In the Spanish dramedy Marisa in the Woods, Marisa (Patricia Jordá) is at a personal and career crossroads. She’s burnt out from her job with a touring theater troupe and takes a needed break. Unfortunately, she doesn’t get any support from her network of friends and colleagues, all of whom are needier than she is. Her bestie is literally hysterical, over-dramatizing everything in her life until it leads to a tragedy. Finally, Marisa finds some empathy after reconnecting with a teacher from her past, who has changed gender.
Marisa in the Woods is an acid commentary on first-world problems and the complaints of the self-absorbed. As Marisa bounces from one dissatisfied friend to another, we are treated to a tour of Madrid locations, all the way to the magical realism at the ending.
This is a very witty film, obviously influenced by early Pedro Almodóvar (not a bad thing), but without Almodóvar’s frenetic energy. Marisa in the Woods is the first feature for writer-director Antonio Morales. Its US premiere will be at Cinequest.
Exploring the challenges of co-parenting with an addict, the realistic Canadian drama Luba is topped off with a ticking time bomb finish. Luba (Nicole Maroon) is a struggling single mom whose estranged husband Donnie (Vladimir Jon Cubrt of Hannibal and Designated Survivor) is a crackhead. Donnie really loves his son, and Luba tries to let her son create some memories with his dad.
Unfortunately, Donnie is helpless to his addiction At his best, he is manipulative, sponging Luba’s last few discretionary dollars. At his worst, he is dangerously irresponsible. Then Donnie decompensates and goes lethally out of control.
In a futile attempt to make ends meet, Luba lives a hamster wheel experience, bouncing between multiple crappy waitress jobs and childcare that she can’t afford. Her only emotional and babysitting support comes from other busy moms and from Donnie’s sympathetic mother. Co-star Vladimir Jon Cubrt wrote Luba and completely captures the essence of Luba’s life – she’s trapped without any moment of relief or enrichment for herself.
Luba doesn’t have unrealistic expectations. She just wants to pay the rent on time, have some adult male companionship, and, being Canadian, play an occasional pickup game of ice hockey. Cubrt’s screenplay vividly brings alive another fundamental truth – the grinding impact of living with an addict’s roller coaster of self-sabotage. Luba’s attempts at moments of normality keep getting hijacked by Donnie’s selfishness. Repeatedly, respite suddenly turns into panic. This is Cubrt’s first screenplay, but he has written three original stage productions for the theater company he founded in Toronto.
Luba is the first feature for director Caley Wilson. This an authentic and relatable drama with an ending that works as a thriller. Cinequest hosts Luba’s world premiere.
The taut Argentine thriller Amateur reminds us of Psycho, but with more grisly killing and sexual perversity. A new hire at a television station is combing through some old tapes and discovers a sex tape (hence the title). He becomes obsessed with the woman in the tape and later meets her in real life. As in Psycho, a serial killer suddenly takes over the story, and Amateur plunges into tales of blackmail, kidnapping and a sordid back story of sexual exploitation. Trying to solve the first murder, the police stumble along as the bodies pile up.
The original sex tape is only the first layer of voyeurism in Amateur. More and more characters video record and view the actions of others.
Jazmín Stuart is very good as a woman that the audience is likely to underestimate at the beginning of the film There is a moment in Amateur when she has just had a consensual sexual encounter but her eyes start to signal that something is terribly wrong; it’s unforgettable.
Alejandro Awada is perfectly cast as a guy who seems formidable at first; we keep learning that he has more and more assets, including his trophy wife. His easy-going affect of geniality and confident charm is an effective juxtaposition to the monster he is revealed to be. Awada delivered another excellent supporting performance in the overlooked neo-noir The Aura.
The veteran producer Sebastian Perillo makes his writing and directing debuts with Amateur. The US premiere of Amateur is at Cinequest.
