Dan's Movie Blog

2012 German Gems

2012-01-22T13:37:00.000-08:00

2012 marked the end for Ingrid Eggers' German Gems Film Festival. As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, Eggers said "I gave it long, deep thought...The Bay Guardian gave me a lifetime achievement award. Once you get that, it's time to quit." Apparently, whatever animus existed between Eggers and the managers of her former festival, Berlin and Beyond, has dissipated to the point that she can claim, B&B is "is back on track."

I thank and congratulate Ms. Eggers for her many, fine years of programming excellent German language cinema in San Francisco. I'll miss her programming.

Unfortunately, the 2012 German Gems ran up against a Henri-Georges Clouzot series at the PFA. I was only able to see one film at the day long event at the Castro Theater.

Under Control; documentary; directed by Volker Sattel; German with subtitles; (2011)

The Castro runs previews before some its screenings. In December, I saw a funky, 1970s looking festival trailer for the 2012 German Gems. I'm still not sure what it was all about but if I had to guess, I think it was referencing Under Control which was filmed at various operating and abandoned nuclear power plants in Germany. I think the outfits in the trailer where riffing on the hazmat/radiation protection suits worn by workers at nuclear power plants.

Let me start by stating (or admitting given your viewpoint) that I am an electrical engineer. More accurately I have degrees in electrical engineering; I don't do engineering work anymore. My specialty was power engineering. Although I didn't specialize in nuclear power, my understanding of how a nuclear power plant works is better than the layman or man-on-the-street. With that out of the way, I was fascinated by the imagery in Under Control. Shot on 35 mm and at times, looking like an outtake from 2001: A Space Odyssey , the film beautifully captured the design of nuclear power plants. The effect was similar to what I read about Manufactured Landscapes which I haven't seen.

As the camera panned across control panels, fuel rod storage pools, the interior of containment buildings, etc., I recalled why I became an engineer. I think it is beautiful to see scale models and pipes and cable trays forming geometric patterns. However, I wondered how many in the audience understood what they were looking at. The dialog was minimal at times.

More problematic was the lack of a narrative. The film seemed to take place at several power plants. Some were still in operation, others were shuttered, still another was converted into an amusement park. I wasn't sure which power plant I was looking at. At one point, it seems like there is an emergency like a stuck valve which would lead to a containment breach or nuclear meltdown. The plant is evacuated. I think that would have made the news but I don't recall anything like that. Was it an exercise? Was it staged for the film? I don't know, it was never mentioned again. The fact that they were using 1960s & 70s looking switches and panels (like the original Star Trek) made me scratch my head. Why hadn't they upgraded that equipment and controls?

In essence, the filmmakers go to nuclear power plants and beautifully film the routine processes and tasks the employees must do as well as the equipment and facilities. Then it hops around to employees of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the crumbling ruins of an abandoned plant(s), etc. The overarching theme seems to be that we (or at least Germany) built these plants to control nature - harnessing the energy of the atom for our increasingly energy-intensive lifestyle. Now, 40 or 50 years later, the people are under control of the nuclear plants - operational safeguards and procedures dealing with the nuclear waste control the lives of those who work at or live near these power plants. I found the premise to dubious. Let's not forget the status quo when these plants were built. In Germany, they were burning coal to generate electricity. Who knows how much air pollution was avoided due to these nuclear power plants? Would they be any less "under control" if there was coal plant spewing NOX and SOX emissions and asthma rates were doubled? Society is all about controls which are more restrictive than anything shown in Under Control.

Avoiding a debate on nuclear power, the film seems to wants decry of the constraints imposed by generating nuclear power. The land use, the storage issues, etc. I just didn't find the arguments compelling. Instead, I found the images compelling.

If anything, I was saddened by the demise of nuclear power in Germany. The images in Under Control hearkened back to the days when society confidently "conquered" the environment. Engineers used to design and build big, ambitious projects like dams to tame rivers, long tunnels to defeat mountains, bridges to span the impassable and nuclear power plants to power a nation. Now, lawyers and environmentalists subvert those ambitions. Is it better for society? Perhaps; solar or wind generation brings a host of problems that most people don't consider. Most of these issues are because we can't "control" the output but for me, it's sad too. The enlightened societies won't allow a nuclear power plant to be built or in Germany, even remain in operation because the risk are too high. Society wants renewable power on demand without any risks and at low costs. It makes me recall why I stopped being an engineer...

As you can see, my take Under Control is intensely personal and unique. I liked the film despite its flaws but I can't really recommend it...except to some of my classmates from engineering school.

King of Devil's Island

2012-01-19T18:53:00.000-08:00

I remember when the Landmark Clay announced it was closing and the San Francisco Film Society entered into negotiations with Landmark and the owner of the building. The SFFS Executive Director at the time (the late Graham Leggat) mentioned in an interview or perhaps KQED panel discussion that SFFS was in a different position than Landmark Theaters. Being a non-profit, SFFS could count on alternate sources of revenue which Landmark cannot. At the time, it sounded to me like Leggat was essentially saying that even if SFFS lost money while operating the Clay, it would be ok because SFFS doesn't have a profit motive and could subsidize the operation of the Clay through charitable donations, government grants and tax write-offs. I remembered thinking it sounded as if they needed gimmickry to keep the single screen theater open.

Whatever happened to the planned closing of the Clay? Regardless, that formula of non-profit operation of single screen and/or small movie theaters has essentially been used or replicated at the Vogue, the Roxie and most recently, the Balboa. That reminds me of something else. When Gary Meyer announced he was stepping away from the Balboa, he mentioned his desire to spend more time working on the Telluride Film Festival which he described as his "paying gig." Since the San Francisco Neighborhood Theater Foundation announced it is taking over the Balboa, Meyer has seemed re-energized and doesn't seem eager to step away anymore.

The reason I bring any of this up is that whenever I go to the New People/Viz Theater for "regular programming," the audience is just as sparse as when it was operated by New People and programmed with primarily Japanese films. I define "regular programming" as the programming not associated with the SFFS fall festivals (Hong Kong Cinema, Taiwan Film Days, etc.). I keep thinking back to Leggat's comments (albeit he was speaking of the Clay) that SFFS's non-profit status gave it advantages in operating a single screen theater. I think his claim will be put to the test.

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My last venture to New People was to see King of Devil's Island.

King of Devil's Island starring Stellan Skarsgård, Benjamin Helstad & Trond Nilssen; directed by Marius Holst; Norwegian with subtitles; (2010) - Official Website

King of Devil's Island is a mediocre film elevated by strong performances and nice outdoor locations. It's essentially a prison film or more specifically a juvenile delinquency prison film. As such, there must be a child molester. Every film about a boy's reformatory has to have a pedophile, typically a guard. Based on true events and set in the early 1900s, King of Devil's Island is set on Bastoy Island, kind of an Norwegian Alcatraz for boys.

The ever reliable Stellan Skarsgård plays the warden - a no nonsense disciplinarian whose probity is compromised when he diverts funds to be used for the upkeep of the facility and its charges. The warden uses it to make life more comfortable for his new and younger bride who is terribly bored on the island and at other times, alarmed by the behavior and treatment of the boys.

The protagonist of the film is a boy-sailor named Erling (Benjamin Helstad). The boys are assigned prison numbers and Erling is referred to as "C-19" for the rest of the film. Sent to Bastoy for killing someone, Erling seems more of a loner and rebel than sociopath. He quickly deals with attempted bullying and begins to test the boundaries of his confinement. This puts him into conflict with the warden and his proxy, Olav or C-1 who is the trustee for his dormitory. Assigned with showing C-19 the ropes, C-1 fails miserably as the stubborn Erling is determined to escape the island.

Over the course of the film C-1 and C-19 form a friendship. As is de rigueur, they bond over shared, forced punishment. If I recall, it was chopping down trees in freezing cold weather. As the film progresses, C-1 loses respect for the warden as he is blackmailed into covering up the acts of his pedophile guard (nice performance by Kristoffer Joner who bears a resemblance to Tom Skerritt). This leads to the final confrontation between the boys and their overseers which plays out a little like Lord of the Flies.

