San Francisco International Film Festival 2018

[Chris Knipp]

BING LIU: MINDING THE GAP (2017)


KIERE IN MINDING THE GAP

Filming best mates: skateboarding and open heart conversations

[CAPSULE REVIEW]

Three guys growing up in the failing blue collar town of Rockford, Illinois are Bing Liu, Asian, who is the filmmaker, following for five years himself and his two best friends, fellow skateboarders Zack, who's white, and Kiere, who's black. All seem to have had abusive fathers, and find in each other and skateboarding family that was lacking. Sometimes, skillfully filmed, they skateboard away the pain. Bing must get his mother to talk on camera about how his stepdad beat both of them as he grew up. Zack marries Nina and has a kid called Eliot, is a roofer who drinks and parties too much, turning abusive. Kiere's father dies, which breaks him up, and he works as a dishwasher, wondering about having white friends and feeling trapped in this dead end town.

With this limited raw material Bing fashions something that is a portrait of skate passion, father-son issues, male irresponsibility, a disadvantaged community, and intimate film-making as therapy, among other things. The film is raw and scattered and yet somehow healing, touching, and brave.

Minding the Gap, 93 mins. Mentored by Steve James and distributed by Kartemquin Films, was created at Sundance for the PBS POV series. It debuted at Sundance Jan. 2018 and showed in six other festivals. It as screened for this capsule review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, Apr. 2018. Longer revivews will be found in Roger Ebert.com, Indiewire, Hollywood Reporter, and Village Voice.

SHOWTIMES SFIFF:
Friday, April 13, 2018 at 9:00 p.m. at Creativity Theater
Saturday, April 14, 2018 at 3:00 p.m. at BAMPFA
Tuesday, April 17, 2018 at 8:45 p.m. at Roxie Theater

[Chris Knipp]

MICHEL HAZANAVICIUS: GODARD MON AMOUR/LE REDOUTABLE (2017)


LOUIS GARREL, STACY MARTIN IN GODARD MON AMOUR

A film not clever enough for its subject

Michel Hazanavicius is noted for his pastiches of films - the one made up of reimagined bits of old silents, The Artist, did very well - though his earlier pastiches of a French James Bond, "OSS 117" never made it to anglophone audiences and his stab at seriousness, a story about Chechnya, The Search, bombed.

This time he's back to the semi-serious mode with a film about Jean-Luc Godard and Anne Wiazemsky, the very young actress he was briefly married to in 1968, based on Wiazemsky's memoir about this experience. Godard, with Anne, participates in the May Paris student strikes and they go to the Cannes Festival, which is cancelled. The young demonstrators scoff at the director, and he eventually breaks up with Anne. Louis Garrel and Stacy Martin look great and are quite adequate as Godard and Anne.

What is Hazanavicius trying to do here? Well, pastiches again, this time of the stylistic devices of Godard's most brilliant early pictures, and of course of his mannerisms and looks. Garrel is a good sport, and gets a slight chance to show off his gift for comedy, being uglied-up to look like Godard, and imitating his odd way of speaking. A mildly amusing tone of passive-aggressive homage is maintained. But it is surprising how uninteresting a movie about such people and such a time could be. Hazanavicius is good at pastiches and there are plenty of those . But that's all there is. There was a great deal more to this man and this time than what gets into Hazanavicius' film. What's glaringly absent is the brilliance of his subjct and the importance of the times.

Godard is still alive, and when he said this film was "a stupid, stupid idea," he was not far wrong. Assuming (which is doubtful) this film needed making, Godard himself would have been the one to do it.

Godard Mon Amour/Le Redoutable, 107 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2017; 19 other festivals. Screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. US theatrical release 20 Apr. Metascore 67%. Released in France Sept. 2017, AlloCiné press rating a fair 3.5,lacking favorable comments from any of the hip journals.

Maybe the always contrarian critic Armond White had a point in his review in saying that for younger people who don't know Godard, this, though a bad movie, will at least have the virtue of arousing their interest in his genius. That's exactly what he says in his <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/movie-review-godard-mon-amour-terrible-but-important/">National Review piece</a>. The film came to US theaters (Quad Cinema in NYC) 20 Apr. 2018 and will tour Landmark Cinemas. It comes to the UK 11 May.

Originally reviewed as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival.

Quoted from A.O. Scott by Mike D'Angelo on Letterboxd: "Godard, for better and for worse, is a cinematic thinker, someone who has tried, over the course of a prolific and contentious career, to locate the philosophical potential and the intellectual essence of the medium, to make it a vessel for ideas and arguments as well as for stories, pictures and emotions. Mr. Hazanavicius is the opposite: an unmistakably skilled maker and manipulator of images and styles with nothing much to say and no conviction that anything needs to be said at all."


