STRING THEORY

Playing today at 1 p.m. at the Vail Comedy Festival in Vail, Colorado:

On a String--Our heroine Isabel (Isabel Hagen) finds herself in the title state, and the string is steadily being pulled tighter. She's a professional violist in New York, playing in a quartet and picking up solo gigs at weddings, funerals, proposals, the occasional film score.

Played by Isabel Hagen, who also wrote and directed and who really is a Julliard-trained violist, Isabel lives in a smallish apartment with her oddball musical family--pleasantly inappropriate parents (Dylan Baker and Karen Blood); passive-aggressive pianist brother (Oliver Hagen, the director's real-life brother). Her love life is a disappointing low-level mess, she suffers chronic wrist pain, and she's worried about an upcoming audition for the Philharmonic. She gets a job teaching violin to a little girl, and drifts into an attraction with her married father (Frederick Heller).

We see the strange episodes of her life, some funny, some poignant, some creepy, almost all of them awkward and tinged with frustration. Violists, I am told, are a traditional butt of musician's jokes, as in: "Q: What's the difference between a violist and a coffin?  A: With a coffin, the dead person is on the inside" or "Q: What does the viola section have in common with the Beatles? A: Neither have played together since 1969."

This movie seems to be a dramatization of this hapless state of simply being a violist. The focus is on Hagen's performance; her onscreen version of herself is patient and emotionally open, with a charming, inviting smile and manner. But she's stretched thin--Isabel is a serious, exquisitely-trained artist knocked around by her cloutless station within the classical music world.

This modest, surefooted gem has some of the flavor of minor-key indie comedies of the '80s and '90s, and the performances, both acting and musical, are impressive. It played last month at Phoenix Film Festival, and if you happen to be at the Vail Comedy Festival today, as in Saturday, May 23, you can catch it at 1 p.m. Hopefully it will go on to find a wider audience.

FEST RESULTS

Check out my short article, online at Phoenix Magazine, about this year's edition of the Phoenix Film Festival...

...which runs through April 19.

YES THEY CANYON

Check out my review, online at Phoenix Magazine...

...of Joe Raffa's moving documentary Bad Indian: Hiding in Antelope Canyon, playing this weekend at Phoenix Film Festival.

24

The 24th annual Phoenix Film Festival...

...kicks off Thursday night and runs through Sunday, April 14; check out my short article, online at Phoenix Magazine, previewing the festivities.

POP QUIZ

This past Friday Your Humble Narrator had the pleasure to moderate a Q&A with writer-director Tom Huang...

...after a Phoenix Film Festival-sponsored showing of his film Dealing with Dad at Harkins Shea in Scottsdale. It was a small crowd, but they were attentive, and asked intelligent questions. The film plays through May 4 at Shea and from May 12 to May 17 at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre in Sedona. Recommended.

We also tried to take a picture in front of the poster for his flick, but all we got was poster.

NOTHING BUT THE FEST

The Phoenix Film Festival opens tonight; check out my short article, online at Phoenix Magazine...

...previewing the festival.

DAD COMPANY

Playing at 2:30 p.m. Sunday, May 22, at the New Parkway Theater in Oakland, California as part of the Center for Asian American Media Film Festival:

Dealing With Dad--Three grown children in a Taiwanese-American family reunite at their childhood home in Milpitas, California when their father shows signs of depression. He lies in bed all day watching TV and won't engage with anybody, except to absently offer his kids money.

The trouble is that this makes him a far more agreeable person than he was before he got sick. Dad (Dana Lee) was an angry, distant, unloving man whose ferocious criticism of his children amounted to verbal abuse. His hyper-organized daughter Margaret (Ally Maki), now married and with a biracial son, self-describes as a "neurotic OCD hypochondriac"; she's haunted by dreams of being overcome by a deluge. His banker son Roy (Peter S. Kim) is overweight from stress eating over his impending divorce. His other son Larry (Hayden Szeto) is a comic book nerd and toy collector who still lives at home in his early thirties, and whose only income is the little he can make from selling off his action figures. 

Their unfiltered, unflappable Mom (Page Leong) shows no special concern at Dad's condition, and Larry certainly finds it easier to share a house with him this way. But Margaret takes charge as best she can, trying to get him diagnosed and medicated. Dad doesn't take her efforts lying down, however--or, rather, he refuses to take them any other way.

