Cinequest Celebs: Kevin Pollak
March 5, 2009 – 4:05 pm by Michael Gant
Kevin Pollak plays to the crowd Wednesday as Cinequest honors him with a Maverick Spirit Award. (Photo by Felipe Buitrago)
Cinequest Mar 4, Meet, Greet and Critique
March 5, 2009 – 1:17 pm by RvB
Hung out at the lounge on the second floor of San Jose Rep and met Corpse Run’s director John-Michael Thomas, who is proceeding onward to the Phoenix Film Festival; this self-taught filmmaker was talking about how he cast star Brea Grant right before she went up to the big time in TV’s Heroes. He also insists there’s a false dichotomy between indie and Hollywood films, feeling that one feeds the other. He’s sending me his film so more on it later.
Mostly, I yakked with Charlie Cockey, CQ’s man in Brno, who is still couch-camping to Follow That Dream; we were mostly talking about his former life as a folk rock musician in the Haight Ashbury days.
Arrived too late for the Chekhov adapataion of The Bet, though according to Alejandro Adams, it has the movie has that thing where there’s a “swoosh” sound every time there’s a whip pan. The programming was going smoothly, though sometimes films get held up in customs, presumably because some members of the Medellin Cartel are pressing loads of cocaine into the replicas of a 35mm film or something like that.
Went with Charley to Bitter and Twisted on multiple recommendations, and wasn’t disappointed. First came the in-house ‘Quest promotional film, with Danny Masterson being interviewed (and being a bit of a ween, if you ask me) as well as previews for Blue Road. “Bullcrit,” according to M. Snyder of San Francisco, is the term for the practice of relying on someone else’s review for judgement in yours. And yet, from the trailers, it looks like Metro’s Michael Gant nailed the film.
I mean, it’s great seeing the Vegas lights slide over a polished car hood; it was great even back in ‘78 when the car was being driven by Dan Tanna. However (as per the unjustly laureled In Search of a Midnight Kiss*) it’s good to see visuals making a comeback, after the indie-film movement had got rid of plot, writing, acting, and visuals. One out of four ain’t bad.
As for Bitter and Twisted—agree with Charlie that the title is awful, as awful as the title of Mommy Is at the Hairdresser’s (another must-see in Charlie’s estimation). But B & T, this wryly Australian twist on the Ordinary People plot, really had a lot going on. Noni Hazelhurst, as the neglected wife of a mountainously obese car salesman (Steve Rogers) starts looking for love in the wrong places; meanwhile “funny puppy” son Ben (Christopher Weeks) is getting picked up by a snazzy male friend. And the girl he thinks he loves, Indigo (Leeanna Walsman, Zam Wessell from the Star Wars saga, ahoy geeks) is of in love with a married man, and is bringing a baseball bat to the m.m.’s house to prove it. Melbourne stands in for Moscow in this Chekhovian drama of all-around failure and dashed hopes; Hazelhurst herself is the one who seemed like the standout in a melodrama-free comedy of disappointment. Good on yer, director Christopher Weekes.
Didn’t stay to see Kevin Pollak, but am good with that decision on the grounds that I had deadlines galore. I did hear his Shatner on KFJC, and it is a stitch.
Would like to recommend a couple of local attractions to visitors. “Some films are a slice of life, mine are a slice of cake,” said Hitchcock. If you’re looking for a slice of cake that’ll dwell in your memories, check the Flames Coffee Shop right next to the big San Jose library; the “Wheel of Ginormous Cakes” is an ancient San Jose pre-movie trad dating from the Flames’ other location next to the Domes on Winchester Boulevard.
Afterward, check out the Window Gallery on Fourth near Santa Clara for a display of eccentric and antique bicycles, including one Believe It or Not relic, a bike impaled by the trunk of a “Tree of Heaven”—”tree of heaven” being the pestilential exotic camphor that I dug up by the cord from the backyard of my Willow Glen house, enough to call it Tree of Purgatory. Was delighted to hear this plant has been nicknamed “Ghetto Palm.”
