SFIFF

DVD/Stream of the Week: ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL – perched on the knife edge between comedy and tragedy

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Olivia Cooke and Thomas Mann in ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL
Olivia Cooke and Thomas Mann in ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL

Here’s a MUST SEE – the unforgettable coming of age Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, a brilliant second feature from director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. The title suggests a weeper (and it is), but 90% of Me and Earl is flat-out hilarious. It’s high on my list of the Best Movies of 2015 – So Far.

Greg (Thomas Mann) is a Pittsburgh teenager who has decided that the best strategy for navigating high school is to foster good relations with every school clique while belonging to none. Embracing the adage “hot girls destroy your life”, he gives the opposite gender a very wide berth. Outwardly genial, Greg is emphatically anti-social in practice, except for his best friend Earl (Ronald Cyler II). But he even refuses to admit that Earl is his friend, describing him “as more of a co-worker”.

Greg’s parents disrupt Greg’s routine by forcing him to visit his classmate Rachel (Olivia Cooke), who has just been diagnosed with leukemia. Rachel doesn’t want any pity, so this is awkward all around until Greg makes Rachel laugh, which draws him back again to visit -and again. A friendship, based on their shared quirky senses of humor, blossoms, but – given her diagnosis – how far can it go?

Rachel is delighted to learn that Greg and Earl shoot their own movies – short knock-offs of iconic cinema classics. She first laughs when she finds that he has remade Rashomon as MonoRash. Their other titles include Death in Tennis, Brew Velvet and A Box of Lips Now.

Ronald Cyler II and Thomas Mann in ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL
Ronald Cyler II and Thomas Mann in ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL

Why is Me and Earl so successful? Most importantly, it perches right on the knife-edge between tragedy and comedy, and does so more than any movie I can think of. As funny as it is, we all know that there’s that leukemia thing just under the surface. But, with its originality and resistance to sentimentality, Me and Earl is the farthest thing from a disease-of-the-week movie.

Any movie lover will love all the movie references, as well as Greg and Earl’s many short films. Gomez-Rejon shot these shorts with Super 8, Bolex, digital Bolex and iPhone. Jesse Andrews adapted his own novel, and, as Gomez-Rejon expanded the number of “films within the film”, he called on Andrews to supply him with the new titles – and there are scores of them, right through the ending credits.

Finally, Me and Earl’s art direction is the most singular of any coming of age film. In fact, all the art direction led to the movie’s very satisfying ending; Gomez-Rejon brought in those surprises on the wall at the end – it’s not in the novel.

But Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is at its heart a coming of age story. Sure, the character of Greg is an original, but the life lessons that he must learn are universal.

Thomas Mann is hilarious as Greg; he could be a great comic talent in the making. Cooke and newcomer Cyler are also excellent. Nick Offerman and Connie Britton are perfect as Greg’s well-meaning parents, as is Molly Shannon as Rachel’s needy mom. Jon Bernthal also rocks the role of Mr. McCarthy, another great character we haven’t seen before – a boisterously vital, but grounded history teacher; Mr. McCarthy lets Greg and Earl spend their lunch hours in his office watching Werner Herzog movies on YouTube. (And Herzog himself reportedly loves the references.)

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon started as a personal assistant to Martin Scorsese and worked his way up to second unit director. With the startling originality of Me and Earl, he’s proved his chops as an auteur.

I saw Me and Earl and the Dying Girl in early May at the San Francisco International Film Festival at a screening with Gomez-Rejon. It also just screened at San Jose’s Camera Cinema Club, another fine choice by Club Director Tim Sika, President of the San Francisco Film Critics Circle.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser and a Must See. It’s available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

 

Stream of the Week: ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL – perched on the knife edge between comedy and tragedy

by
ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL
ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL

Here’s a MUST SEE – the unforgettable coming of age Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, a brilliant second feature from director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. The title suggests a weeper (and it is), but 90% of Me and Earl is flat-out hilarious. It’s high on my list of the Best Movies of 2015 – So Far.

