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Character actor Udo Kier steps into SWAN SONG and emerges a star

06 Friday Aug 2021

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Udo Kier recently spent a lot of time in a nursing home. Oh, not because the 76-year-old German actor was ill or otherwise infirm, but because that was the home of Pat Pitsenbarger, the retired Sandusky, OH, hairdresser he plays in Todd Stephens’ Swan Song.

“I talked to Todd about shooting [the film] as chronologically as possible,” Kier says in a recent Zoom call from his elegant home in Palm Springs.

“We started in the nursing home and I spent time there on my own, to get a feeling for the room, for the mattress. Where are my cigarettes? I have to know that because it is my room. I’ve lived there for years, so I cannot, just as an actor, come to a set and say, ‘Whare are my cigarettes?’ I have to know.”

In a career that spans 55 years and nearly 300 film and television credits, Kier counts among his collaborators Paul Morrissey (Blood for Dracula, Flesh for Frankenstein), Dario Argento (Suspiria, Mother of Tears), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (The Stationmaster’s Wife, The Third Generation, Lili Marleen), Guy Maddin (Keyhole, The Forbidden Room), and Lars von Trier (Europa, Breaking the Waves, The Kingdom TV series, and many more). He was Dragonetti in the 1998 horror film Blade (“I was the overlord vampire who says, ‘I have lived for thousands of years!,'” Kier recalls 23 years later.) In recent years, he’s played a miller with a visceral taste for vengeance in the 2019 adaptation of Jerzy Kosiński’s World War II novel The Painted Bird and a hunting guide whose wealthy clients seek vulnerable prey in Bacurau.

In short, it is not the resume of someone one would immediately think of when casting a flyover country hairdresser, but Stephens knew Kier was his Pat the moment they met. The filmmaker knew Pitsenbarger, so he had specific memories from which he drew the character.

“Pat was a flamboyant guy, but he was also a quiet. He was kind of like Udo,” Stephens says.

“Also, one of the things was I wanted somebody that could relate to the life that Pat led, and that had known people that were lost, that lost friends to AIDS, and lived through that experience and didn’t  have to fake it but be real and that’s Udo.”

The death of Pat’s frenemy, Rita Parker Sloan (Dynasty‘s Linda Evans), sets Swan Song in motion when she leaves instructions that he is to do her hair for the funeral. So, he makes his escape from the home and spends the day visiting old haunts and poking at old memories, all roads leading to the bar where he was once a star drag queen attraction.

Returning to Sandusky where his parents and other family – Stephens’ brother put up Kier for the 18-day shoot – still live was a kind of shock to the filmmaker. He made his first feature, Edge of Seventeen there, 23 years ago and remembers hiding the fact that the film was a gay, autobiographical coming-of-age drama because he felt he couldn’t tell the truth in a small, conservative city. This time out, when he arrived back in town to start production, he was just in time for Sandusky’s third annual Pride celebration.

“There’s Gay Pride flags all up and down Main Street,” Stephens says, “And people knew the real Pat. It was like, ‘Oh my god, my mother went to him or my grandmother went to him,’ and so there was big love for the real guy.”

For Kier, Sandusky helped inform his character. He describes Main Street as his studio. Most of his scenes were shot in various stores and other locations there. He further got to know Pat through the reminiscences of the hairdresser’s old friends that he was able to meet. He became one with his character.

“I had an amazing time, because for me, there wasn’t any difference, I was Pat all the time,” Kier says. “I was the same person, day and night, just like that.”

“It was like 100 degrees half the time,” Stephens adds. “But it was the best experience shooting my life. Watching this guy every day blew my fucking mind.”

So often the character actor who stands out in support, this time Kier is the star, a development not lost on him. He won the best actor prize at the Monte Carlo Comedy Film Festival and his reviews have been stellar. While he jokes he will never star for Steven Spielberg, he senses new opportunities in the independent film realm that has long been his home.

“This film with Todd, it’s very important for me because it changed my attitude for the future,” Kier says. “It also a little changing my life, getting main parts in films. I got a few offers and I’m looking for something where people can follow me, if I play maybe a man I knew very well, William Burroughs. Maybe I’ll play William Burroughs. He was a very interesting man, painting and shooting at his paintings. I knew him quite well. So that’s what I’m looking for.

“And I’m so happy for Todd. This is such a success.” –Pam Grady

Swan Song is playing in theaters.

Grandpa, is that you? Decoding the shared DNA of MARRIAGE STORY’s Charlie and STAR WARS’ Kylo Ren

19 Thursday Dec 2019

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Marriage Story 7-horzSpoiler alert: The following discusses certain aspects and plot points of Marriage Story and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

2019 has been the year of Adam Driver with five movies hitting US theaters: Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, in which he plays a megalomaniac film director; Scott Z. Burns’ The Report that casts the actor as real-life Senate investigator Daniel Jones; Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die, where Driver partners with Bill Murray and Chloë Sevigny as police fighting a zombie invasion; Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, in which he is a theater director going through a divorce; and he reprises his role of villain Kylo Ren in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Already a Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild best actor nominee for Marriage Story, Driver is all but a lock for an Oscar nomination.

