Closer than Toronto, warmer than Sundance and less pricey than Cannes: the Mill Valley Film Fest is a real goldilocks; not too big, not too small, having easy proximity to LA while being a nice, safe distance from it. The festival’s 42nd year brings luminaries from both sides of the camera.
It’s a particularly exciting year, and peak television is part of the uproar. Netflix and Amazon’s decision to (at last) do a little promotion means previews of the Eddie Murphy-starring Dolomite is My Name and Martin Scorsese’s massive The Irishman.
Opening night is Just Mercy, with Jamie Foxx as an Alabama man railroaded for the killing of a white woman in 1988. Closing night is a fielder’s choice of either roaring engines or defective detectives. Matt Damon and Christian Bale star in Ford vs. Ferrari, about the challenge the Ford GT-40 posed to the Italian sports-car maker at Le Mans in 1966. In Motherless Brooklyn, actor Edward Norton adapts Johnathan Lethem’s novel of skulduggery in Eisenhower-era NYC.
The Mill Valley Film Fest continues to fight the canard that indie cinema is white and male, with terrific success. There are three special focuses: politically-active cinema, Swedish cinema and “Queer-ish” cinema. The last is an elastic category encompassing the new Pedro Almodovar (Pain and Glory), the new Francois Ozon (By the Grace of God), a documentary about a peculiarly loathsome lawyer (Where’s My Roy Cohn?) and the latest version of Sheridan Le Fanu’s much-filmed, Victorian-era lesbian vampire story Carmilla.
This year’s fest is particularly strong in films starring and made by women.
Tributes here include celebrations of Laura Dern, Olivia Wilde and Alfre Woodard (starring as a prison warden in Clemency, which took the Grand Prize at this year’s Sundance). Oct. 13 presents an afternoon with Barbara Rush, whose career includes both Nicholas Ray’s brilliant 1956 Bigger than Life and Space: 1999, where she co-starred with her husband of some 30-plus years, Martin Landau. Kasi Lemmons brings Harriet, an about-damn-time biopic of Harriet Tubman (Cynthia Erivo). Prathana Mohan’s The MisEducation of Bindu is a bright movie about a reject girl who may not make it out of high school before her dorky stepdad (David Arquette) kills her from sheer embarrassment.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is back in 4k restoration, and its star Lena Olin will attend the screening. Also newly restored: 1990’s A Thousand Pieces of Gold (see sidebar).
Guest Kristen Stewart screens Seberg, the story of actor Jean Seberg, who was hounded to a lonely death by the FBI. German director of adult comedies Doris Dörrie brings Cherry Blossoms and Demons, an East-meets-West-meets-booze story. Here in spirit if, sadly, not in person: a one-day retrospective of the late Agnes Varda who, in 1967, directed one of the most luminous movies ever made about Marin, Uncle Yanco.
Noah Baumbach, of The Squid and the Whale, receives a MVFF award along with the screening of his newest, Dern-starring Marriage Story; The next Batman, Robert Pattinson, arrives with the terrific-looking, black-and-white The Lighthouse about sea-monsters and men on a remote shore in the 1800s—Robert Eggers, of The Witch, directs.
Michael Apted brings his latest installment of his decades-spanning project recording the two Englands, 63 Up. Roger Michell (Notting Hill, Venus) unveils Blackbird—about a matriarch (Susan Sarandon) who gathers her family before committing assisted suicide over her shame at endorsing Jill Stein (sorry, actually because of terminal ALS).
Musical events at Sweetwater Music Hall augment this fest: the musical clippings of the Hi-Di-Ho Show, in honor of the long-gone, but still-missed record store; bluegrass legend Alice Gerrard, of Hazel and Alice, accompanies a documentary about her career; and there’s a performance by the vintage, all-gal psychedelic band Ace of Cups.
