The List

Bollywood by the Bay

Every morning I wake up with Bollywood movie tunes going through my head. Every. Single. Morning. Such is the life of a Bollywood fanatic who needs the addictive rhythms, blinding bling-covered costumes, sensational settings, and emotional outpourings of Hindi Cinema. To keep from getting the tremors, I require an injection several times a month. Happily the Bay Area is not stingy with its Indian film offerings. Listed below are some of the best places to get your fix.

The much anticipated Bollywood film “Jodhaa Akbar” opens at the Balboa Theater in San Francisco this Friday (the same day as the world-wide release). This movie has big-time creds featuring two of the hottest Bollywood stars, Ashwariya Rai Bachchan and Hrithik Roshan, scored by the prolific composer A.R. Rahman, and helmed by Ashutosh Gowariker, director of the Oscar nominated “Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India” (which featured a truly exciting hour-and-a-half cricket match).

topics: bollywood, lists

Experience

Undying love for George A. Romero

It probably wasn’t George A. Romero’s original dream to become semi-famous for movies about the flesh-eating undead. Yet arguably no American director has creatively given so much to the horror genre as he — or gotten so little back, at least in financial terms. Does he actually like making zombie flicks every few years? Or is it just the one reliable commercial fallback in a career that’s perpetually gotten the short end of the mainstream-funding stick?

topics: directors, lists

Film '07: The best undistributed films of the year

What is it about Korean auteurs that have critics salivating and distributors running for the exits? Last year, Hong Sang-soo’s “Woman on the Beach” topped indieWIRE’s best undistributed films list for 2007. This year, Hong compatriot Lee Chang-dong’s “Secret Sunshine” was far-and-way the winner of the honor. Thirty-four of the 106 critics surveyed in the 2007 indieWIRE Critics’ Poll put the film on their list as one of the best undistributed films of the year. But, of course, it’s an accolade that cuts both ways: Call it a back-handed compliment, as Caveh Zahedi once did upon receiving his award for “Best Film Not Playing at Theater Near You,” or a paean for the sorry state of art-house film distribution.

topics: critics year end polls, independent film, lists

Five great skate features

Gus Van Sant’s new film, “Paranoid Park,” screening this Saturday night at Letterman Digital Arts as a benefit for SF360 co-publisher the SF Film Society, is the latest coming-of-age flick to suggest that an insider’s view of skateboard culture can reveal secrets about the modern teenage condition. Of course, if you’ve ever seen “MVP 2,” a film about a skateboarding monkey, or “The Skateboard Kid,” a low budget kid’s movie, starring Dom DeLuise, you know skate films can also utterly fail as pieces of art, too. As a lifetime skate junkie, I’ve seen it all. This is a list of skate-films that actually matter, films that helped establish skateboarding as the sexiest, dirtiest, and coolest subculture known to man.

1. “Thrashin’”
This was the first film I ever saw that portrayed skateboarding as a lifestyle rather than as a kid’s hobby or a sport. While the plotline is formulaic to the bone — think Romeo and Juliet on wheels — the director does manage to accurately portray skateboarders as members of a distinct subculture, one that has a lot of heart despite its seeming ruggedness. “Thrashin’” was also the first skate-related film to rely on real skateboarders for authenticity. The punked-out Daggers were and are an actual group of skateboarders from LA, and the cameos from professional/amateur skaters are too many to count. Thanks to “Thrashin’”, the public image attached to skateboarding went from childish and corny to “hot, reckless, and totally insane,” the film’s famous tagline.

2. “The Search for Animal Chin”
“The Search for Animal Chin” was the first, and remains one of the only, plot-driven skateboard-industry films to date. It’s really just a skate-action video, loosely based around The Bones Brigade’s search for the alleged founder of skateboarding, an old wispy-bearded man named Animal Chin. The audience follows The Brigade, a crew of the best skateboarders from the 1980s, as they chase the elusive Chin from California to Mexico and Hawaii, stopping along the way to party with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, skate a rich kid’s pool, and get gnarly and rad whenever possible. Ultimately, the crew discovers the true essence of skateboarding: a certain devil-may-care mind-state unattainable off-board. “The Search for Animal Chin” was Stacy Peralta’s first attempt to make a real film, something he pulled off quite well, nearly 20 years later, with “Lords of Dogtown.”

3. “Gleaming the Cube”
“Gleaming the Cube” is another super-sappy Hollywood teen flick about star-crossed lovers who happen to skate. But it helped validate skateboarding as a legitimate youth culture with its own set of beliefs, a distinct look, and an awesome soundtrack. Christian Slater plays a rebellious young skater who turns into a vigilante love machine when his brother turns up murdered. He wears leather and denim, hangs out with real professional skateboarders, and wants nothing more than to be understood on his own terms — something all teenagers yearn for. This is the one that sealed the deal for me. I still want to be Christian Slater (pre- “3000 Miles to Graceland,” of course).

