Category: Experience

Experience

Mill Valley Film Festival's Maher moment

When you’re, say, 14, movies that “everyone” is dying to see come pretty often—they’re most likely the latest megabuck action-fantasy or comedy toy opening Friday at every multiplex in the land. As one gets older, such occasions grow fewer. Taste changes, people have more important things to do (is there a parent alive who hasn’t sighed “Oh, I can’t remember the last time we got out for a movie”?), and so much of the Hollywood fare available to most seems such—kidstuff.

But this week there is, in fact, a movie everyone I know is dying to see. It goes “wide” on Friday, but opens the Mill Valley Film Festival Thursday night. There’s no doubt every cranny of the Smith Rafael Film Center could be filled by locals who can’t wait even those extra few hours before its first regular commercial matinees. That movie would be Religulous, the desperately awaited (by some) and already vehemently decried (by others) film by director Larry Charles (Borat, Curb Your Enthusiasm) and star/provocateur Bill Maher .

topics: actors, directors, documentary film, features, mill valley film festival

Experience

Baloney Sandwiches with no cheese: Ted V. Mikels' wild world at the Clay

In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s great backstage drama, The Red Shoes (1948), Boris Lermontov, the controlling impresario behind a famous ballet company, asks the up-and-coming dancer Victoria Page why she wants to dance. She snaps back with the question, “Why do you want to live?” I imagine that director Ted V. Mikels would give the same response were he asked why he makes movies. “It takes your guts and your entrails and your soul to make a film,” Mikels proclaimed in an interview in RE/Search’s Incredibly Strange Films. “It takes everything you possess within you!”

topics: directors, documentary film, genre films, horror, how-to

Experience

Curating the curators at Bay Area Now 5

Bay Area Now, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ triennial exhibition, has developed a deserved reputation for presenting an energetic survey of current Bay Area artistic practice. YBCA’s film/video curator, Joel Shepard, programs the film portion of the exhibition, and over the years he’s showcased a survey of contemporary Bay Area film, commissioned new work from locals like Bill Daniel and Ellen Bruno and focused on live cinema. This year Shepard curates Bay Area film curators.

topics: cult cinema, curators, documentary film institute, experimental film, features, genre films, yerba buena center for the arts

Experience

Room for thought at SFMOMA

A film in a darkened theater commands our undivided attention, but a video installation in a museum doesn’t have the same effect. Living so long with the insidious remote control, plus the steady erosion of attention spans, has made us impatient and intolerant of any program that isn’t entertaining us NOW! Frankly, we’re so allergic to boredom that a mere instant of stasis or confusion is enough to send us hopping to another channel, or fleeing to another room. The adjacent installations of computer-generated video by Swiss artists Alexander Hahn and Yves Netzhammer currently on display at SFMOMA require more time than most to reveal themselves, and it’s the rare visitor who sticks around that long. Are the peripatetic hordes missing out on some fantastic secret of the universe? I daresay no. Yet I consider it my public duty to encourage anyone who checks out the show in its last month to slow down their meter and get on its rhythm.

topics: art, exhibitions, sfmoma

Experience

Mountainclimbing in the Tenderloin

"A maverick Bay Area filmmaker since his involvement in the Cine Manifest collective starting in the early ’70s, Rob Nilsson was a visible name in the larger Amerindie world during its formative years, with such titles as Northern Lights and Heat and Sunlight," writes Dennis Harvey. "For the last 15 years or so, however, he’s devoted most of his time to one project, albeit a massive one: The ’9@Night’ series, a nine-feature cycle of loosely interwoven tales largely about life in San Francisco’s undersides, improvised and acted by a mix of professional actors and those trained via Nilsson’s Tenderloin workshop program. While individual Night films have premiered at film festivals (many at Mill Valley’s) over recent years, only now has this alternately raw and stylized, grandly ambitious series been available to view in its entirety." With ’9@Night’ ready to play in full at several venues Bay Area-wide (the Roxie and Smith Rafael will be showing all titles, while select screenings are coming to the Parkway and Cerrito), SF360.org asked this veteran indie auteur for his thoughts, which he gamely and intelligently offers here.

