LEVINSKY PARK: refuge for refugees?

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LEVINSKY PARK

Israel was created as a home for refugees.  What happens when African refugees overwhelm a neglected Tel Aviv neighborhood is the subject of the topical documentary Levinsky Park.

Director Beth Toni Kruvant takes us to Tel Aviv’s hardscrabble Hatikva neighborhood,  now burdened with an influx of African refugees from sub-Saharan Africa.  The refugees aren’t Jewish, they don’t speak Hebrew and they sure aren’t white.  Discouraged from working legally, the refugees encamp on the streets and do what they need to survive.  The Israeli government senses a lose-lose media profile on the issue and tries to duck it entirely.

So how do the local Israelis react?  There is a wide spectrum. Some welcome and try to help people fleeing for their lives.  Others tag the newcomers with the loaded pejorative “infiltrators” and try to kick them out.  We see some ugly, overt racism in Levinsky Park, but nothing unlike what we’ve seen in the US in the Trump Era.

It’s the same question that confronts all countries in the West about political asylum-seekers – who will actually invite them in?  What’s different about Levinsky Park, of course, is that this is Israel – the one nation  created by and for refugees.

A leader emerges from the refugees, the charismatic and articulate Mutasim Ali.  He frames their plight as a movement, and they strive to regain some control over their own futures.  Levinsky Park is a compelling real-life story and screens at the SFJFF:

  • Castro (San Francisco), Thursday, July 27 11:15 AM
    Albany Twin (Albany), Friday, August 4 4:05 PM.

The SFJFF runs from July 20 through August 6 at theaters in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Albany, San Rafael and Oakland. You can peruse the entire program and buy tickets and passes at San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

A CLASSY BROAD: “Done. Next!”

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Marcia Nasatir in A CLASSY BROAD

The delightful bio-doc A Classy Broad chronicles the amazingly resilient life of Marcia Nasatir, the first woman production vice-president at a major Hollywood studio.   Nasatir is now 91 years old and still pitching movies.

Nasatir has lived a singular life.  I won’t spoil her hometown, but it’s not a place that is known for producing Jewish Hollywood execs.  As a young single mom in New York, she started at the bottom of the publishing trade, and climbed to a position selling the movie rights of literary properties.  She moved to representing authors as an agent, which resulted in the motion pictures Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Chinatown.  

Nasatir burst through the glass ceiling as a studio exec at UA, where she greenlit One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Rocky, Carrie and Apocalypse Now!  Dumped by the other suits, she became an independent producer and brought The Big Chill to the screen after it had been rejected by seventeen other companies.

Nasatir’s legacy is a huge chunk of Hollywood’s auteur era of the late 1960s through the early 1980s.  The “classy” in the movie title references an episode where she got fired when the moguls thought her movie taste was too elevated to make money for the studio.

Nasatir demonstrated enormous confidence for a woman of her era, and is the very paragon of resilience.  She met every challenge with her two-word slogan (and epitaph-to-be): “Done. Next!”

A Classy Broad screens three times at the SFJFF:

  • Cinearts (Palo Alto), Saturday, July 22 3:50 PM
  • Castro (San Francisco), Sunday, July 23 1:35 PM
  • Albany Twin (Albany), Sunday, August 6 12:15 PM

The SFJFF runs from July 20 through August 6 at theaters in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Albany, San Rafael and Oakland. You can peruse the entire program and buy tickets and passes at San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

https://vimeo.com/159715402

FRITZ LANG: a filmmaker face to face with a real monster

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Heino Ferch as FRITZ LANG

If you’re making a dark crime movie, what better protagonist than Fritz Lang, the creator of the masterpiece M and a founding auteur of film noir?  Fritz Lang imagines Fritz Lang (Heino Ferch) gathering research for M by tracking and interviewing a real serial killer, all while under police suspicion for his own past.

Writer-director Gordian Maugg sets Fritz Lang at after he has triumphed with the sci-fi epic Metropolis.  Most directors are worried about transitioning from silent movies to talkies, but Lang is consumed pivoting from the grand epic to the personal – he aims to focus each film on the inner struggles of one individual.  He begins work on his next film (what will become M) and hides from his agent, producer and even from second wife and co-writer Thea von Harbou.

Lang travels to research a real serial killer.  We see him visualizing scenes for M (and actual snippets from M are inserted in Fritz Lang).  He is confronted by the detective chasing the serial killer, who still suspects Lang of murdering Lang’s first wife.

Indeed, in real life, police were summoned to find Lang’s first wife dead of a gunshot wound to her chest. Lang and von Harbou explained that the wife had discovered them in frangrante delicto, rushed to get Lang’s pistol and killed herself. Because there was no forensic evidence to contradict the two eyewitnesses, no one was charged. But who commits suicide by shooting herself IN THE CHEST?