Greg (Thomas Mann) is a Pittsburgh teenager who has decided that the best strategy for navigating high school is to foster good relations with every school clique while belonging to none. Embracing the adage “hot girls destroy your life”, he gives the opposite gender a very wide berth. Outwardly genial, Greg is emphatically anti-social in practice, except for his best friend Earl (Ronald Cyler II). But he even refuses to admit that Earl is his friend, describing him “as more of a co-worker”.

Greg’s parents disrupt Greg’s routine by forcing him to visit his classmate Rachel (Olivia Cooke), who has just been diagnosed with leukemia. Rachel doesn’t want any pity, so this is awkward all around until Greg makes Rachel laugh, which draws him back again to visit -and again. A friendship, based on their shared quirky senses of humor, blossoms, but – given her diagnosis – how far can it go?

Rachel is delighted to learn that Greg and Earl shoot their own movies – short knock-offs of iconic cinema classics. She first laughs when she finds that he has remade Rashomon as MonoRash. Their other titles include Death in Tennis, Brew Velvet and A Box of Lips Now.

Why is Me and Earl so successful? Most importantly, it perches right on the knife-edge between tragedy and comedy, and does so more than any movie I can think of. As funny as it is, we all know that there’s that leukemia thing just under the surface. But, with its originality and resistance to sentimentality, Me and Earl is the farthest thing from a disease-of-the-week movie.

Any movie lover will love all the movie references, as well as Greg and Earl’s many short films. Gomez-Rejon shot these shorts with Super 8, Bolex, digital Bolex and iPhone. Jesse Andrews adapted his own novel, and, as Gomez-Rejon expanded the number of “films within the film”, he called on Andrews to supply him with the new titles – and there are scores of them, right through the ending credits.

Finally, Me and Earl’s art direction is the most singular of any coming of age film. In fact, all the art direction led to the movie’s very satisfying ending; Gomez-Rejon brought in those surprises on the wall at the end – it’s not in the novel.

But Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is at its heart a coming of age story. Sure, the character of Greg is an original, but the life lessons that he must learn are universal.

Thomas Mann is hilarious as Greg; he could be a great comic talent in the making. Cooke and newcomer Cyler are also excellent. Nick Offerman and Connie Britton are perfect as Greg’s well-meaning parents, as is Molly Shannon as Rachel’s needy mom. Jon Bernthal also rocks the role of Mr. McCarthy, another great character we haven’t seen before – a boisterously vital, but grounded history teacher; Mr. McCarthy lets Greg and Earl spend their lunch hours in his office watching Werner Herzog movies on YouTube. (And Herzog himself reportedly loves the references.)

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon started as a personal assistant to Martin Scorsese and worked his way up to second unit director. With the startling originality of Me and Earl, he’s proved his chops as an auteur.

I saw Me and Earl and the Dying Girl in early May at the San Francisco International Film Festival at a screening with Gomez-Rejon. It also just screened at San Jose’s Camera Cinema Club, another fine choice by Club Director Tim Sika, President of the San Francisco Film Critics Circle.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser and a Must See. It’s available streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play. You will be able to rent it on DVD from Netflix and Redbox on November 3.

LISTEN TO ME MARLON: the pain and the truth in his own words

by
LISTEN TO ME MARLON
LISTEN TO ME MARLON

In the documentary Listen to Me Marlon, we hear Marlon Brando relate his life story in his own words – and we ONLY hear Brando’s words. Director Stevan Riley received access to hundreds of hours of audio tapes – self-recording made by Brando while he was alone – and never heard until now. These recordings, along with recorded Brando interviews and clips, are artfully assembled by Riley, and, together, amount to a deep and apparently truthful self-portrait.

Brando was playful and mischievous and often self-important, and the content of his interviews with journalists aren’t that reliable. But it’s clear that he isn’t BSing in these solitary recordings. He is open about his character flaws and their origin in his family background – a brute of a father and a sweet but erratic alcoholic mother.