Helstad is quite convincing as Erling but Trond Nilssen's turn as C-1 is the lynchpin of the film. His scenes with Helstad, Skarsgård and Joner show his character's evolution which is more powerful than C-19's restless frustrations. Magnus Langlete as C-5 also shines as the victim of the pedophile.

There were recurring scenes of a whale at sea which was a story C-1 and C-19 were writing together and also served as a metaphor for Erling. I thought it was a little contrived and the CGI images of the whale looked second rate. Otherwise, King of Devil's Island is serviceable JD film elevated by a strong cast.

Benny & Bogie

2012-01-11T19:44:00.000-08:00

The first films I saw in the Bay Area in 2012 were at the Stanford Theater.

To Be or Not To Be starring Jack Benny & Carole Lombard; directed by Ernst Lubitsch; (1942)
Casablanca starring Humphrey Bogart & Ingrid Bergman; with Claude Rains; directed by Michael Curtiz; (1942)

I was curious about To Be or Not To Be because I had never seen Jack Benny in a role except as "himself" which he portrayed in a few films and a long-running television series which I saw in reruns. That's the character that says "Well..." and has Rochester as a chauffeur.

In To Be or Not To Be, Benny plays Joseph Tura, the star actor in a Polish theater troupe. Carole Lombard plays Maria, his wife who is also an actress but jealous and dismissive of her husband's vanity and limelight. She copes by accepting the attention of younger men. A running gag throughout gives the film its title. Maria tells her would be paramour's to come back stage when her husband begins his soliloquy in Hamlet which starts with "To be or not to be..." In each instance, Benny deadpans a look of fury as a the young men stand up (invariably in the center of the 2nd row) and make their way backstage. Benny pulls it off for laughs like a pro.

Set immediately before and during the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, the theater troupe deals with the Nazi blitzkrieg and occupation. Robert Stack shows up as a young Polish aviator who is enamored with Maria. After escaping to London, he returns to stop a Polish double agent from revealing the underground resistance network. That's pretty serious stuff but it's played for laughs as mistaken identities, an actor who masquerades as Hitler and Benny's vanity are all expertly mined for laughs. I guess it is the "Lubitsch Touch."

Sig Ruman, who would gain cinematic immortality as Sgt. Schultz in Stalag 17 (1953), plays a more bumbling Nazi in To Be or Not To Be. He shows a fair amount of comedic skills going head-to-head with Benny in many scenes. Lombard, looking less bombshell than usual, also gets some gags (at Benny's expense frequently).

To Be or Not To Be is clearly Benny's showcase. He gets to dress as a Nazi, Hamlet, a Freudian looking Pole and I'm sure I'm missing some of his disguises. He pulls this off with his normal nonplussed aplomb. However, Joseph Tura is not that different from "Jack Benny." Still, it's hard to dismiss To Be or Not To Be. It was Lombard's last film before dying in an airplane crash. I (and the audience) laughed repeatedly throughout which, let us not forget, is a comedy about the Nazi occupation of Poland.

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There's not much I can add to the volumes written about Casablanca. In fact, I've seen the film so many times that I can recite the dialog and plot intricacies by memory. This time, I did forget that my favorite song of the film until it was played. I'm not referring to "As Time Goes By." No, a few minutes before that iconic scene, Dooley Wilson perform a toe tapping rendition of "Knock on Wood" which features a call and response with the band.

Everyone was there - Peter Lorre as the unctuous Ugarte, Sydney Greenstreet as the venal Ferrari, Conrad Veidt as the odious Major Strasser and whoever the actors are that play the young Bulgarian couple trying to escape Casablanca. For all the praise heaped on Bogart and Bergman and even Paul Henreid as Lazlo which I have always thought was a thankless role, Casablanca's real star is Claude Rains as Captain Renault, the delightfully corrupt police chief of Casablanca.

Like his character, Rains steals every scene that's not nailed down. Every line coming out of his mouth is loaded with humor, cynicism, innuendo and weariness. It was a role of a lifetime for any actor. Unfortunately, Rains lost the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor to Charles Coburn in The More the Merrier, a film I've rarely heard of, much less seen. I'm anxious to see Coburn's performance.

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I've noticed the Stanford does good business. They must pack in 100 to 200 people per screening at a minimum. All the tickets are double features and I notice a number of people leave after the organist finishes but I still think they are doing well. The Stanford is owned by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation so their lease and perhaps operations are reduced or subsidized which explains their low admission prices and extremely low concessions prices.

It's a Zoo Out There

2012-01-10T18:29:00.000-08:00

In December, I read in the San Francisco Chronicle that Keith Arnold was named general manager of operations at the Castro Theater. The article goes on to state Mr. Arnold's bona fides in the film programming community.

However, the second paragraph caught my attention. "The announcement comes on the heels of blogosphere and social media recently erupting with dark rumors concerning the venerable movie palace's future. Arnold, however, says the truth is something altogether brighter."

Erupting? I did a little "research" into the matter. What did research consist of before Google? It turns out that, in early December, The Petrelis Files reported that the Castro was moving away from film exhibition and converting to a "live performance venue." This conversion was to take place in January 2012. The post cited a confidential source who was later revealed.

Before it was refuted by the Castro Theater, the news "erupted." The most prominent person who reported on the "news" (without verification) was Roger Ebert via Twitter. Since I don't tweet, I was unaware of the controversy until after it had been refuted.

Petrelis updated his original post three times. In Update #2, Petrelis wrote "I've conferred with my source and they stand by the changes reported last night that will eventually take place over the next year or so at the Castro. The source maintains the owner is headed in a live performance direction and stands by the information shared with me."

While the issue was still fresh in some people's mind, Petrelis posted a follow up item. In this post, Petrelis revealed that Bill Longen, "who formerly worked at [the] Castro Theatre in many capacities from programmer to technical director," was the confidential source or "Deep Throat" for the original claim.

Petrelis' post quoted from a communication by Longen to Petrelis. In the portion cited by Petrelis, which is implied to be in its entirety, Longen never states definitively that the theater will switch to "live performance" programming. Longen details meetings he had to convert the Castro to a live performance venue but never states that the owners have decided to do so. Longen closes his communication with a cryptic message which can be interpreted many ways. "I hope this blog has rattled a few heads and caused some rethinking. If it has, then my work is done."

Most of Petrelis' second post read like a political manifesto. He listed 10 ideas for enhancing "the Castro's engagement with its audience." Several of them called on the owners to have open forums or dialogs with the public to explain their plans for the theater, their movies programming plans and their civic engagement. The entire episode smacked of "have you stopped beating your wife?" rhetoric. The tone had kind of a petulant, agitprop, 99% edge.

Petrelis went on to suggest a cannabis smoking area adjacent to the parking lot! Some of his other suggestions were more mainstream. He mentioned the Roxie had a "discount card" which I don't believe exists anymore. He urged the Castro to adopt a similar program which I certainly would benefit from. However, issues ranging from the building's historic landmark status to the economic wisdom of having the audience pick a film to be screened on a slow night, rendered his suggestions both helpful and self-serving.

Given that the San Francisco Silent Film Festival has already announced their 2012 festival will be from July 12 to 15 at the Castro Theater, it seems likely that any conversion will not occur before then...if ever.

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The second film I saw in 2012 was We Bought a Zoo. It was not a film I wanted to see. I was still in Las Vegas visiting my father. It was the last full day I was there and my father wanted to get out of the house so we ran some errands and this film had a screening time and location which suited our schedule.

We Bought a Zoo starring Matt Damon & Scarlett Johansson; with Thomas Haden Church, Colin Ford, Maggie Elizabeth Jones & Elle Fanning; directed by Cameron Crowe; (2011) - Official Website

I don't have much to write about the film. I immediately noticed the preview trailers included an interesting clip of The Three Stooges, the upcoming Farrelly brothers film. It was the first time I'd seen a preview for that film. Rather than a biopic, it seems the Farrelly brothers have put The Three Stooges in present times. In fact, my father surprised me by asking "Isn't that Snookie?" I didn't even think he knew that Jersey Shore existed.

