THE DOG: obsession and desperation in Mombasa

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Alexander Karim in THE DOG. Courtesy of Cinequest.

The electrifying thriller The Dog follows a classic neo-noir premise. MZ (Alexander Karim), a low level hood, is assigned to drive the call girl, Kadzo (Catherine Muthoni), and he falls for her – against the explicit instructions of their employer and advice from Kadzo herself. To stake a new start for them in a faraway land, he reaches for the big score. Desperation results. What’s unusual about The Dog is that it’s exceptionally exciting and that it’s set in Mombasa, Kenya.

In his quest to make a quick fortune, MZ tries to cash in on a tip about a drug deal. When that goes awry, he finds himself owing a huge debt to Saddam (Caroline Midimo), one of Mombasa’s crime matriarchs. He then tries working with Saddam’s rival Ainea (Veronica Mwaura). MZ takes more and more risks as he get more deeply entangled with the two godmothers. All the way, he’s just one double cross away from disappointing the last people he’ll ever disappoint.

There’s a wonderful low-speed tuk tuk chase (on three-wheel taxis) through Mombasa’s open air markets, street performers and herds of goats. And there’s another unforgettable scene that will be particularly uncomfortable for male audience members.

The Dog matches up well to Howard Hawks’ definition of a great movie – three great scenes and no bad ones“. My FOUR nominations for the three great scenes:

  • a big spender who owes MZ money brings him to his home;
  • Kadzo has MZ film her latest video ad, and he watches her at her sexiest through her cellphone camera.
  • Kadzo explains that she is not asking anyone to save her;
  • MZ faces his reckoning,

The Swedish-born Alexander Karim is superb as MZ. MZ works out to maintain a physicality that intimidates johns and debtors, but he knows his place in the crime hierarchy and grovels before the godmothers; when he screws up, he knows the consequences and moves directly into desperate terror. Alexander Karim has worked in lots of Scandanavian films (so he must be familiar with Nordic Noir) and appeared in Gladiator II.

Catherine Muthoni in THE DOG. Courtesy of Cinequest.

Catherine Muthoni is very good as Kadzo. This may be a neo-noir, but Kadzo isn’t a manipulative femme fatale – it’s only MZ who drives himself to his fate. Midimo and Mwaura are wonderful as the two crime bosses. Watch for how matter-of-factly Midimo dons Saddam’s eyeglasses in the most extreme scene.

The Dog is brilliantly directed, and edited. The director is Alexander’s Ugandan-born brother Baker Karim, who is also based in Sweden. That makes The Dog a Swedish movie, although it has every appearance of a Kenyan film.

I screened The Dog for my coverage of Cinequest.

THE COMPLEX FORMS: what did he bargain for?

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David Allen White in Fabio D’Orta’s THE COMPLEX FORMS. Courtesy of Slamdance.

The visually striking atmospheric The Complex Forms is set in a centuries-old Italian villa, where Christian (David Allen White) and other down-on-their-luck middle-aged men sell their bodies for a period of days to be “possessed”. Possessed how? By who or by what? As the dread builds, Christian resolves to pry the answers from the secretive masters of the villa.

Director Fabio D’Orta unspools the story with remarkably crisp black-and-white cinematography, a brooding soundtrack and impeccable editing. In his astonishingly impressive filmmaking debut, D’Orta wrote, directed, shot and edited The Complex Form.

David Allen White is excellent as Christian, who begins resigned to endure whatever process that he has committed to, but becomes increasingly uneasy as his probing questions are deflected. So are Michael Venni as Christian’s talkative roommate Luh and Cesare Bonomelli as the impassive roommate simply called The Giant.

Like his countrymen Fellini and Leona, D’Orta has a gift for using faces to heighten interest and tell the story. He makes especially effective use of Bonomelli’s Mt. Rushmore-like countenance.

I screened The Complex Forms for its United States premiere at Slamdance. The Complex Forms was my favorite Slamdance film and won the festival’s Honorable Mention for Narrative Feature.  The Complex Forms is playing Cinequest on March 12 and 13.

