Cinequest

Cinequest: Lead Us Not Into Temptation

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The best movie that I’ve seen so far at Cinequest is the French thriller Lead Us Not Into Temptation.  A middle-aged married man does a good deed for a beautiful young woman and finds himself the pawn in a dangerous game.  Inventively constructed, we see the story from the perspective of the guy, then from the young woman’s point of view and finally through the prism of another character.  Unlike in Rashomon, we don’t see different realities, but, as secrets are revealed, we finally understand the whole picture.  It’s a brilliant screenplay by writer-director-producer Cheyenne Carron.   In the young woman, Carron has created a character who is both predatory and damaged but who can act charming, vulnerable and sexy. The story hinges on actress Agnes Delachair’s ability to play that complex role – and she delivers a captivating performance.   The trailer below is not subtitled.   Lead Us Not Into Temptation plays again on March 1 and March 9.

I’ve updated my CINEQUEST 2013 page, which also includes comments on The Sapphires, In the Shadows, The Almost Man, Panahida, Aftermath and The Hunt.

Cinequest: In The Shadow (Ve Stinu)

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The Czech paranoid thriller In The Shadow (Ve Stinu) follows a police detective in 1953 Prague.  The Communist government credits him with solving a case – but he figures out that the crime was committed by different perpetrator with a different motive.   Unfortunately, the truth is not politically convenient, and he must navigate through the criminal underground, Commie thugs, a former Nazi and Cold War show trials or he’ll become yet another film noir tragic ending.

The cop is played by the Czech actor Ivan Trojan, whose performance I admired so much in the creepy voyeur film Visible World.  In Visible Word, Trojan got to play a seriously twisted guy.  Trojan’s role in In the Shadow is not as showy, but he creates a hard-boiled character of uncommon determination and devotion to the truth.

In the Shadow is a well-crafted cop movie with added intensity from a nefarious Big Brother. In the Shadow won Best Film at the Czech Film Critics’ Awards and was the Czech submission to the Academy Awards.  It plays at Cinequest on February 28, March 6 and March 8.  The trailer is in Czech without English subtitles.

Starting on Tuesday: Cinequest 2013

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Mads Mikkelson in THE HUNT

San Jose’s Cinequest film festival begins this Tuesday.  The lineup includes 85 World, North American and U.S. premieres from 48 countries.  In past Cinequest festivals, I have discovered some very strong European films, especially from Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, and some delightful American indie comedies.  This year, the lineup of thrillers looks unusually promising.

So far I have only seen one film from the festival lineup – tomorrow, I’ll be writing about In the Shadow, which won Best Film at the Czech Film Critics’ Awards and was the Czech submission to the Academy Awards.

The critical buzz from other festivals indicates that there are at least two movies not to miss.  The Danish The Hunt plays on March 6.  Mads Mikkelsen (After the Wedding, Casino Royale, A Royal Affair) stars as a teacher wrongly accused of child molestation, spurring hysteria in his town.  Mikkelsen won the Best Actor award at Cannes.

The Sapphires plays on February 27.  In this feel good movie set in the 60s, an Australian Aborigine girl group faces obstacles at home, but blossoms when the girls learn Motown hits to entertain US troops in Vietnam.

Here’s a curiosity:  The last movie that actor Chris Penn made before his death in early 2006 is the thriller Aftermath.  Aftermath has never been released, and its world premiere at Cinequest is this Friday (and it will also screen on March 3 and 5).

I’ll be seeing lots of films and writing about many of them. To avoid spamming my subscribers, you won’t be getting an automatic email for all of my Cinequest posts, so keep checking back here for my festival coverage.  I’ll me summarizing my coverage on my one-stop CINEQUEST 2013 page (also linked off the header at the top of this page).

Cinequest runs from February 26 through March 10 in downtown San Jose.  Check out the schedule and get tickets at Cinequest.

Here’s the Kicker now available on DVD

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Good news. The indie comedy Here’s the Kicker, which I labeled the biggest surprise at San Jose’s Cinequest film festival last year, is now out on DVD.

Please go to the movie’s Netflix page and click SAVE – once it gets enough SAVES, it will become available on Netflix.

It’s hard to write comedy.  Otherwise, we’d be seeing lots of good comedies.  That’s why it’s worth tagging along on the uproarious road trip in Here’s the Kicker.

DVD of the Week: Detachment

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My DVD pick this week is the gripping drama Detachment, with Adrien Brody’s best performance since winning an Oscar for The Pianist.  Detachment is on my list of Best Movies of 2012 – So Far.