7 Splinters in Timehas to be the trippiest film in this year’s Cinequest. The detective Darius (Edoardo Ballerini – Corky Caporale in The Sopranos) is seriously confused. He can’t remember large chunks of his past. And then he’s confronted by an exact look-alike in a most unlikely place. Soon, even more doppelgängers arrive in the story. Darius is trying to figure out what’s going on- and so is the audience.
We go from place to place and, possibly, from time to time. And Darius and/or his lookalikes keep showing up. It’s as if one’s life were depixelated, digitally compressed and then defectively reassembled. Artifacts from other periods of time – Polaroid camera, rotary phone, microfiche viewer – are clues that time travel may be involved here.
Story threads are braided together, some more vividly nightmarish than others. There’s plenty of eye candy and sometimes there’s the feeling of Fellini on Dexedrine. If you like your movies linear and unambiguous, you will likely be impatient until the explanation in the last 20 minutes. But it’s fun to settle in and try to figure out what is going on.
7 Splinters is the feature film debut for writer-director Gabriel Judet-Weinshel. To depict Darius’ different realities (what he calls the “fractured psyche”), Judet-Weinshel used 8mm, 16mm, 35mm film and analog still film, along with the full range of digital, from low-resolution 30-frame video to the large format digital Red Camera. The effect is very cool.
Greg Bennick is excellent as the hyperkinetic mystery figure Luka. Lynn Cohen is a howl as the salty curmudgeon Babs, Darius’ elderly neighbor. Both are effective counterpoints to Ballerini’s chilly and stony Darius.
The beloved character actor Austin Pendleton plays The Librarian, a much more pivotal character than initially apparent. Pendleton has a zillion screen credits, including Frederick Larrabee in What’s Up, Doc? and Gurgle in Finding Nemo. I think I heard his character say, “You are the lizard warrior”. It’s that kind of movie.
Cinequest hosts the world premiere of 7 Splinters in Time. The film is listed under its alternative title of Omphalos, so you can find its screenings here in the Cinequest program.
Greg Bennick and Edoardo Ballerini in 7 SPLINTERS IN TIME
Make your plans now to attend the 28th 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 2018 Cinequest is scheduled for February 27 through March 11 and will present almost 100 feature films and dozens of short films and virtual reality experiences from the US and over thirty other countries. And, at Cinequest, it’s easy to meet the filmmakers.
This year’s headline events include:
Celebrity appearances by William C. Macy, Andie McDowell, John Travolta, Charlie Sheen and Turner Classic Movie host Ben Mankiewicz.
Opening night film: Macy presents his new comedy Krystal, co-starring Rosario Dawson;
Closing night film: Brothers in Arms, a documentary on the making of Platoon, co-presented by the narrator, Sheen.
New movies with Peter Fonda, Burt Reynolds, Jon Hamm, Marion Cotillard, Hilary Swank, Piper Laurie, Rosamund Pike, Stanley Tucci, Melissa Leo, Kiefer Sutherland, Kal Penn, Robert Forster, Mathieu Amalric, Charlotte Gainsbourg, James McAvoy, Alicia Vikander and Michael Shannon.
New movies by directors Wim Wenders, Arnaud Desplechin, Melanie Mayron, Jan Sverak (Kolya) and Tony Gilroy.
The silent The Wind with Lillian Gish, projected in a period movie palace, the California Theatre, accompanied by world-renowned Dennis James on the Mighty Wurlitzer organ.
This year, Cinequest presents 74 world premieres and will host over 800 artists from over thirty countries.
The renovation of the old Camera 3 Theater into 3Below Theaters & Lounge means that Cinequest will regain its Downtown San Jose vibe, with concurrent screenings at the 1122-seat California, the 550-seat Hammer and the 257-seat 3Below, all within 1600 feet of the VIP lounge at The Continental Bar. There will still be satellite viewing in Redwood City.
3Below has lost Camera 3’s middle aisle and replaced all the seats. The decor is sharp, and they’ve added a movable stage for performances, lectures and Q&As. The once notorious restrooms are remarkably clean (and no longer accessible from the neighboring parking garage, so they have a chance to stay that way).