topics: bay area, directors, features, independent film

Experience

"The Dark Cinema of David Goodis" visits the PFA

The now-beloved film noir genre of Hollywood’s 1940s and 1950s didn’t have a name until the French gave it one—they were just ordinary "crime mellers" or "gangster movies" to American audiences and critics who didn’t think twice about any artistic merit they might have until much later. Likewise, the "hardboiled" novels and short stories of the era (going back to the 1930s) was mostly considered disposable pulp fiction. A few authors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler were (and are) more highly regarded, but the majority—even relatively successful ones—hardly attracted much attention at the time. If lucky, they found some degree of real appreciation later on, most often posthumously. People like Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford are considered legends now, but that would scarcely have seemed a logical outcome to them while alive.

David Goodis was one of the fairly-successful-then-forgotten ones. (As one internet "noir" bookseller’s biography succinctly puts it, "The lives of Goodis’ protagonists tend to mirror his own: Early promise, squandered.")

topics: authors, genre films, noir, pacific film archive

Experience

"The Exiles," a return engagement

Despite a handful of more sympathetic portrayals (as in Anthony Mann’s 1950 The Devil’s Doorway), Hollywood’s record on Native American imagery before the late 1960s was one of condescension when not outright "savage" caricature. And that’s just counting the thousands of period-set Westerns—in movies about modern life, American Indians simply didn’t exist.

Ergo there was a startling sense of discovery for viewers when Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles premiered in 1961 at the Venice and San Francisco International film festivals, then other such showcases over the next couple years. This long-in-making naturalistic drama was an unvarnished look at "twelve hours in the lives of a group of Indians who have come to Los Angeles, California."

topics: american indian film, directors, filmmakers

Experience

Andrea Kreuzhage & Someguy riffle through "1000 Journals"

[SF360.org editor’s note: This interview first appeared during the San Francisco International Film Festival, where 1000 Journals played this past spring. It opens this Friday, Aug. 1, at the Roxie.]

In 2000, a San Francisco graphic designer with the humble pseudonym of Someguy had a wildly ambitious brainstorm. He put a thousand blank journals out into the world in stages, opening the spigot on a torrent of contributions encompassing everything from knocked-off diary entries to poignant confessions to obsessively crafted art. Nonetheless, after three years, only a single completed book of 220 pages had made its way back to Someguy. The 1000 Journals project has mushroomed in the intervening years, inspiring both a book drawn from journal entries and a documentary, 1000 Journals, that tracks down participants around the globe and raises a host of fascinating questions about creativity, collaboration, community and communication. We sat down with Someguy and first-time director Andrea Kreuzhage, a German producer who’s lived in Los Angeles since the mid-‘90s, during the first of three screenings of 1000 Journals in the S.F. International Film Festival.

topics: art, authors, bay area, directors, q&a, san francisco international film festival

Experience

The 28th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival

In a small elementary school in Kafr Kara, an Arab village in central Israel, two teachers stand at the front of a classroom to deliver the day’s lesson. The topic is independence—for half the class. For the other half, it’s catastrophe. At least, that’s how the teachers, one Jewish, one Arab, seem to see it, and a classroom of small human sponges waits to see who will get the last word.

It’s not exactly just another day at Bridge over the Wadi, a bilingual, bicultural Jewish-Arab school that is one of half a handful in existence. Rather, it’s the anniversary of the creation of the Israeli state, known as Independence Day to Israelis and to Palestinians as the Nakba, or catastrophe. But how to tell a coherent story to children when narrating from opposing points of view is a question that surfaces repeatedly in the documentary Bridge over the Wadi, which screens in this year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. Directed, written, and produced by the sibling filmmaking team of Barak and Tomer Heymann — a selection of whose films are highlighted this year in a festival tribute — Bridge follows the school, located in the Wadi Ara (wadi is Arabic for "valley"), through its first shaky year of existence in 2004 and 2005.

topics: jewish cinema

Experience

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival

Back at the Castro this weekend for the 13th year, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival presents a variety of titillating titles, showing 12 feature films over 2 1/2 days. I’ve attended each SFSFF since its start in 1996, and can always feel the sincere passion for these classic films exhibited by everyone involved. The perfect marriage of form and content, the Festival makes sure to get the best 35mm prints of films both famous and bizarre, as well as world-class musicians to accompany all the films, which are shown in a bona fide film palace built in 1922.

