The Movie Gourmet

Cinequest’s Charlie Cockey: The Man Who Goes to Film Festivals

March 1, 2014 by movie gourmet

Charlie Cockey (photo courtesy Around the World in 14 Films)

Charlie Cockey is at a film festival. (Actually, right now he’s probably traveling between the Berlin International Film Festival and Cinequest.) But, whenever you read this, the odds are that he’s sampling cinema at a film fest somewhere.

Cockey, the international film programmer for San Jose’s Cinequest, attends twelve or more international film festivals each year. He never misses the great Berlin and Venice fests, and also makes the rounds of the European national film showcases in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and other countries.

Cockey is Cinequest’s film scout extraordinaire and responsible for the most singular films on Cinequest’s program, the movies unlike any you have seen before. In my recent Why Cinequest is essential, I highlighted three of his gems from last year’s Cinequest: the German dark comedy Oh Boy (the debut from talented writer-director Jan Ole Gerster), the absurdist Czech comedy Polski Film and the offbeat The Dead Man and Being Happy, with its gloriously wacky road trip through the backwaters of Argentina. (My favorite Charlie Cockey selection is the unsettling 2011 Slovak Visible World – which is creepy even for a voyeur film.) Cockey found 12 of the films in last year’s Cinequest, and has brought as many as 17.

Cockey, who lives in the Czech Republic’s second city Brno, speaks English, Czech, German, French, Italian and Romanian. That’s helpful, but the national film festivals usually have English-subtitled “festival version” screenings for distributors and festival programmers (plus non-subtitled screenings for the local public).

How did an American guy come to live in Brno? “A Czech woman tied my shoelaces together,” Cockey replies. Before he had acquired his Czech language fluency, he was sitting in a darkened Czech theater and was surprised to see no subtitles on the film. Needing to ask the woman next to him for help with the translation, he touched her hand and sparks flew, or at least one literal spark from static electricity. Fourteen years later, the two are still partners.

What are Charlie Cockey’s tips for sampling movies at a festival? Like any festival-goer, he chooses screenings based on the buzz, the director and sometimes a gut feeling. He doesn’t mind bad movies because “if a film’s not working, I leave”. He adds, “The mediocre ones are tough because you need to stick it out”.

First and foremost, Charlie Cockey is a man who devours culture in any form – books, music, cinema, food – with a voracious but discerning appetite. Cockey’s journey brought him from the East Coast and Idaho to 1960s San Francisco as a musician and as a road manager for a band. He opened San Francisco’s first science fiction bookstore (Fantasy, Etc) and ran it for the last quarter of the 20th Century. “There are no accidents,” he says. “Only surprises.”

Extremely generous with his knowledge and taste, Cockey loves to share the most precisely individual recommendations of books and movies. He relishes the memory of helping a boy – dragged into Fantasy, Etc by his parents – discover a genre of literature (in this case fantasy) that spawned a new love of reading. And he couldn’t resist quizzing me about my interests and then recommending an extremely obscure collection of letters from a German intelligence official in WWII – a book that I NEVER would have otherwise considered but which turned out to be a great read.

Here’s how to experience Cinequest the Charlie Cockey way: “Find films as you live life – by being open, prepared, ready, flexible and friendly”.

Follow The Movie Gourmet on Twitter for my continuing coverage of the 2014 Cinequest.

Movies to See Right Now

February 28, 2014 by movie gourmet

The Chilean drama Gloria is about an especially resilient 58-year-old woman. The Palestinian Omar is a heartbreaking romance inside a tense thriller; Omar is nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.

My DVD/Stream of the Week is the flawless true story thriller Captain Phillips, my choice as the best Hollywood movie of the year. It’s now available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

In theaters, you can still find Oscar nominees Nebraska, American Hustle and Her, which all made my Best Movies of 2013. I also strongly recommend Best Picture nominees The Wolf of Wall Street and Philomena. Dallas Buyers Club, with its splendid performances by Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto, is formulaic but still a pretty good watch.