*to steal a joke from the outtakes of Tropic Thunder: “Runner Up at the Everyone Wins Film Festival”
Cinequest for March 4
March 4, 2009 – 11:25 am by Michael GantTonight’s best bet is definitely Fallen Angel: The Outlaw Larry Norman, a documentary about the religious rocker. It shows at 9:30pm at Camera 12.
Read Richard von Busack’s review at Metroactive.com
Tonight is also Kevin Pollak night, 7pm at the California Theatre. In a Metroactive.com interview, Pollak reminisces about his early stand-up days in the valley.
Also of interest is the long two-part Historia Extraordinarias
(Argentina) This long two-parter (a little over two hours for each half) by Argentine director Mariano Llinds charts the seemingly unrelated stories of three nondescript characters (so nondescript, they are named, a la Kakfa, by letters of the alphabet). In leisurely fashion, we learn about a man who comes into possession of a dangerous dossier connected to an infamous crime; a bureaucrat who stumbles into the obscure animal-smuggling ring of his predecessor; and a man hired to photograph the remains of a failed water-development project. The tales are mostly narrated, with only snippets of dialogue here and there. In a sense, the film is like reading a discursive novel (an effect doubled by the non-Spanish speakers needing to read the subtitles rather than just listen to the narrator). To avoid the inevitable question “Why couldn’t I stay home and read the book?” Llinds varies the visuals considerably, sometimes using tracking shots, sometimes assembling rapidly changing stills like a computerized slide show and sometimes ratcheting between color and black-and-white and playing games with sound effects and music. The air of knowing yet coy mysteriousness (“We will learn more about X’s adventures, but first we must tell you about what H was up to at this time …”) keeps pulling you along, although the payoffs to the three stories aren’t exciting enough to justify the equivalent of two full feature films. Animal lovers beware, the second half begins with a scene about a dying lion that may be hard to take. (MSG)
March 4 at 7:15pm, both at Camera 12.
Documentary Day at Cinequest
March 3, 2009 – 2:44 pm by Michael Gant
Two good documentaries to choose from today at Cinequest according to Metro’s critics.
Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio in the Red Shoes
(U.S.) Gently guiding an eclectic, eccentric ensemble of singers and performers through the down-home radio variety show A Prairie Home Companion for more than 30 years, Garrison Keillor has served as a godlike presence to his longtime listeners. Lacking a story arc, this documentary is less of a biopic and more of a collection of ruminations on the life and personal philosophies of this pragmatic comedian, writer and radio host. Onscreen, Keillor looks like an Al Hirschfeld caricature. His giant fuzzy caterpillar eyebrows and floppy neck make it obvious why Keillor stuck to radio, but his down-comforter of a baritone drives home the man’s genius for observation and pitch-perfect nostalgia. Unfortunately, the film neglects many details of Keillor’s personal life, including anything vaguely controversial. Staying on the comfortable but shallow surface, the film focuses on the backstage goings-on at his show and the corn-pone popularity of a man whose dedicated radio following still tunes in every week to hear him spin tales of the fictional Lake Wobegon. (Jessica Fromm)
March 3 at 7:15pm and March 7 at 6:45pm, both at Camera 12.
Heart of Stone
(U.S.) Beth Toni Kruvant’s documentary about a Newark, N.J., school redefines the concept of surviving high school. At Weequahic High, gangs rule all. Students pass through metal detectors to attend class, the principal wears a bulletproof vest and hallway fights between warring gang members are a common occurrence. The documentary chronicles Ron Stone, the intrepid principal of Weequahic High, and his personal mission to restore the school to its former academic glory. The most compelling scenes are of Stone’s one-on-one chats with gang leaders of the Bloods and Crips and the dedication of the older, Jewish and younger, African-American alumni who are devoted to raise money for scholarships. Kruvant’s gritty documentary is a powerful example of how inner city high schools can turn themselves around by following Stone’s unconventional lead. (Andrea Frainier)
March 3 at 7pm, both at Camera 12; and March 5 5pm at San Jose Rep.