​SHOWTIMES SFIFF:
Saturday, April 14, 2018 at 5:00 p.m. at Victoria Theatre
Sunday, April 15, 2018 at 8:15 p.m. at BAMPFA

[Chris Knipp]

JULIE COHEN, BETSY WEST: RBG (2018)


RUTH BADER GINSBURG IN RBG

Dynamo

[CAPSULE REVIEW]

While you're waiting to see this film you can watch the hour-long interview with RBG by Nina Totenberg at Sundance in January: click.

An extraordinary woman, Brooklyn daughter of working class immigrants, for 25 years a Justice of the US Supreme Court, appointed by Bill Clinton. Her husband, Marty Ginsburg, met in law school at Cornell, was everything to her, and her greatest support and inspiration. In her early years as a lawyer, after law school with a small child, brilliant and ferociously hard working, she achieved milestone decisions before the Supreme Court, defining equal rights for the sexes. This is an admiring homage and review of her career. Notable: her warm friendship with the extreme right wing Justice Scalia, showing a capacity to ignore politics person to person and promote the collegiality of the Court. Now, at 84, criticized by some for not retiring during Obama's Presidency so a young liberalreplacement could be appointed, she affirms she will keep her pledge to work as long as she is able. AT the age of 84, Ginsburg has created a breathtaking legal legacy for feminism and equal rights.

RBG, 97 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 2018, nine other US film festivals. Screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. In US theaters from May 4, 2018. Current Metacritic rating 81%.

SHOWTIME SFIFF:
Saturday, April 14, 2018 at 1:00 p.m. at Castro Theatre
AT RUSH

[Chris Knipp]

AMY ADRION: HALF THE PICTURE (2018)


AVA DUVERNAY IN HALF THE PICTURE

Report from a sexist, misogynistic industry - that governs the culture

[CAPSULE REVIEW]

A documentary that considers the question of why there are so few women movie directors working in Hollywood. It emerges that they they have taken their cas to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and that it has, after considering the matter, brought charges against all the major studios. This film is nothing but a string of talking heads - all women, or at least no men - and they tell many of their stories of internalized prejudice and external obstacles. Sexual harassment (rape, sexual coercion) is a relatively minor issue for them. These are directors. They have encountered such a level of prejudice that, though some of the best directors are clearly women, only a miniscule percentage of the skin in the game is from women.

Half the Picture, 95 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 2018, also at SxSW. Screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, Apr. 2018

SOWTIMES SFIFF:
Saturday, April 7, 2018 at 12:45 p.m. at SFMOMA
Monday, April 9, 2018 at 5:45 p.m. at Creativity Theater
Monday, April 16, 2018 at 1:30 p.m. at Victoria Theatre

[Chris Knipp]

ULISES PORRA GUARDIOLA, SILVINA SCHNICER: TIGRE (2017)



Tropical decadence

Compared, for good reason, to Lucrecia Martel - but the Latin Americans in general have a knack for decadent atmosphere - this debut film by the couple, Ulises Guardiola and Silvina Schnicer, delivers a heady, sensuous but surreal gabble of people and place. The scene is a boarded-up island family estate in the semi-tropical Argentinian Tigre Delta, a musty house revisited by three generations, there to decide whether or not to sell the property. Or, in the case of the young, to hang out, to flirt, and to play strange, menacing sexual-ish games. The roar and hum of developers, it it said, can be heard upriver. Unfortunately, as you can clearly tell in the first five minutes, there's going to be more mood than plot. This is a bit strange, because the issue of whether they must sell, and if they can do so advantageously, is such a clear-cut one. But the tropical heat makes people lazy, and obstreperous, and the wine flows, as well as the whisky.

As the family navigates their relationship to their home and local kids engage in forbidden games, various interpersonal conflicts that arise lead to a powerful crescendo that will make up for all the meandering: the filmmakers have admitted they have thrown together multiple stories, evidently with an aim to create a pleasing complexity, the mystery of the real, with resolution far from anybody's mind most of the way (which fits Martel's Zama rather well too).

I refer the reader to Jessica Kiang's Variety review from San Sebastián, an impressive effort in which she describes Tigre in lush and appreciative detail. The main thing is that the film sketches in the separate action of the matriarch and younger women, her quietly adversarial, covertly hostile son (he wants to sell the property, she insists it "non se vende," is not for sale), while the younger people meander around playing their jeux interdits. The frazzle-haired Rina (Marilú Marini) is sixtyish, but there's life in the dame yet. She tells her friend Elena (María Ucedo) about a recent mating she's staged in a motel, though it didn't go well, and she ditched the app, and lost or broke the phone, it's not clear which. The son is Facundo (Agustín Rittano), whom Kiang calls "middle-aged," though he doesn't look that old; no doubt he's still a player too. His and Rina's conversations are clear, but always at cross-purposes. Elena's daugher Sabrina (Magalí Fernández) is around, with best friend Meli (Ornella D’Elia) and the gawky but cute Estebán (Tomás Raimondi). As a contemporary note, some of the young people have tattoos and piercings. Here in the wilds, these play-tribal markings look more serious.

