Take Two

Review: "The Living End," remixed and remastered

What to think about attitudes toward and images of gays in U.S. media these days? It’s a complicated question. On one hand, clearly there have been enormous advances. Not so long ago, who could have imagined shows like The L Word or Will & Grace being long-running mainstream hits? Ellen and Rosie and such are beloved by housewives across America. Brokeback Mountain won Oscars—though not the big one, in what many speculated was a failure of nerve on the part of older Academy voters who simply didn’t want to watch it.

Yet Brokeback did not open the floodgates for gay-themed Hollywood projects as predicted, the studios regarding its success as a fluke. (We’ll see if Ang Lee’s upcoming gay-perspective Woodstock movie or Gus Van Sant’s Harvey Milk bio changes their minds.)

topics: bay area, dvd, queer cinema

Critic's Notebook

San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival

Cherry blossoms overflow the sidewalks and strangers suddenly seem willing to make eye contact. Spring in San Francisco, which, for the local film fan, means the start of festival season, a parade of one-time-only screenings running from the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival all the way up to July’s Silent Film Festival weekend. Now in its 26th year, SFIAAFF has grown from being a niche event to a major contender on the international festival circuit—with more than enough voices and crossovers to justify its unwieldy moniker.

topics: asian american cinema, asian cinema, center for asian american media, directors, documentary, dvd, sundance kabuki

Critic's Notebook

Cinequest's surprises

A “discovery” festival from Day One—meaning they premiere a lot of films, including many other fests might ignore or pass over—San Jose’s Cinequest actually adopted “Discover” as motto for this, its 16th year.

A five-day wade into the current program’s early going revealed business as usual: Very appreciative, if not often packed, audiences. Excited young filmmakers easy to distinguish from civilian ticketbuyers (who are generally older, wider, and don’t wear nearly so much black). The greeter guy at the Cinema 12 door who wears a different spangly topcoat every day. The hirsute guy who introduces certain films in a manner suggesting thwarted aspirations as standup comic. The highly variable quality of what’s on screen.

As the Hitachi convention at my hotel gave way to the Junior Cheerleader convention, Cinequest also shape-shifted into something much more interesting.

topics: directors, documentary, dvd, film festivals, independent film

Experience

'A Genuine Tribute to Peter Bogdanovich'

There’s a scene a third of a way into Peter Bogdanovich’s debut film Targets (1968) in which the director seems to directly address his future critics. The film, an early mash-up of serial killing and cinematic reflexivity made under Roger Corman’s watch, stars an aging Boris Karloff as a romanticized version of himself. A slick-haired Bogdanovich stands in to play the part of…the young celluloid-mad director trying to revive the Karloff character’s star with a couple of quickies for an independent producer. I’m not sure even the Coen Brothers would be arch enough for such a ploy, but Bogdanovich plays it beautifully in a scene in Karloff’s hotel room. One of the old actor’s first films, The Criminal Code (1931, directed by Howard Hawks), plays on television, and Bogdanovich’s director is immersed within moments. Before long, he’s shushing the real actor in favor of his black-and-white likeness.

topics: castro theatre, critics, directors, dvd, exhibitions

Take Two

"Warts & All: The Films of Danny Plotnick"

My high school physics teacher was a slight, nondescript fellow who hyperactively sparked to life in the classroom. His mantra was “Physics is fun!” and he gave one of the more clever lads an unexpected bonus point for devilishly scribbling it on an exam in place of an elusive correct answer. The reward wasn’t for sucking up, mind you, but for understanding that enthusiasm was more important than the dogged mastery of information. That this long-forgotten anecdote (and life lesson) came rushing back to me after spending some time with “Warts & All: The Films of Danny Plotnick” is neither accidental nor inappropriate. The 10 short comic narratives made between 1986 and 2001 assembled on this wonderful DVD are exemplars of an unpolished, unpretentious school of moviemaking that aims at every moment to be audience-friendly. It’s an attitude embraced today by thousands of adolescents screwing around with camcorders, and by one Seth Rogen. None of them has ever heard of the popular Bay Area filmmaker, I’d wager, but they all inherited his credo: Filmmaking is fun!

topics: bay area, directors, distributors, dvd, experimental film, independent film

"Her Name is Sabine," with SF360 Movie Night

Park your car in your own driveway and/or give your MUNI pass the evening off: It’s SF360 Movie Night, for which the entire Bay Area is invited to watch a film simultaneously in the comfort of home — yours or someone else’s. The selection this time around comes via monthly DVD club Film Movement, who’s sharing French actress-turned-documentarian Sandrine Bonnaire’s “Her Name is Sabine.” A delicately observed, clearly heartfelt, and extremely intelligent depiction of Bonnaire’s autistic sister as she experiences a different reality than many of us and moves/is moved through a variety of settings, “Her Name” offers viewers plenty to talk about at Tosca after the private screenings. The Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight FIPRESCI Award winner, says Rebeca Conget, Film Movement’s Vice President of Acquisitions and Distribution, is a piece of art. “It wasn’t just a dry documentary, but incredibly moving, beautifully shot.” And the subject matter? Conget reminds us of its relevance for a mental-health challenged North America, where autism is more common than cancer in children.

SF360 Movie Night, says, San Francisco Film Society Executive Director Graham Leggat, was developed in early 2006 as a riff on the “one-city one-book” idea. “SFFS is keenly interested in a wide spectrum of film-viewing experiences and in being part of the new social formations that arise around these experiences,” explains Leggat. “SF360 Movie Night marries the grassroots house party with a DVD subscription service and video blogging and tops it off with a party/discussion at Tosca.”

