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Changing Venues

Cinequest Film Festival shifts focus from Camera Cinemas to downtown's new UA Pavilion Theatres

By Richard von Busack

At six years of age, the Cinequest Film Festival is not big on identity--an affliction that clings to its host city, San Jose, as well. In compensation, the festival is compact, accessible and "close to a lot of things," as ex-Mayor Jane Gray's famous comment about the city goes.

This year marks a partial move away from the festival's traditional home at the Camera Cinemas to the new UA Pavilion Theatres on First Street in downtown San Jose. In a paradox of sorts, the eight-screen Pavilion, part of the UA theater chain, will get its cinematic shakedown cruise (the theaters open for the general public on Feb. 16) showcasing a variety of art-house features. Many of those films are exactly the kind of movies that the independent Camera Cinemas worried it might lose in booking battles with the partially city-subsidized downtown complex when it was first proposed.

Cinequest has gone from the unparalleled funk of the since-demised Studio Theater (where Russ Meyer was honored with a retrospective in as authentically sticky a grind house as you could ever hope to see) to the highly funk-free Pavilion Theatres. This year, the Cameras and the Pavilion share the week-long festival between them. The festival has survived a rocky youth in a valley facing the end of its free-spending days and looking toward a future guaranteed to have less funding for the arts. Even though reaching out to corporate sponsors, the festival still includes some risky and challenging work.

Cinequest is also doing a laudable job of programming for the various communities that make up the South Bay. Seminars include discussions of independent women filmmakers, high tech in movies; and series include films with Asian themes (Bugis Street, Chinese Chocolate), African American content (The Morehouse Men, The Keeper) and Latino directors and casts.

Luis Valdez is no stranger to the area; his Teatro Campesino is an a hour's drive from here in San Juan Bautista, "the Vertigo city." Valdez's La Bamba (Tuesday; 4:45pm; Camera One), The Cisco Kid (Tuesday; 9:30pm; Pavilion) and Zoot Suit (Saturday; 7pm; Pavilion) will all be screened. In addition to the fresh look at Valdez, Mexican and South American cinema will be represented, most notably by the droll, sexy Jonah and the Pink Whale (Friday; 9:30pm; Pavilion; also Sunday; 8:45pm; Camera One), a tale about a pyramid scheme concocted by a wealthy Bolivian mortician who wants to preserve his family for eternity. It's a strong debut by director Juan Carlos Valdivia.

Gay- and lesbian-themed work is everywhere in the festival. Of particular interest is the local documentary Family Values (Saturday; noon; Pavilion), Mountain View resident Pam Walton's overnarrated but moving video about being the gay daughter of noted antihomosexual crusader Russ Walton, who is another example of the joke "Republicans love families: they usually have more than one."

In a somewhat mainstream vein, several tributes to relatively well-known directors are planned. Director Gus Van Sant arrives in the wake of his most popular movie, To Die For, bringing not only Drugstore Cowboy (Saturday; 12:30pm; Pavilion) and My Own Private Idaho (Saturday; 5:30pm; Pavilion) but also an earlier tale of cruising Portland, 1985's Mala Noche (Sunday; 12:15pm; Pavilion).

Veteran Hollywood director Robert Wise is probably less loved for his bloated hits of the 1960s, like The Sound of Music, than he is for such genre forays as the first Star Trek movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Curse of the Cat People (Saturday; 3pm; Camera One) and The Haunting (see below).

Neil Jordan has managed to maintain a deeply independent sensibility in the face of studio pressure and the egos of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in the eerie and intelligent Interview With a Vampire. His earlier work will be screened, including his poignant The Miracle (Sunday; 5pm; Pavilion).

There is also, as usual, lots of filler, which will be debuting and dying here. The weaker entries are independents without distributors, analogous to the bad self-published novels that turn up on book-critic's desks. The rule is to leave it alone, and let gravity do the rest. My least favorites in the festival were Hell Bent (Saturday; 12:15am; Pavilion), a JD movie that could be described as a wake-up call to Canada, and Sweet Nothing (Saturday; 9:30pm; Pavilion), a woeful expose of the evils of crack cocaine, with Mira Sorvino apparently auditioning for the lead in the Shelley Winters story.

The opening night offers a choice between The First 100 Years of Movies, a documentary by Chuck Workman, whose montages of films are inevitably the most powerful moments of the Oscar ceremony, and Antonia's Line. The latter could be very highly recommended to those who loved Fried Green Tomatoes and warned against just as strongly to those who hated Fried Green Tomatoes.

What follows is a highly selective guide to the festival's offerings, with the most recommended features marked with asterisks.

