3 Highlights from Mill Valley Film Festival 2024

by William J. Hammon, ActuallyPaid.com

Presented by the California Film Institute, the 47th edition of the Mill Valley Film Festival saw nearly 150 shorts and features vying for attention and hardware at one of the premier prestige festivals on the west coast. With Awards Season quickly approaching, projects from around the world, representing a wide array of subjects and stories, got their moment in the spotlight as the 2024 film calendar winds closer to its conclusion. Here are five highlights from this year’s celebration.

Saturday Night (pictured above)

Directed by Jason Reitman and co-written with Gil Kenan, the same team behind Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire earlier this year (in that case Kenan directed), Saturday Night, which debuted nationwide last week, is a genuinely charming piece of pure entertainment, focusing on the 90-minute lead-up to the very first episode of Saturday Night Live (the wide release coinciding with the 49th anniversary of that fateful evening).

The entire affair is a fast-paced, madcap comedy of errors, mostly based on real events that happened back in 1975, with a healthy amount of license taken for the sake of humor. A massive ensemble cast is led by Gabrielle LaBelle (who had his breakout role in The Fabelmans a couple years ago) as a young, wide-eyed, and ambitious Lorne Michaels, doing everything in his power to make this show go off without a hitch despite just about every obstacle you can think of, from drugged out players, to unsafe working conditions, to a crew ready to walk off the set, to NBC executives itching for the moment where they can pull the plug on the whole thing.

With the program now in its 50th season, we obviously know things turned out all right, but the fun is in just how well this cast pulls off the endless onslaught of shenanigans. Of particular note are Rachel Sennott as Michael’s then-wife and co-producer Rosie Shuster, Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase, Ella Hunt as a note-perfect Gilda Radner, Tommy Dewey as Michael O’Donoghue, Jon Batiste as Billy Preston, and Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris (no relation). Ironically, it’s the film’s biggest stars — Willem Dafoe, J.K. Simmons, and Finn Wolfhard — who have the least to do. Still, everyone has a part to play, and while things wrap up a little too neatly to be believed, you’re having too much fun to care.

A Traveler’s Needs

The film stars Oscar nominee Isabelle Huppert ( Elle, Greta, Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris) as Iris, a French tourist in South Korea living with a much younger boyfriend and attempting to make ends meet as a tutor of the French language. She has no formal training, instead opting for an emotionally-based immersive teaching method. In two separate occasions, she asks her students to play music and describe their feelings when doing so, eventually writing phrases on index cards meant to convey those sentiments in a more conversational tone, a contrast with the more stilted grammatical rules of the tongue.

This is a minimalist affair where the viewer is intended to live in her moments and experience the slow-moving melancholy of Iris’ situation. What has she lost? Why does she only find solace in makgeolli (a Korean rice wine)? Why does she press her students to admit feelings of inadequacy and vanity, then write cards that mention unresolved issues with father figures? Essentially, we’re left to wonder who, or what, hurt her in the past, to drive her so far from home in search of meaning. Everything’s open to interpretation, with only Huppert’s stalwart performance offering any clues. The more you give yourself over to this mental experiment, the more you get out of it.

Tummy Tom and the Lost Teddy Bear

Coming to us from the Netherlands — where the title character is named Dikkie Dik ( snicker) — Tummy Tom and the Lost Teddy Bear is a very simple, very sweet piece of kiddie fare about a cat looking for a stuffed animal. That’s it.

Narrated in English by Tim Gunther (joined by an offscreen chorus of toddlers), the animated film plays like an hour-long episode of Blue’s Clues or Dora the Explorer, as Tummy Tom, a slightly chubby orange tabby originally created for the Dutch version of Sesame Street in the 1970s, has misplaced his beloved teddy and goes searching around his house and the countryside with the help of his friend Catmouse. The whole thing is rather silly, with some nice songs to sing and clap along to, and there’s a fun degree of interactivity for the tykes watching, particularly if they’re attentive enough to realize where the bear is early on, as the answer is laid out for them but a few minutes in if they care to notice.

For the parents watching, there’s not much, except for one little bit of realism. As part of their journey, the cats basically destroy everything in their path, knocking over books and vases, tossing laundry all over the place, and generally making feline chaos. Any adult who owns a cat will feel seen by these bits, allowing them to laugh along with their child while also potentially questioning their life choices. Still, in a festival with some pretty serious subject matter, it’s nice to have this 65-minute distraction as something of a palate cleanser.

Originally published at http://behindtherabbitproductions.wordpress.com on October 21, 2024.