It’s truly been a stellar year for Driver, but here’s the weird thing: Marriage Story and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker would make one of the oddest yet most oddly compelling double bills of all time for those remaining rep houses that still book them. On the surface, the two films have nothing in common other than a single actor. But the men Driver plays in them share certain personality traits that make it all too easy to imagine that Charlie, the theater director, is the great-great-to-however-many-powers grandfather of Kylo Ren. The seed for all that intergalactic strife was planted in 21st century New York.

Unlikely, you say? Check it out: They share the same defining personality trait, petulance. Charlie sulks his way through his divorce, further alienating his ex, Nicole (Scarlett Johansson). Centuries later, Kylo’s peevishness leaves him to reject his parents Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher), embrace his dark side, and eventually murder his father in Star Wars Episode VII – The Force Awakens. Despite the power he’s amassed since, Kylo’s mood hasn’t improved in The Rise of Skywalker. Instead of acting the winner, he’s a whiner.

Of course, I’m sure there are those that would defend Charlie and Kylo as emo rather than pouty, and maybe they would have a point. At least, it would explain their jobs. Charlie is supposed to be some kind of theater savant, he even wins a MacArthur “genius” grant during the course of Marriage Story. But Charlie is awkward and stunted, and it is hard to imagine that his theater doesn’t reflect that. Part of the reason Nicole leaves is because she feels smothered and much of that has to do with her work in his theater, the place pretentiousness and self-seriousness call home.

As for Kylo, sure, he embraces evil and he’s always attacking his mother’s forces, but his ways clearly don’t spark joy. One wonders what Darth Vader, the granddad he worships, would say about this sad boi, this gangly perpetual teenager who always seems on the verge of bursting into tears. Is this villainy or merely pique? You can almost hear him screaming at his mother, “I don’t want to be a Jedi and you can’t make me!”

Charlie and Kylo also share a certain sense of it is all-about-me-ness when it comes to the women they profess to love. Charlie is left poleaxed by Nicole leaving him, because he never saw it coming, never really saw her, never saw that she was unhappy in her role as an extension of his work, and ultimately, of him.

Kylo’s intensity toward Jedi warrior Rey (Daisy Ridley) is that of a stalker as he insists on their future together despite her protests. And what a future! The only thing he can imagine is the two of them sitting on the Palpatine throne as Sith king and queen. That Rey doesn’t want to embrace her own dark side and has worked damned hard to become a Jedi matters not to Kylo. Nor does it dawn on him that Rey isn’t someone likely to embrace a fate that would involve the wholesale slaughter of her friends. Of course not, because, really, it’s all about Kylo and what he wants. He’s a bad boyfriend.

There you have it. In a galaxy far, far away is a troubled man. And the seeds of that trouble aren’t in his turning his back on the Jedi and his parents or even in killing his dad, but in a theater director in our own galaxy and our own time. That ambition to conquer Broadway sprouts many years later as an ambition to conquer worlds. It’s family. It’s legacy. There is no escape. It’s family dysfunction for the ages. –Pam Grady

Review: Crime family dysfunction interrupts Line of Descent

13 Friday Dec 2019

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Similarities between the great mob classic The Godfather and Rohit Karn Batra’s debut feature Line of Descent probably aren’t coincidental. Like Francis Coppola’s gangland epic, Batra’s New Delhi-set thriller starts with a family celebration, in this case, a toddler’s birthday part, that introduces the viewers to three disparate brothers. And like the Corleone siblings, the Sinha’s are part of their father’s criminal enterprise. But Line of Descent is not The Godfather. Rather than a sweeping saga, it is tense, blood-spattered portrait of resentment and family dysfunction the plays out against the passing of the torch from one generation to the next.

What sets Line of Descent into motion is a father’s will. In life, Bharat Sinha (Prem Chopra) directed the strongarm activities of his two elder sons, level-headed Prithvi (Ronit Roy) and volatile Siddharth (Neeraj Kabi). Half-brother Suraj (Ali Haji) is much younger and has yet to join the family business. Bharat’s death shouldn’t leave a vacuum—he has set up his estate so that Prithvi is in charge. But the decision enrages Siddharth, who becomes even angrier when Prithvi has no interest in his scheme to sell arms. Not only that, Prithvi has lost his taste for crime and wants to pull the Sinhas out of the life and transform the family’s legitimate front, an electronics store, into its sole business. It is a set up for a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.

Kabi is scarily good at playing a psychopath willing to put his ambitions before his family, and he’s equipped with two Lady Macbeths in his wife and his mistress. If Prithvi’s urge is to protect, Siddharth’s is to destroy anything in his path that might thwart him. He is oblivious, to the idea that the police (in the form of Abhay Deol’s Officer Raghav) might be investigating the Sinhas or that Charu (an exuberant Brendan Fraser), the American he chooses for his partner, might have second thoughts about hitching his fate to someone so mercurial.

