The man behind Austin Powers and Meet the Parents, Jay Roach, joins the podcast today to talk about his new film, Trumbo, starring Bryan Cranston as legendary Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, whose career was cut short when he and a handful of his associates were blacklisted due to their association with the communist party. Bernard goes solo to review Tom McCarthy‘s newsroom drama Spotlight as well as share his Indie Pick of the Week.

Topics

• Indie Picks (1:23)
• Spotlight (5:28)
• Trumbo (26:49)
• Jay Roach (35:39)

Articles Referenced

Trumbo Review
Spotlight Review
Doomsdays Interview
Doomsdays Indiecast

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“The pen is mightier than the sword.” An overused adage, yes, but one can’t help but think of it while watching Trumbo, Jay Roach’s film following the most famous of the Hollywood Ten, the film industry professionals blacklisted during the communist scare of post-World War II America. But the fact that the film conjures up played out inspirational quotation rather speaks to the film’s methods in portraying Dalton Trumbo’s subversive and clever discrediting of the blacklist. This is clearly an important historical tale and Hollywood loves nothing more than it loves stories about itself, but it’s this assumed dignity that ultimately lessens the impact of the film and detracts from the very real significance of what Trumbo accomplished.

Roach has a rather focused directorial collection ranging mostly from comedy (Meet the Parents) to fact-based politicals (Game Change), his interest in wit and politics is clear. In this regard Dalton Trumbo is understandably attractive. John McNamara—known mostly for his TV writing—adapted a script from Bruce Cook’s novel Dalton Trumbo, and maybe it’s because the film takes place over the entire span of the blacklist’s inception in 1947 to its eventual dissolution around 1960 that the film’s pacing does feel a bit episodic in bursts of plot development. Trumbo’s strength lies in Bryan Cranston’s portrayal of Dalton Trumbo, his wide mouth and dramatic facial features giving an amount of gravitas to this quick-witted writer.

The film flies, barely giving us a chance to get to know the group that makes up those who are starting to speak out against the wave of conservative nationalism flowing through Hollywood, headed by gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren). Trumbo is at the height of his career and making more than any screenwriter in Hollywood ever has, but his penchant for wearing his political beliefs on his sleeve quickly pushes him into the spotlight. Russia has turned from being a WWII ally to an elusive threat as the beginnings of the Cold War push at the growing paranoia in America. Much of this is shown in newsreel soundbites and meetings held by Trumbo with his colleagues in the industry who also identify as either Communist or liberal. It doesn’t take long for Trumbo and his associates, among them Arlen Hird (Louis C.K.) a fellow screenwriter, to be brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee to explain themselves. The now famous Hollywood Ten refused to reveal their personal affiliations and called into the question the constitutionality of such a hearing, as a result several of them went to jail, were fined, and most significantly were fired and/or stigmatized to the point of losing their livelihoods.

The film takes a more dramatic turn when Trumbo serves his time in prison, reflecting on the personal struggle of prison life and that of his family surviving without him back home. Diane Lane plays Cleo, Trumbo’s sweet, supportive and perhaps too tame wife. When he finally comes home from prison almost a year later, it’s Trumbo’s eldest daughter Niki (Elle Fanning) who becomes the film’s other strong character, a contrived decision attempting to better paint Trumbo as both family man and hero. Trumbo enacts a plan that allows him to continue writing—a craft he seems supernaturally good at—and allows him to undermine the blacklist as well. He begins writing for Frank King (John Goodman), a B-movie filmmaker who happily trades Trumbo’s talent for small money, no credit, and a shot to get Trumbo’s movies made. Trumbo begins a sort of screenwriting factory, cranking out originals and doctoring those that need work, enlisting his fellow blacklisters to help. It isn’t long until his pseudonym-written scripts pick up some attention. The man can’t help but be talented.

It would be great to take away from all of this that true talent shines, or right will prevail, or one rock can fell a mighty giant, except that what ultimately allows Trumbo to discredit the blacklist is the combined consciences of several others in the industry who supported him, most notably Otto Preminger and Kirk Douglas. So while Trumbo certainly got a sort of revenge on those who imprisoned and blacklisted him, it was the growing evidence that McCarthy’s scare-tactics weren’t leading to any hard evidence of espionage within the film industry. The truth of this doesn’t detract from Trumbo’s role, but ideally the film would have opted for a more humble approach than spotlight the cleverness of its subject.

