The droll dark comedy Radio Dreams explores the ambivalence of the immigrant experience through the portrait of a flamboyant misfit, a man who rides the roller coaster of megalomania and despair. That misfit is Hamid Royani (Mohsen Namjoo), the director of programming at an Iranian radio station in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Hamid, an author in Iran, is a man of great certainty, with an unwavering sense of intellectual superiority He assumes that everyone should – and will – buy in to his idiosyncratic taste. This results in extremely random radio programming, and Hamid tries to sabotage everything that he finds vulgar (which is everything that might bring more listeners and revenue to the station.)
With his wild mane and indulgent programming, we first think that Hamid is simply batty. But immigrants to the US generally forge new identities, and we come to understand that Hamid has not, perhaps will not, forge that new identity. His despair is real but it’s hard to empathize with – he might be a legitimate literary figure in Iran, but he’s probably a pompous ass over there, too.
The highlight of Radio Dreams is Hamid’s reaction when he is surprised that Miss Iran USA, whom he has dismissed as a bimbo, might have literary chops that rivaling his.
Hamid has concocted a plan to have Afghanistan’s first rock band visit with the members of Metallica on air, and that’s the movie’s MacGuffin. As we wait to see if Metallica will really show up, the foibles of the radio station crew dot Radio Dreams with moments of absurdity. There are the cheesy commercials about unwanted body hair, Hamid’s obsession with hand sanitizer, a radio jungle played live on keyboards EVERY time, a new employee orientation that focuses on international time zones, along with a station intern compelled to take wrestling lessons.
Writer-director Babak Jalali is an adept storyteller. As the movie
opens, we are wondering, why do these guys have musical instruments? Why
are they talking about Metallica? What’s with the ON AIR sign? Much of
the movie unfolds before Hamid Royani emerges as the centerpiece
character.
Hamid is played by the well-known Iranian singer-songwriter Mohsen Namjoo, “Iran’s Bob Dylan”. This is only Namjoo’s second feature film as an actor. He’s a compelling figure, and this is a very fine performance.
Except for Namjoo, the cast is made up of Bay Area actors. Masters of the implacable and the stone face, all of the actors do deadpan really, really well.
As befits the mix of reality and absurdism, here’s a podcast by the characters in Radio Dreams. I saw Radio Dreams at the Cinema Club Silicon Valley, and Babak Jalali took Q&A after the screening by phone from Belgium. Radio Dreams is available to stream from Amazon, iTunes and kanopy.
On April 23, Turner Classic Movies plays the great political comedy The Dark Horse (1932). If you think that political handlers, dumb candidates, spin and sex scandals are creations of contemporary politics, you need to see this gem from 88 years ago. A political party resolves its convention stalemate by nominating an obscure party regular (the gleefully dim Guy Kibbee) as its gubernatorial candidate. It happens that the dark horse is not merely a cipher, but is a vacuous buffoon who is challenged by the task of removing his own shoes. His own campaign manager describes him thus:
He’s the dumbest human being I ever saw. Every time he opens his mouth he subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge.
That equally ruthless and amoral campaign manager, brilliantly played by Warren William (the “King of Pre-Code”), presages modern political handlers with his skill, cynicism and shameless insincerity. He teaches his dimwitted candidate to answer every question with “Yes…and, then again, no.” William’s campaign manager is such a scoundrel that he must first get sprung from jail (by Bette Davis in one of her very first movie roles). There’s spin, staged photo opportunities and even crisis management, when the candidate is about to blunder into a potentially campaign killer of a sex scandal. And it’s still very, very funny today.
Yet more movies to watch at home, still topped by the excellent crime thriller The Whistlers.
ON VIDEO
In the absorbing crime thriller The Whistlers, a shady cop and a mysterious woman are walking a tightrope of treachery. The Whistlers was a hit at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, but COVID-19 impaired its 2020 theatrical release in the US. You can stream it from Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Because the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM) was supposed to be underway now (it’s been cancelled for the COVID-19 emergency), here’s a film from SFFILM’s 2017 program: The Lost City of Z revives the genre of the historical adventure epic, with all the spectacle of a swashbuckler, while braiding in modern sensitivities and a psychological portrait. This is a beautiful and thoughtful film. The Lost City of Z is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas in Seven Days in May
“I’m suggesting Mr President, there’s a military plot to take over the Government of these United States, next Sunday…”
John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate) is a master of the thriller, and his 1964 Seven Days in May is a masterpiece of the paranoid political thriller subgenre. Edmond O’Brien’s performance is best among outstanding turns by Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Frederic March and Whit Bissell. Douglas showed his range by playing a profoundly decent man, for whom “patriotic” meant “devoted, dutiful and loyal to the nation’s principles”, not “jingoistic”. April 23 on Turner Classic Movie.
