The excavation of consummate MAGA poseur J.D. Vance’s “childless cat ladies” remark, combined with the Presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris—who is indeed childless, although also apparently cat-free—makes this an exceptionally ripe moment for the annual CatVideoFest. With proceeds going to local cat charities and animal welfare organizations, this hour and a quarter of furry follies opens nationwide this Fri/2, including Bay Area venues like SF’s Roxie Theater.
We’ll skim over two fact-inspired narrative features also opening this weekend, because they are covered elsewhere on the site. But both are sure to rank among the more deservedly crowd-pleasing films of the year. Greg Kwedar’s Sing Sing stars former local stage actor Colman Domingo and current Magic Theater Artistic Director Sean San José—along with a number of actual formerly incarcerated people, notably co-lead Clarence Maclin—in a vivid, poignant fiction based on the titular maximum security facility’s Rehabilitation Through the Arts program.
A different sort of artistic rehab is portrayed in Rich Peppiatt’s Kneecap, which likewise puts a somewhat imaginative spin on the origin story for its eponymous Irish hip-hop act, a West Belfast trio of two alleged “low-life scumbags” and one music teacher drawn together by a desire to express their (sometimes political, sometimes filthy, often both) innermost thoughts in Gaelic. Channeling a mad energy akin to Trainspotting without the heroin or dead babies, it is a blast.
Rapping against the Queen and doing hard time aren’t the only manly onscreen activities likely to enrage those dang childless cat ladies this weekend. Indeed, women’s rights have no place at all in the world of Hollywoodgate, which opens Friday at the Opera Plaza, with the director present that night; he will also appear for one-off screenings at the Roxie (Sat/3) and Rafael Film Center (Sun/4).
Ibrahim Nash’at’s documentary portrays the immediate aftermath of the US military abandonment of Afghanistan three years ago, to Taliban forces that had become an insurgency movement for nearly two decades. There is no discussion of how that came to pass, little of political or social issues. The filmmaker got permission to shoot on strict condition of limiting his purview to one high-ranking commander (air force chief Malawi Mansour) and one ground soldier (Lieutenant Mukhtar) during roughly a year’s transitional period, as the new/returned regime takes over Kabul Airbase.
What they find there is “enormous treasure” left behind by the Western “infidels”—albeit still just a fragment of over $7 billion in US equipment and supplies the Pentagon admits leaving in the hands of our sworn enemies. The mind boggles at the scale of this giveaway, a stunning testament to defense-budget bloat. There’s everything from refrigerators full of booze (not a big draw for the Taliban) to medicines, machine guns, a fully stocked gym, fleets of Black Hawk helicopters… things this military government will have to teach its forces to use. And it will.
We catch relatively few glimpses of civilian life. Most of Hollywoodgate is consumed by footage of soldiers and officers marveling (if in a mode more caustic than grateful) at the obscenely expensive booty “imperialists” left to them. But there’s an edge to it, not least in the subjects’ frequently overheard suspicion towards the camera crew. Violence is casually threatened, and sometimes just as casually issued, as when a man attempting to board a plane without some formal permission is repeatedly smacked. He doesn’t even seem surprised by that treatment.
A soldier examining a former sniper hideout shouts “Hey Jews, you lost your war!” to no one in particular. Mukhtar explains the “restored” gender norms, likening an unveiled woman to an unwrapped chocolate thrown on the ground—inedible because now it’s “dirty.” There are many such “Yikes!” moments here, with no need for external commentary. At least to American eyes, what the documentary primarily reveals is not so much the expected (and mostly off-screen) repression of Taliban rule, but the futility of our having wasted so many years, lives, and dollars (an estimated $2.2 trillion) waging war in another historically beleaguered land… ending in complete mission failure. “Western values” are a term of derision for those seen here. Yet again, the main effect we had on “hearts and minds” was to turn them rigidly against us.
Cinema from (as opposed to about) Afghanistan has had its own checkered history—successive regimes often destroyed whatever films and even theaters had preceded them, preferring to create their own audiovisual propaganda. Of course nations with healthy, ongoing film industries also produce state propaganda, variably veiled, particularly in times of war. The most concentrated such output in the US was during World War II, when a public initially resistant to joining other countries’ conflicts (as they had been a generation earlier) needed to be convinced, then kept in a state of patriotic willingness to sacrifice resources and loved ones.
Many of those movies are hard to watch now, with their villainous ethnic caricatures and extra-thick slicing of apple-pie sentimentality. Some of our allies took a dim view of Hollywood portrayals in which Errol Flynn or Van Johnson appeared to almost singlehandedly save poor afflicted foreigners from the Nazis—in movies that occasionally attributed an entire battle’s win to the wrong country’s troops, i.e. our own.
Noted as a strong exception to their artificial like, then and now, was The Story of G.I. Joe, based on war correspondent Ernie Pyle’s writings. Released in mid-1945—just after D-Day, not long before V-J Day—it was perhaps too soberly realistic to be a huge hit. Still, it did surprisingly well, and garnered four Oscar nominations, including the only one for Robert Mitchum, for whom it was a significant career breakthrough. He plays Lt. (later Captain) Walker, who laconically presides over US Army Company C as it engages in important battles on the Italian front lines.