*The Company of Wolves Neil Jordan's first film, made in 1984, is taken from short stories by Angela Carter, whose work was as great in range as her life was short. She was best known for recasting fairy tales in symbolic and feminist terms. Saying this, I know how the popular usage of "feminist" means "man hater," which Carter was not. The epigraph of this adult version of "Little Red Riding Hood" is "If there's a beast in man, it meets its match in women." Jordan's lush, puzzling imagery complements Carter's own richness in prose.
(Saturday, Feb. 3, 9:45pm, UA Pavilion)

*Dadetown At first, Dadetown, N.Y., looks like one of those places that make you think, as novelist Frederick Exley once wrote, that Norman Rockwell wasn't a raving lunatic. As the cameras arrive for a routine documentary on hometown America, however, they notice the fissures. American Peripheral Imaging, lured in by tax breaks, has built a campus on the outskirts of town, bringing in workers earning about three times what the other Dadetown citizens have been earning at the town's big industry, Gorman Metal. When Gorman started downsizing, long-smoldering tensions broke out between the haves and the have-nots, escalating into bursts of violence. Director Russ Hexter's class-war correspondence is a seamless, frightening work--just keep telling yourself it's only a movie.
(Saturday, Feb. 3, 5:15pm; Sunday, Feb. 4 at 8:45pm; UA Pavilion)

*The Darien Gap A goofy, compelling account of a 20ish sad sack's last few months scrounging in snowy, miserable Boston before he sets out to travel the Pan-American Highway. He's particularly fascinated by the giant sloth, which, the film suggests, is the perfect totem animal for Generation X. The barrier between antihero Lyn Vaus (played by, yes, Lyn Vaus) and his journey is the Darien Gap, 80 miles of Panamanian swamp, which, in his inebriated mind, he begins to associate with the slough of his own upbringing in ritzy Darien, Conn. Director Brad Anderson advantageously keeps his protagonist from being a poor picked-on fellow, instead seeing him as a dedicated and sometimes unlovable screw-up leaching off of his rather nice girlfriend. The Darien Gap is based on some incidents in Vaus' real life; he was apparently something of a legendary musical deadbeat in his area. I loved the touching denouement and the ghostly calliope theme by the Atlanta band DQE.
(Friday, Feb. 2, 9pm, Camera One)

Ed's Next Move Is this 1996's answer to The Brothers McMullen? And to answer that question with a question, why are movies about bastards so much more compelling than movies about nice guys? Ed (Matt Ross), good-guy biology student from Wisconsin, comes to New York and eventually finds love in the arms of a violinist (Callie Thorne) who plays with the e.e. cummingsish San Francisco folk-rock band Ed's Redeeming Qualities. The band performs the pretty ballad "Spoken Word."
(Friday, Feb. 2, 7:15pm; Monday, Feb. 5, 6:45pm; UA Pavilion)

*The Haunting (1963) "There was a picture of mine on TV the other night--The Haunting--a nice small picture that didn't make a dime"--Robert Wise, quoted by John Gregory Dunne in The Studio. The Haunting (1963), a tale of parapsychologists in the "not sane" haunted mansion Hill House, is regarded as one of the scariest movies ever made. Among its frights is the unspeakable horror of Julie Harris' character being a lesbian, but autre temps, autre moeurs; and Wise's spin-offs on Shirley Jackson's novel include scenes people haven't been able to get out from under their skins for decades since. Wise will host the tribute screening.
(Friday, Feb. 2, 7pm, UA Pavilion)

Liste Noir Routine Montrealaise thriller about a call girl who rather unwisely decides to blackmail some judges who have been using her services. To avert a scandal, the judges turn to murder. The hook depends on several rather eyebrow-raising plot turns. This otherwise modest picture boasts some handsome cinematography.
(Saturday, Feb. 3, 9:15pm; Tuesday, Feb. 6, 7:30pm, UA Pavilion)

*Message to Love The Isle of Wight concert, 90 miles south of London, took place during three humid days in late August 1970. This unusual documentary about the event was only recently assembled after two decades in the can. The focus is not so much on either the performers or the audience--it is a war between the gate crashers and the rock promoters, well-meaning fools who were trying to run a concert for 600,000 people out of a cigar box full of money. The consequent disruption, plus the anger of the hippies who came for free music, began at a Berlin Wall�style arrangement of security guards and police dogs thrown around the concert. Bad music galore: Joan Baez singing the Beatles's awful "Let It Be," Donovan in what looks like a Lane Bryant top, the crucifying bathos of the Moody Blues. Weird scenes: psychotic meets neurotic as bearded lunatic disrupts Joni Mitchell's set. Another bearded lunatic, Jim Morrison, delivers sometimes slurred, sometimes wily "When the Music's Over," looking ready for hell or Las Vegas, whichever would have him. Lastly, priceless cultural artifacts from the Land of the Dead: the Who, at the peak of their power, delivering Mose Allison's "Young Man's Blues," Keith Moon visible, shouting the word "Back!" in the bridge. Best of all is the young Jimi Hendrix in his psychedelic jumpsuit--maybe too virtuosic, too confident, too handsome to live. Golden hindsight makes the troubled fest a harbinger of the disappearance of the Love Generation into a marsh of paranoia and hard drugs, indicated by the concert's aftermath, which looks like Napoleon's Retreat. Director Murray Lerner makes some crass choices (like inserting the same footage of the naked hippie chick twice), but the film is an unusually acrid look at the end of the '60s, as close in tone to Withnail and I as it is to Woodstock.
(Sunday, Feb. 4, 6:30pm, UA Pavilion)

