What Maisie Knew

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Lincoln Spector

A- Family drama

  • Written by Nancy Doyne & Carroll Cartwright
  • Based on the novel by Henry James
  • Directed by Scott McGehee & David Siegel

Full disclosure: I’m inclined to go easy on movies where a very likeable, good-looking, and essentially decent character has the first name Lincoln. Those of you named Bob or John probably won’t understand.

What Maisie Knew follows the aftereffects of a very angry, messy, and vindictive divorce between two selfish jerks who deserve each other. But their young daughter, Maisie (Onata Aprile), deserves and requires something much better than either of them.

As the title suggests, the film tells its story from Maisie’s point of view. We see nothing that she doesn’t see, or hear anything she doesn’t hear. Of course, we understand what’s going on better than she does. But the subjective style allows us to further empathize with this innocent human being so utterly devoid of power.

Julianne Moore plays Maisie’s monster of a mother. An aging rock star who hasimage probably seen better days, she’s incapable of relating to another human being as anything other than an extension of herself. She acts out her love for her daughter–in the opening scene she sings her to sleep–but she ripples with jealousy if the girl bonds with anyone else. She verbally abuses her husband within earshot of their child.

The makeup and costume department did everything they could to age Moore. Gone is the still-beautiful middle-aged mother of The Kids are All Right. Here, Moore looks old and worn out, as if she’d taken too many drugs, smoked too many cigarettes, and allowed her fear and anger to wear her down.

Maisie’s art dealer father (Steve Coogan) seems almost as bad as her mother. Perhaps he’s just as horrible, but he has less screen time  in which to make a bad impression. He’s certainly selfish and self-centered. One suspects that he fights for joint custody not so much out of love for his daughter as punishment for his ex-wife.

Both mother and father marry younger lovers, not so much on a rebound as to give them greater leverage in court. The father marries Maisie’s nanny (Joanna Vanderham), which is a step in the right direction. After all, she already has a close and loving relationship with Maisie, and she has considerable childcare skills.

But it’s the mother’s new husband, the aforementioned Lincoln (Alexander Skarsgård), who has the most interesting and positive character arc. A bartender who improbably finds himself married to a rock star, he’s initially uninterested in his new stepdaughter. But as his irresponsible wife leaves him with more and more of the parenting responsibilities, he grows into the role, becoming the loving adult that Maisie so desperately needs.

Everyone in the cast is spot on, but I’d be unfair not to offer specific praise for the young star. At no point was I reminded that Onata Aprile was a child performer. She was, quite simply, a little girl caught between very bad parents, finding joy wherever she could. She carried the film.

The ending wraps things up a little too neatly, but that’s really my only complaint. This should be seen by everyone contemplating parenthood.

I saw What Maisie Knew at a press screening prior to its Bay Area premiere at the 2013 San Francisco International Film Festival.

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Something in the Air: Radical youth of 1971 act out, then wander aimlessly

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Lincoln Spector

B Period drama

  • Written and directed by Olivier Assayas

Youthful innocence takes strange forms. For many in 1971, it took the conflicting forms of sex-and-drugs hedonism and radical leftwing activism. They didn’t always work well together.

In Olivier Assayas’ loose tale of French youth, the characters spend much of their time fighting the establishment and arguing esoteric bits of Marxist dogma. (In this world, Trotskyists and Maoists hate each other like Protestants and Catholics in the 16th century.) They’re also, to one degree or another, artists, and their artistic instincts don’t always mix with their political beliefs. Of course, because they’re young, they fall easily in and out of love, as well. That doesn’t always match their political theories, either.

The story centers on Gilles (Clément Métayer), a high school radical and a budding painter and want-to-be filmmaker. He seems quiet and shy, a watcher, although he’s actually quite active. He sells a radical newspaper to other students. He takes part in a protest that becomes a police riot, and then, with comrades, commits a couple of very serious acts of vandalism. After a security guard is seriously injured, Gilles and his companions decide it’s best to spend the summer laying low.

image

The rest of the film follows his wanderings, and that of a handful of his friends. He falls in love. They travel a bit with a Communist filmmaking collective. He sells some of his work. He visits an ex-girlfriend in England who has slid into a dangerously hedonistic lifestyle. He works for his father–a more commercial and conventional filmmaker.

Something in the Air doesn’t grab you like a great film (or even like an entertaining movie). You often have to force yourself to stay involved. But the effort is worthwhile. As Gilles grows beyond his radical idealism–even if he never quite renounces it–you’ll find yourself appreciating how we all mature and find ourselves.

