The end of summer traditionally brings a lull in new mainstream movies, as nobody wants to unleash another costly popcorn epic just as the kids are heading back to school, and the fall season of prestige releases aimed at adults has yet to begin. This week there are just two major commercial releases, neither available for preview by presstime: Actor Zoe Kravitz’s directorial debut Blink Twice, a tricksy thriller that casts Channing Tatum as an untrustworthy tech billionaire hosting an invitation-only party on his private island (uh-oh); and a “re-invention” of The Crow, with Bill Skarsgard now cast as the goth comic book superhero essayed by Jason Lee—who was killed in an on-set accident—30 years ago.
There is, however, a great deal of worthwhile screen fodder arriving outside the multiplex, whether in arthouses, rep houses, or on home formats, including beaucoup de golden oldies. The Alamo Drafthouse New Mission is launching a monthly “Weird SF” program of “cult classics, forgotten oddities, and avant-garde works that capture the unique spirit of the Bay Area.”
I’m not sure any of those categories apply to Paul Verhoeven’s 1992 smash Basic Instinct (playing Sept. 25), the lurid murder mystery that—for better or worse—made Sharon Stone a star. But they certainly did to 1984’s heavily MTV-influenced Electric Dreams, a romcom hinging on the then-novelty of a personal computer, which kicks off the series. Ditto Space Is The Place (Oct. 23), Sun Ra’s Afro-Futurist sci-fi curio from a decade prior; Raising Cain (1992), one of De Palma’s baroque exercises in Hitchcockian suspense; and on Dec. 18, The Green Fog, a marvelous 2017 pastiche film by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson that weaves clips from umpteen archival SF-set films into an experimental narrative paying homage to Vertigo.
If you’re seeking something avant-garde in a more up-to-the-moment vein, the same venue can scratch that itch with a “Weird Wednesday” showing on Aug. 28 of The All Golden (more info here). Nate Wilson’s “polyamorous soap opera” is a densely layered construct of vintage audiovisuals (including Taxi Driver and Ulmer’s The Black Cat), nouveau melodrama, much onscreen text, split screen effects, burrito eating, superimposition, gunplay, hot candle-wax dripping, Nazi secrets, and Jackson Browne. It is, like The Green Fog, an elaborate whatsit bound to tempt repeat viewings.
The Alamo is also hosting a 50th-anniversary run of Coppola’s The Conversation (more info here), a quintessential Watergate-era paranoid thriller with Gene Hackman as a San Francisco surveillance expert drawn into a case that is not at all what it seems. It was overshadowed in 1974 by that director’s much bigger hit The Godfather Part II, but this unsettlingly quiet thriller has only gained stature with the ensuing years. A new 4K restoration begins screening as of Fri/23.
Over at the Roxie, the next day brings a first screening of another restoration: Vittorio De Sica’s 1947 Shoeshine (more info here), one of the key titles in the postwar Italian neo-realism movement that changed filmmaking currents worldwide. Using that epoch’s characteristic non-studio locations and nonprofessional actors, it follows two Roman street urchins (Rinaldo Smordoni, Franco Interlenghi) as their attempts at simple survival lead to a juvenile detention facility not at all different from adult prisons, and worse.
That film’s society in bombed-out ruins provides high contrast to the gleaming new world of sleek post-WW2 consumerism glimpsed in Modernism, Inc. (more info here), which opens at the Roxie Fri/23. Jason Cohn’s documentary provides an appreciative overview to the career of Eliot Noyes, who had an extraordinarily influential impact on design in everything from IBM products to Mobil gas stations. We wrote about it at greater length when it played SF Indiefest earlier this year.
A couple features that played the SF Jewish Film Festival are now in general circulation. From last year’s edition, there’s The Secret Art of Human Flight, which after a fleeting recent theatrical run arrives on VOD platforms this Fri/23. Colma: The Musical creator H.P. Mendoza’s latest, written by Jesse Orstein is an unpredictable whimsy in which a severely depressed widower (Grant Rosenmeyer) hires a “life coach”-slash-“guru” named Mealworm (Paul Raci) to roust him out of his funk—which this oddball figure achieves, though by means that range from the alarming to the possibly criminal.
