Platform

Michael House's translation of Tati debuts at YBCA

Riding the crest of the Tati tsunami hitting our shores—two retrospectives, one at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the other at Pacific Film Archive this month, along with arthouse screenings of M. Hulot’s Holiday — is an outstanding documentary, The Magnificent Tati. It’s by Michael House, who lived in San Francisco for 12 years before moving to Paris, where he and his wife, Julie, have lived for the past decade. House still considers himself a San Franciscan, however, and returned to San Francisco to complete the final stages of The Magnificent Tati in collaboration with Kim Aubry’s ZAP Zoetrope. (Aubry used to be the Head of Post Production at Zoetrope Studios and is a long-time collaborator with Francis Ford Coppola.) House phoned me from Paris to converse on the upcoming premiere. The Magnificent Tati has its U.S. premiere in San Francisco at YBCA on Sunday, January 24, 2010, 2 p.m., with the director in attendance.

topics: actors, composers, critics, directors, documentary, french cinema, genre films, hollywood, photography, q&a, world cinema

Report

Citizen critics found new outlets, faced challenges in 2009

The silver lining to a decade that saw traditional critics in conventional media dwindle? The explosion of socially networked citizen critics who’ve helped create a multidimensional, democratic dialogue about the movies. San Francisco, with its panoply of film festivals, has, not surprisingly, spawned a wealth of such web-based writers. We checked in with a few of these writers, some of whom call themselves bloggers, to get a snapshot of what ’09 brought the web’s way as the economy faltered, and the community tweeted.

topics: bay area, blogs, cinephiles, critics, exhibition, festivals, world cinema

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Thoughts on the aughts: best/worst trends of the year and decade

A decade as odd as this one, with George Bush and Barack Obama as its bookends, deserves to be examined. While the U.S. moved from rebuilding decimated skyscrapers to the rebuilding of an entire economy, film moved from the multiplex to the mailbox to the cell phone. But did the pictures really get small? We tried to find out by surveying Bay Area film-industry professionals as well as everyday fans on the trends that moved them. We found love for animation and hate for the ascendancy of the first-person narrator-star in documentary films. We saw pleas for more collaboration and less ego. We encountered disdain for CGI and hope for independent exhibitors and filmmakers. The comments below were selected from many we received; needless to say, we couldn’t publish everything. If you feel we missed anything in particular, we encourage you to issue a few opinions of your own in the "comments" box at story’s end.

topics: activism, actors, animation, bay area, cinephiles, critics, critics year end polls, digital distribution, digital filmmaking, directors, distributors, diy, documentary film, drama, environmental films, gay lesbian cinema, genre films, tv, world cinema, youth

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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

Report

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

First-person

Indie Toolkit writers rewind/fast-forward on the year/decade in film

The decade in screenwriting: Looking back over the past several years—to 2006, for example, when four of the American Film Institute’s top 10 films of the year were comedies, as opposed to just one each in 2008 and 2009—a number of prominent 2009 films took on serious topical subjects, from war to racism to financial insolvency. An ever-expanding number of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror vehicles offered near fatal adrenaline rushes and perhaps a needed relief from everyday troubles. But an especially notable trend in the stories told on film in the past year was toward the dark, lonely, inside story.

topics: activism, audiences, authors, bay area, critics, digital distribution, digital filmmaking, directors, drama, dramatic films, dvd, hollywood, how-to, independent film, internet, screenwriting

Experience

After Sept. 11, 2001, a decade found its way

On September 13, 2001, I stood in a small park in downtown Toronto, shocked but confident, and spoke to Canadian television: From now on, movies would not be the same, Hollywood and indie films would change completely. Everything would be different. It had to be, didn’t it?

Well, no, as it turned out.

I was wrong.

[Editor’s note: SF360.org is devoting this and the following week to coverage of the year and decade in film.]

topics: activism, argentine cinema, audiences, authors, bay area, critics, critics year end polls, curators, digital distribution, digital filmmaking, directors, distributors, diy, documentary, drama, dramatic films, dvd, exhibitio, tv, web, women, women filmmakers, world cinema, youth