Batra excels at atmosphere, particularly in scenes set in the bars and clubs of New Delhi nightlife where so much illicit business is conducted. If the central conflict between Prithvi and Siddharth is clear-cut, the way it plays out is less so. Bullets fly. Bodies fall. If Michael Corleone was able to build an empire out of his particular brand of grandiose psychosis in The Godfather, Siddharth hardly seems that smart or that lucky. But in tracking this crime family sibling rivalry, Batra builds a nail-biter out of a war between brothers where Siddharth might yet prevail—although perhaps not in the way he planned. –Pam Grady

Line of Descent is playing in selected theaters and on VOD.

Q&A: AERONAUTS’ director Tom Harper on his high-flying adventure

06 Friday Dec 2019

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Aeronauts

Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon
Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon
We could float among the stars together, you and I
For we can fly, we can fly – Jimmy Webb, “Up, Up and Away”

Three years after the release of his acclaimed miniseries adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace and after pausing to make the Glasgow-Nashville-set contemporary drama Wild Rose, director Tom Harper returns to the 19th century with The Aeronauts. Combining fact and fiction, the story by Harper and screenwriter Jack Thorne, spins the tale of pioneering meteorologist James Glaisher and balloon pilot Amelia Wren as they take vertiginous flight in the name of science. Glaisher is obsessed with weather. To find the answers he needs takes death-defying feats of derring-do.

The Aeronauts reunites The Theory of Everything stars Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones as Glaisher and Wren, depositing the actors in a real-life replica of a 19th-century gas balloon as Harper filmed scenes as often as possible in the open air to an altitude of 3,000 feet.

On a visit to San Francisco recently to accept SFFILM’s Sloan Science in Cinema Prize on behalf of The Aeronauts and screen the film, Harper, 39, sat down with Cinezinekane to chat about his high-flying achievement.

Q: In this age of CGI, you insisted on building and flying a real balloon.

Tom Harper: We wanted it to feel as real as possible. So much of the jeopardy and the thrills come from experiencing or kind of feeling what it’s like for those characters. And I think that you can just tell the difference if you’ve done some of it for real. We’re now living in a day and age where you can create visuals in CGI that are almost impossible, if at all possible, to tell the difference. But there are other factors as well.

For example, you can shoot something that’s completely photorealistic and believable, but if the camera’s moving around the balloon and the crane, in your subconscious you’re going, ‘That it’s not possible.’ We went up in a balloon and we filmed for real and we saw some, you know, parachuters and, and actually, it’s all of the imperfections that make something believable. And that’s actually the thing that I’m most interested in in filmmaking, the imperfections. Humans are these wonderful, fallible imperfect beings.

Q: You’ve made an action adventure movie about weather. Saying it out loud sounds so daft.

Tom Harper: (laughs) I mean, it’s not the most glamorous of interests, admittedly. But James Glaisher talks about trying to understand the things that you can’t control. There is something so big involved about the weather and our atmosphere, that it is sort of unknowable.

And 170 years ago, it was thought that it would be impossible to predict the weather. Admittedly, we still have a way to go, but we’ve come an incredible way. And I like the idea that what we think is impossible now, in a hundred years will be considered commonplace. There’s something wonderful about that, and it sort of challenges us to think beyond the outer limits.

Q: James Glaisher was a real person, a pioneering aeronaut and meteorologist. Amelia Wren is a fictional character. In fictionalizing his story, you could have followed many different avenues, what led you and screenwriter Jack Thorne to Amelia?

Tom Harper: With Amelia, not only do you have that dynamic of male, female, but she is such a show person. Amelia is based on (19th-century aeronaut) Sophie Blanchard. She was a flamboyant firecracker, a woman who was an acrobat and who shot off fireworks from her basket.

We thought putting someone like Sophie in the basket with James, who’s a meticulous, methodical scientist would be a really interesting combination of characters. The main thing was OK, if you’re gonna spend 90 minutes in that basket, who are the most interesting characters to put there?

Also, there is a gender bias in science, and certain there is in film, where there aren’t enough strong female characters. So, that there was this historical woman to draw from was a wonderful thing and something we embraced wholeheartedly.

Q: In casting Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones, they have great chemistry and that is enhanced by that sense memory of the two of them together in The Theory of Everything.

Tom Harper: They are great friends and they do have this great chemistry, but they also trust each other and they dare each other to take risks. I think the reason that they’re so good together is because they push each other and they have great working relationship.  And that’s reflected in the relationship that eventually evolves between the two of them in the balloon as they start out as these antagonists that are stuck in this basket together. Because of the things that happen, they have to learn how to rely and trust each other or they’re just not going to survive.

Q: And you and Eddie went through hypoxia training so that he would know what it was actually like to be deprived of oxygen?

