Review

"Standard Operating Procedure" and the stories we tell

SF360 asked Bay Area writers and fans to comment on the films of SFIFF51. Stephen Elliott reports from the April 29 Persistence of Vision screening of Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure, opening May 9. The screening was preceded by an onstage conversation between B. Ruby Rich and Morris. This story appeared originally in SF360.org on April 30.

He calls it the "Interrotron." The way Errol Morris interviews a subject is to speak into a camera. His image is then projected on a screen and the interviewee responds into the camera. It’s like a teleprompter that allows the game show host or newscaster to speak directly to you while reading her lines. And that’s the feeling of Morris’ films of the last 15 years, particularly The Fog Of War, featuring former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara: that the subject is speaking directly to the audience. And that’s the feeling of Standard Operating Procedure. The interviewees, primarily the low level military police on duty at Abu Ghraib prison who participated in and photographed the torture of Iraqi prisoners deep inside the war zone, are talking to you.

topics: directors, documentary, political film, reviews, san francisco international film festival

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

Take Two

Review: "Shotgun Stories"

In a recent documentary some interviewees recalled seeing Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets when it came out in 1973, and being amazed that someone, anyone, could actually make a movie about the type of people they’d grown up with in NYC’s tougher boroughs. Thirty-five years later, of course, the general attitude might well be, “Please God, not another Mean Streets knockoff!”—being that New York City slang-speaking East Coast youth dramas have become one of the reigning cliches of indie cinema.

Many things go in and out of fashion at the movies, but it’s seldom noted that among them are entire geographic and population sectors of American life. Middle-to-upper-class WASPS never seem to go out of style; boys (of whatever race) in the ‘hood are a relatively new prevalent flavor; desperately-seeking twentysomethings in the more glittering cities are a favorite; generic suburbia is a fallback setting for many genre exercises.

But the smaller-town “heartland” America that once held our majority populace—and which has duly been shrinking for many decades, though it ain’t vanished yet—is now seldom seen on screen.

topics: directors, independent film, reviews

Experience

SFMOMA's "Nonwestern Westerns" series

Until they started falling out of fashion in the 1960s, Westerns were pretty much the bedrock of the American movie industry. Whole studios had been created to churn ‘em out like “Bronco Billy” Anderson’s in the East Bay. (Fremont’s Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum still shows silent films year-round in his honor.) The Great Train Robbery, considered the first real narrative movie using cross-cuts, close-ups and other then-innovative techniques, was a Western.

topics: asian cinema, genre films, italian cinema, reviews, san francisco museum of modern art, westerns

Take Two

"Shelter"

I’ve no idea how many gay surfers there are—does anyone?—but for sure a whole lot of gay men have long fantasied about shootin’ the curl (ahem) with a surfie. What’s not to like? Laird Hamilton, for example, is a world-class sex object by any standard. Just ‘cuz he’s married with kids doesn’t mean a dude can’t dream.

While gay porn flicks have dubiously mined the surfer fantasy since their inception—at the least exploiting the stereotype of athletic California blonds—non-X-rated films have been much more hesitant. You sure didn’t see gay characters in Hollywood’s takes on surf culture (from Frankie & Annette to Point Break), nor in the never-ending documentaries that flowed from 1966 landmark The Endless Summer to the latest DIY effort at SF’s Red Vic Movie House.

topics: exhibitions, film festivals, gay lesbian cinema, independent film, reviews

Take Two

"Paranoid Park"

You’ve got to give Gus Van Sant credit for integrity. Just when he seemed on the verge of turning into just another Hollywood sellout—via the increasingly impersonal, decreasingly interesting mainstream likes of To Die For, Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester (not to mention the 101 percent useless Psycho)—he did a total about-face.

His four features since have been not just low-budget personal projects, but true art films in a rarefied, semi-abstract, greatly patience-demanding mode that went out of style somewhere around the time that Antonioni and Resnais movies stopped automatically getting U.S. distribution. Sure, Gerry had Matt Damon, while Elephant and Last Days had hot-button themes (school shootings and Kurt Cobain, respectively). Yet they were almost anti-narrative exercises, cryptic reveries that could hypnotize you to death.

topics: authors, directors, independent film, reviews

Take Two

Review: "The Signal"

It’s an idea so vivid yet simple you’ve got to wonder why more movies haven’t used it: Something deliberate or accidental happens that indiscriminately turns the majority populace into irrational, violent maniacs. Zombie movies toy with the notion of familiar folks behaving in a most unfamiliar fashion; there have been a few more direct applications of the concept, like culty horror movies “The Crazies,” “Halloween III” and “Blue Sunshine.” But probably no film has ever deployed this conceit quite as cleverly or viscerally as “The Signal” — which would be mighty impressive even if it didn’t have the additional distinction of being created in sequential, exquisite-corpse style by three writer-directors, two of them making their feature debut.

topics: reviews