Q&A

Red Vic Reprising 'Lesh Sabreen?'

Muayad Alayan, a 24-year-old filmmaker from the only remaining Arab neighborhood in West Jerusalem, was not even aware there was such a think as Palestinian cinema until, as a teenager, he came to the Bay Area to visit his brother and sister. Later, after a stint at the Jerusalem Cinematheque, he returned to San Francisco as a film student at City College. Among his teachers was local filmmaker Christian Bruno, who this year traveled to Jerusalem as the director of photography for Alayan’s Lesh Sabreen? (Why Sabreen?, now taking donations).

topics: activism, arab cinema, bay area, exhibition, red vic movie house

Critic's Notebook

Graphic transformation: Animation rises, CGI sinks in 2009

Science fiction has often dwelt upon the fear that machines will overtake man—which of course they kind of have, from the Industrial Revolution through the Digital Age, in terms of lessening the need for manual labor or even organic brainpower. But while technology may have taken some jobs, polluted our environment, etc., it hasn’t yet completely stolen humanity’s place in the scheme of things.

Except, one could argue, in the realm of movies. With this year’s summings-up extended to considering our first post-millennial decade, it’s a good moment to consider where mainstream cinema has gone since CGI sank its bloodless talons into the already less-than-exquisite corpse.

topics: animation, anime, bay area, comedy, cult cinema, filmmakers, genre films, hollywood, independent film, internet, red vic movie house, sf international animation festival, world cinema, youth

Report

Recession sidesteps theaters, up to a point

The economic downturn is hurting everyone, right? Yet Hollywood is on pace to break the box-office record it set last year. Likewise, the arthouses are doing steady business. Even concession sales at smaller theaters are generally level. So what’s going on out there?

Landmark Theatres CEO Ted Mundorff reports that in 18 of the first 19 weeks of 2009, the arthouse chain’s ticket sales were up from last year. Nonetheless, he says, "I don’t believe the industry is recession-proof. It’s all about the films. If there were 20 films in the marketplace no one wanted to see, they wouldn’t come to the movies. If we had great movies and we were priced out of the marketplace, people wouldn’t go either."

topics: art film, bay area, distribution, exhibition, independent film, international film, landmark theatres, red vic movie house, roxie

Platform

Epps' "Black Rock" unearths buried Alcatraz history

On a damp, rainy night last week, Kevin Epps took 250 supporters, sponsors and friends on a cruise back in time. Although in many ways this trip to Alcatraz resembled the excursion taken by thousands of tourists over the years, there was one crucial difference: The San Francisco filmmaker was premiering his latest documentary, The Black Rock, and the focus was on the African American prisoners and guards who lived on the island from 1934-63, when it was a federal penitentiary. The screening was framed by a tour (we forgot that Park Rangers working the Alcatraz gig are themselves performers as well as historians) and a panel discussion that focused on the uneven number of black males incarcerated since 1980. In his new film, Epps (who debuted with a splash in 2003 with Straight Outta Hunters Point) brings to light a largely forgotten sliver of fascinating, infuriating history and imbues it with both indignation and sadness. The Black Rock plays Friday, February 27, through Thursday, March 5, at the Red Vic Movie House in the Haight. We got the lowdown from Epps via email.

topics: african american cinema, bay area, documentary, exhibitions, red vic movie house

Take Two

Genuflection: "Pray the Devil Back to Hell"

The violence that’s plagued parts of Africa throughout the modern era testifies not just to greed, corruption, cruelty or victimization, but the arbitrariness of defining nation-states themselves. Liberia is a perfect, if particularly bizarre, example. It was founded in the early 19th century by freed African American slaves who, despite their own historical oppression, began exercising a sort of colonialist domination over the west coastal region’s disparate indigenous peoples.

Complex tensions between that “Americo-Liberian” elite and some 16 distinct ethnic groups—as well as amongst the latter—finally led to coups, dictatorships and civil wars. The latter commenced in 1989. How their barely-interrupted progress over the next many years finally came to an end is chronicled in Gini Reiticker’s fine documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which opens Friday at SF’s Red Vic Movie House and Berkeley’s Shattuck Cinemas.

topics: african cinema, directors, documentary, documentary film, red vic movie house

Found

Another Ingmar Bergman in "Monika"

Ingmar Bergman: Master of Sleaze? OK, that’s not exactly how we remember the maker of such deeply serious classics as The Seventh Seal, Persona and Cries and Whispers. (Unless you consider erotic the latter’s scene where Ingrid Thulin inserts a glass shard in her vagina, then wipes the blood over her face. In which case, please seek help.) But you might have thought otherwise from the American marketing of some early Bergman films, at a time when many European movies—even wildly inappropriate ones without a speck of sex appeal—were suggestively advertised as “shocking,” “frank,” “bold” and so forth, usually with art depicting a barely-clad Eurobabe barely resembling anyone in the flick.

