Cinequest

THE CHAPERONE: deeper than it looks

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Elizabeth McGovern in THE CHAPERONE

The Chaperone is a pleasing period tale of self-discovery in 1921 America. Louise Brooks (Haley Lu Richardson) is not yet the silent movie sex symbol that she would become; she’s a 15-year-old from Wichita who has a wonderful opportunity – she can attend a cutting edge NYC dance school, if only she can get a chaperone. Local Wichita matron Norma (Elizabeth McGovern) volunteers to be that chaperone. Highly spirited and supremely confident, Louise is a Wild Child who can shock Norma’s sensibilities. But we learn that Norma has a secret reason for leaving Wichita and another secret reason to visit New York City…

This could have been a standard Odd Couple-type romp, but it’s surprisingly deeper. That’s because it centers on the adult character of Norma and benefits from McGovern’s performance. She has a sense of decorum, but she’s not a garden-variety prude. She doesn’t really appreciate her own inner strength and what that strength has helped her survive already. Now, for the first time, she reflects on what it would take to achieve happiness for herself.

Of course, adoptees longing to find out about their biological parents, child sexual abuse, closeted homosexuality and passionless marriages all existed in 1921, but American society was ill-equipped to deal with (or even acknowledge) them. Those are the pivot points in this screenplay written by Downton Abbey’s Julian Fellowes.

Richardson’s persona as Louise does not resemble the sensuous adult Brooks, but she captures the youthful exuberance and confidence of the role. This is only the second American film for Hungarian actor Géza Röhri (from the brilliant but impossibly grim Son of Saul). Röhri is able to project a fundamental decency that is very appealing.

The Chaperone is a satisfying and easy watch, which I would expect to end up on PBS after its theatrical run. The Chaperone played at Cinequest in March.

TEEN SPIRIT: a well-crafted genre film with a heart

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Elle Fanning in TEEN SPIRIT

In the appealing Teen Spirit, Elle Fanning plays a Polish working class girl on the Isle of Wight who competes in a fictional British version of American Idol.  Even though she is immensely talented, she is not one of the popular kids.   And, recognizable as a teenager – she is bored and she resents being bored.  Seemingly a hopeless underdog, she finds a mentor in the local barfly Vlad (Zlatko Buric), a former opera singer fallen on hard times.

Yes, Teen Spirit is firmly in the underdog competition genre – and we know that the story will climax in the Big Game, the Big Match or – as here – the Big Sing-off.  As with any genre, one of these movies can be an empty, cliche-ridden formula or a masterpiece (Rocky) or something in between.  Teen Spirit may not be a Rocky, but, thanks to writer-director Max Minghella, it is well-crafted and has a heart.

It should be noted that Elle Fanning actually does the singing in Teen Spirit – and sings very well.  Given that Rami Malek just won an Oscar for lip-syncing, we should bestow a Nobel upon Fanning.  She has an ethereal voice and has shown herself to be a fine actress who can carry a more challenging story than this.  Both she and Buric are excellent.

First time director Minghella paces the film very well and delivers some flashy movie making, with fast cuts and pounding soundtrack, sometimes giving the effect of being inside a disco ball.  All for the good.  To his credit, Minghella also follows Billy Wilder’s screenwriting advice – when your story is finished, don’t hang around.

I saw Teen Spirit at Cinequest, and Elle Fanning appeared for a post-screening interview.  Teen Spirit opens this weekend in the Bay Area.

THE HUMMINGBIRD PROJECT: it’s a movie about nanoseconds, but it slows to a muddle

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Salma Hayek and Jesse Eisenberg in THE HUMMINGBIRD PROJECT

In The Hummingbird Project, two brothers take on Wall Street power in a race to build a fiber-optic cable network from Kansas City to New York City. They plan to take advantage of getting financial data several nanoseconds before everyone else and to become zillionaires. Vincent (Jesse Eisenberg) is the wheeler-dealer and Anton (Alexander Skarsgård) is the technical whiz.  It’s a ridiculously audacious bet, and the movie is about whether they can pull it off.

Their ruthless Wall Street competition is personalized in the character played by Salma Hayek.  Hayek is okay, but she appears to be performing in a different (and better) movie than the other leads.

The Hummingbird Project doesn’t quite work.  Eisenberg is not a stranger to jittery, fast-talking roles.  But here, he accelerates into auctioneer-pacing, and he speaks so quickly that it’s hard to follow.  There’s too much film footage invested in the cable-laying procedural.   And why the hell does Vincent return a THIRD time to visit the Amish farmers in the rainstorm?

There are two good scenes in The Hummingbird Project, both involving Anton.  In one, he decides to physically run away from the FBI and, in the other, he exacts some hacking revenge on the Wall Street baddies.

I saw The Hummingbird Project at Cinequest, and it is now playing in Bay Area theaters.

RICH KIDS: topical, but…

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kids (but not the lead kids) in RICH KIDS

Rich Kids has topicality going for it, as it explores our society’s disparity of wealth.  Matias (Gerardo Velasquez), his brainy crush Vanessa (Michelle Magallon) and their pals are dirt poor teens.  There’s a nearby vacant luxury home, and the kids hop the fence  for a dip in the pool.  The pool party moves inside, and the kids get to experience what to them is fantasy opulence.    Drama ensues.