I saw this year’s Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts and was disappointed. There was nothing to match recent gems like The God of Love or Curfew. I liked the British short about a particularly bored and malevolent God masquerading as a convict, but that 13 minutes didn’t justify the two hours that I had invested. A 30-minute Spanish film about child soldiers in Africa was to excruciatingly brutal to justify the trite attempt at a redemptive payoff. (I haven’t seen the Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts, but I have heard good things about that program.)

Check out my first post on Cinequest – and follow me on Twitter for my Cinequest coverage.

I love 31 Days of Oscar, Turner Classic Movies magical month of Oscar-nominated films. On March 1, TCM is showing all five Best Picture nominees from 1967: The winner was In the Heat of the Night, which I can’t imagine holds up as well today as The Graduate or the groundbreaking Bonnie and Clyde. The other nominees were Doctor Doolittle and the now embarrassingly dated Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

The Movie Gourmet’s 2014 Oscar Dinner

October 30, 2017February 28, 2014 by movie gourmet

Every year, we watch the Oscars while enjoying a meal inspired by the Best Picture nominees. For example, we had sushi for Lost in Translation, cowboy campfire beans for Brokeback Mountain and Grandma Ethel’s Brisket for A Serious Man – you get the idea. You can see our past Oscar Dinners on this page (including our Severed Hands Ice Sculpture in 2011 for 127 Hours and Winter’s Bone). Here’s the menu for Sunday’s Oscar Dinner.

PRE-DINNER TEA

Tea cakes from Philomena. The nuns always generously ply Philomena (Judi Dench) and Martin (Steve Coogan) with tea cakes while trying to bamboozle them.

STARTER

Steakhouse salad from Dallas Buyers Club. Ron Woodruff (Matthew McConaughey) and Dr. Eve Saks (Jennifer Garner) dine at a steakhouse and presumably started with a salad before their slabs of grilled beast.

DINNER

Chicken Suqaar with Chapatti (Somali take-out from Jubba Restaurant in San Jose) for Captain Phillips. (And khat leaves are illegal in the US – so no khat chewing before dinner.)

Chicken Piccata from American Hustle. Mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner) rhapsodizes about the chicken piccata in the NYC restaurant.

Sliced white bread for Nebraska. My parents were from Nebraska, so this choice comes from personal experience.

DESSERT

Blueberries for 12 Years a Slave. Solomon made ink from blueberries to write a plea for rescue.

Astronaut Ice Cream for Gravity. Way cooler than Tang.

BEVERAGES

Champagne from The Wolf of Wall Street. There’s a lot of champagne consumed in this movie, and I don’t have any Quaaludes.

Cocktail from Her. Don’t know what Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix)and Blind Date (Olivia Wilde) were drinking on their ill-fated soiree, but I’m gonna make myself a Manhattan with Carpano Antica.

Enjoy!

Why Cinequest is essential

February 26, 2014February 26, 2014 by movie gourmet

Here’s why San Jose’s Cinequest film festival is essential. It’s your best opportunity to find a movie unlike any you have seen before. As you mine Cinequest’s deep and varied schedule, you just may stumble onto a revelatory cinematic nugget.

Cinequest opens on March 4 and runs through March 16. I was about to describe Cinequest as an overlooked gem, but since Cinequest has the second largest audience (110,000) of any film event in North America, it ain’t so overlooked. This year’s fest includes 84 World, North American and U.S. Premieres from 43 countries. There will be spotlighted features starring the likes of Brendan Gleeson, Clive Owen, Juliette Binoche, Guy Pearce, Jude Law, Jena Malone, Gabriel Byrne and Ben Kingsley and celebrity appearances by actor Matthew Modine, author Neil Gaiman, Indiewire critic Eric Kohn and Ain’t It Cool News founder Harry Knowles. LA Times critic Kenneth Turan will introduce a special screening of Fruitvale Station.

Although the higher profile films and the personal appearances by celebrities are always popular with Cinequest audiences, the most stunningly singular film experiences are often mined from Cinequest’s international offerings.

Last year’s Cinequest featured three wholly original films: the German dark comedy Oh Boy (the debut from talented writer-director Jan Ole Gerster), the absurdist Czech comedy Polski Film and the offbeat The Dead Man and Being Happy, with its gloriously wacky road trip through the backwaters of Argentina. You just don’t find this stuff elsewhere in the Bay Area.