Speaking in the third person, Brando describes himself as “a troubled man alone…confused”. Listen to Me Marlon is filled with nuggets:

  • On his upbringing: “My father is never going to come near that child (his first son Christian) because of what he did to me”.
  • On his art: “you want to stop that motion from the popcorn to the mouth. The Truth will do that.”
  • On the womanizing that broke up his first marriage “The beast aspect of my personality held sway”.
  • On the execrable Candy: “the worst movie I ever made” (drawing knowing chuckles from the audience).

Some of the tapes even record self-hypnosis as he battles obesity. And there’s a VERY COOL digitized talking Brando head, swirling around in blue pixels as he expounds.

There are also two outtakes where we SEE Brando’s womanizing in action as he comes on to attractive interviewers. We can recognize the instant that, as he says, he starts “thinking with his penis” and launches his flirtatious charm.

I saw Listen to Me Marlon at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where it will screen again this week. Director Riley spoke at the screening, as did noted film historian David Thomson and Brando’s children, Rebecca Brando and Miko Brando.

Rebecca Brando credits Riley for the film’s “humanity” as it treats Brando’s “childhood pain”. Miko Brando pointed out that the flashing lights in some clips came from the bio-feedback machine that Brando used at night. “He went to work as a movie star and came home – not a movie star – just a father”, said Miko, who had just seen the film for the second time.

David Thomson spoke of Brando’s “momentous” and truthful Method as the birth of “genuinely American approach to acting” and its effect on cinema: “the method is made for the close-up” because “if you are agonizing over what to say”, the audience needs to be close enough to see it.

Stevan Riley made the most of his access to the tapes – it’s a masterful job of selection and editing.   Listen to Me Marlon opens tomorrow in theaters, and I expect it to eventually play on Showtime.

THE END OF THE TOUR: the filmmakers speak

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Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel in THE END OF THE TOUR
Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel in THE END OF THE TOUR

[SPOILER ALERT: There spoilers in this post, but – as usual – NOT in my comments on the film.]

I saw The End of the Tour at the San Francisco International Film Festival.  Director James Ponsoldt, Producer David Kanter, editor Darrin Navarro, Producer James Dahl and actor Jason Segel all spoke after the screening.

Ponsoldt said that he generally doesn’t like biopics, and didn’t want to make a film that exists “from the neck up”.  He wanted to avoid a movie that was ” just two smart guys trying to top each other”.

Ponsoldt decribed The End of the Tour as an “unrequited platonic love story, from the perspective of Lipsky”  The moment at the end when Lipsky receives a package from Wallace tells it all.  Ponsoldt said that the Rolling Stone article was killed because it wasn’t juicy enough – and Lipsky felt relieved.

Ponsoldt got access to Lipsky’s tapes of the real conversations between the two, and Eisenberg and Segel got to listen to them.  Segel noted that “popular culture was the great equalizer”, the common denominator between the two.

And how do you make a compelling movie about two guys talking? Ponsoldt adopts Waldo Salt’s guidance about screenwriting: articulate the character’s greatest human need and recognize whose story it is it? Ask if it’s a struggle for power.  Focus on whose scene it is.

Navarro said the key is to allow the conversations to feel as real as possible, making it feel like you were in the room.  He lets the “inconsistencies and inaccuracies of speech” let you know about where the characters are going.

Jason Segel sees playing David Foster Wallace as about Wallace’s feeling of “not enough”.  Segel believes that Wallace’s Infinite Jest poses question “does anyone else feel this way?” and Segel says that sometimes he DOES feel that way.

Jason Segel said that the tapes constitute the “best conversation I’ve ever heard”.  The End of the Tour is the best movie about conversation that I’ve seen.

 

 

THE LOOK OF SILENCE: chilling and powerful

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THE LOOK OF SILENCE
THE LOOK OF SILENCE

In the powerful and chilling The Look of Silence, documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer explores the aftermath of genocide in a society that has never experienced a truth and reconciliation process. This is Oppenheimer’s second masterpiece on the Indonesian genocide of 1965-66 in which regime-sponsored death squads executed over one million suspected political opponents. Today, the victims’ families live among the murderers.

