Screen Grabs: Sassy ballers, Latino leatherman, E’ville queens? SF Queer Film Fest time!

Frameline recently observed its 50th anniversary, but it is not the only annual LGBTQ+ film event in town. A relative newcomer is the SF Queer Film Festival (Fri/21-Sun/23), whose sixth edition takes place this weekend at the Roxie Theater. Heavy on shorts, and a tad lighter on international scope as well as political content compared to its big sister-brother, it kicks off Fri/21 with a not-atypical evening program of campy yet inspirational comedy. 

First up, Ahuatl Amaro’s 17-minute Mean Goals finds a talented newbie shunned in trying out for an extremely attitudinous West Hollywood gay soccer team—though he gets his revenge in finding a more welcoming crew. Then writer-director-star Robby Kendall’s feature Sweet Nothing has him as an openly gay middle-aged man who nonetheless confronts his own hangups when his new job at a community center requires him to recruit a drag queen for Bingo Night. You can guess where this is heading if you know that the title is also the name of longtime Emeryville activist Kendall’s offscreen drag persona.

Nonfiction highlights include Betsy Kalin’s half-hour Lesbians in Boytown, which examines women’s significant if often overlooked contributions to WeHo culture and politics. Orlando Bedolla’s hour-long Encuerados provides a similar service to Latino men in a Los Angeles leather scene whose mainstream has not always been immune from racism. Bart Everly’s feature-length Velvet Vision pays tribute to the late James Bidgood, a colorful interviewee whose homoerotic photography influenced the likes of Pierre et Gilles, and whose anonymously directed experimental fantasia Pink Narcissus has been a cult favorite for 55 years. 

Additional narrative features in SF Queer Film Fest include Mike Talplacido’s romantic drama In This Moment and Jeff London’s Alzheimer-themed memory piece Snow Falling on Pumpkins. The closing night attraction on Sun/23 is Madeleine Hicks’ Sunshine Girls, a sci-fi satire set in a near future of intensified environmental depletion. There, our heroine signs up for a voluntary synthetic-oxygen-producing program enabling that’s like The Stepford Wives meets Coma—but in this conformist trap she rebelliously finds same-sex love instead. 

There are also numerous themed shorts packages encompassing a gamut of genres and interests, plus a Sat/22 “Surviving Voices” program focusing on AIDS caregivers, with a panel discussion moderated by Sister Roma following Jorg Fockele’s titular half-hour documentary. For full info on the festival’s schedule, programs and tickets, go here.

Also arriving this weekend:

Late Fame 

One of the most remarkable if regrettably underseen US films of the 21st century to date was Kent Jones’ 2018 Diane, with Mary Kay Place as a retired widow whose time is filled mostly by serving the needs of others: Visiting sick friends, offering a sympathetic ear to grousing ones, volunteering at a soup kitchen, trying to steer her addict son towards sobriety. Uncomplaining but no pushover, Diane was the kind of character almost always relegated to a drama’s background. But in portraying her seemingly uneventful later life in terse, telling details, Jones achieved something rare: A portrait of a stubbornly “ordinary” person that somehow seemed a microcosm of all humanity, set against an even bigger-picture backdrop of eternity. 

The writer-director, also a film critic and programmer who’d previously made documentaries involving Martin Scorsese (for whom he’d worked), has finally made a second narrative feature. Late Fame has Willem Dafoe as Ed Saxberger, a longtime post office worker who lives alone in Manhattan and hangs with a group of similarly unassuming older men in a pool hall. They have no idea he first landed in the Big Apple decades earlier with very different aspirations. To his great surprise, however, one day he’s approached out of the blue by twentysomething Meyers (Edmund Donovan), who professes himself a fan. He knows Ed once published a volume of poetry, way back in 1979, and has pronounced it a “masterpiece.” What’s more, Meyers has a whole clique of trust-fundy youths who vaguely aspire to be Artists, comprise a sort of retro salon, and agree Ed’s sole published tome is brilliant.

Swept into their adoring circle, our humble protagonist is abashed, but also seduced—recognition is new to him, igniting a hunger he’d long since buried. After all these years, could he be “discovered” by the literary world at last? Or are these new acolytes just young poseurs who have little real to offer, apart from the flirtatious company of their “muse” Gloria (Greta Lee), a flamboyant would-be actress whose whole shtick may also be pure affectation. These relative youths are all nostalgic for a retro NYC bohemia they’ve only read about, seizing upon Ed as the “real thing” they can only imitate.