Like Gilles, I was in high school in 1971. My idealism ran more in the hippy artist direction, but I had plenty of friends who proudly carried their little red books. The political arguments in Something in the Air ring very true for the time. Yet the film wisely avoids nostalgia. There’s plenty about the early ’70s to be nostalgic about; spray painting schools and arguing Marxism aren’t among them.

I saw Something in the Air on a screener DVD before it’s showing at the 2013 San Francisco International Film Festival.

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SFIFF Saturday: Koreans in Japan, Geek Nostalgia, and a Surreal Documentary

Posted on May 4, 2013 by Lincoln Spector

Here’s what I saw Saturday at the San Francisco International Film Festival

B Our Homeland
For second-generation ethnic Koreans living in Japan, going "home" was once very important–even though "home" was the living nightmare of North Korea. In this calmly imageheart-breaking drama, a man in his early 40s who migrated to a Korea he’d never known 25 years earlier, returns to Japan and his family for a three-month medical leave. He’s withdrawn and frightened, perhaps because of the tumor eating his brain, but more likely because he’s spent most of his life in a place where there are choices and doubt are not allowed. He must adjust to his family–including his true-believer Communist father–and they must adjust to him.

Autobiographical, Our Homeland is told through the eyes of his much younger sister, Rie–a stand-in for writer/director Yang Yonghi.

But many of the film’s cultural and political aspects are opaque to those not already in the know. I wasn’t even sure what year–or decade–the film was set.

You’ve got one more chance to see Our Homeland at the festival: Monday, 1:00, at the New People Cinema. There are no plans for a regular American release.

B- Computer Chess
This reasonably funny mockumentary follows a computer chess tournament in 1980. imageAssorted geeks and nerds (including one "lady") show up at a hotel to test their hardware and software’s chess skills. The winning algorithm will then face an actual human chess master. To add color, a bizarre new-age group has its own gathering at the same hotel. The whole thing is shot in standard-def black-and-white; it looks awful but that’s the point. The jokes range from the clever to the obvious, and I have to admit that most of the audience laughed more than I did.

I saw Computer Chess’  last festival screening. However, it’s on the list of films that "have secured U.S. distribution or are in negotiations with a U.S distributor," so you may have your own chance to decide how funny it is.

A The Search for Emak Bakia
In 1920, surrealist artist Man Ray made a short film called  Emak Bakia. In the Basque language, that means something like "Go away!" or "Leave me along!" Far more recently, Oskar Alegria set out to discover the short’s history, inspirations, imageand locations. (As I write this, I have yet to see Man Ray’s original; I intend to fix that soon). The result, The Search for Emak Bakia, is an appropriately surreal documentary. In addition to conventional detective work–such as looking for a house with the right columns in the front–he follows a plastic glove blowing in the wind and turns his research to clowns on what could only be described as a irrelevant (but interesting) whim. Amongst the more conventional detective work, he finds an old woman who lived in the house as a young girl. The result is much more than informative; it’s magical.

After the film, Alegria stepped in front of the screen for Q&A. Some highlights:

"I loved the mystery [of the original film's creation]. If you see Man Ray films, you can’t see where they were made. I love mysteries, and mysteries have to be good if you want to make a long film."

"This is my first film and my last. I’m a journalist."

"When I was following the plastic glove, that’s not being a journalist. I had to put aside the journalist and be guided by chance."

About the woman: "We were trying to find the same house at the same time, using the same method, without knowing each other. And now we have become friends. She’s now 95 years old."

On its commercial prospects: "This is not a commercial film…I don’t want to make money with it."

"My mother taught me to have faith in magic."

You’ve got two more chances to see The Search for Emak Bakia this week. It plays the Kabuki Monday at 8:45, and the New People Cinema Thursday at 3:30. Since you’ll probably never get another chance to see this picture, I’d make it a top festival priority.

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SFIFF Sunday: Fishy Documentary & Resisting the Nazis

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Lincoln Spector

Much of what I end up watching at the San Francisco International Film Festival is a matter of pure serendipity. I pick the film that’s about to start playing. But there are also times when I very much want to see a particular movie.

Saturday afternoon and evening, I did one of each. And serendipity won.

After the Animated Shorts screening, I took a longer-than-usual break, skipping such promising titles as Big Sur and Big Blue Lake for a documentary on fishing that had received some interesting buzz.

