Diary

Capelle on Composers: Back to Back

Back to music.

I have some friends that were in a Sub Pop band that pre-dated Nirvana. They were known as the Dwarves. Their music is and was a snotty suburban unholy mixture of the Sonics, the Orlons, the Stooges and a vat of amphetamines. Their record covers usually featured midgets and half-naked woman covered in either blood or some sort of Nestle syrup of some sort. Here is one of their lines.

[Editor’s note: For the San Francisco International’s 51st edition, SF360.org has asked Bay Area musician/composer/cineaste Marc Capelle to blog his thoughts on movies, music, and the films showing in the Festival. This is the third of three installments.]

topics: authors, awards, bay area, cult cinema, genre films, music, san francisco international film festival

Diary

Capelle on Composers

For the San Francisco International’s 51st edition, SF360.org has asked Marc Capelle to blog his thoughts on movies, music and the Festival. Below are his first two entries, in reverse order. For more Capelle and other local writers on films, visit SF360.org’s blogs page

Marc Capelle is a native San Franciscan composer and musician. He writes music for films, television, commercials, web spots, toys, and billboards. He has most recently worked with Tommy Guerrero, American Music Club, Tipsy, and Virgil Shaw. He also performs monthly as musical timekeeper at the Porch Light story telling series.

Errol Morris has a giant brain. Anybody who wants to argue against that thesis does not have a giant brain. So let’s move on.

When Morris spoke with B. Ruby Rich Tuesday at the SF premiere screening of Standard Operating Procedure, he also has some very nice casual khaki pants and olive, drab, immaculate low-top lace-up Keds. He also makes a very good living making commercials and, when not doing that, manages to consistently make distinctly American films that are unrivaled in their quality of cinematography, sound, sound editing, musical composition and music editing.

topics: bay area, documentary, music, san francisco international film festival

Insider

SFIFF51: On the breeding behind "Evolution: The Musical!"

You can think of it as The Sound of Music meets Quest for Fire, or Jesus Christ Superstar rocks Land of the Lost. However you slice it, Evolution: the Musical! amounts to some pungent cross-breeding. The most ambitious project to date from Bay Area comedians, impresarios and filmmakers Andrew Bancroft and Kenny Taylor, a.k.a. Illbilly Productions, Evolution is the strikingly contemporary story of a sort of missing-link Romeo (Bancroft, decked out in a few fig-leafs worth of fur and underbrush) and his pent-up, tightly bonneted Juliet (Tonya Glanz, cannily evoking the fervid Amish nymphet). The forbidden romance between Wog Wog and Mary, to give them their proper names, blossoms amid a rap-inflected survival-of-the-freakest showdown between their respective homies: a tribe of Beasties (backed by Darwin himself) and a church-load of Blesseds (playing on Jesus’ team). Gleefully puerile in its comic exuberance, on the politically fraught subject of human origins Evolution: The Musical! manages a wry send-up of religious and secular pretensions. The 38-minute featurette—packed with local comedic talent including the lion’s share of the sketch troupe Killing My Lobster—will enjoy its world premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival, in a combination screening and live performance at Mezzanine for SF360 Film+Club on May 6.

SF360.org sat down for a round table discussion with Bancroft and Taylor, as well as actors and KML veterans Glanz and Jon Wolanske (who plays the petulant head of the Blesseds). This took place over email, which meant there wasn’t really a table. In fact, Taylor was apparently in the woods at the time.

topics: independent film, music, q&a, san francisco international film festival

Report

"Cachao: Uno Más"

"You’re listening to Con Sabór," says KPFA DJ and Music Director Luis Medina. "I am going to be featuring an interview with one of the great masters of Latin Music, Israel "Cachao" Lopez. Cachao will be in concert tonight at Bimbo’s featuring the Cine Son All Stars with special guest Andy Garcia."

That’s how the documentary film Cachao: Uno Más opens. The Cachao tune, "Goza Mi Mambo" (Enjoy My Mambo), bubbles underneath as Luis talks on the radio and a visual panorama of San Francisco scenes—the Bay Bridge, ships, seagulls, cable cars, Muni, Victorians, and the Transamerica pyramid—all collage together.

Cachao: Uno Más gets its premiere as part of the 51st San Francisco Film Festival on Monday, April 28, at the Sundance Kabuki. It comes a few weeks after the passing on March 22, 2008, of the acclaimed bassist and Cuban music innovator at age 89 in Coral Cables, Florida. Now, what was to be a living celebration of his artistic work turns into a memorial mass paying homage to his musicality and accomplishments.

topics: documentary, documentary film institute, music, san francisco international film festival, san francisco state

Platform

"Girls Rock" with Arne Johnson & Shane King

Both Jack Black’s fictional School of Rock and Jack Black-alike Paul Green -based documentary Rock School have entertained many audiences with the notion of actually training the next generation of musically inclined kids in the arts of head-banging, hair-teasing, and amp adjustment. What Bay Area filmmakers Arne Johnson and Shane King discover from Portland’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls,” however, is revolution on a different scale: A camp that trains girls not to perfectly mimic the “masters” of the rock genre, but to find the unique demon screech that exists deep inside each and every one of them. Girls Rock watches a few select 8-18 -year-olds overcome the obstacles — including pressures to be thin, quiet, and Caucasian — to claim their rightful place on Earth and wail away. We got a chance to catch up with Johnson and King last week.

topics: directors, documentary, music

Insider

Noise Pop Film Festival

You might think the Bay Area has just about every kind of film festival, from Irish to Icelandic, from sex workers to surfing to Buddhist. But one there’s one seemingly obvious candidate that missing: A music film festival. Oh sure, almost every festival invariably includes some music-centered titles. Mill Valley, SF Indie and SF Docfest are often particularly heavy on them. Luckily for fans of alternative rock, punk, and folk-pop, Noisepop is a multimedia affair.

Once again this year, in addition to practically every extant band you’d want to see (headliners including British Sea Power, Magnetic Fields, Fu Manchu, Quasi and The Mountain Goats), an art exhibit (featuring a contribution from Yoko Ono), comedy shows, and ever-so-much-more, there are movies

Afraid there might be even one regional corner of the late ’70s through mid-‘80s punk/hardcore scene that is under-documented? Of course you are! Helping allay those fears is Joe Losurdo and Christina Tillman’s You Weren’t There: A History of Chicago Punk 1977-1984. Actually, I was there—at least in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where a lot of these bands toured. But while some of the names may remain familiar to me from a thousand D.I.Y.. handbills on telephone poles, it’s likely Naked Raygun, Effigies, Articles of Faith, Strike Under, Subverts and others will be a fresh archaeological dig for many.

topics: directors, documentary, independent film, music

Found

SF Indiefest diary

I tend to overbook myself and 50 percent of the time, it prevents me from getting anything done. Case in point: Last night I decided I was going to take in a triple feature at the Roxie for purposes of Indiefest coverage. It made sense at the time.

A sucker for music documentaries of all kinds, I showed up at “Electric Heart — Don Ellis,” at 5 p.m. to begin my six-hour movie-watching marathon. Ellis immediately reminded me of a 1970s Peter Gabriel. Specifically pre-“So” Peter Gabriel, when he had officially broken away from Genesis but not yet had huge commercial success, when he was experimenting with complete abandonment using the sounds and limitations of the instruments at his disposal, with tones, with electronics, and heavily influenced by world music.

topics: cult cinema, exhibitions, film festivals, independent film, music, sf indiefest