The Look of Silence centers on 44-year-old optometrist Adi, as he investigates the murder of Ramli, the older brother he never knew. Earlier, Oppenheimer had filmed Ramli’s killers as they describe and act out Ramli’s savage torture, mutilation and murder. They are unrepentant and even nostalgic about their crimes. Their matter-of-fact recollections are sickening. We see Adi watching this video, trying to contain his rage and disgust. Later, Adi – in the guise of fitting them for new glasses – is able to confront those responsible. He faces the actual machete-wielding killers, the leader of the village death squad, the higher-up who ordered the killings and even one of his own relatives.

What makes this bearable to watch (and even more affecting) is meeting Adi’s family: his earthy 80-something mother, his frail and batty 103-year-old father, his giggly 7-year old daughter and his 10-year-old son. There’s plenty of humor in this warm family. But in one scene, the son receives a ridiculously twisted propaganda version of the genocide in public school.

The “Silence” in The Look of Silence is reinforced by the spare soundtrack. We often hear only “crickets” (frogs, actually).

The Look of Silence is the companion to Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, which made my list of Best Movies of 2013. In The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer got the unapologetic killers to re-enact their atrocities for the camera – even relishing their deeds. The Act of Killing contains some of the most bizarre moments in any documentary EVER, including a cross-dressing mass murderer and a staged Bollywood-like musical number of Born Free, complete with dancing-girls in front of a waterfall, in which the garotted dead reappear to thank the killers for sending them on to the afterlife. The Act of Killing is more of a jaw-dropper. The Look of Silence – because it is more personal, is more powerful.

The Look of Silence stands alone – you can fully appreciate it without having seen The Act of Killing. But what I wrote about The Act of Killing is true for both films: “hypnotically compelling – you can’t believe what’s on the screen, can’t believe that you’re still watching it and can’t stop watching”.

I saw The Look of Silence at the San Francisco International Film Festival before its limited theatrical release slated for July 17. It’s one of the best films of 2015.

MR. HOLMES: in old age, Sherlock reopens his final case

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Ian McKellen as MR. HOLMES
Ian McKellen as MR. HOLMES

It’s 1947 and 93-year-old Sherlock Holmes has been self-exiled to the Dover coast in retirement for almost thirty years. He’s still keenly observant, but his memory is deteriorating with age, and he knows it. That’s a problem as he feels an urgent need to summon up the facts of his final case, left unresolved in 1919. In Mr. Holmes, Ian McKellen plays Sherlock in his 1947 frailty and desperation and in the flashbacks to 1919, when he’s at the top of his game.

As Mr. Holmes, opens, Sherlock has just returned home from a trip to Japan. So desperate to refresh his memory, he has sought a Japanese homeopathic cure (“prickly ash”), in the process meeting a Japanese family with an unsolved disappearance of their own. Back home, he lives with his housekeeper (Laura Linney) and her gifted son, Roger (Milo Parker). Holmes recognizes the boy’s exceptionalism and quasi-adopts as a grandchild. The boy has lost his father in World War II, and his relationship with the old man is another central thread in the movie.

Ian McKellen is delightful and endearing as the crusty Holmes. McKellen is an actor of enough stature to pull off this iconic role, and he is able both to project the Holmes genius and to deliver the humor in this very witty screenplay.

Holmes resents how his former roommate Dr. Watson has depicted him in fiction – and doesn’t like fiction at all (until the very last scene). At least, when they lived together, Watson avoided an onslaught of tourists by publishing the wrong address for their rooms (they actually lived across the street from 221B Baker Street). And Holmes goes to a theater to see a very bad 1940s Sherlock Holmes movie.

I saw Mr. Homes at the San Francisco Film Festival at a screening in which producer Anne Carey and screenwriter Jeffrey Hatcher spoke. When Carey read the source material – the novel “Slight Trick of the Mind” by Mitch Cullin – she recognized the appeal of the central role, the settings and the theme of “don’t wait too long for things important to your heart”. It took her eight years to get director Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters, Dreamgirls) on board, who brought in McKellen.

Hatcher was attracted by Holmes’ relationship to the boy Roger and by theme of how we rewrite our own stories. He pointed out that the 1919 story in Mr. Holmes has four versions: what really happened, how Watsone added a happy ending in his book, the Hollywood melodrama of the film-within-the-film and, finally, as Holmes himself connects it to the Japanese story thread at the end.