Detachment is a gripping drama about the failure of American public schools from the teachers’ point of view.   Adrien Brody plays a long-term sub on a 60-day assignment at a high school that has burned out virtually every other teacher.  I can’t use the words  “grim” or “bleak” to describe this school environment – it’s downright hellish.    It’s making their very souls decay.

The students are rebellious and disrespectful, and somehow manage to be zealously apathetic.  No parents support the teachers, but some enthusiastically abuse and undermine them.  Administrators demand better test results but offer little support beyond “flavor of the month” educational fads.   The ills of the high school in Detachment are exaggerated – this is not a documentary – but there isn’t an urban public high school in American that hasn’t endured some elements of Detachment.

Brody won an Oscar for 2002’s The Pianist, and, in Detachment, he makes the most of his best role since.  Brody plays a haunted and damaged man with strong core beliefs, who, faced with a menu of almost hopeless choices, picks his battles.

Detachment’s cast is unusually deep, and the performances are outstanding.   James Caan is particularly outstanding as the veteran educator whose wicked sense of humor can still disarm the most obnoxiously insolent teen.  Christina Hendricks (Mad Men) is excellent as the young teacher hanging on to some idealism.  Blythe Danner and William Petersen (CSI) are the veterans who have seen it all.  Lucy Liu plays the educator who is clinging by her fingerprints, trying not to flame out like the basket case played by Tim Blake Nelson.  Marcia Gay Harden and Isiah Whitlock Jr. (Cedar Rapids) are dueling administrators.  Sami Gayle and Betty Kaye are superb as two troubled kids.  Louis Zorich delivers a fine performance as Brody’s failing grandfather.  There’s just not an ordinary performance in the movie.

For all its despair, Detachment doesn’t let the audience sink into a malaise.  Director Tony Kaye (American History X) keeps thing moving, and his choices in structure and pacing work well.  This is an intense film with a dark viewpoint.  It is also a very ambitious, thoughtful and originally crafted movie – one well worth seeing.

Cinequest – Visible World: creepy, even for a voyeur movie

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visible worldIn the unsettling Slovak film Visible World (Vidite ny Svet), the protagonist Oliver lives by himself in a high-rise apartment building and trains his binoculars on unsuspecting people in the high-rise across the street. The tag line is “There’s a man with binoculars at the window, watching the people across the street. And he’s definitely not James Stewart.”

It’s an uncommon voyeur film.  First, the voyeur isn’t looking at any bad behavior by the people across the street.  Second, although he is compelled to spy, he isn’t getting any apparent sexual kick out of what he sees.  Instead – and this is the really, really disturbing aspect – he is using what he sees to interfere with their lives – and to insinuate himself into their lives.

Most women like a guy who makes that extra effort to find out what she likes. But going through a woman’s garbage to see what products she uses – before he has met her – that’s pretty high up on the Creep-O-Meter.  “I like Chilean Carmenere.  You do, too? Imagine that!”

Oliver is played by Ivan Trojan as an extremely terse and focused guy, but one who can surprise the audience by putting on an act of affability to get what he wants. He is an odd duck, for sure – often rudely abrupt with people who wander between him and his obsessions.  But he is that unusually high functioning crazy who can hide how very, very sick he is.

I saw Visible World at its North American premiere at Cinequest 22.

Cinequest – Four Lovers: those French sure are open-minded

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Today and tomorrow, I’m catching up by commenting on two films from last week’s Cinequest 22.

In the thoughtful French film Four Lovers, two happily married couples hit it off socially.  They quickly decide that it’s okay to have sex with each others’ spouses.  It’s not “spouse swapping”.  It’s an arrangement whereby both couples continue to live as couples, but each adds a permitted fling with one of the other couple.

Plenty of explicit sex follows, but this is not primarily an erotic film.  Instead it explores what follows from this arrangement.  What rules need to be agreed upon? Is there jealousy and/or insecurity?  Will anyone go past the fling to fall in love with the new partner? Can one be in love with more than one lover?  Can they keep this from their kids?  How deeply do they need their new lovers?  How will this affect the original marriages?

It’s all complicated.  In fact, I think that watching this movie would be far superior than trying this out in real life.

Spoiler Alert:  After the arrangement ends, the couples return to their original married lives.  Something is missing in their lives, but it’s not the sexual thrill of the affairs.  Instead each grieves the loss of a lover.  Given this loss, all four are unhappy for the first time in the film and perhaps wishing that it had never happened.

