Experience

Darkness lights up the Castro screen with Noir City's return

Every year at the end of January, many in the Bay Area film community tune their radar to the snowy, showy glare of the Sundance Film Festival. For anyone not actually attending, however, there’s a big, contrastingly “dark” consolation prize: The virtually simultaneous Noir City festival. Who’s to say those stay-at-homes aren’t the luckier ones?

Now in its eighth year, Noir City takes over the Castro Theatre for ten days January 22-31. The theme is “Lust and Larceny," and there are a number of nights paying tribute to particular stars and directors.

topics: actors, castro theatre, film festivals, genre films, hollywood, noir

Experience

Feast your eyes: a holiday film preview

I don’t know about you, but I know what I want for Christmas (and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, for that matter): Some decent movies. Hope springs eternal, especially at this time of year. It’s Hollywood custom now to reserve the majority of its prestige titles for an annual late onslaught, the idea being that award-bestowing organizations’ voters naturally gravitate toward whatever is freshest in their memories. In the indie sector, too, there are some goodies timed for holiday gifting.

So, here’s a glancing, far-from-exhaustive preview of what we’ve got to look forward to between now and New Year’s Day.

topics: activism, actors, animation, art film, awards, bay area, castro theatre, children's issues, comedy, critics, critics year end polls, cult cinema, directors, distributors, documentary film, dramatic films, music, musicals, roxie, world cinema

Report

Rachel Rosen returns to San Francisco Film Society

Rachel Rosen, who served as assistant director of programming at the San Francisco Film Society from 1994 to 2001, has rejoined the organization as director of programming, effective today. She succeeds Linda Blackaby, who held the post with distinction for the past eight years. Rosen was the director of programming of Film Independent (FIND) and the Los Angeles Film Festival since 2001, where she significantly increased attendance through innovative programming and a broader spotlight on foreign films.

topics: bay area, castro theatre, film festivals, hollywood, san francisco international film festival, toronto international film festival, world cinema

Platform

How Scary Cow co-op is making indie filmmaking in SF a little less frightening

"People hear stories about Robert Rodriguez or Chris Nolan," says Scary Cow founder Jager McConnell, and think that all it takes to make a movie is "a camera and an idea." But Rodriguez, he points out, "had a whole town helping him make his movie." San Francisco’s Scary Cow, which calls itself an indie film co-op, aims to be that "town," offering experience, people, money and equipment to aspiring filmmakers with ideas to burn. It currently has 200 filmmakers paying monthly fees and 20 films in progress. Film teams are formed via something of a speed-dating process in which ideas are pitched and crews find films they’d like to work on. The co-op has screened films at a variety of theaters in both the Bay Area and beyond it. We caught up with McConnell over email and he explained how Scary Cow’s been working since its inception in 2007.

topics: bay area, castro theatre, diy, documentary, dramatic films, shorts

Platform

Anita Monga enriches the SF Silent Film Festival

Film programmer Anita Monga has been enriching the local film experience and expanding horizons for audiences since she started, first at the Roxie Cinema and later at the York Theater, nearly 30 years ago. But it was during her tenure at the city’s grand movie palace, the venerable Castro Theatre, that she really made her mark, shepherding the venue to international prominence while working with distributors, festivals and filmmakers, developing eclectic programs and ongoing festivals such as Berlin and Beyond and Noir City. (Her partnership with Noir City’s Eddie Muller has helped turn that event into an annual rite of passage for noir aficionados and led to the establishment of a preservation initiative.) Since her departure from the Castro in 2004, Monga hasn’t looked back. When not juggling her various roles in sundry cities, she’s currently acting artistic director of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which runs this weekend at the Castro. True to Monga tradition, this year’s 12-program lineup, with plenty of live musical accompaniment, promises to be provocative, adventurous and fun.

topics: actors, bay area, castro theatre, silent film

Experience

"The Greatest Year in Film" turns 70 at the Castro

What was the best year ever for painting? Music? Literature? Any answers would be arbitrary at worst, debatable at best—the truth being, of course, that these art forms are just too vast, historied and changeable for the question to be useful at all.

Yet ask when was the best year for movies (Hollywood movies, that is), and there is actually a consensus so widespread it’s gone from opinion to virtual fact. That year would be 1939, when for whatever reasons—some explicable, others just accidents of timing—Hollywood’s “golden age” went platinum, delivering so many classic features it still beggars belief they all arrived in such close proximity.

topics: actors, castro theatre, exhibition, genre films, hollywood, oscars

Critic's Notebook

Frameline33: Youth in revolt

Traps set by lovers playing hunting games in the forest. Tween caterpillars getting ready to bolt the cocoon. Young communards turning their backs on outdated moral strictures. Ghosts of high school obsessions past. And multiple packs of teenagers on the road and on the run. In this year’s Frameline Fest, as so often in life, it’s all about the one(s) that got away.

topics: bay area, castro theatre, critics, cult cinema, diy, drama, frameline, gay lesbian cinema, genre films, sf international lgbt film festival, world cinema, youth