*Procedure 769 The 1992 execution of Robert Alton Harris was witnessed by a group of reporters, cops and relatives of the condemned and Harris' victims: two teenagers that Harris shot for their car. Harris' stupid boast that he finished off the hamburgers of the boys he killed is what made him famous; this sound byte (at least he wasn't a food waster as well as a murderer) eclipsed other incidents of the life of the "Laughing Killer." He was, for instance, one of nine battered children of an alcoholic father who spent time in the joint himself for fucking his kids. In this astonishing documentary, interviews with the witnesses are combined with the minute details of the execution. The event itself is very arbitrary, much postponed--the drama of a killing with the ennui of an all-night Greyhound trip. Those who waited until dawn to see the show noted details as radically different as the smirk on Harris' face and the smirks on the faces of his executioners. In the end no one knows for certain whether Harris went to his death repentant or snorting his defiance even as he inhaled the gas.
(Saturday, Feb. 3, 7:30pm; UA Pavilion)

*Plan 10 From Outer Space The hidden history of the Mormons is revealed in this divinely inspired sci-fi satire. The spunky heroine discovers a lost plaque that proves the extraterrestrial roots of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Unfortunately, the found object also unleashes the wrath of a Queen of Outer Space type (played by Karen Black) and ultimately leaves the fate of Salt Lake City in the balance. The witty title is only the beginning of director/writer Trent Harris' stylish underground comedy that's part tribute to the flying-saucer opuses of the 1950s, and part travelogue of a very strange town and its native religion. It's hard to say what's more refreshing: the film itself or the evidence of avant-garde life even in Salt Lake City (proof to some local whiners that you don't have to live in an art colony to work as an artist).
(Friday, Feb. 2, 11:30pm, Camera One)

*Sonic Outlaws An expletive-filled off-air tantrum by America's Top 40 host Casey Kasem. A little dead dog from Ohio named Snuggles. The gargantuan egos of a band named U2. A scad of very expensive copyright lawyers. And a quartet of prankish doofusses from Contra Costa county who called themselves Negativland. When the dust cleared, there was a bill for $90,000. Sounds confusing? So is Craig Baldwin's impressionist documentary, unless you roll with it; the thesis is that since corporate images, advertisements and music are essentially shoved down our throats, it's only fair (use) to shove some of it back. The various methods of "culture jamming" are described through interviews and hilarious examples, such as the Barbie Liberation Front's transgender electronic-larynx transplants, John Oswald's 1982 record " Reagan Speaks His Mind" (through re-editing, the Gipper became the Gibber) and the science of billboard alternation. Baldwin's own appropriated imagery adds a very funny counterpoint to the slower interviews. The comments about television having shortened attention spans seem uncomfortably true, since the last half hour does drag. Still, you won't be able to wait to try some of these techniques out yourselves. Turn me on, dead man! (Camera One, Sunday, Feb. 4, 10:30 pm) (Sunday, Feb. 4, 10:30pm, Camera One)

Talk of the Town Almost-there German farce about a Hamburg radio host whose depressing love life is made worst after she meets Mr. Right, or rather, Mr. Right, D.D.S. Fast, if somewhat incomplete, Talk of the Town is two-thirds of a funny movie.
(Friday, Feb. 2, 9:45pm; Tuesday, Feb. 6, 7:30pm, UA Pavilion)

*Trailer Camp Coming attractions for some of the worst movies ever made: coke-fueled disco atrocities like Can't Stop the Music, The Pirate Movie and Sextette. The program provides evidence of why John Travolta was referred to as "John Revolta" by 1982, charting his slow career suicide in Moment by Moment and Staying Alive. Don't miss the preview for 99 Women, a prison movie with obligatory lesbian scenes: women, the voice-over promises, are "forced to perform degrading acts which stripped them of all humanity." In Technicolor, yet.
(Saturday, Feb. 3, 10:30pm, Camera One; Feb. 5, 9:30pm, UA Pavilion)

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