Author Archives: John Seal
Big Screen Berkeley: Payback, Yellow Submarine
Payback, it is sometimes said indelicately, can be a bitch. Jennifer Baichal’s new documentary Payback, opening this Friday, May 18 at Landmark’s Shattuck Cinemas (and most definitely not to be confused with the 1999 Mel Gibson thriller of the same name), takes a more contemplative approach to the term: payback, it turns out, can also be a restorative in the right hands.
Inspired by Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s book “Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth”, the film takes a decidedly broad approach to its topic. Traveling around the world, Baichal examines the interrelatedness of payback, debt, reparations, and revenge, with especial attention paid to debts of the non-monetary variety.
The film begins in Albania, where the question emerges — how do you keep them down on the farm once they’ve seen Tirana? The not so obvious answer is to invoke Kanun, an ancient, quasi-legal code of honor developed hundreds of years ago. Kanun still holds sway in the remote regions of northern Albania, where farmer Llesh Prenaga has been under virtual house arrest for the last three years. … Continue reading »
Big Screen Berkeley: God Bless America
Remember Bobcat Goldthwait? Back in the ‘80s and early ‘90s Bobcat was a stand-up comedy star, an HBO prime time staple, and an ensemble cast member of the godawful, but guiltily pleasurable, Police Academy movies. Along with the late Sam Kinison, the long-haired, gravel-throated Goldthwait was one of the MTV generation’s most popular comedians, his political edginess suggesting he could have inherited George Carlin’s throne.
Goldthwait retired from stand-up some years back, but his dark comic visions of a country gone off the rails have continued via a handful of acerbic if inconsistent features he’s written and directed, including Shakes the Clown (1992) and World’s Greatest Dad (2009). His latest film, God Bless America, opens at Landmark’s Shattuck Cinemas on Friday, May 11th — and the good news is that it’s his best behind-the-camera effort yet.
Heavy-set Joel Murray headlines as Frank, a middle-aged Syracuse insurance salesman who’s mad as Hell and isn’t sure if he can take it anymore. Driven to distraction by his Lindsay Lohan obsessed neighbors and their mewling infant, Frank fantasizes about ending their miserable lives, but instead goes to work for another day of annoying water-cooler chat about last night’s TV lowlights, including the latest victim of the ‘American Superstarz’ fame machine. … Continue reading »
Big Screen Berkeley: The Fairy
Apparently, there’s something about Le Havre. Previously the star of Aki Kaurismaki’s eponymous shaggy dog tale, the spotlight is once again on this French port town in The Fairy (La fée), a delightfully absurd comedy opening Friday, May 4 at Landmark’s Shattuck Cinemas.
Dom (writer-director Dominique Abel, a scrawny string-bean who could easily pass for the love child of Steve Buscemi and Roberto Benigni) is night manager at a slightly seedy harborside hotel. He commutes to work on a rickety old bike, wears plastic bags to protect himself from the rain, and spends his shift camped in front of the telly with a tasty snack. Dom enjoys the simple things and evenings, apparently, are not very busy.
This evening, however, will prove to be different. Tourist John L’anglais (John Cleese lookalike Philippe Martz), a typically clueless Englishman who communicates via phrase book, wishes to stay the night with his pooch pal Mimi. When Dom informs him that dogs aren’t allowed in the hotel, John stashes Mimi in his plaid Gladstone bag — and, this being an absurdist comedy, Dom doesn’t cotton on to the ruse. The wily John checks in successfully and his remarkably mobile luggage walks itself upstairs. … Continue reading »
Big Screen Berkeley: Unfair World
The Greek people have been through a lot over the past few years: the whipping boys of European austerity, they’ve suffered brutal wage cuts, deep job losses, and endless benefit takeaways since the country’s slow motion debt crisis began in 2009. The social, economic, and emotional fallout of their national crisis is the unspoken subtext of writer-director Filippo Tsito’s brutally frank drachma — er, drama — Unfair World, screening at Pacific Film Archive as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival at 8:15 pm on Sunday, April 29th.
Sotiris (Antonis Kafetzopoulos) is an Athens policeman at the end of his tether. Though honest to a fault, he also feels deep empathy for the petty thieves and insurance scammers he’s tasked to interrogate — after all, times are hard, and people must do what they can to survive. When off duty he drinks to forget, tippling enough ouzo to send him toppling from his favorite park bench on a nightly basis. … Continue reading »
Opening: 55th San Francisco International Film Festival
If it’s spring in the Bay Area, it’s time once again for the San Francisco International Film Festival. While the Festival proper commences with appropriate pomp and circumstance this coming Thursday at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre, its East Bay offerings begin the following day, Friday, April 20th, with a pair of down-to-Earth Northern European character studies screening at Pacific Film Archive.