Tom Harper:  We did, yes. And Eddie was very keen to (do it), so that he could draw from those experiences and deliver the best performance. We went to a Ministry of Defense base in in the UK and they put us in a decompression chamber and they took us up to the equivalent of 25,000 feet. They take you out, they break off oxygen, and you basically suffocate while you starve yourself of oxygen. That has a very interesting physiological effect on you. And, actually, everyone responds differently. It can lead actually to a sort of euphoria and sort of a fervid quality or you start losing your memory; all sorts of strange things can start happening to you. I just felt very sick and then, of course, forgot everything. Eddie, on the other hand, became fervid and passionate and started reciting lines from the film. He was generally very cool. I was less so.

Q: You spent a lot of time up in balloons preparing to make The Aeronauts. You built and filmed your own balloon and found drama in that tiny basket high up in the air. Has all that experience translated into a lasting addiction to ballooning?

Tom Harper: I hope so. I loved it. There is something majestic and wonderful about it. I would like to get my piloting license, I have to say. You need to be very flexible with ballooning. because it depends on the weather. So, I think it’s like the perfect retirement thing, because you have to drop out, you know, when the weather is right. You just have to drop everything and go.

Q: So, Around the World in 80 Days’ Phineas Fogg, he’s your spirit animal.

Tom Harper: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. –Pam Grady

Director Alma Har’el helps Shia LaBeouf find catharsis in HONEY BOY

25 Monday Nov 2019

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HONEY BOYShia LaBeouf came into the Sundance Film Festival last year a scandal-plagued actor with something to prove. The former child star and one time face of the Transformers franchise announced a career rebirth with Honey Boy, an autobiographical drama he not only stars in but wrote.

LaBeouf’s Israeli director, Alma Har’el had something to prove, as well, a documentary filmmaker making her first feature. Honey Boy premiered to glowing reviews and Har’el came away with a special jury prize for “vision and craft.” But, as she explained nearly a year later in introducing the film to a Toronto Film Festival audience, she took something else from Sundance.

“I realized how many people… have parents or childhood trauma or relationships that they have to forgive in order to move on,” Har’el said, going on to note that the film addresses the inherited, generational pain that so many people carry.

That generational pain Har’el speaks of is all on screen in Honey Boy. English actor Noah Jupe plays 12-year-old Otis Lort, a rising child actor not unlike LaBeouf 20 years ago. LaBeouf plays James, a version of his real-life father, a clown (literally, as LaBeouf’s dad was), alcoholic, and abusive ne’er-do-well living off his child and cultivating hopeless get-rich-quick schemes.

Like LaBeouf, Otis grows up to be an action star—now played by Lucas Hedges. Real life and reel life intersect when the troubled young actor is arrested and sentenced to rehab. In truth, LaBeouf’s journey to Honey Boy arose out of a 2017 incident when he was in Savannah, Georgia, making Peanut Butter Falcon. Arrested for disorderly conduct and public drunkenness in an expletive-laced incident caught on tape, LaBeouf was sentenced to rehab. His screenplay for Honey Boy began as part of his therapy as he dealt with his own alcohol issues and a diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) arising from his childhood.

“It was a really big and deep long process that led to this film,” says Har’el during a visit to the Bay Area where Honey Boy screened at the Mill Valley Film Festival. “When we finished it, I feel Shia got to exorcise all of the anger he had.”

There is an odd sense of destiny that hangs over Honey Boy, a series of steps without which the film might never have been made. There is the public humiliation of LaBeouf’s arrest and court-ordered rehab, of course, but it was to Har’el that LaBeouf sent his pages, a short film set in a hotel room. It was she who suggested he expand the story and include the adult Otis. She collaborated with him through what she estimates is 80 to 90 drafts leading to the final script.

Har’el was essential to LaBeouf getting his story out there and that only happens because of the fan letter that led to their meeting. Blown away by Bombay Beach, Har’el’s award-winning 2011 documentary focused on residents of an impoverished Salton Sea community, he emailed her, leading to a dinner where they discovered they were both the children of alcoholics. A bond formed, growing tighter when he starred in her video for Sigur Rós’ “Fjögur pianó” video and then financed and executive produced her 2016 feature documentary LoveTrue. By the time, he was in rehab, LeBeouf and Har’el were close friends, so much so that she was able to convince him to overcome his qualms about playing his father.

“I think I had to just make sure that he felt safe and that he can trust me, which was something that was inherent to our relationship already,” says Har’el “The lethal combination of PTSD and alcoholism is just so real. It’s a real dive.

“So yeah, it was, it was a hard decision to make (for LaBeouf to play the role), but it was as an extremely organic continuation of the work we did. And I remember calling him and saying, ‘When you think about it, it’s exactly what we did in LoveTrue… That film was people playing with their younger selves and we had a therapist on set. It was like psychodrama… having people go into their trauma or their fears or their memories and sit next to their younger self and talk to them.”