Cinequest’s First Maverick for 2009
March 2, 2009 – 4:43 pm by RvB
Sweet Lou
Cinequest Maverick Spirit Award winnerLou Gossett Jr. brings new film to festival
The actor Louis Gossett Jr. co-wrote one memorable antiwar song, “Handsome Johnny”; as played by Richie Havens, it was a celebrated moment at Woodstock, a 1969 outdoor concert full of “people listenin’ to Mick Jagger and badmouthing our country ...” as Gossett’s most famous character would put it about 13 years later. Gossett also starred in a sci-fi antiwar parable, Enemy Mine, as an alien whose aggression had an understandable reason: the male alien was pregnant. So it’s ironic that Gossett’s best-known role is as a no-nonsense gung-ho military man, Gunnery Sgt. Emil Foley in 1982’s An Officer and a Gentleman. Gossett’s Oscar-laureated soldierly bearing was parlayed into four different Iron Eagle movies, where he created and reprised the role of “Chappy” Sinclair, another figure of toughness and probity. Starting off in the 1961 film version of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, Gossett worked with some noted directors: George Cukor in Travels With My Aunt, Hal Ashby in The Landlord and John Boorman in that director’s most obscure film, Leo the Last. Gossett is a solid comic actor; he was quite funny in a memorable Paul Bogart comedy Skin Game, which was unsuccessfully peeled off into a TV pilot with the less suggestive title Sidekicks. Gossett and James Garner posed as a slave and his master, all the better to fleece Southerners; this good-time, bad-taste comedy anticipated Blazing Saddles by a few years.
Gossett appears at Cinequest with his new film, The Least Among You, based on a true story of a man arrested after the Watts riots and sentenced to serve some time in a white seminary. At the seminary, the angry young man meets a janitor (Gossett) who is trying to conquer his own alcoholism. Gossett’s more than merely commanding presence, even in humble roles, suggests that alcoholism wouldn’t have a chance. This Maverick Spirit event includes a screening of the movie and a Q&A session with Gossett.
LOU GOSSETT JR. appears Monday (March 3) at 7pm at the California Theatre.
Cinequest Day 6 (March 2)
March 2, 2009 – 12:05 pm by RvB
Cinequest Monday:
Canary’s Alejandro Adams got interviewed by Karina Longworth, and she did a fine job of it.
Meanwhile, Monday’s screenings include some that might have been missed first time around, including the highly-recommended Rocaterrania (see Michael Gant’s review below), Bitter and Twisted (5pm, C12), and Necessities of Life (4:15pm, C12). We’re in touch with the Lewis Bros (of Billy Was a Deaf Kid) so we’ll have an interview up presently. Keep watching this space.
