Diary

Nights on the Towne: Film Society Awards Night and a refreshing "Shampoo"

You know a film festival is beginning to work its way into your brain when, in a landscape of intersecting ideas, you begin to witness the collisions. The diners at Film Society Awards Night this past Thursday—including Warren Beatty, Jerry Brown, Willie Brown, Maria Bello, John Burton and Dede Wilsey—saw a mash-up of two opposing approaches to the art of great filmmaking in awards to Mike Leigh and Robert Towne. One shuns Hollywood, one helped create it. Leigh builds screenplays after a long collaborative process with an acting crew. Towne writes screenplay masterpieces he begrudgingly alters at the request of directors and actors, often (though certainly not always) to the detriment of his original vision. Both, of course, are keen observers of humanity, a fact that can be observed not only in their filmmaking, but also in their speechmaking.

[Editor’s note: Visit SF360.org’s Blogs page for Judy Stone’s 1975 interview with Warren Beatty.]

topics: actors, bay area, directors, san francisco international film festival

Insider

SFIFF51: Eddie Muller's muses

A self-described "cultural archeologist," Alameda’s Eddie Muller is renowned as an expert on all things noir. As founder of the Noir City, the annual San Francisco Film Noir Festival—which packs crowds into the Castro Theater to watch rarities like Edge of Doom and The Velvet Touch and pay tribute to forgotten stars like Joan Leslie—Mueller has earned a reputation for breathing new life into lost classics. At this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, Muller showcases a new talent: film directing. His debut short film, The Grand Inquisitor, pays homage to the Dashiel Hammet-style detective story, but with a twist—the investigator is a dame.

topics: actors, authors, bay area, directors, noir, 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

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

Insider

SFIFF51: The Miller Brothers on writing, pitching, acting, directing, and hitting one out of the ballpark

Right about now, San Franciscans could use a baseball story that warms hearts as opposed to chilling souls. Touching Home by Bay Area-raised identical twins Logan and Noah Miller is a largely autobiographical coming-of-age film that radiates sincerity. Two major league hopefuls contending with their alcoholic father and some bad luck round the bases of West Marin with steadfast purpose and occasional humor. More impressive than the gleam of these two new actors’ smiles and the polish of this debut film’s editing and cinematography is the chutzpah the twins demonstrated in getting actors like Ed Harris and Robert Forster to play major roles. Less likely, perhaps, than being called up to the big leagues was their capture of actor Harris’s attention in the alley of the Castro Theatre after a 2006 San Francisco International Film Festival tribute. They showed him a short trailer of their project, and a short while later, they got the call that he would be solidly behind it. The film makes its world premiere Saturday, April 26, during SFIFF51. SF360.org got a chance to ask the twins about baseball and miracles over email last week.

This week, SF360.org runs a special series of interviews with Bay Area filmmakers in the upcoming San Francisco International Film Festival. SFIFF51 runs April 24-May 8 at the Sundance Kabuki, Castro, Pacific Film Archive, Clay Theatre and other locations.

topics: actors, bay area, directors, filmmakers, independent film, san francisco international film festival, sports movies

Found

The San Francisco Irish Film Festival

The Fifth Annual Irish Film Festival begins this Wednesday at the Roxie with a slate of narratives and documentaries imbued with Ireland’s particularly unique sense of time and place in the modern world; the people, the pubs, and that iconic, green pastoral landscape.

Irish actor and comedian Pat Shortt stars in the opening night film Garage (rhymes with ‘carriage’ when said with the appropriate accent) though the film utilizes his talents less for comedic value and more for his ability to believably portray the subtle mannerisms of Josie, the well-meaning, deeply lonely town simpleton. This is the second collaboration by director Leonard Abrahamson and writer Mark O’Halloran, whose first feature Adam & Paul, was a similar, heavily character-driven narrative marked by what seems to be emerging as a thematic trademark: sympathetic characters in inescapably tragic situations. Garage took home the C.I.C.A.E. Award at Cannes in 2007.

topics: actors, directors, documentary, independent film, irish cinema, oscars, shorts, sundance film festival

Crispin Glover

In a show of independence that really is a show, actor-writer-painter-filmmaker Crispin Hellion Glover has been touring the country with his new film, “It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine” (part two of his “It” trilogy, produced by his company Volcanic Eruptions), thus circumventing the standard corporate-dominated model of film distribution with his own horse-and-buggy extravaganza. There are solid reasons for doing so. “Everything Is Fine” is already the kind of idea that does not come out of a major studio alive — at least not in the eyes of a tenacious visionary like Glover — and its delivery to movie audiences requires a little loving care.

topics: actors, castro theatre, filmmakers, independent film