Insider

SFIFF51: The Miller Brothers on writing, pitching, acting, directing, and hitting one out of the ballpark

Right about now, San Franciscans could use a baseball story that warms hearts as opposed to chilling souls. Touching Home by Bay Area-raised identical twins Logan and Noah Miller is a largely autobiographical coming-of-age film that radiates sincerity. Two major league hopefuls contending with their alcoholic father and some bad luck round the bases of West Marin with steadfast purpose and occasional humor. More impressive than the gleam of these two new actors’ smiles and the polish of this debut film’s editing and cinematography is the chutzpah the twins demonstrated in getting actors like Ed Harris and Robert Forster to play major roles. Less likely, perhaps, than being called up to the big leagues was their capture of actor Harris’s attention in the alley of the Castro Theatre after a 2006 San Francisco International Film Festival tribute. They showed him a short trailer of their project, and a short while later, they got the call that he would be solidly behind it. The film makes its world premiere Saturday, April 26, during SFIFF51. SF360.org got a chance to ask the twins about baseball and miracles over email last week.

This week, SF360.org runs a special series of interviews with Bay Area filmmakers in the upcoming San Francisco International Film Festival. SFIFF51 runs April 24-May 8 at the Sundance Kabuki, Castro, Pacific Film Archive, Clay Theatre and other locations.

topics: actors, bay area, directors, filmmakers, independent film, san francisco international film festival, sports movies

Take Two

Review: "Boarding Gate"

Olivier Assayas made his name from the late 1980s via a series of “typical” intimate French arthouse dramas done with bracing freshness and verve. He felt like a leading light in that country’s cinematic next wave, even arriving at the job as so many New Wave greats had a generation before—by first working at famed critical journal Cahiers du Cinema.

From early youth studies Disorder and Cold Water to 1998’s Late August, Early September, he seemed the latest in a line of Gallic filmmakers who made low-key, casual observation stealthily add up to something powerful. Even his rather large-scale, starry “Les destinees sentimentale” (2000) felt cut from the same cloth.

topics: critics, filmmakers, french cinema, reviews

The List

Judy Stone's San Francisco Int'l Asian American Film Festival picks

A name familiar to longtime readers of the San Francisco Chronicle, where she once worked, Judy Stone came out with Not Quite a Memoir two years back, offering audiences conversations on film from around the world. This week, she offers SF360.org readers her top picks for the SFIAAFF’s collection of films from around the world—films screening at the Sundance Kabuki as you read this. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Ramparts, for over 40 years, and Stone has two other books out as well, Eye on the World: Conversations with International Filmmakers and The Mystery of B. Traven.

topics: asian cinema, authors, critics, film festivals, filmmakers

Film '07 -- Bests and more from the Bay Area's scene-makers

The critics have spoken, and the American West is winning in many year-end polls. But a quick survey of Bay Area programmers, curators, distributors, and filmmakers reveals a much richer picture of 2007’s best movie events, from avant-garde showcases to locally programmed extravaganzas. SF360.org offered some of the Bay Area’s leading voices a chance to weigh in on their film favorites and disappointments for the year, as well as their hopes for the next. We present an edited selection of their comments here.

topics: argentine cinema, bay area, castro theatre, critics year end polls, digital filmmaking, film festivals, filmmakers, gay lesbian cinema, jewish cinema, midnight movies, queer cinema, roxie

Reviews: "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story"; "Charlie Wilson's War"

Biopickins: Judd Apatow hits another high note.

It’s been one hell of a year for Judd Apatow, who’s come to so dominate American comedy that more than once I found myself thinking (especially during the tepid “Dan in Real Life”) “If only this movie had been written by Judd Apatow….”

topics: filmmakers, reviews

Crispin Glover

In a show of independence that really is a show, actor-writer-painter-filmmaker Crispin Hellion Glover has been touring the country with his new film, “It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine” (part two of his “It” trilogy, produced by his company Volcanic Eruptions), thus circumventing the standard corporate-dominated model of film distribution with his own horse-and-buggy extravaganza. There are solid reasons for doing so. “Everything Is Fine” is already the kind of idea that does not come out of a major studio alive — at least not in the eyes of a tenacious visionary like Glover — and its delivery to movie audiences requires a little loving care.

topics: actors, castro theatre, filmmakers, independent film

Francis Ford Coppola and "Youth Without Youth"

It’s hard to think of another filmmaker of Francis Ford Coppola’s stature and history who’s been so consistently wedded to the Hollywood mainstream — and so resistant to it.

On the one hand, there’s the director of such celebrated classics as the first two “Godfathers” and “Apocalypse Now;” of pure populist entertainments like “Peggy Sue Got Married” and “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.”

topics: filmmakers