Big mistake.

D Leviathan
One could make an fascinating and informative documentary about a fishing boat that plows the choppy waters off the Massachusetts coast, but Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel chose not to. Leviathan consists almost entirely of badly-framed close shots of objects, waves, pieces of the boat, and so on. You get some idea that imagelife is difficult and dangerous on these boats, but that’s conveyed in the first five minutes. There’s no narration and we never get to know any of the men we fleetingly see (there are far more close-ups of dead fish than living humans).  With the exception of one shot near the end, we never get a sense of the vessel as a whole. The film contains some visually striking shots, but it lingers on them way too long, turning visually striking into boring. I’m happy that people push the cinematic art with daring experimentation, but sometimes, the experiment fails.

You have two more chances to miss Leviathan at the festival. It’s screening tonight at 8:45 at the Pacific Film Archive, and will be back at the Kabuki on Thursday, May 9, at 5:30. Amazingly, Leviathan is on the Festival’s list of films that "have secured U.S. distribution or are in negotiations with a U.S distributor."

After that torturous experience, I randomly picked a movie starting at the right time, and found a gem:

A In the Fog
Think of this as a rural, Eastern European version of Army of Shadows. In Nazi-occupied Belorussia, two resistance fighters set out to execute a man whom they believe is cooperating with the Nazis. Things don’t go as planned, and the three men imageare trapped in ways they didn’t expect. Each man gets his own flashback, which tells us more about him and how he ended up in such a dangerous line of work. Writer/director Sergei Loznitsa (adapting a novel by Vasil Bykov) creates a suspenseful story in a way that’s unknown to today’s commercial filmmakers. He rarely cuts and moves the camera sparingly, giving us the chance to examine the characters and their environment as they work through their impossible situation.

Unfortunately, I caught the Festival’s second and final screening of In the Fog. But it’s been picked up by Strand Releasing, and will play in American theaters. Don’t miss this one.

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SFIFF The Rest of Saturday. A French Bad Marriage and American Shakespeare

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Lincoln Spector

I caught two pictures yesterday after Steven Soderbergh’s State of the Cinema Address. Both were shown in the Kabuki‘s large main theater. I liked both.

B+ Thérèse
In the late 1920s, Thérèse (Audrey Tautou of Amélie) marries the rich and conservative Bernard, who cares mostly about money and family honor. It’s a good match economically, but she almost immediately regrets the loveless and stifling relationship. When Bernard blocks his younger sister (Anaïs imageDemoustier of Living on Love Alone) from marrying a Jew, Thérèse fails to be the heroine that she might have been. Both the character and the film are emotionally remote, yet that’s not really a flaw here. Claude Miller’s final film examines a woman who has been robbed of her character and her ethics, and forced to become an accessory to her husband’s world view, and finds a downright creepy way of extracting revenge. This is a dark, sober film with patches of dry humor and some surprising turns.

There’s some confusion in the title. The Festival is calling it  Thérèse, but IMBD and the press release I’ve been given call it Thérèse Desqueyroux.

Whatever the name is, the Festival will screen the film one more time. Monday, April 29, at 6:30, at the New People Cinema. The movie is on the festival’s list of pictures that "have secured U.S. distribution or are in negotiations with a U.S distributor." In other words, it may play in American theaters.

A Much Ado About Nothing
Most of us don’t associate Joss Whedon–best known for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, and The Avengers–with Shakespeare. Yet his adaptation of one of the Bard’s most popular comedies proves to be far better entertainment than Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 imageversion. Set in modern Italy and shot (in black and white) in Whedon’s own LA mansion, it makes the Elizabethan language sound natural as the characters talk about love, marriage, and jealousy. Much Ado has always been a tricky play to stage. Screamingly funny in the first half, it glides near the edge of Othello-like tragedy in the second. Yet that second half also brings in one of Shakespeare’s funniest characters, Dogberry (brilliantly played here by Nathan Fillion). Whedon keeps all of these mood changes and assorted characters working together flawlessly, for an exceptional entertainment.

After the screening, the film’s stars, Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof, took the stage for some Q&A. They talked about Whedon inviting friends over for Shakespeare-reading parties, and what a good time they had shooting this movie.

The Festival will screen Much Ado one more time: Monday, April 29, at 3:30, at the New People Cinema. The film will enjoy a theatrical release in June.

