Platform

Jack Stevenson and "The Superstars Next Door"

By Matt Sussman

If John Waters is “the Pope of Trash” (according to the gospel of William S Burroughs) then freelance curator and film fanatic Jack Stevenson is a shoe-in for Cardinal. The last time Stevenson rolled into town in 2006, he arrived with a stack of film canisters that were a veritable Pandora’s box filled with drug scare propaganda, witchcraft and Scandinavian skin flicks. This time he comes bearing amateur blue movies, a gritty portrait of a bisexual hustler, and grainy reels documenting live, nude girls — all shot in San Francisco—for the series “The Superstars Next Door” at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. I checked in with Stevenson via email before he boarded his transatlantic flight. Here’s what he had to say about his hatred of television, why film preservationists have it wrong—and the most depraved flick ever made in Denmark.

topics: curators, digital filmmaking, yerba buena center for the arts

Critic's Notebook

Dead Channels comes alive

By Dennis Harvey

Fall is here in earnest, and all good moviegoers know it is time at last for the studios to unleash its least brain-numbing efforts of the year with Oscar in mind. Finally, we can enjoy serious cinematic art based on reputable literary sources, directed by Clint Eastwood, and/or featuring Catherine Deneuve.

But for a moment yet…screw that noise!

Those more inclined toward healthy doses of sleaze, gore and retro-shlock can rejoice that it’s also time for the second annual edition of Dead Channels. It’s dedicated to bringing "entertaining and intelligent science-fiction, fantasy, horror, action, exploitation and a few weird unclassifiable cinematic gems” to Bay Area audiences, this year encompassing one evening at Oakland’s Parkway in addition to a week at SF’s Roxie Cinema.

topics: directors, festivals, genre films, horror

Experience

Mill Valley Film Festival's Maher moment

By Dennis Harvey

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

In Production

Peaches' slice-'em-up and mental health reimagined and redefined

By Michael Fox

There are midnight movies series, and then there is Midnight Mass, Peaches Christ’s long-running vaudeville-burlesque-drag extravaganza at the Bridge. Peaches, aka Joshua Grannell, doesn’t simply screen campy cult faves but produces a themed show. Yet even that’s not enough to slake this gal’s creative thirst: Peaches has also written, directed and starred in a trio of infamous funny-scary short films that made their debut at Midnight Mass. A fourth, Grindhouse, doesn’t include Ms. Christ, and has always struck its director as the most fertile premise to expand into a feature. "The short film was just an attempt at an idea; it’s not a fully realized film," Grannell explains. "What would happen if a woman inherits a failing single-screen theater and she begins making her own art-horror films? What the public doesn’t know is she’s murdering the people in the movies." Grannell chuckles. "She sees these people as being her actors. She’s just not being honest about she’s using them."

topics: bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, documentary, political film

Insider

Yiyun Li, the voice of "A Thousand"

By Judy Stone

Yiyun Li has earned three Master’s degrees, won the Hemingway/Pen Award for her collection of short stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, and seen the title story made into a critically acclaimed film by Wayne Wang. But on the day I met her, she was always apologizing for something: being low-key about her new movie fame, about wearing mismatching socks, about admitting she cried after reading galley proofs of her forthcoming novel, The Vagrants. She even confessed with a giggle, "I’m a very apologetic person." She teaches writing at UC Davis, but today, she could be confused for a student, in bright red shirt and ragged jeans fashionably torn at the knee (although I sense she would cringe at the word "fashionably").

Her own words are written in deceptively simple English, not translated from her first language. They are exquisitely chosen and precise—with delicate, almost tender, surprising perceptions about the characters she explores: an elderly woman who discovers love for a troubled little boy, a middle-aged man engaging in adultery, a young woman pondering an abortion, a gay Chinese American nervously greeting his mom. All are set, needle sharp, in a China that is changing as an infant stock market makes a mockery of ideology.

topics: asian american cinema, authors, bay area, features