Back to We Bought a Zoo, I can't find fault with the performances but the plot was predictable and formulaic, despite being based on a true story. Colin Ford, as Matt Damon's son, surprised me in a scene where he argues with Damon. Elle Fanning was interesting as a naive girl who is surprisingly forward in pursuing Ford's character. Maggie Elizabeth Jones, 6 or 7 at the time of filming, gets to call John Michael Higgins "a dick." It's always entertaining to see prepubescents using profanity. Actually, Higgins' performance as the deadly serious, uptight zoo inspector was the highlight of an otherwise cloying film. Director Cameron Crowe dialed the mawkishness factor a little too high on this film. Nice soundtrack though.

Logan's Run, Footprints and The Descendants

2012-01-09T10:53:00.000-08:00

With this post I close the book on films seen in 2011 and start with films from 2012.

In December, I saw:

Logan's Run starring Michael York & Jenny Agutter; with Farrah Fawcett & Peter Ustinov; directed by Michael Anderson; (1976)
Footprints starring Sybil Temtchine; directed by Steven Peros; (2009) - Official Website

I saw Logan's Run at the Castro and Footprints at the Little Roxie

Logan's Run is a well known film. It's one of those films I missed as a kid which is too bad because in 2011, only a adolescent boy could be interested in the film. Surprisingly, there was no nudity that I recall. Jenny Agutter wore some skimpy outfits but surprisingly little sex for a film which had the reputation among teenage boys as being all that.

The premise is well known. Didn't they do a remake recently? Michael York seems to be playing the role for high camp which I guess it is 35 years later. The special effect have a certain 1970s shabby chic appeal which reminded of the television show Buck Rodgers in the 25th Century. The dialog is cringe worthy at time. Seeing Peter Ustinov and Roscoe Lee Browne (as a robot) perform in the film made me wonder if they were desperate or the produces were paying them boatloads of money. Things were indeed strange in the 70s.

Two questions I have - 1) When Logan 5 (York) is being brain scanned by the computer at the end, he reveals there is no sanctuary. This puts the computer into an infinite loop and eventually overloads the system resulting in the destruction of the domed city. Why? Why does the computer need the existence of sanctuary for itself to exist? 2) What the hell was that carousel stuff? When you aged out, you went on this carousel where people cheered you on as you were zapped by laser. Was there a chance you would survive which was later disproved? I couldn't make heads or tails of the carousel.

Footprints was at times equally head scratching although I had a better sense of what was going on. Extremely low budget, the film starts with a woman (Sybil Temtchine) waking up in Mann's or Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood. She has no memory of her past including her own name. As the film progresses, she meets a number of Hollywood subculture characters - the homeless man, the tour guide operators, the woman who poses for photos dressed as Catwoman, etc.

I won't bother to recount the plot any further. The film has a dreamlike feel which makes it more interesting than it really is. Filmed on and around Hollywood Blvd., it feels like an indie film made for indie filmmakers and Hollywood history buffs. Ultimately, the nameless woman's story is representative of all the young actresses who came to Hollywood and we don't remember them or anything about their lives...the boulevard of broken dreams although technically refers to Sunset Blvd. not Hollywood Blvd.

The film never really captured my interest. The filmmakers seem to be ripping off Chris Rock when the homeless man rants about the less desired locations of black actors footprints in the Chinese Theater's courtyard. Actually, the seem to rip off Tarantino or Kevin Smith as well when the tour opertor goes on a rant about Nick Nolte "taking it up the ass" in The Prince of Tides. This was all in the first 10 minutes so I thought the film was going in one direction when it ended going in another.

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The first film I saw in 2012 was The Descendants. Yes, I saw it second time. I usually don't see films twice in such a short period but I was visiting my father last week. He wanted to see it, it was Senior Tuesday so he got in for $3 and I liked it enough that I thought I could get a better appreciation of the film with a second viewing.

I didn't gain much from a second look. What you see is what you get the first time through. There were no details that I saw during the second viewing which enhanced the film in my estimation. I did notice that Dog The Bounty Hunter was playing with the sound off in the background when Scottie goes over to apologize to the girl for teasing her about her "pubes."

Having watched the credits the first time, I knew that Kaui Hart Hemmings played Matt King's (George Clooney) secretary. Hemmings wrote the novel The Descendants upon which the film is based. I thought she would be older.

So even though I didn't gain added appreciation for The Descendants, neither did the film lose its luster from a second viewing which many films do. My father said it was one of the best films he's seen in quite awhile. I have to agree.

David Lean Double Feature

2012-01-08T11:08:00.000-08:00

In December, I stopped by the Stanford Theater to see two films directed by David Lean.

Great Expectations starring John Mills & Valerie Hobson; with Alec Guinness & Jean Simmons; directed by David Lean; (1946)
Brief Encounter starring Celia Johnson & Trevor Howard; directed by David Lean; (1945)

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A few years ago, I saw a stage production of Brief Encounter at ACT. The play mixed footage from the David Lean film as segues between scenes. Director Emma Rice very cleverly incorporated scenes from the film into the live production. I remember being very entertained & impressed by the play.

When I saw Brief Encounter on the calendar this December at the Stanford, I made time in my schedule to go down to Palo Alto to see it. I'm not sure if my familiarity with the film was because I've seen it before or because I saw the play two years ago. Regardless, the film stood on its own merits and provoked an emotional response.

I think as I get older, I become more sentimental. There is not much opportunity for sentimentality in real life so I am more moved by it in fiction than when I was younger and not as cynical. So it was that Brief Encounter's tale of unconsummated love moved me deeply. Bound by social more and her of sense decency, Celia Johnson's Laura is unwilling to cheat on her husband with similarly married Alec (Trevor Howard).

What makes me equally sad is that the plot of Brief Encounter is foreign and anachronistic to so many people today. By today's standards, Laura choice would be considered cowardly or a needless sacrifice. However by the standards of 1945, Laura's choice is, perhaps not brave, but necessarily selfless.

Putting aside my conservative nature in matters of propriety, Brief Encounter is an extremely well made film. I was left as conflicted as Laura - I wanted her to follow her heart but I knew it would make her miserable. Celia Johnson & Trevor Howard give outstanding performances.

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Great Expectations, based on the Charles Dickens novel, left me uninterested. Like Dickens' novels, Great Expectations was full of characters & coincidences which meander at a leisurely pace. It was interesting to see a young Alec Guinness as Pip's roommate Pocket and an even younger Jean Simmons as a young Estella but otherwise I quickly grew bored with the film. Perhaps I was anxious for Brief Encounter to start.

Noir City X and Xmas

2012-01-07T13:30:00.000-08:00

Noir City hosted a kick-off event for its 2012 Noir City which the 10th edition. Noir City will run from January 20 to 29 at the Castro Theater.

Noir City Xmas, held on December 14 at the Castro, was emceed by Czar of Noir Eddie Muller. The evening consisted primarily of two Deanna Durbin films:

Lady on a Train starring Deanna Durbin, Ralph Bellamy, David Bruce & Dan Duryea; directed by Charles David; (1945)
Christmas Holiday starring Deanna Durbin & Gene Kelly; directed by Robert Siodmak; (1944)

Other than the films, the biggest announcements were that Angie Dickinson was going to appear in person on January 21, there will be a six film Dashiell Hammett marathon on January 29 and on January 28, Noir City will take over the Swedish American Hall to create an authentic period nightclub/bar/canteen which Muller christened "Everybody Comes to Eddie's."

Muller also declared the late George Kuchar was his mentor and gave a short tribute. I assume Muller took classes under Kuchar at the San Francisco Art Institute where he taught for many years.

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Lady on a Train felt more like The Thin Man than noir but it was nice thriller/comedy. Durbin plays a wealthy debutante from SF who arrives in NY by train. While looking out her window, she sees a murder being committed. Unable to identify the location or identify the victim, the police treat her like a kook so she enlists the help of the world's greatest mystery novel writer (David Bruce). Perpetually with a drink in his hand, a pithy retort on his tongue and suspicious fiancée on his tail, Bruce is an unwilling partner in solving the crime. The two of them encounter wealthy brothers Ralph Bellamy & Dan Duryea; each playing with and against their typical typecast.