One quick technical note: Surprisingly, the Festival screened both Thérèse and Much Ado in 35mm. That’s particularly odd, not only because this film festival is showing very little physical film this year, but also because both films were shot digitally.

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SFIFF Friday: Chilean Black Comedy, Russian Whodoneit, and American Rockumentary

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Lincoln Spector

Here’s what I saw at my first almost-full day at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival. I caught all of these films at the Kabuki.

B- Night Across the Street
Writer/director Raúl Ruiz was dying of cancer when he made this strange, surreal comedy. Not surprising that it’s all about death. A moderately elderly man faces retirement and a seemingly pre-ordained violent death with a matter-imageof-fact calmness. Such calmness permeates the film and adds to its deadpan humor. Beethoven and Long John Silver pop up, mostly in scenes of the protagonist as a young boy. In the film’s funniest moment, Beethoven disrupts a movie screening. Ruiz lit almost the entire film with an amber glow coming from one side of the screen–as if everything was shot at what photographers call golden hour. Wonderful at first, Night Across the Street eventually drags. Had it been a half hour shorter, it would have been a much better movie.

Night Across the Street has two more screenings scheduled, at the Kabuki this Monday at 6:00, and at the Pacific Film Archive on Saturday, May 4, at 6:30. It’s also on the Festival’s "Hold Review" list, which means that it will likely receive an American theatrical release.

A- The Daughter
A serial killer is lose in a small Russian town, targeting teenage girls. That’s not a good time for Inna to go through the usual problems of adolescence. What’s more, her mother is long dead, imageher stern father is cold and strict (although there is a sense that he loves her), she’s responsible for her little brother, and her new best friend is a "bad" girl out to seduce the local priest’s handsome son. The film uses the mystery genre to  take us on a tour of post-Soviet Russian life as the protagonist and the community deal with raging alcoholism,  religious conflict, and corpses turning up in the mud. While in many ways deeply depressing, The Daughter also celebrates the resilience of youth, the genuine magic of first love, and the healing power of humanitarian religion.

One big problem: The subtitles appear to have been written by someone who barely knows English. Bad grammar and malaprops  provide unintended laughs that take us out of the story. If you watched Hong Kong films in the 1990s, you know what I’m talking about.

The Daughter is not expected to receive an American theatrical release. But you have two more chances to catch it at the festival. This Sunday at the Kabuki at 1:00, and at the Pacific Film Archive Monday, May 6, 9:00.

A Twenty Feet from Stardom
Now I know why almost all backup singers are African American. They learned to sing in church. Morgan Neville’s wonderful documentary covers the full history of rock and roll from the point of view of the women who stand behind the stars, adding vocalimage texture to the music. We meet the amazing Merry Clayton ("Rape! Murder! It’s just a shot away!"), relative newcomer Judith Hill, and Darlene Love–who actually did quite a bit of lead singing without getting credit for it ("He’s a Rebel"). Big name stars (Springsteen, Jagger) prop up among the talking heads, but this time, the spotlight points to the artists who made it all work. And for once, we get a musical documentary that’s filled with music–and joy, laughter, and inspiration. A celebration of the human voice as a musical instrument.

After the movie, Tata Vega and Merry Clayton came out and sang for us, followed by a brief discussion with the filmmakers. Some highlights:

  • Merry Clayton: All of our fathers were ministers. We were in Church all the time. We lived that. We knew that God was in charge.  I didn’t start cursing until I met Ray Charles.
  • Director Morgan Neville: Church was the perfect training for the phycology of being a backup singer. You learn to serve a greater good.
  • Merry: Darlene Love was the mother of us all. We all love each other and support each other.

Twenty Feet from Stardom will not screen again at the Festival. But it will receive a full theatrical release in June.

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Saturday at the Movies: 50s 3D Horror and Early Talkie Hitchcock

Posted on April 14, 2013 by Lincoln Spector

I attended two very different revival screenings yesterday. In the early afternoon, I visited the Castro to catch the newly-restored Creature from the Black Lagoon in all of its 3D spender. Then, in the evening, I dropped in at the Pacific Film Archive to catch a rare, early Alfred Hitchcock talkie, Rich and Strange.

Both were fun, but neither was a must see.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon

I’d seen this 1954 science fiction monster movie three times before–all theatrical and always in 3D. But that was way back in the 1970s. Yesterday, I believe, was my first time seeing it without benefit of marihuana.

It was still pretty funny.

