Tag: Sarasota Film Festival

Sarasota Scene: Films & Food II

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The Sarasota Film Festival continued. We saw several more films, two very intense, painful to watch, and one that was disappointing.  We then sampled the offerings at Beulah, another restaurant new to us. 

FLICS

Clash.  This Egyptian film covers one day and night in 2013 and a group of individuals involved in one of the many riots between the pro-military and the Muslim Brotherhood after the ouster of President Morsi.  Two journalists, members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and other citizens at the protest are rounded up and forced into the back of a metal police van.  They are of different social classes and religions, adults and a few children, some separated from their family members, and they are trapped together in a horrific environment.  The film is loud, painful, and seems to go on forever.  The truck is shot at, it is hot inside, the individuals fight and bicker and some get hurt.  People cramped in another police truck nearby die from the heat and the crowding.  If one of the aims of good cinema is to transport you to someplace you’ve never been before, this film puts you squarely in that van.

 Katie Says Goodbye.  Far from the clanging and clamor of Cairo, this film is set in the spare desolate Southwest.  The sky goes on forever and there is little besides cheap trailers and a small diner and gas station.  Teenager Katie is kind and almost demure.  She waits tables at the diner, but also does double duty as a prostitute servicing locals and truckers passing through; it’s how she supports herself and her deadbeat mother.  When she becomes involved with a new guy at the car repair shop, an ex-con, aspects of her life begin to unravel.  Katie is a strong and complex character in a world of not-so-nice people.

The movie is raw and powerful and I found myself rooting for this determined, yet guileless young woman who lived midst adversity.  The film was well received by the audience and we had the chance afterward to be part of the Q&A exchange with first-time director and writer Wayne Roberts.

Marjorie Prime.  Touted by the film festival as “Hot, Hot, Hot,” and starring Jon Hamm (of “Mad Men” fame) along with Geena Davis and Tim Robbins, Marjorie Prime did not wow me.  Instead, I found it flat and very slow.  85 year old Marjorie is failing and suffering from dementia.  She lives with her daughter Tess and son-in-law John.  At times, she relives some of her past in conversation with a hologram of her husband Walter when he was in his 40’s.  She seems to take pleasure in these conversations and John also engages with him, particularly by feeding him specific memories to add to his store of information.  Despite focusing on the role of memory and how memories can be suppressed or altered, and offering up fanciful technology, the film failed to captivate me.  I would call it a failed experiment.

FUNKY AND FUN

Beulah.  With an attractive dining area and mirrored bar shelves lined with green and blue glass pieces, Beulah draws you in.  One side of the menu is a selection of pizzas, the other everything from salads to roast chicken, crab cakes, lamb or veal.  The Caesar salads were generous with lots of Parmesan squares on top (we could easily have shared one).  The Chief Penguin sampled the sausage pizza (good, not great) while I ordered the veal scaloppini with asparagus and a rice timbale.  The veal was done with a butter lime sauce and was delicious!  Beulah has a warm vibe and our waiter was welcoming and attentive.  Definitely worth another visit!  

GOOD READ

Glory over Everything:  Beyond The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom.  While not literary in the way that Colson’s The Underground Railroad is, this novel is a good read full of secrets.  It’s 1830 and Jamie Pyke, a former slave and a character from Grissom’s previous novel, is now living as a wealthy white man in Philadelphia.  Successful in business, he’s gained a reputation as a painter.  His household consists of his faithful butler Robert and Pan, the black teen son of Jamie’s mentor and guide, Henry.  It was Henry who took Jamie under his wing when he fled from Virginia to Philadelphia 20 years earlier.  When Pan goes missing and it’s feared he’s been taken by the slave catchers and sold, Jamie undertakes a harrowing journey to North Carolina to rescue him.

Credits:  All photos JWFarrington.  Header:  coloring detail done from 100 Glittering Mandalas.

Sarasota Scene: Film & Food Fare

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This week is the annual Sarasota Film Festival, a time when we see movies we know little about and dip our toes into unfamiliar waters (appropriate given that this year’s theme is Sea & Be Seen!).  Also we make a point of trying some new downtown restaurants.

CINEMA

The Unknown Girl.  A Belgian feature film in French with subtitles, it’s about a young doctor who doesn’t answer her office door after hours and later learns that the young woman who buzzed her died across the street a short distance away.  Haunted by what might have been different had she answered, she takes it upon herself to try to find out who the girl was and where she was from.  We see Dr. Jenny Davin as a compassionate, caring, and mostly unrufflable individual who goes about seeing her patients, often at home, and then after hours is driven to seek answers about the unknown girl.  Adele Haenel as Jenny gives a thoughtful, measured performance and it’s a film that will stay with you.