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Mikey Madison and Yura Borisov in ANORA. Courtesy of NEON.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – it’s time to reset after the Oscars. I’m finishing up my Cinequest coverage; the festival starts on Tuesday, and I’ll be rolling out my fest preview and individual reviews, starting Sunday.

There’s no more excuse for missing big 2024 movies, including the big Oscar winner, Anora. They’re all available to watch at home for under $6, except for The Brutalist ($20) and A Complete Unknown ($25), which are now streaming but pricey. I haven’t yet seen Nickel Boys, Sing Sing and Flow, but they’re also available on inexpensive VOD.

Alternatively, you could honor Gene Hackman by watching The Conversation (Criterion, Paramount, Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango). It’s right up there with The French Connection as Hackman’s best performance and his best movie.

CURRENT MOVIES

ON TV

SEVEN CHANCES
Buster Keaton (out in front) in SEVEN CHANCES

Don’t miss Turner Classic Movies March 11 airing of Seven Chances. I thought that I knew the work of Buster Keaton, but somehow I had never seen Seven Chances until a few years ago.  It features a phenomenal, 26-minute chase scene that rates with the very best in cinema history – What’s Up Doc?, The French Connection, Bullitt!, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Keaton’s own The General.

Keaton’s character publishes a public offer of marriage and gets way more takers than he can handle. There’s a very funny scene where he sits in a church to reflect on his situation and woman after woman seats herself next to and around him; he is oblivious to the fact that each of them is there to marry HIM.  The church fills up with prospective wives, and, 30 minutes into the movie, he flees, with a horde of veiled would-be brides in pursuit. The chase is on.

Keaton is off and running and running and running, in a ridiculously long sprint though the city’s downtown and rail yards and into the hills.  Amazingly, he did all of his own stunts, including leaping over an abyss and being swung around by a railroad crane.  His race with a cascade of falling boulders is pure genius.  You keep asking yourself, “How did they perform that stunt with 1925 technology?”

Keaton understood the comedic power of excess, and the sheer magnitude of the frustrated brides is hilarious   I think I can see the inspiration for the hundreds of crashing cars at the end of The Blues Brothers.

SEVEN CHANCES
Buster Keaton jumps the abyss in SEVEN CHANCES

When he made Seven Chances in 1925, Keaton was only 30 years old and had just directed his first feature two years before.  He had just made the classics Sherlock, Jr. and The Navigator in 1924.  He was about to make his masterpiece The General in 1926 and Steamboat Bill, Jr. in 1928.  Talking pictures changed the industry in 1929, and Keaton signed a disastrous contract with MGM in 1930.  Keaton was to direct only three more features in his career (all unaccredited).  MGM took away his artistic freedom, and no studio kingpin knew what to do with him in the talking era.  Keaton took to drink and went dark for decades.

SEVEN CHANCES

Comments on the Oscars, along with The Movie Gourmet’s 2025 Oscar Dinner

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Photo caption: The Movie Gourmet’s 2025 Oscar Dinner.

The Dinner

Every year, The Wife and I watch the Oscars while enjoying a meal inspired by the Best Picture nominees. Usually, there’s one dish or beverage from each of the nominated movies; here are the 2024 Oscar Dinner and the 2023 Oscar Dinner as examples.

But we just couldn’t contrive an elaborate meal from this year’s nominees. There just weren’t memorable food scenes in A Complete Unknown, Wicked or Conclave. The fancy dinner parties in The Brutalist were pivotal scenes, but it’s not clear what they were serving, nor was it memorable what Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley were taking out of their fridge in The Substance. We had already echoed the giant sandworms of an earlier Dune movie (wih gummy worms on a bed of rice) and didn’t care to duplicate that. The one great 2024 food scene was in Anora, when Annie (Mikey Madison) scarfed the burger in the diner with the Russian/Armenian goons; that is the best Gal-Devours-Burger scene since Peggy Cummins in Gun Crazy.

