.Quest Bets

The Shape of Film To Come | The Public | Steamboat Bill, Jr. | Highlights

Auggie
Connecticut architect Felix (Richard Kind) endures his retirement party with the air of a man who is not leaving under his own speed. But instead of the customary gold watch, he receives the next step in voice-activated digital assistant: a pair of glasses that allows him to see the beautiful young augmented-reality creature Auggie (Christen Harper), who gives him the kind of devotion every crumbling middle-age man supposes he deserves. An added accessory, sent by mail: a pair of pathic pants to make the experience anatomically correct. Actor turned director Matt Kane’s debut is in an uncomfortable zone between Black Mirror style speculative fiction and a straight metaphor for porn addiction; the payoff seems to make it more like the latter. But Kind (the blighted brother in A Serious Man), a master of downtrodden types, brings grit, impatience and hurt in this role, with undertones reminiscent of Jack Lemmon’s big career role in Save the Tiger.
(Plays Mar 9, 3:50pm at Hammer, Mar 10 at 6pm, Mar 12pm at 2:15pm, and Mar 14 at 7:20pm, Redwood City)

Clownvets
A beloved bit of old movie dialogue: “Your plan is so crazy, it just might work!” It seems a particularly bizarre idea to recruit PTSD-struck old soldiers from north Michigan—very serious men that they are—to become hospital clowns under the direction of the documentary’s exec producer, Patch Adams, MD. This motley-clad, Kaiser-mustached healer, famously the subject of a 1998 Robin Williams film, leads a busload of newly minted bozos to Central American hospitals. They travel to places so undeveloped that they haven’t acquired a fear of clowns yet. “I’m not so much used to going around, spreading joy,é says one worried would-be entertainer. But serious-faced clowning works, too, and the experience of dealing with the patients seems to ease some of the bad memories and shattered nerves they got in battle. Since it’s produced by Adams’ Gesundheit! Institute, director Estaban Rojas’ documentary seems slightly promotional: There’s not an underside to this, nor do we meet either vets or patients who failed to cope with this kind of therapy. However, it’s interesting to learn that salaried hospital clowns are now mandated in several South American countries; you have to admire people who go into a line of work that would really test one’s faith in the power of comedy. I’ll be there to do the moderation on stage.
(Plays Mar 7 at 7:20pm at the California Theater, Mar 8 at 11:30am, Mar 9 at 5:30pm and Mar 11 at 7:15pm in Redwood City)

Bill Nighy Maverick Spirit Award
As an actor, Bill Nighy has cornered a market: he’s the last great stiff upper lip-wielder. As crumbling as the White Cliffs of Dover, Nighy excels as the charred rock star whose heyday is gone, the dead-behind-the-eyes stick insect of a British bureaucrat, and—particularly good—as the discreetly hopeful lover. In his signature role in Love, Actually, he exemplified the cold climate, hot blood paradox, having a wounded, compassionate heart but being too well bred to show it. In a lighter vein, he was almost Lovecraftian in the Pirates of the Caribbean series as the undersea horror Davy Jones of Davy Jones’ Locker fame, a resurrected buccaneer halfway evolved into something that should be spread out on ice at a fishmonger’s. He had a beard of writhing tentacles and a crab’s leg for a peg, the smoke of his pipe oozed from his gills: “of his bones are coral made.” Unrecognizable under all that seafood, Nighy made Jones’s voice emphatic; nightmare Glaswegian, smothered into a guttural quack by noselessness. Nighy also had a piece of that blessed annuity to the British thespian, as Minister Rufus Scrimgeour in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, a last line of defense who fell to the horror of Voldemort). Debuting at Cinequest: Sometimes Always Never is a forlorn North England comedy—exactly the sort of thing made for Nighy—about a Scrabble-worshiping father searching for his long lost son.
(Mar 6 at 7:15pm at the California Theatre.)

