Almost exactly a half-century ago (give or take a couple months), the big noise in US theaters was the arrival of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II, the first sequel to what was then the highest-grossing movie of all time. Pretty much exactly 45 years ago, equal fanfare greeted the general release of a long-aborning, more personal Coppola joint, Apocalypse Now. This week history repeats itself—albeit probably not in comparable commercial terms—with the man’s Megalopolis, an even longer-aborning, entirely self-penned and self-financed project that has already excited a wide range of responses as a fabled filmmaker’s magnum opus and/or grand folly.
In any case, the independent artistic spirit that’s bookended his career—with a variably rewarding mainstream Hollywood stint in the long middle—endures in a number of lower-profile openings this week. They include a couple of the year’s best films, as well as some ambitious mixed bags. But first, mention should be made of a single-day event and several revivals.
Arriving as a sort of warmup to next week’s opening onslaught of local fall film festivals, Scumdance is returning to The Lost Church in SF, this year’s edition condensed to just two roughly three-hour “film blocks” in the afternoon and evening of Sat/28. This showcase for “the best and weirdest underground movies” encompasses horror, animation, comedy, political commentary, the avant-garde, and more. The two dozen titles programmed are all shorts, with the exception of gonzo Italian fantasy narrative Requiem Espresso, and hour-long documentary Albert Pyun: King of Cult Movies.
That last is about the late Hawaii-born director who churned out 55 films in 40 years, most of them goofy genre exercises that went “direct to video”—though he did work with notable stars, including Jean-Claude Van Damme, Burt Reynolds, Christopher Lambert and Ice-T, some interviewed here. Lisa D’Apolito’s fond tribute stirs considerable curiosity about a driven eccentric who was in it “for the pure joy of making movies,” caring little about career advancement or box-office success. Full info on Scumdance can be found here.
There’s also an assortment of re-releases this week. Actor James Duval will appear at each screening Sat/28-Sun/29 at Berkeley’s BAMPFA of “Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy” (more info here)—the three movies (1993’s Totally F***ed Up, 1995’s The Doom Generation, 1997’s Nowhere) that took the queer Amerindie bad boy’s hipster nihilism to surreal, sexy extremes. Another bemusedly anarchic vision of youth, Richard Linklater’s delicious 1970s flashback Dazed & Confused, celebrates its 30th anniversary with two screenings of a 4K restoration at the 4 Star Theater Sun/29 (more info here ).
Painter Julian Schnabel’s 1996 all-star directorial debut Basquiat, with Jeffrey Wright at the titular fellow traveler in NYC’s red-hot 1980s art scene, arrives at the Roxie beginning Fri/27 (more info here)—its own new restoration altered from the original color to B&W. Last and perhaps least—unless you’re one of the Internet Movie Database users who’ve voted it into the Top 20 films of all time—there’s Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi cipher Interstellar. It is getting a general re-release this Friday because, well, it’s a whole decade old now. Huzzah.
New releases of note:
A Different Man
Nolan is considered by many the king of thinky filmmakers, at least within the mainstream. But for my money a better contender for that title is Aaron Schimberg, whose own screen Rubik’s Cubes have a more playful (as well as intellectual) mix of Pirandello and retro-B-movie genre schlock. His intriguing prior features (Go Down Death, Chained for Life) laid path for this latest, in which those themes and devices really come into full fruition. Adam Pearson plays Edward, a New Yorker with neurofiromatosis, whose severe facial disfiguration gives him an “Elephant Man”-like appearance.
Accustomed to stares, gasps and unkind laughter, he gets through life simply trying to keep as low a profile as possible. But that rather bleak existence begins to shift with the arrival of attentive if mercurial new neighbor Ingrid (Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve from The Worst Person in the World), then the offer to be a test subject in an experimental drug cure. When one day Edward, now played by actor Sebastian Stan, abruptly becomes unrecognizable—in a socially acceptable “good” way—he decides to embrace a wholly new identity. But discarding the old one proves thornier than expected, particularly since Ingrid is now producing a play she’s written based on interactions with the neighbor she believes dead.
A Different Man starts out rather slowly, in a mode of cruel black-comedy miserabilism akin to last year’s off-putting Beau Is Afraid. There are no end of layers Schimberg eventually piles onto the familiar bones of his premise (basically ye olde “reborn through plastic surgery” concept), however, with elements of camp horror, mystery, satire, surrealism and inquiry into the perversities of human nature—not to mention human appearance. What this writer-director’s precise endgame is, I can’t say. But he’s crafted a movie as original, unpredictable, and provocative as any you’re likely to see this year. Beside its fascinating intricacies, the concurrent The Substance—another semi-satirical indictment of looksism—seems as coarse as a Punch ’n’ Judy show. It opens in Bay Area theaters this Fri/27.
All Shall Be Well
A different, more discreet form of shunning befalls the central character in this fine drama from Ray Yeung, best known for his prior gay male narratives Twilight’s Kiss and Cut Sleeve Boys. Angie (Patra Au) and Pat (Lin-Lin) are a lesbian couple in Hong Kong who’ve comfortably retired after decades of climbing from textile factory workers to textile factory owners. But when Pat suddenly passes away following an accident, her family—whom the duo had been awfully generous to over the years—chooses to ignore the long-running domestic partnership, which has little legal standing here. Worse, Pat left no signed will, and the shared home and other assets were in her name…so these greedy relatives have few obstacles to claiming the fruits of the success they’d always resented in their “aunties.”