Menashe.  After the gritty, grotty streets of a Belgian city, we became immersed in the life of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn.  In Yiddish with English subtitles, Menashe focuses on a recent widower who in trying to be faithful to himself while still being an observant member of his religious community, comes up against its strictures.  He wants to have his young son live with him rather than with his brother-in-law’s family, but his religion says he must re-marry first.  We see his fumbled and inept efforts at being an organized parent and his first foray into dating.

 

FRENCH FARE

Le Bordeaux.  Sarasota has many more Italian restaurants than French ones, a surfeit in fact, so it was a pleasant surprise to find Le Bordeaux.  Opened just a year ago, it’s on Main Street across from the Hollywood 20 movie theater, and has some of the friendliest restaurant staff I’ve encountered recently.  The menu includes all the French classics you would expect:  onion soup, snails in garlic butter, duck confit, coq au vin, beef bourguignon as well as other tempting selections.  We enjoyed attractively presented green salads with Brie or chevre on toast followed by said duck leg confit and sautéed flounder with capers and tomato.  The flounder came with a timbale of saffron rice and a somewhat mushy ratatouille.  There is also a very reasonably priced 2 or 3 course set menu with several choices for each course.  Overall, the food was good, but not exceptional.  We will return!  

 

THEATER NOTE

We were at the Asolo production of The Little Foxes recently and it was excellent.  It’s a play I’ve long wanted to see and seeing it makes me think about re-reading Lillian Hellman’s two memoirs, Unfinished Woman and Pentimento.

CREDITS:  Header photo (salad at Le Bordeaux) by JWFarrington; Hasidic Jews photo by J W Kash; Le Bordeaux dining room from their website.

Tidy Tidbits: Film & Theater

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TIDY TIDBITS:  Film & Theater

This was a week when we gorged on culture, films especially.  The Sarasota Film Festival (SFF) is celebrating its 17th year, and over the course of ten days 270 films, a mix of documentaries and feature films, are screened.  We were late getting tickets, having been away, but still managed to see several noteworthy films.  Most of these are making the rounds of a number of film festivals, and at least some of them are set for commercial release in the next three to six months.  Here are my thoughts and my recommendations:

Dior and I.  An excellent film about the fashion industry and Raf Simons’ first couture collection for the House of Dior.  Featuring both passages from Christian Dior’s memoir and the suspenseful account of the creation of Simons’ collection,  this is documentary film making at its best.  If you ever wondered why haute couture is so dear, then seeing all the hand work involved here, you will understand.  The film was also the focus of a recent NY Times piece in their style magazine.  Not for fashionistas only.

For the Record.  A documentary about court stenographers and those who do closed captioning for TV shows and the like.  I really enjoyed this film.  My husband got bored and snoozed a bit.  There was the excitement of the competition to see who was the fastest transcriber, and one of the contestants was local, from Sarasota.  I think my librarian and linguistically-inclined friends would enjoy this one.

Blood, Sweat and Beer.  The subject of this film is the craft beer industry and it portrayed two start-ups, one in Ocean City, Maryland, whose owner was having a rough time due to a copyright infringement law suit, and the other in a very depressed former Pennsylvania steel town.  Two energetic recent college graduates took on the challenge of creating a brewery and pub in Braddock in the midst of abject poverty and neglect.  The film could have used more editing, but it gives you a sense of how pervasive the craft beer industry has become.

Wildlike.  A feature-length film set midst the gorgeous Alaskan scenery, this is the story of a teenage girl who is sent to stay with her uncle.  She has problems with his behavior and runs away and attaches herself to a middle aged backpacker who has recently lost his wife and is trying to find some peace and solace in Denali National Park. Sensitively done and worth viewing.

Paradise, FL.  Another feature film, this one shot in the Sarasota Bay area and hence of interest due to its local color.  It’s a depressing tale of drug addiction and family strife straining the friendship and loyalty between two young male fishermen.  Overly long and drawn out, it still held my interest.  It would be better with some judicious cutting.

Theater

Asolo Rep did it again with their marvelous production of Somerset Maugham’s Our Betters!  This was the equal of anything you’d see on Broadway and was both well cast and well staged.  Featuring four women, all of whom were part of the exodus of American heiresses to Britain to find titled husbands, it was funny, fabulous and thought provoking about the role of women.  This director chose to move the time of the play from 1917 to the 1920’s in order to have costumes that were more flowing and allowed the women characters greater freedom of movement.  An inspired decision!