Category: Take Two

Take Two

Chris Marker comes home, at last

I confess that for a long while I had the misperception, based on almost no exposure to his work, that French essayist Chris Marker made dense, dry films steeped in political theory and inaccessible to anyone but a narrow strata of irrelevant European intellectuals. This delusion persisted because Marker’s films truly were inaccessible; outside of the infrequent one-shot local premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival or the Pacific Film Archive, they never played. The exception is his tour de force short fiction La Jetée, which pops up with some regularity at venues like The Other Cinema and S.F. Cinematheque. (And even its army of admirers will concede that it’s less a pleasure trip about time and space travel than a pointed examination of the nature and meaning of images.) Marker’s unavailability wasn’t remedied by DVD, where one could only find La Jetée and Sans Soleil. Until today, that is, when Icarus Films releases The Sixth Side of the Pentagon (1967), The Last Bolshevik (1993), Remembrance of Things to Come (2001) and The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004). A gust of fresh air, they’re guaranteed to whisk away your boredom (it’s OK, you can admit it) with story-driven American documentaries with quirky characters.

I should point out that these are individual releases, not a box set, though it hardly minimizes the echoes that ricochet across the films and the decades.

topics: dvd, experimental film, french cinema, reviews

Take Two

"Vicky Cristina Barcelona" summers in Spain

In the twilight of his career, famously stay-put New Yorker Woody Allen has suddenly and surprisingly taken to traveling for work. This is a big deal for a filmmaker whose last project shot abroad—perhaps even out-of-state—was 1975’s Love and Death. It spoofed Russian River and the Napoleonic wars, and thus couldn’t quite be pulled off on the Upper West Side or even in Central Park.

Was it the unpleasantness of that experience (Allen doesn’t seem to remember the film fondly), the backyard-set breakthrough of Annie Hall one year later, or sheer xenophobia that kept his projects as close to home as possible for the next three decades?

topics: reviews

Take Two

Dreamachines: "FliCKer" stares into the light

In our popular imagination—and especially in film— the request to “stare into the light” is often an invitation to let our waking life fall into submission. The words— often spoken by hypnotists, anesthesiologists, and mystics— also describe the act of watching movies, and speak to film’s implicit promise of taking us to some other scene accessed through the flickers on the screen.

The transportive and conscious altering qualities of light were not lost on William S. Burroughs and his compatriot and frequent collaborator Brian Gysin. "We must storm the citadels of enlightenment,” Burroughs wrote to Gysin, “the means are at hand.” The means at hand were Gysin’s revelation about the hallucinatory qualities of flickering light and the device he invented in 1957 to harness its potential: the dreamachine. Nik Sheenan’s hypnotic documentary FlicKer— which makes its U.S. premiere at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts-- looks into the dreamachine’s pulsating brilliance while also sketching a portrait of its troubled and brilliant creator.

topics: art film, yerba buena center for the arts

Take Two

Arghya Basu evokes the mystical and everyday in "A Listener's Tale"

If the Castro Theatre is the church of San Francisco cinephilia, then the Yerba Buena screening room is surely its laboratory—it’s only too fitting that leading curator Joel Shepard is spotlighting the idiosyncratic programming voices of five San Francisco independents for the museum’s upcoming Bay Area Now exhibition. Besides rounding up important international features (e.g. Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone) and oddball retrospectives (e.g. Phil Chambliss: Arkansas Auteur), Shepard also has a penchant for screening otherwise unhyped films which do not hew to typical genre norms. A case in point is A Listener’s Tale, a lovely if unclassifiable mixture of ethnography and poetic reverie which screened at last winter’s Rotterdam Film Festival.

In spite of the earnest attempts of academic critics to problematize both the conception and consumption of filmed representations of indigenous "others," filmmakers have been drawn to exotic cultures and landscapes since the Lumière Brothers first introduced lightweight cameras.

topics: bay area, documentary, world cinema, yerba buena center for the arts

Take Two

Review: "Surfwise"

The Bradys and Partridges. Cowsills, Osmonds, Jacksons. The old-school Von Trapps. There’s a certain fascination to family acts, heightening the interest that inevitably occurs when a performer’s professional and personal lives blur. While the above-named might all be musical acts—both real and fictive—nuclear units surface occasionally in other arenas of public life. Almost inevitably, some dynastic dirt is sure to emerge, because sooner or later the family that works, plays, competes and cohabits together is going to experience some cracks in the household-unity foundation.

