Mill Valley. Preview.

A quick trip to Wikipedia, the great fact-ish site for lazy online journalists and everyone else, provides a few pieces of trivia on Mill Valley, a town in the heart of ritzy, scenic Marin County, just half an hour north of San Francisco over the Golden Gate Bridge. Unlike traversing the other urban bridges that lead away from the city, crossing the Golden Gate immediately lands you in a national park, and then into the rolling countryside beyond. In the Star Trek universe, Starfleet trainees hung out at the 602 Club in Mill Valley. As well as being "home" to famous musicians, high-end American Zoetrope, Lucasfilm and Pixar employees and other moneyed entertainment notables, it was the pre-Korea address of M*A*S*H's BJ Hunnicutt, straight-man to Alan Alda's Hawkeye.

Updated.

Scroll a little further down and you'll see that the population is over 90 percent white, with a median household income of a little beyond $90,000. It's no accident that it was the setting of Jack Finney's 1954 novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers. What later became, in the 1970s, a hippie backwoods chill-out zone, has since been highly gentrified. With gentrification comes money, and they've managed to restore some impressive cinemas, including the California Film Institute's Smith Raphael Film Center, which presents challenging and diverse programming year-round. The festival itself screens several hundred films from many different parts of the world, with strong documentary, emerging filmmaker and local film focuses.

To preview the festival, now in its 29th edition, we've taken another "journalistic" shortcut and opted for an installment of our widely loved (ha!) film dialogues. Several high-profile screenings were left out of my recent conversation with Jonathan Marlow, including the announcement that Mill Valley will be screening Mark Fergus's First Snow, starring Guy Pearce, which screened earlier this year at Tribeca.

We will be following this dialogue early next week with an in-depth look at MVFF's ever extensive shorts program.

Marlow: Mill Valley is unique in several respects but perhaps no more so than the fact that they have two opening night films screening at two different theaters at the same time. Oddly enough, I've seen them both. One appeared at Toronto and the other at both Telluride and TIFF.

Eaves: It seems a little bit strange because The Last King of Scotland is already out in New York. But I actually like that there are two screenings. Everyone comes together for the party and gets to compare notes.

Marlow: Of the two, The Last King is the one to attend. Breaking & Entering is an immensely mediocre and implausible film, albeit with a few good performances. It's the cinematic equivalent of water-boarding.

Eaves: Those are fighting words! I hope you find some defenders in the comments section. I haven't seen it so I can't take you on. It's bringing a few high-profile guests with it. I liked The Last King of Scotland, but I think it's one of those films that won't stick with me at all. Great performances. I'm interested to hear what Forest Whitaker has to say about portraying Idi Amin. It has a great rollicking feel which makes you fall for the premise, which you might not do without it. Being an "immigrant" myself, I've known a lot of people like the main character Dr Garrigan (James McAvoy) who finds himself in a totally foreign country, in a unique and brilliant position, so amazed that unusual things are happening to him that he just constantly says, "Yes," without thinking about the consequences.

Marlow: Whitaker's take on Amin will likely be remembered come Oscar time. It's the sort of portrayal that justifiably wins awards. Another strong candidate is Kate Winslet in Little Children. I have mixed feelings about the film itself but no issue at all with her role. I was particularly fond of Todd Field's use of an omniscient narrator to hold the film together. Normally, I have a bias against such choices but it works here. If only the film had a more rewarding third act...

Eaves: Speaking of the Academy, I wonder if we will have another Truman Capote nomination for Toby Jones. Again, another film that's about to hit theaters. It's impossible to avoid comparing Infamous to Capote, mostly because they deal with the exact same period in Capote's life, the same places and incidents. They are very different films, though. Infamous deals more, I think, with the artistic process, the personal perils of writing a great work, for both Truman Capote and Harper Lee. Peter Bogdanovich does a great turn; he's already such a brilliant anecdote teller and he's a natural in this. [Douglas] McGrath really knew how to take advantage of the natural leanings of the actors behind the characters, particularly Bogdanovich, Gwyneth Paltrow and Sandra Bullock.