The film has a distinct lighting scheme and familiar musical mood, very clearly trying to invoke an old Hollywood nostalgia, but mostly working to make the film far too cartoonish. The introduction of historical figures at every point feels like name-dropping and self-congratulatory (no matter how much Dean O’Gorman looks like Kirk Douglas) and the film’s distinct self-love for the industry seems out of place in a story depicting that industry’s darkest hour. At one point in the film Louis C.K.’s Arlen Hird says to Trumbo “Do you have to say everything like it’s going to be chiseled into a rock?” and this sentiment speaks more to the entire film than anything else muttered.

It’s interesting to note that there will be—and indeed already have been—those who want to remind us that Trumbo’s writing was ripe with socialist messages, as if this proves his complicity in some masterful scheme and marks him as not entirely clean of guilt. Considering the philosophical beginnings of Communism, it hardly seems duplicitous that one would include its main themes in storytelling. If everyone were to feel equally as sensitive to biblical themes in film, there’d be hardly a movie out there that didn’t appear to be propaganda. There may be an amount of historical re-writing, but this hardly seems the film’s worst quality, instead it’s that Trumbo draws a larger picture of its title character than it does the entire tragedy and injustice that propelled him.

Without that level of context Trumbo is reasonably enjoyable, but mostly begs that there be a better film made at least equal to what this Oscar-winning man could have come up with.

Patron saint of the mid-major movie release Megan Ellison announced with her company Annapurna Pictures that a preliminary cast has been assembled for director Mike Mills‘ upcoming family drama 20th Century Women. Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig and Elle Fanning will lead 20th Century Women, a story of a mother (Bening) raising her teenage son in Santa Barbara, California, in the summer of 1979. Gerwig will portray a photographer immersed in the local punk scene while Fanning plays the son’s friend. Beginners and Thumbsucker filmmaker Mills will direct his own script.

Producer Megan Ellison has used her clout to help guide several interesting projects to the screen in recent years, including The Master, Zero Dark Thirty, Her, Foxcatcher and David O. Russell’s upcoming film with Jennifer Lawrence Joy. Ellison will produce the project alongside Anne Carey of Archer Gray and Youree Henley with Annapurna’s Chelsea Barnard on as executive producer. 20th Century Women will film in Southern California later in 2015.

Nicolas Winding Refn has found a trio of talented actresses in Christina Hendricks, Jena Malone and Bella Heathcoat to join his new film The Neon Demon, based on a script by Refn and Mary Laws. They join Elle Fanning and Abbey Lee, whose involvement was announced earlier. Also signed on is Keanu Reeves who is usually at his best when working with visually arresting filmmakers such as Refn.

The Neon Demon, described as a female-centric “horror film about vicious beauty,” will hopefully be yet another interesting entry in Refn’s filmography. Shooting begins at the end of March in Los Angeles, delightful news for anyone anxious to see the filmmaker return to the setting he captured so well with 2011’s Drive.

The styles of post-apocalyptic sci-fi and dustbowl Western collide in Jake Paltrow’s Young Ones, a tragic, imaginative story of a family struggling to survive in a dry world where water is as hard to find as virtue. Michael Shannon stars as Earnest Holm, a survivor and a farmer doing his best to raise his children Jerome (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and Mary (Elle Fanning) the right way, though a handsome scoundrel named Flem (Nicholas Hoult) threatens to take everything Earnest has left.

In our chat with Jake we discuss the myriad inspirations he took for the film, bringing robot dogs to life, how the film isn’t technically post-apocalyptic, the great Michael Shannon, and much more.