More comedy than suspense, I can't find much to fault with Lady on a Train. It wasn't noir and Xmas played little role in the plot but it was a fun little film.

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Christmas Holiday was definitely noir although Xmas played a small role. Told in flashback, Durbin plays a "dancer" in a New Orleans "night club." She is introduced to a soldier who received a Dear John letter just before he was going to fly back to SF to propose to his girlfriend. Bad weather diverts the plane to Las Vegas for Xmas.

Durbin and a reporter/flack (Richard Whorf) fill the GI on her sad story. She was married to a guy (Gene Kelly) who had a gambling problem, bad temper and possible incestuous relations with his mother. Kelly kills a guy over a gambling and gets sent to prison. Durbin, who goes by tow names in the film, is reduced to "dancing" with johns to make a living.

You guessed it - Kelly breaks out of jail and wants to settle the score with his wife although I don't recall exactly what she did to deserve it. I think the fact that she is working in a "night club" is reason enough for the pyschotic Kelly. No need to go beyond there because this was made during the production code.

Durbin does ok in her role, it was interesting to see Kelly play the bad guy, Richard Whorf as the boozy 2nd banana does quite a bit with his limited role and Gale Sondergaard hits a home run as Kelly domineering mother.

Christmas Holiday was a serviceable noir - well made, well acted if not somewhat lacking in flair or panache.

Jeanne Moreau

2012-01-06T11:27:00.000-08:00

The PFA hosted a Jeanne Moreau retrospective in November & December. I saw 9 out of the 12 films in the series although I saw The Bride Wore Black at the Viz which gave it week long run after the PFA series ended.

Bay of Angels starring Moreau and Claude Mann; directed by Jacques Demy; French with subtitles; (1962)
The Lovers starring Moreau & Alain Cuny; directed by Louis Malle; directed by Jacques Demy; French with subtitles; (1958)
Jules and Jim starring Moreau, Oskar Werner & Henri Serre; directed by François Truffaut; French with subtitles; (1961)
Touchez pas au Grisbit starring Jean Gabin & Rene Dary; with Moreau & Lino Ventura; directed by Jacques Becker; French with subtitles; (1953)
The Trial starring Anthony Perkins, Moreau, Romy Schneider & Orson Welles; directed by Orson Welles; (1962)
The Fire Within starring Maurice Ronet; with Moreau; directed by Louis Malle; French with subtitles; (1964)
Mademoiselle starring Etore Manni & Moreau; directed by Tony Richardson; French with subtitles; (1966)
Chimes at Midnight starring Orson Welles; with Keith Baxter, John Gielgud & Moreau; directed by Orson Welles; (1966)
The Bride Wore Black starring Moreau; directed François Truffaut; French with subtitles; (1968)

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In several of the films, Moreau had supporting roles. My favorite films of the series was one such film - Touchez pas au Grisbit which translates to "Don't touch the loot." A vehicle for Jean Gabin, Touchez is tale of honor among thieves and double cross.

Jean Gabin plays Max a 50ish gangster who wants to retire with some gold bars he stole. Unfortunately, Max has to carry his partner Riton (René Dary), the weak link and an equally aging playboy lacking the wisdom of his partner. Riton's girlfriend is a Jeanne Moreau who cuckolds him with Lino Ventura (in his film debut). Lino finds out about the gold, kidnaps Riton and offers to ransom him for the gold. The rest of the film involves Max try to rescue Riton & keep the gold.

Touchez pas au Grisbit was in the Golden Era of French crime capers which includes Rififi (1955), Bob le flambeur (1956), Elevator to the Gallows (1958), etc. Gabin's performance in Touchez pas au Grisbit gives the film most of its character. Polite, wise, weary and aware that he is aging, Gabin's Max could easily be mistaken for a corporate CEO or even a cop. Gabin was in a career slump at the time this film was made but his performance revived his career.

In addition to Gabin, the Paris neighborhood (Montmartre) where the film was shot and the sets (such as the bistro which only caters to gangsters) give Touchez pas au Grisbit much of its atmosphere.

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A close second was Bay of Angels which was directed by Jacques Demy (Umbrellas of Cherbourg). Moreau dyes her hair platinum blonde and cavorts with Claude Mann in the French Riviera. Mann plays a young bank employee who becomes enamored with gambling. He falls in with Moreau's character, Jackie. Jackie is une femme d'un certain age, married but travelling alone and terribly addicted to gambling. Mann's Jean receives a painful lesson in life courtesy of Jackie but between her platinum locks, decadent lifestyle and the soaring Michel Legrand piano concertos, it almost seems worth it.

After seeing Bay of Angels, there is no doubt that Moreau is a movie star. Even when she is silent, you can't take your eyes off her. There are long stretches where Jackie is silent and expresses desire, desparation, frustration and even self-loathing with facial movements.

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Mademoiselle was very compelling also. Moreau plays a small town's mysterious school teacher; I don't believe she is ever addressed by name. Prim and proper...and presumably virginous, I thought Moreau was too old for the role at 40 years of age. By the end of the film, I believe the casting decision was deliberate.

Mademoiselle lusts for a beefy Italian lumberjack whose son is one of her students. Mademoiselle secretly acts on her desires but the man's son discovers the tryst and mademoiselle knows that he knows. What follows is a complex psychological drama where mademoiselle reacts to the threat of her secrets being revealed by arson and flooding, intentionally casting blame on the Italian lumberjacks who are migrant workers. Simultaneously, she becomes resentful towards the boy and humiliates him in class. The boy though seems to want to emulate father even latently desiring mademoiselle. It was all rather fascinating and told in a measured pace.

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The Bride Wore Black was François Truffaut's homage to Alfred Hitchcock with Moreau as an avenging angel seeking retribution for her husband's tragicomedic death. The film is engaging enough but Truffaut seems to be going through the motions lacking the dark humor and morbid glee that Hitchcock displayed in his best works.

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The Lovers, Jules and Jim, The Trial and Chimes at Midnight are all well known films which I'll skip over due to considerations of my time and inclination. My only comment is that there is a scene in The Trial where Anthony Perkins walks among endless rows of workers at their desks which was visually stunning.

A Horse is a Car, You're a Barista and Is LVMH Poking Fun at Itself?

2012-01-05T10:38:00.000-08:00

It seems like everytime I have gone to the movies in the past several months, I see the same commercials.

I see the Hyundai Equus commercial with the familiar strains of DeBussy's "Clair de Lune," the Samsung Galaxy S II commercial which pokes fun at the pretentiousness of Apple users and the LVMH commercial which presents the LVMH brand as some sort pathway to a zen state of enlightenment. The LVMH ad always induces groans and/or giggles from the audience at the end of the spot when people realize what product is being advertised. I'm not sure whether or not to take it at face value. It would be extremely edgy if LVMH was putting the commercial out there tongue in cheek but I suspect the commercial is a serious effort to brand itself.

Love them or hate them, buy their product or not, these three commercials are exceptionally well made. I have to wonder what it says about my demographic or me that I keep seeing them over and over at the various theaters I frequent.

Southern (Dis)Comfort (Part 2 of 2)

2012-01-04T19:26:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned before, the PFA and Roxie copresented a program called Southern Discomfort.

I was able to catch seven additional films from the series in December - four at the PFA and three at the Roxie.

Baby Doll starring Karl Malden, Carroll Baker & Eli Wallach; directed by Elia Kazan; (1956)
God's Little Acre starring Robert Ryan, Aldo Ray, Tina Louise, Buddy Hackett & Jack Lord; directed by Anthony Mann; (1958)
The Intruder starring William Shatner; directed by Roger Corman; (1962)
Two Thousand Maniacs!; directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis; (1964)
Wise Blood starring Brad Dourif; with John Huston, Harry Dean Stanton, Amy Wright & Ned Beatty; directed by John Huston; (1979)
Moonrise starring Dane Clark & Gail Russell; directed by Frank Borzage; (1948)
Swamp Water starring Walter Brennan, Walter Huston, Anne Baxter, Dana Andrews & Ward Bond; directed by Jean Renoir; (1941)

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Overall, I'd have to say I was a little disappointed with the series. I'm not sure what I was expecting but some of the films never moved beyond stereotypes or sanitized versions of the plays they were based on. As a rule of thumb, I do not like films adapted from the plays of Tennessee Williams.

