Category Archives: News

DOCTOR STRANGE IN THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS: The Drinking Games

06 Friday May 2022

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Not a review. Let those invested in the MCU write those. This is for those who will go to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, because, by now, Marvel movies have become habit. Sometimes there is a big payoff as there was most recently with Spider-Man: No Way Home. Other times, not so much.

So, what do you do when you’re squirming in your seat, realizing this Marvel isn’t so marvelous? If you’re me, you imagine drinking games. If you’re you, maybe you play them. And if getting tipsy isn’t your jam, play them without alcohol (or turn them into eating games with some fine chocolate truffles or charcuterie).

Let the games begin:

Take a drink anytime someone says “multiverse.” (Caution if using alcohol, maybe change the rule to every third time someone says it – they beat that dead horse a lot.)

Take a drink anytime some superhero or other who isn’t Doctor Strange or The Scarlet Witch appears on screen.

Take a drink every time Wanda/The Scarlet Witch expresses the desire to reunite with the children that Doctor Strange keeps helpfully pointing out don’t exist.

Take a drink every time those cardboard sitcom children appear on screen.

Take a drink every time the movie pays homage to its director, Sam Raimi, by slipping in a nod to Evil Dead. (This is, by far, the best game.)

Take a drink every time a portal opens to a new universe.

Finally, take a drink, and there will only be one for this game, when you realize that the multiverse means no Marvel character can ever really die, so good luck remaining emotionally invested in any of them. But, oh, such a glorious way to milk that cash cow for the studio.
 

Pre-stardom Jean-Paul Belmondo shines in “The French Had a Name For It” prequel

22 Friday Oct 2021

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Jean-Paul Belmondo and László Szabó in Á double tour (Web of Passion)

“The French Had a Name For It,” Don Malcolm’s festival of Gallic noir returns to San Francisco’s Roxie Theatre, Nov. 12-14, but on Sunday, Oct. 24, he serves up an appetizer with two tribute double bills. In the evening, Malcolm pays homage to the great Jean Gabin with screenings of two of the actor’s best, the 1954 heist film Touchez pas au grisbi (Hands Off the Loot!), and Des gens sans importance (People of No Importance), a 1956 drama limning the affair between Gabin’s middle-aged truck driver and a young waitress (François Arnoul). The afternoon belongs to Jean-Paul Belmondo with two films that capture the actor’s formidable charisma just before he achieved stardom with his breakthrough in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless.

Belmondo’s role is but a small supporting part in Marcel Carné’s Les tricheurs (The Cheaters), a drama about the star-crossed romance between a bourgeois suburbanite (Jacques Charrier) and a hipster existentialist (Pascale Petit). A superb jazz and early rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack that features, among others, Chet Baker, Fats Domino, Lionel Hampton, Dizzy Gillespie, and The Champs propels the action that moves from cafes to the luxurious apartment of one particularly well-heeled member of this demimonde to a club on the Champs-Élysées.

Belmondo makes a striking entrance, rifling through coats at a party, then moves in and out of the action. He rivets the screen in the scenes that he is in – that he is destined to be a star is hardly surprising.

The second feature in the tribute is Á double tour (Web of Passion), Claude Chabrol’s third feature, which begins as the study of a dysfunctional upper-class Provence family before shifting in a murder mystery as Henri Marcoux’s (Jacques Dacqmine) young artist mistress Leda (Antonella Luadi) comes to a bad end. And while Roger (Mario David), the village milkman, is arrested for the crime, there is a whole houseful of suspects at the Marcoux villa to consider.

Belmondo is Laszlo Kovacs – the alias the actor’s character Michel would later adopt in Breathless – tactless, gross fiancé to Henri’s daughter Elisabeth (Jeanne Valérie). He is the man who introduced his future father-in-law to Leda, an old friend. He delights in taunting Elisabeth’s mother Thérèse (Madeleine Robinson) with his boorishness and recognizes that Elisabeth’s classical music-obsessed brother Richard’s (André Jocelyn) is more than simply eccentric. He’s a pig, cheerfully so, but when it comes to toxic masculinity and misogyny he’s a rank amateur compared to Papa Marcoux.