As Variety points out, a local boatman's preteen daughter is the center of attraction for a gaggle of smaller younger boys, whom she dominates "with primal 'Lord of the Flies'-style wildness." But of course Lord of the Flies is all boys, and this whole scene, old to young, has sex in the air. Also menace, as Estebán finds a cache of weapons that used to belong to Facundo, including a brace of hand-crafted spears and a big powerful sling that he hastens to use to down some poor bird. A feral-seeming boy from the village covets them. And one boy apparently is becoming paralyzed. The varied, meandering population wallows in sensuality, while some menacing practical boom waits to be lowered, a decisive step to be taken, as in a play by Tennessee Williams.

Some of this celebration of sensuality seems borderline implausible. If this house is so remote and boarded up, how did they got all this food and drink in, a whole goose, free-flowing wine, and how come everything, such as the fridge, works so well? But the filmmakers weave the increasingly menacing atmosphere so well, and the dp Ivan Gierasinchuk uses sweaty closeups with such vivid effectiveness, we rarely stop to question, merely holding our breath, as things get tenser and crazier, as the owls hoot and the crickets whir, for the inevitable violence, from whence it will come, we know not. (There is rarely music, mostly a satisfying wealth of ambient sound.) In the end, the mood and plot catch up with each other, and this accomplished first film justifies its meandering with its richness.

Tigre, 91 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 2017, also San Sebastián, Atlanta, Fribourg, Miami, East End and others, and screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, Apr. 2018.



SHOWTIMES SFIFF:
Friday, April 13, 2018 at 8:30 p.m. at BAMPFA
Saturday, April 14, 2018 at 5:00 p.m. at Roxie Theater
Tuesday, April 17, 2018 at 1:30 p.m. at Victoria Theatre

[Chris Knipp]

JENNY SUEN, CHRISTOPHER DOYLE: THE WHITE GIRL (2017)


ANNGELA YUEN IN THE WHITE GIRL

Al allergy to vigorous filmmaking?

A girl who has always been told she is allergic to the rays of the sun.

"White Girl is a more focused and conventional film than Doyle’s Hong Kong Trilogy, which Suen produced, but it is still much more concerned with mood and vibe than crass plot points. Without doubt, we can see its aesthetic kinship with some of the classic Wong Kar-wai films he shot. It is a quiet, lulling film. . ." -J.B. Spins (Joe Bendel).

Lulling is right, as in putting to sleep. This is a misfire attempting to bring together misfits and present somewhat obvious allegories about Hong Kong, once a crowd of fishing villages, with its focus on a fishing village and a young woman who lonogs for her mother (the old UK connection, get it?). A young woman whose supposed sensitivity to sunlight keeps her sheltered except at night. One night she goes out and encounters a young Japanese man, Sakamoto (pop star Joe Odagiri) who is living in an abandoned historic tower "which houses a camera obscura that captures village life and projects it onto a decaying wall" (Screen Daily).

Also wandering round is a street kid called Ho Zai (Jeff Yiu) who sells mosquito coils with a singsong chant. He lives with a mute Buddhist monk with the hobby of fashioning Rube Goldberg devices. It is all shot in pale foggy blue. Those who think the visuals at times evoke Doye's cinematography for Wong Kar-wai in the great days of their Nineties collaborations are imagining things, though of course, Doyle is incapable of making uninteresting images. It's just the nonexistent, meandering story and terminally low-keyed quirkiness that are a bore. It is strange that Suen and Doyle returned to Hong Kong after both being long away only to produce such an anemic effort

Conversation with Jenny and Chris: click.

SFIFF SHOWTIMES:
Thursday, April 12, 2018 at 9:00 p.m. at Creativity Theater
Monday, April 16, 2018 at 6:15 p.m. at Victoria Theatre




JENNY SUEN AND CHRISTOPHER DOYLE

[Chris Knipp]

PATRICK IMBERT, BENJAMIN RENNER: THE BIG BAD FOX & OTHER TALES/LE GRAND RENARD MÉCHANT & AUTRES CONTES (2017)



[CAPSULE REVIEW]

Whoever thinks that the countryside is calm and peaceful is mistaken. In it we find especially agitated animals, a Fox that thinks it's a chicken, a Rabbit that acts like a stork, and a Duck who wants to replace Father Christmas. If you want to take a vacation, keep driving past this place. French hand-drawn animated doesn't really bring anything too negative into the picture. It's notable for its lightheartedness and intentional simplicity.

The Big Bad Fox & Other Tales/Le grand renard méchant & autres contes, 83 mins., debuted as a work-in-progress at Annecy; about a dozen other international festivals, including the San Francisco International Film Festival, where it was screened for this review.



SHOWTIMES SFIFF:
Sunday, April 8, 2018 at 1:00 p.m. at Castro Theatre