Unfortunately, Rich Kids wears its  social message on its sleeve.  The dialogue is too obvious and heavy-handed.  Rich Kids becomes a predictable screed.  Most of the actors playing the kids are too old to pass for high school students, and they just aren’t able to elevate the dialogue.

On the other hand, the opening scene pulses with verisimilitude, and the actors who play Matias’ parents  (who I believe are Ricky Catter and Amelia Rico) are really good.

Rich Kids played at Cinequest.

THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE: finally!

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Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce in THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is director Terry Gilliam’s final conquest of the iconic Miguel Cervantes novel. Gilliam has been trying to make this movie for decades, and the 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha, which chronicles one disastrous attempt, is a more entertaining movie than this one. Lost in La Mancha can be streamed on Amazon and iTunes.

Adam Driver plays Toby, a film director, in demand for his commercials, who had failed at a Don Quixote film as a young indie director. Now Toby returns to Spain, and tries again with more resources. He finds that the older local man (Jonathan Pryce) in the first film shoot has become deluded that he really is Don Quixote. He also finds that his earlier venture changed the life of a young girl from the village (Joana Ribeiro).

Terry Gilliam is nothing if not imaginative, as demonstrated by his earlier films Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, The Zero Theorem). Here he creates thread after thread of deluded quests and braids them together. He captures the combination of absurdity and futile earnestness in the source material.

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is witty and well-made, but neither Gilliam’s nor Cervantes’ stories make the film engrossing. I saw The Man Who Killed Don Quixote at the 2019 Cinequest, where it was the closing night film.

Stream of the Week: MAGALLANES – some wrongs cannot be righted

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Magallanes_Still

To honor Cinequest, my stream of the week is a remarkable drama from the 2016 Cinequest. The title character in the Peruvian psychological drama Magallanes is a loser, but is he a lovable loser? Played by Damián Alcázar, Magallanes bounces around from odd job to odd job. He can’t break even driving a borrowed outlaw taxi around the squalid streets of Lima, he lives in a basement hovel and he has one friend. Magallanes glimpses a person from his past, and it rocks him into a series of life-changing events.

Magallanes starts out as a caper movie. But we learn that his one friendship is from his military service in a death squad unit, dispatched to repress the indigenous population with the harshest methods. What this unit did years ago has scarred all the characters (except two snarky cops), and Magallanes is revealed to be a study of PTSD.

What is driving Magallanes’ behavior in this story? We find that he is trying to right a past wrong. But what? And by whom? The revelation in Magallanes is that some wrongs cannot be righted.

Magallanes is a showcase for Mexican actor Alcázar, whom U.S. art house audiences saw in John Sayles’ Men with Guns and as the lead in Herod’s Law. Alcázar makes Magallanes so sympathetic that the movie’s climax is jarring and emotionally powerful.

Magallanes can be streamed from iTunes, YouTube and Google Play.

https://youtu.be/oSVxY2-grAk

ORIGINAL SIN: sending up the rich

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ORIGINAL SIN

The Paraguayan sex comedy Original Sin (Pecado Original) is primarily a social satire, sending up the stiffness of Paraguay’s upper class.  A young married couple is trapped by the roles expected of them, and the wife chafes at her life devoid of anything except daytime TV and day-drinking.  The husband is a prig, and has a particular repression that no male audience member will be able to relate to.  The wife MAY have purchased a painting at a charity auction, and the impossibly handsome artist show up to deliver the painting.  Raucous, and fairly predictable, humor ensues.  A duel-by-badminton is pretty funny.

Cinequest hosted the North American premiere of Original Sin.

THE BRA: just your average silent Azerbaijani comedy

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THE BRA

In the charming Azerbaijani-German comedy The Bra, train tracks run through the narrow main street of a remote Azerbaijani village.  The villagers set up cafe tables and hang their laundry across the tracks.  When the daily train arrives, a 10-year-old boy runs up the tracks sounding the alarm, and the villagers scramble to clear the tracks.  Occasionally, the train snags an object or a piece of laundry, which is rescued by the train’s mournful engineer Nurian (Serbian actor Predrag ‘Miki’ Manojlovic). Nurian then hikes from his even more remote home back to the village to return the item.

One day, the train ends up with a blue brassiere. Nurian goes door-to-door, holding up the bra to each woman in the village, hoping to find its owner. Along with many doors slammed in his face, he gets a variety of responses from village women. Of course all this is absurd, and The Bra is a triumph of absurdist humor.

One day, the train ends up with a blue brassiere. Nurian goes door-to-door, holding up the bra to each woman in the village, hoping to find its owner. Along with many doors slammed in his face, he gets a variety of responses from village women. Of course all this is absurd, and The Bra is a triumph of absurdist humor

Subtitles are unnecessary in The Bra because there is no discernible dialogue.  It’s not a silent film – we hear the ambient noises and the human characters mutter and yell, but we can’t distinguish what they are saying.  Like a silent film, the actors convey their feelings by what is essentially pantomime.  And it’s all more naturalistic than it may seem on paper.