LaBeouf’s last step before embarking on the role was to visit his father. He returned from that meeting with a sense of purpose, determined to challenge himself artistically. Meanwhile, Har’el remained mindful that the role her friend was about to embark on was a potential minefield for his mental health.

“I spoke to his therapist from the court-ordered rehab facility and she knew about everything we were doing,” Har’el says. “I tried to educate myself a lot about what is PTSD.

“She warned me about a lot of things that I should be aware of with Shia playing his father and taking on the person that has been the most abusive to him in his life. It was a learning curve for all of us.”

Perhaps, what is most surprising about Honey Boy is its lack of judgment and bitterness. LaBeouf inherited a terrible legacy from his father, but what is reflected on screen is compassion. James Lort is most certainly not a nice guy and what young Otis witnesses and experiences is disturbing. Yet, James is not portrayed simply as an abusive villain but as a troubled man beset by his own demons.

“You have to develop a sort of empathy to the person that has caused you pain,” Har’el says. “And you have to play out who he was and then you get to see what you inherited, because some of that anger and those behaviors do become yours even if they come out only when you’re triggered or they come out only when you’re put in a certain situation. That’s the tools you’ve had, that you’ve been given.

“You know, we see a lot of movies that are cathartic, but, but it’s still acting. But this was a real catharsis. Bizarrely, this was real, you know, this was a real person at a junction in his life where he thought that he’s never going to act again and was given the opportunity to act again, but only if he can connect to his father who caused him pain.”—Pam Grady

Conflict as fodder for comedy: Filmmaker Sameh Zoabi on TEL AVIV ON FIRE

12 Monday Aug 2019

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Tel avivTel Aviv on Fire is the name of a film. It is also the name of a soap opera within the film that has become appointment TV in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, set in 1967 in the months before the Six Day War and revolving around the affair between an Israeli officer and the gorgeous Palestinian spy sent to seduce him. Salam (Kais Nashif), a Palestinian who is the show’s Hebrew translator, gets bumped up to writer, a position he advances with covert help from Assi (Yaniv Biton), an Israeli border guard and superfan of the show.

Director/co-writer Sameh Zoabi’s third narrative feature is the rare film to come at the situation between Israel and Palestine as a comedy. Zoabi himself was born in Iksal, Israel, a Palestinian village near Nazareth. Tel Aviv on Fire is a Palestinian film that is a co-production of France, Luxembourg, Belgium—and Israel. It has been nominated for four Ophirs—the Israeli equivalent of the Oscar—including Best Screenplay and Best Film. It is a film arising out of the perspective of a filmmaker who is simultaneously an insider and an outsider.

Zoabi screened Tel Aviv on Fire at the recent San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. The following day he sat down with a cinezinekane to talk about the film, using soap opera to comment on Israeli and Palestinian societies, and his unique place within those societies.

Q: Where did this story come from of this odd partnership between a Palestinian writer and an Israeli soldier?

Sameh Zoabi:    The whole idea came to me, because of that personal dilemma that I lived as a Palestinian growing up inside Israel, making movies about Palestinians, and taking Israeli money to do it. So, you’re always in that dilemma with the Israelis, ‘OK, wait a second, is he a good Arab? Is he turning too Palestinian on us with his films?’ And the Arabs are like, ‘He’s taking Israeli money? Is he selling his soul to make his movies?’ Europeans always like, you know, they always want to be balanced, because they don’t want to offend anyone. But it feels like every film you make, you go through the same thing over and over. Nobody’s made a movie about this, about the politics and the people’s agenda or even if they don’t have any agenda, people’s perception of what should be and should not and what it means. 

Q: From the outside, people think of Palestinians as living in Gaza or the West Bank. They don’t think about the sheer number of people that actually live and were born and have grown up within the state of Israel.

Sameh Zoabi: That was my experience when I came to Columbia University on a Fulbright scholarship. And so, it says, you know, in my files it’s always says he’s from Israel, because that’s what’s on my passport… I came to the US in 2000. People would ask, ‘Where are you from?’ ‘I am from Nazareth.’ ‘Oh, you know, we have a lot of Jewish family in Israel.’ ‘But I’m not Jewish.’ And then then you go through explaining yourself and 1948 and how we were there.

I mean I always have to justify and explain that we exist and we’ve been there and we didn’t come from anywhere else, you know what I mean? And that’s why it’s very important for me as a filmmaker to separate that. I would say that’s an important part of also moving forward is acceptance. Like Israelis, sometimes are not comfortable or, or Jewish Americans are not comfortable with the Palestinian Israeli term. Like you are a Palestinian but you are Israeli at the same time. A lot of people are like, ‘You’re an Arab Israeli.’ Yeah, but I’m Palestinian. You don’t have to run away from it by accepting it. Acknowledging the other, you can move forward. But by denying all the time that we existed to start with and even calling us something else is not going to lead us to anything.