Call this double bill “Baby Steps to Belmondo,” as what both films offer are striking glimpses into what Godard saw when he cast the actor in Breathless. The rough-hewn magnetism is there. It was just awaiting the director who would fully exploit it. –Pam Grady

 Á double tour (Web of Passion), 2:00PM; Les tricheurs (The Cheaters), 3:45PM, Sunday, Oct. 24, Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St, SF. www.roxie.com

Celebratory Hector Babenco doc streams in virtual film series highlighting 2021 international Oscar picks

20 Wednesday Jan 2021

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For her feature documentary directing debut, Brazilian actress Barbara Paz, did not have to travel far, only to the other side of the marital bed as she turns her lens on her husband, filmmaker Hector Babenco. A joint project between spouses, Babenco: Tell Me When I Die, Brazil’s 2021 international feature film Oscar entry, is an incandescent examination of an auteur’s life and work and a deep dive into an artist’s reckoning with his own mortality as Babenco – who died in 2016 at 70 – wages a losing battle against cancer. Despite that, the film is not maudlin nor is it an elegy. It is a wife’s love letter to her spouse and a celebration of his art.

By the time, Babenco tells his wife, “I’ve already lived my death; now all that is left is to make a film about it,” the Argentinean-born director, who adopted Brazil as his home, has been living with dying for decades. He was only 38, riding high on the strength of his 1981 critically acclaimed drama of the Brazilian favelas Pixote and his Oscar-nominated 1985 Hollywood debut Kiss of the Spider Woman, when he was first diagnosed with cancer. At one point, in the first years of the disease, he was given four to six months to live. Yet, not only did Babenco survive, he thrived for three more decades.

Images in Babenco: Tell Me When I Die are a luminous black-and-white, even the clips from Babenco’s films and behind-the-scenes footage of the director at work rendered so. His last film, 2014’s My Hindu Friend parallels the filmmaker’s real-life situation, as Willem Dafoe (an associate producer on Babenco: Tell Me When I Die) plays a filmmaker facing death. In the documentary, Babenco similarly struggles with his failing health, but his illness is only one facet of the film. Paz takes the measure of her husband’s life: his youth in Argentina, his life as an artist, his love of film. She also limns a devoted couple’s story as they face the biggest challenge of their relationship. It is not a straightforward biography; playful, surreal touches abound as Paz celebrates Babenco’s life in a rich, impressionistic style that bits her subject and his oeuvre.

Babenco: Tell Me When I Die does not yet have a US distributor, but it is screening Jan. 22-Feb. 11 as part of the California Film Institute (CFI)/Smith Rafael Film Center’s 17th annual For Your Consideration: A Celebration of World Cinema. The virtual program comprised of over two dozen of the 93 films eligible for the international feature Oscar this year is available for streaming nationwide on the CFI website. –Pam Grady

Pixar drops SOUL sneak peak

27 Saturday Jun 2020

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SOULDisney and Pixar’s SOUL is not scheduled for release Nov. 20, 2020, but there is a brand new sneak peek of the animated fantasy about a middle-school music teacher and pianist (Jamie Foxx) who gets the golden opportunity to play with a renowned jazz musician’s (Angela Bassett) quartet. But that plan goes awry when he finds himself in The Great Before – the place where souls go to get their, well, soul before they join their human hosts on Earth.

The sneak premiered June 27 as part of the Essence Festival of Culture when Soul director Pete Docter, co-director and screenwriter Kemp Powers,  and producer Dana Murray joined culture consultants to the film, anthropologist/educator Dr. Johnetta Cole and jazz pianist Jon Batiste (who also arranged and composed music for the film) for a virtual panel, “Finding Soul.” Included in the clip is Cody ChesnuTT performing his song “Parting Ways.”

The French Had a Name for It 6 brings noir and Aznavour to the Roxie

14 Thursday Nov 2019

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horace-62_01When Charles Aznavour died just over a year ago in October 2018, it brought the end of not just one of the world’s great singers but also an actor of considerable charisma. That quality is on full display in The Fabiani Affair (1962), a tense crime drama that is one of 15 1960s Gallic film noirs screening at The French Had a Name For It 6, Thursday, Nov. 14-Monday, Nov. 18 at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater.

Made two years after Aznavour starred as Charlie, the musician swept up in his brothers’ criminal activities, in François Truffaut’s sublime thriller Shoot the Piano Player, The Fabiani Affair once more casts the actor as a man entangled with his siblings in a violent clash. Aznavour plays Horace Fabiani, one of three Corsican brothers living in Paris and the latest generation to become enmeshed in a feud with the rival Colonna family that dates back to the old country. Horace is reluctant to join in; he has a family and among the opposing set of brothers the Fabianis will battle is their sister’s husband Noel (Raymond Pellegrin). But with the Fabianis’ father (Nerio Bernardi) spoiling for war, Horace really has no choice.