How long has the idea for this film been in your head? It’s pretty unique.
Jake: Oh gosh, a long time. It’s been, like, five years from beginning to now. Initially, it really started with the father-son love story and wanting to explore that. There’s a lot of my dad in the Earnest character. He died young, and I hadn’t written anything about him. I wanted to see what that would feel like. It felt sort of sweet and nice, but also dark and tragic. It started there. I reread the S.E. Hinton books–The Outsiders, Rumble Fish–and I really wanted to do a story about kids in an environment like this, sort of imagining what a science fiction book written like her would be like. I approached it like an adaptation of an S.E. Hinton science fiction story. Those don’t exist, but I was imagining that. I wanted to keep those literary devices in the movie so that it wouldn’t feel realistic, in a funny way. I feel like I was trying to find the fine line between making it naturalistic but not realistic.

There’s a fun mixture of sci-fi post-apocalypse and Western in the film that works very well.
Jake: To me, the film isn’t post-apocalyptic at all. It’s an environmental disaster, a man-made thing. It’s an extrapolation of something we’re dealing with right now in California. When you bring the politics of how we got here into it, it’s not that implausible that we could end up in a situation like that. It’s not like the entire world is in drought, it’s just this area. In the urban cities in this movie, people are falling in love with their operating systems and have perfectly functioning lives. But the people who don’t have a lot of money and are suffering the worst of these environmental calamities are the people we’re focusing on in this movie.

I love independent sci-fi movies because it forces filmmakers to be disciplined about their special effects. I love the way you implemented yours.
Jake: Thank you. We really had to prepare to ensure we could get this finished with a very low budget. At the same time, I wanted to have ILM-level visual effects, which I think we achieved.

Talk about that robot. It’s an incredibly convincing creation.
Jake: It was inspired by the Boston Dynamics robot Big Dog. When I first got the idea for the movie, I saw that video, and it had such an emotional quality without being alive. There was something about it…I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it was very emotional. I got really excited about putting it in the movie, and I spent time with people at Boston Dynamics. We really did try to make it work so that Big Dog was in the movie, but they had a lot going on, so it wasn’t really possible at the time. The way we did it was, it was part puppetry and part CGI. The thing that I really wanted to achieve most was the effect where the actors could really put their hands on it and it wouldn’t all feel like it was just an animated foreground effect. We were able to do that.

It was bugging me. I kept trying to figure out whether what I was seeing was practical or CG, and it was pretty much impossible.
Jake: Thank you.

Michael Shannon and Kodi Smit-McPhee are great together.
Jake: My favorite scene is when they’re taking apart the defunct water well and they start play fighting, which is sort of very rough. That’s something that comes from my dad, and I really liked that. It’s a personal thing, and they did it so perfectly. Kodi shows how scrappy that character is, and Mike is so good at playing this compassionate tough guy. That’s probably my favorite moment between them.

I was impressed with Nicholas Hoult because he’s such a likable guy when you see him, but he plays a great villain in your film.
Jake: The character is so complex, and I think that’s a great testament to Nick. I think he made Flem infinitely more complex than he was on the page. Flem was written as a more traditional bad guy, and as we tailored it to him, he brought a complexity to it that made it much better.

You said that this film is a very personal one, a lot of it inspired by your late father. Is that a comfortable thing to do?
Jake: There’s a difference between personal and autobiographical. There’s nothing in the movie that’s autobiographical at all. But there are moments and emotions that I feel close to. When you’re making a movie, there is an element that should be personal and should be confessional. I’ve always gravitated toward those kinds of films as a fan. I just do that intuitively as a filmmaker I guess.

Young Ones is for fans of…what? Who would you recommend it to?
Jake: I like lots of different things. I wouldn’t limit it to film fans. A big part of what I built this movie from is my love of anime and manga comics. Neon Genesis Evangelion was one that always meant a lot to me. A lot of inspiration for Jerome and Ears, the girl across the border is His and Her Circumstances, which is a great anime that I really like. There are a lot of people out there that like sci-fi movies, but also find themselves surprised by these character-based things. I think our film falls into this place where you can have the experience of a genre picture, but at its core, it deals with some larger, interpersonal family issues, and not in a pandering or sentimental way at all.

