So far, as of Sunday afternoon, I've attended fourteen screenings at the San Francisco International Film Festival, have two more to go, and I'm enjoying myself immensely. Since the point of such festivals is to get the word out on little-known movies, I thought I'd post mini-reviews of what I've seen.
Once We Were Strangers is a romantic comedy set mostly in New York's East Village. It's an absolutely charming, gossamer-weight film, which totally immerses you in its world, but disappears as soon as the credits are over.
This is the first movie by director Emanuele Crialese as well as for most of his lead actors; he is clearly a talented director, because he's gotten terrific, joyous, natural performance out of all them. Vincenzo Amato (the director's real-life neighbor), plays the part of Antonio, a recently emmigrated Italian cook whose playful and stubborn personality sets the tone of the movie. Half of the movie is about Antonio's courtship of Ellen, the least clearly drawn of the main characters. Because I didn't get to care enough about Ellen, their story fell flat for me.
The other half of the movie is about Antonio's friend Apu, an immigrant from India who is thoroughly Americanized, and the arrival of his bride-to-be for their arranged marriage. Their expectations and anxieties about each other and married life lead drive the film's funniest and most touching scenes. Apu is intent on opening an Italian restaurant and becoming an American-style success, where his unnamed bride is bewildered by his life and wants to become part of it.
Once We Were Strangers currently has no arrangement for distribution, so it may not be easy to find in theaters. Definitely look for it in video stores. This is, at least, a great date movie.
Conceiving Ada is pretentious trash masquerading as an intellectual movie. It's the worst film I've seen at the festival, and among the ten worst I've seen in my life. There is no excuse for why it is as bad as it is, but the fault must lie with video artist and U.C. Davis professor Lynn Hershman Leeson who directed and co-wrote the screenplay.
The Ada from the title is, of course, Ada Augusta, Countess Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, who is considered to be the first computer programmer, based on her work with Charles Babbage and his Analytical Engine. The movie has a two-part structure, with Emmy, a computer scientist, trying, using many techniques of bad science fiction, to make contact with her heroine, Ada. By means of this narrative device, Ada's story is told, but don't rely on the movie's presentation for history - simple facts such as her date of birth are given wrong. Intermixed with this is the story of Emmy's relationship with her boyfriend, which is neither as interesting or believable as a television sitcom.
Uniformly, the acting was wooden. Tilda Swinton, who was terrific in Orlando, played Ada with no sense of involvement in the character. Because she is such a fine actress, again I blame the director for not being able to deliver convincing performances from any of the actors. There are cameos by Timothy Leary, filmed shortly before his death, and cyber-libertarian John Perry Barlow, explaining two-millenium-old cryptographic techniques to Ada as if they were new; it's fun to see both of them in the movie, but neither really adds anything.
Ada Lovelace lived a fascinating life and probably was the first person to write computer programs. We're told constantly that she made great contributions, but we're never made to understand them. More importantly, we're never shown anything. Ada deserves much better than this moive.
(Halfway into the movie, I realized I'd seen and loved a similar work before - that is, a split-time narrative with a 19th century heroine who's working on mathematics that become important in the 20th century, a present day story which makes an investigation of the past central to the action, and a tie to Byron. Tom Stoppard did that with a fictional story in his play Arcadia, which is probably the best thing I've ever seen on stage. What's the difference? Stoppard can write and he understood what he was writing about. He was able to build suspense in three or four related story lines, and created characters that were easy to care about. I strongly recommend seeing Arcadia if you get the chance; you can also order the script from Amazon.com.)
While the basis for Attila Janisch's Long Twilight is Shirley Jackson's short story The Bus (which appears in the collection Come Along with Me), its Eastern European setting and haunting tone feel much more like a work of Kafka's than something written by an American. I found this compelling movie to be absolutely terrifying, without ever understanding why I was terrified.
Mari Torocsik plays a Hungarian college professor in her sixties, who sets out across some fields spontaneously to visit an area she once knew. After walking for a while, she boards a bus, and at that point is no longer in control of the journey. Torocsik is a remarkable actress playing a very rare role for an older woman - strong and wise, but carefree and open-minded.