My favorite film of the series was The Intruder, a Roger Corman production. One of his more serious films, The Intruder has William Shatner playing a racist trouble maker who comes to a small Southern town when public school desegregation is implemented. This is the second time Shatner played the racist convincingly. At a TV Noir or Not Necessarily Noir in the past few years, the Roxie presented A Town Has Turned to Dust, a Playhouse 90 teleplay from 1958. In that work, Shatner played a rabble-rouser trying to stir a lynch mob up. In The Intruder, Shatner's character seems more like a convenient racist. His character is more interested in playing on the public's fears and African Americans in small town Missouri are just the unfortunate scapegoats.

Surprisingly realistic in its use of racial epithets and attitudes for 1962, The Intruder was quite a revelation for me. In fact, Shatner's predictable acting was almost sufficient. In the end, when he is confronted by mob he had nearly incited into a lynching, Shatner turns into a blubbering mass which I saw him do on Star Trek about a dozen times. Shatner isn't a one note actor but he only has one note for each emotion. When confident, he juts his chin and delivers crisp words with hand waving. When frightened, he shrinks his body, delivers crisps words but the pitch of his voice rises. When smug and smarmy, he wears a smirk and delivers his words not so crisply. Ever present are the odd but presumably intended to be pregnant pauses and the body movements. In The Intruder, not once but twice while delivering racially motivated speeches, Shatner goes through the motions of removing his coat, loosening his tie and rolling up his sleeves.

Shatner affectations should not be the focus of my post. Given that Roger Corman directed and William Shatner starred in The Intruder, the film exceeds all my expectations. PFA programmer Steve Seid shared some fascinating tidbits about the filming. The townsfolk in the Missouri town where the film was made were duped. I guess they thought they were being depicted in a positive light. In one scene, Shatner delivers his race baiting screed on the steps of a courthouse or city hall. The town square is full of white people. The scene alternates between crowd shots from behind Shatner and straight on head shots of Shatner. In the scenes where the crowd is visible, Shatner mouthed the words and the crew gave signals to the crowd as to when to cheer. Shatner later dubbed his words for those shots. Corman was worried that the crowd would find the racist words offensive.

In another scene, they burn a cross a la the KKK. Seid said that was the last scene they filmed. They burned the cross, put out the fire and then the whole cast and crew drove out of town.

I can't stress enough how amazing the film is within the context of its time. One year after the Freedom Riders and the violent reactions to it, Corman, Shatner, et al. show up in Missouri to make a film showing the ugliness and ignorance of Southern racists. They did it in an extremely authentic manner. Veteran character actor Robert Emhardt shines as a wealthy racist who bankrolls Shatner's efforts. Leo Gordon, who did time in San Quentin and usually plays the heavy, delivers nicely as a traveling salesman cuckolded by Shatner.

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The Roxie had a double bill consisting of Moonrise and Swamp Water. I forgot that I had seen Moonrise at the 2008 Noir City aka Noir City 6. As soon as Lloyd Bridges came on screen playing a pompous, rich jerk, I recalled the entire plot of the film. Danny Hawkins (nice performance by Dane Clark even though he looks 10 years too old for the role) lives in a small town where everyone knows his father was a convicted and executed murderer...and they never let Danny forget that they know. He gets into a fight with the town bully (Bridges) and accidentally kills him. In typical noir fashion, Hawkins doesn't think anyone will believe the truth so he hides the body. When it is inevitably discovered, evidence and erratic behavior by Hawkins leads the sheriff (Allyn Joslyn) to consider him the prime suspect.

The beauty of Moonrise is this sense that Hawkins' has a genetic predisposition to murder. Hawkins if fully aware of his father's crime and some in the town continuously project the father's crime onto the son. Hawkins has halfway bought into the notion and the accidental death cinches the deal for him. While Hawkins is self-conflicted and paranoid, he is trying to woo the beautiful Gail Russell. Unable to confess to Gilly and unwilling to leave town because of her, Hawkins is stuck in a prototypical noir situation.

Dane Clark's performance makes the film but I was suppressed by Allyn Joslyn in the relatively small role as the sheriff. Joslyn plays the sheriff as sympathetic to Hawkins situation but nonetheless determined to carry out his duty. Bridges makes the most out of his one scene and the recently departed Harry Morgan is surprisingly effective as a deaf mute. Whenever there is a deaf mute in a noir film, you know its going to be excellent - Out of the Past, Bangkok Dangerous, etc.

Although I enjoyed Moonrise, I was a little disappointed that I had seen it before. I'm not sure I would have gone to the Roxie that night if I had been aware that I had seen Moonrise before. It ended up for the best though. My second viewing of Moonrise was enjoyable and Swamp Water turned out to be quite a discovery.

The first interesting aspect of Swamp Water is that legendary French film director Jean Renoir (son of Impressionist master Pierre-Auguste Renoir) directed the film. Swamp Water is the film Renoir directed after The Rules of the Game which has subsequently been lauded as one of the greatest films ever made. Opening to poor reviews, the film was financially ruinous. When the Nazis invaded France, Renoir fled to Hollywood. Reading the film synopsis, I wondered if Renoir's skills would translate in a film set in the fetid waters of Okefenokee Swamp. There was no need for concern as Swamp Water is a minor masterpiece as far as I am concerned.

Renoir's directorial skills are buttressed by an unusually strong cast including Walter Brennan, Walther Huston, Dana Andrews, Anne Baxter, Ward Bond & John Carradine. The story has a number of strands which run in parallel until resolving themselves at the end. Ben Ragan (Andrews) is a trapper who goes into swamp searching for his hound dog. He encounters Tom Keefer (Brennan), a fugitive hiding out in the swamp. Initially adversaries, the two men strike up an alliance. Keefer has become adept at living in the swamp so he agrees to trap beavers for their pelts. Ragan will keep his location a secret but return periodically to collect the pelts and give Keefer some supplies. In addition, Ragan will set aside some of the money from selling the pelts for Keefer's daughter Julie (Baxter) who serves as the de facto servant for the guy (Carradine) that runs the general store/bar/restaurant/etc.

There are a number of subplots which come together at the end. Ragan's father (Huston) is suspicious that his wife, Ragan's step-mother, is having an affair. At the same time, Ragan's budding relationship with the coquettish Mabel MacKenzie (Virginia Gilmore) is strained by his frequent trips into the Okefenokee. Mabel retaliates by going to the big dance with another man. Ragan reacts by Dr. Doolittling the ragamuffin Julie and taking her to the dance. Always lingering background are Dorson brothers (Ward Bond & Guinn Williams), trouble makers, hog rustlers and the reals murderers for the crime Keefer was convicted of.

I won't give away the final act (partly because it is so convoluted I don't wait to make a mistake) but I will say the ending was not quite "noir." Regardless, watching all these great old time actors on screen was quite a treat - Huston's intense performance as a man barely in control of himself, Bond's blustering and bullying, Baxter's meekness which slowly transform as the movie progresses, Gilmore's pettiness and scorn, etc.

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The other films don't merit much in the way of space and time on this blog.

I thought Baby Doll was yet another failed film adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play.

God's Little Acre was based on a controversial novel of the same title by Erskine Caldwell. The film tilted too far to comedy (unintended?) whereas the novel dealt with issues such Industrialization, socialism and sexual betrayal. About two thirds of the way through the film, it starts to hit its stride but the foundation (i.e. the first portion of the film) doesn't support the change in tone as the film reaches its conclusion.

Two Thousand Maniacs! was just schlock. Perhaps pushing the boundaries in 1964, I am not enough of a schlock connoisseur to appreciate the nuances or historical significance of Two Thousand Maniacs!.