Speaking of not pandering, you leave a lot to the imagination and make us work a bit as an audience.
Jake: I feel like there are certain things we rely on in certain kinds of movies that move away from authenticity. For me, as an audience member, when I see those things, it loses me on the things I do love about it. An example in this movie would be that the end of the movie isn’t Jerome and Ears getting together. That romantic experience of going across the border and meeting the girl that his father mentioned…that’s enough. It always makes me think of Citizen Kane. At the beginning, he says, “I saw a woman through the window of a subway 50 years ago, and not a month in my life goes by that I don’t think about her.” Those moments in our lives are so monumental that it doesn’t need to culminate in marriage or sex. It can just be a meeting or flirtation that stays with you for the rest of your life. For me, that has an emotional relevance that means something to me. In most movies, the reward for this boy going through all this hardship would be for him to get the girl. That’s stuff that I don’t really gravitate toward.

There’s a great visual arc to the film. At first, we’re in a dry, sun-drenched desert, but later in the movie we see an urban environment that feels like a new world.
Jake: Yes, that urban environment is to show that there’s this commercial prosperity in the state next door, that they’re not suffering the way the Holm family is. We talked about the stages of hydration within the environment. Obviously everybody is really suffering at the beginning of the film and sort of dehydrated, and that adds to this heightened emotional state. The idea is, the first stage of the water pumping is this artificial stage where one of these aqueducts has been run toward the farm, so there’s water to irrigate a small portion of the land. There’s water to bathe and water to drink, so we start to see a vibrancy in the skin and in the land they live on. But when the rain starts falling, we can start brining reed clothes into it. We follow an organic way to bring a lushness into the film.

I look forward to your next feature, but I hope we don’t have to wait so long in between!
Jake: Me too. This one took much too long. I definitely won’t be letting that happen again. I’m working on my next project now, and it’s in this same vein, but in a more urban environment. It’s around a similar time frame and has a science fiction element to it. It’s maybe in some ways even more ambitious. I hope to have it finished as soon as possible.

A tragic tale of a farmer, his children, a swindler, and a robot donkey…thing, Jake Paltrow’s Young Ones is a unique film that’ll make you smile with its inventive mixture of sci-fi, post-apocalyptic, and western milieus, though its characters and their melodramatic lives aren’t quite as compelling. You get the sense that Paltrow really opened his creative floodgates and poured all of the things he geeks out about onto the screen, from anime to Bergman to John Ford, a beautiful approach more filmmakers would be smart to adopt, quite frankly. Had there just been a little more discipline in the writing, the film would have been a more noteworthy work, though cult status could very well be in Young Ones‘ future.

The film is set sometime in the near future where the earth has balanced our leaps forward in technology with a crippling drought that’s rendered much of the world a veritable wasteland where starving nomads kill for jugs of water. Though the setting isn’t technically post-apocalyptic (there are thriving, lit-up cities dotting the arid landscape) our story (mostly) operates within the post-apocalyptic rubric. Top-billed star Michael Shannon plays Earnest Holm, who raises his children Jerome (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and Mary (Elle Fanning) on a farm that’s barely fit to keep them alive and fed, let alone turn a profit. Their mouths and wallets are parched, and the’ve just lost the family donkey, which they used to transport bottles of booze Earnest brews and sells to keep the family afloat.

It’s dark days for the Holm family, not just because they’re scraping by, but because they’re a house divided. Earnest has a strong bond with Jerome, who soaks up his dad’s life lessons like a sponge, but Mary is staunchly defiant, her disdain for her father stemming from his sordid past. Years ago, Earnest got drunk and crashed his car, paralyzing Mary and Jerome’s mother (Aimee Mullins), who can now only walk with the assistance of a bionic spine and lives at a rehabilitation center. Though Earnest has a reputation as a good man, all Mary sees is the drunk who tore their family apart. To Earnest’s chagrin, Mary dates a handsome, motorcycle-riding scoundrel named Flem (Nicholas Hoult), who through small deceptions weasels his way into the Holm family and threatens to take everything Earnest has worked so hard to protect.

Had the film been made to stand solely on its narrative legs it would topple over in a quick minute. Though the backstabbing, secrets, and underhanded maneuvering harkens back to old-school Western melodramas, the story feels more rudimentary than classic. What gives Young Ones its real value is its style, which has cinematographer Giles Nuttgens capturing the cruel beauty of the outstretched, dry landscapes. Special effects are used sparingly and tastefully, with the Holms’ replacement for their donkey, a load-carrying robot with four long metal legs, being the most pervading visual flourish. It’s genuinely difficult to discern shot to shot whether the robot is physically there or rendered by computers (when you think it’s CGI, someone will place their hand on it), which is makes it the best kind of visual trick.