Much of Long Twilight has a dreamy feel, and you're never sure what reality is. The story seems at first to progress linearly, then backtracks and starts over several times, with chilling repititions of earlier images and revived memories for our heroine. Janisch has made a very accomplished, very mysterious movie - I recommend strongly.
I Went Down is a classic gangter/caper movie, lightened by the same sort of black humor as Pulp Fiction. Like Bird People of China, it's a road movie and a buddy picture. In this case, the unlikely buddies are Git, who's earnest, innocent, and recently released from prison, and Bunny, a petty thug who thinks quickly, but not very deeply. The story sends them around Ireland hunting for money, hostages, men with friendly faces, and buried secrets.
Brendan Gleeson does an absolute star turn as Bunny. Considering himself a professional, he takes Git under his wing, giving him instructions and not taking no for an answer; it's immediately obvious to everyone but Bunny that everything he says will get them in trouble. Peter McDonald plays Git with the winsome charm of John Cusack, caught in situations he never expected, but is capable of dealing with.
This is the one documentary we're seeing at this year's film festival, and it was a real disappointment. Mingus seems fascinating and what we got to hear of his music was terrific, but I left feeling I knew very little of him. The director, Don McGlynn, never brought us close to his subject, which left a rather cold feeling.
Perhaps the best, and most intimate, moments of the documentary were of his ex-wives reminiscing about Mingus. Also interesting was hearing the composer Gunther Schuller talking about Mingus's compositions and wondering how this young, mixed-race black man from Watts knew the music of Schoenberg in the 1930s, which is a question the film never answers.
Another complaint I have with Charles Mingus: Triumph of the Underdog is that it was made on video, and projected at the screening we saw. That seems perfectly reasonable if the aim was to show it on PBS stations, but the image quality and sound was terrible for a theater seating nearly one thousand people at a film festival.
This short video, shown before Charles Mingus, watches a reheasal of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. I don't know anything about the Art Ensemble - they may be wonderful musicians and interesting people - but this video offers no context, never lets you hear their music, and does not show them off favorably in the least. It's tedious to just hear bits and pieces of their music, without ever hearing them together.
This wonderful movie is about a young Japanese businessman who travels to a remote region in China, looking for Jade, and a world-weary gangster who's keeping tabs on him. Their journey takes them, by some rather unlikely means of transportation, to an isolated village where, tradition has it, people can to fly. Think of Midnight Run, Mediterraneo, and Like Water for Chocolate mixed together in an Asian background.
Takashi Miike directs with real finesse, effortlessly shifting between the hilarious and the sentimental. The tempo of the movie is used to wonderful effect to show differences from fast-paced Tokyo at the beginning to the small village in China, making a contrast no less striking than a shift from Kansas to Oz.
Miike has also taken advantage of stunning settings to make an absolutely beautiful film, and though this movie has several of the funniest scenes I've ever seen on screen, it's much more than a piece of slapstick. If you have a chance to see Bird People of China, do.
After seeing Tamango and He Ran All The Way, I've vowed to never see another John Berry film. Tamango tells of a revolt on a slave ship. It's predictable from the start, with no characters rising above allegorical shorthands. And while the portrayal of the slaves was probably progressive for 1957, when the film was made, the noble savage stereotype feels both ahistorical and patriarchal.
The main reason we had wanted to see Tamango was for Dorothy Dandridge's performance as the captain's lover and slave. Dandrige is certainly beautiful, but this role gave her nothing to work with. The other actors, notably Alex Cressan as the slave leading the revolt and Curd Jürgens as the ship's captain, give solid performance, but all they get the chance to do is convey the one-dimensionality of their characters.
Tamango was filmed in glorious Cinemascope and Berry does have a sense for visuals. The beautiful colors combine with the wide screen to leave some dramatic sailing images. On the other hand, he can't direct a fight sequence for his life, and the actual rebellion sequence is so poorly done that it makes no sense at all. Finally, most of the actors were badly dubbed into English in the version we saw (there may still be an extant French version), which raised some logistical questions about the movie, such as what languages were the slaves or crew speaking to each other?
