Screen Grabs: Psychedelic bro love swirls in ‘Lemurian Candidate’

Though it is purportedly slated for a new, reduced-scale life (under a new name, and new ownership) in the near future, the closure of the 152-year-old San Francisco Art Institute two years ago remains one of the biggest wounds in a Bay Area cultural landscape that’s been suffering significant losses for decades now. But its history and influence live on, not least in this weekend’s Studio 8 Film Festival. This three-day event at three different venues celebrates works by veterans of SFAI’s film/video department, both former faculty and students. While other such institutions might be noted for their graduates’ impact on the commercial movie industry, SFAI fostered experimentation in every cinematic realm, from non-fiction to animation to avant-garde abstraction.

Opening night Fri/19 at Oakland’s Shapeshifters Cinema features a range of shorts by alumni including Juan Luis Matos, Julie McNeil, Rye Purvis, and Nao Bustamente that “explore themes of performance, queer identity, and artistic legacy.” The next day brings three programs at SF’s Roxie Theater, including films by the festival’s own jurors and curators; their selection of shorts submitted via open call that span nearly half a century SFAI inspiration; and two works by Gunvor Nelson, the Swedish-emigre-turned-longtime-Bay-Area-resident who passed away earlier this year. Another towering figure in the U.S. avant-garde, collage animation specialist Lawrence Jordan, will be honored with a career-spanning bill at SFMOMA on Sun/21. Still active in his early nineties, he’ll be present for this program of seven films. For info on the entire festival, go here.

Animation of diverse techniques and tonal aims gets showcased in Animalusa, a compilation package of recent works in that vein from Portugal that opens at SF’s Roxie on Fri/19 and is currently scheduled to play daily through Wed/24. On the evidence of these five shorts, each 10 to 13 minutes long, there is a high degree of both talent and craft at work in the field thereabouts. Maria Trigo’s It Shouldn’t Rain Tomorrow is an impressionistic portrayal of creeping senility; Vincente Niro’s T-Zero is a cool-looking nightmare about housing scarcity. The Tim Burton-ish stop-motion look of Maria Hespanhol’s The Wide Eyed Girl and the Long Legged Boy contrasts with a very hand-sketched texture to Jose-Manuel Xavier’s Saudade, Perhaps. The only piece I didn’t like was Cynthia Levitan’s rather innocuous Pietra, in which a cranky apartment-building “Karen” objects to her neighbors’ joie de vivre (but not really). Still, it too has a high degree of professional polish.

Of related interest, the Roxie is also opening the Quay Brothers’ first feature in 20 years: Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (opens Fri/19), a surreal stop-motion/live action fantasia based on Polish writer Bruno Schulz’s 1937 novel. (His short story collection The Street of Crocodiles also inspired one of the Quay’s earliest works, in 1986.)

This Thu/18 brings the start of “Cheryl Dunye Selects!,” a six-week series (at BAMPFA through November 2) curated by the Liberia-born, Oakland-based writer, director, producer, and teacher who made one of the key New Queer Cinema features of the 1990s with The Watermelon Woman. That multilayered 1996 mockumentary, ostensibly about a (fictitious) Black actress of Hollywood’s “golden age,” kicks off a schedule that also includes her forceful 2001 telepic Stranger Inside and a compendium (on October 15) of her shorter works, going back as far as 1990.

But there are also movies by others, from Ivan Dixon’s neglected 1973 The Spook Who Sat By the Door to Julian Schnabel’s 2000 biopic Before Night Falls, with a heavy emphasis on vintage guilty pleasures: There’s Lewis Seiler’s 1955 Women’s Prison, an Eisenhower-era blueprint for a genre that would become much more violent and sexploitative in coming decades; Harry Kumel’s 1971 “lesbian vampire” classic Daughters of Darkness; and Milton Moses’ 1973 The Werewolf of Washington, a Watergate satire masquerading as a horror movie. Dunye will be present to introduce most programs in the series.

