Probably the starriest single Bay Area event of the year is the Mill Valley Film Festival (Thu/1-October 11), whose calendar placement in early October makes it one of the first regional festivals to magnetize Oscar bait in the long campaign road towards the Academy Award ceremony. That means it gets to cherry-pick from movies that just premiered at A-list festivals like Toronto, Telluride, and Venice—with the added appeal that Marin County is home to quite a number of Academy voters, including Lucasfilm employees and many a retired or long-distance-commuting Hollywood player.
So, as usual, MVFF49—just one year shy of a major anniversary—is full of contenders you’ll probably be hearing a lot more about in coming months, but during the festival can very likely see with some of the filmmakers in attendance.
That starts Thu/1 with opening night selection Wild Horse Nine, an espionage tale set in 1973 Chile that features John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Chilean star Mariana Di Girolamo, Parker Posey, Steve Buscemi and Tom Waits. Writer-director Martin McDonagh (The Banshees of Inisherin) and Di Girolamo will be present, as will Bay Area native Rockwell—one of the most versatile film actors of his generation, whose career will be celebrated in a tribute program the next evening. It ends on October 11 with actor turned writer-director Jesse Eisenberg (A Real Pain) presenting his new feature The Debut, a musical comedy about community theater whose stars Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti are also already considered front-runners in the awards race.
In between, there are more in-person tributes to directors and actors, including James Gray, Lee Chang-dong, Andrew Scott, Lea Seydoux and Sophie Okonedo, plus composer Linda Perry. Eight panel and talks will cover a range of professional viewpoints and guidance for aspiring filmmakers. Documentary subjects encompass everything from portraits of an artist (Avedon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Pete Townshend: Behind Blue Eyes) to space exploration (Carl Sagan: We Are Made of Star Stuff, Odyssey), bikes (No Hands: The Wild Ride of the Schwinn Bicycle Company), dolls (All American Girls), wine (Burgundy), and sport (Everest: The Other Side, This Bright Light).
There’s also activism-related content that circles the globe, from Indonesia (The Last Place on Earth) to Mexico (Querida Fatima), Harlem (When a Witness Recants) and the US (Union Town‘s take on the gig economy). Movies, too, get their due, with all 16 hour-long episodes of Mark Cousins’ The Story of Documentary Film, an overview of the genre’s entire history.
Titles in the program that have already snagged major attention and/or controversy include more nonfiction, notably Musk (whose non-cooperating titular figure has damned it), NAZA (about which the Israeli government is similarly unhappy), and My Undesirable Friends: Part II—Exile (ditto Russian authorities).
Among high-profile narrative features are the latest from Pedro Almodovar (Bitter Christmas), Cold War’s Pawel Pawlikowski (Fatherland), The Fire Inside’s Rachel Morrison (Love Of Your Life), Trainspotting’s Danny Boyle (Ink), Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda (Look Back), Romania’s Cristian Mungiu (Fjord), Mike Leigh (Tender Loving Care), and more. Star turns of note will be seen from Helen Mirren (as author Patricia Highsmith in A Talent for Murder), Sandra Huller (Rose as well as Fatherland), Anthony Ippolito (as young Stallone in I Play Rocky), Rosalind Eleazar (in comedian Chris Rock’s directorial effort Misty Green), Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz (Bunker).
Among features with Bay Area roots, SF-born writer-director Beth de Araujo’s drama Josephine—about a child witnessing a serious crime in Golden Gate Park—comes already draped in two major awards from Sundance. There are also animation, shorts and family-film spotlights, a few choice revivals, and even a documentary from the governor’s spouse—Miss Representation: Rise Up, Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s followup to her prior work about mass-media sexism.
Beware of overdosing on the Mill Valley Film Festival: See too much in these 11 days, and you might lament over ensuing few months that there’s very little worthwhile opening at regular movie houses you haven’t already watched. MVFF49 takes place at various Marin County locations plus Berkeley’s BAMPFA Oct. 1-11, full program, schedule, and ticket info is here.
Elsewhere this week:
The Incomer
Writer-director Louis Paxton’s first feature has a horror movie premise if ever there was one: A skittish government agent (Domhnall Gleeson as Daniel) is dispatched to a small island off Scotland’s northeast coast, to inform the populace that the government requires their moving to the mainland. This does not go down well with siblings Isla (Gayle Rankin) and Sandy (Grant O’Rourke), who lost both parents in childhood, and have raised one another to be very peculiar indeed. Not only do they very much refuse to leave, they have no end of bizarre ideas about the outside world and their own minuscule one. Worse, there is good reason to believe that prior interlopers have met unfortunate ends at their hands.