Actually, at least one early Bergman really was pretty steamy for its era, if hardly in a sleazy way. 1953’s Monika, which plays the Red Vic this Sunday and Monday in a newly restored print, does indeed deal with underage, guiltlessly unfaithful femininity, out-of-wedlock sex and pregnancy.

topics: directors, red vic movie house, reviews, world cinema

Review: "Hannah Takes the Stairs"

Literacy rates are plummeting — clearly our increasingly test-oriented, teacher-punitive ill-funded public education system is failing today’s youth, particularly in lower-income neighborhoods. But a (relatively) old fart like me also wonders if even comparatively well educated, middle-class kids have a less-than-firm grip on the English language these days. They are so, like, whatever. Still, youth is youth — forever stumbling in the wilderness of new things like love, relationships, sex, employment, careerism, and … stuff. Such formative experiences are always interesting because they are so fraught with the intensity of discovery.

The intersection between “interesting” and “inarticulate” is practically the whole gist of an emerging genre dubbed “mumblecore,” which label no doubt its major practitioners hate.

These are frequently improv-based, digitally shot, minimally budgeted seriocomedies about twentysomethings stumbling through, you know, relationship stuff. They are like audiovisual eavesdropping, Cassavetes reloaded for the Whatever Generation. They are massively indulgent, irritating and aimless, or fantastically real, insightful and uncontrived. Either response is totally legitimate; these movies are totally a matter of viewer taste, mood, perspective.

“Hannah Takes the Stairs,” which opens at the Red Vic this Friday, is the perfect case in point. It’s a very casual portrait of Hannah (Greta Gerwig), who is young, smart, and cute in a sorta punky, slightly androgynous, peroxide-blonde way. She works at developmental TV company where at least a couple of the pretty-damn-geeky male bosses are crushing on her. When her own slightly older, almost-30 boyfriend (Mark Duplass), quits his job to slack full-time, Hannah’s restlessness soon results in his being cut loose. She dives into a new relationship with Paul (Andrew Bujalski), while also sending & receiving signals that relate to fellow workmate Matt (Kent Osborne). There’s nothing simple about this triangle, but there’s not much complexly detailed about it, either. Director Joe Swanberg simply lets the improvised scenes go where they will, each utterly credible in their awkwardness if variably revealing of character.

This might be a recipe for meandering torment, but it’s sharply edited and gamely played enough to hold attention. The big question is: Will you care what happens to these people? I enjoyed “Hannah Takes the Stairs,” which is sort of an all-star mumblecore effort: Duplass was in the utterly great “Puffy Chair,” which only semiqualified as mumblecore; Swanberg previously directed “LOL” and “Kissing on the Mouth;” Bujalski directed prior mumbly faves “Mutual Appreciation” and “Funny Ha Ha.”

But it’s still the kinda video-verite vagueness that can’t resonate as deeply as more formally sculpted relationship films — the current “Margo at the Wedding” being an outstanding example of fine craftsmanship within a seemingly loose, intimate narrative context. “I tend to leave destruction in my wake,” an unusually verbose Hannah finally confides at a meltdown point, to the person who’ll most likely be confused by her offer of vulnerability. We feel her pain…but where does it come from? Is it genuinely empathetic, self-pitying, or a role-play even she can’t recognize as such?

She’s as enigmatically ambiguous as the troubled souls Monica Vitti used to play in Antonioni films. Yet while Vitti came off as a beautiful blank surface onto which profound directorial ideas were projected, Gerwig’s Greta is a shallow pool in which very little beyond indecision is reflected, and emotions grow thick but useless, like algae. And needless to say, Antonioni was a cinematic poet — Swanberg is more a transcriptionist. These are people you might very well know. But with maturity, you might also look back and realize such entanglements weren’t even worth the cynical knowledge gained. I can say this for “Hannah”: It’s almost as involving and annoying as whatever last friendship or romance went bust for you.

topics: experimental film, red vic movie house, reviews