This year’s lineup includes such silent icons as Lon Chaney, Harold Lloyd, Joan Crawford, Marion Davies and flapper Colleen Moore, but also lesser-known characters such as Chief Buffalo Long Lance, the supposed Blackfoot chief who, well, wasn’t. This year’s film directors famous as well as infamous include Tod Browning, René Clair, Carl Dreyer, King Vidor and William Desmond Taylor (yes, the victim of the never-solved murder with suspects including three film actresses, one stage mother and the GM of Paramount Pictures).

topics: bay area, film festivals, silent film

Experience

"The Gits," the movie

Every campus, every city, probably everybody you know has stories to tell about the rock band that didn’t Make It, but should have. Most often they fall apart—despite all potential and local fandom—due to interpersonal problems, financial stress, or because certain members simply move on to other locations and professions. Whenever talent goes unfulfilled, it’s sad. But it’s seldom as tragic as in the case of The Gits, a Seattle band on the verge of major-label signage and potential greatness when lead singer Mia Zapata was murdered in 1993.

topics: documentary, independent film, music

Experience

The world of "Derek" at Frameline32

It goes without saying that sexuality is never far from the surface of Derek Jarman’s films, something he himself is clear enough accounting for in the lengthy 1990 interview which forms the backbone of Isaac Julien’s documentary portrait Derek. Over the sepia, postwar home movies that Jarman worked into films like The Last of England (1988), the artist recounts getting caught in bed with a boy during prep school and being "raked over the coals" for it—something which caused him to redirect any sexual energy he had into painting and collecting into his twenties, and later persisted in the vacuum-sealed air of solitary fixation in which his films seemed to play out. Later, accompanying shots of nubile lads and Scorpio Rising (1964) leather, Jarman emphasizes his desire to have sex in public as a kind of a revenge on the society which would repress his desires—a neat enough corollary for the let-it-blurt axiom of his serviceable film style. This contrast between amour fou and a rigid sense of self-preservation rivets Jarman’s collected works, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from Derek, a documentary tribute which does not seek to enlarge or complicate the filmmaker’s legacy so much as succor its loss.

topics: art film, directors, documentary, experimental film, film festivals, frameline, gay lesbian cinema, queer cinema

Experience

Frameline rides Argentina's new wave

Last year’s Frameline First Feature Award winner was Alexis Dos Santos’ debut Glue (2006), an overall festival favorite, and one that SF Bay Guardian Arts and Entertainment Editor Johnny Ray Huston wryly observed as "yet another example of how new Argentine cinema […] continues to stretch the time and space dimensions of the word new." It had already been a half decade since 2001, Argentine film’s watershed year at film festivals abroad and the year the entire industry—and country—suffered through a catastrophic economic collapse. The state-subsidized film schools that had nurtured members of the ’90s new wave were forced to close and many in the film industry fretted over what seemed like a foreclosed future.

topics: argentine cinema, frameline, gay lesbian cinema, queer cinema

Experience

SFFS Screen at Sundance Kabuki

When executive director Graham Leggat announced last April that the San Francisco Film Society would open its year-round screen at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas on June 13—a Friday by this year’s calendar—he added that for SFFS, at least, it would be an auspicious date. Even before the first film has spooled, you don’t need to be draped in garlic or packing rabbits’ feet to believe him. The Film Society (publisher of SF360.org) has reason to be optimistic about its new undertaking, which hopes to significantly contribute to the spectrum of art and specialty films now available at Bay Area theaters.

topics: art film, documentary, exhibitions, features, film festivals, independent film, san francisco film society, sundance film festival, sundance kabuki, telluride film festival

Experience

San Francisco Black Film Festival's 10th

Last month Barry Jenkins’ Medicine for Melancholy, a locally produced fiction feature that premiered at the SF International, made much of the gentrification, "urban renewal" policies and other factors that over decades have made San Francisco perhaps the U.S. city with the lowest percentage of African American residents. Particularly noted was a massive campaign against "blight" in the 1960s Fillmore District—essentially destroying one of the nation’s historic centers of black life, culture, art and economic growth.

