More Cinequest: Read an interview with Halfdan Hussey, cofounder of the Cinequest Film & Creativity Festival.
From March 11–23, during the in-person Cinequest Film & Creativity Festival, hundreds of films will be screened in three locations: the California Theatre, 345 S 1st St, San Jose; 3Below Theaters, 288 S Second St, San Jose; and the Hammer Theatre Center (101 Paseo de San Antonio, San Jose). Immediately following that, the cinematic banquet will continue as Cinejoy, with online screenings through March 31. For the full Cinequest schedule, visit cinequest.org.
Freaky Tales
March 13, 7:15pm, California Theatre
For a hot minute, Hollywood was making movies with multiple characters whose storylines overlapped or intertwined. Films like Crash, Traffic, 21 Grams and Mother and Child come to mind. Last year, Yorgos Lanthimos attempted to reinvent this episodic genre in Kinds of Kindness, deploying his usual arsenal of cruel souls hellbent on harming others, self-destruction or both.
But Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is the template upon which Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Half Nelson) pattern Freaky Tales. In their four-part film, the ultra violence is stylized as if it was torn out of a graphic novel. They shoot slow motion close-ups of spurting wounds, dripping blood and fists connecting with jawbones. Only one of the three tales is violence-free but even that section contains a corrupt cop and R- to X-rated language that would have made my grandmother blush.
Set in Oakland and Berkeley, Freaky Tales is an ode to the grittier aspects of urban life in the East Bay. Part 1 is centered at 924 Gilman Street, an early stomping ground for the band Green Day. Part 2 follows two best friends who are aspiring rappers. Part 3 starts at a video store where Tom Hanks makes a cameo. But it’s really a spotlight for Pedro Pascal (The Last of Us). We get to watch him brood and smolder for a solid half hour.
In Part 4, Freaky Tales amps up the violence to Kill Bill levels. A star basketball player also has a secret identity as a kind of samurai warrior with super psychic powers. He’s on a quest to exact vengeance upon a gang of neo-nazis. While Metallica plays their joyful rollicking tune “For Whom The Bell Tolls,” boy oh boy does he get his revenge.
Ostensibly, all of the protagonists are underdogs linked by a desire to preserve their dignity in the face of some oppressive force. Boden and Fleck add a supernatural element to all of the storylines to link them, at least superficially. Like a magic serum, it temporarily empowers the main characters. It’s a reverse kryptonite that shows up on screen as a bolt of green lightning that’s meant to account for the strange energies that permeate the atmosphere in Oakland. After the bolt strikes its target, it disappears in a mysterious puff of smoke.
—Jeffrey Edalatpour
BAR
March 14, 7:10pm; March 23, 1:30pm; California Theatre
Don Hardy has structured his documentary BAR with the same formulas that reality television programs use. Despite that narrow framework, the film feels remarkably organic, even when the testimonials occasionally move the film into infomercial territory.
Centered around a five-day mixology seminar at the Culinary Institute of America in New York, the participants aren’t contestants vying against each in a competition. They’re accomplished bartenders hoping to learn more about the business they love. The lack of a cutthroat competition that requires them to knock out the other players differentiates the film from the reality genre.
As the narrative opens up to include many points of view, including women and POCs, the group of white men who founded the organization are more than willing to share the camera’s spotlight with everyone. In this context, BAR is actually an acronym that stands for Beverage Alcohol Resource. The group of six expert founders—now expanded to include women and over a dozen other professionals in the wine and spirits world—offer the $3,950 seminar once a year. If the students pass a series of tests, they’re awarded certificates that confirm their bona fides and skill sets in the hospitality industry. It’s the equivalent of passing the bar for lawyers, except it’s for bartenders and less of a time commitment.
Hardy assembles the cast the way that American Idol used to do with home visits before the main event. We get to know a former actor who believes his job at the bar is to change people’s day for the better. There’s a psychology student who has mastered the art of mixing cocktails, lickety split. And a cheerful bartender who wants to continue working with spirits despite her abstemious Muslim family’s disapproval.
BAR creates an optimistic view of the liquor industry. Alcoholism, the ultimate downside of drinking, goes unmentioned. The specialty drinks fill glasses up with colors that glow on camera like a collection of rare gems. For everyone involved at the seminar, they’ve found their calling and a sense of purpose while pursuing this particular professional path. But BAR has a serious blind spot. It’s as if no one on screen has ever had or heard of a DUI or a hangover.
