandro Adams and Sara Vizcarrondo. Alejandro is a noted filmmaker (scroll down this NYT article). Sara is a film writer and film professor.

I first saw my pick for the top movie of 2010, Winter’s Bone (four Oscar nominations, including for Jennifer Lawrence’s breakthrough performance), at the Cinema Club. Here are some other Cinema Club films that have made my Best of the Year lists:

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, I’ll See You in My Dreams, Two Days One Night, Alive Inside, Bernie, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Rabbit Hole, Project Nim, The Messenger, The Tillman Story, Wendy and Lucy, Goodbye Solo, Taxi to the Dark Side, Shotgun Stories, American Splendor, Maria Full of Grace.

Cinema Club members get to see (before their release):

  • Crowd pleasers like Meet the Patels, Cloudburst, Once and Mad Hot Ballroom;
  • Challenging cinematic ground breakers like Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color and Gus Van Zant’s Last Days;
  • Unknown gems like The Grief of Others and In the Family by the as yet undiscovered genius Patrick Wang, the hitherto forgotten neo-noir The Woman Chaser and the delightful Bay Area indie Colma: The Musical.

And I have to admit that, otherwise, I never would have seen The September Issue (I have no interest in the fashion world) or The Tillman Story (I thought I already knew the whole story). Both were rewarding movie experiences.

Cinema Club members also get invited to special previews and events. This year, Alejandro and Sara curated:

  • The Bay Area premiere of the documentary Dark Money featuring appearances by two of the film’s subjects – Obama-appointed Chair of the Federal Elections Commissions Ann Ravel and journalist John S. Adams; and
  • A double feature of Dennis Hopper’s lost film The Last Movie and the Hopper documentary Along for the Ride with a panel of critics and the doc’s director.

In a rare revival showing, the Cinema Club also screened an almost lost film, the 1981 They All Laughed – and I found myself sitting next to its director, the legendary Peter Bogdanovich!

Alejandro and Sara are building on the work of previous club programmer Tim Sika, host and producer of the movie magazine radio show Celluloid Dreams, movie reviewer for KGO radio and recent president of the San Francisco Film Critics Circle.

I’ve been a Club member since its 2003-04 season. If you love movies and live in Silicon Valley, you need to be in the Cinema Club. Sign up for the new season here.

Edie Falco in OUTSIDE IN, screened in the 2018 Cinema Club program

TCM’s Billy Jack extravaganza

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BILLY JACK (1971)

On November 14, Turner Classic Movies will present the Billy Jack trilogy. The iconic character of Billy Jack was created by the groundbreaking independent filmmaker Tom Laughlin. Laughlin originated the character in his biker exploitation movie Born Losers (1967), and then fully unleashed him in Billy Jack (1971), The Trial of Billy Jack (1974) and Billy Jack Goes to Washington (1977).

Billy Jack is a Vietnam vet who embraces his own combo of New Age mysticism and Native American spiritualism.  Billy Jack uses martial arts to kick the crap out of the bad guys who bully women, Native Americans and teenagers. Laughlin played a character along similar themes in his The Master Gunfighter (1975), only bearded and wielding a samurai sword.

The prickly Laughlin made and distributed his films independently, and Billy Jack and Trial were huge box office successes, among the most financially successful indies ever. For The Trial of Billy Jack, Laughlin engineered the then-unheard-of simultaneous release on 1500 screens. This excellent Bill Gibron article in Pop Matters describes this precursor of the Hollywood blockbuster strategy.  Billy Jack was also the first widely seen martial arts movie in America.

Despite his innovations in the movie business, Laughlin never succeeded in making a good movie. Filled with clumsy acting and hackneyed dialogue, the films are still pompous, self-important and humorless.

Laughlin’s signature as a screenwriter is heavy-handedness. It’s never enough for the bad guys in the Billy Jack movies to be bad. They also have to be racist AND mean to animals AND sexually perverted. Billy Jack opens with the bad guys illegally raiding an Indian reservation to steal a herd of wild mustangs and to herd them to a corral where they will be shot at pointblank range to bring in six cents per pound as dog food. One of the Billy Jack villains seduces a 13-year-old, insists on forcing a willing floozie at knifepoint and, for good measure, stakes a saintly teacher to the ground for a ritual rape. In The Trial of Billy Jack, a government henchman shoots a child – in the back – while he is cradling a bunny.

I have a Bad Movie Festival that features unintentionally bad movies that are fun to watch and mock. The Billy Jack movies are too painful for this list. While bad enough, they are gratingly platitudinous.

Laughlin died at age 82 in 2013. Laughlin was married since 1954 to his Billy Jack co-writer and co-star Delores Taylor, who died earlier this year.

See you later, Burt

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Burt Reynolds in DELIVERANCE

I’m gonna miss Burt Reynolds – both for being a movie icon and for being one of the greatest guests ever on Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. He solidified that icon status in Deliverance, brandishing a bow-and-arrow and clad in a sleeveless neoprene vest – there has never been a more studly image in the history of cinema.

The key to Burt Reynolds’ appeal is that unique combination of virility and charm, his stunning physicality leavened by his not taking himself too seriously. I’m ridiculously handsome, and isn’t that just ridiculous?

To celebrate Burt’s rollicking Smokey and the Bandit era, I recommend The Bandit, a documentary about Burt’s collaboration with stuntman/director/roommate Hal Needham. You can stream The Bandit from Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

In his last film, this year’s The Last Movie Star, an aged action movie star (Burt Reynolds playing someone very similar to Burt Reynolds) examines his life choices.  It’s very funny and sentimental (in a good way), and you can stream it on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Aretha in THE BLUES BROTHERS

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There are many aspects to Aretha Franklin’s art that we can celebrate.  She had one notable appearance in a movie, and here it is, an utterly dominating performance in The Blues Brothers.

I also love non-actor/sax player Lou Marini in this scene.  Matt “Guitar” Murphy, who played Aretha’s movie husband in The Blues Brothers, died this June.

San Francisco Jewish Film Festival opening this week

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Subject Gilda Radner in a still from LOVE, GILDA. Photo courtesy JFI.

It’s time to get ready for one of the Bay Area’s top cinema events: the 38th annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF38), which opens July 19, and runs through August 5 at five locations throughout the Bay Area. The SFJFF is the world’s oldest Jewish film festival, and, with a 2017 attendance figure of 40,000, still the largest.

Here’s an early peek at the fest highlights:

  • Opening night’s Bay Area premiere of the Gilda Radner biodoc Love, Gilda, featuring segments of Radner’s diaries. Director Lisa D’Apolito and original SNL cast member Laraine Newman will attend.
  • Closing night’s presentation of another showbiz biodoc,  Sammy Davis Jr.: I’ve Gotta Me, with director Sam Pollard in attendance.  I’ve seen it, and it’s top rate.
  • The especially strong slate of documentaries, always a rich trademark of the SFJFF. I’ll be recommending a slate of Must See docs.
  • A first-time partnership with the Film Noir Foundation, with the Hungarian neo-noir Budapest Noir presented by its director Éva Gárdos and the Czar of Noir himself, San Francisco’s Eddie Muller.
  • The 1924 silent film The City Without Jews, recently discovered in a Paris flea market and now digitally restored and presented with a commissioned live score. It’s a rare Silent Era look at the resurgence of antisemitism in Europe.
  • And the always popular program of short films, Jews in Shorts.  The SFJFF is newly an Academy Award qualifying festival in the Short Documentary Subject category.

One of the most appealing features of the SFJFF is that, wherever you live in the Bay Area, the fest comes to you. SFJFF will present film events at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, the Landmark Albany Twin in Albany, the CinéArts Theatre in Palo Alto, the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, and the Piedmont Theater in Oakland.

You can peruse the entire program and buy tickets and passes at San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

Subject Sammy Davis Jr. in a still from SAMMY DAVIS JR.: I’VE GOTTA BE ME. Photo courtesy Menemsha Films/JFI.

Farewell, Bill Gold

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Let’s face it: there are some movie posters just as iconic as the movies themselves.  Artist Bill Gold, who died this week at age 87, was the master of the iconic movie poster.  His first poster was for Casablanca, of all films! Gold followed that with decades of work, including thirty posters of Clint Eastwood movies alone.

I recommend Gold’s New York Times obit and a scan of the Bill Gold images featured by Ben Travis on Empireonline.

Here’s a small sample of Bill Gold’s remarkable work.

Remembering Miloš Forman

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Miloš Forman. Photo: Robert Clark/Courtesy of LA Times.

The great director Miloš Forman has died at age 86.  Forman directed only 14 features over his forty-year career, but four are masterpieces or near-masterpieces – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus, The People vs Larry Flynt and Man on the Moon.  That’s a remarkable batting average, especially when you add in such fine Forman films as Hair, Ragtime and Valmont.

Forman came of age in Communist Czechoslovakia, and the prevalent thread in his films was the challenging, even mocking, of authority.  There’s no better example than Nurse Rached in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  Nurse Rached is every bit the tyrant as any jack-booted fascist dictator, but Forman chose to have little-known actress Louise Fletcher play Rached as soft-spoken, always-composed and superficially benevolent, which made Nurse Rached’s fiats even more emasculating an soul-crushing.  Fletcher won an Oscar for her performance.

In Amadeus, Jeffrey Jones’ performance as the all-powerful but dim Emperor Joseph II punctured the idea of the divine right of kings.  And, of course, Forman also made movies about Andy Kaufman and Larry Flynt, two outsiders who reveled in defying conventions.

Forman was also a master of casting.  Not any director would have thought of casting Fletcher and Will Sampson in Cuckoo’s Nest or  Jones, F. Murray Abraham and Tom Hulce in Amadeus.   Not to mention Woody Harrelson in The People vs Larry Flynt.  All turned out to be inspired choices.

I particularly love Forman’s final Czech movie before coming to Hollywood, The Fireman’s Ball from 1967.  It’s a comedy of errors set during the annual ball of a small town fire brigade.  It’s an obligatory occasion, and everyone is just going through the motions.  No one is willing or able to do what they are supposed to be doing, whether it is protecting the raffle prizes or even putting out fires.   The film eviscerated the moral bankruptcy of the Communist society and was predictably suppressed by the regime.

The Fireman’s Ball (which is also sometimes listed as The Firemen’s Ball) can be streamed from Amazon Prime and rented on DVD from Netflix.   It’s only one hour, thirteen minutes long, and it’s a hoot.

THE FIREMEN’S BALL

The Movie Gourmet’s 2018 Oscar Dinner

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the breakfast order in PHANTOM THREAD

Every year, we watch the Oscars while enjoying a meal inspired by the Best Picture nominees. For example, we had sushi for Lost in Translation, cowboy campfire beans for Brokeback Mountain and Grandma Ethel’s Brisket for A Serious Man – you get the idea. The high point has been the Severed Hands Ice Sculpture in 2011 for 127 Hours and Winter’s Bone. Here’s last year’s menu, centered on the diner scene from Hell or High Water.

This year’s dinner is really breakfast because so many of the Oscar-nominated movies depict the morning meal. The most memorable, of course, is in Phantom Thread, where Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) gives a comically elaborate breakfast order to waitress Alma (Vicky Kneps): Welsh rarebit with a poached egg, bacon, scones, butter, cream, jam, a pot of Lapsang souchong tea. [Pause] And some sausages.

So here is this year’s menu:

Bacon, scones, butter, jam.  And some sausages from Phantom Thread.

Fried eggs from Darkest Hour:  Early in the film, Winston Churchill (Gary Oldman) is shown breakfasting in bed.  Our eyes are drawn to the glass of whisky and the glass of champagne, but he’s got eggs on the tray, too.

Scrambled eggs from Lady Bird: In one of the many scenes around the McPherson kitchen table, Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig) and her mom (Laurie Metcalf) bicker about who is fixing Lady Bird’s breakfast.

Hardboiled eggs from The Shape of Water: In an act of interspecies kindness, Elisa (Sally Hawkins) feeds that starkest of breakfast food to a grateful Amphibian Man.

Froot Loops and milk from Get Out: As the terror builds, we see Rose (Allison Williams) eating dry Froot Loops, chased by a glass of milk.

Peach from Call Me by Your Name: Not having access to the apple pie in American Pie, Elio (Timothee Chalamet) makes the peach unforgettable.

Rice Krispies and Froot Loops from Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri: Teenage son Robbie (Lucas Hedges) is splattered with soggy Rice Krispies by his Mom (Frances McDormand) and, at one point, he’s called Froot Loop Boy.

Tea from Dunkirk (and Darkest Hour): Essential to fortifying oneself against the threatened Nazi invasion.

Lemonade from The Post: Not your more common breakfast drink, but it was such an adorable moment when Ben and Toni Bradlee’s daughter earned a wad of cash by selling lemonade to a captive audience – the editors and reporters frantically studying the Pentagon Papers on the Bradlee’s living room rug.

The Movie Gourmet’s culinary tribute to 127 HOURS and WINTER’S BONE

Cinequest 2018 is just around the corner

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Make your plans now to attend the 28th edition of Cinequest, Silicon Valley’s own major film festival. By some metrics the largest film festival in North America, Cinequest was recently voted the nation’s best by USA Today readers. The 2018 Cinequest is scheduled for February 27 through March 11 and will present almost 100 feature films and dozens of short films and virtual reality experiences from the US and over thirty other countries. And, at Cinequest, it’s easy to meet the filmmakers.

This year’s headline events include:

  • Celebrity appearances by William C. Macy, Andie McDowell, John Travolta, Charlie Sheen and Turner Classic Movie host Ben Mankiewicz.
  • Opening night film: Macy presents his new comedy Krystal, co-starring Rosario Dawson;
  • Closing night film: Brothers in Arms, a documentary on the making of Platoon, co-presented by the narrator, Sheen.
  • New movies with Peter Fonda, Burt Reynolds, Jon Hamm, Marion Cotillard, Hilary Swank, Piper Laurie, Rosamund Pike, Stanley Tucci, Melissa Leo, Kiefer Sutherland, Kal Penn, Robert Forster, Mathieu Amalric, Charlotte Gainsbourg, James McAvoy, Alicia Vikander and Michael Shannon.
  • New movies by directors Wim Wenders, Arnaud Desplechin, Melanie Mayron, Jan Sverak (Kolya) and Tony Gilroy.
  • The silent The Wind with Lillian Gish, projected in a period movie palace, the California Theatre, accompanied by world-renowned Dennis James on the Mighty Wurlitzer organ.