Carey and Hatcher revealed that Condon playfully referenced Hitchcock in Mr. Holmes: Ambrose Chapel from The Man Who Knew Too Much, carrying of tea a la Notorious and a “Vertigo” sequence under the arches.

It’s a good story with a superb performance by McKellen. Mr. Homes opens tomorrow.

ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL: a Must See, perched on the knife edge between comedy and tragedy

by
Ronald Cyler II and Thomas Mann in ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL
Ronald Cyler II and Thomas Mann in ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL

Here’s a MUST SEE – the unforgettable coming of age Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, a brilliant second feature from director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon.  The title suggests a weeper (and it is), but 90% of Me and Earl is flat-out hilarious.

Greg (Thomas Mann)  is a Pittsburgh teenager who has decided that the best strategy for navigating high school is to foster good relations with every school clique while belonging to none.   Embracing the adage “hot girls destroy your life”, he gives the opposite gender a very wide berth.  Outwardly genial, Greg is emphatically anti-social in practice, except for his best friend Earl (Ronald Cyler II).  But he even refuses to admit that Earl is his friend, describing him “as more of a co-worker”.

Greg’s parents disrupt Greg’s routine by forcing him to visit his classmate Rachel (Olivia Cooke), who has just been diagnosed with leukemia.  Rachel doesn’t want any pity, so this is awkward all around until Greg makes Rachel laugh, which draws him back again to visit -and again.  A friendship, based on their shared quirky senses of humor, blossoms, but – given her diagnosis – how far can it go?

Rachel is delighted to learn that Greg and Earl shoot their own movies – short knock-offs of iconic cinema classics.  She first laughs when she finds that he has remade Rashomon as MonoRash.  Their other titles include Death in Tennis, Brew Velvet and A Box of Lips Now.

Why is Me and Earl so successful?  Most importantly, it perches right on the knife-edge between tragedy and comedy, and does so more than any movie I can think of.  As funny as it is, we all know that there’s that leukemia thing just under the surface.  But, with its originality and resistance to sentimentality,  Me and Earl is the farthest thing from a disease-of-the-week movie.

Any movie lover will love all the movie references, as well as Greg and Earl’s many short films.   Gomez-Rejon shot these shorts with Super 8, Bolex, digital Bolex and iPhone.  Jesse Andrews adapted his own novel, and, as Gomez-Rejon expanded the number of “films within the film”, he called on Andrews to supply him with the new titles – and there are scores of them, right through the ending credits.

Finally, Me and Earl’s art direction is the most singular of any coming of age film.  In fact, all the art direction led to the movie’s very satisfying ending; Gomez-Rejon brought in those surprises on the wall at the end – it’s not in the novel.

But Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is at its heart a coming of age story.  Sure, the character of Greg is an original, but the life lessons that he must learn are universal.

Thomas Mann is hilarious as Greg; he could be a great comic talent in the making.  Cooke and newcomer Cyler are also excellent.  Nick Offerman and Connie Britton are perfect as Greg’s well-meaning parents, as is Molly Shannon as Rachel’s needy mom.  Jon Bernthal also rocks the role of Mr. McCarthy, another great character we haven’t seen before – a boisterously vital, but grounded history teacher; Mr. McCarthy lets Greg and Earl spend their lunch hours in his office watching Werner Herzog movies on YouTube.  (And Herzog himself reportedly loves the references.)

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon started as a personal assistant to Martin Scorsese and worked his way up to second unit director. With the startling originality of Me and Earl, he’s proved his chops as an auteur.

I saw Me and Earl and the Dying Girl in early May at the San Francisco International Film Festival at a screening with Gomez-Rejon.  It also just screened at San Jose’s Camera Cinema Club, another fine choice by Club Director Tim Sika,  President of the San Francisco Film Critics Circle.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser and a Must See.  It’s one of my Best Movies of 2015 – So Far.