Set in a previously-unexplored tributary of the Amazon–that looks suspiciously like the imageUniversal back lot–Creature follows a small group of scientists, plus a colorful local fisherman, as they search for fossils and find something stranger–a sort of man-fish highbred that doesn’t appear to be particularly well-adapted for anything. Perhaps that explains why he’s all alone; his species is well on the way to extinction.

Why am I calling the creature he, despite the lack of any visible genitalia? Everyone in the movie assumes that the creature is male. What’s more, he seems strangely interested in the one female member of the expedition (young and beautiful, of course).

So let’s take a moment to consider that one female character in the movie, played by Julie Adams. She’s supposed to be a scientist, but she never does anything remotely scientific. While male scientists scuba dive to collect underwater rocks, then run tests below deck, she hangs around, puts herself in dangerous situations, and occasionally screams. But as anyone familiar with 1950s horror understands, those are the primary responsibilities of all female scientists.

(To be fair, some 50′s movies treat female scientists a tad more seriously. See It Came From Beneath the See  for a better role model.)

The other characters are equally stereotyped. You’ve got the handsome, virtuous young man, the older, wise scientist, the boss who cares more about money than research, and the colorful fishing boat captain. Much of the dialog is memorable, although perhaps not in the way the screenwriters intended:

Captain: What kind of fishing is that? Who eats rocks?

Old scientist:  I eat rocks, in a manner of speaking. I crush and look inside them and they tell me things.

This was my first time seeing Creature from the Black Lagoon with decent 3D. Before that, I had only seen it in the dreadful anaglyph 3D version of the 1970s, which required cheap, colored glasses that degraded the image.  Yesterday’s screening used modern, polarized, digital 3D, which gets considerably closer to how the film would have looked in the dual-projector setups of 1954.

Director Jack Arnold (who a few years later would make the excellent Incredible Shrinking Man) and cinematographer William E. Snyder don’t overdo the 3D effects–or at least they don’t overdo overdoing them. The underwater scenes are particularly effective in 3D. On the other hand, rear projection scenes are particularly fake.

But then, you don’t go to a movie called Creature from the Black Lagoon expecting realism.

Rich and Strange

The Pacific Film Archive‘s Alfred Hitchcock series is winding down, so it felt like a good time to catch a rare work from the Master of Suspense. Except that Rich and Strange was made in 1931, before he had come anywhere near earning that title.

You can’t honestly call this modestly budgeted British programmer a thriller, as there are very few actual thrills. image(You can, however, call it East of Shanghai; as did the American distributers.) It starts as a comedy of manners, becomes a fake travelogue, then turns into a serious drama about adultery. A shipwreck sequence near the end gives it a little bit of that Hitchcockian suspense.

Why a fake travelogue? Because everything shot for the film was done on a soundstage. Stock footage and studio sets make up for all of the story’s locations.

The plot is simple and initially conflict-free: A bored and miserable married couple (Henry Kendall and Joan Barry) unexpectedly come into some money. So they decide to travel the world first class, seeing the sites and spending time with the "best" people.

Of course things don’t go smoothly. He suffers from seasickness. She gets bored. They both get very drunk. Each is successfully romanced and seduced by someone else, almost destroying their marriage.

For an early talkie, Rich and Strange appears strangely like a silent movie. The many dialog-free sequences are clearly shot with a hand-cranked camera. It even uses a surprising number of narrative intertitles ("To get to Paris, you must first cross the channel.") These add to the light sense of fun, and make for some of the best sequences. The wordless, over-cranked opening, where the husband battles rain, a crowded subway, and a defective umbrella, is one of the funniest sequences in Hitchcock’s work.

The movie sags a bit in the middle, as adultery threatens the marriage and some broadly-drawn characters threaten the film. But the shipwreck sequence, with the characters trapped in a cabin on the sinking ship, reminds us of the Hitchcock to come.

Mildly entertaining on its own merits, Rich and Strange‘s major value today is as a glimpse of the artist who, in three years, would emerge as the greatest creator of thrillers that the cinema has ever known.

The PFA presented a rare, imported 35mm print of Rich and Strange.

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Thoughts on Lawrence of Arabia

Posted on March 23, 2013 by Lincoln Spector

The best motion pictures span genres and overcome their limits. They open a window into the mind and soul of fully developed, complex, imperfect human beings. They push the artistic and technical limits of the medium. And they do it all while entertaining an audience.

Lawrence of Arabia is one of the greatest motion pictures ever made.