—Jeffrey Edalatpour
The Dreamers and I
March 15, 4:40pm, Hammer Theatre Center
Kenji Yamamoto’s rough-edged documentary starts in one place and lands in another. The film begins in an autobiographical mode—but it turns out that’s a feint. With the help of his wife and business partner, the filmmaker Nancy Kelly, they point the camera at Yamamoto as he begins to talk about his professional career. He and Kelly run a film production company together but Yamamoto took a detour through Silicon Valley to get there.
At Kelly+Yamamoto Productions, Kelly has been a director, writer and producer whereas Yamamoto has worked behind the scenes as an editor. The Dreamers and I is his first filmmaking venture as a director. It’s a story he wants to tell as a way of finding his own voice. To illustrate the difficulties of the form, Kelly puts him on camera and we watch him struggle to articulate his thoughts. They cut and replace his on-camera presence with an animated version of Yamamoto whose voiceover flows out of his mouth with ease.
Once the black and white cartoon Yamamoto appears, the documentary gets going. The real subject is a less glamorous side of Silicon Valley’s startup culture. Yamamoto finds Carlos de la Lama-Noriega, a sort of “den father” who runs a hacker house he affectionately calls the Startup Embassy. Like all of the other hackers, Lama-Noriega dreams of becoming Steve Jobs. But he knows the odds are stacked against him. In the meantime, he rents out rooms in a large house to other Silicon Valley hopefuls.
The large household welcomes a range of international immigrants freshly arrived from Spain, Turkey and Russia. They all want to win the startup lottery with their own special sauce. This sounds like it’s going to be a recipe for disaster. Lama-Noriega could have behaved like a creep. Instead, he, like the other hackers, exhibits varying strains of naivete, self-absorption, self-delusion and ambition.
Yamamoto follows their stories and presents them, years apart, in a before and after tableau. The cinematography and the shot setups aren’t expertly executed (lots of shaky camera movements) but that’s beside the point. Yamamoto’s first film plays out as a lesson about process rather than a perfectly polished final product.
In closing he sums up his raison d’etre, “Making art is a time-consuming and costly torture, that doesn’t have any guarantees. But making films is the only skill I have. And I have to share these stories with you. When I first met these hackers, they made me want to fly. And now I’m one of them.”
—Jeffrey Edalatpour
American Agitators
March 16, 6:45pm, California Theatre
Narrated by San Jose’s own Luis Valdez, American Agitators takes us through the life of legendary community organizer Fred Ross (1910-1992), whose groundbreaking social justice efforts still resonate today. Not only did Ross mentor the likes of Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and Luis Valdez himself, he practically invented new ways of sitting down with constituents, listening to peoples’ grievances, setting aside boundaries and gathering everyone together to combat racism, bigotry and injustice. While protests make all the headlines, Ross understood that any sustained change requires persistence, organization and sincere empathy when listening to others, even if just one-on-one in their living rooms. His results directly built communities. He empowered legions of people, helping them find a voice in shaping their conditions.
Ross worked with Dust Bowl refugees during the Great Depression, including a stint managing the camp Steinbeck wrote about in The Grapes of Wrath. He took on the KKK. He helped Japanese-Americans secure jobs and housing after their release from internment camps. He helped Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta build the United Farm Workers Union. Even after he was gone, Ross influenced and inspired many movements, including the Oakland teachers strike.
Throughout the film, one particular Fred Ross line is repeated, that an organizer is like a social arsonist. He lights people on fire. During Ross’ memorial service in San Francisco, we even see footage from the likes of Valdez and Cesar Chavez using that line. It fits.
—Gary Singh
The Courageous
March 20, 5pm, California Theatre; March 21, 9:30pm 3Below Theaters
In a brief opening scene, Jasmin Gordon’s film The Courageous efficiently establishes the main character’s state of mind. After parking her car at the far edge of a strip mall, Jule (Ophélia Kolb) and her three children walk towards a cafe. When they pass by a cherry tree, Jule tears fruit from the branches and shares it with her two sons. Her oldest child, a daughter, questions their right to take it. In response, her mother chews on a cherry and then spits the pit onto the ground.
A single mother on the verge of economic ruin, Jule is trying to fill her children’s empty stomachs by grabbing for anything within reach. When she drops them off at the cafe and disappears for hours without telling them where she’s going, they’re baffled by her behavior but they also have no choice but to accept it. By continually lying to her children, it’s clear she’s lost the way forward.
Without any job or familial support system at her disposal, Jule’s psyche is starting to rebel against a society that cannot make accommodations for her and her family. Kolb, who registers on screen as a Gallic Amy Ryan, gracefully evokes Jule’s restlessness and anguish derived from the push and pull of her maternal responsibilities.
