Insider

Of bunnies and backstories: SFFS Screen's "Hank and Mike"

Thomas Michael remembers well the birth of Hank and Mike, the titular blue-collar Easter bunnies in director Matthiew Klinck’s absurdist workplace comedy on the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki starting Friday. It was a decade ago and the then 19-year-old writer/actor was spitballing ideas with the rest of the writing staff of Y B Normal?, a Canadian Comedy Network sketch show.

"I said, ‘Hey, what about an Easter bunny and I pretended to take a drag on a cigarette, ‘Those fucking kids and their fucking chocolates!’" Michael relates in a conference call with SF360.org and his writing partner and co-star Paolo Mancini. "That got a big laugh. Then Paolo and I locked ourselves in the basement for a few hours and came up with the actual characters."

topics: comedy, san francisco film society, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki

Found

SFFS Screen offers a new Eric Rohmer

Though grouped with the Cahiers du Cinéma critics-turned-filmmakers who comprised the French New Wave, Eric Rohmer is eight years older than Jacques Rivette, ten years the senior of Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol, and was a full dozen years ahead of Francois Truffaut. Even so, Rohmer was still working as an editor at Cahiers when Truffaut and Godard had their respective breakthroughs (The 400 Blows, Breathless). By the time Rohmer joined their ranks, Truffaut was in a brief post- Jules and Jim (1962) wilderness and Godard was toying with Marxism. Rohmer’s capacious behavioral inquiries couldn’t help but seem somewhat aloof by comparison—though certainly not insensitive to the moral reckonings embedded in quotidian actions and thought processes.

topics: art film, directors, french cinema, san francisco film society, sundance kabuki

Found

Hong Sang Soo on the SFFS Screen

For South Korean director Hong Sang Soo, it’s the road often traveled that makes all the difference. Where Hong’s films frequently go is toward dichotomies—"life" vs. "death," "clean" vs. "unclean"—while dancing around the ambivalent partners of intimacy and isolation. Hong’s films are full of come-hither gestures followed by bodies retreating once the fleeting desire is consummated, yet this consummation never brings satiation. Hong’s characters always wander away, as if slightly fearful or disgusted following attainment of what they thought they wanted. Those of us who appreciate Hong’s films know not to expect resolution. Fulfillment comes in the delayed gratification that happens days later as your mind meanders along the paths of Hong’s characters realizing the significance of something as everyday as the accidental gifting of an umbrella or a scarf given to a sick child only to be taken back soon after.

topics: asian cinema, directors, san francisco film society, sundance kabuki

Experience

SFFS Screen at Sundance Kabuki

When executive director Graham Leggat announced last April that the San Francisco Film Society would open its year-round screen at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas on June 13—a Friday by this year’s calendar—he added that for SFFS, at least, it would be an auspicious date. Even before the first film has spooled, you don’t need to be draped in garlic or packing rabbits’ feet to believe him. The Film Society (publisher of SF360.org) has reason to be optimistic about its new undertaking, which hopes to significantly contribute to the spectrum of art and specialty films now available at Bay Area theaters.

topics: art film, documentary, exhibitions, features, film festivals, independent film, san francisco film society, sundance film festival, sundance kabuki, telluride film festival

Report

SF Int'l announces its 51st program and year-round screen

The San Francisco International Film Festival announced not only its 2008 program today at the Westin St. Francis Hotel, but also the June 13 launch of its year-round programming on one screen at the Sundance Kabuki.

San Francisco Film Society Executive Director Graham Leggat told the assembled that the Film Society has been working very hard since he arrived to turn its programming into a “year-round operation,” and that the SFFS screen will feature international independent and documentary features with limited U.S. distribution.

[Editor’s note: SF360.org is published by SFFS.]

Most of the event was devoted to unveiling the work inside the 51st Festival, which runs from April 24 through May 8. It opens with Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress, starring Asia Argento—one of three films in the Festival’s opening weekend featuring the actress, who Leggat spoke of as “alluringly vulpine. And that’s a compliment.” The International’s closing night is an Alex Gibney documentary with roots in San Francisco publishing, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Jonathan Levine’s Sundance hit The Wackness is the Centerpiece presentation.

topics: documentary, environmental films, exhibitions, french cinema, genre films, independent film, international film, italian cinema, midnight movies, san francisco film society, san francisco international film festival, sundance film festival, sundance kabuki, technology

Found

Why skaters heart Spike

Most of the kids you see tooling around the streets on skateboards these days don’t know this, but there was once a time when spotting a professional skateboarder in a movie or on television was about as likely as finding a hundred bucks on the ground. But that was a long time ago. Skateboarding’s popularity has boomed a thousand-fold over last ten years and skate-related media coverage is now ubiquitous. It’s great for money-minded professional skateboarders and for large corporations, but skateboarding’s mainstream presence just seems strange to people like me who have been skating their entire lives. On one hand you have the MTV extreme sport stuff—the Rob and Big show, The Life of Ryan, the X-games, etc. And on the other you have contrived docu-dramas, like Larry Clark’s Kids, that treat skate-culture as a symptom of urban decline. It’s interesting stuff, but none of it has anything to do with skateboarding. Thank god for Spike Jonze, the patron saint of real skateboarders and the only real “skate director” out there.

topics: directors, san francisco, san francisco film society

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