Cinequest

Best Bets at Cinequest

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HEAVENLY SHIFT
HEAVENLY SHIFT

17 movies to watch for at Cinequest:

Most likely to be crowd pleasers:

  • The Grand Seduction: In Cinequest’s opening night film, Brendan Gleeson (In Bruges, The Guard, The General, Braveheart) and Gordon Pinsent (Away from Her) play isolated Canadians try to snooker a young doctor (Taylor Kitsch of Friday Night Lights) into settling in their podunk village.
  • Friended to Death: Bromantic comedy about a jerk who fakes his own death to see how many of his social media “friends” will attend his funeral.  Very funny.
  • Words and Pictures: Romantic comedy starring Clive Owen and the ever-radiant Juliette Binoche as sparring teachers.
  • Dom Hemingway: Jude Law and Richard E. Grant star as two cheesy British hoods in a reportedly funny and fast-paced crime caper. Opens widely in theaters in April.
  • Unforgiven: the Japanese remake of Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning Unforgiven  starring Ken Watanabe (Inception, The Last Samurai, Letters from Iwo Jima).   Since Clint’s career was boosted by a remake of Yojimbo (A Fistful of Dollars), it’s fitting that his Unforgiven is remade  as a samurai film.
  • Fruitvale Station: the masterpiece debut from Bay Area filmmaker Ryan Coogler, introduced by LA Times and NPR Morning Edition movie critic Kenneth Turan.

Most promising foreign entries:

  • Ida: This Polish story of a young nun who learns that she is the survivor of a Jewish family killed in the Holocaust won the International Critics’ Award at the Toronto International Film Festival.
  • The Verdict:  This Belgian drama won Best Director at the Montreal Film Festival.  I’ll be writing about The Verdict early this week.
  • The Illiterate:  Paulina Garcia, the star of the popular Gloria, stars in this metaphorical emotional Chilean drama.
  • Class Enemy: You’ll be rocked by this classroom drama, Slovenia’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.  I’ll be writing about Class Enemy early this week.
  • Heavenly Shift: A hilariously dark (very dark) Hungarian comedy about a rogue ambulance crew with a financial incentive to deliver its patients dead on arrival.  I howled at Heavenly Shift, and I’ll be writing about it early this week.
  • Zoran: My Nephew the Idiot: OK, this Italian comedy has a great title, and it was a hit at the Venice Film Festival.  I’ll be writing about Zoran before its US Premiere.

Documentaries:

  • Teenage: Great subject material: chronicling that 20th century American phenomenon – the evolution of “the teenager”.
  • Sex(ed): The Movie: Sampling Sex Ed instructional films from 1910 through today.  Should be a howl.  May be thoughtful, too.  World Premiere at Cinequest.

Something you haven’t seen before:

  • Happenings on the Eighth Day: This is a pure art film, juxtaposing the attempts to create art against forces seeking to censor or obliterate it.  Filmed in the Bay Area by Iranian filmmakers. World Premiere at Cinequest.
  • The Circle Within: A Turkish fable that turns into a psychological drama.  Not a favorite of mine, but it provides a rare glimpse into the Kurdish religion of yezidism.

Here’s the Cinequest program and ticket information.

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

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

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GLORIA
GLORIA

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.

Follow The Movie Gourmet on Twitter

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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.

2013 at the Movies: Most Fun at the Movies

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The Movie Gourmet had a great year at the movies and here are the highlights:

1.  Taking The Wife to Bad Girl Night at the Noir City Film Festival.  Noir City is the great San Francisco celebration of film noir, and Bad Girl Night is an annual double feature of noir’s nastiest femmes fatale.  Now The Wife loves it too!

2.  Interviewing Cinequest’s international film programmer Charlie Cockey – a film finder extraordinaire and a man who devours culture in any form.   Watch for the interview when I preview the 2014 Cinequest.

3.  Seeing three wholly original films at 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.

4.  Seeing five of the year’s best films (Mud, Stories We Tell, Me and You, The Spectacular Now and Before Midnight) in a May fortnight that included The Movie Gourmet’s Film Rampage.

5.  I was the only audience member for Not Fade Away. I love sitting all alone in a theater because it makes me feel like a movie mogul in a studio screening room. Because I see lots of obscure movies at odd times like Monday nights and Sunday mornings, I am often part of a very small audience (five or fewer). But I hadn’t been the ONLY viewer since El Mariachi in 1992.

6. The DVD release of Here’s the Kicker featuring a blurb from The Movie Gourmet on the DVD cover.  I enjoyed this indie comedy, and I hope my blurb will persuade folks to see it.

heres kicker dvd

DVD/Stream of the Week: The Sapphires

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TTHE SAPPHIRES

The Sapphires is a triumph of a Feel Good Movie. Set in the 1960s, a singing group from an Australian Aboriginal family faces racial obstacles at home, but blossoms when the girls learn Motown hits to entertain US troops in Vietnam. Remarkably, Tony Briggs based the screenplay on his mother’s real experience – make sure you stay for the Where Are They Now end credits.

The ever amiable Chris O’Dowd (one of the best things about Bridesmaids) is funny and charming as the girls’ dissolute manager. Jessica Mauboy, who plays the lead singer, has a great voice for soul music. A surprisingly beautiful song by the girls’ mom, played by veteran actress Kylie Belling, is an especially touching moment.

The Sapphires is not a deep movie, but it is a satisfying one. It’s predictable and manipulative, but I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t enjoy it.  The Sapphires is a guaranteed good time at the movies. 

The Sapphires is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, GooglePlay and other VOD outlets.

The Hunt: terrifyingly plausible and the year’s best movie?