After playing at Phoenix Film Festival and Tucson's Arizona International Film Festival in April, writer-director Tom Huang's briskly directed feature makes its Bay Area debut Sunday at the CAAM Festival. Despite some sitcom-like schtick, the movie is a small triumph, a sweet but firmly unsentimental, believable family comedy that's no less genuinely funny for its edge of poignancy. Huang focuses on ensemble acting with impressive results; every member of the cast is top-notch but the core, the siblings, reflexively teasing and bickering with a palpable undercurrent of love and support for each other, come across like people it would be fun to hang out with.

And in any case, it's the certainly best movie to come out of Milpitas since The Milpitas Monster (1976).

FESTIES

The 18th edition of Phoenix Film Festival...

...and the simultaneous International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival...

...kick off Thursday. Check out my preview, online at Phoenix Magazine.

MOVIE NIGHTS

This year's postponed edition of the Phoenix Film Festival finally kicks off tomorrow at Harkins Scottsdale 101...

...and runs through August 22, concurrent with the International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival, at the same venue. Check out my short preview article, online at Phoenix Magazine.

FORSTERY

Robert Forster passed on last week, at 78; even though his hair had gone gray and thinner, the verve and sharp edge of his acting made him seem at least ten years younger.

Like many actors, the soulfully craggy-faced fellow with the accent that sounded like pure Chicago--though he hailed from Rochester, New York--paid the bills over the years with a great deal of low-rent dreck, often elevating it by his very presence. But his few and far between career highlights were such that they've given him the legacy of a true star.

The son of an elephant trainer for Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, Forster studied history the University of Rochester, but was lured away from pursuing a career in law when he followed a pretty coed into a theatre audition. His film career started on a high-profile note, when he was poached away from a brief tenure on Broadway to appear opposite Marlon Brando in Reflections in a Golden Eye.

Roles opposite the likes of Gregory Peck in The Stalking Moon or Anthony Quinn in The Don is Dead followed; so did his lead in Haskell Wexler's 1969 verite classic Medium Cool. Alas, this was followed by two failed TV series in the early '70s, and soon Forster's career was in decline. Despite the occasional starring role in an A-list production like 1979's The Black Hole, by the late '70s and throughout the '80s and early '90s many of Forster's credits were in stuff like Satan's Princess and Maniac Cop III.

Things changed in 1997, when Forster was cast as the stoic bail bondsman Max Cherry in Quentin Tarantino's best movie, his Elmore Leonard adaptation Jackie Brown. Cherry assists the title character, played by Pam Grier, in her elaborate scheme to trick the deadly arms dealer for whom she smuggles money in and out of Mexico. Forster's thunderstruck expression when Cherry sees the imperious Jackie emerging from a lockup may be the single most effective portrayal of love at first sight in all of movies.

Max Cherry was the performance for which Forster got his Oscar nomination, and it will probably, and deservedly, be remembered as the signature role of his career. Even so, I have a favorite from the lean part of Forster's career: his star turn as the perplexed police detective Dave Madison in Lewis Teague's 1980 Alligator. Helped by the thoughtful dialogue of John Sayles, Forster turns what could have been a routine lead in a routine creature feature into a sly and even touching character study.

He kept acting for more than twenty years after Jackie Brown, and while the work was steady and probably more lucrative, it was only a little better in terms of quality; there were lots of forgettable supporting parts in action movies, and there were still credits like Dragon Wars and Rise: Blood Hunter. He did well on TV, with roles on Breaking Bad and Karen Sisco and Last Man Standing, and the reboot of Twin Peaks.

As you can likely guess, I'm a fan. Forster had a low-key, unpretentious everyman persona with an underlying tinge of melancholy. At his best, he was deeply lovable. This past weekend I caught up with one of his very last movies, 2018's What They Had, in which he plays a devoutly Catholic husband and father struggling to care for his dementia-afflicted wife (Blythe Danner) at home. It's the kind of role he should have gotten to play more often.

