Cinequest – Page 23 – The Movie Gourmet

Cinequest: FOR GRACE

February 26, 2017 by movie gourmet

Andrew Keatley and Jacob Casselden in FOR GRACE

In the winning British dramedy For Grace, Ben (Andrew Keatley) is a young can-do guy who has started his own successful company. He’s adopted, so when he becomes a dad, it triggers a need for him to track down his biological family. He even hires a documentarian to film his quest. Of course, Ben’s journey doesn’t go as he might expect. Along the way, For Grace explores the kinds of connections to other humans that we need. And what, at its core, is “family”?

Ben is more than a little self-absorbed. After all, who makes a movie about a such personal moment, assuming that his experience will merit being documented and that others will want to watch it? Ben also has an odd way of dealing with difficult feelings; he completely withdraws until he has processed his feelings himself. Until he emerges from self-isolation, he really can’t hear what others have to say.

The hard-charging Ben encounters the laid-back Peter (Jacob Casselden), who seems nothing like Ben. Ben has had every advantage, but he is ever restless; Peter has a disability and grew up as an institutionalized orphan, but he seems sublimely free of resentment. Both men feel something missing in their lives, but only Ben aspires to fill that void. Peter is sweet and simple, and Peter has protected himself with low expectations.

I hesitate to call For Grace a “mockumentary” because it’s not a straight Best in Show-like comedy. But the pseudo-documentary format is very effective – for the first 15-20 minutes, I kept asking myself whether this was a real documentary that had been mislabeled as a narrative feature.

For Grace maintains a very clear-eyed perspective on human nature, which results in some acidly funny observations of human behavior. Watch, for example Ben’s reaction when his adoptive parents learn that he is hunting for his biological parents – it doesn’t go AT ALL as he had expected.

For Grace is a an especially promising first feature for director Sebastian Armesto. Keatley wrote the story, and the dialogue was improvised by the cast. For Grace works because it is essentially character-driven, and Keatley’s and Casselden’s performances are very strong.

And there’s a Big Plot Twist.

For Grace is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. Have a hankie ready for the ending. I’ve seen over twenty films from this year’s Cinequest, and I will be shocked if For Grace fails to win an audience award.

Cinequest: EXILED

February 26, 2017 by movie gourmet

The gripping Latvian drama Exiled is one of the most emotionally powerful and visually arresting films at this year’s Cinequest. In the aftermath of World War I, a German military physician (Ulrich Matthes) arrives deep in the Latvian woods, at a sanitarium for shell-shocked soldiers. It is a terrifying place. The caretaker has been indifferent, even criminally negligent. Patients are howling and literally raving. It’s the kind of place where the patients are fed disgusting gruel, cower under beds and smear feces on the walls. A young boy lives in the woods as feral beast, and is hunted by the local peasantry. The squalor seems impossible to conquer.

The doctor crusades to bring compassion and decency to the place. But it is still a place where the patients’ heads are shaved and they wear night shirts all day and night.
Even the well-intended treatments, with their leather restraints, unsettle us.

Exiled is not what we think of as a horror film, but horror is at its core, in the form of humans who have been emotionally broken by experiencing horror. And the horror of inhumanity toward the broken and vulnerable. There’s also a flashback to the horrors of World War I combat that was experienced by the soldier patients.

Of course, there is terror in insanity itself. We find it disturbing to be amidst those whose realities are so disconnected from our own. And we worry, “There but for the grace of God…”

Ulrich Matthes, who played Joseph Goebbels in Downfall, delivers a charismatic performance as the doctor. His zeal to help his charges gleams, sometimes in desperation and sometimes in outrage. It is 1918. Warfare is brutal, the peasants are barbaric, psychiatric medicine is primitive and he has no resources. How much difference can he make? Will cruelty triumph?

Exiled is a striking first narrative feature by the documentarian Davis Simanis Jr. Visually astonishing, each shot is magnificent, whether in the fog shrouded woods or the oil lamp lit interiors. It is compelling from the get-go, with an eerie soundtrack that helps us imagine the terror of both the reasoning and the deranged. The final shot – a static long shot of very long duration is devastating. Keep your focus on the very center of the frame.

Exiled is an exquisitely haunting film.

Cinequest: CURTAIN CALL

February 26, 2017 by movie gourmet

In the madcap Korean comedy Curtain Call, a talent-challenged theater troupe is about to go under. The company specializes in soft porn, and they are so bad that – even though they are simulating sex on stage – they still can’t sell enough tickets. In desperation, they enter a competition to put on Korea’s best version of Hamlet.

