`TITANIC TOWN’
Drama. Starring Julie Walters, Ciaran Hinds and Nuala O’Neill. Directed by
Roger Michell. (Not rated. 101 minutes. At the Galaxy.)
The first film in the new series from the New York distributor Shooting
Gallery is a winner. Set in Belfast in 1972, “Titanic Town” is the story
of a middle-aged mother of four who finds herself the principal player in an
effort to bring peace to Northern Ireland.
Julie Walters is remarkable as Bernie McPhelimy, who is sick of raising kids
in a war zone. There are gunfights between soldiers and the Irish Republican
Army outside her door. Citizens are being harassed and innocent people
killed. Acting out of anger and instinct rather than design, Bernie makes
remarks critical of the IRA and becomes an outcast in her community.
Yet by persisting, she soon finds herself in the position to act as an
intermediary between the IRA and the British government. What’s splendid
about Walters is that she resists all temptation to condescend to Bernie, to
make her a cute charac
ter. Bernie is a rather simple person, but Walters never comments on her
simplicity. Walters also lets us see Bernie’s ego, which blossoms under the
media spotlight.
Directed by Roger Michell (“Notting Hill”), the film is based on an
autobiographical novel by Mary Costello, whose mother was the inspiration
for Bernie. The film also follows Bernie’s 16-year-old daughter, Annie
(Nuala O’Neill), tracing her blossoming first romance with a young medical
student.
The ’70s setting and the intercutting between the teenagers and the
adults make “Titanic Town” a sort of Northern Ireland version of “The Ice
Storm.” There are no “key parties” in this one, however. This is a tense,
intelligent and sober film.
– Advisory: This film contains strong language and graphic violence.
Mick LaSalle
“THE BALLAD OF RAMBLIN’ JACK”
Documentary. Directed by Aiyana Elliott. (Not rated. 105 minutes. At the
Shattuck in Berkeley, Rafael Film Center in San Rafael and Camera 3 in San
Jose.)
The word busking, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott explains in this new documentary on
his peripatetic life, comes from the Spanish word buscar — to search.
The film’s subject has been searching his whole life. Born Elliott
Adnopoz in Brooklyn in 1931, he transformed himself into Ramblin’ Jack, a
storytellin’, guitar-pickin’ troubadour who never met a ride — by truck,
train, boat — he didn’t take.
This agreeable documentary, made by Elliott’s only child, Aiyana Elliott,
splits its time between straight biography (concert footage, interviews with
colleagues and family members) and the filmmaker’s efforts to get her
elusive, wayward father to discuss their relationship.
Awkward as the mix might sound, the film ends up musing perceptively on
the American dream of wanderlust and its unintended consequences.
As a young man in New York, Elliott befriended Woody Guthrie, who was
already suffering from Huntington’s chorea, the neurological disease that
would eventually kill him. The young folksinger traveled to England, where
he taught a budding generation of rock ‘n’ rollers how to affect the Wild
West style.
In the early 1960s, Elliott’s influence on the Greenwich Village folk
scene was considerable, if short-
lived. Bob Dylan’s first gig, at Gerde’s Folk City, billed him as the “Son
of Jack Elliott.”
But Elliott never had much commercial success. Instead, he traveled the
country, occasionally surfacing to accept performing invitations from
friends such as Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash. (There’s some wonderful
footage, circa 1970,
of the psychedelic cowboy appearing on Cash’s network television program.)
Scenes of the filmmaker trying to get her father, now 69, to sit still
long enough for an in-depth interview are a little uncomfortable to watch.
They’re intended to be; it’s clear that Aiyana believed this might be her
last chance to get her dad’s attention.
Elliott’s reluctance to have a heart-to-heart on camera — he gets
spacey, he gets grumpy — is comical. The emotional estrangement it suggests
is not. The life of the stage, of course, is notoriously tough on families.
Arlo Guthrie, Woody’s son, finds himself frustrated by Aiyana’s rising
anxiety about what makes her father tick. “Maybe you’re not supposed to
know,” he blurts.
