Critic's Notebook

SF International Asian American Film Festival Visits the Archives

A theme that emerged in this year’s San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF) was the importance of archives in the film world. The existence of film archives and restoration facilities all have a part to play in the films of Lino Brocka (who received retrospective treatment in the fest), Kim Ki-young’s 1960s classic The Housemaid, Ruby Yang’s documentary A Moment in Time (about Chinese American movie houses of old San Francisco), documentaries such as Aoki and State of Aloha that make heavy use of archival footage to tell their non-fiction narratives, and even an Austrian director’s film about representatives of the North Korean women’s soccer team, Hana, Dul, Sed….　

topics: activism, asian american cinema, asian cinema, audiences, authors, awards, bay area, blogs, sf international asian american film festival

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Bay Area's Pixar rises again at Oscars

Cementing its status as the preeminent animation company of the ‘00s, Pixar won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature for the third time in seven years. Up director Pete Docter collected his first trophy in six trips, a stunning run that includes original screenplay nominations for Toy Story (1995), Wall-E (2008) and Up. The helium-fueled adventure was further buoyed by Michael Giacchino’s Oscar for original score, the category in which he was nominated two years ago for Ratatouille.

Pixar received five nominations altogether, including Best Picture (snagged by The Hurt Locker, directed by San Carlos native and San Francisco Art Institute alum Kathryn Bigelow), Original Screenplay (awarded to Mark Boal’s for The Hurt Locker over Docter and co-writer Bob Peterson) and Mixing.

topics: activism, animation, awards, bay area, hollywood, independent film, oscars

Q&A

Ehrlich, Goldsmith on Unearthing, Reclassifying ‘Pentagon Papers’

Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith’s Academy Award nomination for The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers is, among other things, a validation of the documentary’s right-now relevance. In revisiting the suspenseful events surrounding the formerly hawkish military analyst’s principled decision to leak the military’s classified history of the Vietnam War to the New York Times and 18 other newspapers in 1971, the Berkeley filmmakers inevitably call to mind the Bush Administration’s hyped case for invading Iraq and the media’s abdication of its responsibility to question and investigate. The Most Dangerous Man in America flows naturally from both Ehrlich’s 2002 doc The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It (co-directed with Rick Tejada-Flores) and Goldsmith’s 1996 Oscar nominee, Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press. I sat down separately with Goldsmith and Ehrlich at the Zaentz Media Center in December, smack between their local premiere in the Mill Valley Film Festival and the Academy Award announcement. Currently beginning its national theatrical release through First Run Features, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers opens Friday, February 19, in San Francisco and Berkeley.

topics: activism, awards, bay area, documentary, oscars

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The greatest finds of my generation

The harsh glare of the spotlight that brought Howl mixed reviews from critics on opening night of the Sundance Film Festival had melted into a warm glow by Saturday, when the Bay Area-made nonfiction feature played to an adoring audience at Park City’s Library venue. Programmer David Courier’s slip of the tongue as he celebrated "two of the most venerated documentary filmmakers of our time, Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman" (Oscar winners for Common Threads and The Times of Harvey Milk), by praising how the two were "making their first fourway—I mean FORAY—into dramatic films" offered an appropriately irreverent frame for a film about Allen Ginsberg’s development as a poet and the fate of his epic "Howl" in a 1957 San Francisco courtroom.

[Editor’s note: Continue reading entries on the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, including interviews with Bay Area makers Sam Green and the Butcher Brothers Mitchell Altieri and Phil Flores, critical takes on films and events of the festival, behind-the-scenes photos, as well as exclusive interviews with Bay Area Sundance staffers in SF360 Blogs.]

topics: activism, actors, authors, awards, bay area, diy, documentary, drama, dramatic films, sundance film festival, sundance kabuki

Experience

Animal-rescue film "Mine" finds no shelter from Katrina's emotional aftermath

It’s not fair, but the shelf life of a documentary often depends more on its subject than its quality. And for certain works in progress, the window may be quite small and the pressure on the filmmaker pretty intense. All the while Geralyn Pezanoski worked on Mine, her debut doc about the separation and occasional reunion of pets and owners in post-Katrina New Orleans, the 2005 hurricane was receding into the distance. “A lot of people told me, ‘If you don’t get this out in two years, you won’t have an audience,’” she recalls. Sound reasoning, except it was blown out of the water from the moment the doc premiered last spring at South by Southwest, where it went on to collar the Audience Award. As Film Movement takes the film across the country this month , with the Roxie serving as the local venue beginning Friday, January 8, ahead of its February broadcast on PBS’s Independent Lens, Pezanoski has a theory about the timeliness of Mine. “It transcends Katrina or any disaster, because it’s about how we are in the world,” she explains.

topics: activism, awards, bay area, digital filmmaking, distribution, diy, documentary, women filmmakers

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Top 10s of the 2000s

It’s no surprise that we—a group of critics, fans, exhibitors and filmmakers in the Bay Area responding to survey questions on the best films of the decade—did not arrive at a consensus. It would be a terrible sign of the aggregation era if we had. Indeed, the eclectic nature of this list proves that the long tail may continue to wag, happily, into the next decade, bringing diversity, perhaps even democracy, to a screen near you. The lists below are published in the order they were received, with director/country of origin on first mention of a film, with comments offered in a few cases. Please, offer us lists of your own in the "comments" box below.

topics: audiences, authors, awards, bay area, critics, critics year end, cult cinema, curators, directors

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Top 10s of 2009: Critics, filmmakers, exhibitors, distributors and fans speak

It was a big year for 3D, but critics and film-industry folk in the Bay Area found many other dimensions in the cinema of 2009. Included in these lists we solicited from the community are not just films released this year locally, but occasionally films that have had festival-only screenings elsewhere or films made in ’08 that had local releases in ’09. We gave wide berth to our well-traveled respondents, a few of whom offered comments on films, or limited their selections to moments within films. Directors and countries of origin on films are listed on first mention; lists appear in the order they were received. And please: Join the fray. Share your own lists in the "comments" box, below.

topics: audiences, authors, awards, bay area, cinephiles, critics, critics year end polls, cult cinema, curators, directors