Charlie Hunnam in THE LOST CITY OF Z
photo courtesy of SFFILM
Because the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM) was supposed to be underway now (it’s been cancelled for the COVID-19 emergency), here’s a film from SFFILM’s 2017 program. In auteur James Gray’s sweeping turn of the 20th Century epic The Lost City of Z, a stiff-upper-lip type British military officer becomes the first European to probe into the deepest heart of unmapped Amazonia. Finding his way through the lush jungles, braving encounters with sometimes cannibalistic indigenous warriors, he becomes obsessed with finding the lost city of an ancient civilization. I know this sounds like Indiana Jones, but it’s based on the real life of Percy Fawcett as chronicled in the recent book Lost City of Z by David Grann.
The Lost City of Z begins with an Edwardian stag hunt
through the verdant Irish countryside, complete with horses spilling
riders. This scene is gorgeous, but its point is to introduce the young
British military officer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) as a man of
unusual resourcefulness, talent and, above all, drive. Despite his
abilities, he has been chaffing at the unattractive assignments that
have precluded his career advancement. In the snobby Edwardian military,
he has been in disfavor because his dissolute father had stained the
family name. One of Fawcett’s commanders says, “He’s been rather
unfortunate in his choice of ancestors”.
That yearning to earn the recognition that he believes he merits –
and to attain the accomplishments of a Great Man – is the core of this
character-driven movie. Fawcett resists yet another assignment away from
the career-making action, a mapping expedition designed to have a minor
diplomatic payoff. But it takes him on a spectacular Amazon exploration
that brings him celebrity – and backing for more high-profile
expeditions. Fawcett was surfing the zeitgeist in the age of his
contemporaries Roald Amundsen (South Pole), Robert Peary (North Pole)
and Howard Carter (King Tut).
In that first expedition, Fawcett becomes convinced that he can find the magnificent city of a lost civilization deep in the Amazon, a city he calls Z (which is pronounced as the British “Zed”). The Lost City of Z takes us through two more Amazonian expeditions, sandwiched around Fawcett’s WW I service in the hellish Battle of the Somme. That final expedition ends mysteriously – and not well.
No one knows for sure what happened to Fawcett. In The Lost City of Z,
Gray leads us toward the most likely conclusion, the one embraced by
Grann’s book. If you’re interested in the decades of speculation about
Fawcett’s fate, there’s a good outline on Percy Fawcett’s Wikipedia page.
Fawcett comes with his own Victorian upper class prejudices, but he
has the capacity to set those aside for a post-Darwin open-mindedness.
Gray made it a point that the indigenous peoples in the movie are
independent of Fawcett; Gray shows them living their lives in a world
that Fawcett has found, not just advancing the plot points in Fawcett’s
quest. Four real tribes – and their cultures – are shown in the film.
As Percy Fawcett, with his oft-manic obsession and fame-seeking that
color his scientific curiosity and his old-fashioned Dudley Do-Right
values, Charlie Hunnam gives a tremendous, perhaps carer breakthrough,
performance. He’s been a promising actor in Sons of Anarchy and the overlooked thriller Deadfall) (and such a good actor that I never dreamed that he’s really British). Hunnam will next star as the title character in the King Arthur movie franchise.
Robert Pattinson is unexpectedly perfect as Fawcett’s travel buddy Henry Costin. With his Twilight dreaminess hidden behind a Smith Brothers beard, Pattinson projects a lean manliness. It’s probably his best performance.
Sienna Miller shines as Fawcett’s proto-feminist wife Nina. I first
noticed Miller (and Daniel Craig) in the underrated neo-noir thriller
2004 Layer Cake. Now Miller is still only 35 years old and has delivered other fine recent performances in Foxcatcher, American Sniper and (in an especially delicious role) High-Rise.