I guess my film career has been kind of dedicated to show that side of Palestinians who live in Israel, who speak Hebrew, they can manage their way. They’re trying to survive. My first film [Man Without a Cell Phone, 2010] was also about that, about a young guy growing up in an Arab village trying to go university in Tel Aviv, like the lives that we actually live in Israel. A Palestinian who grew up in the West Bank would never be able to write or make this film, because my experience is different. I grew up knowing what Israelis think of us and what I think of them as a Palestinian. And, of course, stereotypes are the best form of comedy. It’s about how everyone sees the other.

Q: What was your thinking in setting the soap opera in 1967 before the Six Day War?

Sameh Zoabi: It’s about how everyone sees the other. So, in the West Bank they’re writing the Israeli general in ’67, imagining what the Israelis were thinking at that time. And Assi wants to change the story, because he thinks they should think otherwise. And that, for me it is always fascinating how our Palestinian experience dictates also the variety of filmmaking that we do. And we should not be judging that. In essence, we should be celebrating, you know, the different points of view. We have a narrative now where in the West Bank, Palestinians don’t meet Israelis. They only see, soldiers. In Gaza, they don’t see Israelis or soldiers. They see bombs or helicopters. For me, as a Palestinian who grew up inside, I have more possibility to interact and that’s why I was able to do this. It doesn’t mean that it’s only a film that depends on a Palestinian perspective, but it’s one that plays on this knowledge of both Palestinians and Israelis.

Q: The show isn’t just a soap opera. It’s a show everyone watches on both sides of the border.

Sameh Zoabi: That is true, by the way. When I was growing up, there were only two channels, Israeli and Jordanian. And on Fridays, every Friday, Israeli TV showed Egyptian films.  And Palestinians from all over, from Gaza, the West Bank, from inside, they would all watch Egyptian films on the Israel channel and the Israelis would all watch, as well.

When I wrote the script, many people said, ‘Yeah, but that show never existed where Israelis and Palestinians both watched,’ but when I showed the film to Israelis, nobody questioned it. Because it’s not farfetched. It did happen. We had elements of it.

Q: What is this film to you?

This film captures the essence of what I’ve always believed in a sense. It’s very personal in a sense. It’s broad, it’s comedy, but it has things that Palestinians love. We just had a screening back home, in my hometown. All the Palestinian activists inside Israel wrote about how Palestinian the film is, how strong of a voice it has, how it makes fun of our reality that becomes so abnormal and tragic that we can accept the idea that someone wants to change a TV show. It’s such farfetched idea, but it’s so believable there because (of what goes on).

With Israelis, it’s the same thing. They can see through humor. I mean for me; I see Israelis and Jewish audiences responding to and following the journey of a Palestinian character and they really want him to succeed. That’s the core of it, seeing each other at this humane level. What we need is for the ground to change… We live in a reality of disconnect: Walls, checkpoints, them again us. That’s not going lead to peace, of course.

I always get a few questions about what do I think of the government? It’s like they are so busy keeping the status quo, they would do anything for people not to meet, because God forbid, if they meet they’re going to like each other. –Pam Grady

Sing a song of THE NIGHTINGALE: Q&A with Aisling Franciosi

08 Thursday Aug 2019

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The Nightingale - Still 1Over the course of the past seven years, Irish actress Aisling Franciosi has amassed quite a resume, counting among her characters Marie in Ken Loach’s 2014 drama Jimmy’s Hall, an award-winning turn as a serial killer-obsessed teenager in the British series The Fall (2013-2016), and Lyanna Stark, mother to Jon Snow, on Game of Thrones. In The Babadook filmmaker Jennifer Kent’s savage revenge thriller, The Nightingale, Franciosi steps into her first starring movie role. Delivering a resonant performance as Clare, a 19th-century convict of the penal colony on the Australian island of Tasmania, Franciosi convinces as a woman pushed over her limits. Forming a partnership with similarly vengeful aboriginal Billy (dancer Baykali Ganabarr in his screen debut), Clare goes on the hunt for Hawkins (Sam Claflin) and other Australian officers who have done her wrong.

In San Francisco in April for the SFFILM Festival, Franciosi was ebullient and expansive as she sat down for a conversation about The Nightingale.

Q: The film is very much in your face in terms of the off-chart-violence. Was that intensity apparent even when you read the script for the first time?

Aisling Franciosi:  I knew it would be a tough watch no matter how it was filmed, but what even I was surprised at when I saw it for the first time on the screen and what makes it so difficult to watch is how human all the characters are and how as you watch the violence inflicted on them, you can’t escape the fact that they’re human beings. Whereas in other films, I think frequently we’re quite distant from the people who are being killed or slaughtered or whatever. In this, it’s a very intimate form of violence. And I think that that makes it really, as you say, in your face, but you know, if we’re going to show it and we’re going to, if you want to talk about violence, if you want to talk about sexual violence, well, then here it is. You know, let’s look at it properly.

Q: It’s not just the visuals. It’s the sound design, as well, that really underlines the brutality.