Other MVFF Must-See Moments
Jojo Rabbit
A risky, but uproariously funny, comedy by Taika Waititi (Thor: Ragnarok, What We Do in the Shadows). In 1944 or so, young Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) is a picked-on and facially scarred member of the Hitler Youth, whose father has vanished in the war. Fortunately, he has an imaginary confidant to buck him up: his pal Der Fuhrer (Waititi). The boy has a speculative idea of the dictator, who he imagines smokes and eats meat (roast unicorn heads). Trouble worsens when Jojo discovers his mother is using the attic to hide Anne-Frank, a Jewish girl (a terrific Thomasin McKenzie, from Leave No Trace). Scarlett Johansson, using a soft Dietrich accent, is at her very best as Jojo’s teasing mom. Sam Rockwell, the local Jugend-leader, is a little light in the jackboots. In its detailed art direction, this film is what a Wes Anderson movie would look like if it had teeth. Still, some people will hate it like they’ve hated nothing since Life is Beautiful.
Phil Tippett: Mad Dreams and Monsters
More than just a profile of the white-bearded, Berkeley-based animator and his wife Jules Roman, the businessperson who kept the roof on his studio. Tippett’s path is similar to a lot of stop-motion animators: early obsession with the Dynamation of Ray Harryhausen (Jason and the Argonauts), a stint doing advertising and then in on the ground floor with Industrial Light and Magic. Tippett contributed to the magic of The Empire Strikes Back by creating the Tauntaun, the macropod steeds used on the ice planet Hoth, and the 3D chessboard where the pieces whack one another. He designed the slouching, Sidney Greenstreetish Jabba the Hutt and some of the beasts of the Mos Eisley cantina. The meta-story is how Tippett and his colleagues weathered the advent of digital technology, which they were sure would put them all out of business. In fact, the sculpting with motion Tippet perfected was essential to the success of the digital age of special effects.
Danny Trejo: Inmate No. 1
Cinema is not all about pretty people: take Danny Trejo, the granite-faced, steam shovel–jawed actor generally cast as a son of Satan, mostly under the direction of Robert Rodriguez who loves Trejo like John Ford loved Ward Bond. A fearsome sight in Desperado, he took off his shirt to reveal a vest stuffed with a cutlery-store’s worth of knives and a massive chest decorated with a dinner-plate-sized tattoo of La Adelita. Later, he was Isador “Machete” Cortez, formidable star of the Mexploitation-flick Machete: “You didn’t tell me that ‘Mexican day laborer’ was a got-damn federale!” squawks a Texan chump. Rodriguez found the tough man’s tender side in the Spy Kids series. Turns out he’s sort of a local (lived in San Quentin for a spell); this documentary shows how the actor/restaurateur first endured prison, then show business.
Laura Dern
One of her earliest films, the Joyce Carol Oates–derived Smooth Talk, played at Mill Valley in 1985. Since then, Dern’s international career has included quiet dramas and blockbusters alike; she fled dinosaurs at Jurassic Park and commanded an armada in deep space. In Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Dern was the intrepid glam Vice Admiral Holdo, whose idea of battle dress was a grey/maroon evening gown. Dern’s look of slightly wary innocence made her a long time wanderer in the catacombs of David Lynch, from Blue Velvet on. In 2006, Lynch whimsically mounted a one-man Oscar campaign for Dern in Inland Empire by pasturing an attention-grabbing cow in the grass on an LA traffic island. Maybe that was his idea of a joke. Here’s the punchline: Dern absolutely should have won. She’ll be accompanying Marriage Story, her newest film.
Xmas Cake: This American Shelf-Life
In this enlightening short—a sort of animated TEDtalk with sumi calligraphy—Mill Valley’s May Yam profiles Petra Hanson. She was a hyphenate whose careers included clothing designer and rock star in Tokyo. And then Hanson started to age… . The title is an unpleasant Japanese phrase, akin to one describing stale holiday fruitcake, for women who are unmarried at 24. It was a problem that used to be solved by suicide.
Mill Valley Film Festival takes place Thursday, Oct. 3, through Sunday, Oct. 13, at several venues in and around Mill Valley. For complete schedule and tickets, visit mvff.com.