I met Forster once, by the way; more than a decade ago at the Phoenix Film Festival, I introduced a not-very-good crime film in which he appeared, and ran the Q&A with him after the screening. I introduced him so effusively that when he stepped up to shake my hand he gave me a quizzical look, as if he wondered if my enthusiasm was a put-on. It wasn't.

VARIETY IS THE SPACE

Saturday night at 10 p.m. only, at FilmBar Phoenix:

Time Masters (Les Maitres du Temps)--This animated 1982 space opera, directed by Rene Laloux from a tale by Stefan Wul, with the collaboration of illustrator Jean "Moebius" Geraud, maybe doesn't quite have the eerie beauty of Laloux's 1973 classic Fantastic Planet. But it has a charm and a sweetly imaginative atmosphere all its own. It concerns the efforts of a band of good-hearted (and terribly chic) space adventurers to rescue a rather irritable little boy stranded on a distant planet. In the course of the rescuers' odyssey, they encounter a planet of winged, faceless ciphers in thrall to a conformist intelligence, well-intentioned telepathic spore creatures, greedy bureaucratic officials and other obstacles, while the boy must contend with tentacled cave dwellers and giant insects. I've seen an English-dubbed version for Brit TV, but the chance to see this one on a screen is a bit of a rarity, and probably shouldn't be passed up.

Check out the April issue of Phoenix Magazine...

...for my "Four Corners" column, this time about patio dining.

Also underway this week, and continuning through April 15, are both Phoenix Film Festival and, running concurrently, the International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival. Check out Phoenix Magazine online for my interview with IHSFF director Monte Yazzie.

SHRIEK WEEK

In anticipation of De Palma, the upcoming documentary about the director by Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, Phoenix Film Festival is presenting “De Palma Week,” June 13 through June 16 at Scottsdale 101. Three of De Palma’s major works will be screened, one each night at 7 p.m., followed on the final evening by a screening of the documentary. Admission to the first three evenings is just $5; tickets to the De Palma screening are not available for purchase, but must be won; there will be opportunities to do so at the three earlier screenings:

June 13: Carrie—De Palma’s 1976 version of Steven King’s novel, the first movie adaptation of King’s work, was a smash, and probably started the process of turning King into American horror’s household name. For this sad, scary fairy tale of a picked-on, outcast high school girl (Sissy Spacek) with telekinetic powers who raises hell at her senior prom, De Palma uses his characteristic tricks—spilt screens, slow motion, long sinuous tracking shots—to cast a dreamlike spell. Both Spacek and Piper Laurie as Carrie’s religious fanatic mother got Oscar nominations, and the young John Travolta, Nancy Allen and Amy Irving are also in the cast. The final jolt is a classic; I can remember the screams in the theater (including my own) when I saw it the first time.

 

June 14: Scarface—One of the signature American movies of the ‘80s, De Palma’s 1983 gangster saga reset the 1932 classic in Miami, and gave Al Pacino, hamming vigorously, the second most famous role of his career, that of Tony Montana, the Cuban refugee turned killer turned cocaine kingpin. As with so much of De Palma’s work, the film is loaded with bloody violence and carnage, presented in elegant, finely-constructed sequences. The pace bogs down some in the second half—until the wild shootout finale, that is, from which derives Pacino’s now-familiar catchphrase, as he’s about to let loose at his enemies with a comically enormous automatic weapon: “Say hello to my leetle friend!”

The June 15 offering was a “Viewer’s Choice,” between Dressed to Kill and Carlito’s Way. The online voting is completed, and though I like 1993’s Carlito’s Way, another gangster melodrama with Al Pacino, I’m glad the choice is: 

Dressed to Kill—De Palma’s 1980 homage to Hitchcock, this gruesome psychological thriller with Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson and Nancy Allen seems, in some ways, like the quintessential expression of De Palma’s twisted psyche, for better and worse. The sensibility of the movie, which De Palma also scripted, has aged poorly—both the horrifying brutality of the central murder sequence and the implications of the story’s twist ending are unsavory. But as an exercise in technique, it packs at least as much of a punch as it ever did.

Finally, on June 16, the series will conclude with the special screening of Baumbach and Paltrow’s documentary De Palma, which gives the man in question a chance to explain himself.

Go to PhoenixFilmFestival.com for details.