Experience

Getting Behind the Music at Noise Pop Film Festival

Jimi Hendrix is not playing San Francisco’s 18th annual Noise Pop festival this year, but—along with Drive-By Truckers, George Clinton, Lou Barlow and Tool—he is making an appearance in the event’s Film Festival component, which runs February 24-28 at a variety of S.F. venues. It’s a disparate program ranging from portraits-of-an-artist to historical flashbacks, philosophical musings on music itself—and a couple items only tangentially about the auditory art form.

topics: cult cinema, digital filmmaking, directors, diy, documentary, music

Take Two

PFA revisits Val Lewton's brooding mood, chilling themes

The horror genre has only grown stronger in recent years—not just commercially, but also in terms of creativity (albeit the latter mostly in the genre’s non-mainstream efforts). Throughout cinema’s first decades, however, horror movies were dismissed by most grownups (and nearly all critics) as juvenile, silly, even offensive.

We can look today at the peak work by 1920s horrormeister Todd Browning (director of Lon Chaney’s greatest hits) and his 1930s successor James Whale (of the first Boris Karloff Frankensteins, plus The Invisible Man) and realize they made some of the finest films of their Hollywood era. But at the time, theirs and all other horror films were considered basically stupid—as was anything that hinged on superstition.

topics: actors, cult cinema, curators, directors, pacific film archive

Report

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

Critic's Notebook

Graphic transformation: Animation rises, CGI sinks in 2009

Science fiction has often dwelt upon the fear that machines will overtake man—which of course they kind of have, from the Industrial Revolution through the Digital Age, in terms of lessening the need for manual labor or even organic brainpower. But while technology may have taken some jobs, polluted our environment, etc., it hasn’t yet completely stolen humanity’s place in the scheme of things.

Except, one could argue, in the realm of movies. With this year’s summings-up extended to considering our first post-millennial decade, it’s a good moment to consider where mainstream cinema has gone since CGI sank its bloodless talons into the already less-than-exquisite corpse.

topics: animation, anime, bay area, comedy, cult cinema, filmmakers, genre films, hollywood, independent film, internet, red vic movie house, sf international animation festival, world cinema, youth

Platform

David Thomson revisits "Psycho's" critical moment

Fifty years ago this week, Alfred Hitchcock shot the shower scene in Psycho. Try not to think of Norman Bates, or his mother, or Anthony Perkins, when you hear “Don we now our gay apparel” —especially Dec. 23, when Psycho and Frenzy conclude the Castro Theatre series “Hitch For the Holidays.” Critic and historian extraordinaire David Thomson’s slender new book, The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder (Basic Books, $22.95), is a delicious and incisive commemoration of the film’s golden anniversary. Thomson spans the negotiations that gave Hitchcock creative control (and a financial windfall), drops in nuggets from the production and delivers a brilliant analysis of the film’s structure, scenes and shots. As the title suggests, the British-born, San Francisco-based writer also invokes the genteel world of movies before Psycho and catalogs the savagery that followed, from Polanski and De Palma to Red Riding, a British trilogy airing in February on IFC. We recently sat down for a civilized chat in his living room.

topics: authors, bay area, critics, cult cinema, film history, hollywood

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