Bring Me an Avocado
A lesson in why surprise parties are a bad idea, this new drama by the Bay Area’s Maria Mealla (Women and Cigarettes) begins with the birthday of Robin (Sarah Burkhalter). By the time the evening is over, this mother of two young girls is left in the hospital in a long coma. Her husband George (Bernardo Peña) is in a state of bright-eyed denial, and does what he can to try to cheer up his family and keep things positive. But his wife’s sister Greece (the Lauren Graham-like Molly Ratterman, the film’s standout) and her best pal Jada (Candace Roberts) provide friction by sticking around the house during the crisis, getting a little too close to George and his daughters. Some aspects of Bring Me an Avocado are going to help it out as a possible audience favorite for the fest: UCSC’s Gavin V. Murray makes Oakland as radiant as it’s ever been in a movie. And Mealla doesn’t blame any one person for the fracas to come, not laying the guilt upon George’s weakness under stress. Moreover she’s quite good with the child actors. But this compact drama never completely shakes the feeling of soap opera.
(Mar 8, 7:15pm, Hammer; Mar 10, 1:05pm Redwood City; Mar 16, 12:15pm Redwood City; Mar 17; 10:45am, California Theatre.)

Happier Times, Grump
One of the most outright appealing films at Cinequest 2019. In these days of European nationalism, one is suspicious of folkloric comedies, and whether the Powers that Be have an agenda to lure their citizens back to the heartlands they’re quitting for the cities. But from the first sighting of old man Mielensaphoittaja (Heikki Kinnunen), it’s clear Tiina Lyme’s dry comedy is going to be well shaped. The old Finnish grumpus is a man of few pronouns, a spud farmer with a Leonid Brezhnev scowl; he’s a wearer of plaid shirts, suspenders and a homemade pelt hat with earflaps, a bonnet the size of a grizzly bear’s head. His is a glottal language that, when the speaker is miffed, sounds exactly like a Klingon raging at Captain Kirk. He grudgingly shows up at his wife’s funeral just to announce to the crowd, “Reminisce. I will go and die”—and quits to build his coffin in his garage. His expatriate son, in town for mom’s funeral, is a heartless businessman raising up his daughter Sofia (Satu Tuuli Karhu, a good thunderstruck comedienne) to go to Princeton. Instead, she got drunk and impregnated, and now has to hide from her parents at grandad’s potato farm. It’s more than cute-codger comedy, having some pepper in it. Lyme is good with the the folkloric appeal of trees, creeks, inarguable folk wisdom, odd rural characters and accordions (the Finns are perhaps Earth’s most deft accordionists these days).
(Mar 6, 9:15pm, 3Below; Mar 8, 6pm, Redwood City; Mar 10, 3pm, RWC; Mar 14, 12pm, RWC)

Peterloo
This August is the bicentennial of the Peterloo massacre in Manchester, in which vets of the Napoleonic wars cavalry charged into a demonstration of unarmed protestors. Shelley honored the slain in a poem that was too angry to publish during his lifetime: “Rise like lions!” he urged the starving and unrepresented English working class. After this atrocity, the kind of laid-low workers Dickens depicted in Bleak House fought for their rights. Mike Leigh is the most immersive of British directors (Secrets and Lies, Mr Turner); the one who builds most organically and who seems to understand history more than any other director alive. He sets the stage for the massacre from the bottom of society to the top (the decadent Prince of Wales, the regent for crazy George III, who resembled Elvis in his final years). It’s at this point unpreviewed, outside of some European film festivals. There has been an interesting range of opinions, calling it everything from talkey to indelible.
(Mar 11, 6:30pm, Hammer.)

Tucson Salvage
In his Tucson Weekly columns Tucson Salvage: Tales from La Frontera, Brian Jabas Smith has been writing deep-focused, sensitive profiles of the kind of people the Trumpers and the police demonize: everyone from junkies to day laborers from Oaxacan villages. In a multimedia evening, Smith and his wife, director Maggie Smith, will be world premiering a pilot program for a TV series now in development based on the columns; before the screening, Smith will be reading from his works at the MLK Library.
(Mar 10, 6:15pm, 3Below).