Also in real life, von Harbou warmed to the Nazis.   Lang saw that the Nazis would eventually learn of his Jewish mother, and a troubling meeting with Joseph Goebbels caused Lang to leave von Harbou in Germany.  The real Fritz Lang went on to become one of the pioneering masters of American film noir, creating a classic body of work: Scarlet Street, House by the River, The Blue Gardenia, The Big Heat, Human Desire, While the City Sleeps and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.

The fictional narrative Fritz Lang explores Lang’s creative process, particularly in the creation of M, still one of the most unsettling examples of cinema.   Heino Ferch (Albert Speer in Downfall, the crime boss Ronnie in Run Lola Run) is very good as an imperious but tortures Lang.

Fritz Lang will play the SFJFF at:

  • Castro (San Francisco), Thursday, July 27 9:30 PM
    Albany Twin (Albany), Thursday, August 3 8:30 PM.

The SFJFF runs from July 20 through August 6 at theaters in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Albany, San Rafael and Oakland. You can peruse the entire program and buy tickets and passes at San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

SUBTE-POLSKA: memory, vitality and loves from the past

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SUBTE POLSKA

Subte-Polska is an Argentine gem about a nonagenarian chess master addressing his own memory, vitality and the need to find closure with his past.  A promising first feature for writer-director Alejandro Magnone, Subte Polska is the sleeper Must See at this year’s SFJFF.

Great movie. Off-putting title.

Tadeusz (Hector Bidonde) is a working class nonagenarian chess master. He’s still able to win several simultaneous chess matches, but his age is catching up to him and he has periods of confusion and memory loss. His doc has prescribed meds that counteract the memory loss, but he refuses to take them because they…wait for it…diminish his sexual performance.

His adult adopted son (Marcelo Xicarte) is understandably frustrated because he has to keep tracking down an unnecessarily (from his perspective) addled old man. And the son is in a touchy period in his own marriage.

Tadeusz is a Communist Jew who left Poland, his family and his girlfriend to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War. He found another lover in Spain, but he left her,too, when they were defeated by Franco. Tadeusz’ family didn’t survive Hitler. That’s a lot of loss, and Tadeusz dealt with it by emigrating to Argentina and LITERALLY going underground. To avoid triggering painful memories, he gets a job constructing and then working in the Buenos Aires subway system. He sets up his son as a subway driver, and his best buddies also work in the subway, including the guy who runs the underground newsstand (Manuel Callau).

As Subte-Polska unfolds, Magnone explores our sense of memory, and how we consciously and subconsciously handle both the cherished memories and the devastating ones.  As he takes and abstains from taking his meds, Tadeusz’s short-term memory ebbs and flows.  This is a guy who has framed his entire life to suppress the memories of his youth, but he begins to remember his youth more and more vividly.  As he remembers, he feels a need to find closure.

Tadeusz is a strong-willed person, and Subte-Polska is pretty funny as he causes consternation in his son, doctor and friends – in everybody except his well-serviced girlfriend and his ball-busting old friend from their first days underground.  Marcelo Xicarte and Manuel Callau both prove to be excellent comic actors.

Speaking of acting, Hector Bidonde delivers a magnificent lead performance.  Bidonde plays someone who has always been determined to do what he wants, stubborn to his core, still confident in his beliefs, mental acuity and sexual prowess, but occasionally shaken by moments of confusion.

You have three chances to catch Subte-Polska at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival:

  • Cinearts (Palo Alto), Sunday, July 23 4:25 PM
  • Castro (San Francisco), Wednesday, July 26 4:05 PM
  • Albany Twin (Twin), Tuesday, August 1 6:30 PM.

The SFJFF runs from July 20 through August 6 at theaters in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Albany, San Rafael and Oakland. You can peruse the entire program and buy tickets and passes at San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

Subte-Polska is funny, insightful and moving. I’m still mulling it over.  This film deserves a US distributor – and a US distributor who changes the title. After all, it’s a subtitled movie about a 90-year-old; ya gotta help the audience want to see this.  It’s the under-the-radar Must See at this year’s SFJFF.

Movies to See Right Now

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Ray Romano and Holly Hunter in THE BIG SICK

This week’s primary recommendation is to go out and see The Big Sick, the best American movie of the year so far. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll fall in love.  Here are more choices (but see The Big Sick first!):

  • Baby Driver is just an action movie, but the walking, running and driving are brilliantly time to the beat of music.
  • The Journey is a fictional imagining of a real historical event and is an acting showcase for Colm Meaney and Timothy Spall as the two longtime blood enemies who collaborated to bring peace to Northern Ireland.
  • Okja, another wholly original creation from the imagination of master filmmaker Bong Joon Ho, is streaming on Netflix and opening in theaters.
  • The amusingly naughty but forgettable comedy The Little Hours is based on the dirty fun in your Western Civ class, Boccaccio’s The Decameron.
  • The character-driven suspenser Moka is a showcase for French actresses Emmanuelle Devos and Nathalie Baye.
  • The bittersweet dramedy The Hero has one thing going for it – the wonderfully appealing Sam Elliott.