Perhaps the only way to make a fresh and convincing Western these days is to merge it with a Hong Kong martial arts film. Which is exactly what Sammo Hung Kam-Bo has done with the sixth installment of the Wong Fei-hung series. Overflowing with Western cliches (bad Indians, good Indians, corrupt law enforcement, the whore with the heart of gold) and the plot devices of melodrama (amnesia, double- and triple-crossing villains), Once Upon a Time in China and America does do something a little bit different, by focusing on the plight of Chinese mine workers, but that's little more than a cover story for justifying the presence of Chinese nobleman Wong Fei-hung, played by the charismatic Jet Li, in the 19th-century American west.
The stars of the movie, of course, are the incredibly choreographed fight sequences, which feature acrobatics never seen before with a sagebrush background. Jet Li and Hung Yan-yan (playing Seven, the classic sidekick role) are simply geniuses in this Hong Kong form of ballet.
All dialogue in the movie is double-subtitled, in both English and Cantonese, and it's clear from the number of times that the spoken English diverges from the subtitles that the precise wording was not that important to the movie.
When buying tickets for the film festival, we didn't set out with the goal of seeing Kung Fu movies. I'm certainly not very knowledgeable about the genre, and I've not seen any other Jet Li movies. But while this may not be the best film I've seen at the festival so far, it's the one I've enjoyed the most.
First of all, Xiu Xiu is an absolutely stunning movie. It's the first film directed by Joan Chen, and she demonstrates a marvelous ability for drawing performances from the actors. She also makes the most of the rolling hills of the grasslands near the Tibetan border, where the movie was filmed.
The taut unity of Xiu Xiu makes it feel like a short story, and, in fact, it was adapted from a story by a friend of Chen's, Geling Yan. The film is the intertwined tragedies of the two main characters. It follows Wen Xiu, a teenage girl from Chengdu, who is sent to the countryside during the cutural revolution, and is left behind with Lao Jin, a Tibetan horse herder, when the educated youth start returning to the cities. Wen Xiu's tragedy is that of an innocent who thinks herself sophisticated, thrown into a situation beyond her abilities. Lao Jin's tragedy is to develop a profound love for someone who can't reciprocate it. Perhaps the most moving scene shows Lao Jin, after many efforts to make Wen Xiu happy, simply watching her eat an apple.
My major complaint about the movie is that the subtitles seemed clumsy and simple-minded, and felt out of character from what you saw of the speakers. Also, short bits of narration by a friend of Xiu Xiu's from home frame the story, but detract by creating an irrelevant character who we never learn anything about, while the narration tells almost nothing that we don't see for ourselves.
This is an American film noir from 1951, directed by the soon-to-be-blacklisted John Berry. It's a story of a robbery that goes wrong and turns into a hostage situation. Unfortunately, it's a terrible movie. The script is laughably bad, setting up the situation with no real tension. Perhaps worst (and funniest) of all, is the casting of a young Shelley Winters as the ingénue. On the bright side, John Garfield as the dimwitted triggerman, in what appears to have been his last role, is terrific. And the newly restored print is beautiful to watch, if you can get past the action on the screen.
The obvious pitch line for this recent French movie - a musical, romantic comedy about AIDS - makes it seem like it's trying a little too hard to become an unlikely favorite. It's easy to focus on the bad parts, but I actually enjoyed Jeanne, mostly due to its spritely sense of timing and the two lead actors, Virginie Ledoyen playing Jeanne and Mathieu Demy as the garçon formidable. The disappointments include the skimpy storyline and the music itself.
People who don't like musicals will not like this one; I don't mind disrupting the story for a musical sequence, so I wasn't bothered. If you do want to see this movie, make sure you see it in a theater, because video won't do justice to the rich, bright colors or the full widescreen images.
This collage-based animated short, shown before Jeanne and the Perfect Guy, takes Jimmy Olsen places you'd never seen him before. While it goes on a little long, and thus loses its power to shock from the justapositions, it benefits from a wonderful score of three soulful, jazzy solos, including ones by Frank Sinatra and, I think, Paul Robeson. Catch it if you can.
| Date | Time | Movie |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday 5/3 | 6:00 | Surrogate Mother |
| Monday 5/4 | 12:45 | Murmer of Youth |