The San Francisco International Film Festival in late April remains the best place to see the very best indies. This year, the SFIFF entries Before Midnight, Stories We Tell, The Spectacular Now and The Act of Killing all made my list of Best Movies of 2013. Poised in October, the Mill Valley Film Festival excels in booking the prestige films that are opening within a few weeks (this year: Nebraska, 12 Years a Slave, All Is Lost, Dallas Buyers Club, August: Osage County). (Mill Valley also featured a special 2013 presentation of Oh Boy – but Bay Area cinephiles had seen it seven months before at Cinequest.)

Still, among Bay Area film festivals, Cinequest remains our very best chance to see something remarkable and unexpected – something you’ve never seen before. I know there’s an Oh Boy somewhere in this year’s Cinequest schedule. When I find it, I’ll let you know.

Here’s the Cinequest program and ticket information.

Postscript: My recap of the 2013 Cinequest.

DVD/Stream of the Week: In a World…

February 25, 2014 by movie gourmet

Actress Lake Bell wrote/directed/stars in In a World…, the story of an underachieving voice coach who still lives in the house of her dad, the king of movie trailer narration. She’s disheartened when he kicks her out to make room for his new and very young squeeze, but she lucks into a voiceover gig herself and is “discovered” as the hot new talent. In fact, she’s up for the most prestigious new payday when she finds out that her dad is not as supportive as one might expect…

Here’s why In a World… is so damn good – Bell has written a very funny comedy about a generational rivalry and woven it together with a Hollywood satire, an insider’s glimpse into the hitherto under-the-radar voiceover industry and a romantic comedy. The romantic comedy thread, in which our heroine is oblivious to the nice guy who really likes her, is better by itself than most romantic comedies. But we also get many LOL moments among the self-absorbed and back-stabbing Hollywood set. Plus there’s a very sweet story of the relationship between the protagonist’s sister and her hubby – that could stand alone and be better than a lot of indies as well..

Bell gets most of the laughs from the foibles of the characters and from really intelligently crafted dialogue. But she know how to pull off a physical gag, too. At one point, our heroine wants to be kissed by a handsome Hollywood bigshot, but when it happens, his technique is to put her entire nose into his mouth – and her surprise and discomfort is very funny.

Fortunately, Bell was able to cast Fred Melamed, a distinguished voiceover artist, as the father. Melamed has been the voice of CBS Sports, the Super Bowl, the Olympics and Mercedes-Benz. He’s also a brilliantly funny actor. I called Melamed’s performance as the hilariously pompous and blatantly manipulative Sy Ableman in A Serious Man “the funniest movie character of the decade”.

Bell’s previous roles have been secondary parts that have taken advantage of her unconventionally severe beauty. You may remember Bell as Alec Baldwin’s new trophy wife in It’s Complicated. Having written it herself, she finally has a role in which she can show her comic chops. I turns out that she’s a gifted comic actress, with screwball timing, a rich take and a knack for physical comedy.

The rest of the cast is uniformly good. I especially enjoyed Rob Corddry (Warm Bodies) as the long suffering husband of the sister.

In a World… is a complete and winning film and the year’s best comedy. In a World… is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, GooglePlay and Xbox Video.

Goodbye, Harold Ramis

February 24, 2014 by movie gourmet

Filmmaker Harold Ramis has died at age 69. Most of us remember Ramis from his performance in Ghostbusters, a movie that he also wrote. But he also wrote one of the funniest movies ever – and one of my all-time favorites – Animal House. He also wrote and directed Groundhog Day, a comedy masterpiece that will last forever.

There’s a tendency to inflate the achievements in dramatic filmmaking. After all, that’s where the Important Pictures come from. But comedy is very difficult to do well, and a good comedy can be every bit as artistic and intelligent as a serious picture. Now I wouldn’t put Ramis quite up there with Billy Wilder, Jacques Tati and Preston Sturges. Nevertheless, how many filmmakers have written anything – dramas or comedies – as good as Animal House and Groundhog Day?