The directing debut of actor André Versini, The Fabiani Affair builds suspense over a long night in Paris as the two sets of brothers alternately hunt for one another. None of them really seem to have their hearts into the fight, but their clash is a matter of family honor and destiny, so they drive on. Versini displays a gift for setting atmosphere with Marcel Grignon’s striking cinematography and Paul Mauriat’s evocative jazz score. Aznavour further amps the tension through his performance as a man increasingly giving himself over to the despair of an untenable situation in a film that is as downbeat as it is suspenseful.

Among other highlight of The French Had a Name for it 6:

Joy House (1964): One of the biggest, sexiest French stars of the 1960s, Alain Delon (Purple Noon, Le Samouraï) stars alongside Americans Lola Albright and Jane Fonda in René Clement’s sly thriller. On the run from gangsters who mean him harm, Delon’s Marc thinks he has found the perfect hideout and a sweet situation when he signs on as chauffer to rich widow Barbara (Albright) and her pretty young cousin Melinda (Fonda). Perhaps Melinda’s obsessive attentions and Barbara’s one-sided dialogue with her dead husband should clue Marc into the idea that his refuge isn’t the oasis from danger it seems. But beauty doesn’t always equate with brains, and certainly not in this delicious little drama.

Le Petit Soldat (1963): Originally shot in 1960 as Jean-Luc Godard’s follow-up to his immortal Breathless, this war drama was banned by French authorities for three years. The director’s sin? Depicting torture and other war crimes in context of the then raging Algerian War. Michel Subor is a photographer in Geneva, Switzerland, who comes to grief at his other job working against the Algerians. Godard’s future wife Anna Karina is the model the photographer falls for in a film as stylistically dazzling as the director’s storied feature debut.

One Does Not Bury Sunday (1960): An interracial romantic triangle is at the heart of this downbeat noir in which Gabonese writer Philippe Valence (Philippe Mory) becomes involved with both an au pair (Margaretha Lundal) and a rich married woman (Hella Petri). Sex and murder interrupt an artist’s brilliant future in a drama that grows ever bleaker as the police (and the walls) close in on Philippe.

Objective 500 Million (1966): Pierre Schoendoerffer’s nifty thriller stars Bruno Cremer as Jean, a disgraced former air force captain sucked into a caper that involves both a beautiful femme fatale (Marisa Mell) and the man (Jean-Claude Rolland) responsible for his disgrace and imprisonment during the Algerian War. His share in the heist of millions could go along way toward fixing what’s wrong with Jean’s life but the possibility of revenge motivates him more in a tense crime drama with an arresting climax that alternates between the Paris-to-Bordeaux flight that is ferrying the cash and confederates on the ground awaiting a big payoff. –Pam Grady

The French Had a Name For It 6, Nov. 14-18, Roxie Theater, 3117 16th Street, San Francisco, $12-$14. http://midcenturyproductions.com

A maiden voyage on the world-famous Maiden

23 Friday Aug 2019

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The two-hour sail almost didn’t happen. Maiden, the yacht made famous in Alex Holmes’ eponymous documentary about skipper Tracy Edwards and her all-female crew and their history-making bid to win the 1989 Whitbread Round the World Race, has been docked at the St. Francis Yacht Club since the evening of Monday, Aug. 19. Now, she was off with a few invited guests for a sail around the Bay, but a dredging operation with a huge barge at the mouth of the harbor dropped the water level even more than the low tide, trapping Maiden inside the marina. But cooperation is a hallmark of people who spend their lives on water. The barge moved off. The sail began.

On the boat: Skipper Wendy Tuck, a cheerful Australian who became the first woman to win a round the world race when she came in first in the 2018 Clipper Race; three sailors of the permanent crew, Matilda Ajanko, Courtney Koos, and Amalia Infante; Angela Heath, a member of the 1989 crew, joyful to find herself back in familiar surroundings; an assortment of journalists and others most of whom seemed familiar with the sport; and me—a landlubber whose boating experience can be summoned up in one word: ferries.