Marlow: It seems that the caliber of films in the program are somewhat "higher profile" than previous years. Babel, for instance, or Stephen Frears's latest, The Queen. Of course, there are plenty of works by criminally little-known directors like Dorota Kedzierzawska (I Am) and Rolf de Heer (Ten Canoes), along with two new works from Rob Nilsson (Pan and Opening). Something of a Mill Valley tradition to premiere at least one Nilsson film at the festival. Few other fests have such a consistent and rewarding relationship with a filmmaker.

Eaves: Yay! Ten Canoes and The Queen are both great films. Incidentally, what a year for screenwriter Peter Morgan [who also wrote the script for The Last King of Scotland]. In fact, I think this really has been a good year for cinema. Ten Canoes and The Queen are both getting distributed. There are heaps of smaller local films playing that might not, though - close to twenty narrative and documentary features, and even more shorts, all from the Bay Area. That's a huge block. I haven't seen any of them yet, so I can't comment on them except to note that they're there, which is notable enough.

Marlow: That won't stop me. I've heard a number of tales about Full Grown Men and Drifting Elegant that would encourage me to see them. We're fortunate here that "local film" doesn't imply that it is on the schedule for that reason alone. I suspect that the best film in the program with Bay Area roots is the documentary Orozco: Man of Fire. I suppose that reflects a certain interest in the subject.

Eaves: You're just saying that because you know I love Orozco. I used to always stay in a Quaker-owned hostel in Mexico City that was once Orozco's studio. He was a very dramatic, violent painter, one of Mexico's greatest muralists. In Mexico City, you can see several of his works alongside Diego Rivera's. Man of Fire is a reference to a ceiling mural in Guadalajara that gives the illusion of a man standing on the roof, as though the dome he's standing on is made of glass. And he's, you know, on fire. Or made of fire. There's another amazing Orozco fire mural in Guadalajara, in the Government Palace, of Hidalgo waving a flaming torch over the bodies of the oppressed.

Marlow: I'm not simply dropping a reference to the film for that reason, but it certainly plays a part. The documentary selection at MVFF is quite commendable. Walking to Werner, which I caught at the Seattle International Film Festival in June, is a better idea for a movie than the resulting doc, but it still has a certain charm that sustains its duration. Perhaps, because it is a clear journey from one location to another, it has an easily comprehensible beginning and end. All of the rest is merely middling with momentary diversions in-between. A half-dozen other highlights seemingly include Deliver Us From Evil, Three Women and a Chateau, Cine Manifest, The Short Life of Jose Antonio Gutierrez, Dr Bronner's Magic Soapbox and Cinematographer Style. Of course, I haven't seen any of them yet. They could all be horrible. I doubt it.

Eaves: Locally, I've also heard good things about China Blue. Beyond our fine borders, Black Gold has garnered quite a bit of attention this year. We shouldn't forget to mention that the great Dame Helen Mirren will be here as a tributee. Everyone's already written about The Queen, but I would add that combining it in a Peter Morgan double feature with The Last King of Scotland would make for a great study in contrasts between extremely benign and extremely malignant heads of state. All in all, the festival seems to be an even-handed mix of larger films with numerous local highlights. I'm certainly willing to watch films at the beautifully restored, comfortable Christopher B Smith Rafael Film Center in pretty, fog-free Marin County, where the trip back to San Francisco affords you the best Golden Gate Bridge reveal in existence.

Marlow: Despite all of the above, I am most curious about two debut features - Milarepa, directed by Neten Chokling, and Lam Tze Chung's I'll Call You. These actors-turned-directors previously starred in the well-respected football films The Cup and Shaolin Soccer respectively. Granted, the descriptions can occasionally steer you wrong. I was surprised to discover The Mystery of the Sardine in the program, a film that we stumbled into nearly two years ago in Rotterdam. It sounds great on paper, like so many things, but the reality is something else entirely. It's unfortunate that the MVFF Focus on the Netherlands doesn't include my favorite undistributed Danish documentary of last year, Alias Kurban Saïd. You can't have everything.

Updates: More MVFF previews: Michael Guillén and, at SF360, Dennis Harvey.

Posted by dwhudson at October 5, 2006 6:02 AM