Aisling Franciosi: Yeah. It’s amazing. Jennifer told me, ‘I don’t think we’re going to have music. Actually, I think we’re going to just have sounds.’ We had an incredible sound designer. And I think it really adds to it, because in some moments it just completely feels suffocating and inescapable in the ways it should. And then other times, it just allows you to breathe and you feel that there’s a moment of respite. There’s nothing taking away from that. You know, breathe for a second in the same way that the characters are, the audience has given a moment to kind of go, ‘Whew!’

Q: You’re Irish, so you were not raised with that history.

Aisling Franciosi: I knew a little bit about the convict history of Australia, but you’re right, I definitely didn’t know the extent to which I know now. And also I didn’t realize how systematic it was, you know, or how particularly, at a certain point, women and girls were sent there. Lots of convicts were sent for extremely petty crimes, like survival crimes, stealing bread, stealing food. But women and girls were sent very, very young and essentially to populate the island of Tasmania in particular where there was an extremely low ratio of men to women. So, you can imagine what happened when these women stepped off the ship. They were sometimes bartered for a bottle of whiskey. They endured terrible violence and terrible lives.

I remember reading one book that said a British officer there to do a survey noticed that if you were a convict, you were, you know, the lowest of the low. But if you were an Irish convict, you were like dirt. Like you were at the lowest rank of all the convicts just for being Irish. And so, if you can imagine, not only are you Irish, but you’re also a woman and you’re a convict. I found learning about it so interesting, but also found myself getting very angry. You would be sent to to Australia and frequently you would finish your term, not in the jail, but you know, working for a sergeant or whoever and if you were raped and became pregnant by him, you would go to prison and your baby was taken away. And nothing would happen to the rapist. It was just a constant battle for survival for these convicts. I find it so incredible how resilient they all were to then go on and essentially, you know, build a nation.

Q: Well, it’s that idea of institutionalized rape, some that goes on in places even now.

Aisling Franciosi: What I’m really proud about in this film is if you don’t want to acknowledge it for what it is, we’re going to make you acknowledge it for what it is. I think it’s often brushed aside, whether it’s because of shame or just not wanting to accept it for how brutal and violent that it is or how destructive it is. But like, even as part of my prep, I was watching a documentary called The Invisible War. It’s fascinating and it’s about sexual violence and rape in the US military. It was appalling, it was shocking to me. And one of the quotes that you see on the screen at the very end of the movie was from a very highly ranked officer, and he says, ‘Rape is a hazard of the job.’ Getting shot, maybe, getting hurt in battle, maybe, but rape should never be a hazard of the job.

Q: One of the things that struck me about Clare is how strong she is. And I don’t mean just after everything happened, but even before, she’s much stronger than her husband.

Aisling Franciosi: Yeah. It’s so interesting people say to me, ‘Oh, she goes from timid to Joan of Arc.’ But if you really think about it, she is actually enduring so much for the sake of her family. It’s not that she’s not strong enough to stand up to Hawkins. I mean, it would probably cut her life short, but I think she would do it if she was just on her own. But she’s trying to protect her dream of a future with her family, the safety of her husband and the safety of her baby. It’s all on her shoulders and all just kept safe by her enduring, enduring, enduring. Endurance might not be the most glamorous type of strength, but it’s a strength and she has it in spades. Then it becomes a different kind of strength going forward. But yeah, I don’t, I don’t see her as going through this transformation. I think it’s actually the opposite. It’s just her unleashing all the rage.

Q: She also undergoes a different kind of transformation, because at a certain point, she’s just like every other white person in Tasmania looking at the aboriginal people through racist eyes until she’s thrown in with Billy.

Aisling Franciosi: Well, I think it’s beautiful that it’s two very traumatized and hurt souls kind of metaphorically holding each other’s hands and just going through it together. Yeah, she absolutely does (change). She initially is quite awful to him, but I like that Jen has portrayed Clare as being a human being with her flaws and showing the not-so-great sides to her personality. You know, I like that she’s a fully formed person. And I love that it’s essentially Billy and the compassion she gets from him and then the friendship that they have that makes Clare choose survival. –Pam Grady

That’s Entertainment! Show biz films in the spotlight at SF Jewish Film Festival

17 Wednesday Jul 2019

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

 

 

 

 

 

Incandescent Jessie Buckley steps up to the mic in WILD ROSE

28 Friday Jun 2019

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Wild RoseIn 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.

The juxtaposition of Scotland and Nashville, where Rose-Lynn hopes to eventually hang her hat, may seem incongruous, but Glasgow has a thriving country scene where Rose-Lynn has been a star at a local pub, which just happens to be named Grand Ole Opry, since she was a teenager. Country (not “country ‘n western,” Rose-Lynn emphatically insists) is also music that celebrates hardscrabble lives and hers has been more hardscrabble than most. The single mother of two before she was 18 years old—her daughter Wynonna (Daisy Littlefield) is eight and her son Lyle (Adam Mitchell)—she has never settled into the role of parent, to her mother Marion’s (Julie Waters) consternation. She drinks too much, breaks promise after promise, and places her own interests front and center, always.

