Take Two

Expecting the Unexpected with Werner Herzog's 'My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done'

Werner Herzog has spent an entire career reaching wildly beyond the cinematic norm. His poetic, frequently transcendent narrative features have encompassed a parabolic society of little people (1970’s Even Dwarves Started Small), an adult wild child (Each Man for Himself and God Against All), putting his entire cast under hypnosis (Heart of Glass). Plus various permutations of Klaus Kinski, the brilliant, impossible actor Herzog showcased from 1972’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God through 1982’s Fitzcarraldo (on which Kinski replaced an ailing Jason Robards). The tortuous relationship between director and late subject—death threats included—was captured by Herzog’s My Favorite Fiend, one of his many great, eccentric documentaries.

topics: actors, film history

Avoiding Disaster

What's in a name?

Usually, in the afternoons, I go to the Walgreens near my office to pick up a Red Bull, and I’m often amused by the jumble bin of $5 DVDs near the checkout counter. Most of them are ridiculous action movies with washed up B-listers. I remember a couple of years ago, when Snakes on a Plane was out in theaters, I looked into the DVD jumble bin and saw a title called Snakes on a Train. It looked like a ridiculous, opportunistic ripoff. Such an opportunistic rip off, I bought it!

topics: diy, film history, hollywood, legal issues

Avoiding Disaster

What's in a name?

Usually, in the afternoons, I go to the Walgreens near my office to pick up a Red Bull, and I’m often amused by the jumble bin of $5 DVDs near the checkout counter. Most of them are ridiculous action movies with washed up B-listers. I remember a couple of years ago, when Snakes on a Plane was out in theaters, I looked into the DVD jumble bin and saw a title called Snakes on a Train. It looked like a ridiculous, opportunistic ripoff. Such an opportunistic rip off, I bought it! (Note: It’s still somewhere in my office, wrapped in plastic) Beyond very general plot similarities and a similar title, the two films are different, and only a fool would confuse Snakes on a Plane and Snakes on a Train. That being said, it is clear that the producers of Snakes on a Train were trying to cash in on the perceived popularity of Snakes on a Plane (the producers of Snakes on a Train also brought you the Transformers -like Transmorphers and The Day the Earth Stood Still -like The Day the Earth Stopped!). These films bring up some interesting copyright questions, but the question I am going to focus on is one of the film’s title.

topics: diy, film history, hollywood, legal issues

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

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

Experience

The Cockettes' celluloid afterglow still strong at 40

As a performing ensemble, The Cockettes were relatively short-lived. (So, sadly, were many members due to the AIDS crisis a decade later.) But their influence has been large, and seems ever more recognized. At present next-generation alternative S.F. theatre troupe Thrillpeddlers is passing the six-month mark with its surprise smash-hit revival of the Cockettes’ camp operetta Pearls Over Shanghai, currently extended through January 23.

It now includes an “Afterglow Floorshow” reprising numbers from other original Cockettes shows to honor the 40th anniversary of the troupe’s founding. That same milestone is marked Thursday by a one-night-only SFMOMA program you might kick yourself from here to eternity for missing.

The Cockettes on Film, at 40! sounds as good as it could possibly get for those of us too young or geographically disadvantaged to have experienced the group’s heyday in the flesh.

topics: activism, actors, diy, experimental film, film history, filmmakers, gay lesbian cinema, genre films, sfmoma

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