2011 Mostly British FIlm Festival Recap

The Mostly British Film Festival ran from February 3 to 10 at the Vogue Theater. It also screened at the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael although I didn't attend any of those screenings.

I watched nine films at the festival.

West is West starring Om Puri; (2010)
Crying with Laughter starring Stephen McCole; (2009) - Official Website
Get Carter starring Michael Caine; (1971)
Beneath Hill 60 starring Brendan Cowell; (2010) - Official Website
Heartless starring Jim Sturgess; (2009) - Official Website
I Love You Too starring Brendan Cowell and Peter Dinklage; (2010) - Official Website
Dorian Gray starring Ben Barnes & Colin Firth; (2009)
The Infidel starring Omid Djalili & Richard Schiff; with Archie Punjabi; (2010) - Official Website
Boy starring James Rolleston & Taika Waititi; directed by Taika Waititi; (2010) - Official Website

I should note a few things. First, the relatively unheralded Mostly British Film Festival trumped the mighty San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival by programming West is West as the opening night film. On March 10, SFIAAFF will open their festival with West is West.

I attended this festival at the expense of the first week of the San Francisco Independent Film Festival. I did not watch any films during the first week of IndieFest. I guess that is becoming a habit as I passed on the 2010 DocFest to see the Mill Valley Film Festival and Berlin and Beyond.

However, I have no regrets as the lineup at Most British was very strong this year. During its innaugural year (2009), I saw two films. Last year, I skipped the festival to see a full slate at IndieFest. This year, I swapped festivals to see nine films at Mostly British. The crowds were healthy for most of the screenings I saw. The Infidel sold out the Vogue.

Breaking the films by country, West is West, Get Carter, Heartless, Dorian Gray and The Infidel were British productions. Crying with Laughter was Scottish, Beneath Hill 60 and I Love You Too were Australian and Boy was Kiwi.

The Mostly British is closely associated with the Vogue Theater. The Vogue is operated by Peerless Entertainment but owned by the San Francisco Neighborhood Theater Foundation which is a non-profit whose mission is "to preserve and maintain neighborhood movie theaters in San Francisco." Several Board members of SFNTF are also on the Board of Mostly British. The festival is programmed primarily by Ruthe Stein of the San Francisco Chronicle. The SFNTF Board President (whose name I have forgotten) referred to the film festival as essentially a fundraiser for the Vogue.

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Getting on to the films...my favorite film was Beneath Hill 60. The film was set during WWI in the trenches or more precisely, under the trenches. Both sides employed miners and mining engineers to tunnel under No Man's Land to detonate mines under the enemy's positions. Based on a true story, Beneath Hill 60 follows Oliver Woodward (Brendan Cowell), a mining engineer from Australia whose is put in charge of the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company
on the front lines. While there, he experiences the horrors of war and the difficulties of mining. Woodward's group is assigned the task of blowing up Hill 60 in Belgium. I'll give away the ending since is it historical; approximately 1,000,000 pounds were used to destroy the hill which resulted in the largest man-made explosion up to that time.

Beneath Hill 60 reminded me of The Hurt Locker in that how could anything but a riveting drama emerge from a war story about guys blowing things up and/or getting blown up during war. Both sides would use listening devices to detect mining underground and would use explosives to kill the enemy miners. So in addition to the deprivations of soldiers at the front and concomitant dangers, the miners had to work in dark, dank and claustrophobic conditions and make as little noise as possible lest they be detected by the enemy.

I was engrossed by the film although the flashback scenes where Woodward romanced a 16 year old girl dragged down the film's pace. Didn't statutory rape laws exist in 1915? Actually, when did it become wrong (as well as illegal) for a man (Cowell was 33 when they filmed) to "romance" a 16 year old girl (Bella Heathcote)? Anyway, the flashbacks show a carefree (and frankly, childish) Woodward whose demeanor would mature quickly on the front lines. Cowell captured the transformation in Woodward but Steve Le Marquand as battle weary Sergeant Fraser delivered the signature performance of the film.

Sadly, Stein or whoever introduced the film, mentioned that the film will not be released theatrically in the US although it is already out on DVD.

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Brendan Cowell also starred in I Love You Too about a immature man who cannot commit to his girlfriend. The film seemed oddly derivative. Cowell's wingman in the film is Peter Helliar but it seemed like a role tailor made for Jack Black or Philip Seymour Hoffman in Along Came Polly. Cowell runs the kiddie train at an amusement park and in those scenes, he looked like Russell Brand in Get Him to the Greek.

Despite these nagging similarities, the film was entertaining on its own merit. It certainly wasn't insightful and covered ground which has been well trodden. Cowell, the always solid Peter Dinklage and Yvonne Strahovski as the love interest carry the film admirably. Their performance made an otherwise predictable film amusing.

