MILL VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL: see ’em here first (and see ’em at home)

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Olivia Colman and Anthony Hopkins in THE FATHER. Photo courtesy of Sundance Institute

The Mill Valley Film Festival (MVFF) is always the best opportunity for Bay Area film goers to catch an early look at the Big Movies – the prestige films that will be released during Award Season. This year is the same – except we don’t even have to visit Marin County in person.

The MVFF has gone virtual and is streaming most of its program. A few of the biggest movies can be seen on a big screen – at Marin County drive-in theaters. Browse the program and buy tickets here.

THREE of the movies I am expecting to be the year’s best are playing at this year’s MVFF:

  • Nomadland: Frances McDormand stars in the latest from filmmaker Chloe Zhao (The Rider).
  • The Father: some say this is Anthony Hopkins’ greatest performance. Olivia Colman co-stars.
  • One Night in Miami: highly acclaimed directorial debut of actress Regina King.

This 2020 MVFF has an especially rich slate of documentaries, including:

  • Banksy Most Wanted (will it reveal his identity?)
  • The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart (opens the fest at a drive-in)
  • The Boys Who Said No (Vietnam War resisters)
  • Trust Me (explores misinformation on social media)
  • Coded Bias (there’s an Algorithmic Justice League searching out racial bias in AI and facial recognition software)
Chritian Petzold’s UNDINE

The Heist of the Century from Argentine plays on opening night and looks pretty funny. Other international cinema includes:

  • I Carry You With Me (double Sundance winner)
  • Jumbo (popular at Sundance and the Berlinale)
  • My Donkey My Lover and I (with the hilarious actress Laure Calamy)
  • Undine (the latest from German auteur Christian Petzold)

Other promising films including Alexandre Rockwell’s much buzzed-about indie Sweet Thing and the romp The Comeback Trail (with Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman and Tommy Lee Jones). Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit with Judi Dench opens the fest at a drive-in.

Last year’s MVFF showcased five films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar: the winner Parasite, along with Marriage Story, The Irishman, Jojo Rabbit and Ford vs. Ferrari. The 2018 festival featured Roma, Green Book, Shoplifters, If Beale Street Could Talk and Cold War; those five films combined for 28 Oscar nominations and 7 Oscars. You get the idea.

This year, I’m not going to have to find a parking space in downtown Mill Valley nor race from Mill Valley’s Sequoia to San Rafael’s Rafael during Marin’s rush hour. But I’ve already got my tickets to nine of the offerings. Pick out your tickets here.

Movies to See Right Now (at home)

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Regina King’s ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI opening at the Mill Valley Film Festival. Photo courtesy of Amazon.

This week: The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE. And this weekend, I’ll be previewing a great film festival that we can all attend (virtually).

Don’t miss this beautifully-written essay on Five Easy Pieces by Steven Gaydos in Variety. Gaydos gets the impact on the 1970 audience just right and shines overdue credit on its female screenwriter Carole Eastman. There’s also a tidbit on Helena Kallianiotes, the funniest hitch hiker in movie history.

Karen Black, Helena Kallianiotes, Toni Basil and Jack Nicholson in FIVE EASY PIECES

REMEMBRANCE

RAGING BULL: cinematography by Michael Chapman

Cinematographer Michael Chapman shot the most stunning boxing scenes ever in Raging Bull. Before that, Chapman had an amazing run of work in indelible films from 1973 through 1979: The Last Detail, Taxi Driver, The Last Waltz, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Wanderers.

RAGING BULL: cinematography by Michael Chapman

ON VIDEO

I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Anymore: This wonderfully dark comedy is a showcase for Melanie Lynskey as a schlub who goes postal. Streaming on Netflix.

The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:

ON TV

Edih Chatterton and Walter Huston in DODSWORTH. Photo by Goldwyn/Kobal/Shutterstock (5880310c) Goldwyn USA Scene Still

On October 1, Turner Classic Movies airs the compelling Dodsworth, William Wyler’s 1936 film version of the Sinclair Lewis novel. The title character is a guy who has worked hard to get rich enough to step away from the rat race and take his wife on an extended European holiday. He thinks that he finally has it all – until he discovers that his wife has conflicting needs.

In one of his greatest performances, Walter Huston plays Sam Dodsworth as a guy supremely confident in his own skin, until he is devastated in learning who his wife really is. Unlike many stars from the Classic Era, Huston’s naturalistic acting would work in today’s cinema. Ruth Chatterton, who was a big Broadway star just ending a ten-year movie career, is equally good as Sam’s unashamedly selfish wife Fran (you’ve just to let me have my fling!).