So this year, we’re just celebrating the movies with movie food. We’ve got the fountain drinks, popcorn and movie candy, and we’re getting our protein from nachos and hot dogs. The very idea of multiplex hot dogs would make me gag, but I remember that the sadly departed Landmark Embarcadero in San Francisco, served Nathan’s All-Beef hot dogs, and that’s what we’re going with here.

The Academy Awards

And how about the Oscars themselves? The lead story is that the nominations were pretty solid. For the second straight year, there weren’t any gross miscarriages of justice in snubs or undeserved recognition. Either Anora or The Brutalist would deserve Best Picture and ither Timothy Chalamet or Adrien Brody would deserve Best Actor. Kieran Culkin was always a lock for the Best Supporting Actor, but the others guys all deserved to be nominated. It was fun to have such a wide-open race for Best Actress, without a clear frontrunner and this clearly being the only chance at an Oscar for Demi Moore, Karla Sofia Gascon and Fernanda Torres.

I had been thinking about the Best Actor award, where Adrien Brody had been the frontrunner for months, as the star in this year’s most ambitious, epic, intentionally arty movie – An Important Movie. Brody gave a wonderful performance as a guy who came into the story drained of his resilience; Brody played a guy weathering big lows and big highs, without ever controlling his destiny. To my mind, Timothy Chalamet had the tougher assignment – to play a character so odd, so prickly, so witty and so ambitious. Yeah, Dylan was a genius at age 20, but he was so obsessed about songwriting, so reverential about Woody Guthrie and yet so self-confident when there wasn’t any objective evidence to support him until people like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez heard his work. Chalamet captures all of of Dylan’s complications and gives us a believable impersonation of an icon, too. IMO Chalamet had the best performance. But Brody was excellent, and he gave a heartfelt acceptance speech.

FWIW I’ve had Anora as the #1 film on my running list of the Best Movies of 2024 since the week it released in October.

The Show

The best moments of the telecast were:

  • The opening We Love LA segment followed by Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo and their beautiful renditions of home-themed songs. Sentimental? Sure, but very fitting as an acknowledgement of the fire disasters on the industry and the community.
  • Conan O’Brien’s claim to interrupt overlong acceptance speeches, not with music, but with John Lithgow looking disappointed. Very funny.

The Oscar producers actually improved two areas that have been pet peeves of mine. First, they condensed the presentation of the Best Song nominees, and excised the tiresome full performances of the five songs. Finally!

Second, recent changes to the In Memoriam segment (always my favorite part of the show) had been sucking out the emotional impact. This year, it helped to show examples of the decedents’ work in the background of their portraits.

But there’s no reason for this show to drag to three hours and 46 minutes, and it would generate more viewer engagement if an hour shorter. Examples of time wasting abounded tonight: the silly Adam Sandler gag, O’Briens’s “time waste“ musical number, professional firefighters delivering jokes from the writers room, and the inexplicable medley of James Bond songs. I think it’s time to move the animated, live action and documentary shorts off the live telecast, too.

Still, I’m a sucker for the Oscars. I’ll be watching next year, too.

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Gene Hackman in THE CONVERSATION

This week on The Movie Gourmet – a new review of Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) plus my First Look at Cinequest.

I’ve finished my coverage of the Slamdance Film Festival, which continues on-line. Through March 7, you can watch Slamdance films at home on the Slamdance Channel: Here’s my wrap-up coverage of Slamdance:

REMEMBRANCE

Gene Hackman was one of the greatest screen actors of all time, justifiably best known for his searingly original Popeye Doyle in The French Connection. When we examine Hackman’s body of work, it’s striking that he delivered indelible performances in multiple movies in each of four decades: the 1960s (Bonnie and Clyde, The Gypsy Moths, Downhill Racer), the 1970s (The Conversation, Night Moves, Young Frankenstein), the 1980s (Hoosiers, Mississippi Burning, BAT*21, The Package) and the 1990s (Unforgiven, Get Shorty). Who else has accomplished that – Jimmy Stewart and very few others? My favorite Gene Hackman performance bar none – will always be as the dogged, and then obsessive, Harry Caul in The Conversation.

