Rants and Ruminations

Cinequest’s Charlie Cockey: The Man Who Goes to Film Festivals

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Charlie Cockey (photo courtesy Around the World in 14 Films)
Charlie Cockey (photo courtesy Around the World in 14 Films)

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.

The Movie Gourmet’s 2014 Oscar Dinner

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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!

Why Cinequest is essential

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cinequest 2014Here’s why San Jose’s Cinequest film festival is essential.  It’s your best opportunity to find a movie unlike any you have seen before.  As you mine Cinequest’s deep and varied schedule, you just may stumble onto a revelatory cinematic nugget.

Cinequest opens on March 4 and runs through March 16.  I was about to describe Cinequest as an overlooked gem, but since Cinequest has the second largest audience (110,000) of any film event in North America, it ain’t so overlooked.  This year’s fest includes 84 World, North American and U.S. Premieres from 43 countries.  There will be spotlighted features starring the likes of Brendan Gleeson, Clive Owen, Juliette Binoche, Guy Pearce, Jude Law, Jena Malone, Gabriel Byrne and Ben Kingsley and celebrity appearances by actor Matthew Modine, author Neil Gaiman, Indiewire critic Eric Kohn and  Ain’t It Cool News founder Harry Knowles.  LA Times critic Kenneth Turan will introduce a special screening of Fruitvale Station.

Although the higher profile films and the personal appearances by celebrities are always popular with Cinequest audiences, the most stunningly singular film experiences are often mined from Cinequest’s international offerings.

Last year’s Cinequest featured three wholly original films: 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. You just don’t find this stuff elsewhere in the Bay Area.

The San Francisco International Film Festival in late April remains the best place to see the very best indies.  This year, the SFIFF entries Before Midnight, Stories We Tell, The Spectacular Now and The Act of Killing all made my list of Best Movies of 2013.  Poised in October, the Mill Valley Film Festival excels in booking the prestige films that are opening within a few weeks (this year: Nebraska, 12 Years a Slave, All Is Lost, Dallas Buyers Club, August: Osage County).  (Mill Valley also featured a special 2013 presentation of Oh Boy – but Bay Area cinephiles had seen it seven months before at Cinequest.)

Still, among Bay Area film festivals, Cinequest remains our very best chance to see something remarkable and unexpected – something you’ve never seen before.  I know there’s an Oh Boy somewhere in this year’s Cinequest schedule.   When I find it, I’ll let you know.

Here’s the Cinequest program and ticket information.

Postscript: My recap of the 2013 Cinequest.

Goodbye, Harold Ramis

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Harold Ramis in GHOSTBUSTERS
Harold Ramis in GHOSTBUSTERS

Filmmaker Harold Ramis has died at age 69.  Most of us remember Ramis from his performance in Ghostbusters, a movie that he also wrote.  But he also wrote one of the funniest movies ever – and one of my all-time favorites – Animal House.  He also wrote and directed Groundhog Day, a comedy masterpiece that will last forever.

There’s a tendency to inflate the achievements in dramatic filmmaking. After all, that’s where the Important Pictures come from.  But comedy is very difficult to do well, and a good comedy can be every bit as artistic and intelligent as a serious picture.  Now I wouldn’t put Ramis quite up there with Billy Wilder, Jacques Tati and Preston Sturges.  Nevertheless, how many filmmakers have written anything – dramas or comedies – as good as Animal House and Groundhog Day?

Follow The Movie Gourmet on Twitter

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Please follow The Movie Gourmet on Twitter at @themoviegourmet. Besides letting you know about my postings here, I’ll be giving followers my early reactions to movies – sometimes well before I write about them here.  There’s a handy Follow @themoviegourmet button on the upper right of this page just under the Search box.

And following this site will also be an excellent way to monitor my coverage of the upcoming Cinequest as I tweet from the festival.

Feeling the loss of Philip Seymour Hoffman

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Philip Seymour Hoffman in CAPOTE
Philip Seymour Hoffman in CAPOTE

I’ll always remember Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death as a punch to the gut on a Super Bowl Sunday.  Only 46, Hoffman leaves an incredible body of work behind him.  Presumably, he had as many masterpiece performances ahead of him – performances that we will never see.

Hoffman could transform himself into characters of any level of self-esteem, intelligence and emotional affect.  Even without the looks of a conventional leading man, Hoffman was magnetic.  His characters – even in the minor supporting roles – were so vivid that they captivated the audience.