Rocaterrania
(U.S.) This fascinating documentary uncovers a significant artistic talent. Elderly, white-bearded Renaldo Kuhler has spent most of his life creating in drawings and text a mythical country called Rocaterrania, located on the border between Canada and New York. His fantastical visions depict a brightly tinted blend of Russian, Serbian and Jewish influences with touches of Middle Earth whimsy. The visuals come with ledger books full of written mythology, including a fully fleshed-out alphabet for Rocaterrania’s language. In some ways, Kuhler style resembles that of another obsessive outsider artist, without so much of the creepy sexuality centered on young girls. Kuhler, however, is not exactly a true outsider artist; his considerable skills were put to mainstream use in his day job as a scientific illustrator at a natural history museum; and he clearly must have learned something about design from his father, Otto Kuhler, a famous industrial designer responsible for streamliner trains in the 1930s. Kuhler’s parents were cold and unyielding, and when they took their sensitive teenage son to live on a remote Western range, he retreated into his imaginary world, using it to deflect his psychological traumas. If he had been born a decade later, Kuhler might have found his way into print earlier—it is easy to imagine him working side by side with R. Crumb (Kuhler draws lots of muscular, big-thighed women in the Crumb mold) at Zap comics. For that matter, a decade earlier and he could have been trading ideas with Joseph Cornell (as it is, Kuhler did contribute some title lettering to one of Stan Brakhage’s experimental films.) Filmmaker Brett Ingram has done a great surface by bringing Kuhler’s hidden universe to light. (MSG)
March 2 at 7:15pm andMarch 3 at 12:30pm, all at Camera 12
Cinequest filmmakers party on Friday at Vivid
February 28, 2009 – 9:31 am by Michael Gant
All About Dad’s editor Jeremy Castillo, director/producer Mark Tran and producer/director of photography Todd Banhazl at Vivid’s Cinequest Party
Michael Cecchi, Blanchard Ryan, Dave Steck and Julian Mark Kheel from Capers
(Photos by Felipe Buitrago of Metro)
Cinequest Shows Off on Friday; Two Million Stupid Women screens
February 28, 2009 – 9:20 am by Michael Gant
<>The cast and crew of “Two Million Stupid Women” before and during the screening of their film at the San Jose Rep on Friday at Cinequest.
(Photo by Felipe Buitrago)
Cinequest Presents Silent Epic Birth of a Nation
February 27, 2009 – 12:05 pm by RvB
Tonight at Cinequest brings what may be the most controversial film at the festival, and it is almost 100 years old.
The Birth of a Nation (1915)
The Civil War is fought and lost, and during its aftermath in the Reconstruction, the South is saved by bold, masked heroes: the Ku Klux Klan. Here is an example of the power of cinema, both as unifier and destroyer. D.W. Griffith’s silent epic invented much of the language of the movies. It was the first megahit—the most popular film for almost 20 years until Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and film school classes have been deservedly apologizing for it ever since. The skeleton in the American cinema’s closet, this epic is a lesson in how heedless filmmakers can be playing with dynamite without realizing it. Griffiths’ blundering attempt to write history revived the Klan, a national horror that made the South a wasteland of lynchings during the 1920s. His follow-up, Intolerance, was a handsome apology; unfortunately, it wasn’t as popular as this opus. To provide some much-needed context for modern audiences, the film will be introduced by professor Michael Cohen, who teaches American studies and African American studies at UC-Berkeley.
Shows Feb. 27 at 7pm at the California Theatre in San Jose; tickets are $12.
Gotta Love the Title
February 26, 2009 – 5:06 pm by Michael Gant
Not every film at Cinequest has to be a meditative chronicle of a doomed relationship or a cry of help for the oppressed of the world. There’s room for a good old-fashioned gore fest, as Metro reviewer Steve Palopoli writes about …
Samurai Avenger: The Blind Wolf
(U.S.) This geeky postmodern take on the samurai film is not so much a pastiche of psychotronic swordfight movies as it is a pastiche of Quentin Tarantino’s pastiche of those movies. In fact, it’s so much like Kill Bill—right down to the black-and-white flashbacks—that even some of its fans are likely to wonder what the point is. But this modern-day story of a blind Japanese swordsman who has to battle the big boss’s assassins on his quest for revenge takes itself less seriously—as in, not at all. One of the random bits of narration, for instance, lets us know: “He was an ordinary man. Happy marriage, happy family. A nightmare riding on the desert winds would change it all.” That’s about the tone of the whole thing, and it’s too hammy and silly sometimes. But the over-the-top violence, gore and general sleaze are pretty damn entertaining. Triple impalements, exposed intestines and geysers of blood from severed limbs abound. Writer-director-producer-star Kurando Mitsutake had a small role on TV’s Heroes, as White Beard. He seems to be having a lot more fun here, and it’s pretty infectious. (SP)
Feb. 27 at 11:30pm at Camera 12 and March 3 at 9:30pm at San Jose Rep.