Movies to See Right Now

February 21, 2014 by movie gourmet

The Palestinian Omar is a heartbreaking romance inside a tense thriller; Omar is nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar. The Chilean drama Gloria is about an especially resilient 58-year-old woman. Harder to find, Stranger by the Lake is an effective French thriller with LOTS of explicit gay sex.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is another fine thriller from that franchise, with another amazing performance by Jennifer Lawrence. I also like the Mumblecore romance Drinking Buddies, now available on VOD.

We’re still enjoying Turner Classic Movies magical month of Oscar-nominated films – 31 Days of Oscar. This week I recommend the brilliant 1971 drama The Last Picture Show and the classic Bogart/Bacall thriller Key Largo.

Omar: a heartbreaking love story inside a West Bank thriller

February 20, 2014 by movie gourmet

The gripping and thought-provoking Palestinian drama Omar, which opens tomorrow, is a fundamentally a love story that drives an action thriller. It seems to be about a college-age Palestinian guy named Omar and his two buddies. They live in a West Bank Arab community that is repressed by apparently omniscient and omnipotent Israeli security forces. It’s an environment where one bad choice can spiral one’s life completely out of control – and one that is toxic with betrayals.

There are thrills aplenty when the Israeli security teams are chasing our hero. We’ve never seen more riveting chase scenes through the alleys and rooftops of West Bank cities. Shot in Nazareth and Nablus, Omar gives us a novel look at these Arab communities and the Israeli security wall.

But it is basically a love story, albeit a heartbreaking one, because most of the plot is motivated by Omar’s love for his sweetheart Nadia. The first action by the three young guys stems from politics, testosterone and the foolhardiness of youth. But everything that happens after is because of Omar’s yearning for Nadia. We also see the chaste Palestinian courtship rituals; the kids are burning with passion for each other as they exchange letters and discreet glances.

Omar is not for everyone. For one thing, it doesn’t try to be even-handed about the Israeli Occupation – everything is seen through the Palestinian lens. It’s realistic – one Israeli character in particular is humanized and it’s easy for the audience to disapprove of the boneheaded behavior by the young Palestinians. But if you aren’t open to that Palestinian perspective, you’re not going to like this movie. And the ending is unusually jarring – my fellow audience members sat in shocked silence for a few seconds.

Omar won a jury prize at Cannes and is nominated for this year’s Best Foreign Language Oscar.

Follow The Movie Gourmet on Twitter

February 19, 2014 by movie gourmet

Please follow The Movie Gourmet on Twitter at @themoviegourmet. Besides letting you know about my postings here, I’ll be giving followers my early reactions to movies – sometimes well before I write about them here. There’s a handy Follow @themoviegourmet button on the upper right of this page just under the Search box.

And following this site will also be an excellent way to monitor my coverage of the upcoming Cinequest as I tweet from the festival.

DVD/Stream of the Week: Captain Phillips

February 18, 2014 by movie gourmet

Here’s my pick for 2013’s best Hollywood movie. In Captain Phillips, Tom Hanks stars as the real-life ship captain hijacked by Somali pirates and rescued by American commandos in 2009. The real-life Phillips survived his terrifying ordeal with guts and smarts, and Hanks and director Paul Greengrass bring the story alive. Greengrass is an old hand at movies with urgency and tension: Bloody Sunday, two movies in the Bourne franchise and an Oscar nomination for United 93.

Another key is that Captain Phillips was shot on the high seas on an actual container ship, an actual lifeboat and a skiff just like the real pirates use. As a result, it’s amazingly real when the pirates clamber up the side of the massive ship while both vessels roll in the waves and when the seamen and pirates play hide-and-go-seek below decks in the dark.

That being said, the movie wouldn’t work without Tom Hanks, who is unsurpassed at playing an Everyman thrust into a perilous situation. Hanks is our generation’s Jimmy Stewart, and I can see Hanks playing Stewart’s roles in Rear Window, Vertigo, Anatomy of a Murder and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Most of the pirates are standard types, but the lead pirate is a much more textured character, superbly played by Barkad Abdi, hitherto a Somali-American limo driver from Minneapolis. The depth in Abdi’s performance is also essential to the film’s success. The cast also features character actor Michael Chernus, so good in Higher Ground and Men in Black 3, as the #2 on the ship.

All in all, Captain Phillips is a flawless true story thriller. It’s now available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.