The Courageous takes place in a liminal realm. We don’t get a glimpse of Jule’s life before her money problems began to multiply. But facing the constant threat of eviction from their small apartment, the film also prefigures the fact that this family will shortly be unhoused.
To punctuate Jule’s predicament and her ongoing emotional distress, Gordon intermittently inserts cutaway scenes of the natural world surrounding the semi-rural Swiss setting. Mountaintop forests silently absorb the wind and passing weather. When Jule picks up one of her sons at a birthday party, it’s painfully clear that she can barely manage to make small talk while standing in the confines of someone else’s house.
She has evolved to exist outside the boundaries of polite society. When the camera cuts to shots of rustling leaves, the view isn’t an ominous harbinger of death. Gordon reverses our contemporary ideas about Eden. Jule plucks the forbidden fruit, eats it and is cast out of civilization. The film suggests that leaving the known world and returning to the wilderness might be the answer to her lonely predicament.
—Jeffrey Edalatpour
Lilly
Saturday, March 22, 1pm at the California Theatre, San Jose
In Lilly, the road to fair and equal pay is filmed with good intentions. To tell the story behind the landmark 2007 court case Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., Patricia Clarkson is required to wear a series of scene-stealing wigs. Whether long-haired and auburn red or as a bobbed blonde, the actress has to work hard to make us believe she’s Lilly Ledbetter (1938–2024).
Overall, the production values—including the set and costume designs—look like they’ve been repurposed from another made for TV movie, 1981’s Stand By Your Man with Annette O’Toole as a bewigged Tammy Wynette. It all distracts from the earnest and well-meaning story the filmmakers want to tell.
With her reputation at stake in Red State Alabama, Ledbetter stood up against the corporation that employed, underpaid and unfairly discriminated against her. Eventually, the case led to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which Congress passed in 2009 under the Obama Administration. An era which now seems like ancient history.
Of course the filmmakers want Ledbetter’s deserving story to have as much impact as Silkwood and Norma Rae. But the movie is dramatically inert in comparison and lacking in nuance. Alabama’s good ol’ boys and the corporate baddies are depicted as one-dimensional villains. The clichés may be true but they aren’t compelling or original. We’ve seen them many times before and this film doesn’t add to our understanding of their nefarious motivations.
And Clarkson’s truncated scenes with her husband Charles, as played by John Benjamin Hickey, lack any conversational or emotional logic. The chemistry between them is off-kilter. A documentary version of Ledbetter’s case could have just presented the facts. The inherent melodrama of it would have emerged without all the shabby bits of filmmaking fakery.
—Jeffrey Edalatpour
The Friend
Closing Night: March 23, 6pm, California Theatre
Grief is the thing with a pair of giant paws. After Walter, his owner, dies, a Great Dane named Apollo refuses to eat. He’s temporarily in the care of one of Walter’s many exes. In The Friend, it’s universally accepted by his bereaved wives, girlfriends and lovers that Walter (Bill Murray) was a benign lothario. His death inspires forgiveness in all of them. This charming man may have caused hurt feelings when he was alive but his suicide has blurred, if not erased, the pain of their breakups.
After some initial resistance, Iris (Naomi Watts), Walter’s platonic best friend and, briefly, a former lover, agrees to temporarily take Apollo in. The biggest obstacle that prevents her from keeping Apollo is her rent-controlled New York City apartment building, where dogs aren’t allowed. During the first hour of the film, Iris and Apollo share the same emotional state. They’re in mourning for their beloved companion.
Based on Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 novel, the filmmakers Scott McGehee and David Siegel largely avoid taking the “Marmaduke” approach. Apollo’s presence on screen is more symbolic and less of a comedic foil to Iris. The Friend begins at a dinner party where Walter tells the apocryphal story of how he first met Apollo. On a chance encounter, the full-grown harlequin dog was simply waiting outdoors for Walter to claim him. After Walter’s death, this story enhances his own mythical qualities and, by extension, Apollo’s.
While the exes circle in and around Iris with their own tiny melodramas, The Friend primarily concentrates on Iris’s range of stricken emotions. Watts slowly and carefully unfurls shock, disbelief, anger and sadness as she contemplates how to cope with loss and the impractical demands of Walter’s Great Dane. What starts as a burden evolves into a love story, like King Kong, between beauty and the beast. When the rent board forces Iris to part with Apollo, the thought of his absence is as unbearable to her as Walter’s.
—Jeffrey Edalatpour