Director James Gray (The Yard, Two Lovers, The Immigrant) is
a favorite of cinephiles and of other filmmakers, but regular audiences
don’t turn out for his movies. That may change with The Lost City of Z,
a remarkably beautiful film that Gray shot, bucking the trend to
digital, in 35 mm. The jungle scenes were filmed in a national park in
Columbia. The cinemeatographer is the Oscar-nominated Darius Khondji.
Khondji shot The Immigrant for Gray and has been the DP of choice for David Fincher (Se7en) Alan Parker (Evita), Michael Haneke (Amour), and Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris).
Along with the stag hunt and the voyages up and down the jungle rivers,
there is also a breathtakingly beautiful ballroom scene and a gaspingly
surreal nighttime discovery of a rubber plantation’s opera house deep
in the jungle.
There have been other Lost Expedition movies, most famously Werner Herzog’s Aquirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo. The Lost City of Z
shares an obsession, a quest and a mysterious tragic end with those
films, but it stands apart with its exploration of the motivation of a
real life character and the authenticity of Gray’s depiction of the
indigenous people.
Movie studios used to make an entire genre of very fun movies from Gunga Din and The Four Feathers through Lawrence of Arabia and Zulu
that featured white Europeans getting their thrills in exotic third
world playgrounds. We often cringe at the racist premises and the
treatment of “the natives” those movies today. Since the 1960s, the best
examples of the genre, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, have had an ironic tinge. With The Lost City of Z, James Gray loses both the racism and the irony, and brings us brings a straight-ahead exploration tale.
The Lost City of Z revives the genre of the historical
adventure epic, with all the spectacle of a swashbuckler, while braiding
in modern sensitivities and a psychological portrait. This is a
beautiful and thoughtful film. The Lost City of Z is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Also see my notes from the director James Gray’s Q & A at the San Francisco International Film Festival. [And here are some completely random tidbits. There’s a cameo by Spaghetti Western star Franco Nero. And the closing credits recognize the “data wrangler”.]
More movies to watch at home: I’ve amped up my streaming recommendations as we shelter in place. And we start with a new film, The Whistlers.
ON VIDEO
In the absorbing crime thriller The Whistlers, a shady cop and a mysterious woman are walking a tightrope of treachery. The Whistlers, was a hit at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, but COVID-19 impaired its 2020 theatrical release in the US. You can stream it from Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
My tribute to the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM), which would have been underway but for COVID-19, is Rojo. Set just before Argentina’s bloody coup in the 1970s, this moody, atmospheric film works as a slow-burn thriller. Rojo made my list of 10 Overlooked Movies of 2019. Stream it from Amazon, iTunes and Vudu.
Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blache is a biodoc of a female cinema pioneer – one of the first directors, producers and studio heads – in both France and the US. You don’t know the whole story of the beginnings of cinema if you don’t know about Alice Guy. It’s currently free on WATCH TCM and can be streamed from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play. You can watch Guy’s comic 1906 critique of male behavior, The Consequences of Feminism, on my blog post.
Evelyn Keyes in THE KILLER THAT STALKED NEW YORK
And is it too soon for Pandemic Noir? My post highlights Panic in the Streets and The Killer that Stalked New York. The Killer That Stalked New York has played on Turner Classic Movies; it’s not currently available to stream, but the DVD is available to purchase. The better movie, Panic in the Streets, plays frequently on Turner Classic Movies and can be streamed from iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
On April 11 and 12, Turner Classic Movies brings us Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, another film noir from the great Fritz Lang. Seeking to discredit capital punishment, a novelist (Dana Andrews) gets himself charged with and CONVICTED of a murder – but then the evidence of his innocence suddenly disappears! Crackerjack (and deeply noir) surprise ending. Film noir historian Eddie Muller will introduce the film.
Dana Andrews and Joan Fontaine in BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT
REMEMBRANCE
Character actor Allen Garfield contributed to many fine films, especially in the 1970s heyday of American auteurs, including The Candidate, The Brink’s Job, Nashville and The Stunt Man. My favorite Garfield performance was as the sleazy Bernie in the 1974 masterpiece The Conversation.
Is it too soon for pandemic noir? Actually, these two movies from 1950 are about outbreaks and epidemics, not really pandemics. But heroic public health officers are central in both, just like in today’s COVID-19 pandemic. Both Panic in the Streets and The Killer that Stalked New York are among my Overlooked Noir.