Ferries are big. Ferries are kind of like buses, only on water. Maiden is not that. Thrilling and terrifying at the same time. For one thing, Maiden (at least to these eyes, actual sailors may feel differently) is small, its deck narrow, ringed by a taffrail we were told to hold onto at all times when walking on the deck (not something this scaredy cat was not going to attempt—it is far too easy to imagine pitching forward overboard, so not a good look). Then there’s the heel, those moments when a boat leans more to one side than the other and it feels as if you could slide off the world.

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Despite the fear, it was a joy to be on the water. The crew invited confidence, moving around the deck as if on solid dry land. And they were kind to the newbie, particularly skipper Wendy, a surfer who came to sailing in her later 20s, and Amalia, a Spaniard who has been sailing since she was a small child.  And despite the Golden Gate being so socked in that the bridge disappeared—Wendy admits she doesn’t like sailing in fog, but we weren’t going that way—it was a beautiful day for a cruise around the inner San Francisco Bay, around Alcatraz and within shouting distance of Angel Island and Sausalito.

So, why is Maiden here? After the Whitbread race, circumstances forced Tracy Edwards to sell her beloved yacht. It passed through several hands and then dropped out of sight, only to be found in a state of profound disrepair in 2014 in the Seychelles. Edwards raised the money to buy Maiden back and brought her back to England where she was fully restored.

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Now, Maiden is sailing around the world again, but not as part of a race. Instead, she is on a two-and-a-half year world tour that will cover over 60,000 nautical miles, visit 20 countries, and make 36 stopovers, including all five stopovers the Maiden made during the Whitbread race.  The boat left the UK in Nov. 2018.

The journey is not simply one of sport, it also a way of raising awareness of as well as funds for the education of girls and the rights of women through The Maiden Factor and The Maiden Factor Foundation. Part of that effort is outreach. To that end, Maiden is offering public tours, Sat., Aug. 24, 11 a.m.-3 p.m., South Beach Yacht Club in San Francisco and Sun., Aug. 25, 12 p.m.-4 p.m. at the Richmond Yacht Club in Richmond. There is also a benefit screening of Maiden on Weds., Aug. 28, 6:30 p.m. at the Premier Theater at Lucasfilm. Original Maiden crewmembers Jo Gooding and Angela Heath will take part in a Q&A. Maiden departs from the St. Francis Yacht Club at 8:30 a.m. on Friday, Aug. 30.

And now I can say I’ve sailed. (And, yes, I would do it again despite the fear.) And I can brag, because my maiden voyage was on the world-famous Maiden. –Pam Grady

For more information about Maiden and The Maiden Factor, visit www.themaidenfactor.org

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John, Egerton’s duet at Cannes

17 Friday May 2019

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Rocketman’s world premiere was met with a standing ovation. Dexter Fletcher’s musical biopic of Elton John starring Taron Egerton as the glittery pop idol is currently sitting at 86% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. If that isn’t enough to whet your appetite for the movie, there’s this: the legendary piano man and the actor who portrays him in a sublime duet of the song that gave the film its title. —Pam Grady

Maigret Steps into Spotlight at San Francisco Fest

08 Wednesday May 2019

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San Francisco may be gentrifying at a terrifying rate, but at least we’ll always have homicide. Of the movie variety. The City is lucky to be awash in noir festivals: Elliot Lavine’s I Wake Up Dreaming (Elliot’s moved up near Portland, but we hope he hasn’t totally abandoned us), Eddie Muller’s Noir City, and Don Malcom’s The French Had a Name for It, which is teeing up its latest menu of mystery, mayhem, and murder May 10-13 at the Roxie Theater.

Fourteen films will unreel, opening with Z director Costa-Gavras’ 1965 debut feature, The Sleeping Car Murders (Compartiment tueurs), a jazz-inflected thriller starring Yves Montand as the detective investigating a case where a woman’s strangulation on a train is only the beginning of a gruesome spree. It is a fast-paced, involving drama and the perfect film to set the mood for the four-day series.

Malcolm has put together a strong slate. Pick any of the 14 and you won’t go wrong, but I want to make a special plea for three films in the festival: Night at the Crossroads (La nuit du carrefour) (1932) and the closing night double-bill of Maigret Sets a Trap (Maigret tend un piége) (1958) and The Head of a Man (La tête d’un homme) (1933).  Georges Simenon’s great French detective, Commissaire Jules Maigret, the protagonist of 76 novels and 28 short stories published over four decades from 1931 to 1972, remains a popular figure in movies and TV to this day. The French Had a Name for It is screening three of the most memorable.

