Rants and Ruminations

French Cinema Now

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RENDEZ-VOUS IN KIRUNA

I spent last weekend at the San Francisco Film Society’s French Cinema Now series, which features current French language movies that have not been theatrically released in the US (and may not be).   I’ve written complete posts on five of the eight movies that I saw. Here’s my summary (in order of my subjective ranking).

My favorite was the road trip to redemption, Rendez-vous in Kiruna.  A French curmudgeon takes an obligatory drive to northern Sweden, setting up some very funny moments as the film explores the oft unhappy relationships of fathers and sons.

In the drama Suzanne, a young woman makes some bad choices, and the consequences are shared by her father and sister.  Very well written and acted, Suzanne may be released in the US in mid-December.

Launched with great notoriety at Cannes, Stranger by the Lake (L’inconnu du lac) is a thriller set in a secluded gay cruising spot.  There is LOTS of explicit gay sex in this movie, and at least some of it is actual (not just simulated) sex.  It does work as a thriller, and it will get an NC-17 release in the US in late January 2014.

I liked Miss and the Doctors (Tirez la langue, mademoiselle), the kind of light romance that the French do so well and that Hollywood would turn into a series of sitcom moments.  Two pediatrician bachelor brothers fall for the single mom of a young patient – and then her ex returns to the scene to create a love quadrangle.  Miss and the Doctors is sweet and funny, and I think it would be popular with US art house audiences.  (The original French title translates as “Stick Out Your Tongue, Miss”.)

House of Radio (La Maison de la Radio), a wonderfully appealing observational documentary that takes us behind-the-scenes for a peek at the operations of Radio France.

Written and directed by its star, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, A Castle in Italy (Un château en Italie) tells three dark story threads but in a very funny, even screwball, movie.  It had me until the sentimental and almost pretentious ending.  Not bad overall.

Bastards (Les Salauds) is Claire Denis’ dark revenge tale – well made but gratuitously disturbing – and even too disturbing for me to recommend.

My pick for the worst movie in the series was a French language film from Canada, Vic + Flo Saw a Bear (Vic + Flo ont vu un ours).  A 61-year-old lesbian is released from prison and reunites with her fortyish lover/crime partner to go straight.  Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to commend this film except for a bad ass female villain.  The story was pointlessly dark, and the audience did not respond well.  Afterwards, I was standing in line in front of a Frenchwoman who ranted, “Stoopeed Canadians – what do zay know about making films…I am just so glad that Jean didn’t show up – he would have puked.”  I actually like Canadian films, but this one sucked.

Farewell, Karen Black

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Jack Nicholson and Karen Black in FIVE EASY PIECES

Karen Black, one of the icons of 1970s American cinema, has died.  From 1969 through 1976 she starred in Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Drive He Said, the Kris Kristofferson vehicle Cisco Pike, Portnoy’s Complaint, The Outfit (with Robert Duvall), The Great Gatsby, Robert Altman’s Nashville and Alfred Hitchcock’s Family Plot.  She excelled at playing sexually liberated and kooky women, generally downscale and down on their luck.  Her New York Times obit quoted this 1975 appraisal from Time magazine:

“Black brings to all her roles a freewheeling combination of raunch and winsomeness.  Sometimes she is kittenish. At other times she has an overripe quality that makes her look like the kind of woman who gets her name tattooed on sailors.”

My favorite Karen Black performance was her Oscar-nominated turn in Five Easy Pieces (1970) as Rayette, the girlfriend of Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson).  Brimming with alienation, Bobby is working as an oil field roughneck, and the diner waitress Rayette falls in love with him.  However, he comes from a highbrow family of classical musicians, and when he must revisit their world, it’s heartbreakingly clear that Rayette isn’t going to fit in.

Here’s the most famous scene in Five Easy Pieces from my Most Memorable Movie Food Scenes.  Karen doesn’t have much to do in this scene (besides reacting to Jack), but it’s nice to see her again.

Eileen Brennan

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Eileen Brennan (left) in PRIVATE BENJAMIN

Eileen Brennan, who died Sunday at age 80, is perhaps best known for playing Capt. Doreen Lewis, the Army commander so unsympathetic to Goldie Hahn’s spoiled Judy Benjamin in Private Benjamin.  She also was also memorable as Billie in The Sting.  I like her best as the waitress Genevieve in The Last Picture Show.  She excelled at playing a very interesting, smart-alecky gal with some mileage on her.  Brennan was apparently as spunky as her characters, having survived a near fatal auto accident in 1982 and having amassed over 60 screen credits AFTER a bout with breast cancer in 1990.