This month, the SF Black Film Festival is doing its bit to right that wrong, using for the first time as a primary venue the newly Sundance-owned and remodeled Sundance Cinemas right there at the old neighborhood’s Fillmore and Geary center. It’s a landmark year for SFBFF in other ways as well, as 2008 marks its 10th anniversary with the most expansive program yet. Flagging the theme "10 Years, 10 Days, 100 Films," the fest encompasses two long weekends (June 4-8 and 11-15) as well as several other event locales, including Yoshi’s and the Rasselas Jazz Club on Fillmore itself, plus the African-American Arts and Culture Complex on Fulton and the Museum of the African Diaspora downtown.

topics: african american cinema, african cinema, bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, documentary, features, film festivals, gay lesbian cinema

Experience

SFIAF: "Mordake" and week two -- reviewed, previewed

Bay Area composer Erling Wold’s new solo chamber opera, starring acclaimed tenor John Duykers, is enjoying a thrillingly intimate world premiere this week under the banner of the San Francisco International Arts Festival. Based on the deeply weird story of 19th-century scion and medical curiosity Edward Mordake (driven to suicide by the residual visage on the back of his head of his female "evil twin"), Mordake packs a multisensory punch inside a tightly knit, highly portable production—one clearly unwilling to sacrifice opera’s theatrical grandeur to avant-garde budgets.

Thanks, in part, to Mordake’s use of some contemporary video technology and an exquisite design concept, it doesn’t have to. Sets, properties, costumes and lights are all kept to a lean but choice minimum in a production that takes supreme advantage of a prerecorded electronic score as well as a striking interactive visual panorama featuring a video motion-sensing program designed by German engineer Frieder Weiss.

topics: bay area, dance, digital filmmaking, experimental film, opera

Experience

Jimmy Stewart at 100

When the late 1960s brought about radical change on many fronts to a hitherto somewhat fossilized—and suddenly bejeezus-scared—Hollywood, many observed that an entirely new breed of movie star was emerging. Instead of the glamazons and broad-shouldered he-men that dominated before, we now had stars as quirky, flawed and non-glam as Dustin Hoffman, Sandy Dennis, Mia Farrow, Elliott Gould, Glenda Jackson, Gene Hackman, Gene Wilder, Donald Sutherland, George Segal and so forth. They were actual leading men and women, not just the character actors, comedy relief or stage-exiled talents they might have been just years before.

topics: actors

Experience

Finding Warren Sonbert

Unlike most experimental filmmakers, Warren Sonbert’s collected works have had the benefit of full retrospectives at major museums (San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, New York’s, Guggenheim) and a strong preservation effort. These garlands were posthumous, coming after the artist died of AIDS in 1995, but accord on this scale is rare for an underground moviemaker, no matter the biographical fillings. An avid traveler, opera buff and cinephile, Sonbert dipped into many cultural niches without subscribing to any particular dogmatism. Beginning as a teenage prodigy amidst Andy Warhol’s Factory, Sonbert brought his Bolex camera to bear on his life, tastes and milieus. He’s sometimes simplistically referred to as a "diarist" filmmaker, though Sonbert developed more over time than the term implies. As his films moved from outsider pop to symphonic polyvalence, their overlaid and often contradictory tones and themes inscribed a uniquely capacious cinema.

topics: bay area, directors, experimental film

Experience

Asia Argento, in full flower

Motherhood has supposedly had a slowing-down effect on Asia Argento, though at present evidence points rather wildly to the contrary. Not only does she star in this week’s San Francisco International Film Festival official opener, Catherine Breillat’s costume intrigue The Last Mistress, she also figures heavily in two other SFIFF features. Both are programmed in the culty "Late Show" section: Go Go Tales, Abel Ferrara’s most acclaimed film in years, and The Mother of Tears, a latest horror opus directed by her own fan-idolized gorehound dad Dario Argento. A couple weeks ago yet another vehicle opened commercially, Olivier Assayas’ Boarding Gate, which is entirely dominated by her feverish and highly physical performance.