There’s plenty o’ such juicy stuff on display in Surfwise, the latest documentary from Doug Pray (Hype!, Scratch). His subject here is the Paskowitz clan, whose patriarch and nine count ‘em nine children have been legends in the surfing world for decades. It’s an eccentric real-life saga that’s compelling whether you’re a wave rider yourself or couldn’t care less about the sport.

topics: documentary, sports film

Take Two

Review: "Love Songs"

French musicals are an acquired taste. I should know, because I thought I hated ‘em until I suddenly acquired it. The moment of revelation is cloudy, but may have been tethered to first hearing the Michel Legrand song score for 1968’s Young Girls of Rochefort—music so cheerful, insouciant, wistful and catchy it could charm the distemper from Guantanamo Bay. (It took several more years to actually see that film, which outside France was a big flop, only recently getting belated appreciation and restored-print DVD exposure.)

As defined by the original taste-making blueprint, Demy’s 1964 Umbrellas of Cherbourg (also with a Legrand score, one more famous but I think less intoxicating), the French musical is not at all like your classic Hollywood model—or even the Bollywood one. Songs simply seep into the "action," simply extending the inevitable discussion of relationships or their lack rather than providing plot with some flamboyant interruption. People don’t "burst" into song, they slip into it. The music is usually less Broadway than youthful pop, movement not half so formal as would require the term "choreography."

topics: french cinema, musicals, reviews

Take Two

Review: "Postal"

It may not be easy being Uwe Boll, but it must be fun. I conclude this only after having met the guy (and gotten on his emailing list, which is not recommended—you get multiple spammy missives about All Things Uwe every freakin’ day). He’s disarmingly friendly, boundlessly energetic, a fanboy-turned-maker who thinks large and has the entrepreneurial skills to pull off his ideas in the real entertainment-biz world. Who else could have cobbled together funding for so many modest-to-fairly-big-budget features without any major Hollywood studio backing whatsoever? Not to mention his talents as an ebullient self-promoter, one who seizes on bad press (of which he gets plenty) as a license for public pugnaciousness.

topics: games, reviews

Take Two

Review: "Mister Lonely"

Part Luis Buñuel parable, Artforum spread, Jonestown ballet and Warhol camp, Harmony Korine’s latest film is a prime, insomniac two hours of midnight-movie drifting. Mister Lonely is Korine’s first film since 1999’s Julien Donkey-Boy and his third feature since his rainmaking screenplay for Larry Clark’s Kids (released to much controversy in 1995, when Korine was all of 22). Erratic perhaps, but then maybe that’s a good thing given the endemic professionalism of much American independent film.

Mister Lonely is certainly his mostly plainly winsome film yet, though the 35-year old Korine still tends towards the associative, scene-by-scene narration style that’s marked his work since Gummo (1997).

topics: art, directors, reviews

Take Two

Review: "The Living End," remixed and remastered

What to think about attitudes toward and images of gays in U.S. media these days? It’s a complicated question. On one hand, clearly there have been enormous advances. Not so long ago, who could have imagined shows like The L Word or Will & Grace being long-running mainstream hits? Ellen and Rosie and such are beloved by housewives across America. Brokeback Mountain won Oscars—though not the big one, in what many speculated was a failure of nerve on the part of older Academy voters who simply didn’t want to watch it.

Yet Brokeback did not open the floodgates for gay-themed Hollywood projects as predicted, the studios regarding its success as a fluke. (We’ll see if Ang Lee’s upcoming gay-perspective Woodstock movie or Gus Van Sant’s Harvey Milk bio changes their minds.)

topics: bay area, dvd, queer cinema

Take Two

Review: "Boarding Gate"

Olivier Assayas made his name from the late 1980s via a series of “typical” intimate French arthouse dramas done with bracing freshness and verve. He felt like a leading light in that country’s cinematic next wave, even arriving at the job as so many New Wave greats had a generation before—by first working at famed critical journal Cahiers du Cinema.

From early youth studies Disorder and Cold Water to 1998’s Late August, Early September, he seemed the latest in a line of Gallic filmmakers who made low-key, casual observation stealthily add up to something powerful. Even his rather large-scale, starry “Les destinees sentimentale” (2000) felt cut from the same cloth.

topics: critics, filmmakers, french cinema, reviews

Take Two

Review: "Shotgun Stories"

In a recent documentary some interviewees recalled seeing Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets when it came out in 1973, and being amazed that someone, anyone, could actually make a movie about the type of people they’d grown up with in NYC’s tougher boroughs. Thirty-five years later, of course, the general attitude might well be, “Please God, not another Mean Streets knockoff!”—being that New York City slang-speaking East Coast youth dramas have become one of the reigning cliches of indie cinema.

Many things go in and out of fashion at the movies, but it’s seldom noted that among them are entire geographic and population sectors of American life. Middle-to-upper-class WASPS never seem to go out of style; boys (of whatever race) in the ‘hood are a relatively new prevalent flavor; desperately-seeking twentysomethings in the more glittering cities are a favorite; generic suburbia is a fallback setting for many genre exercises.

