San Francisco International Film Festival announced

Posted on April 2, 2013 by Lincoln Spector

The Bay Area’s Big Kahuna of film festivals (or at least one of of the two Big Kahunas–the other being Mill Valley), announced most of its line-up today. The 56th Annual San Francisco International Film Festival opens April 25 and runs through May 9. As usual, the heart of the festivities will be at the Kabuki multiplex. But you’ll also find screenings at the New People Cinema (across the street from the Kabuki), the Castro (only a few, big events), the Pacific Film Archive (for those reluctant to cross the Bay), and assorted other venues.

The Festival opens with What Maisie Knew, a very loose, updated adaptation of Henry James’ 1897 novel. 15 days later, it will close with Before Midnight, the threequel to Richard Linklater’s 1995 Before Sunrise.

In between, according to a San Francisco Film Society press release, there will be 65 additional narrative features, 28 documentary features, and 63 shorts coming from 51 different countries.

Some other major events:

  • The Centerpiece screening, Inequality for All, is one of those feature documentaries. It focuses on economist/rabble rouser Robert Reich, and plays Saturday, May 4.
  • A local talent, Phillip Kaufman, receives this year’s Founder’s Directing Award. They’ll screen his 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers at the Castro on Sunday, May 5.
  • Steven Soderbergh, the sometimes-brilliant director who shocked the film world recently by announcing an early retirement, will give this year’s State of Cinema address on Saturday, April 27.
  • Sarah Polley first impressed me as a child actor in The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen. Then as a writer/director with Away from Her and  Take This Waltz. Now she’ll be turning up at the Festival with her new documentary, Stories We Tell.
  • The Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award goes to Jem Cohen. I’m not familiar with his work, but at the press conference this morning, Director of Programming Rachel Rosen described his films as "unclassifiable." However, the title that the festival will screen, Museum Hours, is one of his rare narrative features.
  • The Festival always screens one silent film, at the Castro, with an interesting artist providing musical accompaniment. This year, it’s the German expressionist feature Waxworks. accompanied by Mike Patton, Scott Amendola, Matthias Bossi and William Winant.
  • The big mystery so far: The Festival has yet to announce its Kanbar Award winner. I tend to respect screenwriters more than do most cinephiles, and I’m always eager to see wwho receives one of the few life achievement awards given to those filmmakers who sit and type. I’ll let you know when the recipient is announced.

    • Should be fun.

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    This Year’s IndieFest Announced

    Posted on January 13, 2013 by Lincoln Spector

    Most film festivals fall into one of three categories:

    1. Genre festivals, like Noir City and the the Silent Film Festival, concentrate on a particular kind of film.
    2. Ethnic festivals, like the Jewish Film Festival and Frameline, concentrate on a particular kind of filmgoer.
    3. General festivals, like the San Francisco Film Festival and Mill Valley, don’t specialize. They show any films they think are worth showing, to an audience that loves cinema.

    The upcoming IndieFest fits uneasily between categories 1 and 3. Technically, it’s a genre festival, concentrating on independent films. But that’s a very broad genre these days, and almost everything at a general festival qualifies.

    Despite this hybrid identity, or perhaps because of it, IndieFest celebrates its 15th anniversary this year with a line-up of movies that I know pretty much nothing about. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

    However, if you liked Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as much as I did, you’ve got a good chance of liking the opening night feature, The We and I, also directed by Michel Gondry. It’s a study of adolescents in all their confusion, cruelty, and humor. The festival closes with Inside Lara Roxx, a drama about AIDS in the porn industry.

    Also of interest: The Revisionairies, a documentary about a creationist trying to control what our children are taught.

    But the festival isn’t all serious. Manborg follows a group of misfits as they fight to save the world from "Count Draculon’s robo-Nazi-vampires from Hell." Every film festival should have at least one movie like that.

    big_lebowski[1]But there is one film scheduled that I’ve seen. And it’s the one that’s ended up on more of my weekly newsletters than any other: The Big Lebowski–at a midnight screening.

    Now I just hope I have time to see some of these films.

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    Yet Another Upcoming Festival, This One With a Stiff Upper Lip

    Posted on December 25, 2012 by Lincoln Spector

    When I posted First Festivals of the New Year yesterday, I missed an important one:

    Mostly British Film Festival
    January 17 – 24

    This festival celebrates British cinema–by a rather broad definition of the term–both old and new. Amongst the films you may have seen are Odd Man Out, two by David Lean, This Happy Breed and Brief Encounter, plus the recent hit Once. Other promising titles include My Tehran for Sale, the Australian Black and White, and a documentary on ventriloquism, Her Master’s Voice.