Wise Blood was fairly interesting. It featured a flashy if not impenetrable performance by Brad Dourif in the lead role. Based on a Flannery O'Connor novel, Wise Blood mixed comedy with advanced theological concepts which are beyond my engineering school education and aggressively secular lifestyle.

It Was the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

2012-01-02T22:28:00.000-08:00

For the past few years, I've had a job where there are a bunch of
month-end/quarter-end/year-end activities. As you can imagine, late December is a busy period for me. That's ok for me though. Since my mother passed, Xmas hasn't been as important to me so I visit my father over the New Year's week. One of the upsides is that work is much easier. A lot of people are out of the office for vacation and I can get my work done quicker because of less interruptions. That allows me to go to the gym and go to the movies. Not only is that better for my health but I usually feel better and more alert after working out so I can concentrate better on the films. I think they call that the endorphin rush.

So it was that for seven consecutive days from December 23 to 29, I saw nine films which may be the longest streak of thoroughly enjoyable films I have ever seen.

The Artist starring Jean Dujardin & Bérénice Bejo; directed by Michel Hazanavicius; silent with intertitles; (2011) - Official Website
Shame starring Michael Fassbender & Carey Mulligan; directed by Steve McQueen; (2011) - Official Website
Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness; documentary; directed by Joseph Dorman; narrated by Alan Rosenberg; (2011) - Official Website
The Descendants starring George Clooney & Shailene Woodley; directed by Alexander Payne; (2011) - Official Website
Silent Souls; directed by Aleksei Fedorchenko; Russian with subtitles; (2010) - Official Site (Russian)
The Gold Rush starring Charlie Chaplin & Georgia Hale; silent with intertitles (1925)
On the Town starring Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Vera-Ellen & Ann Miller; directed by Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen; (1949)
Singin' in the Rain starring Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds & Jean Hagen; with Cyd Charisse & Rita Moreno; directed by Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen; (1952)
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg starring Catherine Deneuve & Nino Castelnuovo; with Anne Vernon & Marc Michel; directed by Jacques Demy; French with subtitles; (1964)

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The Artist is one of the most talked about films of the season. The film trailer set to the tune of "Sing, Sing, Sing" is one of the best I've seen. I won't quibble that "Sing, Sing, Sing" came out after the semi-fictitious events depicted in the film.

I was familiar with star Jean Dujardin & director Michel Hazanavicius from their James Bond spoof OSS-117: Lost in Rio. Deliciously insensitive in the role, Dujardin's turn as the anachronistic Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath (Agent 117) gave no indication that he could carry a silent film as the debonair, silent film star George Valentin in The Artist.

I won't bother to rehash the plot of The Artist. It borrows somewhat from A Star is Born and Singin' in the Rain but tells the entire story without dialog (except for the final shot). It tells the story in a extremely effective manner which makes me wonder how silent films would have evolved if they hadn't been supplanted by talkies or allowed to coexist. Like Charlie Chaplin's City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936), Hazanavicius utilizes sound effects and a soundtrack to supreme effect.

I may be getting sentimental as get older, but my eyes were moist as I watched the once proud Valentin reduced to ruins while the beautiful and kind-hearted Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) attempts to help him. The film features strong supporting performances from Penelope Ann Miller as Valentin's shrewish wife, John Goodman as the movie studio chief, James Cromwell as Valentin's loyal manservant and Missi Pyle as Valentin costar in one scene where she seems to be channeling Jean Hagen from Singin' in the Rain. Uggie, a Jack Russell Terrier, was a little unctuous for my tastes but nonetheless gets a lot of screen time as Valentin's second banana.

The Artist is a tremendous film which left me impressed with its technical mimicry of silent era films and the emotional punch it packed. Count me as one of The Artist's biggest fans.

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I saw The Artist at the Landmark Theater Embarcadero Center Cinema on Friday, December 23. I returned there the next day to see Shame.

I was not too familiar with the plot for Shame. I knew that Michael Fassbender plays a sex addict & Carey Mulligan (whom I most recently saw in Drive) plays his sister. I knew it was going to be a depressing film but I wasn't sure how the plot was going unfold.

That didn't quite prepare me for Shame. The film is about Brandon Sullivan (Fassbender) and his younger sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan). They must have had one hell of a childhood although it is never explicitly explained. Sullivan copes with his problem through sex addiction and viewing pornography; Sissy is a codependent and reformed cutter with scars all along her forearms. Sullivan is a functional addict but the appearance of his sister stirs up deep-seated emotions. An ill advised one-stand between Sullivan's boss and his sister creates more stress. Finally, a failed romantic encounter with an attractive coworker lays bare Sullivan's dysfunction and addiction. This leads to the dénouement which involves a beating, anonymous gay sex, a ménage à trois and attempted suicide.

The film keeps getting darker and darker as we see Sullivan lose control of his addiction. In addition to anonymous sex, use of prostitutes and on-line porn, Sullivan masturbates like fiend. It's as if each ejaculation provides relief from his demons within. It's difficult to watch. Sissy delivers a line which sums up the plight of these characters when she says "We’re not bad people. We just come from a bad place." Shame is a powerful film which left me numb at the end.

Fassbender's performance has been lauded with a Golden Globe nomination. Two performances stand out for me - James Badge Dale as Sullivan's jerk boss and Nicole Beharie as his co-worker whom he has eyes for. Mulligan didn't have a lot to do in the film and her torch song version of "New York, New York" unintentionally made me laugh.

While watching the credits, I noticed the two women who were part of Sullivan's ménage à trois were credited as Calamity Chang and DeeDee Luxe...what great names. It turns out both are burlesque performers in New York and have cult followings.

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On Xmas, I made a day of it in the South Bay. My first cinematic stop was at the Camera 3 in San Jose. I caught Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness, a documentary about the writer who created the character of Tevye the Dairyman, the protagonist of Fiddler on the Roof.

Sholem Aleichem was the pen name of Solomon Rabinovich, a Hasidic Jew born in 1859 in the Ukraine. Sholem Aleichem means "peace be upon you." The filmmakers posit that Sholem Aleichem essentially defined Jewish humor and that his perspective on life was heavily influenced by his childhood, marriage, Jewish pogroms and the Yiddish language of the region. Using talking head experts on Jewish culture, the film meanders while following Sholem Aleichem's success and failures...much like one of his stories.

Buoyed by the mellifluous but vaguely Jewish sounding narration of Alan Rosenberg and some superb comedic readings by Saturday Night Live alumni Rachel Dratch, Sholem Aleichem kept me interested in a man I had never heard of before and time & culture I had never given much thought to before. At 93 minutes, the film was a 10 to 15 minutes too long for me but otherwise it was a solid documentary.

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After Sholem Aleichem, I had a bite to eat and I stopped by the Landmark Aquarius in Palo Alto to see The Descendants.

Since this film has a Golden Globe nomination and on the short list for an Oscar, I see no reason to recount the plot since there must be hundreds of reviews on-line.

I've never been a big fan of George Clooney but he pleasant enough in his roles. He seems to have a limited range as an actor - the quizzical look for comedic effect and he drops his voice to barely audible with clipped speech for dramatic effect. I will credit Clooney for not being a selfish actor. He lets other play off his relatively impassive demeanor. Although Clooney has the central role in The Descendants, it is 20 year old Shailene Woodley as his oldest daughter who does much of the heavy lifting in the film. Her character hints at some of the issues she may have had with her parents before her mother's injury and reflects a genuine love of her father. Her character is 17 years old but has been through rehab, knew her mother was cuckolding her father, learns her mother is dying and helps to confront her mother's lover...she has a lot on her plate and when you consider this, Woodley's performance is very complex.

In addition, Robert Forster shows up as Clooney's dyspeptic father-in-law and Beau Bridges has a memorable scene as Clooney's cousin. Clooney pretty much clears out and lets both actor emote and do their thing while berating Clooney's character.

Beyond Clooney's translucent performance and the strong supporting actors, The Descendants mixes tragedy and comedy in a way which becoming associated with director Alexander Payne. He has covered some of the same ground in Sideways and About Schmidt but in The Descendants it looks more natural. The scenes in Sideways and About Schmidt looked contrived and the characters too self-aware but The Descendants moves at pace that better reflect life or at least my perspective of life.

