San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
REEL LOCAL NEWS By Pam Grady
Tessa Thompson (“Sorry to Bother You” and “Creed II” ) and Lily James (“Downton Abbey” and “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again”) star in “Little Woods,” writer-director Nia DaCosta’s feature debut that is the opening-night selection of the 21st SF Independent Film Festival (SF IndieFest), which opens Jan. 30 and runs through Feb. 14. Thompson plays a parolee who commits a crime to help her sister ( James) out of a jam in a North Dakota fracking town.
Other festival highlights include “Desolation Center,” a documentary about 1980s guerrilla music and performance art spectacles in the Mojave Desert, a kind of precursor to Lollapalooza and Burning Man. The doc features punk bands Sonic Youth, Redd Kross, the Minutemen and the Meat Puppets, and also includes explosive footage of Survival Research Laboratories, which was founded by Petaluma resident Mark Pauline, who also appears in the film’s contemporary interviews.
Jaime Leopold (who died in May), an original member of the Bay Area band Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks, stars in “The Last Hot Lick,” as an aging musician who still harbors hopes of a comeback. Sam Elliott plays a World War II vet who once assassinated a genocidal dictator and now, decades later, sets his sights on a more outlandish target in “The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot.” Cult writer Dennis Cooper (“Frisk”) co-wrote and co-directs with Zac Farley “Permanent Green Light,” a drama about a young Frenchman planning to publicly blow himself up, seemingly without motivation.
Special events at IndieFest include “Super Bowl: Men in Tights,” with comedians providing color commentary to the NFL’ s championship game, and “The Power Ballad Sing A Long,” in which the audience is encouraged to sing along to the music of bands such as Journey and Bon Jovi. www.sf indie.com
A winemaking doc: Producer Lauren Capps and director Bernardo Ruiz focus their attention on Mexican American winemakers and migrant farm workers in “Harvest Season,” screening 4:15 p.m., Jan. 20, at the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. Set during the 2017 North Bay grape harvest, a documentary meant as a portrait of the region’s winemaking takes a turn when October 2017’s devastating wildfires erupt. Capps and the film’s subjects, vineyard manager Vanessa Robledo and winemaker Gustavo Brambila (proprietor of Gustavo Wine and portrayed at the beginning of his career by Freddy Rodriguez in “Bottle Shock”), will be in attendance for a post-screening discussion and wine tasting. https://rafaelfilm.cafilm.org
Mostly British goes Irish: “Game of Thrones” star Aiden Gillen cowrote and stars as an actor turned serial killer dealing with fame and family troubles in Jamie Thraves’ Dublin-set “Pickups,” which will show on Feb. 17 as part of the Irish Spotlight at the Mostly British Film Festival. Also on tap that date is “Lost & Found,” in which director Liam O Mochain is the linchpin of seven stories in the portmanteau comedy. Lance Daly’s previously announced Great Famine drama “Black ‘47” completes the program. The Mostly British Film Festival runs Feb. 14-21, at San Francisco’s Vogue Theatre. http://mostlybritish.org How often groundhog-based weather predictions come true, the science of memories and musings on the space-time continuum will be under discussion by science communicator Kilshore Hari and astrophysicist Jeff Silverman, along with a screening of the Bill Murray comedy “Groundhog Day,” 7 p.m., Jan. 21, Alamo Drafthouse New Mission, S.F. https://draft house.com
Movie Making Through the Bay! presents its latest Short Film Festival showcasing work made at its “Make a Film in a Day!” challenge events, 2 p.m., Jan. 19, Rheem Theatre, Moraga. https://moviemaking bay.com
The life and career of record producer Konrad “Conny” Plank, who worked with a wide array of artists, including Kraftwerk, Brian Eno and Ultravox, comes into focus in the documentary “Conny Plank — The Potential of Noise,” co-directed by his son Stephen and screening 9:15 p.m. Jan. 18 at the Roxie Theater. www.roxie.com
Pam Grady is a Bay Area freelance writer