There have been more than a few actual horror movies very close to that plot outline. But The Incomer is something else—it flirts with thriller content, but quickly turns into more of a black comedy, one with surprising elements of pathos and charm. Suspicious, antagonistic Isla and hulking yet infantile Sandy are really just kids in adult bodies, with no adults to mind them. At first hostile towards Daniel, they prove easily won over, both craving his attention… and in his way, he’s just as much a weirdo as they are. This very handsome-looking movie is funny and original, a slightly sweeter spin on the kinds of grotesque fairy tales Yorgos Lanthimos has made his specialty. It opens Fri/2 at Bay Area theaters that were TBA at press time.
Don’t Play With Fire
Prolific Hong Kong director, writer, and producer Tsui Hark (of the Chinese Ghost Story and Once Upon a Time in China films, among many more) was just starting out in the industry—after a late-1970s US stint—when he made this memorable 1980 third feature. It finds three nerdy teenaged schoolboys already up to some prankish mischief when they attract the attention of Wan-chu (Lin Chen-chi), a much more formidably malevolent, sociopathic peer. She goads/blackmails them into increasingly reckless actions that only grow more catastrophic when their hijinks cross the paths of organized crime syndicates, gangs, and arms-trafficking American Vietnam War vets. Almost all these people would just as soon kill as look at you, generating an astronomical body count by the thoroughly nihilistic fadeout.
Better known under the title Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind, Hark’s film throws in everything but the kitchen sink—including animal cruelty and gay bar scenes—in its crazed narrative collision course. The over-the-top violence and implied political content alarmed censors, who demanded major changes. As a result, there have been very different versions, each with some unique scenes, story structuring, and other elements. The Roxie is showing a director-supervised recent 2K restoration that doesn’t include everything Hark shot… but believe me, it’s enough. As energetic and visually inventive as it is cartoonishly “dark,” this mashup of crime drama, action, horror, and black comedy will flabber your gast. It opens at the Roxie Fri/2, more info here.
October scares: ‘Chronovisor,’ ‘Infirmary,’ Japanese chills, Joan Crawford
’Tis the month of Halloween, so that means actual horror flicks are plentiful in every venue and format that movies are shown. Various examples arriving this week represent at least a partial break from current mainstream genre conventions. Certainly the most out-there in that respect is Chronovisor, a first feature from the writing-directing team of Jack Auen and Kevin Walker. Their protagonist—and nearly the only person onscreen for 100 minutes—is Beatrice Courte (Anne Laure Sellier), a multilingual French professor in Columbia University’s Philosophy Department. Apart from dinners with colleagues, where she tries others’ patience with her pedantic monologuing, she seems to have no social life—no spouse, lover, friends, not even a pet or hobby. Research is her entire life.
Thus she becomes obsessed after stumbling upon mention of an alleged device invented some 70 years ago that “photographs the past.” It’s a “complex apparatus of machinery allowing images, sounds, and events that took place hundreds of years ago to be reconstructed,” in a form “like a hologram, about the size of a television screen,” as an old magazine article quotes one of the international physicists involved. But did it ever really exist? Why has it been near-completely erased from the public record? And why did those who claimed to have created or witnessed the Chronovisor themselves disappear long ago, seemingly driven into silence or worse by governmental powers?
Always chasing leads in old media (journal clippings, videotaped lectures etc.) at some cavernous research facility where she’s the sole patron, or taxing the cross-Atlantic phone lines in search of a surviving participant, Beatrice might be the only person in the world—at least this movie’s world. She’s oblivious to her isolation, fully absorbed going down a rabbit hole of frustratingly fragmentary information. End credits thank literary giants including Borges, Eco, Bolano, and Auster for inspiration, a list alerting you that our heroine’s chimerical quest may end in a pretty dark place.
It’s hard to think of another narrative film so dependent on onscreen text as this one, with reading highlights (translated into English from myriad other languages) taking up a great deal of screentime. Yet there’s also a surprising elegance to the directors’ assembly, recalling such prior high-minded, genre-adjacent enigmas as Aronofsky’s Pi. Probably best seen in a theater for maximum absorption, Chronovisor opened at the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission the other week, and arrives at SF’s Roxie this Fri/2.