Finally, this Sat/20 Other Cinema is hosting an evening whose two recent documentary features remind that there are ongoing injustices that should not be buried by outrage over Charlie Kirk’s death, or whatever else seizes temporary media focus. Vin Arfuso’s Walled Off is a survey of issues pertaining to Palestinians and the occupied territories, from sabotaged prior peace processes to bogus latter-day ones (notably featuring that great international negotiator, Jared Kushner), from propaganda apparatuses like the Sheldon Adelson-funded Birthright Israel organization to Israeli teenagers’ reaction upon seeing the 2011 West Bank village portrait 5 Broken Cameras. This episodic piece is punchy, short-attention-spanned—seemingly aimed at generations likely to watch it on their phones—but also informative and insightful. It is tough to watch at times, whether in graphic footage of violence or the inimitable inflammatory speechifying of Benjamin Netanyahu. After a break, there will be a screening of last year’s Oscar winning No Other Land, chronicling the gradual erasure of a different West Bank Village, which we previously reviewed here. It’s worth noting that reprisals to the film continue—just five weeks, ago one of its consultants was shot to death by an Israeli settler.

Lots of interesting-looking movies opening commercially this week as well, though many of them (Him, Steve, The Lost Bus, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, The History of Sound etc.) were not available for preview by deadline. So instead we’re covering a clutch of worthy smaller titles arriving for limited runs or going straight to home formats, having already bypassed Bay Area theaters.

Griffin in Summer

The titular character here is an aspiring Arthur Miller for our times, a playwright determined to rip the lid off the hypocrisies of the American Dream, revealing all the raw truths of substance abuse, infidelity, abortion, and whatnot beneath. Laudable, perhaps… but Griffin (Everett Blunck) is also a 14 year old living in wholesome suburbia, where neither adults or peers understand his humorless drive toward greatness. It’s summer vacation, and nobody else wants to spend 60 hours a week rehearsing this pint-sized tyrant’s gesamkunstwerk, which is titled no less than Regrets of Autumn.

Then Griffin himself is distracted, by the hunky 25 year old handyman his long-suffering mother (Melanie Lynskey) hires to do jobs left undone by an apparent runaway husband. Brad (Owen Teague) turns out to be a frustrated actor and performance artist who’s already tried his luck in NYC. Could this be a match made in theatrical heaven? A boy’s first love? Or just a terrible case of projection from one wildly immature lad onto an older dim bulb with great abdominals?

Writer-director Nicholas Colia’s debut feature is a sharp comedy with bittersweet aspects and some emotional depth—though like everyone around him, viewers may have a hard time getting past just how insufferable Griffin is. It’s a testament to all concerned that there is well-earned poignance in the end, as well as awareness that for all his pretensions, our antihero is still really just a kid who has a lot of growing up to do. A particularly offbeat coming-of-age tale, Griffin in Summer nonetheless finally satisfies in some comfortably familiar ways. It arrived on streaming platforms this week after failing to score local bookings during its theatrical release.

A Little Prayer

In contrast to conflict-stirring Griffin, our main character in Angus MacLachlan’s film is a mild-mannered peacemaker frustrated by his inability to fix other people’s problems. Bill (David Strathairn) is the third-generation owner of a Winston-Salem sheet metal company, which he hopes to pass onto a fourth. But the quiet sense of needing to “do the right thing” he takes pleasure in with both family and employees too often seems to get no reciprocation. His wife (Celia Weston) is a chronic complainer. Their daughter (Anna Camp) is a hot mess who arrives without warning, fleeing her awful husband (not for the first or probably last time), dragging a five-year-old child to whom she’s an indifferent mother. Most painful to Bill is the realization that his son (Will Pullen) is turning into a callous lout who’s very likely cheating on his own wife with an office colleague. It’s particularly grievous because that daughter-in-law, Tammy (Jane Levy), is exactly the open, generous, and upstanding person Bill strives to be for others.