The recent loss of a wife also has a disabling effect on Ben (Jason Schwartzman) in Between the Temples, which was a highlight in the JFF program last month. The needed spiritual tonic is unexpectedly provided by 70-something Carla (Carol Kane), whom he hasn’t seen since she was his 6th-grade music teacher. Writer-director Nathan Silver’s film is a shambling neurotic comedy with echoes of Harold and Maude and The Heartbreak Kid; it’s very funny stuff, if you can take the rollcall of annoying character personalities on display. It opens in Greater Bay Area theaters this Fri/23.
Two adventurous new dramas are getting under-radar releases as of the same date. Going straight to arthouse streamer MUBI is the French Passengers of the Night, in which another suddenly-single figure occupies center stage. Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Elisabeth is a Parisian mother of two in 1980s Paris whose husband has just left her; Mikhael Hers’ deceptively casual story leaps across years and major changes in several characters’ lives. It’s a warm-hearted piece with cumulative punch much accentuated by a soundtrack full of vintage Europop hits you may have forgotten, but will be glad to hear again.
A much, much bloodier affair is Strange Darling, the stylish, shot-on-35mm second feature for writer-director JT Mollner, whose 2017 debut Outlaws and Angels was arguably a better one-setting Old West frontier grand guignol than Tarantino’s Hateful Eight. This new “Thriller In 6 Chapters” scrambles chronology, and our expectations with it. Starting at what turns out to be a narrative midpoint, we first experience the figure designated only as “The Lady” (Willa Fitzgerald) as a classic damsel in distress, fleeing a maniacal man (Kyle Gallner as “The Demon”) who shoots out her car’s back window and continues pursuit on foot once she crawls from the subsequent crash wreckage. But soon we have reason to question just who is the victim and who the serial killer in this scenario, as the twists just keep on coming.
Featuring a thundering original score by Craig DeLeon, songs by indie pop goddess Z Berg, striking widescreen cinematography by actor Giovanni Ribisi, and several familiar faces (including Barbara Hershey and Ed Begley Jr.) in short-lived support roles, this rural Oregon-set neo-noir/black comedy is as inventive as it is self-conscious. It has the kind of clever showiness that cloaks a lack of any real emotion, or meaning—but you will not be bored. The film opens Fri/23 at SF’s downtown Metreon, Cinemark Century Daly City, the AMC Bay Street 16 in Metreon, and other Bay Area theaters.
Finally, the Pacific Film Archive is providing a rare opportunity this week to take in pretty much an entire career in one concentrated gulp. “The Films of Lynne Ramsay” (more info here) gathers all four features and several shorts to date from the Scottish director whose work has consistently won acclaim—yet she’s also been dogged by ill luck on projects that failed to come to fruition or were taken away from her. (Most notable among the latter was The Lovely Bones, whose film version she became attached to before the novel was published. When it became an international best seller, the suddenly-hot commodity was yanked away and given to just-post-Lord of the Rings Peter Jackson—whose budget-bloated vision, cluttered with CGI fantasy imagery, made everyone regret that decision.)
The brief series starts this Thurs/22 with her 1999 first feature Ratcatcher, set in Ramsay’s native town of Glasgow in 1973. Then, a garbage workers’ strike made life in some of the UK’s bleakest public housing even more grim. 12-year-old James (William Eadie) is surrounded by casual cruelties, and feels horribly responsible when a playmate drowns after some roughhousing. But as is often the case with Ramsay, this seeming exercise in Ken Loach-type downscale realism has unexpected moments of lyrical flight. It’s a remarkable debut.
The director followed it with Morvern Callar (2002), which plays the following night; in it, Samantha Morton plays a young woman whose enigmatic reaction to a partner’s suicide leads to an equally ambiguous holiday in Spain. Saturday brings the 2011 We Need To Talk About Kevin, with Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly as the baffled, horrified parents of a school shooter; Sunday it’s the 2017 You Were Never Really Here, a cryptically stunning crime drama casting Joaquin Phoenix as a contract killer whose comingled violence and conscience-stricken pain are complicated by PTSD as a Gulf War veteran. Unfortunately due to scheduling issues, Ramsay will not be presenting her films in-person as originally announced, but they’re worth a trip to BAMPFA nonetheless.