This whole story is reminiscent of the first and best segment in 2001 omnibus cable movie If These Walls Could Talk 2, which had a heartbreaking Vanessa Redgrave as a woman left with nothing after her late same-sex spouse’s hitherto estranged relatives arrive to summarily claim their “inheritance.” But that story took place in 1961—Yeung’s tale is set now, revealing the lingering biases of a supposedly tolerant society. Not the incessant downer it may sound like, All Shall Be Well is involving and nuanced, eschewing melodrama for astute character observation. It opens Fri/27 at the Roxie, Balboa and Smith Rafael Film Center.
Fallible Fathers: ‘In the Summers,’ ‘Mountains’
Two US independent dramas, both feature debuts for their writer-directors, offer low-key, naturalistic yet potent looks at difficult working-class family dynamics. Monica Sorelle’s Mountains centers on Xavier (Atibon Nazaire), a hulking construction worker mostly employed tearing down existing homes—lived in by people like himself—to make room for new, upscale ones in the rapidly gentrifying Miami neighborhood of Little Haiti.
He’s built a life from scratch here with fellow Haitian emigre wife Esperance (Sheila Anozier), a dressmaker with whom he’s maintained an amorously close bond. But even decades on, neither have fully assimilated, chafing at casual racism, nostalgic for the welcoming culture of their homeland. Xavier also finds it hard not to snap at their only child Junior (Chris Renois), a thoroughly Americanized youth who still lives at home, but whose aspirations, including stand-up comedy, seem useless to dad. This loosely plotted slice of life, shot in richly colored hues, is the sort of quasi-verite fiction that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular, then surprises you with its cumulative impact. Music Box Films released Mountains to digital platforms this week.
Even better is In the Summers, which opens at the Roxie this Fri/27. Alessandra Lacorazza’s film, a multiple prize-winner at Sundance, keeps hurtling forward to chart succeeding years in which two daughters—played by an aging-up succession of young actresses—arrive from a divorced mother’s house in California to visit their father in New Mexico. Vincente (Rene Perez Joglar, aka popular rapper Residente) at first impresses as trying very hard to be a “fun dad,” in compensation for the family’s splintered circumstances. But he can get scary in a hurry, his temper volatile, his drinking out of control. There are summers when one or the other of his offspring refuse to visit. Even finding another partner and fathering a new baby only temporarily stabilize him. While magnetic and well-intentioned in many ways, Vincente is something of a loser—and what’s painfully affecting here is the realization that not only do his daughters know it, but he does, too.
As with Mountains, this episodic narrative can feel loose, almost directionless—but then it’s about lives for whom those qualities are a kind of affliction. Few movies capture this kind of slow-disintegration big picture, in which family members can only stand by helplessly observing as one of their own inevitably circles the drain. It’s a very common type of experience, yet one you don’t see dramatized often, at least not in the unsensational, all-too-credible terms seen here. With an indelible central performance, In the Summers is depressing but also engrossing, a series of snapshots that add up to a terrible poignance. It opens Fri/27 at SF’s Roxie.
Women In Warzones: ‘Lee,’ ‘Azrael’
Finally, two problematic but interesting new films place female protagonists in the line of fire, often quite literally. A first narrative directorial feature from celebrated cinematographer Ellen Kuras (who’s shot films for Scorsese, Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Rebecca Miller and others), Lee is about Lee Miller, an ex-fashion model whose primary legacy was behind the camera—in addition to accomplished fashion, portrait and abstract art imagery, she notably provided some of the first pictures of atrocities at newly liberated Nazi concentration camps.
This multinationally produced biopic is impressively scaled, and with Kate Winslet in the title role (plus significant parts for Alexander Skarsgard, Andy Samberg, Andrea Riseborough and Marion Cotillard), it inevitably has some finely acted moments. There’s also a nice ending, in which we realize the framing device (involving Josh O’Connor as a visitor interviewing an elderly Miller) is something other than what we’d assumed. But it’s difficult to do this kind of globetrotting-life-in-a-nutshell without it turning into a sort of trite historical highlight reel, even if the team-written script mostly sticks to the 1938-1945 period of its subject’s most consequential work, when she was a war correspondent for Vogue(!). Kuras doesn’t transcend that trap, and the at-times almost cartoonishly brusque, prickly central figure often frustrates her star’s efforts, too. While Lee Miller remains an arresting and important figure, a documentary might have served her better than this rather pedestrian dramatization.
Also opening in theaters nationwide this Fri/27 is the very different Azrael, from director E.L. Katz (Cheap Thrills) and writer Simon Barrett (You’re Next, The Guest). It’s an action thriller on the edge of horror and sci-fi, with almost no spoken dialogue (and none in English). Samara Weaving plays a young woman living furtively in a forest “many years after The Rapture”—so ambiguous opening onscreen text tells us—with her mate (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett). Then they are captured and separated by some kind of religious cult whose members are also mute. Our heroine is to be sacrificed to the feral zombie-vampire creatures who prowl about. But she escapes…and gets re-captured…and escapes…and gets re-captured…over and over and over.
Handsomely shot in rural Estonia, Azrael is like Katz’s prior features in that it’s basically a non-stop series of over-the-top physical perils. It lacks their edge of black comedy, however, which makes the repetitious structure more wearying, further unalleviated as it is by any general backstory or explanation whatsoever. (A sequence involving a verbal, truck-driving passer-by suggests perhaps the rest of the world is living much more normally than the principal figures here…but that’s as much intel as we get.)
There’s a raw muscularity to it, not least in Weaving’s athletic performance. But what it all means, if anything, is cryptic without being especially intriguing—this is a mystery whose resolution you stop caring about well before it’s clear it won’t have one. Azrael ends up feeling like a stray middle chapter extracted from a horror-fantasy epic; divorced from any context, it is lively but pointless.