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The Infidel has had a very successful festival run over the past year. Only the most cursory of synopses is necessary. A Muslim man in Britain learns that he is adopted. Not only that but he learns that his birth parents are Jewish and his original name was Solly Shimshillewitz. In addition to the identity crisis this provokes, the man's son is engaged to the step-daughter of a radical Muslim cleric and the man, who is politically moderately and not religiously observant, is urged by his son to adopt a lifestyle more in suit with the potential in-laws.

That should be enough to induce a smile and the film delivers laughs. Omid Djalili plays the lead, West Wing alumnus Richard Schiff plays his only Jewish friend and the always fantastic Archie Punjabi plays the wife.

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Get Carter is a classic which I had never seen. Noir City's Eddie Muller introduced the film along with mystery writer Tony Broadbent. Michael Caine had charisma and always will.

West is West had a few laughs but I much preferred the original East is East. Like Michael Caine, actor Om Puri is one of those types that command attention on the big screen.

Dorian Gray could have benefited from some editing but Colin Firth and Ben Barnes acquit themselves well. Unlike I Love You Too, the actors' performances were not enough to lift the film beyond melodrama with a few scenes of debauchery.

Boy was a heartfelt dramedy based on the life of director Taika Waititi. It was a little too whimsical for my tastes.

Stephen McCole delivered an outstanding performance in Crying with Laughter. Set in the world of stand-up comedy, McCole's character ranges from funny to pathetic to sympathetic.

One Fourth of 2011 is Already Booked Up

The film festival season kicks off tomorrow evening with the opening night of German Gems at the Castro Theater. German Gems is the festival which Ingrid Eggers founded after leaving Berlin and Beyond. This is the second annual German Gems. I missed last year's screenings. The festival runs through January 16 at the Castro and presents encore screenings on January 22 at Point Arena.

The films that interest me based on the program guide are The Architect, She Deserved It on January 15 and Mountain Blood on Janaury 16.

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Noir City will be at the Castro from January 21 to 30. In total, they'll screen 24 films. The films I'm looking forward to are Don't Bother to Knock (1952) with Marilyn Monroe and Richard Widmark, Jean Renoir's The Woman on the Beach (1947) and Otto Preminger's Angel Face (1952) with Jean Simmons and Robert Mitchum.

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The Mostly British Film Festival runs February 3 to 10 at the Vogue Theater. The festival is long on old school classics such Get Carter (1971), The Ipcress File (1965), Black Narcissus (1947), Gallipoli (1981) and East is East (1999).

Among the films which caught my attention are West is West (2010) which is the opening night film and sequel to East is East, Beneath Hill 60 (2010) and Down Terrace (2009).

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Overlapping Mostly British is the San Francisco Independent Film Festival or SF IndieFest at the Roxie.

The most outrageous titles are Nude Nuns With Big Guns and Machete Maidens Unleashed! which is a documentary about Filipino exploitation films from the director of Not Quite Hollywood (which I saw at 2010's Mostly British Film Festival).

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On February 12 at the Castro Theater, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival will present their Winter Event.

The all-day program consists of trio of Chaplin's early short films, L’Argent (1928), an adaptation of the Émile Zola novel and King Vidor's La Bohème (1926) starring Lilian Gish and John Gilbert.

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From March 1 to 13, Cinequest screens in San Jose. From March 10 to 20, the San Francisco Asian American Film Festival runs at various locations. If the past is indicative, the festival will screen in San Francisco, San Jose and Berkeley.

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On top of all these festivals, the PFA has a series that greatly interests me. It called Suspicion: The Films of Claude Chabrol and Alfred Hitchcock and runs from January 13 to February 25.

A founding member of the French New Wave, Claude Chabrol began, like his contemporaries Truffaut, Godard, and Rohmer, as a critic for Cahiers du Cinema; unlike his more rigorously intellectual colleagues, however, he embraced genre filmmaking, specifically suspense films (“I love murder,” he said). Chabrol’s career as a critic peaked with the 1957 publication (with Rohmer) of a pioneering study of Alfred Hitchcock; he turned to filmmaking a year later, beginning a cinematic career that could arguably be described as a continuing study—and continuation—of Hitchcock.

Like Hitchcock, Chabrol is the consummate craftsman; his films flow with the ease and assurance of someone who understands the power of cinema to manipulate emotion, while simultaneously embracing—and winking at—such power. “I am a farceur,” he once admitted. “You have to avoid taking yourself too seriously.” Unlike Hitchcock, though, Chabrol hits harder, with a steely condemnation of bourgeois values and a weighty moral resonance in his tales of infidelity, suspense, and murder. In a use of genre similar to his other great influence, Fritz Lang, “the stories he chooses become the frameworks for clear-eyed subtle explorations of guilt, innocence, and accountability,” wrote Stephen Holden in the New York Times.

Chabrol passed away in September, aged eighty, having made over sixty films. We present a generous sampling of his work, in conjunction with some of Hitchcock’s finest; two “masters of suspense,” together at last.

The series consists of 20 films. Many of them overlap with Noir City or IndieFest.