Take Two

Mostly British and Very Entertaining

Tragically underrepresented in the Bay Area’s densely packed world of globally oriented film festivals is: the land(s) of our erstwhile colonial rulers! Being English-language, films from the UK and its former colonies do have a leg-up in terms of crashing the U.S. foreign-film market. (Although Canada is the exception. . . . ) And those that don’t make it are frequently programmed in the larger festivals like the San Francisco International, Mill Valley and Cinequest.

Still, there’s a fair amount of good work that’s underseen Stateside. Ergo the San Francisco Neighborhood Theatre Foundation and California Film Institute’s second annual Mostly British Film Festival, which unfolds February 4-11 at S.F.’s Vogue Theatre and Feb. 7-10 at the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.

topics: bay area, british cinema

Take Two

'Fish Tank' finds truth

Writer-director Andrea Arnold created a stir with her first feature Red Road, which scooped up the 2006 Cannes Prix du Jury among a slew of other awards. (She’d also won the Live Action Short Oscar a year prior for Wasp.) It was a dark and surprising drama about a Glasgow woman who develops an obsessive, stalker-type interest in an ex-con who’s unaware they’d had a significant prior encounter long before.

The new Fish Tank which opens this Friday in Bay Area theaters, is arguably an even stronger work. It confirms Arnold—writing solo this time, where Red Road was based on characters created by others for a unique Denmark-Scotland coproduction trilogy—as one of the most promising screen talents to emerge from Britain in recent years.

topics: actors, british cinema, directors, women filmmakers

Take Two

Capturing a rough time for Clough in "Damned United"

There’s an advantage to being an insulated American when watching The Damned United and its dramatization of an important part of the life of British coaching legend Brian Clough. Since the States likes its football with helmets and shoulder pads and a ridiculous amount of commercial breaks, most Americans are likely not to know how things pan out for Clough, allowing The Damned United to offer the English football novice viewer complete discovery. The unknown unknowns were part of the pleasure in watching this film for me—but I will take your continued reading of this piece as permission to partly spoil that particular pleasure.

Brian Clough is a man known for many things by English football fans, but this film focuses on the 44 days he managed the Leeds United football club.

topics: british cinema, directors, sports film

Take Two

Witty "In the Loop" is whip-smart

Given the surfeit of good real-world material these last few decades, one might imagine there’s always plenty of sharp political satire around. Yet take away The Colbert Report and suddenly the landscape looks a lot more barren than it ought. The dearth really becomes obvious when something arrives as high contrast: Something like In the Loop, the razor-toothed, no-stranger-than-truth British satire opening in theaters this Friday.

topics: actors, british cinema, comedy, political film, world cinema

Critic's Notebook

Frameline33: Icons and unsung heroes

"What do they want from an old dinosaur like me?" quips John Hurt, reprising his career-making role as Quentin Crisp, in response to an invitation to regale a much younger audience about his life. By this point in An Englishman in New York, Richard Laxton’s sequel to The Naked Civil Servant (1975) and this year’s opening night film at Frameline33, Crisp has been branded a black sheep for refusing to retract flip comments made on the then-emerging AIDS crisis and is still adjusting to the slights that come with being perceived as some living relic of the past. To a large degree, the image of Crisp as a stoic holdover from an earlier age of faeries and rough trade who survived on wit and sheer force of will was one of his own making, and it is certainly a reputation that Claxton’s film helps secure.

topics: audiences, avant-garde, bay area, british cinema, documentary, filmmakers, frameline, gay lesbian cinema, genre films, queer cinema, sf international lgbt film festival, world cinema

Found

SFIFF52: Planet Armstrong

Franny Armstrong is a fast talker. That is, if the breathless clip at which she answered questions after Sunday’s San Francisco International Film Festival screening of her climate-change film, The Age of Stupid, is any indication. Then again, the British documentarian (McLibel, Drowned Out) has some pressing information to convey. And as her film makes plain, and as she engagingly reiterated during the Q&A—where she used audience questions as starting points for rattled-off anecdotes, wry asides, and pleas for the involvement of everyone sitting in the theater—there isn’t much time left.

topics: british cinema, documentary, environmental films, filmmakers, independent film, san francisco international film festival

Take Two

Terence Davies' "Of Time and the City" is poetic, personal

One might assume from the unhurried meticulousness of his features—and the fact that there have only been four of them over the last 20-plus years—that Terence Davies is simply a slow worker. But the truth is something much worse, at least for those of us who think he’s one of the greatest living filmmakers: He apparently just has a hell of a time getting his productions funded.

It’s been almost a decade since the brilliant Edith Wharton adaptation House of Mirth, and Davies has been quite public of late about his frustrations in getting the money people to commit. Such travails collapsed his plans to film the classic 1930s Scottish novel Sunset Song with Kirsten Dunst, amongst other fine fits. The BBC, Channel 4 and UK Film Council all declined his proposals—and what the freak should take priority for such institutions over supporting a national treasure like Terence Davies?

topics: british cinema, cannes film festival, directors, distributors, documentary, world cinema