Category: Critic's Notebook

Critic's Notebook

Frameline's new lesson plan

Marriage changes everything. At least, this is what the disgruntled often say in movies and sitcoms regarding the ball-and-chain effect. Whether this ominous notion entered the heads of the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival programmers back in the planning stages of early 2008, same-sex marriage’s recent change of status in California has certainly provoked far-ranging discussions about queer folks’ own change of status in the world at large, a transformation in which the right to wed has, for better and for worse, taken center stage. As was only fitting, there was ample opportunity for filmgoers flipping through the Frameline 32 catalog to seek out glimpses of where the LGBT community is at today as well as how it got there.

topics: documentary, film festivals, frameline, gay lesbian cinema

Critic's Notebook

Frameline32: Hot and handled

Opening weekend at the SF International LGBT Film Festival was hot—particularly in that, if you didn’t notice, we had a heatwave goin’ on. Frameline’s current three venues for the annual event are all old movie palaces (OK, I’m not sure how old the Roxie is, but it sure ain’t palacial), none air-conditioned.

Of course it was hot in a good way, too, from the audience members (memo to self: Stop playing hooky from gym immediately) to what was onscreen. Starting with opening night’s selection—what could be hotter than repressed Victorians perspiring lust through their corsets?

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

Critic's Notebook

Hole Head, week one

It may not get the biggest audiences or hype amongst umpteen local film festivals, but Another Hole in the Head surely must have the most dedicated viewership of them all. To make a crass generalization: Either you’re a horror/fantasy fan, or you’re not. And if you are, you can watch a lot of the stuff—even the more low-budget, formulaic or simply not-so-good stuff—back-to-back. Many Hole Head patrons would probably just live at the Roxie for two weeks if there was room for sleeping bags. They know this will probably be their first/last chance to see most of the programming on anything but a TV or computer screen.

Going with that flow to an extent, SF360 sampled a healthy share of the festival’s first half in order to give you a sort of dear-diary, blow-by-blow overview. (Mostly omitted here are the movies already discussed in our Hole Head preview.

topics: horror

Critic's Notebook

Mike Leigh directs a topsy-turvy world

If any one thing unites the 22 winners so far of the SF Film Society’s Founder’s Directing Award, it’s that they’re all unique cinematic voices whose signature viewpoints and styles could never be mistaken for another’s. Akira Kurosawa (for whom the award was originally named), Michael Powell, Robert Bresson, Jiri Menzel, Francesco Rosi, Im Kwon-Taek, Arturo Ripstein, Abbas Kiarostami, Robert Altman, Werner Herzog, Spike Lee—these are the kinds of talents that term "auteur" fits like a glove, as their directorial personalities are manifest in every frame, in every film. (The list’s only partial exceptions are, curiously, a few other Americans including Eastwood, Penn, Mankiewicz and Donen—superb craftsmen who’ve often subsumed a personal touch in service to the subject at hand.)

Over four decades as a writer-director whose film, TV and stage work have created a distinctive ongoing insider’s portrait of working-to-middle class English life, Mike Leigh now seems a natural 23rd addition to that lofty roll call. His each new movie or play is a cultural event—OK, not a pop-culture event, but one exported to arthouses and theatres around the world. His initial rise during the late 1980s must have galled Thatcherites who’d have preferred British cinema to be represented by Merchant-Ivory-style sumptuous nostalgia—not Leigh’s grotty, funny, barbed extensions of the "Angry Young Man" anti-nostalgic tradition.

topics: british cinema, critics, directors, san francisco international film festival

Critic's Notebook

I [heart] Jason Lee

Dear Higher Being Should You Exist:

When I prayed for the American public to wake up and smell "reality," I didn’t mean American Idol, Survivor, America’s Most Wanted, The Biggest Loser, Breaking Bonaduce and Temptation Island. To list just a few highlights in the TV genre to date.

Seriously, who could’ve imagined a decade ago we’d reach a point where the sitcom was a species endangered by even dumber-and-dumberer wastings of viewer braincells than Gilligan’s Island or The Beverly Hillbillies dreamt of?

Still, there remain isolated bright spots on the tube. Even amongst sitcoms. Even on the non-cable major networks.

topics: actors, san francisco international film festival

Critic's Notebook

San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival

Cherry blossoms overflow the sidewalks and strangers suddenly seem willing to make eye contact. Spring in San Francisco, which, for the local film fan, means the start of festival season, a parade of one-time-only screenings running from the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival all the way up to July’s Silent Film Festival weekend. Now in its 26th year, SFIAAFF has grown from being a niche event to a major contender on the international festival circuit—with more than enough voices and crossovers to justify its unwieldy moniker.

topics: asian american cinema, asian cinema, center for asian american media, directors, documentary, dvd, sundance kabuki

Critic's Notebook

Cinequest's surprises

A “discovery” festival from Day One—meaning they premiere a lot of films, including many other fests might ignore or pass over—San Jose’s Cinequest actually adopted “Discover” as motto for this, its 16th year.

A five-day wade into the current program’s early going revealed business as usual: Very appreciative, if not often packed, audiences. Excited young filmmakers easy to distinguish from civilian ticketbuyers (who are generally older, wider, and don’t wear nearly so much black). The greeter guy at the Cinema 12 door who wears a different spangly topcoat every day. The hirsute guy who introduces certain films in a manner suggesting thwarted aspirations as standup comic. The highly variable quality of what’s on screen.

As the Hitachi convention at my hotel gave way to the Junior Cheerleader convention, Cinequest also shape-shifted into something much more interesting.

topics: directors, documentary, dvd, film festivals, independent film

Critic's Notebook

SF Indiefest, from day one

Everything seems to be business as usual for a typical early evening in the bowels of the Mission District.

topics: bay area, film festivals