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THE HUNT

In the Danish drama The Hunt (Jagten), Mads Mikkelsen plays a man whose life is ruined by a false claim of child sexual abuse. You’ll recognize Mikkelsen, a big star in Europe, from After the Wedding and the 2006 Casino Royale (he was the villain with the bleeding eye). He won the 2012 Cannes Best Actor award for this performance.

The story is terrifyingly plausible. The protagonist, Lucas, is getting his bearings after a job change and a divorce. He lives in a small Danish town where everyone knows everyone else, next door to his best friend. The best friend drinks too much and his wife is a little high-strung, but Lucas embraces them for who they are. He’s a regular guy who hunts and drinks with his buddies and is adored by the kids at the kindergarten where he works. He’s not a saint – his ex-wife can get him to fly off the handle with little effort.

A little girl hears a sexual reference at home that she does not understand (and no one in the story could ever find out how she heard it). When she innocently repeats it at school, the staff is alarmed and starts to investigate. Except for one mistake by the school principal, everyone in the story acts reasonably. One step in the process builds upon another until the town’s parents become so understandably upset that a public hysteria ensues.

Director Thomas Vinterburg had previously created the underappreciated Celebration (Festen). The Hunt is gripping – we’re on the edges of our seats as the investigation snowballs and Lucas is put at risk of losing everything – his reputation, his job, his child, his friends, his liberty and even his life. Can Lucas be cleared, and, if he is, how scarred will he be? The Hunt is a superbly crafted film with a magnificent performance by Mikkelsen.

I saw The Hunt earlier this year at Cinequest.

The Sapphires: irresistible

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TTHE SAPPHIRES

The Sapphires is  a triumph of a Feel Good Movie.  Set in the 1960s, a singing group from an Australian Aboriginal family faces racial obstacles at home, but blossoms when the girls learn Motown hits to entertain US troops in Vietnam.  Remarkably, Tony Briggs based the screenplay on his mother’s real experience – make sure you stay for the Where Are They Now end credits.

The ever amiable Chris O’Dowd (one of the best things about Bridesmaids)  is funny and charming as the girls’ dissolute manager.  Jessica Mauboy, who plays the lead singer, has a great voice for soul music.  A surprisingly beautiful song by the girls’ mom, played by veteran actress Kylie Belling, is an especially touching moment.

The Sapphires is not a deep movie, but it is a satisfying one.  It’s predictable and manipulative, but I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t enjoy it.  I saw it at this year’s Cinequest, and predict that it will become a word-of-mouth hit.   The Sapphires is a guaranteed good time at the movies.

Emperor: one romance too many

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Completely destroyed by US aerial bombardment and facing nuclear annihilation, Japan has just surrendered.  General Douglas MacArthur has just arrived to lead the American occupation of Japan, with the long-term goal of rebuilding Japan as a modern, democratic, pro-Western and relatively demilitarized country; in the short-term, he has to punish Japan’s WW II war criminals. MacArthur makes a grand strategic decision not to blame the Emperor of Japan for the war, but to enlist the authority of the Emperor in support of MacArthur’s efforts.  Emperor is the story of this moment in world history, with Tommy Lee Jones playing MacArthur.

Tommy Lee Jones is always fun to watch, especially when he is not suffering fools,  and he does an excellent job of portraying MacArthur’s decisiveness, self-promotion and vanity.  But he is is perhaps too sympathetic here, failing to capture MacArthur’s absolute and defining narcissism.

But we only occasionally see MacArthur.  Most of the screen time is reserved for the officer (Matthew Fox of Lost) gathering the evidence that will justify MacArthur’s preferred option (absolving the Emperor).  Unfortunately, Fox’s character is also searching for the Japanese woman who was his pre-war lover.  Unpeeling the onion of the Japanese imperial bureaucracy is more interesting than the sappy love story.

Given that it was directed by Peter Webber (Girl With a Pearl Earring), I had higher hopes for Emperor.  I would recommend it only for those with an interest in WW II and Japanese history.

Cinequest: The Hunt

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THE HUNT

The most exhilarating moment of Cinequest has been the screening of the Danish drama The Hunt (Jagten) – one of the very best films of the year. Mads Mikkelsen won the Best Actor at Cannes for his portrayal of a man whose life is ruined by a false claim of child sexual abuse. You’ll recognize Mikkelsen, a big star in Europe, from After the Wedding and the 2006 Casino Royale (he was the villain with the bleeding eye).

The story is terrifyingly plausible.  The protagonist, Lucas, is getting his bearings after a job change and a divorce.  He lives in a small Danish town where everyone knows everyone else, next door to his best friend.  The best friend drinks too much and his wife is a little high-strung, but Lucas embraces them for who they are.  He’s a regular guy who hunts and drinks with his buddies and is adored by the kids at the kindergarten where he works.   He’s not a saint – his ex-wife can get him to fly off the handle with little effort.

A little girl hears a sexual reference at home that she does not understand (and no one in the story could ever find out how she heard it).  When she innocently repeats it at school, the staff is alarmed and starts to investigate.  Except for one mistake by the school principal, everyone in the story acts reasonably.  One step in the process builds upon another until the parents become so understandably upset that a public hysteria ensues. 

Director Thomas Vinterburg had previously created the underappreciated Celebration (Festen).   The Hunt is gripping – we’re on the edges of our seats as the investigation snowballs and Lucas is put at risk of losing everything – his reputation, his job, his child, his friends, his liberty and even his life.  Can Lucas be cleared, and, if he is, how scarred will he be?  The Hunt is a superbly crafted film with a magnificent performance by Mikkelsen.