At Cinequest, you can get a festival 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 2018 page, with links to all my coverage (links on the individual movies will start to go live on Sunday February 25). Follow me on Twitter for the latest.
The funny and sentimental Canadian dramedy Cloudburst pairs Oscar-winning actresses Olympia Dukakis (Moonstruck) and Brenda Fricker (My Left Foot) as lesbian life partners of many decades. Because they live in Maine before the legalization of same-sex marriage there, their union is not legally recognized. The sweet-tempered Dotty (Fricker) is visually-impaired and becoming more and more infirm. Her partner Stella (Dukakis) is irascible and enjoys a startlingly vulgar vocabulary. The pair is separated when Dotty’s granddaughter moves Dotty into a convalescent home over Stella’s objection. Stella rescues Dotty and spirits the two of them off to get legally married in Nova Scotia. On the run from Maine authorities, they pick up a feckless young guy (Ryan Doucette) and head off on a very funny, and sometimes dangerous, road trip.
Cloudburst is directed and written by Thom Fitzgerald from his own play. Fitzgerald has written wonderful characters for Dukakis and Fricker to play, and their performances are superb. Surprisingly, this is the first lead role for the 68-year-old Fricker.
Cloudburst was an indie hit in Canadian theaters, but was purchased by Lifetime and didn’t get a theatrical release in the US. That’s a shame, because I think that Cloudburst could have become an art house hit like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. It’s a crowd pleaser.
Cloudburst is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Netflix, Amazon Instant Video , iTunes, Vudu and Xbox Video.
In the German psychological drama Phoenix, Nina Hoss plays Nelly, an Auschwitz survivor whose face has been destroyed by a Nazi gunshot; her sister has arranged for plastic surgery to reconstruct her face. When Nelly gets her new face, we accompany her on an intense quest.
Writer-director Christian Petzhold is an economical story-teller, respectful of the audience’s intelligence. Watching a border guard’s reaction to her disfigurement and hearing snippets from the sister and the plastic surgeon, we gradually piece together her back story. The doctor asks what seems like a very good question – Why would a Jewish woman successfully rooted in London return to Germany in 1938? The answer to that question involves a Woman Loving Too Much.
The sister plans to re-settle both of them in Israel, but Nelly is obsessed with finding her husband. She does find her husband, who firmly believes that Nelly is dead. But he notes that the post-surgery Nelly resembles his pre-war wife, and he has a reason to have her impersonate the real Nelly. So he has the real Nelly (who he doesn’t think IS the real Nelly) pretending to be herself. It’s kind of a reverse version of The Return of Martin Guerre.
It’s the ultimate masquerade. How would you feel while listening to your spouse describe you in detail to a stranger?
Nina Hoss is an uncommonly gifted actress. Here she acts with her face fully bandaged for the first third of the film. We ache for her Nelly’s obsessive need for her husband – and when she finally finds him, she still doesn’t really have him.
As the husband, Ronald Zehfeld shows us the magnetism that attracts Nina, along with the brusque purposefulness that he thinks he needs to survive and flourish in the post-war Germany.
Christian Petzold and Nina Hoss collaborated on the recent film Barbara (he won the Berlin Film Festival’s Silver Bear for his work). About Barbara, I wrote
“Given that’s it difficult to imagine how anyone else could have improved Barbara, I’ll be looking for Petzold’s next movie.”
Well, here it is, and it’s gripping.
The ending of the film is both surprising and satisfying. Several people in my audience let out an audible “Wow!” at the same time.
Phoenix was one of my Best Movies of 2015. It is available to stream from Netflix Instant, Amazon Video, YouTube and Google Play.
Willem Dafoe and Brooklynn Prince in THE FLORIDA PROJECT
The gripping and searingly authentic drama The Florida Project centers in the plight of six-year-olds living in a poverty motel in Orlando, Florida. These are what we used to call “latchkey kids” – children unsupervised and essentially feral because their parents are focused on economic survival.
