Movie Recommendations, Rants and Ruminations
Happy St. Patrick’s Day. Now, tonight you CAN go out and drink green beer with all the amateur drinkers. Nothing wrong with that, if that’s your thing.
OR you could settle in for some top shelf cinema set in recent Irish history – The Troubles of Northern Ireland. For eight fine films about The Troubles, see my Best Films About the Troubles (Northern Ireland).
A deep selection of comedies, international cinema and spotlight films combined for a very strong program at Cinequest 2014. My pick for the festival’s best film is the Polish drama Ida. Although not all of the films engaged me, the only bad movie this year was the incoherent Chinese thriller Parallel Maze.
COMEDIES
This year, Cinequest programmed 22 comedy features (which seems like an unusually high number), and that paid off with some of the festival’s most popular films. I thought the funniest was the dark, dark Hungarian comedy Heavenly Shift about a rogue ambulance crew. Probably two of the top four most popular movies at Cinequest (along with Ida and the Canadian weeper Down River) were the opening night’s The Grand Seduction and the Israeli caper comedy Hunting Elephants. The American indie satire Friended to Death (which had its world premiere at Cinequest) also broke through – and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it soon in theatrical release.
INTERNATIONAL CINEMA
As I said, my pick for best film at Cinequest was Ida, about a Polish novice nun in 1962 who, just before she takes her vows, learns that she is the child of Jewish Holocaust victims. Also remarkable for its authentic and textured characters was the Slovenian classroom drama Class Enemy. And, of course, Heavenly Shift from Hungary and Hunting Elephants from Israel were festival highlights.
Once again, it’s just impossible to give too much credit to Cinequest’s international programmer Charlie Cockey. Unfortunately, just before the fest, Charlie developed a cough that kept him home in Brno, Czech Republic, so we missed him here in San Jose. Before the fest, I profiled Charlie with Cinequest’s Charlie Cockey: The Man Who Goes to Film Festivals.
SPOTLIGHT FILMS
Cinequest’s program of spotlight films are the bigger movies that are screened just once, usually at the California Theatre. In the past these have included some celebrity-driven events that have been the weakest links in the fest (only Grand Piano fit this profile in 2014). But, over all, in the 2014 Cinequest, the spotlight films sparkled, especially: The Grand Seduction, Mystery Road, Words and Pictures, Teenage, Unforgiven and Dom Hemingway. Cinequest also gets a lot of cred for having LA Times critic Kenneth Turan introduce last year’s Bay Area masterpiece Fruitvale Station. In 2014’s Cinequest, you could do well just by showing up to the California Theatre every night at 7 PM.
For my comments on over 20 of this year’s Cinequest movies, see my CINEQUEST 2014 page.
FRIDAY
SATURDAY
SUNDAY
The 2014 edition of Cinequest has emphasized comedy, and that has paid off with some of the festival’s biggest hits:
The other most popular Cinequest hits have been the exquisite Polish drama Ida and the Canadian weeper Down River. I also particularly like the Slovenian class room drama Class Enemy.
Most of these films are still scheduled to play in the last half of the festival. Subject to Cinequest’s exhibition rights, I’m guessing that the most likely candidates for Cinequest’s Encore Day on Sunday, March 16 are Ida, Friended to Death, Down River, Hunting Elephants and Class Enemy.
The indie comedy Friended to Death has its US premiere tonight at Cinequest, and it’s not the first time for the filmmakers. Friended to Death writer-director Sarah Smick and co-writer Ian Michaels brought their Here’s the Kicker to Cinequest in 2011 (Michaels directed that one). Smick and Michaels also act in both movies.
In Here’s the Kicker,the relationship of a prematurely retired football player and his girlfriend is being battered by their dead-end jobs in LA; (she is a make up artist – in porn films). To save their relationship, he agrees to move back to her hometown in Texas where they can open a salon/saloon: a combo beauty parlor and sports bar. Just as they are leaving on the road trip, he is offered his dream job as a football scout. When is he going to get the nerve to tell her? Along the way, they pick up his obnoxious former teammate and, most hilariously, his dad, who does NOT want to return to alcohol rehab. Many guffaws ensue in this all too rare occurrence – a satisfying American film comedy.
