Collage by Riley LeBlanc, Photographer.
In the midst of intense flooding, the Newport Beach Film Festival returned for its 27th year last weekend. Drawing a wide array of stars, filmmakers and film lovers alike, the festival has long been a nearby hotspot for Chapman students to be at the center of the film festival circuit. This year, The Panther was given press access to experience the festival firsthand. Collectively watching 13 films over the course of the festival, below are our rankings, our accounts and our recommendations of what to look forward to as these films are released in the coming months.
13. “White Belt”
I really, really wanted to like this movie. The premise of an illiterate jiu-jitsu world champion begrudgingly training his favorite female author was promising, and I was expecting a sharp, comedic critique of the surge in alt-right male echo chambers. There were certainly funny moments. But ultimately, the movie’s critiques of the misogynistic main character didn’t seem rooted in anything beyond the driving force for the novelist Tay Kennedy to “prove him wrong.” Seeing a woman keep up with an out-of-shape jiu-jitsu class would’ve been great in the early 2000s, but at this point, lacks a little bit of depth. The protagonist Rick Dale bears a striking resemblance to Kit Dale, the director. Mostly because he’s played by Kit Dale. The lack of subtlety of the self-insert are self-referential to the romance book that Dale is hellbent on completing. In some ways, the movie follows the conventions of a romance film; Rick Dale and Tay Kennedy play a sort of cat-and-mouse game. But instead of a romantic relationship growing, it’s a growth towards mutual mentorship and respect, on both ends.
I have to give props to director Kit Dale for shooting the nearly 2-hour feature in 16 days on a budget of $150,000. But without the general public’s understanding of the homages to the sport, I wonder if the off-beat comedy will be enough to win over the crowds.
12. “Sunspark”
“Sunspark” is an animated short made entirely by Danny Bourque. While this love story between robots seems a little simple on the surface, this is clearly a labor of love from Bourque and a touching look at self-sacrifice. While this clean 3D animation style can feel cheap at times, I thought it was thematically resonant with the story following robots. Plus, this is full of silly little guys, and that’s in many ways the highest compliment I can give a film.
11. “In Waves”
Although I went into “In Waves” nearly completely blind, I had heard some excitement for it out of both Cannes and TIFF. Taking place in Southern California and following a surfing-centric love story, this feels tailor-made for Newport Beach audiences. As this takes some tragic turns, it’s also a tear-jerker that got me a few times. While I can see why the film earned such buzz — featuring stunning animation — I couldn’t help but ultimately feel a little distant from its emotional swells. Perhaps this was a symptom of the film being dubbed into English from the original French, as I tend to have an issue with dubbing and found some of the performances here (from the likes of Oscar nominee Stephanie Hsu) to be stiff. I also feel as though this probably works better in its original form as a graphic novel, covering such a broad period of time. Nevertheless, this was touching and intimate. I wouldn’t necessarily go out of your way for it, but if the trailers or plot have you interested, it could be worth checking out. If nothing else, the day-drinking women in their 60s next to me adored it.
10. “The Good Life”
“The Good Life” is a documentary about creative aging as director Mark Mannucci interrogates how people can stay fulfilled later in life. As was the case with many screenings at Newport Beach, I was at least a couple of decades younger than anyone else in the theater, but I still felt like I got a lot out of this. The film was followed by a Q&A with the creative team alongside one of the film’s subjects, D'yan Forest, a 91-year-old comedian. While the documentary often fell into a familiar reliance on talking heads format, I found the interviews to be generally entertaining, and the team’s plan to screen the film to senior communities over the next two years rather than dumping it on streaming is inspiring. Overall, can’t wait for more folks to see this; it will work well for many!