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“The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack” is a swell, entertaining documentary of a
nearly overlooked American performer. More than that, though, it’s a
thoughtful piece of work about parents and their children.
– Advisory: This film contains raw language.
James Sullivan
“WILDFLOWERS”
Drama. Starring Clea DuVall, Daryl Hannah, Tomas Arana, Eric Roberts,
Richard Hillman, Eric Yetter and Robert Hass. Directed by Melissa Painter.
(Not rated. 91 minutes. At the Rafael Film Center.)
Hippie, and maybe a bit dippy to some viewers, the small-budget independent “Wildflowers” captures with lyricism the ’80s counterculture days in Marin
County.
“Wildflowers” stars Clea DuVall (“But I’m a Cheerleader”); Daryl
Hannah, who is also the film’s exec
utive producer; Tomas Arana; and Eric Roberts. Bay Area poet Robert Hass,
the former U.S. poet laureate, is also featured — as a poet.
The film, shot in 21 days in Marin County and San Francisco, was written
and directed by Melissa Painter of Sonoma. She’s a New York University film
school graduate who grew up in Mill Valley and obviously had her heart in
this story of a 17-
year-old girl named Cally (DuVall) who lives with her single dad (Arana) in
the funky Sausalito houseboat community.
Cally is a product of the extended Summer of Love, and she isn’t sure who
her mother is — her father has refused to talk about the woman.
“Wildflowers” is set in 1985. The tough-minded but searching girl often
hangs around in Bolinas and in San Francisco’s North Beach, where she takes
an interest in tracking a mysterious hippie artist, Sabine (Hannah), with
whom she is inexplicably fascinated. Cally soon grows obsessed with Sabine,
and eventually their fitful relationship leads to a touching rite of
passage.
The film is beautifully photographed, to be sure (Paul Ryan is credited
as director of photogra
phy). Bolinas, Mount Tamalpais, North Beach and Sausalito’s Gate 6 are
luminous backdrops for the story. In this film, they appear to have changed
little since the 1980s.
Roberts, in fine form, plays a randy-looking North Beach drug dealer, a
link between Cally and Sabine.
No doubt there is a meaty movie to be made about the kids born dur
ing the hippie revolution of the 1960s — kids who often had to play parents
to their own messed-up parents — but this is not quite it. “Wildflowers”
could have used more dramatic energy, maybe at the expense of some of that
gorgeous scenery.
– Advisory: This film contains nudity and strong language.
Peter Stack
“CRIMINAL LOVERS”
Modern fairy tale. Starring Natacha Regnier, Jeremie Renier and Miki
Manojlovic. Directed by Francois Ozon. (Not rated. In French with English
subtitles. 90 minutes. At the Lumiere.)
French director Francois Ozon’s perverse little erotic fable, “Criminal
Lovers,” straddles a number of genres — horror film, lovers on the lam,
fairy tale — and gives them all a cool, knowing spin.
Bondage, female and male rape, murder and cannibalism all figure in this
dispassionately observed tale of a 17-year-old sexual hysteric and her not
completely compliant young lover. He escapes with her deep into the forest,
where he discovers a mysterious woodsman and something hidden about himself
as well.
The surface of Ozon’s film, set among high school students in a suburban
French town, is cold and hard but carries an erotic charge. As it begins,
Alice (Natacha Regnier) teases her blindfolded boyfriend Luc (Jeremie
Renier) in an attempt to arouse him. She will then test him by asking him to
kill for her.
In the dark forest where they have fled, Luc frees a trapped rabbit. Soon
he will become one himself. A scruffy woodsman (Miki Manojlovic) tosses
Alice in the cellar and fattens up Luc. “I like my girls dry, but I like my
boys nice and plump,” he says. D.H. Lawrence, meet Hannibal Lecter.
– Advisory: This film contains nudity, explicit sex and violence.
Bob Graham
..
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian: Adventure. Starring Ben Barnes, Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, Sergio Castellitto, Anna Popplewell and William Moseley. Directed by Andrew Adamson. (PG. 144 minutes. At Bay Area theaters. For complete movie listings, and to buy tickets, go to sfgate.com/movies.)