But the smaller-town “heartland” America that once held our majority populace—and which has duly been shrinking for many decades, though it ain’t vanished yet—is now seldom seen on screen.

topics: directors, independent film, reviews

Take Two

"Shelter"

I’ve no idea how many gay surfers there are—does anyone?—but for sure a whole lot of gay men have long fantasied about shootin’ the curl (ahem) with a surfie. What’s not to like? Laird Hamilton, for example, is a world-class sex object by any standard. Just ‘cuz he’s married with kids doesn’t mean a dude can’t dream.

While gay porn flicks have dubiously mined the surfer fantasy since their inception—at the least exploiting the stereotype of athletic California blonds—non-X-rated films have been much more hesitant. You sure didn’t see gay characters in Hollywood’s takes on surf culture (from Frankie & Annette to Point Break), nor in the never-ending documentaries that flowed from 1966 landmark The Endless Summer to the latest DIY effort at SF’s Red Vic Movie House.

topics: exhibitions, film festivals, gay lesbian cinema, independent film, reviews

Take Two

Q&A: Brillante Mendoza

It is clear from the very first interaction with Brillante Mendoza that he is an extremely gracious man. This, even after the substantial acclaim he had been garnering for three feature films he unveiled this past year. In the most obvious ways, the two of his films playing at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, Foster Child and Slingshot, couldn’t be more different. The first of these films centers on the adoption day of Jon-Jon, a darling 3-year old, from a loving foster family. The latter examines the criminal underworld and its corrupt government counterpart in a dark and labyrinthine Manila. Still, as Mendoza makes clear, these films share a basic approach to the world, one that engenders respectful understanding through a desire to depict and see things as they really are. In part, because of filmmakers like him, Filipino independent cinema has enjoyed a renaissance in this first decade of the 2000s. Mendoza was in San Francisco for the first time recently for his screenings, when he took time to speak with SF360.org.

topics: asian cinema, critics, directors, documentary, film festivals, q&a

Take Two

"Paranoid Park"

You’ve got to give Gus Van Sant credit for integrity. Just when he seemed on the verge of turning into just another Hollywood sellout—via the increasingly impersonal, decreasingly interesting mainstream likes of To Die For, Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester (not to mention the 101 percent useless Psycho)—he did a total about-face.

His four features since have been not just low-budget personal projects, but true art films in a rarefied, semi-abstract, greatly patience-demanding mode that went out of style somewhere around the time that Antonioni and Resnais movies stopped automatically getting U.S. distribution. Sure, Gerry had Matt Damon, while Elephant and Last Days had hot-button themes (school shootings and Kurt Cobain, respectively). Yet they were almost anti-narrative exercises, cryptic reveries that could hypnotize you to death.

topics: authors, directors, independent film, reviews

Take Two

"Warts & All: The Films of Danny Plotnick"

My high school physics teacher was a slight, nondescript fellow who hyperactively sparked to life in the classroom. His mantra was “Physics is fun!” and he gave one of the more clever lads an unexpected bonus point for devilishly scribbling it on an exam in place of an elusive correct answer. The reward wasn’t for sucking up, mind you, but for understanding that enthusiasm was more important than the dogged mastery of information. That this long-forgotten anecdote (and life lesson) came rushing back to me after spending some time with “Warts & All: The Films of Danny Plotnick” is neither accidental nor inappropriate. The 10 short comic narratives made between 1986 and 2001 assembled on this wonderful DVD are exemplars of an unpolished, unpretentious school of moviemaking that aims at every moment to be audience-friendly. It’s an attitude embraced today by thousands of adolescents screwing around with camcorders, and by one Seth Rogen. None of them has ever heard of the popular Bay Area filmmaker, I’d wager, but they all inherited his credo: Filmmaking is fun!

topics: bay area, directors, distributors, dvd, experimental film, independent film

Take Two

Review: "The Signal"

It’s an idea so vivid yet simple you’ve got to wonder why more movies haven’t used it: Something deliberate or accidental happens that indiscriminately turns the majority populace into irrational, violent maniacs. Zombie movies toy with the notion of familiar folks behaving in a most unfamiliar fashion; there have been a few more direct applications of the concept, like culty horror movies “The Crazies,” “Halloween III” and “Blue Sunshine.” But probably no film has ever deployed this conceit quite as cleverly or viscerally as “The Signal” — which would be mighty impressive even if it didn’t have the additional distinction of being created in sequential, exquisite-corpse style by three writer-directors, two of them making their feature debut.

topics: reviews