9. “The Education of Jane Cumming”
Based on the logline: “A scandal when a Scottish student accused two of her teachers of having an affair,” I blindly entered the theater expecting a comedy. This was not a comedy. It was, in actuality, an imagined backstory to a real 1800s court case. The film focuses on Jane Cumming, an Indian girl developing a relationship with two schoolmistresses in the face of the discrimination from her white peers. It’s a very slow-building drama, and despite Cumming’s eventual allegations, the lesbianism doesn’t exactly make itself known beyond charged glances. I struggled to find the story’s purpose beyond a glimpse into the time period and the hypothetical curiosities the court case suggests. The complexity of the characters and gravity of the situation does not make it difficult to empathize with the characters and understand their actions. But even through fictionalizing the story, it still fell short of any groundbreaking commentary on its heavy-hitting topics of racial discrimination, queer invisibility or female education, beyond simply portraying the struggles as they were. Potentially, the film portrayed a minority enacting a sort of revenge plot to inflict similar oppression not onto the oppressors, but the adult bystanders whose failure to bring justice between the girls was their biggest crime.
8. “The Liberation”
An influx of movies where the twist is a “cult” has made me somewhat fatigued on cult movies, and I believe it’s time that the cult movies are further explored beyond the use of a plot device. “The Liberation” is a sincere exploration of the inner workings of
two sisters as they attempt to rescue their businesswoman mother, Rita Cooper, from the clutches of an all-female cult. The film cuts back and forth between the woman’s gradual induction and the unraveling of her traditional family life and her current life in the commune being interrupted. It explores how the stifling silence inflicted upon women in the 80s led them to seek understanding elsewhere to unpack their trauma. A title card at the end of the film reveals that the film is dedicated to the filmmaker, Guy Nattiv’s grandma — Rita Cooper.
Now, Nattiv’s resistance to pushing the dramatic boundaries of the film made sense. Its grounded tone could be attributed to the personal tragedy that inspired it. He emphasized the ethical dubiousness of the situation, as Rita’s trauma from surviving the Holocaust forced her to seek both “alternative healing” and self-inflicted punishment through the suffering of the cult.
“It's like trying to grab sand in the middle of a wind storm,” Guy Nattiv said of his own experience with losing his loved one to the cult. “You cannot fight it.”
7. “Fatherland”
Apart from Sandra Hüller’s involvement, I knew very little about “Fatherland” or the true story of Thomas Mann’s return to Germany after World War II. While this doesn’t do much in the way of clearly outlining the events of the true story, this takes a more meditative approach on how a country changes and the impacts that has on our identities. It’s a film I personally felt may have worked better as a short, but Sandra Hüller is nothing short of outstanding, providing even the most mundane of scenes with a dissonant weight through her dreary expressions. Truthfully though, I didn’t get as much out of this as I had hoped to. While it’s certainly not bad, and may work well for those more familiar with the history, “Fatherland” was always just on the verge of being something great.
6. “Otra”
“Donde estan los Latinos?” someone in the audience yelled, followed by a packed audience’s response: “Aqui!”
The Newport Beach Film Fest shone a spotlight on a number of Latino works, and among those, “Otra” stood out as a sold-out show. It was a colorful, jukebox musical about a man who gets the chance to redo his memories in an attempt to save his love life. Filmmaker Armani Ortiz paints a rich tapestry of Puerto Rican culture in a series of oners, capturing entire musical sequences in single shots. The choreography was certainly the star of the show. Even sequences without a featured song felt meticulously orchestrated. The result was a strong tone that felt almost as if I was watching a live stage performance. The film takes some interesting turns, including the characters crashing a real stage musical that’s unprepared for opening night — likely a meta nod to the production process. Between the choreography and the characters’ complex history, there’s already a lot going on. And that’s before we breach the worldbuilding rules of the afterlife, where characters can return to the living world but only after addressing a needlessly elaborate set of terms and conditions and stakes, etc. It’s an overly complicated premise that spends more time explaining itself than soaking in the genuine, heart-wrenching moments of unrequited love. By the end of the screening, I couldn’t exactly unravel what statement was being made on love or memories or regret. Nonetheless, I came to see a vibrant, fun musical and I got a vibrant, fun musical.
