Dan Slevin looks forward to an autumn, winter and spring of great cinema at his local film society.
Spike Lee as Mookie in Do the Right Thing. Photo: Universal
Goodness me, I appear to have been previewing film society programmes for nearly fifteen years, in various locations, without once using the headline “High Society” which is obviously a testament to my taste, discipline and forbearance. But now those days are gone, and this year’s (Wellington) Film Society programme is so good I want to reach for the hyperbole.
This year also features a decent number of films I have written about already, either here at Widescreen or at my earlier online homes so consider this also a kind of “greatest hits” tour.
We start with one of the all-time classics, Spike Lee’s devastating 1989 treatise on race in New York, Do the Right Thing. For its 30th anniversary restoration in 2019, I wrote: “Do the Right Thing was the film that Barack and Michelle Obama saw on their first date. Watching it today, you could swear that the last 30 years saw no progress at all. It is as urgent as it ever was.”
I also said how much I wanted to see the new 4K restoration on the big screen and here we are, tonight at the Embassy in Wellington (and in Auckland on 8 March). Dreams do come true, people.
There’s more Spike Lee later in the year with Clockers (1995) and Bamboozled (2000).
Photo: Madman
Nadine Labaki’s Capharnaüm (aka Capernaum) is one of quite a few titles held over from last year after Covid-19 played havoc with the schedule. I reviewed it for At the Movies back in February 2019: “Labaki has captured something awful – but something awfully alive – with her alert, mobile, camera, her patience – it took six months of guided improvisation to shoot and two years to edit – and her ability to work with dozens of non-professional actors to produce something like a Lebanese Ken Loach film.”
Also notable for indelible children’s performances is Sean Baker’s The Florida Project: “… a glowing call-back to the greats of the Italian New Wave” according to this reviewer. Set in the seamy underbelly of Kissimee, Florida, a place that pre-pandemic was a playground for the world’s holidaymakers, we see the life of the working poor and semi-homeless through the eyes of the children.
Sandra Hüller and Franz Rogowski flirt in the tea room in Thomas Stuber’s In the Aisles Photo: NZIFF ( Anke Neugebauer)
In the Aisles was a sleeper hit in the 2018 film festival. Featuring the star of Toni Erdmann (Sandra Hüller)and also the lead from Christian Petzold’s Transit, Franz Rogowski. In my preview of that festival I wrote: “The description, ‘Germany’s best film since Toni Erdmann’, implies that pickings have been lean over the last few years but In the Aisles does have charm including a sequence where Rogowski unleashes his inner Buster Keaton with a power jack pallet stacker.”
The Last Black Man in San Francisco missed out on a cinema release last year because of the lockdowns but I did get to review it for At the Movies when it became available for video-on-demand rental. Inspired by the true story of Jimmy Fails’ attempt to buy back the house he grew up in, in the face of a spectacularly overheating Bay Area housing market, the film has the air of a fable or fantasy: “Vivid, sensitive and evocative, The Last Black Man in San Francisco has moments of grandeur and moments of wonderful surreality.” It also features stand out performances from Jonathan Majors (recently seen in Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods and TV’s Lovecraft Country), the great Danny Glover (Lethal Weapon) and Fails himself.
Photo: A24
Recently on Twitter there have been lots of pointless and ugly arguments over “old” movies and whether – on one hand – they are sexist and racist and therefore worthless or whether modern viewers who don’t believe in watching anything before 1980 are philistines in thrall to the corporate entertainment machine (paraphrasing Martin Scorsese).
At their extremes, these are both reductive and pointless arguments but those looking for evidence that classic movies still have something to tell us will have plenty to work with in this film society programme: Louis Malle’s debut Elevator to the Gallows (1958) is notable for a groundbreaking improvised score from Miles Davis; Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972) was the first Australian feature to look at the treatment of indigenous people with any seriousness and Pauline Kael called it “the one great Australian film that I have seen”. Which is nice.
Finally, if I’m to admit to any disappointment it might be the relative lack of local content but what there is you have to give respect to: Merata Mita’s Mauri hasn’t been seen often enough on the big screen here since it first came out in 1988 (and will be shown in a restored version supervised by cinematographer Graeme Cowley in 2018) and there’s another chance to see Heperi Mita’s superb documentary about his mother Merata which also premiered in 2018.
The Wellington Film Society programme runs from 22 February to 6 December, interrupted only by public holidays, the film festival and occasional pandemics. For information on other film societies around New Zealand, visit the NZ Federation of Film Societies site.