I wasn't deeply moved by The Descendants nor did laugh uncontrollably but when the film ended, I felt as though I had seen an expertly crafted film.

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On Monday, December 26, I intended to see the 6:30 PM screening of The Gold Rush at the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. However, I caught heavy traffic on Park Presidio Blvd. on the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge so, in mid-trip, I changed my mind and decided to see Silent Souls at the San Francisco Film Society Cinema at the Viz.

Of all the regions of the world, Eastern Europe is an area whose cinema holds little appeal to me. It seems like Eastern Europe cinema is a constant stream of depressing stories with the ever present spectre of totalitarian government suppression which results in beaten down and depressed old men bundled up against the bitter cold with a dank, grey backdrop of utilitarian buildings and polluted skies. While the consensus opinion of some these films is that they masterpieces, I'm left scratching my head.

Silent Souls has some of these characteristics. Set in a drab town that I can't recall but assume is in the Russian Steppes, the film follows the peculiar customs of the Merjan, an extinct culture of Finnish origin who was swallowed up by the Slavs. Despite this, in these small towns, their customs are still observed.

Silent Souls follows two Merjan men as they bury one man's wife. I don't know about the veracity of the depicted Merjan customs but we learn among other tidbits that Merjan women tie stings around their pubic hair on their wedding day, that Merjan men "smoke" about their dead wives which means they tell explicit sexual stories and that all Merjan have an affinity for the water and desire to have their remains be consecrated in the waters near their birthplace.

Silent Souls is set apart from my stereotyped view of Eastern European films by a sense mysticism and spirituality which infuses every scene. These two Merjan men are doing something deeply personal and haunting as they accompany the corpse back to her origins. The extended scene where they methodically & ritually cleanse the woman's body is mesmerizing as are a few other scenes.

The net effect is that I felt like I was watching something profound. Perhaps it was more abstruse or abstract than profound but the film never lost my interest. Like a noir film, the story is told in flashback as the narrator refers to everything in past tense and pre-shadows certain events. This adds an elegiac layer to the film. I had to dust of some 25 cent words to describe the film so it must insightful.

Silent Souls is playing at the Roxie this week.

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On Tuesday, December 27, I gave myself extra time to get across the Golden Gate Bridge although I didn't need it. Traffic was not as heavy on Tuesday as the day before.

Sadly, there were only six people in the audience for the 6:30 PM screening of The Gold Rush. The 35mm version screened at the Smith Rafael Film Center was a restored version. The prologue mentioned the version screening that night incorporated footage from the 1925 silent release and music from the 1942 re-release which Chaplin oversaw. However, the 1942 version was shorter than the 1925 version. The print that screened that night tried to marry all the frames from the silent film with the soundtrack from the 1942 version.

The Gold Rush is basically The Little Tramp in the Yukon. There are a few classic gags including the dancing dinner rolls, eating a boot and the shack on the ledge which teeters and totters depending on what side of the room the men are on. Like all Chaplin silent films, The Gold Rush had some inspired moments.

There was one plot point I found strange - the Little Tramp got the money and the girl in The Gold Rush. Also, the girl (Georgia Hale) had a capricious streak which left the ending ambiguous. Although they share a romantic kiss as the film fades out, I wondered if the girl loved him, wanted his money or was trying to atone for having previously toyed with his affections.

Apparently Chaplin felt the same. In the 1942 reissue, he ended the film before the final kiss. The Little Tramp never gets the girl, right? Chaplin also changed a scene were the girl's love note to another man is delivered to him. In the 1942 version, the girl sends the Little Tramp the love note to make clear her affection is not a byproduct of his newfound wealth.

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On 28th, I went to the Castro to see a Gene Kelly double bill - On the Town and Singin' in the Rain. Both these films are classics but Singin' in the Rain is considered by some the greatest musical ever made. Being contrarian, I preferred On the Town. I think saw On the Town on television when I was a kid. I've never Singin' in the Rain except for select musical numbers. Going in, I didn't even know it was set during the silent film era.

On the Town is iconic in its own right. When I see see a trio of sailors in their crackerjacks, I think of Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and...the other guy. Given 24 hour shore leave in New York, the three try to paint the town red. In quick order, two of three find girls but poor Gene Kelly is stuck on Miss Turnstiles (Vera-Ellen) who moonlights as a Coney Island cooch dancer and coincidentally comes from the same small town as Kelly's character (wouldn't they know each other or each other's family?). Like most musicals, the plot isn't important.

On the Town has a few musical numbers that I greatly enjoyed. Among my favorites were the opening number when the sailors come on shore and sing

"New York, New York, a helluva town.
The Bronx is up, but the Battery's down.
The people ride in a hole in the groun'.
New York, New York, a helluva town!!"

I also liked "Prehistoric Man" which set at the Museum of Natural History when sexy Ann Miller hooks up with the third sailor (Jule Munshin).

My favorite number from either On the Town and Singin' in the Rain is "Miss Turnstiles" where Vera-Ellen gets to dance, show off her athleticism and wear some short skorts which highlight her shapely legs.

I can't add much to what has already been written about Singin' in the Rain. Between Singin' in the Rain, The Artist and Once in a Lifetime at ACT, the 4th quarter of 2011 was all about the transition from silent films to talkies.

Having only seen the musical numbers from Singin' in the Rain, Jean Hagen's performance as nasal voiced, Brooklyn accented Lina Lamont was quite a pleasant surprise. Ms. Hagen won an Supporting Actress Oscar for the performance.

Cyd Charisse shows up for an extended dance number. Although Rita Moreno is listed fairly high in the credit, her role is so small that I cannot recall her speaking any dialog. Kelly shows a flair for comedy when he's not singing or dancing in the film.

On the Town and Singin' in the Rain are great musicals. I can't help but smile, laugh and feel better about life after watching them.

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The week ended when I returned to the Castro on December 29 to see The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Umbrellas is a musical but definitely a horse of a different color. French language, continuous recitative "songs" and closer to sad than bittersweet.

The film is closer to a three act opera than a Hollywood musical. Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo are Geneviève Emery & Guy Foucher, two young people in love for the first time. Guy is drafted into the French Army and sent to Algeria during the war. On their last night together, Geneviève & Guy procreate, leaving Geneviève in a socially and financially awkward situation. Unrelated, Geneviève's mother is having financial difficulties of her own. Looking to pawn the family jewels, the women encounter Roland Cassard (Marc Michel), a wealthy, single, jewelry merchant.

The 30something Cassard shows romantic interest in the 17 year old Geneviève. Rather than be alarmed by the older man's intention, Madame Emery tacitly encourages her daughter to choose the older, wealthier man. Especially when Cassard agrees to the union after discovering Geneviève's delicate condition.

Meanwhile, Guy is wounded in Algeria and his letters to Geneviève go unanswered. Upon his discharge from the Army, he returns to Cherbourg to discover Geneviève has married and moved away and Madame Emery has closed her umbrella shop and similarly moved away. Guy has one more tragedy to overcome. His beloved aunt passes away soon afterwards which sends Guy on a downward spiral. His salvation comes in the person of Madeleine (Ellen Farner), his aunt's live-in caregiver. In a classic rebound relationship, Guy and Madeline eventually marry.

The coda comes a few years later when Guy & Madeline run a gas station (Guy's dream). Around Christmastime, a fancy Mercedes pulls up for gas. Who other than Geneviève should be driving? Older, more sophisticated, clearly weatlhy, Geneviève and her daughter (Guy's child) are driving through Cherbourg. Making small talk but sharing meaningful glances, Guy declines to meet his daughter and Geneviève's drives off. Guy doesn't mention the encounter to Madeline and their son.

The vibrant colors of the sets and costumes made up for the dirge-like songs. Being a guy, I was slightly alienated by Geneviève. However, the film showed both young lovers in difficult circumstances trying to cope as best they can. Far from melodramatic, I thought Umbrellas was an exceptionally well made film. The circumstances were difficult and ambiguous...like life itself. I suspect the story could have been told more powerfully without the musical constraints but director Jacques Demy accomplished more than I initially thought he could have within those confines.