In my DVD/Stream of the Week, the thriller Locke,  Tom Hardy never leaves his car and, for the entire duration of the movie, we only see his upper body, his eyes in the rearview mirror, the dashboard and the roadway lit by his headlights. All the other characters are voiced – he talks to them on the Bluetooth device in his BMW.  Sure, that’s a gimmick – but it works because it complements the core story about the consequences of responsibility.  Locke is available on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

On July 15 Turner Classic Movies reminds why Alfred Hitchcock was the master of the suspenseful psychological thriller.  To paraphrase Hitchcock, when a bomb under a table explodes, the audience is SURPRISED.  But when the audience knows that the bomb under the table is ticking away, that creates SUSPENSE.

  • One of Hitchcock’s all-time best was Strangers on a Train.   A hypothetical discussion about murdering inconvenient people turns out to be not so hypothetical.  Robert Walker plays one of the creepiest villains in movie history. The tennis match and carousel finale are unforgettable set pieces.
  • Rope is based on the notorious 1924 Leopold and Loeb thrill kill murder in 1924.   Look for John Dall playing the insufferably smug textbook narcissist while his Nervous Nellie partner (San Jose’s own Farley Granger) is about to snap. Can they outwit Jimmy Stewart?  Hitchcock employed a gimmick to make the entire movie look like it was photographed in one single shot.
ROPE
Farley Granger, James Stewart and John Dall in ROPE

THE BIG SICK: best American movie of the year so far

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THE BIG SICK
THE BIG SICK

The Must See romantic comedy The Big Sick is the closest thing to a perfect movie this summer.  Kumail Nanjiani (Dinesh in Silicon Valley) plays a Pakistani-American stand-up comedian whose parents insist on arranging a marriage with a Muslim Pakistani woman. He falls for Emily (Zoe Kazan), who is neither Muslim nor Pakistani. Kumail is too cowardly to make a choice between Emily and his family, so he keeps delaying the decision by lying to both. At a critical moment in his relationship with Emily, she suddenly and mysteriously becomes very ill and is placed in a medically induced coma.   Kumail waits out the coma in the hospital with Emily’s out-of-town parents (Holly Hunter and Ray Romano), whom he is meeting for the first time. The parents have relationship issues of their own.

How can Kumail and Emily’s parents weather the stress of an unconscious loved one on a respirator?  Will Emily’s parents accept Kumail?  Will Emily’s parents stay together themselves?  Will Kumail’s parents kick him out of the family?  Will Emily wake up, and what will she think of Kumail if/when she does?

The coma may seem contrived, so it’s important that you know that THIS REALLY HAPPENED to Kumail Nankiani’s real-life wife Emily V. Gordon.  Nanjiani and Gordon co-wrote this screenplay, with support from producer Judd Apatow.

The Big Sick is hilarious (and not just for a coma movie).  The humor comes from the characters, and how they must individually deal with life’s struggles.  Kumail is cowardly delaying a choice between Emily and his own family by lying to both; we know that’s it’s only a matter of time before somebody finds out, and the clock is ticking.  The Big Sick is flawlessly directed by comedy writer and television director Michael Showalter.

Zoe Kazan, the very talented screenwriter (Ruby Sparks) and actress, makes us fall in love with Emily along with Kumail.  Kazan nails the heartbreaking scene when she finds out that Kumail hasn’t been straight with her.  It’s a pretty remarkable performance, especially given that she’s in a coma for most of the movie.

The casting of Holly Hunter and Ray Romano as Emily parents is inspired.  Each of them brings unusual depth and texture to their characters, the tightly wound mom and the conflict-avoidant dad.  Each has at least one of the Big Scenes that bring Oscar nominations

The Big Sick is the best American movie of the year so far and the best romantic comedy in years. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll fall in love.

THE LITTLE HOURS: sex comedy from your Western Civ class

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THE LITTLE HOURS

The amusingly naughty but forgettable comedy The Little Hours is based on the dirty fun in your Western Civ class, Boccaccio’s The Decameron.   A hunky young lad goes on the lam after cuckolding a local lord and hides out in a nunnery, pretending to be a deaf-mute.  He is then serially molested by the young over sexed nuns.  There is lots of sexual activity in The Little Hours, all played for laughs and none of it erotic.

It’s the 1300s but the potty-mouthed nuns speak as though it was 2017.  Aubrey Plaza is particularly funny as an unceasingly fierce nun with a knife-to-the-throat fetish and a secret life as a witch.

