Tags
Alfred Lion, Anton Yelchin, Beyond the Bolex, Blue Note Records, Casablanca, Curtiz, Francis Wolff, It Must Be Schwing - The Blue Note Story, Love Antosha, Michael Curtiz, Pauline Kael, San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, What She Saide: The Art of Pauline Kael
The 39th edition of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, July 18-Aug. 4, kicks off with Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles, a documentary about Fiddler on the Roof, the musical that became a Broadway phenomenon and later a 1971 Oscar-winning film. That opener sets the stage for a festival rife with films about the business of show, its personalities, indelible moments in entertainment history, and even a documentary about a camera beloved by filmmakers and its inventor. Here is a report on five of the most notable, followed by a list of the remaining show biz titles. –Pam Grady
Beyond the Bolex
The world may be increasingly digital, but celluloid still exists, and the Bolex 16mm movie camera is still manufactured. The story of that camera and its inventor, Russian-born Jacques Bolsey, is the subject of this enchanting documentary. Made by Bolsey’s great-granddaughter Alyssa Bolsey, who had access to Jacques’ journals, schematics, cameras, and footage (generously employed throughout the documentary), Beyond the Bolex is both industrial history and the personal story of the Bolsey family. It is also, in a way, a fascinating detective story as Alyssa Bolsey unravels the enigma of a man she never knew but with whom she shares a deep love for the beauty of the analog image.
Curtiz
Director Michael Curtiz’s (Ferenc Lengyel) battles with studio and government interference over the production of his latest film, Casablanca, are only the start of the filmmaker’s troubles in this elegant, noirish Hungarian production. Supercilious government suit Johnson (Declan Hannigan) insists the movie should be wartime propaganda. Curtiz resists the reduction of his work to knee-jerk jingoism even as he wrestles with how to end the picture. Complicating matters is the appearance of his estranged daughter Kitty (Evelin Dobos), demanding attention he scarcely has time to give. Luminously shot in black and white (with the occasional red flourish to suggest shooting in progress) with an evocative score by Gábor Subicz, the drama does not gloss over the less savory aspects of Curtiz’s personality while also depicting him as a strong-willed artist unafraid of ruffling powerful feathers.
It Must Be Schwing – The Blue Note Story
Not to be confused with Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes, the other recent documentary about the legendary New York jazz label, this entertaining German import more tightly focuses on the label’s founders, Alfred Lion (1908-1987) and Francis Wolff (1907-1971). United in friendship by their love of jazz from the time they were teenagers and Jews forced to flee Hitler’s Germany, the two made their passion into their business in forming the label that would record such artists as Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, Lee Morgan, Herbie Hancock, and so many more jazz giants. Eric Friedler’s delightful doc employs what one would expect from a film of this nature, a lot of archival footage, bursts of the music upon which Blue Note made its name, and interviews with music historians, Blue Note recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder, and plenty of musicians, including Quincy Jones, Sonny Rollins, and Hancock. But to fully tell Lion and Wolff’s story, Friedler turns to animation, a stroke of inspiration that brings the men and their fascinating story to vivid life.
Love, Antosha
The actor, Anton Yelchin, who died in 2016 at 27, has 68 credits on the IMDB, an astonishing number for someone so young and encompassing shorts, TV shows, and movies ranging from small indies to the latest Star Trek franchise. Garret Price’s moving documentary, produced by Yelchin’s Like Crazy director Drake Doremus, suggests the promise unfulfilled: the parts he had left to play, the directorial debut he was planning, his immersion into photography. More vitally, this heartfelt film—chockful of clips from Yelchin’s films, including his own boyhood efforts—reveals Anton as a bright, curious, and caring personality in stories told by his friends, coworkers, and his heartbroken parents, figure skaters Viktor and Irina Yelchin.
What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael
In time for Pauline Kael’s centennial birthday comes Rob Garver’s documentary that will appeal to Paulettes everywhere, a film that spins the story of one of the last of the truly influential film critics. A poultry farmer’s daughter from Petaluma, she got her start on the radio at KPFA in Berkeley before pulling up stakes and heading East where she eventually rose to prominence at The New Yorker. Sarah Jessica Parker voices Kael’s words in a film that combines archival footage of Kael and others, clips from many of the movies that she reviewed, and interviews with her daughter Gina James and writers and filmmakers, including Camille Paglia, James Wolcott, Carrie Rickey, Paul Schrader, Francis Ford Coppola, and John Boorman.
