Best of 2022 Palms Springs Film Festival
While the 2022 version of the Palm Springs International Film Festival was cancelled due to the resurgence of COVID-19, a few wise and enterprising filmmakers made their projects available online for press. It is the ardent hope of this writer that the below titles find the distribution and audiences they so richly deserve.
With BORN IN CHICAGO, co-directors John Anderson and Bob Sarles have collaborated on an insightful and tuneful ode to the Chicago blues. They begin with dual towering icons Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, as well as harmonica legend Little Walter and other Black blues notables.
Anderson and Sarles fascinate with the biographical arc of Mike Bloomfield, whose driving, frenetic guitar created a bridge between white Chicago players and their progenitors. Teaming with Paul Butterfield, Bloomfield not only accompanied Dylan when he notoriously went “electric” at Newport in 1965 but also, Bloomfield significantly urged rock impresario Bill Graham to revive the careers of Black blues greats, including Waters, Wolf, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker and others. Their being embraced by open-minded Bay Area rock audiences became the key to revivified sales of blues recordings nationwide.
Born in Chicago benefits from the smooth writing of author and former San Francisco Chronicle rock critic Joel Selvin and a satisfying proportion of historical performance clips and interviews from the past. Comedian and Blues Brother Dan Aykroyd is among the producers, and while his unabashedly enthusiastic voice-over verges on the idolatrous at times, he and the production team cannot be faulted for their encyclopedic knowledge of and devotion to this rousing genre.
From the Windy City and Bay Area, we venture to New York City and Philadelphia, to reminisce about the charm and societal impact of THE AUTOMAT. Director Lisa Hurwitz peppers the doc with acerbic and outlandish commentary from comedian Mel Brooks, as well as those who fondly remembered their thrift yet tasty meals, depositing nickels into cases displaying entrees, vegetables and a staggering assortment of cakes and pies. From Colin Powell, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elliott Gould down to everyday Americans who warmly recall the automats, the doc covers the 100 year history, including the Horn and Hardart families’ creation, the gorgeous buildings that housed the restaurants, the technology, and how all classes of people could be found in the environs of the automat.
Hurwitz makes us yearn for those days, curtailed after fast food and fashionably expensive dining led to the automat’s demise. At 79 minutes, too, the film does not overstay its welcome, a quirky yet elegant bit of entrepreneurial history that can appeal to both those who never visited the automat and those, like this writer, who as a boy was fascinated by coffee coming out of a dolphin head or lemon meringue pie out of a glass enclosed cube.
Finally, those Palm Springs titles available for screening included a sojourn south with the Peruvian comedy feature, THE BEST FAMILIES (Las Mejores Familias). Sisters Luzmila (Tatiana Astengo) and Peta (Gabriela Velásquez) are maids for two aristocratic Lima families, about to be riven during a fractious birthday celebration. Despite what could have been a standard melodrama, writer-director Javier Fuentes-León achieves the remarkable, balancing the histories of numerous characters with laugh-out-loud moments of vicious glee.
His ability to deal with classism, homophobia and abandonment is always delicate and the entire cast, in a whirlwind of activity, acquits itself wonderfully. And what’s not to like about two proper, effete matriarchs rolling around on the floor of a life size dollhouse, trying to rip each other’s hair out? Culminating with a street demonstration interrupting the woebegone festivities, The Best Families reaches the heart, the funny bone and one’s social conscience all at the same dazzling time.