The third great performance is Mary Astor’s most sympathetic, as Edith, the straight-shooting anti-Ftan. Astor shot Dodsworth during the daytime and then suffered through a humiliating child custody trial, held at night (with Chatterton at her side for support). Astor won over the court on the stand by channeling the character of Edith.

“Love has to stop somewhere short of suicide.” I just discovered Dodsworth this year, thanks to TCM guru Sandy Wolf.

I DON’T FEEL AT HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE – a schlub goes postal

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Elijah Wood and Melanie Lynskey in I DON’T FEEL AT HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE

In the wonderfully dark comedy I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Anymore, Ruth (Melanie Lynskey) is wallowing in a lonely, depressing, humdrum existence, when she has one of those days where everything goes wrong. When she staggers home in abject failure, she finds that her home has been burglarized. It’s the last straw, and Ruth becomes energized in an obsessive quest to track down the thieves. She picks up her geeky neighbor (Elijah Wood) an a confederate. Soon the lovable loser and her oddball sidekick follow the clues to a very dangerous gang, and they find themselves in a lethal thriller.

Melanie Lynskey and Macon Blair in I DON’T FEEL AT HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE

I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Anymore is the directorial debut of actor Macon Blair, an actor who has elevated a slew of indies, especially the refreshingly original thriller Blue Ruin. Blair has a tiny but very funny role as spoiler-dropping bar patron.

Melanie Lynskey is a comic treasure, and her deadpan earnestness carries I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Anymore. What’s so funny here is that her Ruth, a workaday schlub, only needs to become SLIGHTLY deranged before she falls into a life-and-death adventure.

After a Blink-And-You’ve-Missed-It theatrical run in 2017, I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Anymore is available to stream on Netflix.

Movies to See Right Now (at home)

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Niels Schneider and Virginie Efira in SIBYL

This week: a wildlife documentary unlike any you’ve ever seen and two movies about human wild life. Korean zombies, too.

ON VIDEO

Sibyl: The sex-filled melodrama from director Juliet Triet is trashy, but in that sly and expert French way. Sibyl is streaming on Virtual Cinema; I watched it at the Laemmle.

#Alive: A Korean Home Alone with zombies. Streaming on Netflix

DTF: The wild and unpleasant DTF is not the documentary that filmmaker Al Bailey planned, but instead it’s an unexpected descent from prurience into menace.

Rodents of Unusual Size: This charmingly addictive documentary features 5 million orange-toothed critters and a Cajun octogenarian. Streaming from Amazon and iTunes.

RODENTS OF UNUSUAL SIZE

The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:

ON TV

On September 19, Turner Classic Movies will play the 1957 classic Western  3:10 to Yuma.  This may the career-best performance by the underrated Van Heflin, who plays a financially ruined rancher who bets his life for a chance to support his family.  All he has to do is to guard a cruel and resourceful outlaw (Glenn Ford) against rescue attempts by his gang.  Heflin’s rancher is totally outmatched and his only chance comes from his desperation-fueled adrenaline. It’s an edge-of-your-seat countdown until help is scheduled to arrive.  The 2007 remake with Christian Bale and Russell Crowe is very good, too, but Van Heflin reigns supreme.

Van Heflin in 3:10 TO YUMA

DTF: an unexpected descent from prurience into menace

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Documentarian Al Bailey and his subject “Christian” swiping though Tinder. Photo courtesy of DTF and Gravitas Ventures.

In all fairness, the wild and unpleasant DTF is not the documentary that filmmaker Al Bailey planned to make. Bailey wanted to explore the world of dating apps by following a heavy user of Tinder as he coursed through a series of casual hook-ups.

Bailey thought he had the perfect subject, his friend Christian, a widowed, globe-hopping airline pilot. Bailey expected to harvest lots of prurient fodder from the horny Christian’s meeting and dating lots of single ladies across the world. And Bailey, who had introduced Christian and his late wife of 14 years, justifiably thought he knew Christian.

But Christian had become an altogether different person, not just a party hound, but someone who had descended into a vortex of sex addiction, depression and substance dependency. And when Christian is drunk, we see a despicable torrent of misogyny and racism.

“Christian” is not the pilot’s real name – and his face and voice are obscured throughout the film. If identified, he would certainly lose his job because DTF documents alcohol and drug use that violates the restrictions for long haul airline pilots.

“Men behaving badly” has become a genre of its own in narrative cinema and even documentaries. DTF is not that. Christian’s behavior is not just hedonistic, but jaw-droppingly dangerous to others. He is not just a jerk, but a public menace.