Up first, at 6:30 pm, is German writer-director Ulrich Köhler’s Sleeping Sickness (Schlafkrankheit), winner of the Silver Bear at last year’s Berlin International Film Festival. Set in the West African republic of Cameroon, it’s an elliptical examination of the uneasy relationship between the First and Third Worlds, a film that doesn’t tip its hand until the very last frame — and arguably not even then. … Continue reading »
Big Screen Berkeley: Applause
Love it or hate it, the Dogme Manifesto has been hugely influential since Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg puckishly penned it in 1995. Though a Dogme film hasn’t been produced since 2005, the Manifesto’s lessons and strictures have since become part of the DNA of Danish cinema.
During its lifetime, Dogme’s results were mixed: for every success such as Kristian Levring’s memorable King Lear adaptation The King Is Alive (2000), there was an unwatchable piece of nonsense such as Harmony Korine’s Julien Donkey-Boy (1999). Even Dogme haters, however, can be grateful for one of the Manifesto’s unanticipated benefits, actress Paprika Steen.
The only thespian to appear in the first three Dogmes (Vinterberg’s The Celebration, von Trier’s The Idiots, and Soren Kragh-Jacobson’s Mifune’s Last Song), Steen was already in early middle age by the time she became a film star. Now closing in on 50, Steen continues to deliver quality performances in films such as Applause, a powerful character study opening this Friday, April 13th at Landmark’s Shattuck Cinemas. … Continue reading »
Reviewed: They Call it Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain
Things finally seem to be looking up in the Republic of the Union of Myanmar (formerly known as the Union of Burma): as I write these words, longtime political prisoner and dissident leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been elected to the national Parliament’s lower house. Though Myanmar’s military junta will maintain its overwhelming parliamentary majority, the country will soon be enjoying its first small taste of electoral democracy in half a century.
Generally considered the second most isolated country in the world (North Korea, of course, being number one), Myanmar has been the subject of several recent documentaries, including Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country, and Burma Soldier. While better than nothing, these films were understandably limited in scope due to tight censorship restrictions. … Continue reading »
Big Screen Berkeley: Where the Sidewalk Ends
Fill your brain with enough ephemera, and eventually you’ll lose track of some of it. Consider the case of Where the Sidewalk Ends, an Otto Preminger noir cum police procedural screening at 7:00 pm on Thursday, March 22nd as part of Pacific Film Archive’s ongoing series, “Dark Past: Film Noir by German Emigrés.”
Though I’d seen Where the Sidewalk Ends in the past, my addled brain had long since conflated it with Fritz Lang’s 1956 crime drama While the City Sleeps — perhaps in part because both films are headlined by Dana Andrews. Of course, Lang was an Austrian, technically disqualifying his work from this series. Then again, Preminger was born in the Ukraine: perhaps PFA should have called this series “Film Noir by Citizens of the Former Habsburg Empire.” Maybe next time. … Continue reading »
Preview: SF International Asian American Film Festival
The 30th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival is already under way, with screenings taking place in San Francisco, San Jose, and — as in years past — at our very own Pacific Film Archive. As usual, PFA will be screening some of the Festival’s most interesting and prestigious titles, and the week ahead offers a solid selection of documentaries and dramatic features, with fans of non-fiction cinema particularly well served.
Produced with the assistance of HBO, Iranian-born filmmaker Tanaz Eshaghian’s Love Crimes of Kabul kicks things off at 9:00 pm on Wednesday, March 14th. The director’s previous film, Be Like Others, was an eye-opening and genuinely shocking look at the lives of gay Iranian men forced to undergo sex change operations in order to circumvent their homeland’s onerous morality laws. … Continue reading »
“The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye” (free tickets!)
How times change. Derided in 1976 by Tory Member of Parliament Sir Nicholas Fairbairn as a “wrecker of civilization” and forced into exile in the early ‘90s after being falsely accused by Scotland Yard of satanic child abuse, Manchester-born musician and artist Genesis Breyer P-orridge (formerly Neil Megson) recently arranged for his exhaustive archives to reside at one of the world’s greatest art galleries, London’s Tate Modern.
Bodies change, too. Now 62, Genesis was an early adopter of the so-called “modern primitive” lifestyle, adherents of which eagerly tattoo, pierce, and otherwise alter their bodies in any number of imaginative ways — and Genesis, never one for half measures, ultimately decided to take body modification to its logical conclusion after falling head over heels in love with Jacqueline Breyer (aka Lady Jaye), a one-time New York City nurse. Such was the couple’s devotion that they began a long term transition to “pandrogyny”, a state where male and female genders are united within one body. Their amazing and utterly compelling story is told in The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, a new feature opening this Friday, March 9th at Landmark’s Shattuck Cinemas. … Continue reading »