Within the last two years, I’ve written three posts about Lawrence of Arabia, two of them in the last three months. But all three concentrated on theatrical presentation–an important part of appreciating a roadshow epic like Lawrence. But Hollywood released many big roadshow blockbusters in the 1950s and 60s, and they all required a giant screen and great projection. What makes Lawrence of Arabia so special?

At its heart, this big, epic adventure studies the enigma of one very strange man. T. E. Lawrence, at least as betrayed here, is a military genius with a love/hate relationship to violence. An idealist, an exhibitionist, and a raving egomaniac, he believes that he and those who follow him can do anything. The fact that he usually succeeds only feeds his already too-high self-esteem. Yet he also knows that, deep down, he can never truly become what he wants to be–an Arab.

During World War I, the British saw Arabia as a sideshow, but also as a potential conquest. It was part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, which had allied itself with Germany. By aiding an Arab revolt against the Ottoman, the Brits could keep the Turks occupied outside of Europe. But helping the revolt was tricky. Well-armed Arab freedom fighters wouldn’t easily become part of the British Empire.

And into this comes Lawrence. First sent to Arabia as an observer, he disobeys orders and pulls off a daring raid. Suddenly he’s a hero, both to the British and even more to the Arabs, whom he truly wants to liberate. But somewhere, in the back of his mind, he must know that his superiors have less idealistic intentions.

I don’t know much about the historical T. E. Lawrence, but I do know that he was gay. That sort of historical fact had be either ignored or danced around carefully in 1962, and the filmmakers rightly chose to dance. Peter O’Toole’s performance is slightly feminine (the Mad Magazine parody was called "Florence of Arabia"). It all makes you wonder about the extremely close friendships he makes with other men.

This film has something very close to an all-male cast. You never hear a woman’s voice, and the only shot of a female face is in a photograph. The few times you see women, they’re wearing vales. Women in the audience have the pleasure of watching O’Toole and Omar Sharif when they were young and gorgeous.

Speaking of gorgeous, Freddie Young’s photography turns Lawrence of Arabia into a visual feast, intended to be served on a giant canvas. The desert never looked so hot, so foreboding, or so enormous. Or, for that matter, so beautiful. Important characters often appear as tiny dots in the distance, emphasizing the size and emptiness of the environment that they inhabit. You can easily understand why Lawrence falls in love with desert life.

image

David Lean and his exceptionally talented collaborators took the ingredients of the roadshow epic–long length, lush music (including an overture and intermission music), and a large, wide frame that fills a giant screen–and turned it into a masterpiece. There were bigger epics, and longer ones, but there’s only one Lawrence of Arabia.

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Return to an Aging Multiplex, plus Side Effects & Silver Linings Playbook

Posted on March 7, 2013 by Lincoln Spector

Over the past week, I’ve twice visited the UA Emery Bay, a once-popular multiplex I used to patronize regularly. But this was my first visit there in maybe a decade. On Saturday, I caught Side Effects there. Tuesday night, Silver Linings Playbook. I’ll tell you about the theater, and then the movies.

Built in the late 1980′s, the Emery Bay was the major multiplex of the Greater Berkeley Area (Berkeley, North Oakland, Albany, and Emeryville) for over a decade. Eight of its ten screens were (and still are) large enough for a true immersive experience if you sit near the front. It played both Hollywood and Indiewood fare. Among the films I saw there in its heyday were sex, lies, and videotape, Forrest Gump, Groundhog Day,  The Fifth Element, Whale Rider, The Princess Diaries, The World Is Not Enough, and The Fellowship of the Ring. But not, I should point out, The Two Towers or The Return of the King.

Mind you, it was always a multiplex, with all of the negatives that word entails. It existed to get people into and out of the theater, and to expose them to advertising before the feature. And the concession stand contained then and now little that I would want to eat. (One clear difference between an art house and a multiplex: Good coffee and tea vs. none at all.)

But in the early 21st century, AMC opened a larger, fancier multiplex in Emeryville, just a few blocks from the Emery Bay. It immediately got the bigger titles, and with them more customers. The Emery Bay, I suspect, lost a lot of business.

Which is a pity because in many ways it was and still is a nicer theater. Parking is free and plentiful. The screens are fixed height rather than fixed width, which allows the scope films to be immersive and the standard ones to be appropriately sized. I’ve yet to experience bad projection there, while I’ve experienced it often at the AMC. Both films I saw recently were well screened off Sony 4K digital projectors–without the problematic 3D lenses (which degrade 2D films). And although there’s little that’s attractive to eat, you’ll find a very nice food court across the parking lot.