Now Bailey is not blameless here. There are several cringe-heavy moments where Bailey reneges on promises to Christian and his dates to stop filming them. And Bailey tries a Michael Moore-style ambush of Tinder’s corporate HQ, a tactic that I despise even when Moore or 60 Minutes deploys it. And there are moments where Bailey and his colleagues debate the ethics of continuing when the film itself may be prompting Christian toward even more risky behavior.

Sometimes I’ll watch a movie and feel like I need to shower afterwards. After DTF, I felt like I needed to dive into a pool of disinfectant. DTF is available to stream from on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and other platforms.

SIBYL: masking its trashiness with expert filmmaking

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Virginie Efira and Laure Calamy in SIBYL

In director Justine Triet’s sex-filled (and sometimes darkly funny) melodrama Sibyl, the psychotherapist Sibyl (Virginie Efira) decides to phase out her practice and return to her primary obsession – novel writing. Sibyl is changing the trajectory of her own life, and she reflects on the one true love in her past (Niels Schneider), her sobriety, her parenting and the family of her sister (Laure Calamy).

While off-loading most of her patients, Sibyl picks up a new one – a needy young actress (Adèle Exarchopoulos from Blue Is the Warmest Color). The actress is about to jump start her movie career, but she’s having an affair with the other lead actor (Gaspar Ulliel), who is inconveniently married to the director Sandra Hüller (Toni Erdmann).

Each of these threads is its own melodrama, and Triet braids them together into an always entertaining story. We are our choices – and we can be our impulses.

Sibyl may be a psychotherapist, but she hasn’t mastered the concept of boundaries. Most egregiously, she doesn’t hesitate to use the personal secrets of her patients as fodder for her novels. Yikes! And she doesn’t resist rampant boundary-crossing by the actress, the actor and the director, either, and she’s used by all of them.

The characters, especially Sibyl, fill the camera lens with passionate sex – on the floor, up against a door, on the beach, on an apartment bathroom’s sink, on the deck of a boat, but not, to the best of my recollection, on a bed.

Niels Schneider and Virginie Efira in SIBYL

There’s lots of sly, dark humor, beginning with the over-intellectualized mansplaining in the very first scene. The sister is hilarious, especially when she coaches her niece on how to manipulate her mother. At one point, the director of the film-within-the-film responds to a lover’s meltdown on the set: “Guys, let’s keep the drama fictional if you don’t mind.“

The scene where the director first meets the actress who has just been impregnated by the director’s husband is another comic masterpiece from Hüller.

Many of us so revere French cinema that we forget that one of the things French filmmakers do well is trashy. And Sibyl is every bit as trashy as Fifty Shades of Grey. However, the editing (Laurent Sénéchal) and the acting are so exquisite that it masks the trashiness of the story.

Sibyl is streaming on Virtual Cinema; I watched it at the Laemmle.

#ALIVE: the ultimate pandemic shelter in place

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Ah-In Yoo in #ALIVE, Photo courtesy of Perspective Pictures.

Just suppose there’s a pandemic and you can’t leave your home. Oh, wait…

In #Alive, a pulmonary affliction is causing people in a Korean metropolis to savagely attack and bite other humans, further spreading the pandemic. The young gamer Jun-woo (Ah-In Yoo) is isolated in his eighth floor apartment, under siege from what are essentially zombies. It’s kind of Home Alone with zombies.

The hook here is that, like in Home Alone, our hero must depend on his ingenuity to survive, both in fighting off the cannibalistic attackers and in harvesting equipment, food and water from the ravaged apartment building. Fortunately, he discovers another, much smarter survivor, a girl (Shin Hye-Park) holed up in the apartment building across the courtyard. There are two surprises in the final 20 minutes.

Ah-In Yoo (wielding golf club) in #ALIVE, Photo courtesy of Perspective Pictures.

This is the first feature for writer-director Il Cho. He peppers #Alive with funny bits, all the more effective because he doesn’t linger on any of them. One example is when Jun-Yoo presses a button to wait for an elevator as a horde of zombies rush toward him.

#Alive contains the requisite amount of throat biting, brain eating, amputations and bloody splatter for a zombie movie. If you don’t like gore, there are better choices for you on my list of Zombie Movies for People Who Don’t Like Zombie Movies.

This isn’t great cinema, but it has its moments. #Alive is streaming on Netflix. On Netflix, the Korean dialogue is both subtitled and dubbed into English.

RODENTS OF UNUSUAL SIZE: 5 million orange-toothed critters and a Cajun octogenarian

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Thomas Gonzalez in RODENTS OF UNUSUAL SIZE

The offbeat documentary Rodents of Unusual Size, with its bizarre subject, is charmingly addictive. That subject is the nutria, a 20- to 30-pound Argentine rodent that threatens Louisiana’s wetlands and coastline.  Yes, 30-pound swamp rats with orange teeth.

