Next Tuesday, Mystery Science Theater 3000 creator Joel Hodgson, along with other MST3K veterans, will invade the Castro to riff on a 1968 Japanese science fiction called War of the Insects. “It’s a great looking print, widescreen, really well made,” Hodgson told me earlier this month in a phone interview. “It’s kind of the story [...]
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After two detours into early Kurosawa films I couldn’t catch the first time around (see this and that), I’m finally back to the main point of what this Kurosawa Diary project: an examination of all of his films in chronological order. And what a relief that is—returning from the uneven (and often dreadful) quality of [...]
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I took Sunday morning off from movie-watching, and got to the Castro in time to see the last three screenings of the festival. A- Man with a Movie Camera: I read about Dziga Vertov’s 1929 surreal documentary in college, but I didn’t see it until yesterday. The genre was actually fairly common in the late [...]
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Four days of silent films, spectacularly presented with live music at the Castro, is too much even for me. I left before last night’s screening of Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages and, as I type this, am missing Amazing Tales from the Archives: First the Bad News…then the Good! I plan to miss The Shakedown, [...]
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Last night I attended the San Francisco Silent Film Festival opening. The movie: John Ford’s first big-budget western, The Iron Horse. I had seen it once before on television. It was much better on the Castro’s very big screen. Ford biographer Joseph McBride introduced the film, comparing it to Jaws in the effect it had [...]
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It’s official! I have now seen every film Akira Kurosawa ever made. I still have nine films left in my Kurosawa Diary project, but that’s mostly about revisiting films I’ve seen before, this time in chronological order. Last night at the Pacific Film Archive, I caught a double-bill of The Most Beautiful and The Men [...]
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