 

DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD: The Story of the National Lampoon

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DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD
DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD

DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD: The Story of the National Lampoon takes us through an engaging and comprehensive history of the groundbreaking and seminal satirical magazine.  For those of you who weren’t there, the National Lampoon – ever irreverent, raunchy and tasteless – was at the vanguard of the counter-culture in the early 1970s.  Once reaching the rank of #2 news stand seller among all US magazines, it may be the most popularly accepted subversive art ever in the US (along with the wry Mad magazine during the Cold War).

In a few short years, the Lampoon rose from nowhere (well, actually from the Harvard Lampoon) to a humor empire with the magazine, records, a radio show and a traveling revue.  And, yes, the title DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD does encapsulate the arc of the Lampoon’s story.

Documentarian Douglas Tirola tells the story so successfully because he persuaded almost all the surviving key participants to talk. We meet co-founder Henry Beard, publisher Matty Simmons, Art Director Michael Gross and other Lampoon staff including P.J. O’Rourke and Christopher Buckley.  You’ll recognize the first editor, Tony Hendra, from his performance as the harried band manager in This Is Spinal Tap.  We see clips of two Lampoon originals who haven’t survived, co-founder Doug Kenney and resident iconoclast Michael O’Donoghue.

The National Lampoon’s live performance revue featured John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Brian Doyle Murray, Gilda Radner and Harold Ramis.  When Lorne Michaels hired the whole crew for Saturday Night Live, the hit television show instantly surpassed the magazine in cultural penetration.  “The Lampoon lost its exceptionalism”, says one observer.

But the Lampoon made its mark on the movies by launching the entire genre of raunchy comedies with Animal House and spawning the careers of filmmakers John Landis and Harold Ramis, as well as the SNL performers.  We also see a clip of Christopher Guest in an early Lampoon performance.  On the other hand, I hadn’t remembered a less successful Lampoon project from its later era, Disco Beaver from Outer Space.

This is all, of course, major nostalgia for Baby Boomers.  Before seeing DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD, I thought, yeah, I’ll enjoy the Blast From The Past, but will younger audience viewers dismiss this humor as quaint? After all, the Lampoon’s success came from puncturing the boundaries of taste, and it’s hard to imagine anything today that would be shockingly raunchy.  But, after watching DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD, I have to say that the humor stands up today as very sharp-edged.  After all, an image of a baby in a blender with Satan’s finger poised to press the “puree” button is pretty transgressive no matter when it’s published.  The sole exception is the Lampoon’s over-fixation on women’s breasts, which comes off today as pathetically sophomoric – or even adolescent.

DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD: The Story of the National Lampoon has also vaulted on to my list of Longest Movie Titles.

DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD is currently knocking about the film festival circuit, and distribution theatrically or on another platform is unresolved.  I saw it at the San Francisco International Film Festival.  This is an important cultural story, well-told and it deserves a wide audience.

Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead2

MR. HOLMES: in old age, Sherlock reopens his final case

by
Ian McKellen as MR. HOLMES
Ian McKellen as MR. HOLMES

It’s 1947 and 93-year-old Sherlock Holmes has been self-exiled to the Dover coast in retirement for almost thirty years.  He’s still keenly observant, but his memory is deteriorating with age, and he knows it.  That’s a problem as he feels an urgent need  to summon up the facts of his final case, left unresolved in 1919.  In Mr. Holmes, Ian McKellen plays Sherlock in his 1947 frailty and desperation and in the flashbacks to 1919, when he’s at the top of his game.

As Mr. Holmes, opens, Sherlock has just returned home from a trip to Japan.  So desperate to refresh his memory, he has sought a Japanese homeopathic cure (“prickly ash”), in the process meeting a Japanese family with an unsolved disappearance of their own.  Back home, he lives with his housekeeper (Laura Linney) and her gifted son, Roger (Milo Parker).  Holmes recognizes the boy’s exceptionalism and quasi-adopts as a grandchild.  The boy has lost his father in World War II, and his relationship with the old man is another central thread in the movie.

Ian McKellen is delightful and endearing as the crusty Holmes.  McKellen is an actor of enough stature to pull off this iconic role, and he is able both to project the Holmes genius and to deliver the humor in this very witty screenplay.