First, there’s irector Elia Kazan’s noirish thriller Panic in the Streets This Kazan’s OTHER movie set in a gritty waterfront, and he shot it on location in New Orleans. In his screen debut, Jack Palance plays a hoodlum who commits a murder and unknowingly becomes infected with pneumonic plague. Richard Widmark plays the public health expert who is trying to prevent an epidemic by tracking down Patient Zero (Palance) without causing a panic in the city. Of course, the cops are trying to solve the murder, and the man hunt for the murderer will lead them to the same target. Jack Palance was nothing if not intense, and he brings the right combination of vicious thuggery and escalating desperation to his performance.
Evelyn Keyes in THE KILLER THAT STALKED NEW YORK
You might have difficulty imagining a movie procedural of Public Health officers quelling an epidemic being described as “lurid”, but then there’s The Killer that Stalked New York. The star is Evelyn Keyes, who plays Sheila, a Typhoid Mary of smallpox. Sheila has made a very bad choice in boyfriends – a guy for whom she has taken one fall already and is now helping with a delivery of stolen jewelry. She’s on the run from the cops until she can deliver the loot – and bad boyfriend (Charles Korvin) wants that loot right away, too. And she’s not feeling well…
Sheila has smallpox, so she’s zipping furtively around NYC infecting people. So the Public Health Department is also tracking her down as Patent Zero. The Killer that Stalked New York is about these two overlaid ticking bombs – the jewelry caper and the smallpox – all while Sheila is getting sicker and sicker. Fortunately, a dreamy Public Health doc (William Bishop) is drawn to save her.
Evelyn Keyes is the best thing about the movie, although she has to play a pretty overwrought role. And she is made up to look worse and worse in the course of the plot, getting really sweaty and finally sporting pustules.
Visit my posts on Panic in the Streets and The Killer that Stalked New York for more discussion, images and a trailer. The Killer That Stalked New York has played on Turner Classic Movies. It’s not currently available to stream, but the DVD is available to purchase. The better movie, Panic in the Streets, plays frequently on Turner Classic Movies and can be streamed from iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Richard Widmark and Paul Douglas in PANIC IN THE STREETS
The San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM) was set to open tomorrow before it was cancelled for the COVID-19 emergency, so in tribute, here’s a film from SFFILM’s 2019 program.
Rojo is Argentine writer-director Benjamín Naishtat’s slow burn drama. Rojo
is set just before the 1970s coup that some characters expect – but no
one is anticipating how long and bloody the coup will be. Several
vignettes are woven together into a tapestry of pre-coup moral malaise.
A prominent provincial lawyer Claudio (Darío Grandinetti) is invited
to participate in a scam. There’s a scary encounter of lethal
restaurant rage. It looks like Claudio, bobbing on a sea of moral
relativism, may well remained unscathed, but the arrival of crack
detective becomes a grave threat.
As Claudio weaves through his life, his society shows signs of
crumbling. There’s a failed teen seduction, an emotional breakdown at a
formal reception and a natural metaphor – a solar eclipse.
It’s funny when the audience finally connects the dots and
understands who the character nicknamed “the Hippie” is. And Naishtat
and Grandinetti get the most out of the scene where Claudio finally
dons a toupee.
We know something that the characters don’t know – or at least fully
grasp – how bloody the coup will be. Watch for the several references
to desaparecido, a foreboding of the coup. Argentina’s coup was known for the desaparecidos
– the disappeared – thousands of the regime’s political opponents went
missing without a trace, having been executed by death squads. In Rojo,
a very inconvenient madman dies and his body is hidden, there’s a
disappearing act in a magic show, and a would-be boyfriend vanishes.
In the absorbing crime thriller The Whistlers, Cristi (Vlad Ivanov) is a shady Romanian cop who is lured into a dangerous plot by the rapturously sexy Gilda (Catrinel Marlon) and the promise of a fortune. A lethal Spanish mafia is planning a Perfect Crime to recover the loot stolen by Gilda and her Romanian partner, Zsolt. Only Zslot knows where the treasure is, and he’s been jailed by Cristi’s colleagues. To beat the omnipresent surveillance of Romanian state security, Cristi is sent to La Gomera, an island in the Spanish Canary Islands to learn a whistling language.
A whistling language? Indeed, residents of La Gomera can communicate by whistling in code. The language is called Silbo Gomera and it was already being used in ancient Roman times. The whistling can be heard for up to two miles, which allows the locals to communicate across the impassable ravines on the mountainous island.