When a few hundred participants watch “Her Name is Sabine” Thursday night, November 29th, they may be watching in the homes of individuals, but they are participating in a collective encounter. Says Leggat, “Though this event will take place across the Bay Area, technology (and the post-screening nightcap/chat in North Beach) allows for a networked expanded cinema, a conservation of community, as it were. This is interesting to us, and to our audiences. And it’s not happening anywhere else in the country.”

Film Movement, the service that’s offered the film, is a company that started with the idea of bringing quality films from the international film festival circuit to people who wouldn’t otherwise have access to them, according to Conget. These are people perhaps not so much like you and me: people who live in areas without an art house theater, or who live in major metropolitan areas, but don’t have time to get out. The subscription model of the company, she says, makes them feel they’re in the loop — that they can actually see the films being talked about in the New York Times or SF Chronicle.

But Film Movement has appeal to more than just the temporarily shut in or geographically shut out: Their catalogue includes the highly touted Danish Academy Award entry, “Adam’s Apples,” and ’07 Sundance World Cinema Selection from Burkina Faso, “Dreams of Dust,” among many other titles.

SF360.org is a co-publication of the SF Film Society and indieWIRE.

topics: bay area, dvd, san francisco film society

Friedkin, "Cruising," and the Castro

There are untold artistic benefits to living in a culture of critical reassessment—otherwise, what would current generations think of “Vertigo?” But if the glut of superfluous “special edition” DVD packages over the past ten years is any indicator, then there are also some sorry side effects. Falling somewhere between the enshrined camp package (“Mommie Dearest”‘s Hollywood Royalty Edition, complete with John Waters commentary track!) and the sober-minded resurrection of the long unavailable and disenfranchised as crucial artifact (the recent “Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky” box set, featuring “El Topo”) will surely be Paramount’s imminent deluxe edition of William Friedkin’s 1980 film maudit, “Cruising.”

[SF360.org editor’s note: This is an indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot, published originally in indieWIRE on Sept. 4, 2007. A weeklong showing of the film — Sept. 7-13 — closes the Castro Theatre‘s William Friedkin series currently running.]

“Cruising”‘s squishily anticipated return to home video, and to the hearts and minds of a generation who had the benefit of possibly not knowing of its existence, will be accompanied by a brief theatrical run in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Add to all that a recent Cannes screening, followed by an alleged double standing ovation for Friedkin (come on…really?), and we have on our hands a full-fledged attempt at recouping “Cruising” as some sort of misunderstood masterpiece, and a reaffirmation of its director as visionary provocateur.

Paramount can only hope for cultural amnesia for this to work: “Cruising” remains a work of unparalleled, unedifying discomfort. Even the very synopsis still raises both cackles (“Al Pacino goes undercover in New York’s underground gay leather community…”) and hackles (”…to find a homosexual serial killer who’s indiscriminately leaving his victims’ severed parts and torsos all around the city”). What remains most befuddling about “Cruising”‘s address (which is definitively to the scared straights) is that, as Friedkin often states on the upcoming DVD’s supplemental interviews, it’s a film less about an underworld than a “transformation.” Which is that of Al Pacino, from ostensible hetero everyguy to…what exactly? Corrupted sodomite? Freaky-deaky leather dude? Literal murderer? Friedkin leaves all the possibilities as wide open as a gaping, well, you know, but all the ambiguity in the world can’t detract from the fact that Friedkin’s vision of the denigration of society and the individual starts right here, with a sling and a lubed-up fist. As a cop states while driving through the meat-packing district at the “Taxi Driver”-cribbed outset, “One day this whole city is gonna explode.”

Reactionary late-Seventies politics aside (“Cruising”‘s pre-AIDS fear of urban promiscuity is simply the gay flipside to “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” and just as crass), what is “Cruising” today other than a cultural curio? Sure, Friedkin’s aural pudding of jarring voice dubs and layered sound effects is at turns surprisingly erotic (rarely has the creak of leather been so teasingly heightened in a film) and memorably distressing (the villain’s voice sounds utterly inhuman, as though emanating from the bowels of a bog), but the best one can say for “Cruising” is that it sufficiently dramatizes seediness. If Friedkin were only interested in naturalistically evoking a time and place, as he now claims, why are almost all of the scenes with Pacino’s bright-eyed, boring, reassuringly feminine girlfriend (Karen Allen) underscored with airy violin allegro to so explicitly contrast the punk rock-infected ninth circle of the popper-sniffing, chain-wielding sexual miscreants? Pacino doesn’t learn big-time life lessons through his dabbling in the dark side—“Cruising” charts Pacino’s evolution not into sensitive straight guy, but rather into sexually dysfunctional maybe murderer; no “Tootsie,” this.

Paul Sorvino’s police captain states early on, in one of the film’s attempted self-defenses against the maelstrom of criticism that was to come, that the fetish community is “not in the mainstream of gay life”—reemphasized by Pacino’s friendly, unintimidatingly blonde neighbor (Don Scardino), who serves to establish that the lifestyle isn’t exclusively relegated to leather daddies but also theater queens. While the film may not be disarmingly retro, its generalizations could at least be chalked up to the thorough marginalization of all gay men of the era. Some may let “Cruising” off the hook today—looking at it through a 2007 filter, its schlocky score, dated characterizations, and gritty ’70s New York time-capsule feel make it safely irrelevant. Yet it’s also far too easy for its filmmakers to now plead innocence, painting the 1980s as some dark unenlightened age during which they were stunned by the gay community’s organized protests. Recouping this one amounts to nothing more than taking part in a Friedkin vanity project. “Cruising” has been freshly dug up for a new generation of luckily clueless viewers; but, as we know, children shouldn’t play with dead things.

[Michael Koresky is co-founder and editor of Reverse Shot and the managing editor and staff writer of the Criterion Collection. Reprinted with permission, copyright Michael Koresky, indieWIRE 2007.]

topics: dvd, filmmakers, reviews