4. “Kids,” “Ken Park,” “Wassup Rockers”
Larry Clark has done wonders for skateboarding’s rebel identity. “Kids” revealed that skateboarders enjoy drugs, sex, and partying almost as much as jumping down stairs and nose-grinding ledges. In “Ken Park,” Clark uses skate culture to comment on the American Dream swindle, suggesting that even the children of wholesome suburbanites are prone to having group sex, killing their grandparents, doing drugs, and committing suicide. “Wassup Rockers” follows a group of Latino punk-rocker skaters from East LA as they cope with racism, exploitation, and life in the ghetto. Here, Clark uses skate-culture as a metaphor for the universal teenage problem of feeling like an outcast. In each of his films, Clark uses inexperienced actors to convey a sense of authenticity, a tactic Van Sant uses in “Paranoid Park.”

5. “Lords of Dogtown”
I was all set to hate this movie, but when I found out Stacy Peralta — former owner of Powell-Peralta skateboard, a skate-legend in his own right, and the maker of “Dogtown and Z-Boys” — actually wrote the script, I decided to give it a chance and was pleasantly surprised. “Lords of Dogtown” explains that skateboarding will always be an outsider sport even if it does occasionally whore itself out to corporate interests. Skateboarding’s roots are that deep.

Honorable Mentions

6. “Back to the Future”
Marty McFly had this special thing he would do with his board where he’d stop abruptly and kick it into the air and then catch it without batting an eye. It was pretty much the coolest thing in the world if you happened to be a six year-old boy at the time.

7. “Video Days (Blind Skateboard Co.)”
This was Spike Jonze’s first “film,” and remains one of the most respected skate-industry flicks to date. It helped launch Jonze’s directing career and set Jason Lee (“Mallrats,” “Alvin and the Chipmunks,” “My Name is Earl”) on a path toward super-stardom. If Jonze hadn’t impressed so many people with “Video Days,” movies like “Jackass I and II,” “Being John Malkovich,” and “Adaptation,” would have never been made.

8. “Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator”
When I was 11 years old, Gator was one of the biggest and coolest names in skateboarding. He eventually turned into a raging egomaniac and murdered his girlfriend. “Stoked” is a cautionary tale for aspiring skaters.

topics: directors, filmmakers, letterman digital arts center, lists, san francisco film society

15 docs on the Oscar short list

Fifteen documentary films have been selected for the "short list" of titles competing in the Best Documentary Feature category at the 80th Academy Awards, according to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Documentary Branch screening committee viewed the eligible documentaries in a preliminary round of screenings, according to AMPAS, and branch members will now select the five 2007 nominees from among the 15 titles on this shortlist.

[SF360.org Editor’s note: This article appeared originally in indieWIRE on Nov. 19, 2007.]

The full list is:
1. "Autism: The Musical," directed by Tricia Regan
2. "Body of War," directed by Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro
3. "For The Bible Tells Me So," directed by Daniel G. Karslake
4. "Lake of Fire," directed by Tony Kaye
5. "Nanking," directed by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman
6. "No End in Sight," directed by Charles Ferguson
7. "Operation Homecoming – Writing the Wartime Experience," directed by Richard Robbins
8. "Please Vote For Me," directed by Wejun Chen
9. "The Price of Sugar," directed by Bill Haney
10. "A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman," directed by Peter Raymont
11. "The Rape of Europa," directed by Richard Berge and Bonni Cohen
12. "Sicko," directed by Michael Moore
13. "Taxi to the Dark Side," directed by Alex Gibney
14. "War/Dance," directed by Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine
15. "White Light/Black Rain," directed by Steven Okazaki
Nominations will be announced on Tuesday, January 22, 2008 and the Academy Awards for outstanding film achievements of 2007 will be presented on Sunday, February 24, 2008.

topics: awards, critics year end polls, documentary, lists, oscars

The many faces of Dylan

One of those American icons who got that way partly by carefully shaping his own enigma — oh, plus he’s kinda talented — Bob Dylan is not the kind of musician one would expect to lend himself to something as corrupt, populist, exposing and/or distorting as The Movies. He’s no Elvis, capable of being haplessly soul-sucked into a Hollywood machine that might wring his commercial value dry (in such deathless vehicles as “Tickle Me,” “Fun in Acapulco,” “Kissin’ Cousins” and “Clambake”) while destroying his artistic credibility.

Elvis needed — and fortunately got — a strictly-music career “comeback” that restored his cred. Dylan, on the other hand, never pandered. In fact, he frequently left his core audience bothered and bewildered by making creative leaps they were only able to process (if at all) in retrospect. Since his earliest brushes with fame he’s clearly enjoyed confabulating, confounding, and confusing any clear perception about himself, refusing to play the usual celebrity game of fake transparency. With Dylan, there’s always smoke both in front of and behind the mirrors.