A long time friend of Simenon’s, since long before the writer even conceived the great detective, Jean Renoir (Boudu Saved from Drowning, The Grand Illusion, The Rules of the Game) introduced the cinematic Maigret to the world in 1932 with Night at the Crossroads. His older brother Pierre played the detective, called to a desolate town that consists of a gas station and a few houses, to solve the murder of a jewel thief. Made years before the term “noir” was even coined to describe the genre, of the three Maigret films, it is the most noir of them all. It is there in the atmosphere, so foggy and damp it’s almost tactile, creating an aura of doom. It is there in the rogues’ gallery of suspects that include gas station jockey Oscar (Dignimont, one name only, probably artist André Dignimont) and Germans Karl (Georges Koudria) and Else (Winna Winifried), whose claims of being brother and sister Maigret doesn’t believe. As portrayed by Pierre Renoir, Maigret is a frank investigator, willing to forego social niceties in his quest for the truth—as the unfortunate Else comes to discover. An almost documentary-like car chase adds to the suspense in a thriller that is short, nasty, and efficient.

Julien Duvivier’s (Pepe le Moko) The Head of a Man takes a more psychological approach as Maigret (here played by the great Harry Baur in a wonderful performance) refuses to give up on a case that is apparently solved. Joseph Heurtin (Alexandre Rignault) had to have killed the old lady found stabbed in her bedroom. His bloody finger and shoeprints are all over the murder scene and he’s captured on the run. The slow-witted man admits that he was there to rob the woman but denies his guilt in her murder and won’t talk about any accomplices. Case closed, but Maigret thinks otherwise. Gaston Jacquet as Willy Ferrière, the woman’s nephew and heir, and Valéry Inkijinoff as Radek, an ailing immigrant with a serious chip on his shoulder, are part of the detective’s puzzle. The Head of a Man delights, not just in its central mystery, but also in the cop’s dogged determination to seek justice instead of an easy win and in his uncanny ability to get into the heads of his array of suspects.

The immortal Jean Gabin steps into the legendary detective’s shoes in Maigret Sets a Trap, directed by Jean Delannoy (Obsession, The Hunchback of Notre Dame) and co-written by Michel Audiard, A Prophet writer-director Jacques Audiard’s father. Someone is killing women in Montmarte and Maigret and his officers are determined to find the culprit before he can murder again. All clues lead one way, but Maigret follows a different path. In this outing, Maigret could give Columbo a run for his money when it comes to needling suspects into either confessing or putting themselves in a position to be caught in the act. The most stylish of the three films—Midcentury furnishings fans will find a lot of eye candy in one suspect’s apartment—it is also the most buoyant. Maigret is at a low point at the film’s start, wondering if it is time to retire and let someone else solve the case. Watching him recover his mojo and joie de vivre is a joy. Gabin is terrific and so is a mystery rooted ultimately in twisted relationships. Together with The Head of a Man, it is the perfect double bill on which to end The French Had a Name for It, one that will leave you wanting more. –Pam Grady

The French Had a Name for It 5 1/2 , May 10-13, Roxie Theater, 3117 – 16th Street, San Francisco. http://www.midcenturyproductions.com/

Crocodile Glam Rock: The Fashions of ROCKETMAN

07 Tuesday May 2019

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The latest promo to drop on Rocketman is all about the fashion. To see Elton John back in the ’70s would have been an experience: Not just the music, but the clothes, the glasses, the larger-than-life flamboyancy. From the looks of it, Rocketman captures that. Certainly, star Taron Egerton wears it well. Whether the movie lives up to the hype remains to be seen, but for now, bravo!

Orchard drops THE HUMMINGBIRD PROJECT trailer

18 Friday Jan 2019

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One of the more unusual thrillers to come down the pike in recent years, The Hummingbird Project revolves around the construction of a high-speed fiber optics cable to facilitate high-frequency stock trades where every millisecond counts. The project pits cousins Vincent (Jesse Eisenberg) and Anton (an almost unrecognizable Alexander Skarsgård) against their high-flying trader ex-boss Eva (Salma Hayak) who is determined to put a stop to the upstarts’ attempt to usurp her business. The Orchard release debuts in March.