One more thing: Go there on Tuesday and you get in cheap. $5 for 2D films; $8 for 3D.

The Emery Bay is no longer Emeryville’s king multiplex. But as the scrappy number two, it provides a nicer movie-going experience.

Now then, about the movies I saw:

A Side Effects
Writing about Side Effects without giving away spoilers is like dancing in a mine field. imageMake the wrong move and I ruin a wonderful experience. Steven Soderbergh’s latest and, according to him, last film is a physiological mystery about depression and prescription drugs. Except…well, I can’t really say more. Let me just say that it’s a puzzle well worth unraveling, with Jude Law as an overworked psychiatrist and Rooney Mara as a patient with some very good reasons for feeling depressed. The story has more plot twists than a really good Simpsons episode.

B Silver Linings Playbook
How can good actors give great performances as interesting characters, and come up so empty? Bradley Cooper plays imagePat, recently released from a mental institution, despite his clearly still being a danger to himself and others. Friends match him up with Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence in a role for which she deservedly received an Oscar), presumably because she’s also pretty crazy.  Although the characters are complex, realistic, surprising, and ultimately likeable, the story is utter Hollywood cliché–right down to the dance competition (over-edited, as is almost all dancing in modern movies). With characters like these, the last thing you want is a everything-works-for-the-best happy ending, yet you see that coming a mile off.

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Lore: An Adolescent’s View of the Fall of the Third Reich

Posted on February 27, 2013 by Lincoln Spector

A Historical drama

  • Written by Cate Shortland and Robin Mukherjee
  • Based on the novel The Dark Room," by Rachel Seiffert
  • Directed by Cate Shortland

What happens when your entire world–wealth, security, parental love, and the values you were raised with–dissolve almost overnight? That’s what happens to Lore (Saskia Rosendahl), a teenage member of the Hitler Youth, when the Thousand Year Reich comes crashing down around her ears. But she doesn’t have much time to ponder morals or philosophy. With her parents gone–presumably arrested by American troops–she must lead her four younger siblings across a chaotic and destroyed Germany to her grandparent’s home.

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Luckily, she acquires a helpful companion. Thomas (Kai Malina) is a bit older than her, good-looking, and considerably more experienced in basic survival. He knows how to hide, steal, and get across a river. And the two are obviously attracted to each other. But Thomas has a number tattooed on his forearm, and papers that clearly identify him as a Jew. Lore isn’t inclined to trust someone who she has been taught to hate and fear.

We see the story entirely from Lore’s point of view. We know only what she knows–and whatever we knew about the Nazis before the movie starts. All she knows, at the beginning, is that her parents are very scared, and expect to be arrested by the Americans who have occupied their corner of Germany. (We don’t know what her parents did, but they’re enthusiastic Nazis with a very nice house, so we can assume it was something awful.) Her introduction to the Holocaust are a series of photos that the Americans require people to examine in order to receive rations. We don’t know exactly what Lore thinks about it all, but others insist that the pictures are fake.

Filmmakers Cate Shortland and Robin Mukherjee don’t let you off with easy moralizing. Many of the ardent Nazis are also decent, generous, even loving people–at least to other Germans. Thomas, while in many ways the most virtuous character, is a thief and arguably a murderer, and is responsible for the most horrible tragedy to hit Lore and her siblings. While Lore’s own prejudicial worldview seems to open up a bit over the story, there’s no heart-warming realization.

In one scene, Lore walks away angrily from Thomas and the young children, only to find herself facing a slovenly, pot-bellied, middle-aged man. Any moviegoer knows what to expect. He’ll attempt to rape her, and Thomas will turn up at the right moment and rescue her. That sort of happens, but in a way that’s far more morally ambiguous than what I just described.

The film was shot quickly with a shaky hand-held camera, almost entirely in close-ups. I’m usually not a fan of shaky-cam, but this time it worked. Many scenes started with a close-up, often of an inanimate object, forcing you to wonder just where you were–an effective technique for a film told from the point of view of a confused teenager with grave responsibilities, lost both physically and morally.

Lore provides an intimate view of evil, not from the point of view of the victim, but of someone on the verge of realizing what her parents and their generation had done. It opens Friday at the Embarcadero and the Shattuck.

Filed under: Drama, Reviews | 1 Comment »

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