Cinequest – Detachment: nightmare for teachers

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Detachment is a gripping drama about the failure of American public schools from the teachers’ point of view.   Adrien Brody plays a long-term sub on a 60-day assignment at a high school that has burned out virtually every other teacher.  I can’t use the words  “grim” or “bleak” to describe this school environment – it’s downright hellish.    It’s making their very souls decay.

The students are rebellious and disrespectful, and somehow manage to be zealously apathetic.  No parents support the teachers, but some enthusiastically abuse and undermine them.  Administrators demand better test results but offer little support beyond “flavor of the month” educational fads.   The ills of the high school in Detachment are exaggerated – this is not a documentary – but there isn’t an urban public high school in American that hasn’t endured some elements of Detachment.

Brody won an Oscar for 2002’s The Pianist, and, in Detachment, he makes the most of his best role since.  Brody plays a haunted and damaged man with strong core beliefs, who, faced with a menu of almost hopeless choices, picks his battles.

Detachment’s cast is unusually deep, and the performances are outstanding.   James Caan is particularly outstanding as the veteran educator whose wicked sense of humor can still disarm the most obnoxiously insolent teen.  Christina Hendricks (Mad Men) is excellent as the young teacher hanging on to some idealism.  Blythe Danner and William Petersen (CSI) are the veterans who have seen it all.  Lucy Liu plays the educator who is clinging by her fingerprints, trying not to flame out like the basket case played by Tim Blake Nelson.  Marcia Gay Harden and Isiah Whitlock Jr. (Cedar Rapids) are dueling administrators.  Sami Gayle and Betty Kaye are superb as two troubled kids.  Louis Zorich delivers a fine performance as Brody’s failing grandfather.  There’s just not an ordinary performance in the movie.

For all its despair, Detachment doesn’t let the audience sink into a malaise.  Director Tony Kaye (American History X) keeps thing moving, and his choices in structure and pacing work well.  This is an intense film with a dark viewpoint.  It is also a very ambitious, thoughtful and originally crafted movie – one well worth seeing.

Recapping Cinequest 22

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San Jose’s Cinequest 22 film festival has ended.  For me, Cinequest 22 meant seeing 17 features, a short and several interviews and Q&As with filmmakers – all including several world and US premieres.  I saw my share of American films, but I also saw movies from China, Spain, Belgium, the Slovak Republic, Argentina, Hungary, Russia, Sweden and Norway.

Among the festival crowd, movies about overcoming disability and disease seemed to be the most popular.  I generally preferred the comedies and romances that prove that it is still possible to write a good movie in those genres.

I especially liked two of the biggest movies in the festival:  the zany Chinese action film Let the Bullets Fly and the drama about the American education system Detachment (I’ll be commenting on Detachment on Wednesday before its release this weekend).

There were some smaller films that I hope gain distribution:  King Curling, the Norwegian comedy about a curling star who must go off his psych meds to win the big match; the Argentine modern-day spaghetti western Salt; and the hipster screwball comedy Percival’s Big Night.  If given the chance to see these films, American audiences will love them.

Here’s the trailer for King Curling.

 

 

 

Cinequest – Percival’s Big Night: screwball comedy for hipsters

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Imagine if Howard Hawks were making a screwball comedy today –  a guy and a girl spar with snappy patter, survive the crazed antics of their goofy friends and fall in love.   If he set the movie in the shambles of a hipster pot dealer’s NYC apartment, you’d have Percival’s Big Night, one of the gems of Cinequest 22.

You’ll recognize the set-up:  Two 24-year-old underachievers have so far made the least of their BFAs.  Percy is infatuated with Chloe, and needs his roommate Sal to introduce her to him.  Chloe arrives with her friend Riku, who is appropriately crazy enough to match up with Sal.   The guys and girls bicker and banter, eavesdrop on each other and pair into couples.

What’s so refreshingly welcome about Percival’s Big Night is how well all of this is executed, due to the frantically paced dialogue from writer-director Jarret Kerr, who also stars as Sal.  It’s briskly paced by director Will Sullivan and very, very funny.

The cast has performed Percival’s Big Night as an off-Broadway play.  They were able to shoot the movie in six 15-minute captures that are blended together to look like one shot.  Because of the madcap pace, the audience isn’t distracted by the single shot; instead, the technique intensifies the story compressed into the small apartment.

Percival’s Big Night is enough of crowd-pleaser to deserve theatrical release; in any case, hopefully, it will be available soon on cable TV, DVD, streaming or some other outlet.