CURRENT MOVIES

WATCH AT HOME

From my Best Movies of 2024:

  • Anora: human spirit vs the oligarchs. In theaters and Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
  • The Bikeriders: they ride, drink and fight, and yet we care. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
  • Hit Man: who knew self-invention could be so fun? Netflix.
  • Challengers: three people and their desire. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
  • La Chimera: six genres for the price of one.  Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
  • In the Summers: they mature, he evolves. Amazon.
  • The Substance: the thinking woman’s Faust, if you can take the body horror. MUBI (free), Amazon, AppleTV.
  • Ghostlight: a family saves itself, in iambic pentameter. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango (included).
  • The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed: is she going to be a loser? Amazon, AppleTV, Hulu.
  • Love Lies Bleeding: obsessions and impulses collide. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
  • I Saw the TV Glow: brimming with originality. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.

ON TV

William Powell and Carole Lombard in MY MAN GODFREY

On March 2, Turner Classic Movies is airing the timeless and fantastic comedy, My Man Godfrey (1936). An assembly of eccentric, oblivious, venal and utterly spoiled characters make up a rich Park Avenue family and their hangers-on during the Depression. The kooky daughter (Carole Lombard) brings home a homeless guy (William Powell) to serve as their butler. The contrast between the dignified butler and his wacky employers results in a brilliant screwball comedy that masks searing social criticism that is still sharply relevant today. The wonderful character actor Eugene Pallette (who looked and sounded like a bullfrog in a tuxedo) plays the family’s patriarch, and he’s keenly aware that his wife and kids are completely nuts.

I feel strongly about this 89-year-old movie, which I first saw when it was only 36-years-old. We talk about screwball comedy, but this is the gold standard. And we need to remember the comic genius of Carole Lombard, who died supporting the war against fascism when she was only 33.

First look at Cinequest

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Photo caption: Naomi Watts and Bill Murray in THE FRIEND, the closing night film nd Cinequest. Courtesy of Bleecker Street.

Cinequest, Silicon Valley’s own major film festival, returns March 11-24 to downtown San Jose, with screenings at the California Theatre, the Hammer Theater and 3Below. Selected films from the program then move to to Cinequest’s virtual platform, Cinejoy, March 23-30.

Highlights of the 2025 Cinequest include:

  • 110 world and US premieres and many directorial debuts.
  • Films from 45 countries, including from Italy, Russia, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, China, India, Vietnam, Iran, Serbia, Korea, Kenya, Switezerland and the United Kingdom.
  • New movies with Naomi Watt, Bill Murray, Glenn Close, Patricia Clarkson, David Straithern, Gillian Anderson, Walton Goggins, Paul Walter Hauser, Lou Diamond Phillips, Constance Wu, Ken Jeong, Carla Gugino and Jon Heder. 
  • A personal appearance by film star Gillian Anderson  (The X-Files, The Crown), who will receive an award and present her latest film, The Salt Path.
  • Directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel make very few films but they’re superb (The Deep End, Montana Story); they’re contributing their latest to Cinequest – The Friend, starring Bill Murray and Naomi Watts.
  • Two films of local historical interest: American Agitators (about famed organizer Fred Ross mentoring Cesar Chavez in San Jose) and A Little Fellow The Legacy of A.P. Gianni (about the founder of Bank of Italy/Bank of America – his first branch still stands in San Jose, three blocks from Cinequest).
  • Cinequest’s Silent Cinema Event will present F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (the seminal 1922 Dracula film, starring the scary Max Schenk) accompanied by master organist Dennis James on the historic California Theatre’s Mighty Wurlitzer.
  • And, at Cinequest, it’s easy to meet the filmmakers.

At Cinequest, you can get a festival pass for as little as $199 (a ten-pack for $110), and you can get individual tickets as well. The prices have not been raised SINCE 2019!) Take a look at the entire program, the schedule and the passes and tickets

I’ll be rigorously covering Cinequest for the fourteenth straight year with features and movie recommendations. I usually screen (and write about) over twenty Cinequest films from around the world. Bookmark my CINEQUEST 2025 page, with links to all my coverage (links on the individual movies will start to go live on Sunday, March 9.