As the girlfriend, Sarah Smick succeeds in remaining sympathetic despite being continually aggrieved – no easy accomplishment. Luce Rains is great as the drunk dad.
According to Ian Michaels at the Cinequest screening, Producer/Cinematographer/Editor Chris Harris made the key decision to cut some early scenes so the road trip could commence sooner. Obviously, that move worked. Here’s the Kicker deserves a wide release.
Good news. Here’s the Kicker is available streaming on YouTube. It’s also is now out on DVD. Please go to the movie’s Netflix page and click SAVE – once it gets enough SAVES, it will become available on Netflix.
It’s hard to write comedy. Otherwise, we’d be seeing lots of good comedies. That’s why it’s worth tagging along on the uproarious road trip in Here’s the Kicker.
My feature articles and comments on individual Cinequest movies and my feature articles are linked at CINEQUEST 2014. Follow @themoviegourmet on twitter for real-time Cinequest coverage. Here are my tips for Cinequest films this weekend:
TODAY
Heavenly Shift: I howled at this hilariously dark (very dark) Hungarian comedy about a rogue ambulance crew with a financial incentive to deliver its patients dead on arrival. North American premiere at 2:30 PM.
SATURDAY
A special screening of Fruitvale Station: the masterpiece debut from Bay Area filmmaker Ryan Coogler, introduced by LA Times and NPR Morning Edition movie critic Kenneth Turan.
Haven’t seen it, but the chatter in festival queues is universally positive for the Canadian weeper Down River.
Words and Pictures: I haven’t seen this romantic comedy starring Clive Owen and the ever-radiant Juliette Binoche as sparring teachers, but it figures to be a crowd pleaser.
SUNDAY
A noon screening is your last chance to see one of the very best films at Cinequest, the polish drama Ida, which won the International Critics’ Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. Justifiably very popular at Cinequest.
Hunting Elephants: I haven’t seen this Israeli caper comedy starring Patrick Stewart, but it’s picked up positive buzz at the festival.
Here’s the 2014 Cinequest program and ticket information.
17 movies to watch for at Cinequest:
Most likely to be crowd pleasers:
Most promising foreign entries:
Documentaries:
Something you haven’t seen before:
Here’s the Cinequest program and ticket information.
Yeesh, what a bore – and I used to LIVE for the annual Oscar show.
There were heartfelt and classy moments from Jared Leto, Lupita Nyong’o and Bill Murray. Jamie Foxx added some unscripted foolery and Best Song winners Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez delivered a clever rhyming acceptance. That was it – five worthwhile moments in a three-hour drudge through self-congratulation and scary cosmetic surgery.
How does one celebrate our most vivid, immediate and accessible art form and make our eyes glaze over? Apparently, the most effective means is to devote a fifth of the telecast to live musical performances, mostly from the worthless Best Song category. This show is supposed to be about cinema, not the mediocre songs that dot a few of the films. Wasting yet more screen time with Twitter jokes didn’t help. They’ve also sucked the pathos out of the In Memoriam montage, which has generally been my favorite part of the show.
As to the winners themselves? They all seemed deserving to me. I would have preferred The Act of Killing to win Best Documentary and Before Midnight to win Best Original Screenplay, but there weren’t any forehead-slapping boners this year. 12 Years a Slave is undeniably a fine film, but I don’t know many folks who will actually ENJOY the two-and-a-half hours of unremitting brutality before Brad Pitt shows up in an Amish beard.
Bottom line: good year for the awards and bad year for the award show.
Charlie Cockey is at a film festival. (Actually, right now he’s probably traveling between the Berlin International Film Festival and Cinequest.) But, whenever you read this, the odds are that he’s sampling cinema at a film fest somewhere.
Cockey, the international film programmer for San Jose’s Cinequest, attends twelve or more international film festivals each year. He never misses the great Berlin and Venice fests, and also makes the rounds of the European national film showcases in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and other countries.
Cockey is Cinequest’s film scout extraordinaire and responsible for the most singular films on Cinequest’s program, the movies unlike any you have seen before. In my recent Why Cinequest is essential, I highlighted three of his gems from last year’s Cinequest: the German dark comedy Oh Boy (the debut from talented writer-director Jan Ole Gerster), the absurdist Czech comedy Polski Film and the offbeat The Dead Man and Being Happy, with its gloriously wacky road trip through the backwaters of Argentina. (My favorite Charlie Cockey selection is the unsettling 2011 Slovak Visible World – which is creepy even for a voyeur film.) Cockey found 12 of the films in last year’s Cinequest, and has brought as many as 17.
Cockey, who lives in the Czech Republic’s second city Brno, speaks English, Czech, German, French, Italian and Romanian. That’s helpful, but the national film festivals usually have English-subtitled “festival version” screenings for distributors and festival programmers (plus non-subtitled screenings for the local public).
How did an American guy come to live in Brno? “A Czech woman tied my shoelaces together,” Cockey replies. Before he had acquired his Czech language fluency, he was sitting in a darkened Czech theater and was surprised to see no subtitles on the film. Needing to ask the woman next to him for help with the translation, he touched her hand and sparks flew, or at least one literal spark from static electricity. Fourteen years later, the two are still partners.
What are Charlie Cockey’s tips for sampling movies at a festival? Like any festival-goer, he chooses screenings based on the buzz, the director and sometimes a gut feeling. He doesn’t mind bad movies because “if a film’s not working, I leave”. He adds, “The mediocre ones are tough because you need to stick it out”.
First and foremost, Charlie Cockey is a man who devours culture in any form – books, music, cinema, food – with a voracious but discerning appetite. Cockey’s journey brought him from the East Coast and Idaho to 1960s San Francisco as a musician and as a road manager for a band. He opened San Francisco’s first science fiction bookstore (Fantasy, Etc) and ran it for the last quarter of the 20th Century. “There are no accidents,” he says. “Only surprises.”
Extremely generous with his knowledge and taste, Cockey loves to share the most precisely individual recommendations of books and movies. He relishes the memory of helping a boy – dragged into Fantasy, Etc by his parents – discover a genre of literature (in this case fantasy) that spawned a new love of reading. And he couldn’t resist quizzing me about my interests and then recommending an extremely obscure collection of letters from a German intelligence official in WWII – a book that I NEVER would have otherwise considered but which turned out to be a great read.
Here’s how to experience Cinequest the Charlie Cockey way: “Find films as you live life – by being open, prepared, ready, flexible and friendly”.
Follow The Movie Gourmet on Twitter for my continuing coverage of the 2014 Cinequest.
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. You can see our past Oscar Dinners on this page (including our Severed Hands Ice Sculpture in 2011 for 127 Hours and Winter’s Bone). Here’s the menu for Sunday’s Oscar Dinner.
PRE-DINNER TEA
Tea cakes from Philomena. The nuns always generously ply Philomena (Judi Dench) and Martin (Steve Coogan) with tea cakes while trying to bamboozle them.
STARTER
Steakhouse salad from Dallas Buyers Club. Ron Woodruff (Matthew McConaughey) and Dr. Eve Saks (Jennifer Garner) dine at a steakhouse and presumably started with a salad before their slabs of grilled beast.
DINNER
Chicken Suqaar with Chapatti (Somali take-out from Jubba Restaurant in San Jose) for Captain Phillips. (And khat leaves are illegal in the US – so no khat chewing before dinner.)
Chicken Piccata from American Hustle. Mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner) rhapsodizes about the chicken piccata in the NYC restaurant.
Sliced white bread for Nebraska. My parents were from Nebraska, so this choice comes from personal experience.
DESSERT
Blueberries for 12 Years a Slave. Solomon made ink from blueberries to write a plea for rescue.
Astronaut Ice Cream for Gravity. Way cooler than Tang.
BEVERAGES
Champagne from The Wolf of Wall Street. There’s a lot of champagne consumed in this movie, and I don’t have any Quaaludes.
Cocktail from Her. Don’t know what Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix)and Blind Date (Olivia Wilde) were drinking on their ill-fated soiree, but I’m gonna make myself a Manhattan with Carpano Antica.
Enjoy!