    Her Master’s Voice

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    First Festivals of the New Year

    Posted on December 24, 2012 by Lincoln Spector

    The holiday season isn’t so festive for Bay Area cinephiles. In fact, it’s a big, seasonal, film festival drought.

    But it won’t last. Here are some festivals on the way:

    For Your Consideration
    January 11 – 17

    As it does every year, the Rafael will screen a series of movies that the Academy is considering for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Although these films all opened in the US in 2012, most of them haven’t opened in the Bay Area.

    I’ve seen only one film on the list, The Intouchables, which I found entertaining but not exceptional (read my review). Other promising titles include Keep Smiling, a satire from Georgia about a beauty contest and War Witch, a Canadian film about a child soldier.

    Note: I have changed the For Your Consideration section above to include new material.

    Noir City
    January 25 – February 3

    There’s one thing about this year’s Noir City that must be acknowledged right away: They unquestionably have the most bad-ass logo in the history of film festivals:NOIR CITY X, the 10th Annual San Francisco Film Noir Foundation, presented by the Film Noir Foundation

    Now that you’ve enjoyed the visuals, what will they be screening?

    Over the course of 11 days, the festival will show 27 features from the 30s (proto-noir), 40s, 50, and into the 60s. These include one film that everyone knows, Sunset Boulevard, another that everyone should know–opening night’s Gun Crazy, The way-ahead-of-its-time Intruder In the Dust, and 24 movies that I would very much like to get acquainted with.

    Others that sound promising include James Whale’s pre-code The Kiss Before the Mirror, Native Son, and Experiment In Terror.

    Three of the films will be screened in what the festival describes as "35mm restorations." I assume this means that the source materials were in good enough condition to not need digital restorations. Several others have undergone "4K digital restorations." I don’t know if these will be screened in 35mm or DCP. Nor am I worried about that one way or another.

    IndieFest
    February 7-21

    I can’t tell you anything about this one yet except the date. I’ll have more information, and a URL, come the second week of January.

    Silent Winter
    February 16

    This year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival winter event will take place over one long but (presumably) fun day at the Castro. The program contains the 1916 version of Snow White, a selection of three Buster Keaton Shorts, The Thief of Bagdad (my favorite Douglas Fairbanks movie), My Best Girl (Mary Pickford’s last silent and the only film in the series I haven’t already seen), and F. W. Murnau’s Faust. Donald Sosin will cover most of the films on the grand piano, but Faust will get the full Mighty Wurlitzer organ treatment by Christian Elliott, and the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra will help Fairbanks do his magic.

    The sad part: I’m not sure I’ll be able to attend. I’m directing a play that will have its one and only performance a week later.

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    The Coming PFA Schedule

    Posted on December 19, 2012 by Lincoln Spector

    The new Pacific Film Archive schedule arrived in the mail today, and it left me wanting to move into the screening room for a few months.

    Unfortunately, that’s not possible, and not only because it lack beds and showers. I’m directing a one-act play to be performed on February 23, and my time will be restricted.

    But here’s some of the highlights. I hope I can catch a few.

    Alfred Hitchcock: The Shape of Suspense
    January 11 – April 24
    Running well beyond this two-month calendar, this series will screen 28 of Hitchcock’s 53 films, concentrating primarily but not exclusively on his American work. It includes all of his major films (unless you count The Lodger and Blackmail), and quite a few lesser but still interesting one. My top priority here: Under Capricorn, which I’ve never seen, in an imported print, on March 3. The series also includes all of my personal favorite Hitchcocks: The Lady Vanishes, Rear Window, North by Northwest, Strangers on a Train, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, and Psycho.

    The Hills Run Red: Italian Westerns, Leone, and Beyond
    January 10 – January 27
    I’m not really an expert on spaghetti westerns, especially when you get beyond Sergio Leone. In fact, this six-film series contains nothing I’ve seen, including Duck, You Sucker, the one Leone title in the bunch. I’m hoping to find time to rectify this.

    Film 50: History of Cinema: The Cinematic City
    January 23 – May 1
    Marilyn Fabe’s usual Wednesday afternoon film class (open to the public) concentrates this semester on urban environments. Features include Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, Metropolis, The Bicycle Thief, The Third Man, and Do the Right Thing.

