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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Andrew Jenkins in Chris Scheuerman’s brilliant debut LOST SOLACE
We’ve completed a strong Cinequest 2016, and I’ve seen 36 feature films. All of my features on this year’s fest , along with recommendations on over twenty Cinequest 2016 films are on my CINEQUEST page. Here are the festival highlights (and lowlights).
PERSONAL FAVORITE: I loved writer-director Chris Scheuerman’s brilliant debut – the highly original psychological thriller Lost Solace.
THE MEMORY OF WATER
BEST OF THE FEST: The Memory of Water: This Chilean drama explores grief, its process and its impact and was the most masterful filmmaking achievement at Cinequest 2016. Exquisite.
BIG MOVIES: The selection of this year’s Spotlight Films, the prime-time movies shown at the California Theatre, may have been Cinequest’s most successful ever. Cinequest programmers led off with a home run with the Opening Night rouser Eye in the Sky, the thriller-meets-thinker from Oscar-winning director Gavin Hood. The screening was preceded by Cinequest co-founder Halfdan Hussey’s interview of Hood, which was probably also the best ever on-stage interview in festival history.
The Cinequest audience also loved the next Spotlight Film, the Norwegian disaster movie The Wave. Arnaud Desplechin’s affecting coming of age film My Golden Days was also popular. I liked James Franco and loved Ed Harris in The Adderall Diaries. Cinequest’s Closing Night feature, the Australian drama The Daughter, packed a powerfully emotional punch.
Alan Rickman in EYE IN THE SKY
BIGGEST SENSATION: The hard-hitting and often excruciating Love Is All You Need?, the exploration of homophobic bullying and hate crimes, will be the Cinequest film that gets the most national attention.
MOST IMPRESSIVE DEBUT: Along with Lost Solace, I was also impressed by Chris Brown’s The Other Kids and Lori Stoll’s Heaven’s Floor.
BEST FOREIGN FILM: Along with The Memory of Water, I most admired Magallanes, a Peruvian psychological drama about those wrongs that cannot be righted. Magallanes won the jury award for international cinema. I also enjoyed the sex, intrigue and murder in the operatic Hungarian period drama Demimonde.
COMEDY: There really wasn’t a Can’t Miss comedy this year, but fans of absurdist deadpan comedy had The Modern Project and Lost in Munich. My Guilty Pleasure was the deliciously low brow A Beginner’s Guide to Snuff.
BEST ROMANCE: We don’t always have an extremely strong romance at the festival, but the Hungarian Fever at Dawn was just that – an urgent period romance between Holocaust survivors, with an unexpected nugget at the end.
WORST OF THE FEST: Thankfully, there were not many stinkers at this year’s fest, but Remember Me was a disappointing clunker and The Blackcoat’s Daughter was utterly wretched.
Thriller meets thinker in Eye in the Sky, a parable from modern drone warfare. Eye in the Sky poses this question: is it acceptable to neutralize the very worst evil in the world when it requires the simultaneous taking of the most innocent life?
If we are to pursue drone warfare as a morally acceptable military option, we must see what happens on the ground so we understand it. Eye in the Sky asks if we can stomach it once we’ve seen it.
Is the choice framed too simplistically in Eye in the Sky? No, the starkness of the choice in this film brings clarity to the question that we must ponder. Star Helen Mirren and director Gavin Hood have said in interviews that they expected married couples to argue different points of view after seeing this movie.
As Eye in the Sky’s star, Mirren commands the screen as few can and is especially fierce here. Jeremy Northam excels as the chief ditherer. Barkhad Abdi (Oscar-nominated as the Somali pirate in Captain Phillips) delivers another charismatic performance.
But this is Alan Rickman’s movie. In one of his final performances, Rickman plays the military commander who understands how difficult the choice is – because he’s already made it. Now he must navigate through all the other characters as they behave with varying degrees of belligerence, ambivalence and avoidance. It’s a supremely textured performance, layered with his wry humor, contained frustration and quiet determination.
At its Cinequest screening, director Gavin Hood said that he is as proud of Eye in the Sky as he is of his earliest films, A Reasonable Man and the Oscar-winning Tsotsi. He should be.
In the paranoid Romanian drama Why Me?, an able young prosecutor is assigned to bring down a corrupt kingpin, but is frustrated at every turn. Is the system fixed? This is Romania, so you tell me. This is based on real events. However, there are much more entertaining examples of paranoid, cynical mysteries – and much, much better examples of Romanian cinema.
I was looking forward to the horror film The Blackcoat’s Daughter (recently retitled from February) because it stars Kiernan Shipka, whose work on Mad Men I admire. Unfortunately, it soon became clear that the wooden dialogue and the plodding, contrived story reminded of the worst drive-in cinema of the early 1970s. Easily the worst film at Cinequest 2016. I walked out.
The Other Kids 11 AM Hammer Theatre Center
A completely fresh and authentic coming of age film – and a triumphant directorial debut.
Love Is All You Need? 1 PM California Theatre
This is the Cinequest film that will be the most talked-about across the nation. It’s a vivid and sometimes excruciating examination of the impacts of homophobic bullying, hate speech and hate crimes.
The Promised Band 4 PM Camera 12 – Screen 10
This documentary is a successful exploration of the effects of mutual isolation and a very explicit snapshot of the barriers to travel and social integration between Israelis and Palestinians.
This emotionally powerful Australian drama is Cinequest’s Closing Night film. Top-rate Aussie cast includes Geoffrey Rush and Sam Neill.
OR
Magallanes 6:45 M Camera 12 – Screen 10
This Peruvian psychological drama seems to start out as a lovable loser heist film, but turns out to be an exploration of PTSD. Mexican actor Damian Alcázar brings home the jarring climax. emotionally powerful. Along with The Memory of Water, the best foreign film at Cinequest 2016.