Eileen in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

June movie doldrums

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FAST & FURIOUS 6

Yeeesh.  The pickings are slim in theaters.  For example, take this one local multiplex that usually offers some appealing films for adults.  This week, it is devoting all sixteen of its screens to the 2D and 3D versions of After Earth, Epic, The Hangover: Part III, The Great Gatsby, Star Trek Into Darkness, Fast & Furious 6, Now You See Me and Iron Man 3.  I’ve seen the flashy, hollow and lame Gatsby.

I don’t want to see any of the others.  Fast and Furious 6 is supposed to be pretty entertaining, but it’s just not my kind of movie.  Same with the fantasy Epic.  Now You See Me is getting critically trashed, but nothing like After Earth and The Hangover: Part III, which are battling for recognition as the year’s very worst film.

The indie that is opening widely this weekend is Frances Ha, but after Greenberg and Damsels in Distress, I am never sitting through another annoying Greta Gerwig movie.

Alas, Sarah Polley’s superb documentary Stories We Tell is gone after a mere two week run in local theaters. Thank God for The East.

So, what is a movie junkie to do?  Fortunately, there are some fine choices on TV, especially with TCM’s June noir festival and HBO’s upcoming summer documentary series (including Casting By), plus some promising films coming out on VOD.

And we can wait for some good stuff later this summer, among them the indie heartbreaker Fruitvale Station, the Brie Larson star-maker Short Term 12, Pedro Almodovar’s I’m So Excited, and Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine.  I’ve already seen the brilliant teen coming of age film The Spectacular Now, which is on my Best Movies of 2013 – So Far.  You can read descriptions and watch trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

The Movie Gourmet’s Four-Day Film Rampage

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Shailene Woodley and Miles Teller in THE SPECTACULAR NOW

Some promising movies opened this weekend while I was sampling the San Francisco International Film Festival.  The result: ten movies for me in seven theaters in three cities over four days.

I started on Friday at the SFIFF with Prince Avalanche and Rent a Family Inc. at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas.   Prince Avalanche, a droll comedy with Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch that will open in theaters later his summer, is very funny.  Writer-director David Gordon Green (All the Real Girls, Pineapple Express) introduced his film and took questions.  Rent a Family Inc., a documentary about an odd Japanese practice of renting fake family members, was less successful.  (Note:  I missed my monthly poker game for these two flicks.)

On Saturday, I caught up with the new releases:  The Reluctant Fundamentalist at Camera 7 in Campbell (okay), At Any Price at San Jose’s Camera 12 (liked it a lot) and the French thriller In the House at San Jose’s Camera 3 (surprisingly clever).

On Sunday, I caught Kon-Tiki at San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center Cinema; (I’m writing about Kon-Tiki tomorrow).  Then it was over to SFIFF for Me and You at the Kabuki.  Me and You is the latest from Italian cinema legend Bernardo Bertolucci, and I LOVED it.  (I had to miss the great director William Friedkin’s appearance at a rare screening of his 1977 Sorcerer at Camera 3; I would have loved it, but I just saw Friedkin last summer at a Killer Joe screening and I already had my SFIFF tickets; to make up for it, I am gonna buy Friedkin’s new book and Netflix his Sorcerer.)

Then I rendezvoused with my nephew Danny and his friend Zeke for a special showing of the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers at the Castro Theatre, preceded by a Q&A with director Philip Kaufman.  It was the first time that the guys experienced both a grand movie palace and an appearance by a filmmaker – and they enjoyed the movie, too.  Body Snatchers, which I saw in its theatrical release, held up very well – and still has one of the all-time great closing shockers in cinema.

I returned to the SFIFF on Monday with The Wife.  First, we saw The Spectacular Now at the Kabuki, a coming of age indie focused on teen alcoholism; one of the best films of the year, it will open widely on August 2.  Then we saw Deceptive Practices, the fine documentary about my favorite magician/card shark Ricky Jay, at the New People Cinema.

Whew!  That was a whirlwind!  It’s lots of fun to go to the movies, but trying to write about so many in a compressed period is tough for me.  The highlight was sharing the movie experience with The Wife and the guys.  But I also saw some movies that will be on my Best Movies of 2013 – The Spectacular Now, Me and You and (probably) At Any Price – all in one glorious weekend.

Thank you, Ray Harryhausen

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Ray Harryhausen with one of his sword-fighting skeletons from JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS

Ray Harryhausen, who died today at age 92, was a unique genius of movie special effects.  His stop-motion animation created the vivid creatures that made possible movies about ancient mythology (from the 1958 The 7th Voyage of Sinbad through the 1981 Clash of the Titans) and fantasy literature (The Three Worlds of Gulliver).  His pioneering work in stop-motion animation has influenced the field since, all the way to today’s Aardman Animation and Wallace and Gromit.