SLY LIVES! (AKA THE BURDEN OF BLACK GENIUS): rise, fall and legacy of a groundbreaking prodigy

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Photo caption: Sly Stone in SLY LIVES! (AKA THE BURDEN OF BLACK GENIUS). Courtesy of Hulu.

Questlove’s insightful documentary Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) traces the rise, fall and legacy of the groundbreaking musician Sly Stone (birth name Sylvester Stewart) of Sly and the Family Stone. It’s the remarkable story of a prodigy

Sly led and wrote the songs for Sly and the Family Stone, startlingly innovative as both a multi-racial and a multi-gender band. It’s too easy to use the label psychedelic soul (although it does fit Sly and the Family Stone’s music); but, Sly was an original and a genre-buster, whose music blurred (or erased) the lines between rock, R&B, funk, soul and pop.

The term prodigy also gets thrown around, but I didn’t know (until I watched Sly Lives!), that Sly was working as a songwriter, producer and D-jay as a TEENAGER, already moving the needle on Bay Area music culture during its most fertile period.

Sly Lives! also gives us file footage showing Sly to be articulate and charming, with the gift of being quick-witted even while stoned. But then came the heavier drugs, sabotaging his career with a pattern of concert no shows and walkouts that have persisted thru at least 2007. His productivity essentially ended in 1974. All members of Sly and the Family Stone were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993. Sly is alive today at age 81.

This is an exceptionally well-sourced fil. Besides lots of previously obscure archival material from before Sly’s stardom, we get plenty of footage of Sly in interviews and performances back in the day. Perspective comes from the band member themselves, Sly’s ex-wife and his former partner, and a slew of experts in the music industry,

Questlove asks his interviewees about black genius (and seems to confound them). There’s no question Sly was a musical genius. I think that Questlove is emphasizing the word burden in his subtitle – suggesting that having to achieve while battling institutional racism finally sapped Sly of his resilience.

Questlove also reminds us that Sly’s creativity peaked during one of our most turbulent periods – the MLK and RFK assassinations, urban riots and the political evolution from Civil Rights to Black Power. The Black Panther Party suggested that Sly bankroll them personally.

Questlove, who was three years old at the time of Sly’s last hit in 1974, is widely known as the band leader of The Roots on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and the producer for many recording artists, including Common, Jay-Z, John Legend Al Green and Elvis Costello. He is a musicologist and a historian of Black music and Black culture. In his directorial debut as a filmmaker, he won the Best Doc Oscar for Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). (The Movie Gourmet predicted that Oscar BTW.)

I loved this nugget from the film – band members celebrated their first big paycheck by acquiring signature dogs. Not cars, jewelry or exotic vacations – dogs.

Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) is streaming on Hulu.

FOUL EVIL DEEDS: from not so bad to worse

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Photo caption: Alexander Perkins in Richard Hunter’s FOUL EVIL DEEDS. Courtesy of Slamdance.

The deadpan anthology FOUL EVIL DEEDS depicts a range of aberrant human behavior, most of it darkly funny. The deeds themselves arise from a wide variety of root causes:

  • a couple’s social clumsiness;
  • a loner’s inner rage;
  • some kids’ youthful stupidity;
  • one guy’s uncommon sexual need;
  • an otherwise upstanding dog-walker’s entitlement;
  • and one man filled with deep-seated, sociopathic evil.

The threads are woven together into a wry, clever and very cynical movie that veers to the misanthropic. The segment about a neighbor’s cat could have been written by Larry David about George Costanza.

Writer-director Richard Hunter’s debut feature is consciously an art film; Hunter says he is influenced by the work of Ulrich Seidl, Michael Haneke and Roy Andersson, and it shows. It’s a slow burn, and the audience wonders, why is that guy checking out the remote wooded wetland? (Hint: he’s looking to coverup a future evil deed.)

