Bayflicks.net

it’s been a very busy week for me, with visiting family, changes in my PC World column, and a major hardware upgrade. So please excuse me if I missed a few things, like the new Pacific Film Archive schedule. I will get to them, hopefully, early next week.
West Side Story, Castro, playing all week. I [...]

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Period comedy

Written and directed by Jirí Menzel
From a novel by Bohumil Hrabal

If you weren’t lucky enough to be born wealthy, and you haven’t made your own fortune, You should devote your life, for your own, selfish reasons, to serving the filthy rich? Whether you’re a waiter or a prostitute, you’ll have a wonderful time.
For [...]

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American Teen, Roxie, opens Friday. I can’t think of another documentary that felt so much like narrative fiction. American Teen, which follows four kids in their last year in a Warsaw, Indiana high school, is structured very much like a Hollywood movie, with struggles, lessons, and triumphs all in the right order. On one hand, [...]

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Drama

Written by Jan Schütte, from three stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Directed by Jan Schütte

I hesitate to describe Love Comes Lately above as a “drama,” since it isn’t particularly dramatic. On the other hand, it’s not very funny, either. Nor is it exciting, historical, romantic, or erotic. I think it’s supposed to be insightful.
A grand-niece of [...]

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Just a quick note about what to expect at the Rafael over the fall.
Tributes: Both Ingmar Bergman and Irving Thalberg will receive retrospectives. (I don’t believe the phrase “brilliant and historically-important filmmaker” can accurately refer to two more different people.) Bergman’s runs October 13-19, and will include a multimedia installation called “Ingmar Bergman: The Man [...]

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Documentary

Written and directed by Nanette Burstein

I can’t think of another documentary that felt so much like narrative fiction. American Teen follows four kids in their last year in a Warsaw, Indiana high school. They apply for college, they get drunk, they fall in and out of love. In other words, they do what [...]

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Trumbo, Lumiere, Shattuck, opens Friday. Trumbo walks a fine line between performance art and documentary. Like any conventional showbiz biodoc, it delivers plenty of film clips, old photos, home movies, and interview clips of people close to the subject. But it also spends much of its time on famous actors (Joan Allen, Michael Douglas, Paul [...]

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Documentary

Written by Christopher Trumbo
Directed by Peter Askin

Trumbo walks a fine line between performance art and documentary. Like any conventional showbiz biodoc, it delivers plenty of film clips, old photos, home movies, and interview clips of people close to the subject. But it also spends much of its time on famous actors (Joan Allen, Michael Douglas, [...]

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I haven’t had much time for Bayflicks this week–or for movie-going. You probably guessed. But here’s what I can tell you:
The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival plays through Monday, but not, for the most part, in San Francisco. Since the Castro is free from that festival, it’s running one of its own this week: [...]

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The Jewish Film Festival, finished in San Francisco, plays this week in Berkeley and Palo Alto, and almost entirely dominates this newsletters I’ll put the non-Jewish films first.
Dr. Strangelove, UA Berkeley 7, Thursday, 8:00. We like to look back at earlier decades as simpler, less fearful times, but Stanley Kubrick’s “nightmare comedy” reminds you just [...]

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