Conventional logic might suggest all this visibility means it’s "breakthrough" time for Asia Argento, that moment when an actor goes from being a familiar face to a marquee name that can singlehandedly draw folks into the multiplex, or at least the arthouse. (In Europe she’s already quite well-known.) But as her project choices among other things bear out, Argento probably isn’t very interested in becoming a "star" in the conventional sense. In fact, she seems the girl most likely to run from any such fate.

topics: actors, genre films, italian cinema, san francisco international film festival

Experience

Will 'The Thrill' Viharo's 'Thrillville' turns 11

One man’s camp is another man’s trash. Or maybe it’s the other way around. In any event, this is the endless, bruising debate among cinephiles: What “distinguishes” the painfully bad stuff—the misfires of talented artists, the hack work of lesser mortals, the by-the-numbers cookie-cutter crap—from the low-rent gems, the bizarre one-offs, the twisted genre riffs, the pinnacles of unintentionally hilarious bad taste? With the latter we have entered the exalted province of Will “The Thrill” Viharo, the fez-festooned impresario of the monthly East Bay cult-movie extravaganza “Thrillville.” In anticipation of his 11th anniversary show April 10 at the Cerrito Speakeasy, featuring the 1958 chiller “It! The Terror From Beyond Outer Space” (whose plot was ripped off by “Alien,” it’s widely maintained), we hobnobbed with Viharo over a mug of joe. “Garbage to me is anything with Tom Cruise,” he explained. “Trash to me is anything with Tura Satana. Trash is something you keep and recycle; garbage is something you use then throw away. I prefer trashy films; they have a longer life.”

topics: cerrito speakeasy, cult cinema, directors, exhibitions, genre films

Experience

Earthdance Short-Attention-Span Environmental Film Festival

Who says it’s not easy being green? If you ask the folks behind the Bay Area-based Earthdance Short-Attention-Span Environmental Film Festival, engaging films with positive and eye-opening ecological themes can not only be easy but high fun. And they’ve been proving it since 2004, with an annual spate of short films covering a gamut of environmental subjects and stylistic approaches while studiously avoiding the doomy.

“We’re living at a time when we need stories that connect people, bring them together and inspire hope,” explains festival director and founder Zakary Zide. “We wanted to reach out and be more inclusive.” Doing so meant highlighting the humor, adventure and sheer wonder of the natural environment and the place of human beings in it. Rather than targeting single issues like global warming or the coming water crisis, EarthDance aims to be a bridge between art, nature and science. In that sense, says Zide, “It’s not even political.”

topics: environmental films, exhibitions, experimental film, film festivals, oakland museum of california

Experience

SFMOMA's "Nonwestern Westerns" series

Until they started falling out of fashion in the 1960s, Westerns were pretty much the bedrock of the American movie industry. Whole studios had been created to churn ‘em out like “Bronco Billy” Anderson’s in the East Bay. (Fremont’s Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum still shows silent films year-round in his honor.) The Great Train Robbery, considered the first real narrative movie using cross-cuts, close-ups and other then-innovative techniques, was a Western.

topics: asian cinema, genre films, italian cinema, reviews, san francisco museum of modern art, westerns

Experience

San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival 2008

The San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival is always nothing less than enticing. There’s pre-show dinner in Japantown; the noisy, neon-colored anticipation of a big show at the Castro; and you might drop in on a film like My Secret Cache (Shinobu Yaguchi, SFIAAFF 1998) for nothing more than the words "Japanese" and "comedy," and have one of the worst laughing-fit moments of your life when the heroine, escaping from a holdup, runs into trouble (two words: air bag).

Or you might buy a ticket for The Dream Catcher (Ed Radtke, SFIAAFF 2000), not expecting much more than a darkened theater and the occasional Junior Mint, and leave struck by the impressionistic feeling of how painterly, wide-open spaces compare to an identity that’s open to interpretation.

The 26th annual SFIAAFF, playing from March 13–23 in San Francisco, Berkeley and San Jose, kicks off with Wayne Wang’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, based on the book by Oakland-based writer Yiyun Li (currently a visiting professor at Mills College).

topics: asian american cinema, asian cinema, directors, film festivals

Experience

'A Genuine Tribute to Peter Bogdanovich'

There’s a scene a third of a way into Peter Bogdanovich’s debut film Targets (1968) in which the director seems to directly address his future critics. The film, an early mash-up of serial killing and cinematic reflexivity made under Roger Corman’s watch, stars an aging Boris Karloff as a romanticized version of himself. A slick-haired Bogdanovich stands in to play the part of…the young celluloid-mad director trying to revive the Karloff character’s star with a couple of quickies for an independent producer. I’m not sure even the Coen Brothers would be arch enough for such a ploy, but Bogdanovich plays it beautifully in a scene in Karloff’s hotel room. One of the old actor’s first films, The Criminal Code (1931, directed by Howard Hawks), plays on television, and Bogdanovich’s director is immersed within moments. Before long, he’s shushing the real actor in favor of his black-and-white likeness.

topics: castro theatre, critics, directors, dvd, exhibitions

Experience

Danny Glover, "Honeydripper," and us

Danny Glover is 61 years old, a born-and-raised San Francisco resident. He’s best known to the masses by far as the calm co-star to a much crazier (both on- and off-screen, it seems) Mel Gibson in those Lethal Weapon movies, though he (and we) would probably cite his best work as being elsewhere, in films seen much less widely.

One of them might well turn out to be Honeydripper, which opens this Friday. An all-too-rare instance these days of a (more or less) starring vehicle for him, this latest from writer-director John Sayles—a filmmaker whose track record of pro-labor projects must have made him simpatico with the longtime unionist actor—casts Glover as Tyrone “Pine Top” Purvis, piano-playing proprietor of the titular blues joint in 1950 rural Alabama. Facing financial ruin, he needs a big windfall, fast. So he creates one, claiming that he’s secured a show from famed (if fictive) electric guitarist Guitar Sam. But the latter doesn’t turn up as promised, forcing Pine Top to try saving his club via a desperate gambit.

topics: african cinema, directors, documentary, political film, san francisco

Experience

Cinema, Israeli style

Israel turns 60 in May, and the anniversary will be celebrated in this country with acres of Op-Ed space devoted to sober analyses of how the Jewish state long ago lost its idealism. It’s true that the nation is no longer defined absolutely by Zionism, the secular nationalist movement that was endorsed worldwide (except by the Arab states) as details of the Holocaust emerged in the weeks and months after World War II. Likewise, Israel’s socialist values, embodied by a kibbutz system that enjoyed mythological status until the late ’70s, have given way to the greed, selfishness and corruption endemic to most capitalist societies, young or mature. But even as the country has become a typically affluent Western society, its cinema has retained its status as a crucial component of the national dialogue. Israeli films serve as both conscience and instigator, possibly because artists are able to exert influence in a country of just 7.3 million people. (Movies in this country are produced almost exclusively for entertainment and socialization, in case you hadn’t noticed.) But Israeli movies have been exposed to even bigger audiences in recent years, garnering praise, prizes and distribution deals on the international festival circuit. With the current and imminent release of “The Band’s Visit, “Beaufort” and “Jellyfish” in the U.S., on the heels of last year’s “Close to Home” and “The Bubble,” the wave has reached our shores.

topics: directors, independent film, jewish cinema, oscars

Experience

Undying love for George A. Romero

It probably wasn’t George A. Romero’s original dream to become semi-famous for movies about the flesh-eating undead. Yet arguably no American director has creatively given so much to the horror genre as he — or gotten so little back, at least in financial terms. Does he actually like making zombie flicks every few years? Or is it just the one reliable commercial fallback in a career that’s perpetually gotten the short end of the mainstream-funding stick?

topics: directors, lists