Recently paroled from prison after spending a year there on a drug charge, the kids are last on her list of priorities. She is a heat-seeking missile of inchoate ambition, confident in her talent if utterly clueless on how to make what passes for her life plan a reality. A job as a maid with Susannah (Sophie Okonedo) feels like a big step backward, but Susannah is the first person out of Rose-Lynn’s own circle to recognize that the young woman isn’t fooling herself. She is the real deal, whether anything come of it or not.

Wild Rose is a movie with a big heart and a big performance at its heart. Buckley, who has extensive stage musical experience and who is best known to audiences from 2016’s War and Peace and the recent Chernobyl HBO miniseries, is electrifying. Playing a personality as vivid as her flaming red hair, she is by turns empathetic, entrancing, and enraging, forthrightly portraying the unsavory aspects of Rose-Lynn’s narcissism and neglect of her children.  And when it comes to the music (with many songs co-written by Buckley with screenwriter Nicole Taylor, singer-songwriter Ian W. Brown, and guitarist Simon Johnson), Buckley is the real deal. When she sings, she is simply stunning.

All roads eventually lead to Nashville and a moment of catharsis on the stage of the Ryman Auditorium, the original home of the Grand Ole Opry. But nothing in this movie is as it seems. It may have the contours of a Scottish A Star Is Born, but it confounds those expectations. What Taylor and helmer Tom Harper (Buckley’s War and Peace director) have created is more in line as a miniature portrait of what Robert Altman portrayed in his sprawling Nashville. Show business in general and Nashville in particular attract strivers and dreamers and Rose-Lynn is one of those. But she also has a life in opposition to her ambitions. It is a dilemma worthy of a heart-wrenching tune by Patsy Cline or Tammy Wynette. And it is one that won’t leave a dry eye in the house as Rose-Lynn gives voice to that song. –Pam Grady

TOY STORY 4: Pixar visits the Island of Misfit Toys

21 Friday Jun 2019

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TOY STORY 4Rankin-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.

There are five types of toys in Toy Story 4: the traditional playthings that belong to one child, represented by Woody, Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), and the rest of the usual Toy Story crew; the antique store misfits that include Gabby Gabby (Christina Hendricks), a talking doll with a broken voice box, and her army of spooky ventriloquist dummies; feral toys in the wild that any child may pick up and play with, the place to where Woody’s old friend Bo Peep (Annie Potts), now missing an arm, has fallen; unobtainable toys that are carnival game “prizes” that no one can ever win like Ducky (Keegan Michael-Key) and Bunny (Jordan Peele); and crafts, crude toys made by children themselves, in this case Forky (Tony Hale), a spork with mismatched googly eyes, a misshapen clay mouth, pipe cleaner arms, and Popsicle-stick feet.

It is Woody’s determination that Forky, the current favorite among the child Bonnie’s toys, not become lost during a family vacation that leads to the antique store and a reunion with Bo in a nearby park. Gabby Gabby, with an eye toward Woody’s working voice box, conspires to keep him near, while a Buzz Lightyear reconnaissance mission connects the toys to the carnival crew.

There is a lot of inspired hilarity in Toy Story 4. Allen’s Buzz Lightyear has some wonderful moments after misunderstanding what Woody meant when he tells him to always listen to his inner-voice if he is unsure what to do. Key and Peele delightfully reunite as the cuddly and cute and oh-so-aggressive stuffed animals who deliver some of the film’s most inspired comic moments with their vivid and cartoon-violent imaginations. Hale is both moving and howlingly funny as the little spork who is not sold on this toy business. And coming hot on the heels of John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum and Always Be My Maybe, Toy Story 4 adds to Keanu Reeves’ current moment with his brilliant and side-splitting turn as Duke Kaboom, a Canadian Evel Knievel-like stuntman toy who can strike a lot of poses but can’t quite nail his stunts.

But this is a Pixar movie and one that deals with a key moment in childhood, at that, when a child either outgrows or grows bored with a toy. It is set aside, never to be played with again. It happens to all toys sooner or later – the Island of Misfit Toys is real, only its residents aren’t just faulty; some are playthings that were once cherished only to be abandoned. That is what Woody is facing. Bonnie plays with him less and less and sometimes leaves him alone all day in the closet. She prefers a spork to his company. In Woody’s drooping posture, in his expressions, the toy’s sadness is evident. When he opens his mouth to speak, the poignancy is complete. This is Hanks at his best, suggesting the weight of the world resting on that little doll’s shoulders.

But cowboy Woody is not a pessimist by nature and he is a problem solver. What Toy Story 4 wrestles with is what comes next when you realize the life you’ve always known may not work anymore. It is a familiar situation and not just to toys. How Woody faces his future is at the heart of Toy Story 4 and it is his sometimes faltering steps to plan his tomorrow that is the beating heart of the movie. –Pam Grady