Todd Haynes’ new “I’m Not There,” the talking-point movie of this fall’s festival season, both replicates and examines the hazy landscape of fact, fiction, art and myth comprising Dylanology. It’s not a documentary or even a dramatized biography, but rather a meditative fantasia on the many guises and interpretations Dylan has lent himself to thus far — though in fact his name is never even uttered.

Instead, we have a crazy sextet of not-at-all-alike actors playing aspects of a mostly imaginary yet familiar iconography. Marcus Carl Franklin is a pre-teen, Southern, African American blues prodigy who calls himself “Woody Guthrie.” Arthur (Ben Whishaw) is the very portrait of slouching Beat poet disaffection. Robbie (Heath Ledger) is a ’60s Method actor — clearly Brando and James Dean helped shape Dylan’s self-image, as they did a whole generation — whose stray-dog wanderings have pretty much exhausted the patience of his wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg), prompting her toward her own new independence.

Christian Bale plays Jack, the folk-music hero who “betrays” his flock by going electric, then finds another entirely by going Christian. Richard Gere (!) is Billy (as in The Kid), an exhausted Old West outlaw hero forced into one last confrontation, amidst the carnival-ized Americana of Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 film “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” (in which Dylan played a supporting role) and some post-folk, pre-Jesus Dylan songwriting. Last but way-not-least, Cate Blanchett does a brilliant drag king turn as Jude, the squirrelly, rude, media-taunting anti-Beatle flirting with Op Art pop stardom in an Andy Warholian B&W-chic milieu — complete with Michelle Williams as a pathetically needy stand-in for doomed Warhol “superstar” Edie Sedgwick, with whom Dylan supposedly had an affair. (Among other paramours, Haynes regular Julianne Moore is wryly funny as somebody very like Joan Baez.)

These stylistically, tonally disparate strands are interwoven in an unpredictable manner that makes the execution even more post-modern than its already-left-field concept. “I’m Not There” will no doubt baffle many, but for those willing to go with the flow, its craft, intuition and sheer adventure can be exhilarating. These 135 minutes go by a hell of a lot faster than many a mall flick has of late. One only regrets that director-cowriter (with Oren Moverman) Haynes makes movies so slowly — in the decade before this he’s only delivered the beleaguered (by budgetary problems) 1998 “Velvet Goldmine” and brilliant 2002 “Far From Heaven.” That he chooses subjects so far outside the commercial mainstream (i.e. the earlier “Poison” and “Safe”) has probably kept him from being properly regarded as one of the greatest active American directors.

At least Haynes has been mightily discriminating in applying his talents to the screen. There’s somebody I can think of who hasn’t been nearly so careful…and his name is Bob Dylan. Looking beyond his many, many bestowings of music useage to film and TV projects in recent decades — good, bad and ugly (“Days of Thunder”? “Georgia Rule”? “Free Willy 2”?!?) — there are his deeper cinematic diggings as actor, scenarist and director. Every artist is entitled to blunder into the wilderness once in a while, but arguably this one’s most embarrassing (as opposed to simply controversial) public expressions were all on celluloid.

Herewith a Hall of Shame list, most of it mercifully unavailable for home viewing:

“Don’t Look Back” (1967)
D.A. Pennebaker’s film about his 1965 tour of England — neatly parodied in “I’m Not There” — is a classic portrait-of-the-artist, but that artist sure comes off as a dick. Watching him ridicule the pathetically worshipful “British Dylan” (ha) Donovan is like watching a pro baller make fun of a Little Leaguer. Unflattering.

“Eat the Document” (1972)
Dylan’s first directorial effort is another tour document that’s been compared to Neil Young’s “Journey Through the Past” and The Rolling Stones’ “Cocksucker Blues” — other unwatchably amateur records of rock stars at their peak that have gained cache by being extremely little-seen. Covering the same period as “Don’t Look Back,” it was considered so dreadful it was shelved for years. It’s been semi-shelved ever since.

“Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” (1973)
This revisionist Western flop by Sam Peckinpah cast James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson as the titular real-life characters. Dylan (who also contributed the mixed-bag original soundtrack) was third-billed as a character called “Alias,” and was stiff as a board. MGM drastically recut the film without the director’s permission; after his death it was “restored” for DVD release by its original editor. This version is considered a definite improvement — but still a flawed movie, with at least one (guess who) very flat principal actor.