It’s a motley crew. There’s the Bieber-coiffed millennial who thinks that he’s a method actor. One veteran suffers from being public recognized for his trademark “Shag Shag Shake It”. They add an aged career Shakespearean who can’t always remember which play he’s in right now. For personal reasons, the theater company owner foists upon them an inexperienced ingenue who refuses to speak anything except her lines. In a seemingly hopeless quest to master the elevated source material, these bottom feeders become scrappy underdogs.

Curtain Call is a pleasant enough diversion, with some happily ribald moments. Audience members who know their Shakespeare will find the Hamlet scenes even funnier. The trailer is in Korean, but you’ll get the idea.

Cinequest: ANISHOARA

February 26, 2017 by movie gourmet

Anishoara is an art movie of breathtaking visual quality. It also has a remarkable sense of time and place and . That place is the rural back country of Moldovia, a small, impoverished country wedged between Romania and Ukraine. That time is now, although it could just as easily be in a past century.

The visual artistry comes from writer-director Ana Felicia Scutelnicu, a Moldovan director who studied in Germany. I saw her first 61-minute feature Panihide, at the 2013 Cinequest. In both Panihida and Anishoara, Scutelnicu demonstrates a fine eye both for landscape and human observation. However, her pace is sloooooow. Scutelnicu is so gifted as a visual director, I’d really like to see a movie that she directs from someone else’s screenplay.

Anishoara begins with an Icarus-like folk parable about a girl’s unsuccessful quest to love the sun deity. We then see that tale reflected in a girl’s daily life over a year, as she sequentially deflects three suitors. Anishoara’s star is the non-professional actress Anishoara Morari, who was about 12-years-old in Panihide and about 16 in Anishoara. Morari is beautiful, with an unusual directness of gaze, and exudes striking alertnesss.

Not everyone is going to be able to stay with a movie this (ahem) unhurried, but the whole thing is great to look at. I’m thinking of a nighttime scene where we see Anishoara sitting on the ground in her cobalt dress before the camera pans to the landscape across a valley and the dramatic sky above. Every so often there’s a shot like that makes you gasp.

Cinequest: ALOYS

February 26, 2017 by movie gourmet

The title character of the Swiss drama Aloys is a solitary and harshly anti-social guy who repulses all gestures of human kindness and interest by others. He is a private detective who specializes in documenting infidelity through undercover surveillance. Using hidden microphones and cameras, he is steadfast in always avoiding contacting with his subjects. Then, in a moment of recklessness, he allows someone to rock his life, which results in the riveting story of Aloys.

An unknown woman steals his surveillance tapes and taunts him over the phone. In a completely original twist, she teases him with what she calls “phone walking”, daring him to use aural clues to visualize himself in places and situations and, ultimately find her. At first, his desperation to find her creates an obsession worthy of The Conversation. But then his imagination is unleashed, and he creates fantasies at once both more real and more outlandish. This is not a movie that you’ve seen before.

Aloys is on a thrill ride that he can’t get off. What is real, and what is fantasy? Can we be what we imagine? Can someone trade in his own life for a more appealing fantasy life? Can the fantasy be sustained? Aloys delivers surprise after surprise for the audience.

Cinequest 2017 around the corner

February 24, 2017 by movie gourmet

Make your plans now to attend the 27th edition of Cinequest, Silicon Valley’s own major film festival. By some metrics the largest film festival in North America, Cinequest was recently voted the nation’s best by USA Today readers. The 2017 Cinequest is scheduled for February 28 through March 12 and will present 132 films and virtual reality experiences from the US and over twenty other countries. And, at Cinequest, it’s easy to meet the filmmakers.

This year’s headline events include:

Celebrity appearances by actress Jane Lynch (Glee, Best in Show) and director Jason Reitman (Juno, Up in the Air, Young Adult).
Opening night film The Last Word, with Shirley MacLaine and Amanda Seyfried;
Closing night film The Zookeeper’s Wife with Jessica Chastain.
Preview screenings of films planned for theatrical release later this year: Carrie Philby (Nathan Lane, Gabriel Byrne), Tommy’s Honour (Sam Neill, Jack Lowden, Ophelia Lovibond), The Promise (Oscar Isaac, Christian Bale), The Ottoman Lieutenant (Michael Huisman, Josh Hartnett, Ben Kingsley) and (Re)assignment (Michele Rodriguez, Sigourney Weaver).
The silent Flesh & the Devil with Greta Garbo, projected in a period movie palace, the California Theatre, accompanied by its mighty Wurlitzer organ.
Ten programs of virtual reality cinema, accessible in nearly a hundred screenings.