Hunter seems to be measuring human behavior by its impact on others. Some might still consider an unconventional sexual practice to be a “sin”, but it’s entirely victimless (and isn’t even illegal). In another thread, what is intended as a harmless practical joke becomes tragic.

Alexander Perkins is excellent as a man with anger management issues that he can’t shake. As a consequence, he is grinding his teeth through workaday drudgery, and he’s mad about that, too. Does he have a path out of his situation, or he just going to stew until he explodes? There’s only one person who he can talk to (Oengus MacNamara in an unexpectedly riveting performance).

I think that FOUL EVIL DEEDS is likely to secure US arthouse distribution. FOUL EVIL DEEDS It premiered at Locarno, and I screened FOUL EVIL DEEDS for its North American premiere at Slamdance.

Through March 7, 2025, you can stream FOUL EVIL DEEEDS on the Slamdance Slamdance Channel. A 2025 Slamdance Film Festival Virtual Pass, which brings you FOUL EVIL DEEDS and almost all of my Slamdance recommendations, only costs $50.

MEMORIES OF LOVE RETURNED: moments preserved

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Photo caption: MEMORIES OF LOVE RETURNED. Courtesy of Slamdance.

The fine documentary Memories of Love Returned is the result of an accidental meeting. On a 2002 trip to his native Uganda, actor Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine (Treme, The Chi, The Lincoln Lawyer) happened upon a rural studio portrait photographer named Kibaate. Over a span of decades, Kibaate had documented everyday people over decades in thousands of portrait, many of them stunningly evocative. Mwine helped Kibaate preserve his body of work, and, after Kibaate’s death 20 years later, organized a public showcase of Kibaate’s collection.

The revelation of the unknown Kibaate as an artistic genius, is a compelling enough story, but the exhibition prompts a complicated and sometimes awkward exploration of Kibaate’s siring a prodigious number of children with a bevy of surviving mothers. The filmmaker’s own health and family story takes Memories of Love Returned seamlessly into another direction, topped off by Kibaate’s documentation of Ugandan LGBTQ culture.

Memories of Love Returned is the second documentary feature directed by Mwine. Executive-produced by Steven Soderberrgh, the film has been piling up awards from film festivals. I screened Memories of Love Returned for Slamdance.

Through March 7, 2025, you can stream Memories of Love Returned on the Slamdance Slamdance Channel. A 2025 Slamdance Film Festival Virtual Pass, which brings you Memories of Love Returned and almost all of my Slamdance recommendations, only costs $50.

STOLEN KINGDOM: true crime with nerds

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A scene from STOLEN KINGDOM. Courtesy of Slamdance.

The documentary Stolen Kingdom uncovers a series of offbeat pastimes and their bizarre convergence. Of course, we’re already aware of Disney fans and collectors. Stolen Kingdom also reveals the world of urban explorers, who trespass into closed and abandoned buildings. They’re enjoying the thrill of being where they’re not supposed to be and gawking at what the public isn’t supposed to see.

In Stolen Kingdom, we meet people who sneak into closed theme park attractions and even some daredevils who jump off the rides while operating and mosey around backstage(see photo above). Those folks can be tempted by the black market in Disneyana. As the behavior escalates from pranks to larceny, we know that somebody’s going to get in big trouble, Centering on the theft of an obsolete animatron, Stolen Kingdom takes on the guise of a true crime story, but with the very nerdiest criminals.

A scene from STOLEN KINGDOM. Courtesy of Slamdance.

Stolen Kingdom is one of those documentaries about our fellow humans that make us shake our heads.

Stolen Kingdom is the first feature for director Joshua Bailey. I screened Stolen Kingdom for Slamdance, a week after its world premiere at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival.

Through March 7, 2025, you can stream Stolen Kingdom on the Slamdance Slamdance Channel. A 2025 Slamdance Film Festival Virtual Pass, which brings you Stolen Kingdom and almost all of my Slamdance recommendations, only costs $50.