Hoffman has become a brand name actor in that, if he were in the movie, it was probably really good: Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Happiness, The Talented Mr. Ripley, State and Main, Punch Drunk Love, 25th Hour, Capote (for which he won the Oscar), The Savages, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Charlie Wilson’s War, The Invention of Lying, The Ides of March, Moneyball and The Last Quartet.  Who else has been in that many outstanding movies since 1996?  Even the movies that I didn’t embrace (Magnolia, Synecdoche New York, The Master) were ambitious, and Hoffman was good in them.

There are reports that Hoffman had 22 years of sobriety before he relapsed two years ago.   If that’s accurate, his death is even more heartbreaking.  That’s the thing with addiction – not everybody makes it.

Noir City: the great San Francisco festival of film noir

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Rififi
I always look forward to the Noir City film fest, which 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.  Here’s one of my experiences from a recent Noir City

Film noir, the genre of cynical stories that are starkly photographed to emphasize the darkness of the plots, originated in the US in the 1940s but was named by the French.  So it’s fitting that this year’s Noir City goes international, sampling film noir from France, Argentina, Mexico, Great Britain, Japan, Spain, Norway and Germany, along with some American noir set in the far East and South of the Border.  I’ll be checking out the Argentinian classics Never Open that Door and Hardly a Criminal, which are not available on DVD.

To see the this year’s Noir City program and buy tickets, go here.

weighing in on the Oscar nominations

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Barkad Abdi from CAPTAIN PHILLIPS

I’m pretty satisfied with this year’s Oscar nominations.  The Best Picture nominees do represent the best Hollywood films of the year, which is the most that we can expect.  I’ve seen all of them except for Dallas Buyers Club, and no stinkers got nominated.  There’s a pretty strong overlap with my Best Movies of 2013, the 23 movies that I think are the very best – the ones that you think about in the days AFTER you’ve walked out of the theater.  (Most of my choices are indies, documentaries and foreign films – not big Hollywood movies.)

Captain Phillips, which has the #10 spot on my top ten, is my favorite Hollywood film of the year.  (And I’m particularly glad that the Academy recognized Minneapolis actor-limousine driver Barkad Abdi with a nomination as Best Supporting Actor for his performance as a Somali pirate in Captain Phillips.)  Nebraska, American Hustle and Her also were among my 23 top movies.  Although they didn’t make my list, I also liked The Wolf of Wall Street, Gravity and Philomena. I admired 12 Years a Slave – which is undeniably a fine film – but it’s not on my list because it is such an ordeal to watch.

My choice for the second best film overall in 2013 is the Danish drama The Hunt, which is competing for the Best Foreign Language Oscar with another film that I admire, Italy’s The Great Beauty.  My choice for the very best movie of the year is the French film Blue Is the Warmest Color, but it was not released in time to be nominated by France for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.

The Academy took a chance in nominating the uncomfortable and jaw-dropping documentary The Act of Killing (my #9) for Best Documentary Feature, but, in this year’s biggest Oscar mistake, failed to recognize my #4 film overall, the wonderful Canadian documentary Stories We Tell by Sarah Polley.

Michael Polley in STORIES WE TELL

better than the movie

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This stunt HAS GOT to be better than the movie that it’s promoting. There is nothing about Devil’s Due, which opens Friday, that is promising – but this 1:49 video is a howl-and-a-half. It was posted on YouTube yesterday and already has almost 6 million views.

2013 at the Movies: farewells

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Roger Ebert’s passing was a particularly somber moment for me because the Siskel & Ebert television show was one of the two essential triggers for my love of movies (along with my college History of Film class).

I first set up my massive 1982 VCR to record his and Siskel’s Sneak Previews. In the early 2000s, Ebert’s was the first blog that I checked every day. The reason that I signed up for Twitter was to follow Roger Ebert.

Roger Ebert was first a great film critic, period. He was also the most effective popularizer of movie criticism. Most importantly, especially for me starting in the late 1970s, he was the leading evangelist for independent and foreign cinema in the US. Without Siskel & Ebert, I wouldn’t have known to seek out a French film like La cage aux folles or the debut features of indie directors John Sayles (Return of the Secaucus Seven) and Spike Lee (She’s Gotta Have It).

In taking a “leave of presence” the day before his death, Roger Ebert wrote, “On this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I’ll see you at the movies.”

On the lighter side: Roger Ebert’s favorite lines from his movie reviews.

In 2013, we also lost the genius of stop-motion animation, Ray Harryhausen, groundbreaking indie filmmaker Tom Laughlin (Billy Jack), the iconic Lawrence of Arabia star Peter O’Toole and Eleanor Parker, Oscar-nominated in 1951 for Caged, perhaps the best ever women’s prison movie.