San Fran Festival Previews

~ Lincoln Spector

I’ve just posted my first three microreviews of films screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival. One is a new film I saw at a press screening; the other two are older films I’d already seen. I’ll post more as I see more.


 Flanders, Pacific Film Archive, Sunday, May 6, 5:15; Kabuki, Tuesday, May 8, 9:00 and Wednesday, May 9, 9:30. Judging from Bruno Dumont’s film, you don’t want to spend your vacation in the bleak Flemish winter. On the other hand, it’s a lot better than a war of attrition in an unnamed Middle Eastern country. Dumont puts us in both environments in this atmospheric study of how war effects those who go and those that stay behind. The film suffers a bit early on from the dull nature of the leading characters (who take part in some of the most depressing sex I’ve ever seen), but stick around; it improves.

The Iron Mask, Castro, Saturday, April 28, 2:00. This won’t be just the movie, but An Afternoon with Kevin Brownlow, the great British silent film expert who’s receiving this year’s Mel Novikoff Award. Douglas Fairbanks must have felt melancholy as he made what he knew would be his last silent film. The first of at least three Hollywood versions of Dumas’ sequel to The Three Musketeers, The Iron Mask is unusually dark for a Fairbanks film, with several likeable characters meeting untimely deaths. But writer-producer-star Fairbanks lacked the knack for serious drama, resulting in an odd juxtaposition of bad melodrama and entertaining swashbuckling. The bad news about the presentation is that it will lack live musical accompaniment; the good news is that the recorded score is by Carl Davis, one of today’s giants in silent film accompaniment.

Cecil B. De Mille – American Epic, Kabuki, Saturday, April 28, 9:15. Kevin Brownlow’s documentary on the greatest showman in Hollywood history (although not, by a long shot, the greatest filmmaker) provides an interesting and sympathetic portrait of an influential artist treated today more as a joke than as a great innovator. This is a TV documentary, one I saw on Turner Classic Movies, and it may feel a bit slight on the big screen. On the other hand, it may not. There are plenty of clips, and no one knew how to fill the big screen like Cecil B. DeMille.

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Published by Lincoln Spector

Lincoln Spector writes about cinema, technology, and cinema technology. From 1986 through 2008, he wrote Gigglebytes, the first technology-oriented humor column. From 1977 through 2016, he wrote PC World's Answer Line column and blog.