The four-legged hunk of metal is also surprisingly one of the film’s key characters. It plays an important role in the film’s most pivotal scene, but there’s more to it than that. Much like the titular donkey in Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, the robot has no inner thoughts to speak of, and is there only as an innocent, silent witness to the evils of human nature. There’s an inherent sympathy that comes with its dog-like appearance and mannerisms, especially as we see its legs buckle as it’s kicked and beaten by its owners. But unlike Balthazar, the robot gets a measure of revenge on its prime abuser (its built-in, always-on camera comes into play), though to say a thoughtless work-bot is capable of vengeance is a bit of a stretch. We may project the revenge storyline ourselves, but it’s no less satisfying.

The performances are generally very good, with Shannon anchoring the film with his stripped-down, nuanced turn as the Holms’ patriarch. He plays the gun-toting former drunk like a dormant volcano that could erupt at any moment, and while he isn’t afraid to take a life for his family (a toughness we see on full display in the film’s grisly opening moments), he also has a tender rapport with the scrappy Jerome. Smit-Mcphee, who’s subtle yet deceptively emotive, has great chemistry with Hoult, who’s a great villain despite being known to play more likable characters very well. Fanning is a fine young actress, but she isn’t done justice with the role of Mary, who feels one-dimensional and slightly objectified.

What’s most enjoyable and impressive about Paltrow’s sophomore effort is how well he blends his homages to other films into a cohesive vision. From on-screen titles dividing the film into three chapters; to the actors posing in front of a curtain and looking straight into the camera for the closing credits; to the brief glimpse of a futuristic city that recalls the kookier side of mainstream sci-fi, we see countless influences, old-fashioned and contemporary, and they’re all a treat for the eyes and ears. If the characters’ journeys were as innovative as the aesthetics, Paltrow would have had a career-defining masterpiece on his hands.

Young Ones trailer

At just 16 years old, Elle Fanning has become the youngest recipient of the Mill Valley award in the festival’s 37-year history. Earning her the honor was her heartbreaking performance in Low Down, the feature debut of director Jeff Preiss in which she plays Amy-Jo Albany, the real life daughter of critically lauded, woefully drug-addicted jazz pianist Joe Albany (played here by John Hawkes).

Following a red carpet stroll by Preiss and Fanning (who was shockingly tall in person) at the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, the director and his star sat in the audience, foregoing an onstage introduction to experience the film alongside everyone else. Fanning did take the stage after the screening to accept the award, presented by festival Executive Director Mark Fishkin and festival Director of Programming Zoë Elton, as well as participate in a Q&A, which Preiss joined in on as well.

Click to view slideshow.
Fanning was visibly giddy on stage (hell, I would be too if I were receiving an award the same year I got my driver’s license), overwhelmed by the crowd’s warm reception. As Elton said during the award presentation, the role seems to be a transitional one for the young actress, as the material is darker than anything she’s yet done. Joe Albany’s addictions ruled his life, consequently leading to him failing his daughter in many ways, on many occasions. But as Fanning’s Amy-Jo says in the film’s opening monologue, the girl loved her father “out of all proportion”.

“I think she’s the most incredible lady in the world,” Fanning said of Amy-Jo. “She [saw so many things living with her dad] that someone that young probably should not have seen, but dealt with it.” With her father hanging around with his druggy friends in their run-down Hollywood apartment, sometimes popping in and out of jail, and on one occasion abandoning her for two years as he traveled to Europe, Amy-Jo had every reason to resent him and his neglectful non-parenting. But her love for him never wavered, and she continued support him through all the pain he put her through. “Even though she hates him at times and is angry with his choices, there’s always the love there. If anyone said something negative about her dad, she’d stick up for him, even if she thought he was wrong.”

The complexity of Fanning’s role would be tricky for an actor three times her age, but she manages to rise to the occasion and outshine her cast mates. With Hawkes, Glenn Close (as her grandmother) and Lena Headey (as her awful, absentee mother) sharing the screen with her, this is no small feat.