The parents, moored in multi-generational poverty and mostly classified as the working poor, understand that this situation is not ideal for the kids. All the parents love their kids, and most take extra steps to protect them and to raise them with the right values. These are people who are forced into unappealing choices – working multiple minimum wage jobs and leaving kids at home because they can’t access childcare, and even relocating and uprooting their kids from their friends and familiar environments.
These families are living literally in the shadow of Disney World, where tens of thousands of families are paying for $100 theme park tickets and $200 hotel rooms; the residents of the The Florida Project’s Magic Kingdom motel are paying $35 per night and can’t afford ice cream for their kids.
The kids are on their own to express their exuberance, curiosity and mischief. Some of their misadventures are innocent and harmless, but some range to the very dangerous. We see the kids’ moral compasses being forged, often not along the best axis. Even the local Motel Row traffic is scary. The sketchy environs, with the anonymous transience of the tourists and with some of the locals in the criminal class, is even more foreboding. For most of each day, the only responsible and caring adult is the beleaguered motel manager, Bobby (Willem Dafoe – great in this movie). Here’s the effect on the audience – we enjoy the kids’ joy in play and exploration, but worry, along with Bobby, about their safety.
Brooklynn Prince (center) in THE FLORIDA PROJECT
The ringleader of the kid is the highly spirited Moonee. Moonee is perfectly played by Brooklynn Prince, a very talented and charismatic child actor.
The smart and charming Moonee’s disadvantage is her Mom, Hallee (Bria Vinaite) – a tattooed and pierced woman in her early twenties. Hallee is as immature as Moonee, and is basically a walking bundle of Bad Choices. She has a terrible, irresponsible and entitled attitude, and always does things the easiest way in the short-term, regardless of legality or long-term consequence. Hallee knows that she’s one more arrest from having Moonee taken away. The term “unfit mother” has come to seem quaint – but not here, where the audience eventually starts begging for child welfare officials to rescue Moonee from her Mom.
The Florida Project was written, directed and edited by Sean Baker, who most recently made Tangerine, the movie he shot entirely on an iPhone (and you can’t tell). In both The Florida Project and Tangerine, Baker uses first-time actors to tell a character-driven story about marginalized people. Baker found Bria Vinaite, the non-actor who plays Hallee on Instagram. It’s also the first screen credit for Mela Murder, who plays Ashley, a mom who is perceptive enough to ascertain that her son needs to disassociate from his best friend Moonee because of Hallee’s influence.
One of the minor beauties of The Florida Project is the whimsy of roadside vernacular architecture in Orlando, the tourist-hustling commercial buildings from the 1940s-1970s built as castles, ships, dogs and the like.
The Florida Project is close to a perfect movie, but not quite there. Baker did edit his own movie, and one hour, 51 minutes is a little too long for this story. And, two months after seeing the movie, I’m still not sure what I think about the controversial ending. The movie has the feel of cinéma vérité until it doesn’t, when the audience is jarred by a sudden plunge into magical realism. Unlike some viewers and critics, I thought that the ending did have a truthful consistency with the preceding story; but there’s no doubt that the abrupt change in tone pulls the audience out of being immersed in the story.
Still, The Florida Project is a Must See for its emotional power and its uncommonly authentic dive into an oft-ignored subculture. As Willy Loman’s wife says in The Death of a Salesman, attention must be paid.
The nominations for this year’s Academy Awards come out tomorrow – and Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is not asking my opinion. But if I picked the Oscars:
Best Picture: My choice for the year’s best movie – Truman – is NOT going to be nominated because it is a little-seen Spanish movie. But there are several deserving choices, including The Big Sick, The Shape of Waterand The Post. The Academy almost always chooses a drama for Best Picture, seemingly equating seriousness and gravitas for quality. That means that comedies – and despite the coma, The Big Sick is fundamentally a romantic comedy – get underrated. So I don’t think it will win, but I gauge The Big Sick, an almost perfect film, to be the best American flick of the year.