Although Rodents of Unusual Size is decidedly non-preachy, the nutria is serious business. Imported for the commercial potential of its fur by a Tabasco sauce heir, nutria escaped into the Louisiana wilds and propagated wildly. When the US fur market crashed in the 1990s, the locals stopped trapping them, and Louisiana’s nutria population exploded to 20 million.

The problem is that nutria eat the roots of the vegetation in the Louisiana wetlands, causing erosion that has converted at least 42 square miles of land into open water. Worse, those wetlands are the storm buffer for the rest of the state.

Louisiana offers hunters a $5 bounty for the tail of each dead nutria, which has reduced the nutria population to a more manageable 5 million.  We even meet a guy whose official job title is Nutria Tail Assessor.

One of the reasons I love Louisiana is that folks just don’t take themselves too seriously there. Even when they are focused on the grave environmental impacts of the nutria invasion, they still appreciate the absurdity of a 30-pound, orange-toothed swamp rat.  (And, fittingly,  Rodents of Unusual Size is narrated by Louisiana native Wendell Pierce.)

Along the way, we are also introduced to nutria fur and the fur company Righteous Fur, nutria meat, nutria sports mascots and even nutria as pets.

But most compellingly, we meet Thomas Gonzalez, an 80-year-old bayou native, nutria hunter and bon vivant. Gonzalez is a force of nature, complete with strong-willed opinions and some impressive dance moves. Gonzalez serves as the voice of Louisiana and finishes the movie with a profound perspective on the nutria.

I saw Rodents of Unusual Size at Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club with filmmaker Chris Metzler available for Q&A. Metzler and his colleagues Jeff Springer and Quinn Costello filmed Rodents of Unusual Size over four years during Louisiana’s nutria season (November to April). The affable Metzler is a font of nutria knowledge, full of tidbits like albino nutria being prized by taxidermists. Because nutria are very difficult to spot and film in the wild, the filmmakers used Nooty the stunt nutria throughout the film. Nooty joined the filmmakers in creeping along the red carpet at various film festivals and has her own Facebook page.

Thomas Gonzalez alone is worth meeting on film, and, as told by Rodents of Unusual Size, the story of the nutria is quirkily fascinating. Rodents of Unusual Size can be streamed from Amazon and iTunes.

Movies to See Right Now (at home)

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Nathalie Baye and Emmanuelle Devos in MOKA

This week: a slow burn showcase for two great French actresses plus a little indie comedy set in NYC’s Chinatown. The best Summer 2020 movies (like The August Virgin, The Truth, The 11th Green, An Easy Girl and Yes, God, Yes) are on my list of most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE.

ON VIDEO

Moka: a well-crafted fuse-burner and a showcase for two great actresses. You can stream it from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Lucky Grandma: There’s not that much to this indie comedy except for Tsai Chin’s tour de grouch performance as the crusty Grandma and the NYC Chinatown setting. Lucky Grandma is moderately entertaining and is streaming on Amazon.

The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:

ON TV

Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer OUT OF THE PAST

You really haven’t sampled film noir if you haven’t seen Out of the Past (1947), and it’s coming up on Turner Classic Movies on September 12. The model of a film noir hero, Robert Mitchum plays a guy who is cynical, strong, smart and resourceful – but still a sap for the femme fatale…played by the irresistible Jane Greer. Director Jacques Tourneur told Greer, ” First half of the movie – Good Girl; second half – Bad Girl.”

Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum in OUT OF THE PAST

LUCKY GRANDMA: tour de grouch

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Tsai Chin in LUCKY GRANDMA

In the indie comedy Lucky Grandma, an elderly woman resists leaving her apartment in New York City’s Chinatown to join her son’s family in the burbs, Her plan is to invest her savings on a wild night in a New Jersey casino, but she falls into an ill-gotten treasure, running afoul of a murderous Chinatown gang that wants their loot back.

Tsai Chin (the mother in The Joy Luck Club) plays Grandma as a crusty curmudgeon who believes that the best defense is always a good offense.

Hsiao-Yuan Ha, a massive Taiwanese-born (just under 6’7″) actor, is winning as Grandma’s amiable mercenary bodyguard.

Lucky Grandma is the first feature for Asian-American female filmmakers, director Sasie Sealy and her co-writer Angela Cheng.

There’s not that much to Lucky Grandma except for Tsai Chin’s tour de grouch performance and the Chinatown setting. Lucky Grandma is moderately entertaining and is streaming on Amazon.