Film Review: We the Animals

Where the wild things draw

Evan Rosado as Jonah in We the Animals.

Racing, clawing, screaming, drumming, dreaming their way through an impoverished childhood are three young boys at the center of Jeremiah Zagar’s heartfelt but lacking film We the Animals.

Based on the 2011 novel of the same name by Justin Torres, Zagar’s film locates its heart, its head, and its attitude squarely with Jonah, played by Evan Rosado.  As the youngest of three boys, Jonah prefers drawing to fighting, and dreaming to adolescent scheming. In upstate New York, where Jonah and his brothers play out their childhoods, dangerous overpasses become impromptu playgrounds, and wild runs through the woods can take up whole afternoons. TV, video games, even radios are nowhere to be found. These are semi-feral boys left to their own devices for long periods of time.

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Film Review: BlacKkKlansman

Lee’s tonally uneven picture diminishes impact of relevant, astonishing true story  

Colorado Springs detective Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) infiltrates the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. 

Released just two days before the one year anniversary of the deadly Charlottesville, VA white nationalist rally and this Sunday’s “Unite the Right” white nationalist DC march, and coming on the heels of the recent Proud Boys/Patriot Prayer “Western chauvinist” gatherings in Portland and Berkeley, director Spike Lee’s polemical new film BlacKkKlansman is both relevant and disheartening in the way it reveals how little has changed in the 40+ years since the based-on-a-true story takes place. That the film’s message remains topical and necessary is indisputable; that it’s executed so poorly, then, is a disappointment.

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Interview: Actress Kelly Macdonald and Director Marc Turtletaub

Actress Kelly Macdonald and director Marc Turtletaub discuss their new indie film Puzzle

Puzzle director Marc Turtletaub with lead actress Kelly Macdonald. (photo by Alex Geranios)

A neglected housewife turns the tables on her dull life by enrolling in a jigsaw puzzle competition in the new film Puzzle, one of the breakout hits at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Director Marc Turtletaub and lead actress Kelly Macdonald (Trainspotting) are the first to admit that a movie about competitive puzzle building may not be at the top of everyone’s must-see list, and yet the duo have managed to make a compelling movie despite those odds.
 
The pair recently traveled to San Francisco to promote Puzzle and found that the Bay Area reception to their movie was just as rapturous as the one on the festival circuit. We recently sat down with them to talk about the movie, and the following is a transcription of that conversation.

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Film Review: Mission: Impossible—Fallout

Impossibly, the missions continue

Left to right: Henry Cavill as August Walker, Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt and Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa Faust in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – FALLOUT, from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.

The sixth installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise finds Ethan Hunt and team missioning for our greater good all over the world. After six films, the franchise has worn some pretty deep grooves on the floor of the house of action adventure. To offer some new perspective, this reviewer decided to bring in a fresh voice, that of his wife. 

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SFJFF38 Spotlights #2: To Dust/The Last Suit/Simon and Théodore/Wajib/The Devil We Know

The 38th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival is going strong; it entered its second week today, and we’ve got five more spotlights for you (you can find our first round of coverage here). Below we profile four more feature films and one documentary. Complete programming and ticket information can be found here; now get out there and see some films before the Festival ends on August 5th!

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Film Review: Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot

The self and its discontents

Joaquin Phoenix as John Callahan and Jonah Hill as Donnie star in DON’T WORRY, HE WON’T GET FAR ON FOOT.

Over the years, the director Gus Van Sant has returned time and again to his favorite subject: our constant struggle with self-deception and our many, mostly failed attempts at self-discovery. Let’s start with some dreamy-eyed pharmacy thieves (Drugstore Cowboy), move to homeless hustlers (My Own Private Idaho), catch up to a hitchhiker with enormous thumbs (Even Cowgirls Get The Blues), watch an aspiring TV Newswoman (To Die For), and let’s not forget the genius mathematician janitor at M.I.T. with girl trouble and the world’s funniest psychologist (Good Will Hunting). Van Sant’s characters show what an illusion we can be to ourselves. Does he return to this ground in Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot? Absolutely. Is it worth it to follow him yet again on this journey? Mostly.

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Film Review: Eighth Grade

The agony and the adolescence of middle school

8th grader Kayla (Elsie Fisher) spends much of her free time on her smart phone. 

Regular readers of Spinning Platters may have noticed that I’m partial to coming of age films; The Way, Way Back is a personal favorite, and I had both The Edge of Seventeen and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl on my Top 10 lists for their respective years. But all three of those have now been pushed aside in favor of a new genre champion: writer/director Bo Burnham’s feature debut Eighth Grade sets a new standard for all future coming of age pictures. Filmmakers may as well concede now, because no other film will ever come close to measuring up to this exquisite masterpiece.

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Film Review: Blindspotting

Local boys make good in masterful look at their changing city

Longtime Oakland friends Collin (Daveed Diggs, l.) and Miles (Rafael Casal) assess their changing city. 

Berkeley High grads and old friends Daveed Diggs (of Broadway’s Hamilton fame) and local slam poet and artist Rafael Casal join Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station; Black Panther) and Boots Riley (Sorry to Bother You) in bringing Oakland to the big screen, in a timely and powerful picture that should be required viewing not only for all Bay Area residents, but also for those who want to understand the ever shifting cultural and economic landscape of a Bay Area in flux. Diggs and Casal both wrote and star in Blindspotting, under the direction of their TV and short film director friend Carlos López Estrada, who makes his extraordinary feature film debut here, and was rewarded with a Sundance Grand Jury Prize nomination for his efforts.

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SFJFF38 Spotlights #1: Budapest Noir/Memoir of War/Murer–Anatomy of a Murder/The Interpreter/Promise at Dawn

The 38th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, showcasing over 65 films from more than twenty countries, opens this Thursday, July 19th, and runs for two and a half weeks, concluding on Sunday, Aug. 5th. Films will be shown at venues in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Albany, Oakland, and San Rafael, so there is plenty of time and opportunity to see a lot of quality films. Below we spotlight five Festival movies that you may want to check out. Complete schedule, tickets, and more information are available here. And be sure and follow Spinning Platters for more coverage during the Festival!

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Interview: Actor Peter Fonda and Writer/Director Shana Feste

Peter Fonda and writer/director Shana Feste discuss their new family comedy Boundaries

Peter Fonda. (Photo courtesy of Sean McCarthy.)

A family road trip is at the center of the new comedy Boundaries, a movie that has become very therapeutic for its writer-director, Shana Feste. Her story of a pot-smuggling father (Christopher Plummer) forced to bond with his neurotic daughter (Vera Farmiga) after being kicked out of a nursing home mirrors her reality very closely. To hear Feste tell it, only a few small changes needed to be made to the story, and the rest wrote itself.

The film mostly plays out during a long car ride to transport the cranky free spirit to a new home but along the way we meet a few characters from his wild past. One of them is fellow pot-smoker Joey, played by Peter Fonda with the devilish charm of an ex-hippie. His scenes are few, but shock the film to life in unexpected ways. Feste and Fonda came to San Francisco to promote Boundaries, and we spoke about filmmaking, battle scars, and the challenge of adapting family stories to the big screen. The following is a transcription of that conversation. Continue reading “Interview: Actor Peter Fonda and Writer/Director Shana Feste”