As usual, I’m deep into covering Cinequest rigorously with features and movie recommendations. Bookmark my Cinequest 2018 page, with links to all my coverage. Follow me on Twitter for the latest.
Opening in the Bay Area today, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story is the riveting biopic of a glamorous movie star who invented and patented the precursor to wireless technology; that’s amazing enough, but Bombshell delves deeply into how Lamarr’s stunning face, her Jewish heritage and mid-century gender roles shaped her career, marriages and parenting. Top notch.
Also opening is The Leisure Seeker, an Alzheimer’s road trip dramedy with Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland. Mirren and Sutherland are excellent, possibly enough to see this in a theater.
These Oscar winners are still in theaters:
- The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro’s imaginative, operatic inter-species romance may become the most-remembered film of 2017.
- Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri a powerful combination of raw emotion and dark hilarity with an acting tour de force from Frances McDormand and a slew of great actors.
- Pixar’s Coco is a moving and authentic dive into Mexican culture, and it’s visually spectacular.
- I, Tonya is a marvelously entertaining movie, filled with wicked wit and sympathetic social comment.
My Stream of the Week, the insightful and topical documentary The Brainwashing of My Dad, comes from the 2016 Cinequest. The Brainwashing of My Dad is available streaming on Amazon Video, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
On March 10, Turner Classic Movies airs 99 River Street (1953), featured in my Overlooked Noir. Film noir tends to be about guys with bad luck, but nobody would trade their luck with Ernie Driscoll (John Payne), the anti-hero of 99 River Street; a former boxer with a career cut short, he’s being emotionally abused AND cuckolded by his no good wife, framed for a murder, beaten up, and THEN he’s set up by the Good Girl, of all people. That Good Girl is played by one of the most underrated of 1950s actresses, Evelyn Keyes. She has two killer scenes in 99 River Street. An “acting scene” on a darkened theater stage is one of the movie’s highlights. And later, her character gets to pretend to be a boozy floozy who lights her cigarette in the most suggestive manner possible.
Off-screen, Evelyn Keyes enjoyed a very rich personal life. “I always took up with the man of the moment and there were many such moments,” she said. She married directors Charles Vidor and John Huston and big band leader Artie Shaw. Her kiss-and-tell autobiography recounted affairs with Glenn Ford, Sterling Hayden, Dick Powell, Anthony Quinn, David Niven, Kirk Douglas.and Mike Todd (who left her for Elizabeth Taylor). Wow.