This year, Cinequest presents the world or US premieres of sixty-two features. And of the feature and short films in the Cinequest program, films, 75 were directed by women!

I’m going to be strongly recommending at least two of these first features, the family dramedies For Grace and Quality Problems, along with the brilliant Czech drama The Teacher and the forehead-slapping documentary The Twinning Reaction. More on those to come.

Indeed, the real treasure at Cinequest 2017 is likely to be found among the hitherto less well-known films. In the past three years, the Cinequest gems Eye in the Sky, Wild Tales, Ida, The Hunt, ’71, Corn Island, The Memory of Water, Magallanes and Lost Solace Class Enemy, Heavenly Shift, Oh Boy/A Coffee in Berlin and The Grand Seduction all made my Best of the Year lists.

Cinequest is on my list of Silicon Valley’s Best Movie Deals. You can get a pass for as little as $165, and you can get individual tickets as well. The express pass for an additional tax-deductible $100 is a fantastic deal – you get to skip to the front of the lines!

Take a look at the entire program, the schedule and the passes and tickets. (If you want to support Silicon Valley’s most important cinema event while skipping the lines, the tax-deductible $100 donation for Express Line Access is an awesome deal.)

As usual, I’ll be covering Cinequest rigorously with features and movie recommendations. I usually screen (and write about) over thirty films from around the world. Bookmark my Cinequest 2017 page, with links to all my coverage (links on the individual movies will start to go live on Sunday). Follow me on Twitter for the latest.

Cinequest: THE MODERNS

March 22, 2022February 11, 2017 by movie gourmet

ES MUY COMPLICADO. In the Uruguayan dramedy The Moderns, Fausto (Mauro Sarser) is a free-lance film editor. Clara (Noelia Campo) is the producer of Uruguay’s most intellectually pretentious public TV talk show. They are working together on a documentary project – and dating each other. Fausto claims that Clara is pressuring him and dumps her. Fausto spots a New Shiny Thing in the form of the Argentine actress Fernanda (Marie Hélène Wyaux). Clara starts dating the beautiful lesbian Ana (Stefania Tortorella), which re-fascinates Fausto. Is Fausto confused, weak-willed or a selfish scoundrel? Who is going to end up with whom?

The Moderns is plenty funny. The fantasy scenes are uniformly LOL. And there’s a humorously unlikely impregnation. After watching the somewhat misleading trailer, I thought that I’d be starting this post with “Two Uruguayans walk into a studio and make a Woody Allen movie…” Indeed the white-on-black credits, the 1930s/1940s music in the score, the repertory cast and the black-and-white photography evoke Woody. But The Moderns is not an homage, but an original, character-based exploration

The Moderns is the first feature for co-writers and co-directors Marcila Matta and Mauro Sarser, and they show a lot of promise.

There’s an unexpectedly satisfying ending, and we are left with “We live our lives – and it’s complicated.”

2016 at the Movies: most fun at the movies

April 14, 2017December 29, 2016 by movie gourmet

The most fun on this blog this year was the reader reaction to my recommendation of Man Up: I’ve never had so many people thank me for recommending a movie! This British romantic comedy had a very brief US theatrical run last November that did not even reach the Bay Area. Man Up is available to stream from Netflix Instant, Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Flixster.

This year I covered FIVE film festivals:

Cinequest: My favorites were premieres of the debut films Lost Solace and Heaven’s Floor.
San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF): My favorites were Chevalier, Weiner and Frank & Lola, and I especially enjoyed taking the wife to a screening of Our Kind of Traitor with director Susanna White.
International Film Festival of North Hollywood (IFFNOHO): especially Gazelle: The Love Issue.
San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF): My favorite film was the upcoming television miniseries False Flag, but I most enjoyed accompanying The Wife to a screening of Robert Klein Still Can’t Stop His Leg with Robert Klein.
Mill Valley Film Festival: Was lucky enough to see Toni Erdmann.

Andrew Jenkins in Chris Scheuerman's brilliant debut LOST SOLACE — Andrew Jenkins in Chris Scheuerman’s brilliant debut LOST SOLACE

I’m in my fourteenth year of the Camera Cinema Club, and this year’s highlight was Take Me to the River by San Jose filmmaker Matt Sobel – it made my year-end top ten!

