Mine 9

10 overlooked movies of 2019

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Luke Lorentzen’s MIDNIGHT FAMILY. Courtesy of SFFILM

I posted my traditional Top Ten list – Best Movies of 2019. Now here are some gems that you probably haven’t heard of.

  • Midnight Family. This gripping documentary takes us on ridealongs with an all-night ambulance crew in Mexico City. It’s even wilder than you may expect. Midnight Family is just finishing a brief theatrical release, and I expect it will be available to stream soon.
  • Light from Light. Three portraits of personal awakening are ingeniously embedded into what looks like a familiar haunted house movie. I’ll let you know when it’s streamable.
  • Sword of Trust. This is a wickedly funny comedy with an emotionally powerful personal story underneath it all. Great performances by Marc Maron and the film’s director Lynn Shelton. You can buy, but not yet rent, Sword of Trust. I’ll let you know when it’s available.
  • Auggie. In this superb indie, augmented reality glasses fulfill every need and insidiously trigger even more inner desires.  Stream from Amazon, iTunes and Vudu.
  • The Sound of Silence. Peter Sarsgaard stars in this novel and engrossing character study about obsession. Stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
  • Rojo. Set just before Argentina’s bloody coup in the 1970s, this moody, atmospheric film works as a slow-burn thriller. Stream from Amazon, iTunes and Vudu.
  • Mine 9. This race-against-the-clock rescue thriller is both a mine safety exposé and a mining procedural.  I’ll let you know when it’s available to stream.
  • Jirga. A man goes on a quest in this parable of atonement. The film was shot guerilla-style, under cover in wartorn, terrorist infested Afghanistan. Stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and Redbox.
  • Making Montgomery Clift. This biodoc is an unexpectedly insightful and nuanced probe into the life of Montgomery Clift, and it explodes some of the lore that has shaped popular understanding of the movie star. Stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Redbox.
  • Long Day’s Journey into Night. This brilliantly original film explores memory – a man obsessed with a doomed romance from twenty years ago plunges into a neo-noir underworld.  After a slow burn beginning, his search reaches its climax in a spectacular ONE-HOUR single shot. It can be streamed on Amazon, iTunes and Vudu.
  • Mr. Klein. This is actually a reissue of a 1976 film that almost nobody has seen in 43 years. Joseph Losey’s slowburn thriller is a searing critique of French collaboration with the Nazis. Mr. Klein stars Alain Delon as a predator trapped by his own obsession. It is not currently available on the major streaming platforms, nor can it be found on DVD, except for some bootlegs from Asia.

Yes, two of my Overlooked movies are also on my Best of 2019 list. I’ll let you know when you can stream the ones that aren’t yet available.

Marc Maron in SWORD OF TRUST

CINEQUEST 2019: festival preview

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cq logo

I’ve already seen over twenty offerings from Cinequest 2019, and here are my initial recommendations. As usual, I focus on the world and US premieres. Follow the links for full reviews, images and trailers. I’ve also included some tips for making the most of the Cinequest experience under “Hacking Cinequest”.

CLOWNVETS

FEEL GOOD

  • Clownvets: In this documentary, famed hospital clown Patch Adams heals the PTSD of US combat veterans by ministering to neglected souls in the third world. I am generally not a fan of warmhearted movies, but Clownvets moved even me. I expect Clownvets to be the Feel Good hit of this year’s Cinequest and to win the Audience Award. World premiere and Patch Adams himself is expected to attend.

 

Richard Kind in AUGGIE

INDIE

    • Auggie :  In this brilliant indie, augmented reality produces addictive temptation.  Great performance by Richard Kind.  World premiere.

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MINE 9

THRILLER

  • Mine 9: This is Cinequest’s best thriller, a gripping, smart  and remarkably authentic mine rescue cliffhanger.  World premiere.

 

 

HIER

WORLD CINEMA

  • Hier:  In this brilliantly original and trippy thriller, an executive takes what he thinks will be a quick trip to Morocco, but becomes entangled in a series of mysteries.  He becomes a detective but doesn’t fully understand what he is looking for in his own past.  North American premiere.
  • A Shelter Among the Clouds: In this beautiful and unhurried Albanian drama, a simple man regards human behavior.  North American premiere.
  • Little Histories: The premise of this inventive Venezuelan anthology is that sometimes the great events of history affect – and even change – our lives. And sometimes those events are merely the backdrop to our own personal dramas. World premiere.

 

LAST SUNRISE

SCIENCE FICTION

  • Last Sunrise: In this edge-of-your-seat Chinese sci-fi thriller, we’re in a super-hi tech future, powered almost totally by solar energy –  until our Sun dies.  North American premiere.

 

Kelsea Bauman-Murphy and appendage in VANILLA

COMEDY

  • Vanilla: There’s an odd couple and a road trip, but the portrait of two characters who have trapped themselves in poses elevates this very smart comedy.  World premiere.