Holmes resents how his former roommate Dr. Watson has depicted him in fiction – and doesn’t like fiction at all (until the very last scene).   At least, when they lived together, Watson avoided an onslaught of tourists by publishing the wrong address for their rooms (they actually lived across the street from 221B Baker Street).  And Holmes goes to a theater to see a very bad 1940s Sherlock Holmes movie.

I saw Mr. Homes at the San Francisco Film Festival at a screening in which producer Anne Carey and screenwriter Jeffrey Hatcher spoke.  When Carey read the source material – the novel “Slight Trick of the Mind” by Mitch Cullin – she recognized the appeal of the central role, the settings and the theme of “don’t wait too long for things important to your heart”.  It took her eight years to get director Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters, Dreamgirls) on board, who brought in McKellen.

Hatcher was attracted by Holmes’ relationship to the boy Roger and by theme of how we rewrite our own stories.  He pointed out that the 1919 story in Mr. Holmes has four versions:  what really happened, how Watsone added a happy ending in his book, the  Hollywood melodrama of the film-within-the-film and, finally, as Holmes himself connects it to the Japanese story thread at the end.

Carey and Hatcher revealed that Condon playfully referenced Hitchcock  in Mr. Holmes: Ambrose Chapel from The Man Who Knew Too Much, carrying of tea a la Notorious and a “Vertigo” sequence  under the arches.

It’s a good story with a superb performance by McKellen.  Mr. Homes is scheduled for a theatrical release on July 17.

LISTEN TO ME MARLON: the pain and the truth in his own words

by
LISTEN TO ME MARLON
LISTEN TO ME MARLON

In the documentary Listen to Me Marlon, we hear Marlon Brando relate his life story in his own words – and we ONLY hear Brando’s words.  Director Stevan Riley received access to hundreds of hours of audio tapes  – self-recording made by Brando while he was alone – and never heard until now.  These recordings, along with recorded Brando interviews and clips, are artfully assembled by Riley, and, together, amount to a deep and apparently truthful self-portrait.

Brando was playful and mischievous and often self-important, and the content of his interviews with journalists aren’t that reliable.  But it’s clear that he isn’t BSing in these solitary recordings.  He is open about his character flaws and their origin in his family background – a brute of a father and a sweet but erratic alcoholic mother.

Speaking in the third person, Brando describes himself as  “a troubled man alone…confused”.   Listen to Me Marlon is filled with nuggets:

  • On his upbringing: “My father is never going to come near that child (his first son Christian) because of what he did to me”.
  • On his art: “you want to stop that motion from the popcorn to the mouth. The Truth will do that.”
  • On the womanizing that broke up his first marriage “The beast aspect of my personality held sway”.
  • On the execrable Candy: “the worst movie I ever made” (drawing knowing chuckles from the audience).

Some of the tapes even record self-hypnosis as he battles obesity.  And there’s a VERY COOL digitized talking Brando head; Brando tried out very early scanning technology, resulting in moving imagery of his head in swirling blue pixels as he expounds.

There are also two outtakes where we SEE Brando’s womanizing in action as he comes on to attractive interviewers.  We can recognize the instant that, as he says, he starts “thinking with his penis” and launches his flirtatious charm.

I saw Listen to Me Marlon at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where it will screen again this week.  Director Riley spoke at the screening, as did noted film historian David Thomson and Brando’s children, Rebecca Brando and Miko Brando.

Rebecca Brando credits Riley for the film’s “humanity” as it treats Brando’s “childhood pain”. Miko Brando pointed out that the flashing lights in some clips came from the bio-feedback machine that Brando used at night.  “He went to work as a movie star and came home – not a movie star – just a father”, said Miko, who had just seen the film for the second time.

David Thomson spoke of Brando’s “momentous”  and truthful Method as the birth of “genuinely American approach to acting” and its effect on cinema:  “the method is made for the close-up” because “if you are agonizing over what to say”, the audience needs to be close enough to see it.

I expect Listen to Me Marlon to get a theatrical release in the second half of 2015 and then play on Showtime.