The real life Amy-Jo was on set for the filming of the movie, making herself available to Fanning for reference. “With Amy, I was really nervous about asking questions. She said, ‘Ask me anything!’, and I’d just go blank.” Fanning did say that she’s now more comfortable asking questions of real life subjects (in her next film, Trumbo, she plays Nikola Trumbo, daughter of blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo), a lesson she learned from Close on the set of Low Down. “Glenn would just pick Amy’s brain apart,” Fanning said of her veteran co-star. “I definitely learned a lot from Glenn. She even had some fake teeth made for the role.”

Set in the ’70s, the film utilizes that signature mustard color palette to convey the dusty, smelly Hollywood atmosphere. Though Fanning steals the show, the rest of the cast (which also includes Caleb Landry Jones, Flea, and Peter Dinklage) turn in excellent performances as well. Preiss and screenwriter Topper Lilien have fashioned a film that’s too meandering and one-note to be a worthy vehicle for the actors’ work. The film covers every trope in the drug-addition sub-genre, and while story’s authenticity is indisputable (the real Amy-Jo was heavily involve, after all), it nonetheless disappoints, cinematically.

Still, as an entry in Fanning’s filmography, Low Down is a watershed moment in her young career. She was all smiles as she received a standing ovation in the packed theater, holding her award in one hand. I predict we’ll see her holding many more shiny statues as her bright career unfolds.

The Mill Valley Film Festival has built a reputation as a showcase for future Oscar winners and emergent independent and foreign filmmakers. The festival has hosted five of the last six Best Picture Oscar winners, rolling out the red carpet for A-list actors and filmmakers while heavily supporting local filmmakers as well. Nestled in one of the most beautiful places in the world, filmmakers, actors, and attendees alike are drawn to Mill Valley every year by the easy, low-stress atmosphere, the gorgeous surroundings, the varied special events and, of course, the films. In its 37th year, the festival looks to deliver everything loyal festival-goers expect and more.

“Variety has said once–probably more than once–that Mill Valley has the ambience of a destination festival and the clout of an urban festival,” said festival founder and director Mark Fishkin at yesterday’s press conference. “Change” is one of the themes of this year’s festival, with the folks behind the festival embracing the evolving landscape of film and film distribution. Said Fishkin: “For us, change is inevitable, but we are still part of a special division of the film industry, which is theatrical exhibition. We take our role as curators very seriously, whether it’s films that are coming from the Bay Area or films coming from Cannes.”

The Homesman

Tommy Lee Jones‘ latest offering, The Homesman, will open the festival, with star Hilary Swank set to attend. The film is a Western, following a claim jumper (Jones) and a young woman (Swank) as they escort three insane woman through the treacherous frontier between Nebraska and Iowa. Fishkin describes it as a “feminist Western” that is “extremely moving. We’re just so proud to be showing it in this year’s festival.”

Co-headlining opening night is Men, Women, & Children, Jason Reitman‘s new film starring Ansel Elgort, Adam Sandler, Judy Greer, and Jennifer Garner that explores the strange effect the internet age has on parents and their teens. Reitman will be in attendance to present. Lynn Shelton‘s Laggies will also play opening night, completing the killer triple-threat. The film, about a woman stuck in slacker adolescence, stars Chloë Grace Moretz, Keira Knightley, and Sam Rockwell.

The festival looks to finish as strong as it started, with Jean-Marc Valée‘s follow-up to Dallas Buyers Club, spiritual quest movie Wild, starring Reese Witherspoon as Cheryl Strayed, who embarked on a 1,100-mile hike to heal deep emotional wounds. Laura Dern also stars, and will be honored with a tribute.

French favorite Juliette Binoche stars across Kristen Stewart in Clouds of Sils Maria. Binoche plays an actress who’s asked to return to a play that made her famous 20 years ago, but this time in an older role, forcing her to reflect on the young woman she once was and what she’s become since. Another French actress who can do no wrong, Marion Cotillard is outstanding in the Dardenne brothers’ new film, Two Days, One Night. Recalling the best of Italian neorealism, the film follows a woman who’s got a weekend to convince her co-workers to forego their bonuses to save her job.