This year, Cinequest presents 74 world premieres and will host over 800 artists from over thirty countries.

Indeed, the real treasure at Cinequest 2017 is likely to be found among the hitherto less well-known films. In the past four years, the Cinequest gems Eye in the Sky, Wild Tales, Ida, The Hunt, ’71, Corn Island, The Memory of Water, Magallanes, Quality Problems, The Sense of an Ending, For Grace, Lost Solace, Class Enemy, Heavenly Shift, Oh Boy/A Coffee in Berlin and The Grand Seduction all made my Best of the Year lists.

The renovation of the old Camera 3 Theater into 3Below Theaters & Lounge means that Cinequest will regain its Downtown San Jose vibe, with concurrent screenings at the 1122-seat California, the 550-seat Hammer and the 257-seat 3Below, all within 1600 feet of the VIP lounge at The Continental Bar.  There will still be satellite viewing in Redwood City.

3Below has lost Camera 3’s middle aisle and replaced all the seats.  The decor is sharp, and they’ve added a movable stage for performances, lectures and Q&As.  The once notorious restrooms are remarkably clean (and no longer accessible from the neighboring parking garage, so they have a chance to stay that way).

At Cinequest, you can get a festival pass for as little as $165, and you can get individual tickets as well. The express pass for an additional tax-deductible $100 is a fantastic deal – you get to skip to the front of the lines!

Take a look at the entire program, the schedule and the passes and tickets. (If you want to support Silicon Valley’s most important cinema event while skipping the lines, the tax-deductible $100 donation for Express Line Access is an awesome deal.)

As usual, I’ll be covering Cinequest rigorously with features and movie recommendations. I usually screen (and write about) over thirty films from around the world. Bookmark my Cinequest 2018 page, with links to all my coverage (links on the individual movies will start to go live on Sunday February 25). Follow me on Twitter for the latest.

NOIR CITY 2018 is here

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The Noir City film fest, always one of the best Bay Area cinema experiences, is underway in San Francisco this week. Noir City is the annual festival of the Film Noir Foundation, spearheaded by its founder and president Eddie Muller. The Foundation preserves movies from the traditional noir period that would otherwise be lost. Noir City often plays newly restored films and movies not available on DVD or streaming. And we get to watch them in a vintage movie palace (San Francisco’s Castro Theatre) with a thousand other film fans.

Eddie Muller, who you should recognize as host of  Turner Classic Movie’s Noir Alley series, has programmed this year’s version as “Film Noir from A to B”.  Back in the classic noir period of thw 1940s and early 1950s, filmgoers expected a double feaure – an “A” movie with big stars, followed by a shorter and less expensively-made “B” picture.  Each evening of Noir City will feature A and B movies from the same year, starting with 1941 and ending with 1953.  Trench coats and fedoras are not required (and no smoking, please), but, other than that, you’ll get the full retro experience in the period-appropriate Castro.

Noir City runs through next Sunday, February 4. To see the this year’s Noir City program and buy tickets, go here.

Many of the films in this year’s program are VERY difficult to find.  The Man Who Cheated Himself, Destiny, Jealousy, The Threat and Quiet Please, Murder.  The Man Who Cheated Himself has just been restored by the Film Noir Foundation.

My personal favorites on the program:

  • I Wake Up Screaming (sorry – last Friday night):  A very early noir with a stalker theme and a creepy performance by the tragic Laird Cregar.
  • Shadow of a Doubt (sorry – last night): Set in Santa Rosa back when you could drive through it quickly, the ultra-sympathetic Theresa Wright starts connecting the dots that link her very favorite Cool Uncle (Joesph Cotten) to serial murders.
  • Roadblock: I love the growly noir icon Charles McGraw as a mean heavie or a relentless copper.  Here he plays against type as a super-straight sap turned to the dark side by the dame he falls for.
  • The Blue Dahlia:  The only original screenplay by the master of the hardboiled, Raymong Chandler.  Alan Ladd returns from wartime service to find an especially disloyal wife.  When she is murdered, the cops suspect him, and the mob is after him, but he does find Veronica Lake. (Digression: Were Ladd and Lake the shortest pair of romantic leads ever?)

To see the this year’s Noir City program and buy tickets, go here. Don’t miss out on Noir City’s bang up final weekend, with The Man Who Cheated Himself and Roadblock, The Big Heat and wickedly trashy Beverly Michaels in Wicked Woman.

Laird Cregar in I WAKE UP SCREAMING