The plan to spring Zsolt depends on Cristi learning Silbo Gomera and then implementing an intricate plan in which nothing can go wrong. Even if the plan goes right, Cristi and Gilda run the very real risk of being killed by the pitiless Spanish mafia or by the corrupt and unaccountable Romanian cops. Cristi and Gilda are walking a tightrope of treachery.
Vlad Ivanov in THE WHISTLERS
The Whistlers is written and directed by Corneliu Porumboiu, who is a master of the deadpan. Two of his earlier films became art house hits in the US, 12:08 East of Bucharest and Police, Adjective. Both of those films explored fundamental corruption in Romanian society as a legacy of the communist era..
Cristi is played by Romanian actor Vlad Ivanov. Ivanov is best known for the Romanian masterpiece 4 Days, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, in which he played one of cinema’s most repellent characters – Mr. Bebe, the sexual harassing abortionist. American audiences have also seen Ivanov’s performances in Police, Adjective and Snowpiercer.
Ivanov excels in playing Everyman piñatas, which serves him well in The Whistlers. Ivanov delivered a tour de force in the 2019 Cinequest film Hier, as a man more and more consumed by puzzles, and increasingly perplexed, dogged, battered and exhausted.
For The Whistlers to work, Catrinel Marlon must make Gilda quick-thinking and gutsy, and she pulls it off. She is very good, as is Rodica Lazar as Cristi’s coldly ruthless boss Magda.
This is a Romanian film with dialogue in Romanian, English, Spanish and, of course, whistling. The Whistlers, a top notch crime thriller, can be streamed from Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
The documentary Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blache pulls us out of ignorance about one of the most important pioneers of cinema. Alice Guy was one of the first movie directors, one of the first producers and one of the first studio heads. She was one of the inventors of movie comedy, use of color, special effects and a host of other aspects of filmmaking that we take for granted today. She worked in all three centers of early filmmaking – Paris, Fort Lee, New Jersey and Hollywood. And she was a woman.
Alice Guy had been almost erased from history precisely because – and only because – she was a woman. But if we don’t know about Alice Guy, we are as ignorant as if we didn’t know about the Lumieres and D.W. Griffith. This is essential movie history.
Fortunately, more and more of her films are being rediscovered – found, properly credited and preserved. At the bottom of this post, you can watch one of her films, The Consequences of Feminism. I didn’t even know that the word “feminism” was extant 114 years ago, but the film still has #MeToo topicality. It’s a withering parody of gender roles and male entitlement. In the film, men and women have taken each others’ conventional gender roles. Men perform the thankless household drudgery while the women smoke, drink and play pool. Throughout, the women are outrageously sexually harassing the men, kind of like Mad Men in reverse. Of course, the men finally rebel at all the mistreatment.
Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blache is currently free on WATCH TCM and can be streamed from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Here’s the entire seven minute film from 1906: The Consequences of Feminism:
Here are more Shelter In Place movie recommendations – you can watch them all at home.
ON VIDEO
More of an art movie than a neo-noir crime thriller, The Wild Goose Lake is a beautifully shot fable from China’s underworld. You can support San Francisco’s Roxie Theater by buying a ticket to stream The Wild Goose Lake from the Roxie Virtual Cinema.
The intriguing documentary Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project tells how and why a woman’s obsession turned into an essential and irreplaceable video archive of 30 years worth of American broadcasting and society. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project is streamable on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Buck is a documentary about real-life horse whisperer Buck Brannaman, an exceedingly grounded and gentle man who knows everything about horse behavior. But the movie is more about human behavior, about the disturbing crucible that formed Buck, and about what we can learn about people from their handling of horses. You can rent Buck from Amazon, YouTube and Google Play or buy it from iTunes.
On April 7, Turner Classic Movies airs the innovative film noirHe Walked By Night, completed by an uncredited Anthony Mann. Inspired by a true life story, the LAPD goes on a man hunt for a highly skilled wacko played by Richard Basehart, with his bland good looks (but maniacal eyes). It’s a police procedural elevated by the great cinematography of John Alton, especially the sewer escape chase (right up there with the one in The Third Man). Look for film noir veteran Whit Bissell is perhaps his shadiest role. As a bonus, Jack Webb of Dragnet fame plays a CSI with a decidedly unsafe but cool way to confirm that a substance is really nitroglycerine.