There are lots of low-grade laughs in The Little Hours, including an ancient nun so intent on her embroidery that she is oblivious to enthusiastic sex in the same room and communion made more challenging by a priest’s palsied hand.  Comedy stalwarts John C. Reilly, Nick Offerman, Fred Armisen and Molly Shannon all sparkle.

Horny nuns, arise!

 

San Francisco Jewish Film Festival: Al Gore in person, plus Hedy Lamarr!

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sfjff

It’s time to get ready for one of the Bay Area’s top cinema events: the 37th annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF37), which opens July 20, and runs through August 6 at five locations throughout the Bay Area. The SFJFF is the world’s oldest Jewish film festival, and, with a 2016 attendance figure of 40,000, still the largest.

Al Gore in AN INCONVENIENT SEQUEL: TRUTH TO POWER

Here’s an early peek at the fest highlights:

  • A pre-release screening of the environmental documentary An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power with an appearance by former Vice-President Al Gore (the screening is currently at rush).
  • Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, the riveting biopic of a glamorous movie star who invented and patented the precursor to wireless technology; that’s amazing enough, but Bombshell delves deeply into how Lamarr’s stunning face, her Jewish heritage, and mid-century gender roles shaped her career, marriages and parenting. Top notch.
  • The especially strong slate of documentaries, always a rich trademark of the SFJFF.
  • Scores of feature films from around the world (I’ll be recommending movies from the US, Israel, Germany and Argentina).
  • And the always popular program of short films, Jews in Shorts.

One of the most appealing features of the SFJFF is that, wherever you live in the Bay Area, the fest comes to you. SFJFF will present film events at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, the Landmark Albany Twin in Albany, the CinéArts Theatre in Palo Alto, the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, and the New Parkway Theater in Oakland.

You can peruse the entire program and buy tickets and passes at San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.  This weekend I’ll be posting my top picks for the fest.

BOMBSHELL: THE HEDY LAMARR STORY

DVD/Stream of the Week: LOCKE – a thriller about responsibility

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lockeThe thriller Locke is about an extremely responsible guy (Tom Hardy) who has made one mistake – and he’s trying to make it right. But trying to do the responsible thing in one part of your life can have uncomfortable consequences in the others. The title character drives all night trying to keep aspects of his life from crashing and burning.

In fact, he never leaves the car and, for the entire duration of the movie, we only see his upper body, his eyes in the rearview mirror, the dashboard and the roadway lit by his headlights. All the other characters are voiced – he talks to them on the Bluetooth device in his BMW. Sure, that’s a gimmick – but it works because it complements the core story about the consequences of responsibility.

Locke is written and directed by Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things, Eastern Promises). The story is actually a domestic drama – there are no explosions to dodge, no one in peril to rescue and no bad guys to dispatch. But it’s definitely a thriller because we care about whether Locke meets the two deadlines he will face early the next morning.

It’s a masterful job of film editing by Justine Wright (Touching the Void, The Last King of Scotland). After all, her cuts help keep us on the edge of our seats, despite her working with a very finite variety of shots (Locke’s eyes, the dashboard, etc.).

Hardy, who’s known as an action star, is excellent at portraying this guy who must try to keep his family, biggest career project and self-respect from unraveling at the same time, only armed with his ability to persuade others. It’s a fine film. Locke is available on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube abd Google Play.

Movies to See Right Now

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THE BIG SICK
THE BIG SICK

After a long and boring drought, there is finally an appealing menu of movie choices in theaters:

  • Baby Driver is just an action movie, but the walking, running and driving are brilliantly time to the beat of music.
  • The Journey is a fictional imagining of a real historical event and is an acting showcase for Colm Meaney and Timothy Spall as the two longtime blood enemies who collaborated to bring peace to Northern Ireland.
  • Okja, another wholly original creation from the imagination of master filmmaker Bong Joon Ho, is streaming on Netflix and opening in theaters.
  • The delightfully smart and character-driven Israeli comedy The Women’s Balcony with a community of traditional women in revolt. The longer you’ve been married, the funnier you’ll find The Women’s Balcony.
  • The character-driven suspenser Moka is a showcase for French actresses Emmanuelle Devos and Nathalie Baye.
  • The bittersweet dramedy The Hero has one thing going for it – the wonderfully appealing Sam Elliott.

My DVD/Stream of the Week is the darkly realistic Western Dead Man’s Burden.   Dead Man’s Burden is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and Google Play.

Tonight on TV, Turner Classic Movies presents Raw Deal (1948), with some of the best dialogue in all of film noir, a love triangle and the superb cinematography of John Alton.

Later this week on July 11, TCM offers the very best Orson Welles Shakespeare movie, Chimes at Midnight.

And on July 12, TCM airs Days of Wine and Roses, Blake Edwards’ unflinching exploration of alcoholism, featuring great performances by Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick (both nominated for Oscars) and Charles Bickford.

Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon in DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES
Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon in DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES