In the bawdy Norwegian comedy Chasing Berlusconi, a beleaguered harness racing driver gets into trouble with menacing (and very, very funny) Finnish loan sharks, which precipitates a farce involving two shady dim bulbs and a pair of even dumber cops. Oh, and then there’s the driver’s nyphomaniacal wife. Did I mention the racetrack owner with a piercing, sudden cackle and a predilection for toupees and cowboy hats? (The movie’s title comes from a racehorse named for the Italian scoundrel/politician.)
This all makes for very good lowbrow comedy. And lowbrow it is, featuring jokes based on impotence, penis length, horse poop and the like. Chasing Berlusconi also features very clever references to Columbo, The Wire and Fifty Shades of Grey. The characters of the racetrack owner and the lead loan shark are especially funny.
I loved filmmaker Ole Endresen’s hilarious King Curling at the 2012 Cinequest. That story had a very original hook – to win a curling tournament, the protagonist needs to stop taking his meds, and then tries not to slip into psychosis. Chasing Berlusconi isn’t the comic masterpiece of King Curling, but it’s worth some guffaws.
Chasing Berlusconi plays again at Cinequest March 1 at the California Theatre and March 3 at Camera 12.
Another struggling Hollywood artist is the heart of Booze Boys and Brownies, and this, time, she bursts into song. She’s an actress unlucky in both love and career, and she navigates through both with her BFF and her once and future boyfriends. Not one of the songs is a show-stopper. None of the characters is especially winning. Pass.
Cinequest Director of Programming/Associate Director Mike Rabehl
I asked Cinequest’s Director of Programming/Associate Director Mike Rabehl to compare the 2015 Cinequest with the programs of previous festivals. After all, he’s put his imprimatur on twenty Cinequests. “The first time feature filmmakers are the strongest in many years,” Rabehl noted, specifically calling out the overall quality of this year’s writing.
What are your predictions for the biggest audience pleasers? Something like The Sapphires from 2013 or The Grand Seduction from 2014?
Rabehl: Probably Batkid Begins, Wild Tales and Slow West.”
What might be the festival’s biggest surprise hit?
Rabehl: “Possibly Milwaukee, The Centerand/or Marry Me.”
Is there anything that we haven’t seen before in a movie? Something wholly original like Polski Film or The Dead Man and Being Happy from the 2013 Cinequest?
Rabehl: “Beast of Cardo is a film that is more about her relationship to the town than it is about the supernatural. Corn Island is completely unique, with very little dialogue, and the filmmakers built their own island to film it. ”
Is there any remarkable new filmmaking talent (a la the 2013 German gem Oh Boy, which later secured a US theatrical release as A Coffee In Berlin)?
Rabehl: “The Center, Antoine et Marie (a second feature), Dermaphoria(a first narrative feature), Feverand Happiest Place on Earth. Plus For An Inexplicable Reason, Factory Boss, Malady and In the Company of Women.”
How does this year’s international cinema shape up?
Rabehl: “Belgium (especially the Flemish side) and Norway are really strong this year.”
Belgian entries include the Flemish films Halfway, In the Heart, Marry Me and Plan Bart, plus the French/Belgian Three Hearts. Cinequest’s Norwegian films are Amnesia, Beatles and Chasing Berlusconi.
One Cinequest MUST SEE is WILD TALES, the darkly comic Argentine collection of revenge stories. Wild Tales has been a festival hit around the world and was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar. One of its vignettes features one of my favorite screen actors, Ricardo Darin (the Argentine Joe Mantegna). See it at Cinequest before it gets to Bay Area art houses in the next few weeks.
I liked the Nerd Olympics documentary SWEDEN’S COOLEST NATIONAL TEAM, which has its North American premiere tonight in Camera 12.
I’ll be watching the Norwegian comedy CHASING BERLUSCONI because I loved the filmmaker’s hilarious King Curling at the 2012 Cinequest.
I’ve also heard from some insiders that the Hungarian comedy FOR SOME INEXPLICABLE REASON is especially promising.
It’s time to dive into the 2015 version of the San Jose film festival Cinequest running from tomorrow through March 8. This year’s program looks GREAT. You can find my festival coverage, including both features and movie recommendations, on my Cinequest page (which you may wish to bookmark). Follow me on Twitter for the very latest.
Here are my 18 best bets at Cinequest 2015:
WILD TALES: the darkly comic Argentine collection of revenge stories. Wild Tales has been a festival hit (Cannes, Telluride, Toronto and Sundance) around the world and was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar. One of its vignettes features one of my favorite screen actors, Ricardo Darin (the Argentine Joe Mantegna). See it at Cinequest before it gets to Bay Area art houses on March 6. Ann Thompson (Thompson on Film) will be receiving a Media Legacy Award at the screening.
CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA: The ever-radiant Juliette Binoche plays an actress now relegated to the older role in her breakthrough play, with her younger role going to Kristen Stewart (All About Eve, anyone?). And Stewart just became the first American actress to win a César (the French Oscar) for this performance.
’71: Everybody says that this thriller about a British soldier trapped overnight in a hostile Northern Ireland neighborhood during the Troubles is pedal-to-the-metal intensity.
SLOW WEST: This offbeat Western with Michael Fassbender won a prize at Sundance.
QUEEN AND COUNTRY: Director John Boorman’s Korean War-Era quasi-sequel to his Hope and Glory. Boorman (Deliverance) will appear at the screening. Silicon Valley release on March 6.
L’ATALANTE: The 1934 masterpiece of French writer-director Jean Vigo, who died at age 29 soon after its completion. Richard von Busack, the highly respected film critic for Metro, will receive a Media Legacy Award at the screening.
Here are my pre-festival picks from among the films that I’ve seen:
DRAMA:
ANTOINE ET MARIE: A brilliantly constructed French-Canadian drama with two unforgettable characters.
THE CENTER: An absorbing and topical American indie drama about the seductiveness of a cult.
COMEDY:
LOS HAMSTERS: A biting darkly hilarious Mexican social satire.
DIRTY BEAUTIFUL: An American indie comedy that is decidedly NOT a by-the-numbers battle of the sexes.
DOCUMENTARY:
ASPIE SEEKS LOVE: A surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a guy looking for love like anyone else, but whose social skills are handicapped by Asberger’s.
MEET THE HITLERS: Tracking down real people burdened with the Fuhrer’s name, this successful doc weaves together both light-hearted and very dark story threads.
I’ve also gotten tips from insiders about some other very promising films (that I haven’t seen yet):
CORN ISLAND: Reportedly transcendent Georgian drama.
FOR SOME INEXPLICABLE REASON: Hungarian comedy.
GUARD DOG: dark and violent Peruvian thriller. US premiere.
MILWAUKEE: US indie sex and relationship comedy. World premiere.
THREE WINDOWS AND A HANGING: Searing Kosovan drama.
Take a look at the program and the passes and tickets. (If you want to support Silicon Valley’s most important cinema event while skipping the lines, the $100 donation for Express Line Access is an awesome deal.) You can download the Festival Guide from this page.
Cinequest Director of Programming/Associate Director Mike Rabehl
“Everybody always thinks that you watch a bunch of films and you pick what you would like – but it’s not like that.”
Michael Rabehl is Cinequest’s Director of Programming/Associate Director. He’s held the position of Director of Programming since 1996, which makes Cinequest 2015 the twentieth festival program that bears his mark.
So how does he select the 190 (short and feature) films in the festival? He’s looking primarily for quality, production values, strong writing and strong acting. “I like it when people think about the movie.” It’s “not all for me”, but “what an audience may like”. Rabehl is looking for movies of interest to Silicon Valley’s population, so he sifts especially carefully through the Asian, Spanish language and tech-oriented films. If a film will be released theatrically, the release must be after Cinequest’s run in late winter. (Last year, about ten Cinequest selections ultimately got a theatrical release).
About 80% of the films programmed at Cinequest are submitted by the filmmakers. Rabehl recruits the other 20%, after discovering them in other film festivals himself or with the help of his European and New York movie scouts.
Each year Cinequest receives about 2400 submissions. Rabehl leads screening teams (one team for narrative features, one for docs, one for shorts, etc.) who watch and evaluate every film. They winnow the total down by 92% – down to the 190 movies that actually make the festival program. One of those submissions, Miss India America, will receive its world premiere at the California Theater as a spotlight film.
There are more than enough submissions to fill the festival program. Rabehl says that this year there were “at least 71 titles that would have been great for us, but there’s just not enough space”. Keeping the filmmaker in mind, he says “We don’t want to be somebody’s world premiere at 9 AM”.
Rabehl laughed when I told him that people think that I see an unusually high number of movies (150-200) each year. He annually sees about 800, with 650 of them entered in his festival spreadsheet. Rabehl has personally seen all but two of the movies in this year’s Cinequest (all except for two high buzz choices that would be no-brainers for any film fest).
Each year Rabehl goes on scouting trips to identify possible Cinequest entries at other festivals – always to the Toronto International Film Festival and the Montreal World Film Festival and then to a different third fest each year. How does Rabehl navigate a film festival himself? He looks for films that “will work at Cinequest” and is always on the hunt for potential spotlight films.
At the industry-oriented Toronto fest in mid-September, he has the discipline to eschew the big Oscar-bait movies that will open soon as prestige Holiday movies (too early for Cinequest). Toronto has a professional audience, he notes, and Montreal (late August-early September) has more normal film fest audience.
Rabehl is able to be more of a “film fan” at Montreal. He values his enduring relationship with the strong national film programs of Norway and Belgium, which results in some wonderful nuggets for Cinequest. (Think of the hilarious King Curling in 2012.) At Montreal in 2013, he latched on to Ida, the jewel of the 2014 Cinequest – and since universally acclaimed, the winner of the 2015 Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar and #2 on my list of the Best Movies of 2014.
Throughout the year, Rabehl’s ascerbic observations make @cqMike the funniest guy on Twitter. But, in person, he is engaging, not particularly edgy; and deeply passionate about cinema.
Rabehl started helping Cinequest in 1994, and became its Director of Programming in 1996: “I kind of fell into it.” Rabehl had been making short films himself, and his producer had been programming Cinequest as a volunteer and was ready to move on. Rabehl met with Cinequest co-founder and CEO Halfdan Hussey over Thai food, discovered their common vision and the rest, as they say, is Silicon Valley cinema history. Rabehl “wasn’t thinking long-term, but it became long-term.” “I don’t like isolated work”, preferring the collaboration with others that putting together a film fest brings.
In Rabehl’s first Cinequest, the fest expanded to seven days (it’s now thirteen days) and attracted appearances by Kevin Spacey and Jackie Chan. That gave everyone a future glimpse into what Silicon Valley’s film festival has become today.
“When I see audience members excited about being here and talking to each other about the movies, that’s why I do this.”
TOMORROW: Mike Rabehl looks at the 2015 Cinequest.
The winning Nerd Olympics documentary Sweden’s Coolest National Teambrings us into a world that I didn’t know existed – international competition in memory sport. That subject is the first factor that elevates Sweden’s Coolest National Team above the familiar arc of the sports movie. We see people who can remember the exact order of a shuffled deck of cards, seemingly endless strings of binary numbers, even entire dictionaries. (The current world record for memorizing the order of a shuffled deck of cards is 21.19 seconds.) It is a jaw-dropping exhibition.
We meet the sport’s founder and several world champs, and we do end up at the World Memory Championship. Along the way, we see the universal aspects of competition – the pressure to perform, the rookie’s overconfidence, comeuppance for both the brash rookie and the complacent old champ. One competitor’s sister phones their parents to report “he got crushed”.
But what makes Sweden’s Coolest National Team so engaging is that its subjects are so fascinating. As one might expect, the competitors don’t seem particularly athletic and many are downright geeky. Several of the past world and Swedish champions are remarkably devoted to the sport and amazingly generous in helping younger memory sportsmen. Then there is the smug yuppie who dresses like he is giving a TED Talk and seeks to mold the sport into something that he can monetize.
And it has plenty of slyly funny moments – just as our yuppie complains about a former champ making the sport look like it’s just for oddballs, the old geek wanders through a competition with an alarming case of Plumber’s Butt.
The film’s epilogue notes that one of the subjects won the World Championship in 2013. He repeated his win in 2014.
Sweden’s Coolest National Team, which flies past the audience in a just-right 58 minutes, will have its North American premiere at Cinequest on February 25 and play again on February 27 and March 1, all at Camera 12.
The ever-absorbing The Center explores how someone of sound mind and normal disposition can be completely enveloped by a cult. The Center is writer-director Charlie Griak’s first feature, and it’s a very impressive debut.
We meet Ryan (Matt Cici), a talented guy with low self-esteem. He is highly functional and ultra-responsible, but it seems like nobody is in his corner. The first six minutes of this screenplay paint a detailed portrait of a guy who is crapped upon more than Job. No one encourages Ryan to do anything for himself, and he ends each night alone, with a beer and late-night TV. Then someone else shows personal interest in the hang-dog Matt, and he gradually slides into what at first seems the appreciation of his potential, but which is revealed to be a web of exploitation.
The audience recognizes some red flags before Ryan does, but every step in this story is credible – and there isn’t a cliché in sight. The keys to The Center’s success are the crafting of the Ryan character and the believability of the story. Ryan’s journey is compressed into a taut and compelling 72 minutes.
Matt Cici, who is in virtually every shot, is perfect as Ryan – a guy with plenty to offer, but whose lack of self-confidence sets him up for exploitation by everyone else. The acting is strong throughout The Center. Ramon Pabon is especially memorable as a twitchy loser who has been sucked into the cult. With piercing eyes, Judd Einan nails the role of the uberconfident, emotionally bullying cult founder. Annie Einan is excellent as Ryan’s world-weary sister, so burdened by their mother’s care that she can’t be there for Ryan until she spots the crisis in his life.
This spring, HBO will premiere documentarian Alex Gibney’s (Taxi to the Dark Side, We Steal Secrets, Client 9, Casino Jack and the United States of Money) expose of Scientology – Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief. Going Clear will be a big deal, and will beg the question, “How can smart, able people fall into this stuff?”. The Center should become the perfect narrative fiction companion to Going Clear.
One more thing – The Center was shot in St. Paul, Minnesota, a city that I’m not used to seeing in a movie. The Center’s sense of place (a place fresh and unfamiliar to many of us, anyway) adds to its appeal.
With The Center, Charlie Griak has shown himself to be a very promising filmmaking talent and has left a serious professional calling card. I can’t wait to see what he does next.
Cinequest will host the world premiere of The Center on February 27, and it will play again on March 1 and March 3, all in Camera 12.
Fairuza Balk, Ryan Merriman (rear) and Rick Ravanello in DOSE OF REALITY
To celebrate the beginning of Cinequest 2015, my weekly DVD/Stream is one of the hits of Cinequest 2013 – the American indie thriller Dose of Reality. Dose of Reality star Rick Ravanello also has the lead in Withdrawal, a short playing Cinequest 2015 in the BARCO Escape 1 Short Program on March 1, 7 and 8.
Dose of Reality packs wire-to-wire intensity and a surprise ending that no one will see coming. A woman is found in a bar’s restroom after closing time, apparently beaten and raped, but unable to remember by whom. Two bar employees are the only possible suspects. Both deny it, and the woman launches a series of searing mind games to determine her attacker.
Fairuza Balk (American History X, Almost Famous) commands the screen as the woman. Her character, starting from a place of utter victimization, becomes totally dominant over the men. The most interesting of the guys is played by veteran TV actor Rick Ravanello, (106 acting credits on IMDb). Ravanello’s eyes have an uncommon capacity to credibly take the character through dimness, cunning, tweaked impairment, guilt and terror.
It’s a plenty compelling movie for the first 75 minutes, but Dose of Reality is all about the Big Surprise at the end – which is a shocker on the scale of The Crying Game. Afterward, I was able to reflect back and identify at least four clues in the story, but every one of the 250 audience members at Dose of Reality’s Cinequest world premiere was rocked by the surprise on first viewing. Actor Ravanello recounts that when he first read the script, he got to the end and blurted “No Fucking Way!”. Writer-director Christopher Glatis has a real winner in Dose of Reality.
Dose of Reality is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, GooglePlay and some other VOD outlets.
In documentarian Julie Sokolow’s suprisingly moving Aspie Seeks Love, we meet a geeky guy named David Matthews, and we can immediately tell that he has really bad social skills. He’s initially off-putting – he has a robotic speaking voice, he’s bringing up the wrong conversational subjects and any woman he meets can safely be predicted to run, run, run away. Then we learn that David (now age 47) was diagnosed with Asberger’s at 41. (Aspie is a self-descriptive term used by some folks with Asperger’s syndrome.)
David is determined to overcome his Asberger’s and find love. We follow David with his support group, his therapist and even along on some dates. We’re with him when he’s hanging around a pool table with three Aspie buddies; they’re talking about how difficult it is to navigate courtship rituals when you don’t have the ability to pick up cues – for example, whether a woman is ENCOURAGING or DISCOURAGING an escalation in physical contact. I really felt for these guys – non-verbal communication while dating can be hard enough to decipher without the handicap of an autism spectrum disorder. It’s heartbreaking that David spent 41 years (before his diagnosis) with people thinking that he was just a weirdo.
Small talk is a challenge, too. David says, “I’m a vegan”, which draws some interest. But he doesn’t understand why you shouldn’t follow that up with “It makes my body smell clean”.
Despite his disorder, David is really smart, artistic, and enjoys an ever present sarcastic sense of humor. I’m no softy, but I found myself really rooting for this guy. Okay – so he’s socially awkward, but he’s employed and stable, lives in his own house, is about to become a published author, is impeccably clean, doesn’t smoke drink or do drugs, has no criminal record – he must be right for SOME WOMAN out there. I live in Silicon Valley among engineers and David really isn’t THAT socially inept by comparison.
Possibly because David doesn’t really GET awkwardness, writer-director Julie Sokolow is able to follow him into situations that normal folks might find intrusive. Sokolow also edits, and the editing choices are just about perfect. Aspie Seeks Love is a gem.
Cinequest hosts the world premiere of Aspie Seeks Love on February 27, and it plays again on March 1 and March 4, all at Camera 12.