Writer-director MacLachlan is a playwright who started out in film 20 years ago with the screenplay for Junebug, one of the best American movies of its era. It was also a North Carolina domestic story, and A Little Prayer suffers a bit from being too similar and not quite as good. (Weston even plays variations on the same role in both.) Still, it is well worthwhile. These characters are all astutely written and acted, their foibles sometimes humorous but never caricatured or entirely unsympathetic. And we become very invested in the bond between Bill and Tammy, the two most (only?) truly “decent” people here—even if the commitment to kind and ethical behavior that draws them together may also eventually force them apart. This is one “family values” movie more bittersweet than blandly affirming, which can risk sentimentality because there’s nothing false about its emotions. It opens at Marin’s Smith Rafael Film Center on Fri/19.

The Summer Book

Also arriving at the Rafael Center is this English-language adaptation of the late Tove Jansson’s slender 1972 fiction. Though best known as author (and illustrator) of the Moomin children’s series, she also wrote adult novels. I read several a few years ago, but the only one that left a lasting impression was this a miracle of evocative simplicity with everything to say about mortality, loss, and other big themes—all handled with extraordinary lightness, though never frivolity. It is the sort of near-plotless narrative feat that seems remarkable in its native medium, and would likely be very hard to transfer to another.

As indeed turns out to be the case. Charlie MacDowell’s film, with a screenplay by Robert Jones, is well-crafted and prettily shot on Finnish coastal locations. But it never captures the transcendent qualities of the source material. Glenn Close plays the warm, stoic, widowed grandmother who hosts her son (Anders Danielsen Lie) and granddaughter Sophia (Emily Matthews) once again in the isolated summer island cabin they’ve frequented all their lives. But this is a more fraught occasion: Sophie’s mother has died, her father has grown distant in his grief, and grandma too is facing mortality, her body fading fast even as her spirit remains strong.

In the book, Sophia is six years old; here, she seems as much as twice that age, which considerably reduces the poignancy of someone so young trying to comprehend profound loss. (It also makes the whiny tone of Matthews’ performance tenor seem less sympathetic and more irksome.) This Summer Book has its lyrical qualities, but MacDowell is not a born stylist, and Hania Rani’s piano-based score strikes a routine sentimental note. Reliable talents Close and Lie are solid here, yet feel underutilized because the film never quite digs deep enough. It’s a pleasant drama perhaps best enjoyed by those who haven’t read its inspiration.

The Lemurian Candidate

Having a very different kind of summer vacation are the three hapless, 30-ish male BFFs in veteran producer Casey Cooper Johnson’s first fiction feature as writer-director. Actually, they’ve somewhat drifted apart since college, but reunite for a camping weekend. Unbeknownst to Jesse (Ben Groh), it’s a trip that’s been instigated because his mother is desperately worried about his mental health, particularly as he seems to have gone off his antipsychotic meds. Meanwhile, his pals have their own issues to contend with. Tom (Dakota Shapiro) just got dumped by his girlfriend, a devastating blow to an already low-ebb ego. By contrast, Stan (Oliver Cooper) has all the exterior trappings of success, including wife, house, and corporate job. Yet, he’s not happy, either.

Jobless, mateless, and back living with mom, Jesse may be off his meds, but that doesn’t mean he’s off everything. Indeed, he’s brought an alarming array of recreational drugs on this trek to Mount Shasta, a site where he fully expects psychedelic revelations to occur. In fact, he’s hatched a whole if incoherent set of beliefs involving the mountain, UFOs, Lemuria (a speculative lost continent a la Atlantis), climate change, Deep State conspiracies, and anything else that comes to mind. Under various chemical influences, he and his friends find their trip getting trippier and trippier.

Candidate is a buddy comedy with fantasy elements and some serious moments; it’s got the playful, spontaneous energy to pull all that off, and more. (There are even some Yellow Submarine-like animated sequences.) Not everything works, but it turns out the initially anticipated course of stoner humor is just one element in a pretty fresh mixture that is by turns anarchic, silly, touching, and imaginative. It will be playing one night only, Tue/23, at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theater, with the director and other special guests present—though if you want a road trip of your own, you can also see it at the Mt. Shasta Cinemas this Fri/19-Thu/25. Those and other dates are detailed on the film’s website.