 

Franz Rogowski in TRANSIT. Courtesy of Music Box Films

TWO I HAVEN’T SEEN YET

  • Transit:  The latest from director Christian Petzold, the master filmmaker of Barbara and Phoenix. This time, Petzold brings us an escape story that takes place in WW II, but the movie is shot in modern Europe.
  • The Man Who Killed Don Quixote: The festival’s closing night film is Terry Gilliam’s finally successful attempt to put Don Quixote on film and stars Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce.  Gilliam was the American member of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the one behind the surreal animation.  The trippiness of Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Twelve Monkeys and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus all sprang from Gilliam’s imagination.  The Movie Gourmet usually doesn’t assign homework, but I recommend the 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha, about Gilliam’s apparently cursed 2002 attempt to film Don Quixote, available to stream on Amazon and iTunes.

 

TELEVISION

  • Taboo: Many will cringe at the promise of this Belgian reality show: a humorist spends time with four dying people and then hosts an entire audience full of terminally ill people for his stand-up comedy show – about their situation. It’s surprisingly empathetic and touching.

 

DOCUMENTARY

  • Travel Ban: Make America Laugh Again: Besides, Clownvets, I recommend this serious documentary with some hilarious comedy.  Comedians confront the misunderstanding, bigotry and hatred faced by Americans who are Muslim and by Americans whose families come from the Middle East.  World premiere.

 

CLASSIC MOVIE EXPERIENCE

  • The silent Steamboat Bill, Jr. with Buster Keaton will be projected in a period movie palace, the California Theatre, accompanied by world-renowned Dennis James on the Mighty Wurlitzer organ.

 

BEFORE IT’S IN THEATERS – SEE IT HERE FIRST

  • Several Cinequest films already are planned for theatrical release later this year. I haven’t seen them yet, but you can see them first at Cinequest:   Sometimes Always Never, Freaks, Hotel Mumbai, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, The Hummingbird Project, Peterloo, The Public, Teen Spirit, The Third Wife, Transit, The Chaperone, The Wedding Guest and Woman at War.

 

HACKING CINEQUEST

Cinequest retains 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.

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 2019 page, with links to all my coverage.  Follow me on Twitter for the latest.

MINE 9: betting your life…every day

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MINE 9

The superb thriller Mine 9 opens with men at work in a dangerous workplace – a coal mine two miles under their hometown.  Something goes wrong, but the men, under the confident, expert direction of their Section Leader Zeke (Terry Serpico), demonstrate their training and quickly quell the emergency.  Once on the surface, Zeke thinks that methane levels have made the mine too dangerous; but his crew demand to return to the mine because they can’t afford the lost paychecks.  They are betting their lives for those paychecks.

To keep the crew – his friends and family members – as safe as possible, Zeke reluctantly leads them back underground.  Then a methane explosion traps them deep underground.  They must find a way out and soon – they only have a one-hour supply of oxygen and time is ticking away.  What happens next is a gripping page-turner.

Mine 9 is the second feature for writer-director Eddie Mensore.  A major reason it’s so successful is that Mensore has delivered remarkable verisimilitude;  he has created what we accept to be a specific claustrophobic workplace.  Mine 9 is both a mine safety exposé and a mining procedural.  I can’t think of another movie that shows the underground safety protocols and the use of real modern mining machinery.

Mine 9 is also an exploration of – and contemplation on – the inherent danger of coal mining.  These miners come from a local and family tradition of mining, so they accept dangers that the rest of us would not; if these men lived somewhere else, they would have safer jobs – but they haven’t seen any opportunity to move out of coal country.

And then there’s the economic imperative.  In Mine 9, the miners understand that the mine has become more dangerous than usual.  But the fear of missing even one paycheck outweighs what we would see as a crazy risk.

One of the crew, the 18-year-old son and nephew of the miners, is going underground for the first time, so the audience is able to see the work environment through his lens, without the more experienced miner’s earned sense of comfort.  He is quickly shown an undecipherable diagram of the mine and told, if anything goes wrong, go here.  Good luck with that.

All of the performances are very good, especially those of Terry Serpico as Zeke and Erin Elizabeth Burns as the on-site mine manager Teresa.  Movies often portray the non-college educated working class, especially in Appalachia, as ridiculous, dumbass rednecks or with some artificial nobility.  As written by Mensore and played by Serpico and Burns, Zeke and Teresa, both smart and inventive under pressure, also appreciate how the business environment has taken away their best options to protect the workers.

Mine 9′s soundtrack, which can be sampled here,  is filled with haunting Appalachian music that helps give the film a sense of place.  This is a culture that recognizes, even in its music  that death is always near.

Cinequest hosts the world premiere of Mine 9, the best thriller at this festival.  Stay through the end credits to meet some real coal miners.