More SFJFF show business-themed films:
The Amazing Johnathan Documentary
Before You Know It
Carl Laemmle
The Humorist
The Mamboniks
Shut Up and Play the Piano
Standing Up and Falling Down
Tel Aviv on Fire
In a key moment of Wild Rose, aspiring country singer Rose-Lynn Harlan (Jessie Buckley) travels to London—probably the farthest she’s been outside of her hometown of Glasgow—to meet one of her heroes, real-life BBC The Country Show radio host Whispering Bob Harris—who tells her that if she is serious about making it in country music she needs to write her own songs. It is a suggestion that flummoxes her; she feels she has nothing to write about. She can’t see what the audience sees: Her life is a country song. And so is this movie, the story of a working-class heroine who can’t seem to get out of her own way, whose life would utterly defeat most other people, but whose hope and big dreams remain undistinguished.
Rankin-Bass probably doesn’t have cause for action, but it is impossible not to feel the influence of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in this fourth Toy Story adventure. The world Woody (Tom Hanks) stumbles on where toys go unloved and unwanted is not an island nor toy world unto itself, but a dusty antique store where toys go unloved and unwanted. For Woody, beginning to contemplate his own obsolescence and a time when no child will call him his own, the place is a revelation. If this is truly Woody’s last roundup, he goes out in a blaze of laughter and tears.
Nicolas Brown adapts Sean B. Carroll’s book The Serengeti Rules, at once paying homage to the five scientists at the heart of it, and explicating their theories in a handsome, engaging documentary. Like so many environmental docs that have come before it, it identifies a threat to our planet, in this case, the degradation to our natural world that ensues with the loss of biodiversity. But unlike so many films of its nature, it is more hopeful in tone. The scientists know what needs to be done to cure this particular malady; the trick is getting it done. The Serengeti Rules serves as a clarion call for action.
Fun fact: When Renaldo and Clara, Bob Dylan’s sole (and notoriously unsuccessful) foray into narrative filmmaking—a nearly four-hours-long fever dream combining vignettes with concert footage–opened in San Francisco in 1978, it was at the Castro Theatre. It is only fitting then that Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese that employs that same footage should have its one and only San Francisco screening before settling into its home on Netflix at the Castro. Complete with tastings of Dylan’s Heaven’s Door whiskey line, which is somehow perfect. The film, up to a point, anyway, is delicious. And so is the booze.
Anyone expecting Rocketman–a film about the life and times of Elton John, executive produced by Elton John and produced by his husband David Furnish—to be a rock star’s vanity project, will be disabused of that notion in the dramatic musical’s opening scene. That’s when Elton (Taron Egerton), arrestingly attired in a skintight, bright orange jumpsuit with feathered wings and topped off with devil horns and rhinestone, heart-shaped glasses, bursts into what is unmistakably a 12-step meeting, sits down, and confesses to a long list of addictions. No, Rocketman is not a vanity project; it’s an anti-vanity project, a lacerating portrait of the artist as a young, self-loathing man. It is a movie that defies expectations, revealing the emptiness and inner turmoil hidden beneath such a glittering career.
Nearly 28 years ago, on Dec. 23, 1991, three little girls died in a fire in Corsicana, TX. In short order, the authorities declared the blaze an arson and identified the children’s father, Cameron Todd Willingham, a local ne’er-do-well as the killer. Fifteen years later, the state of Texas executed Willingham by lethal injection. Those are the bare bones of the case that serves as the basis for the Edward Zwick’s (Blood Diamond, Defiance) new film, Trial By Fire, a tense true-crime drama that argues that an injustice has been done and an innocent man executed. Jack O’Connell as Willingham and Laura Dern, as Elizabeth Gilbert, a playwright who worked on behalf of Willingham’s exoneration, lend their considerable talents to a riveting tale of justice denied.
John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is quite the timepiece. He is the Timex watch of assassins: He’s takes a licking and keeps on ticking. In John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum he takes more licks than seems possible and still survive and even thrive, but if John Wick (it doesn’t seem right to call him either just “John”or just “Wick”) has a superpower, it is his preternatural ability to get up and keep fighting even when every fiber of his being is no doubt willing him to just stay down. John Wick is determined to live and no worldwide assassin army is going to stop him—or so he chooses to believe.