A different kind of institutional research leaves an unsettling legacy in Nicholas Pineda’s own debut feature Infirmary, which begins streaming on Shudder this Fri/2. But rumors of nightmarish medical experiments and such provide just a purposely vague backstory here. The focus is on a first/last shift as security guard for Edward (Paul Syre Lee), a young Marines veteran. Under the supervision of cranky Lester (Mark Anthony Williams) and personnel director Mrs. Downey (Danielle Kennedy), this new hire’s job is simply to patrol the endless corridors of an already-shuttered psychiatric hospital set for imminent demolition. But it’s a creepy place, with a supposed history of “crazy things happening.” Soon, of course, strange phenomena begin to manifest. Does something supernatural lurk here, or are the nervous newbie’s coworkers just cruel pranksters?
Yes, Infirmary is a “found-footage horror,” in that everything we see is ostensibly from the building’s surveillance cameras, or from the guards’ bodycams. But it avoids the wobbly hand-held annoyance of similar exercises, as well as most of their other cliches. Pineda gets great atmospheric mileage from the setting’s variably overbright and decrepit, labyrinth-like spaces. While not wildly original in concept or minimal plotting, this is an effective piece of sheer spookiness.
The Roxie is wading into the month’s sinister spirit with a “Beautiful Nightmares” series of mostly-vintage Japanese horrors. It starts this Sun/4 with a recent restoration of Masaki Koabayashi’s 1965 Kwaidan (more info here). That three-hour widescreen omnibus of four ghost stories has long been considered one of the most aesthetically refined exercises in the genre ever.
The rest of the program (more info here) will be screened at the New People Cinema in Japantown. There are multiple shows of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s demented 1977 haunted-house opus Hausu (starting Fri/2), US White on Rice director Dave Boyle’s new Japanese chiller Never After Dark (Fri/9), and Nobuo Nakagawa’s 1960 Jigoku, which culminates in an eye-popping extended vision of Hades. The series ends on Halloween itself with a single show of Noriaki Yuasa’s 1968 The Snake and the Silver-Haired Witch, a B&W “B” movie that compensates for its relative modesty of scale with a full course of crazy ideas.
Finally, that itch for seasonally relevant camp can get thoroughly scratched at the “Joan Crawford Hagstravaganza” taking place at SF’s Great Star Theater on Fri/2. Hosted by DJ Dank and Valentine, with drag performances, a Crawford video tribute and costume contest, plus more, the evening resurrects La Crawford at her most colorfully gorgon-like in 1964’s Strait-Jacket.
That 1964 thriller from celluloid cheesemonger William Castle cashed in on the veteran star’s lurid new popularity thanks to hit “psycho-biddy” trailblazer Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? It cast her as an apparent murderess released from an asylum after 20 years, reunited with her daughter (Diane Baker). But the search for tranquility proves elusive, particularly since people (including unsavory George Kennedy) around her keep suffering gory deaths by axe. Crawford rises to an occasion that requires no subtlety, giving one of her most flamboyantly entertaining performances. Full event info is here.
Your Attention Please
Something more insidious than an axe to the brain—but nearly as harmful—is examined in Sara Robin’s documentary, which begins streaming on AppleTV and other platforms October 6. Even the Pope is concerned about what some call “the defining public health issue of our time”: social media addiction, which has been proven to hamper development of real-world social skills, ability to focus (particularly in the classroom), healthy self-image, and so forth. Cyberbullying is a regular trigger to teen suicides. Depression, loneliness, anxiety, eating disorders and more are frequent byproducts of too much screentime amongst a wider age range.
These aren’t alarmist views. They are borne out by statistics and studies, some even generated by social media giants themselves… then suppressed by those companies, whose spokespersons blithely deny all such knowledge or culpability in Congressional hearings. (If you want to see Zuckerberg squirm under such drilling, this is the movie for you.) Parallels are drawn here to the tobacco industry’s erstwhile similar tactic of burying its own findings re: the connection between cigarettes and cancer, simply to keep profits soaring. Likewise, social media corporations need to protect addicting algorithms and other elements that sustain endless growth, no matter how damning the evidence of their long-term effect. And lawmakers, often in the pocket of their lobbyists, have been awfully slow to take action protecting consumers—a syndrome of guilty passivity that’s started anew yet again with AI.
Designed to appeal to the average viewer (particularly parents), Your Attention Please is heavier on the warm-and-fuzzy and lighter on the hard facts than would be my personal preference. Still, it makes a powerful case for the notion that we have let irresponsible bad actors cripple entire present and future generations for the sake of clicks.