Harryhausen’s masterpiece was the 1963 Jason and the Argonauts, for which he created the Harpies, Talos, the Clashing Rocks Triton, the Hydra and the sword-fighting skeletons that emerge from the Hydra’s teeth.  I still watch Jason and the Argonauts whenever it’s on TV, and I often give the DVD to kids.   Thank you, Harry.

Ebert’s favorite lines

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Roger Ebert was never snarky unless a movie deserved it – and then he was masterful.  In 2011, he published Roger Ebert’s Favorite Lines From Movie Reviews, which quickly made my own list of Other People’s Great Movie Lists.

Here are some examples from Ebert’s reviews:

“Pearl Harbor is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle.”

“Heaven’s Gate is the most scandalous cinematic waste I have ever seen, and remember, I’ve seen Paint Your Wagon.”

“I know full well I’m expected to Suspend My Disbelief. Unfortunately, my disbelief is very heavy, and during Ocean’s Thirteen, the suspension cable snapped.”

“Keanu Reeves is often low-key in his roles, but in this movie, his piano has no keys at all. He is so solemn, detached and uninvolved he makes Mr. Spock look like Hunter S. Thompson at closing time.” — The Day the Earth Stood Still

“She and Daredevil are powerfully attracted to each other, and even share some PG-13 sex, which is a relief, because when superheroes have sex at the R level, I am always afraid someone will get hurt.” — Daredevil

“I am informed that 5,000 cockroaches were used in the filming of Joe’s Apartment. That depresses me, but not as much as the news that none of them were harmed during the production.”

Thank you, Roger Ebert

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Roger Ebert has died.  It’s 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” yesterday, 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.”

Cinequest at Mid-Festival

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Fairuza Balk in DOSE OF REALITY

Here are my top picks from San Jose’s Cinequest Film Festival so far.  I’ve updated my CINEQUEST 2013 page, which includes comments on all nineteen films that I’ve seen to date at the fest.

Topping my list so far is the inventively constructed French thriller Lead Us Into Temptation.  A middle-aged married man does a good deed for a beautiful young woman and finds himself the pawn in a dangerous game.  Lead Us Not Into Temptation plays again on March 1 and March 9.

The American thriller Dose of Reality packs wire-to-wire intensity and a surprise ending that no one will see coming. Dose of Reality is playing Cinequest again on March 5 and 9, and will release on DVD and VOD on March 26.

The deadpan American comedy Congratulations! sends up the police procedural and will screen at Cinequest again on March 5.

The very dark and suspenseful French Chaos is centered on a creepy character that you know is up to no good, but the audience has to wait to find out what he plans and why.  You can see Chaos at Cinequest on March 7.

The compelling The Deep tells the fact-based survival story of a shipwrecked Icelandic fisherman’s ordeal in frigid waters.

In The Shadow is a Czech paranoid thriller that won Best Film at the Czech Film Critics’ Awards and was the Czech submission to the Academy Awards. It plays at Cinequest on February 28, March 6 and March 8.

In the Belgian drama Offline, we meet a character struggling to redeem himself.  You can see Offline at Cinequest on March 5 and 7.

In the solid American drama Solace, three stories are interlinked.  Solace plays Cinequest again on March 6.

In the documentary We Went to War, the filmmaker goes to small town Texas to revisit the Vietnam vets who were the subjects of his 1970 I Was a Soldier.    It’s a poignant snapshot of a 40-year-old war that is still going on for the participants and their families.  We Went to War is told successfully in a style that contrasts from other talking head docs.  We Went to War will be screened again on March 5.

The documentary Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself shares the extraordinarily rich life of the Zelig-like George Plimpton.  He was somehow able to marry the most highbrow literary world with cheesy TV celebrity.  You can see Plimpton! at Cinequest on March 8.

I haven’t yet seen it, but the Danish drama The Hunt (plays on March 6) has been univerally acclaimed at other festivals.  Mads Mikkelsen (After the Wedding, Casino Royale, A Royal Affair) stars as a teacher wrongly accused of child molestation, spurring hysteria in his town. Mikkelsen won the Best Actor award at Cannes.

I’ve also heard credible good buzz on two other films that I haven’t seen:  the Turkish comedy One Day or Another and the American comedy The Playback Singer.

After seeing Lawrence of Arabia digitally restored in the very impressive Sony 4K, I wanted to point out that, also recently restored in Sony 4K, Taxi Driver plays on March 6 and Dr. Strangelove plays on March 9.

And again, you can always check my CINEQUEST 2013 page, which also includes comments on Aftermath, The Almost Man, I Am a Director, The Sapphires, Panahida, Pretty Time Bomb, Welcome Home and White Lie.