    Werner Schroeter: Magnificent Obsessions
    January 19 – March 31
    Until I opened the schedule, I’d never heard of this German experimental filmmaker, who suddenly appeared on the scene in 1967 (a major year for experimentation), and went on to influence Fassbinder and Wenders. Maybe I’ll have time to acquaint myself with his work.

    African Film Festival 2013
    January 23 – February 5
    I should learn to expect this one, since it happens every year. I’ve never heard of any of these films, but that’s basically the point. I’m sure there are some wonderful gems here.

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    The Return of the Found Footage Festival

    Posted on December 11, 2012 by Lincoln Spector

    The world is full of unwanted VHS cassettes, which is a good thing for Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett. They mine comic gold from the unwanted dregs of the video universe, which they serve up every so often with their Found Footage Festival. The results are often shocking, absurd, and pathetic. But they are also, almost always, funny.

    Prueher and Pickett arrive in the Bay Area this coming weekend for three shows, highlighting their sixth collection. They sent me a DVD of the current show, recorded in concert in Chicago.

    There’s nothing here quite as disgusting as their second collection’s How To Seduce Women Through Hypnosis, but the show still goes over the edge. There are male andimage female how-to masturbation videos (and yes, I really believe they were intended to be educational), and a nude exercise video starring a woman with breasts that are not found in nature. But easily the most disgusting clip is “Wound Round Live,” a horrifyingly upbeat, extremely graphic, mock game show about deeply injured body parts.

    But “Dancing With Frank Pacholski”–while only mildly disgusting–took the humor prize, leaving me laughing so hard I was gasping for air. Mr. Pacholski, who manages to look both ripped and paunchy, wears nothing but a mask and an American flag jock strap as he does the most bizarre dancing imaginable, all in front a a handful of very confused senior citizens. He seemed very happy about it.

    Other memorable moments include montages of child safety videos (one of which stars a clown far more frightening than any strangers with candy), instructional videos for ferret ownership and opossum massage (and no, oppossum is not meant here as a metaphor), a slideshow of VHS covers, and a fake yo-yo expert who manages to get on several local news broadcasts despite a clear lack of ability.

    Not everything hit a home run. The montage of music lesson videos was only moderately amusing. “The Chris Tape,” involving a very stoned man explaining that he’s the new Jesus, only produced moderate derisive laughter.

    Whether the clips are hilarious or only moderately amusing, the format remains the same. Prueher and Pickett come on stage and introduce a clip or a montage. They generally remain silent during the clip, but occasionally make comments.

    While I admit that I have yet to see them perform live, I’m confident that it would make for an extremely enjoyable evening–assuming you like this sort of thing. I certainly do.

    The Festival will perform at the New Parkway Friday the 14th, at 10:00, and Saturday and Sunday (the 15th and 16th) at the Roxie, at 8:00.

    Filed under: Bad Movies, Live Performance (other than for silent movies), Upcoming & Local | 4 Comments »

    Mill Valley Film Festival Preview

    Posted on September 25, 2012 by Lincoln Spector

    Getting ready for the Mill Valley Film Festival? Here are four films that I’ve been able to preview:

    A The Central Park Five, Rafael, Saturday, October 6, 3:30; Monday, October 8, 3:15. In 1989, a white woman was brutally raped and left for dead in Central Park. New York’s finest arrested five black and Puerto Rican teenage boys, all of whom confessed under police interrogation, even though there was no physical evidence that they committed the crime and considerable evidence that they did not. Ken Burns sets aside his usual historical style to examine this far more recent story of five young men convicted of a horrible crime that they did not commit. Most Ken Burns documentaries help us understand how we, as Americans, got where we are. This one shows us exactly where that is.

    B+ On the Road, Rafael, Thursday, October 4, 6:30 & 6:45 (in different auditoriums). Jose Rivera and Walter Salles came maddeningly close to making a great film out of Jack Kerouac’s highly-regarded novel. The sense of time and place are letter-perfect. The characters are rich, surprising, believable, and sexy. On the Road captures the dizzy and seductive joys of a drug-soaked and sexually wild youth, as well as the less joyful results of this lifestyle. The lead performers, Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, and Kristen Stewart (of Twilight fame) bring wild abandon, sexual urgency, and subtle characterization to their roles. But in trying to capture the full arc of the novel, it bogs down at times, and the picture is marred by stunt casting in the smaller roles.