“Renaldo and Clara” (1976)
Dylan’s only exercise as star, director and writer (with Sam Shepard, wbo obviously went on to better things) is a monumental, impenetrable four-hour exercise in obscurantist wankage that drove me out of the theatre during a college screening around 1980 or so. It’s badly shot, pretentious, aimless, humorless, and most of all endless. Still, the suspicion remains (even in my brain): Could it possibly have been so bad? It was shot during the legendary “Rolling Thunder” tour. It featured a cast including not only the inexpressive Cipher Himself but Baez, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Harry Dean Stanton, Allen Ginsberg, Ronee Blakley, and T-Bone Burnett. Plus not-exactly-acting cameos by musicians Roberta Flack, Joni Mitchell, Mick Ronson, Roger McGuinn, Arlo Guthrie and David Blue. It’s surely an important slice of cultural history. And on that day when a DVD finally comes out, you too will know that it’s also an unbearable hunk ‘o’ dreck.

“Hearts of Fire” (1987)
Given prior evidence, who’d have possibly thought Bob Dylan would make a good dramatic lead in a narrative film? Some batty Brits, apparently. This famous (but-only-as-a) flop tale of a wannabe pop star (actual pan-flash Fiona), her jaded older mentor (Dylan) and contemporary rocker lover (Rupert Everett) was written by none other than the inimitable Joe Eszterhas, between “Flashdance” and such later triumphs as “Basic Instinct” and “Showgirls.” Director Richard Marquand (“Jagged Edge,” “Return of the Jedi”) died before its release-taking the easy way out, some might say.

“Masked and Anonymous” (2003)
Dylan had learned his lesson (OK, at least one-third of a lesson) after “Renaldo and Clara:” Don’t direct yourself in your latest quasi-autobiographical cinematic masturbation. So he got brilliant but presumably bedazzled Larry Charles (“Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “Borat,” “Seinfeld” et. cetera) to do it for him. As a result, “M&A” is so starry and polished it required extreme pretentious vacuity to render it unwatchable. Mission accomplished. Dylan plays “Jack Fate” (whoa), a reclusive musician held in captivity (for being so individual!) who’s released to participate in a sham benefit concert intended to bolster his quasi-fascist country’s widely rich/poor-divided status quo. Does he rebel? Does Willy get Free? Among those suckered into the bluntly “symbolic,” misanthropic and misogynist proceedings are Jeff Bridges, Penelope Cruz, John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Luke Wilson, Angela Bassett, Bruce Dern, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer, Cheech Marin, Christian Slater, Mickey Rourke….and a dozen-plus more erstwhile-hippie or born-too-late Hollywood actors desperate to serve their idol’s “vision.” Oh you glittering thespians: Must you always be so easy?

“I’m Not There”
Though he presumably had no direct participation in its creation, “I’m Not There” gains instant status as the supreme representation of Dylan on film. It’s a more sophisticated Portrait of the Artist than any he’s offered himself. Excluding his music, of course. In that realm, he’ll always be more purely Bob Dylan than any visual-media interpreter could manage.

topics: lists, music, reviews

The short films of Big Ugly Review

Big Ugly Review is, actually a literary “review,” but “big” and “ugly,” I’m happy to say, it’s not. A small and popular online publication put out by a staff of volunteers, it regularly includes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, as well as downloadable music, photo essays, and, more recently, short films. Bay Area editor Elizabeth Bernstein is herself at work on two films — collaborating with director Kia Simon on a story about a little girl with a parasitic Guinea worm called “Alice,” (alicefilm.com) and a psychological thriller called “Tinderbox.” What makes each issue of Big Ugly so, yes, precious and beautiful is how each issue’s theme works its way through every artery and vein of the journal. This time around the theme is “Fight or Flight,” so if you have adrenaline to spare…they’re taking film submissions of five minutes or less through Dec. 1. (Guidelines at www.biguglyreview.com/submissions.html.) We thought we’d take this Friday’s list opportunity to link you to Big Ugly’s four fairly amazing short films to date.

1. Kia Simon’s “The Dive” goes underwater to reimagine a strangely beautiful death by skydiving. (Simon won Best Short Doc at SXSW for “Looking for Sly,” about an Armenian Rambo impersonator trying to meet Sylvester Stallone.)

2. Amy Harrison’s “The Keep” builds a haunting, horrifying story from a very creepy location, a wispy Annie Sprinkle voiceover narrative, and the vortex where Geiger counters meet wind tunnels.

3. Lev’s “Conversation” is an animated romantic tragicomedy with dead-on writing and imaginatively simple drawing that manages to make its bitter sweetness very very funny. (Lev is the creator of the ultra low-budget comic/animation series “Tales Of Mere Existence,” viewable in a self-published comic book that is sold with a DVD of the movies, at Lev’s website, www.ingredientx.com.)

3. Scott Prendergast’s “Happy Birthday” feels a touch Jonathan Caouette with a very special, first personal birthday wish from a mommie dearest.

topics: bay area, lists