Best Director: I’m rooting for Guillermo del Toro for The Shape of Water, a story that could not be told as well in a novel, on stage or in any other artistic medium. It has to be a movie and one which springs from del Toro’s imagination.
Best Actor: He’s probably not going to even get nominated, but I would go with Richard Gere in his best career performance in Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer. The huge favorite, of course, is Gary Oldman for Darkest Hour; it’s a fine performance, but I think the Oscars over-elevate portrayals of Great Men and Women.
Best Actress: Can’t go wrong with Meryl Streep in The Post or Sally Hawkins in The Shape of Water. Saoirse Ronan in Lady Bird was pretty special, too.
Best Supporting Actor: Sam Rockwell is going to win this for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, but I prefer the performance of Woody Harrelson in the same movie. Harrelson doesn’t have as showy a role, but this is one of Woody’s very best performances. Another brilliant performance that will NOT be nominated is Steve Coogan’s guy hanging on to sanity with his fingernails in The Dinner, but nobody saw it. Among the guys who stand a chance of getting nominated, my preference is for Willem Dafoe in The Florida Project.
Best Supporting Actress: Allison Janney will be nominated for I, Tonya, she will win and she will deserve it.
Best Animated: Coco, of course. Pixar is back.
Best Documentary: The brilliant Ken Burns documentary The Vietnam War, which aired on PBS, isn’t eligible for an Oscar, but it was the year’s best doc. Of the eligible documentaries, I really liked Abacus: Small Enough to Jail.
Best Foreign Language Picture. I am all in for Truman from Spain, which will not be nominated. Of those nominated, I most admired In the Fade from Germany.
Original Screenplay: Martin McDonagh for Three Billboards in Ebbing, Missouri.
Adapted Screenplay: Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber for I Tonya.
Cinematography: I’m going to cop out on this category. There just too many wonderfully visual movies this year tp pick just one as the best. In any other year, the Academy could easily recognize the cinematography in The Shape of Water, Dunkirk, Call Me by Your Name, Phantom Thread, Baby Driver and Okja – but only one can win the statuette.
Film Editing: Baby Driveror Dunkirk.
Long ago, the Oscars recognized a “Juvenile” acting category. Brooklynn Prince of The Florida Project would be deserving for her exuberant performance.
Other groups give a “Promising Newcomer”award; mine would go to Greta Gerwig as writer. Obviously, she’s not new to the movies, but her first screenplay makes me eager to see her next ones.
Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell in THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI
A scene from THE FINAL YEAR, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
In the documentary The Final Year, we get to peek inside the last year of the Obama foreign policy. Director Greg Barker’s cameras go behind the scenes to follow Secretary of State John Kerry, UN Ambassador Samantha Power and Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes as they travel the globe to keep the peace and mitigate conflict.
We see a lot of movies about the military and the intelligence services, so it’s a rare and welcome treat to watch diplomacy in action.
The Final Year primarily depicts and references the Obama Administration’s signature accomplishments – the Iran nuclear deal, avoiding catastrophe in North Korea, the Paris climate accords – along with the challenges of Syria.
We tend to see these folks as talking heads on television, so it’s humanizing to see them in candid moments. However, this is hardly a warts-and-all expose, and sometimes the tone even reaches reverent or fawning. Rhodes even gets the chance to evade responsibility for a basic political mistake – letting a reporter exploit his words.
It’s impossible to watch The Final Year in early 2018 without comparing these folks with the current administration. Whatever their imperfections, Kerry, Power and Rhodes are serious, competent people trying to implement a coherent foreign policy in our national interest and, in the process, earning the respect of other nations. The juxtaposition with the clown show of the current Administration is alarming and profoundly sad.
[SPOILER: In the final shot before the closing credits, the very-soon-to-be-former President Obama says, “Are we done here? Okay, see you later.” and turns down a White House corridor with his security detail for perhaps the last time. It’s heartbreakingly wistful.]