The role is a snug fit for Dafoe, who as a stage performer really was a part of NYC’s edgy artistic avant-garde in the late 1970s. Late Fame has the essential pleasures of an intelligent drama that’s well-crafted and cast. But Jones didn’t write the screenplay this time—it’s by Samy Burch (of Todd Haynes’ May December), and based on a story by Arthur Schnitzler. The latter’s fin-de-siecle Viennese modernism, shocking long ago, belongs very much to its original era. It often resists translation to our own times, perhaps most notoriously in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. 

This much smaller, warmer film has its virtues, but also a false core: Character dynamics that would have been incisive in 1895 feel oddly cozy and contrived 130-odd years later. Lee, in particular, is playing a wannabe-diva whose decadent, mercurial postures were already the stuff of parody a century ago. Late Fame is worth seeing, but disappointing. If Diane utilized the banal to reach the transcendent, this meticulous film finally just underlines its own conceptual limitations. It opens Fri/21 at Bay Area theaters including the Smith Rafael Center in Marin. 

The Floaters

Summer may nearly be over, but there’s still time for a summer-camp comedy, the tradition that goes back to 1960s Disney live-action comedies through the racier likes of Meatballs and Little Darlings, then on to spoof Wet Hot American Summer. (There’s also of course a whole separate subgenre of summer camp horrors, starting with the original Friday the 13th… but that’s a whole different matter.) This entry from director Rachel Israel, which played SF’s Jewish Film Festival last year, does not have sex on the brain, though its protagonists are largely old enough for that to be expected. 

Instead, The Floaters is a snarky inspirational-underdog tale set at struggling Camp Daveed. Current proprietor Mara (Sarah Podemski) is having to deal with myriad financial and infrastructural crises, unhelped by the proximity of a much more upscale rival Jewish camp gloatingly presided over by Seth Green. When Mara’s longtime best friend Nomi (Jackie Tohn) gets kicked out of her own punk band on the brink of a European tour, she’s hired on as last-minute counseling help. 

She doesn’t want to be here—but then neither do the charges she’s stuck with, a half-dozen or so teenage misfits dubbed “floaters” because they stubbornly refuse to join any of the standard sporting or other activities. So they’e tasked with devising the entertainment that will cap the final day, when parents return to collect their own little darlings. That performance typically consists of yet another Fiddler on the Roof, zzzzz. But Nomi & co. decide to invent something more daring.

With its mild satire of political correctitude and doses of medium-bad-taste gags, The Floaters is seldom as funny as it wants to be. The sizable list of writing contributors results in a certain lack of focus. But it also arguably keeps things lively, making for 100 minutes that are amiable and colorful if uneven. The juvenile actors are decent, the adults fun albeit somewhat under-utilized—you might wish for more of Green, or Steve Guttenberg as the camp athletic director. This is a reasonably hip movie to, say, take your 13-year-old niece or nephew to. It’s a little rude at times, but not really. And as most summer camp experiences tend to, it all ends in hugs and positive lessons learned. It opens Fri/21 at SF’s Opera Plaza Cinemas.

Everyone Is Lying To You For Money

One of the year’s more entertaining and informative documentaries played here only briefly a few months back, with in-person appearances by actor (Southland, Gotham) turned director Ben Mackenzie. His first feature behind the camera explores—and exposes—the dubious world of cryptocurrency, which he also wrote a book about. Intrigued by the amount of hype that surrounds it, aware from unfortunate past experience that “you should never invest in something you don’t understand,” Mackenzie pokes around—discovering this “electronic gold” is primarily the fool’s kind. 

He visits El Salvador, with its “crypto-bro president” embracing Bitcoin as an official currency, only to find almost no ordinary citizens use it. He attends a Miami conference, meeting some high-profile CEOs who turn out to be big-time fibbers. He endures the slings and arrows of online crypto boosters outraged that a mere actor should skeptically rain on their parade. He’s humored by his wife (fellow thespian Morena Baccarin), who doesn’t quite grok this obsession, while in turn humoring a public that no matter what he does will always remember Mackenzie as a teen hottie on The O.C. 

As collapse follows collapse, bankrupting Average Joe investors and enriching a few insiders, the message is clear: These are glorified Ponzi schemes. They claim to liberate money from such corrupt institutions as government and banks…but those bodies are regulated, to an extent protecting the public from just the kind of predatory cash-grab crypto routinely turns out to be. And still, the faithful keep climbing aboard that train, and our own POTUS continues to push it on the gullible. (His own “$Trump” coin brand has to date has lost buyers nearly $4 billion, while he’s gained $600+ million in profit.) Everyone is droll fun, as well as a warning you’d ignore at your own peril. It is available on digital platforms as of Sat/22. 

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