5. “That Night”
Directed by Hoda Sobhani, “That Night” is a deeply moving animated documentary short. Following the experience of arrested Iranian protestors speaking out against to Mahsa Amini’s murder after “improperly” wearing a hijab, this short is filled to the brim with symbols of Iranian resistance and deeply intimate stories from Sobhani. The animation takes on a gorgeous hand-painted aesthetic, and while it at times feels like a rushed or shortened version of what could be an excellent feature, I was ultimately blown away by how personal and impactful this short was.
4. “Aontas”
If I had a nickel for every time I saw an Irish film about a heist, I’d be 10 cents richer this weekend. As Ireland’s submission for Best Foreign Film for this year’s Oscars, I had high expectations, and I was not disappointed. The film opens on a credit union robbery going horribly wrong, and spends the rest of the runtime working backwards to explain the complicated circumstances that drove the three women to commit the crime. In a small Irish town going bankrupt, everyone’s lives are woven into an interconnected web, creating a mystery that asks not “how?” but “why?”
Director Darian McCann co-wrote the film with his wife during and after her pregnancy, with a running joke that the baby would pop out with the answer to a plot hole. Taking turns writing on the laptop and holding the baby, the couple went back and forth on whether to write the script forwards or backwards.
“It started as a heist movie, but once you write it backwards, it becomes a drama,” said McCann.
Notably, the film was shot entirely in the Irish language, a patriotic monument for Irish cinema and a personal moment for the director.
“I was now sitting down in that cinema to watch my own first movie,” said McCann. “I had never seen an Irish language film in the cinema before…For the first time ever, I would hear in 5.1 surround sound my own language, and I would see on a screen that's much bigger than I am. I would see myself reflected back at myself.”
3. “You’ll Never Believe Who’s Dead”
People were pulling up chairs to make it into the theater for this screening. Director Dallan Shovlin introduced the film by explaining the title: a colloquial Irish conversation-starter implemented in dull moments at social gatherings to liven up the conversation. And it certainly opens up the conversation in the film, leading an Irish family down on their luck to hatch a plan to execute a robbery. The character dynamics are fleshed out well to create possibly the least competent bunch of on-screen criminals of all time, allowing the film to excel at both incredibly tense moments of action and hilarious physical comedy. The attention to detail in the characters also makes for some great heartfelt moments as they discover their need to trust and also be trusted by the others in their family.
2. “Wild Horse Nine”
Perhaps my most anticipated of my watches at Newport this year, “Wild Horse Nine” stars John Malkovich in what I would consider one of his best performances to date. Centering around two CIA agent pals on Easter Island, Malkovich plays an aging agent with classified knowledge of he plans to leak in a memoir while Sam Rockwell plays the agent tasked to kill him. For fans of writer-director Martin McDonagh and his wicked wit, it won’t come as a surprise that this is full of delightful banter between the two. All of it builds to an incredible and touching third act that, while not always perfect, was surprisingly poignant in a number of ways. This is bound to be a favorite of the year for many, and while I feel the film peaked in its third act, this was absolutely worth the hype.
1. “Anima”
Yet another film with a sold-out audience awaiting its debut,Anima hinges on a sci-fi concept with very human execution. Starving artist Beck takes on the job of chauffeuring an old man to an experimental facility that preserves his likeness for after his death. Embarking on the journey allows the terminally ill button tycoon to grapple with feelings of guilt and regret while attempting to make peace with those he’s leaving behind. It’s an interesting look into a potential hypothetical of our near future, but like any great sci-fi film, it asks a timeless question: Should we live forever? The three leads did the touching story justice with grounded performances, not to mention, the soundtrack was such a banger that someone in the audience used their one question for the filmmakers to ask if it was on Spotify. The production company behind the film, Kabrado, shoots only on celluloid, and the attention to detail pays off. You can tell that a lot of care was put into this story and its execution from start to finish, and I believe this is not the last any of us will hear about Anima.
From hotly-anticipated Oscar contenders to unknown independent breakthroughs, the Newport Beach Film Festival is one of the few film festivals to capture such a broad cinematic span. There truly isn’t anything quite like the atmosphere at a festival like Newport Beach, and discovering these upcoming films promises for an exciting close to the year in movies.