And, of course, I always love Noir City, and the best night this year featured The Bitter Stems and Girl with Hyacinths.

Every year I watch a zillion movies on Turner Classic Movies, and this year I discovered a Buster Keaton masterpiece that I hadn’t seen: TCM Seven Chances.

Finally. I got the chance to take The Wife and our adult kids to see It’s a Wonderful Life on the big screen at the Stanford Theatre’s Christmas Eve screening. Hard to top that.

I go to the movies to be thrilled, provoked and exhilarated, and I’m looking forward to what 2017 will bring.

THE HOUSE ON PINE STREET: does she really see a ghost?

October 31, 2016October 29, 2016 by movie gourmet

So here’s the thing with every movie ghost story – either the ghost is real or the protagonist is crazy enough to hallucinate one. The beauty of The House on Pine Street is that the story is right down the middle – ya just don’t know until the end when the story takes us definitively in one direction – and then suddenly lurches right back to the other extreme.

Jennifer (Emily Goss) is a very pregnant urbanist, who reluctantly moves from her dream life in Chicago back to her whitebread hometown in suburban Kansas. Unlike Jennifer, her husband hadn’t been thriving in Chicago, and Jennifer’s intrusive and judgmental mother (Cathy Barnett – perfect in the role) has set up an opportunity for him in the hometown. They move to a house that is not her dream home AT ALL, “but it’s a really good deal”. Jennifer overreacts to some crumbling plaster.

Jennifer is pretty disgruntled, and, generally for good reason – her mom’s every sentence is loaded with disapproval. Her mom’s housewarming party would be a social nightmare for anyone – but it’s too literally nightmarish for her. One of the guests, an amateur psychic (an excellent Jim Korinke), observes, “the house has interesting energy”.

Then some weird shit starts happening: knocks from unoccupied rooms, a crockpot lid that keeps going ajar. And we ask, is the house haunted or is she hallucinating? Her sane and sensible and skeptical BFF comes from Chicago to visit as sounding board, and things do not go well.

Co-writers and co-directors Aaron and Austin Keeling keep us on the edges of our seats. Their excellent sound design borrows from The Conversation and The Shining – and that’s a good thing.

The Keelings also benefit from a fine lead – Emily Goss’ eyes are VERY alive. She carries the movie as we watch her shifting between resentfulness, terror and determination.

The total package is very successful. I saw The House on Pine Street at Cinequest, and now it can be streamed from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

DVD/Stream of the Week: WILD TALES

August 2, 2016 by movie gourmet

Okay, here’s the hilariously dark Argentine comedy Wild Tales. Writer-director Damián Szifron presents a series of individual stories about revenge. It’s still high my list of Best Movies of 2015 – So Far.

We all feel aggrieved, and Wild Tales explores what happens when rage overcomes the restraints of social order. Think about how instantly angry you can become when some driver cuts you off on the highway – and then how you might fantasize avenging the slight. Indeed, there is a story in Wild Tales that has the most severe case road rage since Spielberg’s Duel in 1971. Now Wild Tales is dark, and you gotta go with it. The humor comes from the EXTREMES that someone’s resentment can lead to.

One key to the success of Wild Tales is that it is an anthology. In a very wise move, Szifron resisted any impulse to stretch one of the stories into a feature-length movie. Each of the stories is just the right length to extract every laugh and pack a punch. The funniest stories are the opening one set on an airplane and the final one about a wedding.

The acting is uniformly superb. In one story, Oscar Martínez plays a wealthy man in a desperate jam, who buys the help of his shady lawyer fixer (Osmar Núñez) and his longtime household retainer (Germán de Silva) – until their prices get just a little too high. The three actors take what looks like it’s going to a thriller and morph into a (very funny) psychological comedy with a very cynical view of human nature.

One of the middle episodes stars one of my favorite film actors, Ricardo Darín, who I see as the Argentine Joe Mantegna. I suggest that you watch Darín in the brilliant police procedural The Secrets in Their Eyes (on my top ten for 2010), the steamy and seamy Carancho and the wonderful con artist movie Nine Queens.

Wild Tales was a festival hit (Cannes, Telluride, Toronto and Sundance) around the world and was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar. I saw Wild Tales at Cinequest 2015. It’s now available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu and Xbox Video.