The men are sometimes accompanied by journalist Pyle, played by Burgess Meredith—a fine actor who seems miscast here. He was the real-life figure’s secondary choice for the role, bizarrely following the #1 choice of effete English actor Leslie Howard. But the latter was killed in action before he could be cast, just as Pyle was before he could see the finished film. Mitchum, on the other hand, already sports the seemingly effortless natural authority that would secure stardom after his own brief real-life Army stint, which began once the film’s shooting ended.
However, G.I. Joe (a phrase that well predates the action figure, by the way) is more of an ensemble piece than any lead player’s vehicle. It’s about the life of a combat unit, with all attendant attrition through casualties, bonds forged between diverse personalities, and trauma accumulating in the occasional nervous breakdown. A WWI veteran who excelled from the late silents through the end of the 1940s, director William A. Wellman (best remembered now for James Cagney’s The Public Enemy, the original A Star Is Born, and 1939’s Beau Geste) brings a welcome air of authenticity to the episodic proceedings, despite some obvious back-projection, corny over-scoring and uneven performances.
There is combat footage that looks and may well be real, as well as a fine, eerie sequence in a bombed-out village. No less than General Eisenhower called Story “The greatest war film ever made.” Eighty years later, its flaws are more apparent, but it holds up much better than most of its ilk and era. It has just been released on Blu-ray in a 4K restoration by Ignite Films.
Two men who contributed real works of art to British propaganda during WW2—but remain best known for work made just after—are the subjects of David Hinton’s Made in England, which opens at the Roxie on Fri/2. Englishman Michael Powell had already done a lengthy apprenticeship in films (onscreen, behind the scenes, and directing umpteen British “quota quickies”) when he met Hungarian emigre Emeric Pressburger, the “genius of story and structure” to his dynamic “man of action.” First working together on 1939’s The Spy in Black, they quickly comprised a team without precedent in UK cinema, ambitious in ideas and bold in style, capable of making movies with international appeal.
They included lavish fantasy The Thief of Bagdad (1940), highest-end war propaganda 49th Parallel (1941), unexpectedly big-hearted satire The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), and magical-realist romance A Matter of Life and Death (1946). Nevertheless, their greatest impact would be made with two postwar exercises in very un-British sensuality and extravagance of eye-popping color: 1947’s Black Narcissus, a psychodrama of erotic repression set in a Himalayan nunnery, and 1949’s The Red Shoes, a gaga phantasmagoria of ballet, obsession, and neurotic fatalism.
The latter was a huge success, but “The Archers” (P&P’s production entity) was so dismayed by the lack of faith shown it by British entertainment mega-conglomerate distributor-producer Rank Organisation, they abandoned that longtime corporate umbrella thereafter. It was an unwise move, as subsequent films found the duo dogged by either commercial failure or studio interference, until the strain finally severed their partnership. Powell got practically blacklisted from the industry after his 1960 solo serial-killer piece Peeping Tom—released just two months before Hitchcock’s Psycho—was decried as lurid trash.
That film’s reputation underwent a rehabilitation much later, in part due to the championing of Martin Scorsese, who almost singlehandedly rescued Powell himself from obscurity. Made in England is basically an illustrated lecture by the fabled American director, who remains greatly influenced by the “color, light, movement, sense of music… the mystery and the hysteria” of Powell & Pressburger’s most characteristic achievements. Indeed, there may be a little too much emphasis here on drawing parallels to Scorsese’s own work, though one can understand how that might help introduce the late elder filmmakers to younger generations. Still, his methodical walk through their movies (including under-sung ones like A Canterbury Tale, The Small Back Room, and Gone to Earth) does whet the appetite to explore one of the more eccentric, as well as admirable, filmographies in the medium’s history.
Another London-based pursuit of art and sensuality—or at least exploitation of sex for art’s sake—lies at the core of Mikko Makela’s Sebastian, which opens Fri/2 at the Opera Plaza. This Scottish-Finnish coproduction has Ruaridh Mollica as the title figure… sort of. Actually, that name is the one used by Edinburgh native Max when he’s practicing his secret side gig as a rent boy, servicing mostly older men for pay. It’s ostensibly “research” for a novel he’s writing in his “real” vocation as a promising young scribe, one already published in Granta and employed at an upmarket magazine. But of course Max-Sebastian soon finds himself unable to quit this furtive identity, even when it means ignoring or threatening his day job.
I quite liked the director’s 2017 prior feature A Moment in the Reeds, a raw, deeply felt gay romance between a Finnish youth and a Syrian refugee. This English-language followup is much more polished, but feels titillating in familiar ways. It’s yet another fictive gawk at male hustling, combined with the even more cliched notion of a talented writer who apparently can’t possibly craft a story unless he actually borrows it from personal experience. Max is competitive and insecure (at age 24 he frets he’s “already late” to become a famous prodigy), vain, petulant, cute in a rather simpering way. He’s ambivalent about turning tricks, sometimes so transparently that we feel sorry for his clients. When one of them realizes he’s being used for “material,” he’s enraged, and who could blame him?
But it’s unclear whether the writer-director does. At the end, there’s meant to be a sense of liberation, of Max finally accepting “who he really is.” Still, it’s hard to applaud that conglomerate being, who’s simply lied his way to some degree of scandalous success. His semi-fictionalized memoir, if it really existed, would be all too like any number of literary con jobs we’ve read before, from JT Leroy to American Sniper and Hillbilly Elegy—books whose real achievement lies in the art of celebrity author self-promotion.
