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

Report

Jennifer Phang on "Half-Life" and identity

Filmmaker Jennifer Phang’s experienced more than enough culture shocks in her life to empathize with the identity challenges of the men and women in her first feature, Half-Life, which is being released via VOD and DVD from Wolfe Video and Warner Digital this month. In Half-Life’s psychological drama, part live action, part animation, Pam, the 19-year old daughter, and Timothy, the 8-year old son of an Asian American mother, try to cope with their father’s disappearance and their mother’s affair with a young white lover. In the meantime, Pam’s only friend, a Korean adoptee, trying to find some sense of individualism and self-worth, has to find a way to reveal the existence of his African American lover to his fundamentalist Christian white parents.

topics: activism, asian american cinema, audiences, bay area, diy, film festivals, gay lesbian cinema, immigration, sf international asian american film festival, women, women filmmakers, world cinema, youth

Experience

Wintering with the SF Silent Film Festival

You’d assume the sound of silence would be restful. But just as Simon & Garfunkel started their song on that subject with “Hello Darkness, my old friend…,” one must admit there’s room for it to be kinda creepy, too. Arriving a tad late for Halloween, this year’s Silent Film Festival Winter Event offers one long day of revivals at the Castro that’s surprisingly macabre—given that it hails from the era best remembered for the chipper and charming likes of Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Clara Bow.

topics: bay area, film festivals, film history, hollywood, silent film

Platform

Frazer Bradshaw on the evolution of "Everything Strange and New"

It’s a testament to the programming staff at the Sundance Film Festival that first-time feature filmmaker Frazer Bradshaw’s low-key, Oakland-shot domestic drama was chosen to debut there last January. It makes a bold impression without brand names or buzzwords—working instead with solid performances and an inventive score to convey a dissonance between the inner and outer lives of a working-class man. Bradshaw appeared with other outliers and innovators, including Laurel Nakadate, Scott Sanders and David Russo, on a panel I moderated at that festival last year. (The film premiered locally at the SF International in the spring.) I recently got the chance to catch up with Bradshaw over email. His film opens at the Roxie on December 4 with a weekend benefit for co-star Luis Saguar, who passed away this past summer.

topics: actors, directors, diy, film festivals, independent film, sundance film festival

Avoiding Disaster

A challenge to filmmakers

Usually I use this column to address specific legal problems that come up when producing a film. I’m not going to address a legal concern this time, but instead, speak to a larger issue that I feel is rarely discussed: the lack of quality independent filmmaking today.

topics: authors, bay area, distributors, diy, film festivals, filmmakers, independent film, legal issues

Platform

Gerald Peary on the rise and fall of the film critic

Will the last film critic please turn out the lights? For a century, film critics have separated the wheat from the chaff and made the case for great films. But who will make the case for them? Boston Phoenix film critic Gerald Peary takes the task for this dying breed of writer in his feature-length documentary For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism. The film tours the rise, fall and reorientation of film criticism in the United States, from early silent-era plot summarizers who make way for the daily newspaper reviewers of the ’30s, who are replaced by auteur-theory debaters of the ’60s, who are succeeded in turn by the alt-weekly thinkers of the ’70s who, finally, face end times via the past decade’s upsurge in bloggers. What’s most interesting about the film is its take on the changes in public consciousness of both the movies and criticism itself. (And to his credit, Peary prioritizes the wry over the dry, even giving Andrew Sarris the opportunity to dish on his adversary Pauline Kael, who was not above gay-baiting her rival in the early stages. Sarris’s retort: "I took one look at Pauline, and she was not Katharine Hepburn.") In addition to the iconic Sarris, interviewees include The New Republic’s stately Stanley Kauffmann, self-starting phenom Harry Knowles (aintitcoolnews), pop-and-academic theorist B. Ruby Rich, Boston Globe daily reviewer Wesley Morris, the Los Angeles Times’s sometimes embattled Kenneth Turan and breakthrough newspaper-to-TV critic Roger Ebert. SF360.org got a chance to sit down with Peary first in his visit to the San Francisco International Film Festival last spring (where he spoke on a panel I moderated) and more recently, in the storied lobby of the Roxie Theater, where the film opened Friday. A few excerpts from the discussion follow.

topics: authors, critics, film festivals, film history, q&a, world cinema

Avoiding Disaster

A challenge to filmmakers

Usually I use this column to address specific legal problems that come up when producing a film. I’m not going to address a legal concern this time, but instead, speak to a larger issue that I feel is rarely discussed: the lack of quality independent filmmaking today.

In addition to being an entertainment lawyer, I’ve ended up acting as a sales rep on a number of films. In that role, I’ve spent the past couple of years going to a lot of film festivals, becoming intimately aware of the current downward trend in the independent film industry. It is true that the sky is falling, that the industry is downsizing, and the economics, which never made too much sense to begin with, make even less sense today. What a terrible time to be an independent filmmaker! Fewer buyers paying less! A shrinking audience! A digital world that no one knows how to utilize effectively, and is not meaningfully monetized! So what’s a filmmaker to do?

The answer may be the one no one wants to hear: Make better films.

topics: directors, distribution, film festivals, legal issues