    B Last Man on Earth, Sequoia, Tuesday, October 9, 9:30; Rafael, Thursday, October 11, 7:15. For the first half of this unclassifiable Italian feature, the aliens arriving on Earth are just background noise. The film is far more concerned with Luca (Gabriele Spinelli), a repressed waiter who can barely talk to his co-workers and spies on an attractive female neighbor. Then the aliens start interacting with the Earthlings and things get really weird. The first two scenes lead you to believe that you’re about to watch a droll and very funny dark comedy, but the picture is serious to its core–examining homophobia and misogyny, and with one very disturbingly violent scene. All these conflicting styles and approaches never really come together as a whole. But the good scenes, and there are many, outweigh the weak ones.

    C Jayne Mansfield’s Car, Rafael, Sunday, October 7, 6:30; Sequoia, October 14, 5:00. This southern gothic about the long-range mental effects of war provides little more than a chance to watch great actors struggle with a shallow script. Robert Duvall stars as Jim Caldwell, the aged, stern, remote, and possibly loving patriarch of a prosperous, small-town Alabama family. Two of his three sons, deep into middle age, still live with him–one of them with a wife and son. Then Jim’s ex-wife dies, and her second husband and his grown children arrive with mommy’s body in tow for a culture clash funeral. It’s like Death at a Funeral without the laughs. Thornton wanted to make a great drama about war and the 1960s (the film is set in 1969), but he didn’t succeed. Both shows sold out; rush tickets will be available at showtime.

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    This Year’s Mill Valley Film Festival Announced

    Posted on September 12, 2012 by Lincoln Spector

    As summer closes, the superhero blockbusters dry up. In their place comes a whole other genre–Oscar bait. That’s okay, because these are usually the best films of the year.

    And if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, your first chance to catch the Oscar bait is usually the Mill Valley Film Festival. The two most recent Best Picture winners, The King’s Speech and The Artist, both had their Bay Area premieres at Mill Valley.

    The festival was officially announced this morning, at the same time and not far from Apple’s big announcement. Rather than try to turn a press conference into a narrative, I’ll just list some of the more interesting nuggets discussed.

    And yes, I know that Mill Valley is only one of 13 festivals coming up in the Bay Area. I’m sorry I can’t cover all of them in detail, so I’m concentrating on the most important one.

    As I write this, the Festival Web site is not yet complete, so I can’t provide links to many of these films.

    • Mark Fishkin delighted the press by not reading off a list of sponsors. But he pointed out that ticket sales bring in a fraction of what it costs to run this event, and that we should be thankful to the corporations that make the festival possible.
    • The stats: The Festival will screen 92 features, 62 shorts, and 32 US premieres.  They expect some 45,000 people toi attend and buy about 60,000 admissions.
    • Most of the films will not be on film at all, but screened digitally. The Rafael installed a digital projector in one screen some time ago, and has recently installed another, leaving only one more waiting for the change. They’ve kept their 35mm projectors, as well. The Sequoia has already converted to digital.
    • The two opening night films are On the Road (yes, based on Jack Kerouac’s novel) and David O. Russell’s Silver Lightings Playbook.
    • Tributes will go to Dustin Hoffman, Mira Nair, and Billy Bob Thornton. Hoffman’s tribute will include the local premiere of his directorial début, Quartet.
    • In a tribute to actor John Hawkes, the festival will screen the Bay Area premiere of The Sessions.
    • The Italian Caesar Must Die sounds fascinating. It’s a reworking of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, filmed in a prison with the prisoners and guards performing.
    • Ken Burns will teach a master class.
    • The Festival will screen the world premiere of The Sinners, a murder mystery from Iran with a victim who has just returned from the United States.
    • On Monday, October 8, the Festival will screen Star Wars (AKA A New Hope) on the giant, curved screen at the Corte Madera. This year is the film’s 35th anniversary, but I’m sure they’re not showing the original version.
    • The Festival will close with Ang Lee’s first 3D film, Life of Pi.

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    Jewish Film Festival Preview

    Posted on July 11, 2012 by Lincoln Spector

    I’ve been able to preview three shows coming to the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, which opens a week from today. Here’s what I thought of them:

    B+ Under African Skies
    You can find plenty of political music documentaries, but few that examine both sides of a difficult controversy. This doc, which examines the making of Paul Simon’s hit Graceland, and the controversy over Simon’s breaking Under_African_Skiesthe South African cultural boycott of the time, is the exception. Structured around a friendly 2011 chat between Simon and Artists Against Apartheid Founder Dali Tambo, it asks whether it was right for Simon to have recorded music in South Africa when he did, and doesn’t come down with an easy answer. It mixes the politics vs. art issues with more conventional making-of footage–jam sessions, mixing, and so on. But it left me, like so many other such documentaries do, wishing they had included more concert footage; you seldom get to hear a song from beginning to end.