The Bra is the work of German director and co-writer Veit Helmer, who has been making films in Central Asisn nations for a decade.  The cast is Central Asian and Pan-European, with some recognizable faces like Denis Lavant from France and Paz Vega from Spain.  The performance by Manojlovic, so filled with humanity, is very special.

The little boy who runs up the tracks is a homeless orphan, cruelly treated by the villagers. The relationship that Nurian builds with the boy is a touching counterpoint to the film’s many comic situations.

Now I need to say that The Wife hated this movie and found it offensive to women; I think this was an aberration caused by her physical discomfort during the screening. I heard women laughing heartily throughout the film and other women told me how much they liked the film, which was, after all, a festival favorite among all genders.

Cinequest hosted the US premiere of The Bra, and was one of the hits of the festival. The Bra won the jury prize for Best Narrative Feature (Comedy) and, when a prime time screening needed to be filled, programmers called on The Bra. Yes, this is an Azerbaijani comedy without any dialogue, but it’s a Must See if you get the chance

BRING ME AN AVOCADO: under pressure, relationships evolve

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BRING ME AN AVOCADO

In the indie drama Bring Me an Avocado, an Oakland mom goes into a coma, and her husband and two daughters must spend several months going on with their lives, not knowing whether the mom will wake up.  The mom’s sister and her BFF step up to support the family by helping out with cooking and childcare.  Of course, there’s a lot of pressure on this extended family, and the relationships between the three adults evolve and get complicated.

[MINOR SPOILER]  After months, the mom wakes up.  Things are not the same as before, and she decides, in an emotional catharsis, how the family will move forward.

Bring Me an Avocado is the first feature for writer-director Maria Mealla.  Anyone who writes a coma movie has to decide how the character gets in the coma without making it an obvious contrivance; Mealla’s solution rings authentic, an event that is horrific and absolutely plausible.

Sarah Burkhalter plays the mom, and her performance takes over the final ten minutes of the movie; her character pieces together what happened while she was comatose, processes it and acts on the future of her family.; Burkhalter makes the ending very powerful.  The child actors playing the daughters, California Poppy Sanchez and Michaela Robles, are superb.

I really wanted to like this Bay Area indie more than I did.  It runs 104 minutes, and would have been better film at 90 minutes – and without the musical interludes.    Not all of the cast is as strong as are Burkhalter and the kids.  And [MINOR SPOILER] , it’s distracting when the mom spends months in a coma without any wasting, waking up looking pretty hearty, with just a bandage on her back.

Cinequest hosted the world premiere of Bring Me an Avocado.

Movies to See Right Now

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MINE 9

I’m deep into the 2019 Cinequest, running through March 17. Here’s my Cinequest preview; I’m recommending the world premieres of Mine 9 tonight and Saturday for Auggie. Throughout the festival, I link my festival coverage to my Cinequest page, including both features and movie recommendations. Follow me on Twitter for the very latest coverage.

 

OUT NOW

  • In They Shall Not Grow Old, Lord of the Rings filmmaker Peter Jackson has, for the first time, layered humanity over our understanding of World War I. By slowing down the speed of the jerky WWI film footage and adding sound and color, Jackson has allowed us to relate to the real people in the Great War. This is a generational achievement and a Must See.
  • Roma is an exquisite portrait of two enduring women and the masterpiece of Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity, Children of Men and Y Tu Mama Tambien). It won multiple Oscars. It is streaming now Netflix.
  • Green Book: This is the Oscar winner for Best Picture.  Tony Lip is a marvelous character, and Viggo Mortensen’s performance is one of the great pleasures of this year in the movies.
  • Vice: in this bitingly funny biopic of Dick Cheney by writer-director Adam McKay (The Big Short), Cheney is played by a physically transformed and unrecognizable Christian Bale. A superb performance, pretty good history, biography from a sharp point of view and a damn entertaining movie.
  • Stan & Ollie: Steve Coogan as Stan Laurel and John C. Reilly as Oliver Hardy deliver remarkable portraits of a partnership facing the inevitability of showbiz decline.
  • Pawel Pawlikowski’s sweeping romantic tragedy Cold War is not as compelling as his masterpiece Ida.
  • The Favourite: Great performances by three great actresses, sex and political intrigue are not enough; this critically praised film didn’t work for me.

 

ON VIDEO

My Stream of the Week comes from the 2015 Cinequest. The ever-absorbing The Center explores how someone of sound mind and normal disposition can be completely enveloped by a cult. The Center can be streamed from Amazon (included with Prime), Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

 

ON TV

On March 14 on Turner Classic Movies: The Blue Gardenia presents a 1953 view of date rape, with lecherous Raymond Burr getting Anne Baxter likkered up into a blackout drunk with Polynesian Pearl Divers. There’s a very nice twist on the whodunit: when she wakes up, she doesn’t remember killing him, but he sure is dead. There’s even a cameo performance by Nat King Cole.

THE BLUE GARDENIA
THE BLUE GARDENIA