The Theory of Everything

Two emerging young actors will be spotlighted as Eddie Redmayne and Elle Fanning will be in attendance to discuss their respective new films. Fanning stars in Low Down, which views the troubled life of jazz pianist Joe Albany (John Hawkes) from the perspective of his teenage daughter (Fanning). Set in the ’70s, the film also stars Glenn Close, Peter Dinklage, and Lena Headey. In a breakout performance, Redmayne portrays legendary physicist Stephen Hawking in the stirring biopic The Theory of Everything, which is quickly generating momentum on the festival circuit.

Several other films that have been building steam on the festival circuit will play at the festival as well. English landscape painter J. M. W. Turner is played brilliantly by Timothy Spall in Mike Leigh‘s Mr. Turner, which we loved at Cannes. Also portraying a significant real-life figure is Benedict Cumberbatch, who stars in The Imitation Game, the story of English mathematician Alan Turing and his groundbreaking intelligence work during World War II. Steve Carell‘s highly-anticipated turn in Foxcatcher as John Du Pont, the man who shot olympic great David Schultz, will surely continue to stir up Oscar talk as the film plays late in the festival. Robert Downey Jr. stars as a big city lawyer who returns home to defend his father (Robert Duvall), the town judge, who is suspected of murder.

Metallica is set to play a pleasantly unexpected role in the festival as his year’s artist in residence, with each of the four members of the band presenting a film. Drummer Lars Ulrich has naturally chosen to highlight Whiplash, Damien Chazelle‘s drama about a young aspiring drummer and his relentless instructor. Chazelle will also be in attendance. Lead singer James Hetfield has chosen to present a classic, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, while guitarist Kirk Hammett, one of the world’s foremost horror aficionados, will offer up Dracula vs. Frankenstein. Bassist Robert Trujillo is showing a sneak peek at a documentary he produced himself, Jaco, which tells the story of legendary bassist Jaco Pastorius.

On the local side of things is a special screening of Soul of a Banquet, a documentary by filmmaker Wayne Wang  about celebrity chef Cecilia Chang. Wang and Chang, who both have deep San Francisco Bay Area roots, will be in attendance to celebrate their storied careers and present their film collaboration. Chuck Workman, another Bay Area legend who’s best known for editing the clip reels at the Oscars, will be honored at the festival as well.

Francis Ford Coppola, who has been on an experimental kick with films like Tetro and Youth Without Youth, returns to the horror genre with Twixt. Directed, written, produced and financed by Coppola himself, Twixt is clearly a personal project right down to its shooting locations on Coppola’s own estate. While seeing Coppola make a return to form after his apparent banishment from Hollywood would have been ideal, Twixt is baffling throughout.

The film starts with a narrator (Tom Waits) introducing the small town setting and storyline. The town has several distinct features, including a broken clock tower with seven faces and a mass murder that no one likes to talk about. Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer), a writer who is described as “third-rate” and a “bargain basement Stephen King,” arrives to sell copies of his newest book. Baltimore is trying to think of a new idea that’ll put him back on top but keeps coming up short until the town’s sheriff (Bruce Dern) shows him the corpse of a girl who was staked in the heart. The same night Baltimore has a dream involving a young girl named V (Elle Fanning) and Edgar Allen Poe (Ben Chaplin) that convinces him to stay and try to write a new novel.

Anyone going into Twixt expecting an easy time is setting themselves up for disappointment. There are at least three storylines going on in the film involving the mystery behind whoever staked the girl, the dreams that explain the town’s history and the novel being written by Baltimore in the film. Twixt switches back and forth between all three of these, with the only distinction coming in the form of the black and white imagery of Baltimore’s dreams. Distinguishing reality from fiction seems easy at first, but by the final act everything blurs together so much Twixt becomes a tangled mess of a film.

The confusing nature of the plot isn’t even the worst thing about Twixt either. Coppola, shooting the film on what appears to be consumer grade cameras, makes everything look cheap and inept. The use of colour in the black and white dream sequences (mostly reserved for reds) looks hokey, and a subplot involving a boy who might be a vampire (Alden Ehrenreich) is downright laughable. Some of the worst examples are when Edgar Allen Poe’s face is superimposed on to the moon and when Ehrenreich rides a motorcycle with a CG background that would look impressive over 20 years ago.