    B Arab Labor Season 3
    I loved the first season of this hit Israeli sitcom, as well as the three episodes I saw of season 2. But I can’t be quite as enthusiastic about this year’s subset of season 3. The humor and satire hit home, Arab_Labor3but rarely with the intensity of earlier episodes. As usual, Arab-Israeli journalist Amjad tries desperately to fit into a society that rejects him. This time, he ends up on a reality TV show and becomes a celebrity. But the nature of his celebrity keeps changing. One day he’ll be a hero to the Jews and a pariah for the Arabs, and the next day the other way around. With much of the satire aimed at the obvious target of celebrity culture, the bite gets lessoned. It’s still funny, and still gives us a flavor of the Arab-Israeli experience, but the show seems to be running out of steam.

    C+ The Day I Saw Your Heart
    Justine, an X-Ray technician and aspiring artist, doesn’t much care for her sixtyish father. He’s critical, cruel, and so emotionally distant that he can’t get excited by his The Day I Saw Your Heartmuch younger third wife’s pregnancy. Neither can Justine, who doesn’t want another child raised by that monster. He also has a habit of befriending her boyfriends as soon as she breaks up with them. Then, in the course of her work, she discovers that he’s got a heart condition. The Day I Saw Your Heart starts as comedy and ends as drama, but works only moderately as either. Justine herself is a reasonably interesting character, and well played by Mélanie Laurent, but everyone else seems only a foil for her reactions.

    Note: This post was corrected on 7/18. I found errors in some of the show times.

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    San Francisco Jewish Film Festival

    Posted on June 19, 2012 by Lincoln Spector

    This morning, one month before opening night, I attended the press conference announcing this year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. It will run in seven different venues around the Bay Area from July 19 through August 6. The largest runs will be at the Castro and Berkeley’s Roda Theater.

    A few noteworthy items:

    • A lot of music documentaries this year. The festival opens with Hava Nagila (The Movie), and closes with A.K.A Doc Pomus. In between you can catch Gypsy Davy, Under African Skies, Ben Lee: Catch My Disease, and God’s Fiddler.
    • This year’s Freedom of Expression Award goes to actor and ’70s icon Elliot Gould. The program honoring him will include a screening of his latest film, Dorfman.
    • The Centerpiece presentation, The Other Son, concerns two 18-year-old boys, one Jewish Israeli, the other Palestinian, who discover they were switched at birth. Oddly, this appears to not be a comedy.
    • There will, of course, be "four or five" Holocaust films. I’m still hoping for a Jewish Film Festival without them.
    • You’ll get another chance to see The Law in These Parts, a very good documentary about the occupation that screened at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival. You’ll find my thoughts on that one here.
    • If you’re under 30, this festival is a real bargain. The Millennials Pass gets you access to 60 films for only $25.

    After the conference, the press was treated to a screening of the first three episodes of Arab Labor‘s third season. In 2008, the festival screened the entire first season. It was brilliant. In 2010, they screened three episodes from season 2. My only disappointment was that they didn’t show the rest of it.

    But I can’t be quite as enthusiastic about this year’s subset of season 3. The humor and satire hit home, but rarely with the intensity of earlier episodes. As usual, Arab-Israeli journalist Amjad Alian tries desperately to fit into a society that rejects him. This time, he ends up on a reality TV show and becomes a celebrity. But the nature of his celebrity keeps changing. One day he’ll be a hero to the Jews and a pariah for the Palestinians, and the next day things get turned around. With much of the satire aimed at celebrity culture (an obvious target), the bite was lessoned. It’s still funny, and still gives us a flavor of the Arab-Israeli experience, but the show seems to be running out of steam.

    The best scenes involved a young interfaith couple. If you’ve seen the previous seasons, you know who I’m talking about. It appears that, in one of the season 2 episodes that didn’t screen here, they got married. Now they’re new parents, and even though neither of them are religious, parenthood creates ethnic content.

    By the way, I recently discovered that season 1 is available on DVD in the US. You can rent it from Netflix, or buy it from numerous online outlets.

    Filed under: Festivals, Jewish FF, Upcoming & Local | Leave a Comment »

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