Val Kilmer luckily has enough talent to pull off a good performance as Baltimore, but the same can’t be said for others in the cast. Elle Fanning mostly looks lost at sea, but it’s understandable why she’d have a hard time considering how bizarrely awful the rest of the film is. Alden Ehrenreich doesn’t say much outside of one scene but he does manage to show off some seriously stilted delivery before driving off on a motorcycle. Ben Chaplin and Bruce Dern manage to walk away mostly unscathed, with Dern’s hammy performance heightening some of the film’s similarities with David Lynch’s work.

The incompetent way that Twixt is shot might have been done intentionally by Coppola to match the pulpy B-movie storyline, but the result is laughable. It’s unsurprising that Coppola shot the majority of Twixt on his own estate because, for the most part, it feels like someone messing around in their backyard. A few interesting moments here and there don’t salvage the messy, amateurish quality that runs throughout the film. If this is Coppola experimenting, then the result is a complete failure.

Super 8 is a summer blockbuster film by director J.J. Abrams that contains obvious hints of Spielberg throughout. The film is both entertaining and predictable when a group of adolescent filmmakers stumble upon a magical discovery. It is everything you would expect from a summer blockbuster; it’s exciting, entertaining, mindless and the plot could have used a little work.

Super 8 takes place in a small Ohio town set in 1979, with 12 year old Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) helping his friend Charles (Riley Griffiths) make an 8mm zombie movie for a local film festival. Those two have a few other friends to join them that are committed to filmmaking as well. Together they try keeping it mostly a secret from their parents as best as they can.

Somehow the group of boys gets the attractive girl, Alice (Elle Fanning), to star in their film but she is reluctant when she figures out Joe is a part of it. This is because she is driving her father’s vehicle without a license and Joe’s father is a deputy. Joe is at first shocked that she even knew who he was and tells her that he will never tell his father about it.

Once they arrive at the train station where they are going to shoot the next scene, they begin to setup lights, get makeup on and rehearse the lines. I must say it was truly impressive for a group of 12 year olds. As they are reading their lines everyone is taken aback at how wonderful Alice conveys emotion through her lines. She does so in a way that is brilliant because you can tell she is acting like she is acting.

The scene suddenly gets a huge break when they hear a train coming on the tracks next to them. Charles realizes that this opportunity will add a great amount of production value to the film if they can use it in the scene. So Charles rushes everyone into position and starts filming.

Everything goes as planned and the scene nears the end as the train is passing until Joe witnesses something odd. He spots a pickup truck getting on the tracks and heading towards the train at full speed. The train and pickup collide head-on that derails the train and setting off an enormous explosion. The camera gets knocked over on its side during all the commotion but continues to film the entire thing.

The group slowly wanders around the site looking at all the train parts on fire when they spot the truck that caused the accident. They approach the truck cautiously and find that the person behind the wheel of the truck had a schedule of the train. The man who is barely alive tells them not to tell anyone else about the accident.

You cannot read any reviews of this film without someone comparing this to a Steven Spielberg film but it is easy to see why. First of all, Spielberg is an executive producer of this film. Second of all, the film contains a ton of classic Spielberg elements such as; having a small courageous group of friends who all vary in different talents that are slightly beyond normal for their age. In my head I could not stop comparing this to a modern day version of The Goonies. It did lack one element that Spielberg seemed to always nail, an amazing original soundtrack.

Oddly enough, I was least impressed with the main character’s acting; Joel seemed to lack emotion that Elle and Riley expressed. Elle Fanning’s performance stood out the most for me but knowing that she is the younger sister of actress Dakota Fanning, it is not surprising she has so much talent. I would be shocked if she did not start getting some larger roles and later down the road pick up an Oscar for one of them.

I very much enjoyed the first two-thirds of Super 8 because it was focused much more on the group of kids trying to make a film together and less on the monster itself. However, the film seemed to abandon that in the last third of the film. This made it seem like the whole idea of them making a film for a festival seem like an afterthought by showing it in the ending credits only instead of referencing it again beforehand. The film is called Super 8 after all. I wonder if they won the local film festival?