New Year, New Parkway

2012-01-01T21:28:00.000-08:00

As I wrote last year, the New Parkway Theater was having trouble finding a location. I noticed that J. Moses Ceaser stopped posting weekly updates regarding his progress in negotiating a lease at various locations. Around Xmas, he posted a batch of newsletters.

He didn't seem too optimistic. From his December 7 newsletter, Ceaser wrote "But I’m still not optimistic that we’ll get something done, just because these landlords don’t seem very motivated to get something done. At the very least, they’re aware of our urgency, so we’ll know something soon. I’m guessing that there’s a 25% chance of success, and until that dwindles to zero or 2011 ends, I’ll do everything in my power to find a home for the New Parkway." Ceaser and/or his investors had set a December 31 deadline to sign a lease or return the startup funds to the investors.

2011 ended like a bad Hollywood movie for Ceaser which is good news for supporters of his efforts to resurrect the Parkway. The East Bay Express reported that the New Parkway signed a lease at an Uptown Oakland warehouse. It's not the same location as the original Parkway but as Ceaser says of the new location, "It’s smaller. It’s got less character. Everything will be set up different. But we’ll at least be able to talk about our beloved Parkway coming back to life."

Ceaser's muted enthusiasm reflects the tone of the East Bay Express article. "The theater’s new location will be at 474 24th Street, a 7,800-square-foot former sheet-glass factory currently used for special events...From the outside, the boxy warehouse is nondescript and, as it stands now, a tad uninviting. Unlike 25th Street, 24th Street is devoid of casual foot traffic and other art institutions. Current neighbors include an adult video store five storefronts away at Telegraph Avenue and a large mid-century apartment complex one door to the east. 'I think it will create some challenges for us,' Ceaser said. 'I’m knocking down the attendance figures, knowing that it won’t have the facade some of the other places did.'"

The article goes on to say that opening day should be sometime in the summer or fall. Also, the theater will have two screening rooms seating 240 total, a cafe/bar area and a kitchen. The lease term is 21 years and the monthly payments approx. $8,000.

A Contra Costa Times article reports the admission price will be $6 and that the theater will employ 16 full-time workers.

I never attended a screening at the old Parkway Speakesy Theater, I've never met J. Moses Ceaser, did not contribute any funds to his effort and cannot say I play on attending the New Parkway on a regular basis but I was rooting for him. Everyone likes the underdog and I congratulate Mr. Ceaser on his persistence and wish him ultimate success in this endeavor...but the hard work begins now.

2011 By the Numbers

2011-12-31T19:17:00.000-08:00

Refreshing a post from early 2010, I summarize my 2011 theater going experiences below.

I saw 406 "films" on a theater screen in 2011. This compares to 382 "films" in 2010. For these purposes, a film is not just a feature length film but also includes programs (typically from film festivals) which consist of mutlitple short films. If it was categorized as a single program in a festival guide, it counts as one film entry on my list. Conversely, I saw several programs which consisted of a short film and a feature length film. For my counting purposes, those are counted a single film entry.

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The top 10 venues in which I saw films in 2011 were:

1) Castro Theater (102 films) - 19 films at the 2011 Noir City and 12 films at the 2011 San Francisco Silent Film Festival. While these numbers are comparable to their 2010 coutnerparts, I went to the Castro for their regular or house programming more frequently in 2011 than 2010. I was frequently in attendance at the Cary Grant and Pedro Almodóvar retrospectives.

2) Roxie Theater (78 films) - 23 films as part of their 2011 I Wake Up Dreaming series, 11 films at 2011 Another Hole in the Head and 10 films at the 2011 Docfest.

3) Pacific Film Archive (58 films) - 11 films from the Japanese Divas series, 7 films from the Jeanne Moreau series, 7 films from the 1970s Cinema series and 7 films from the Southern Discomfort series.

4) New People/Viz/SFFS Cinema (27 films) - 6 films at French Cinema Now, 5 films at the Classic Summer Weekends Japanese film series, 4 films at the Hong Kong Cinema Series and 4 films at Taiwan Film Days.

5) Camera Cinemas (24 films) - 22 films at the Camera 12 and 2 films at the Camera 3. Of the 22 films at the Camera 12, 14 films were part of 2011 Cinequest and 8 films were part of the 2011 San Francisco International Asian American Films Fesatival (SFIAAFF).

6) Landmark Theaters (23 films) - six films at Embarcadero Center Cinemas, four at the Clay (all from the 2011 SFIAAFF), four at the Bridge, three at Berkeley Shattuck and the remainders at the Lumiere, Opera Plaza, Berkeley California and Palo Alto Aquarius.

7) Kabuki Cinemas (21 films) - 16 films were part of the 2011 SFIAAFF and five films were part of the 2011 San Francisco International Film Festival.

8) 4 Star (13 films) - six films at the Asian Movie Madness series. Not included in the 13 is the film (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) I saw at the Presidio which is affiliated with the 4 Star.

9) Vogue and Balboa (9 films each) - all nine films at the Vogue were part of the 2011 Mostly British Film Series. All the Balboa films were programmed by the Balboa staff. It's appropriate I saw an equal number of films at these two theaters since the Balboa came under the San Francisco Neighborhood Theater Foundation (SFNTF) aegis this year. SFNTF owns and operates the Vogue.

Tied for the 11th place were Stanford and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts with 8 films each.

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The top three venues (Castro, Roxie & PFA) remained the same from 2010 although the order was rearranged in 2011.

The 4th place venue (Viz) remained the same as 2010.

Camera Cinemas vaulted into the top 10 (at #5) in 2011 as a result of my going to Cinequest and the San Jose screenings of SFIAAFF.

Camera Cinemas pushed the Landmark Theaters down one spot to #6 in 2011.

The Kabuki and 4 Star swapped relative positions. They came in at #7 and #8 in 2011 vs. #7 and #6 in 2010, respectively.

The Red Vic dropped off the list in 2011. I saw three films there in 2011 before it closed in July

The Vogue cracked the top ten (#9) in 2011 as a result of my attending the Mostly British Film Festival.

The YBCA and Stanford tied for 9th in 2010 and coincidentally tied for 11th in 2011.

The Balboa moved from #11 in 2010 to #9 in 2010.

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On 246 days in 2011, I saw at least one film.

My maximum was four films during a single day. I did that eight times in 2011. The first time was in February when I saw three films at the Silent Film Festival's Winter Event and then caught a midnight screening (Nude Nuns With Big Guns) at Indiefest. Five of the eight days were in March when I went to quadruple bills at Cienquest (2 days) and SFIAAFF (3 days). In July, I went to four films on the Saturday and Sunday of the SF Silent Film Festival.

On 16 days, I saw three films. On 100 days, I saw two films. On 122 days, I saw one film.

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I still track how much I spend on admission but it's getting difficult to boil everything into one number. Charitable donations and prepayments mean that I paid for some 2011 films in 2010 and incurred costs in 2011 for films I plan to see in 2012.

The cumulative 2010 and 2011 average is $8.49 per admission but that is almost certainly overstated as I have not accounted for the tax deductions I enjoyed and am sitting on a modest stockpile of Landmark Theater Gold Books which will yield savings in 2012 and perhaps beyond.

Gold Arbitrage and I'm Getting Tired of Writing About This

2011-12-27T12:15:00.000-08:00

Little did I know that a passing comment about how many cinema discount cards I have could be mined for so many posts...

On Christmas Day, I decided to drive down to San Jose to see Christmas in the Park. What is Christmas in the Park? According to their FAQ, "Each year, the two-acre Plaza De Cesar Chavez is transformed into a holiday fantasy with over 60 musical and animated exhibits, glittering lights and the 60-foot Community Giving Tree. Some of the original displays housed in one of the largest exhibits, the Lima Train, include a melting snowman, caroling mice and elf woodcrafters."

I've long wanted to see what the hullabaloo was all about. It's kind of interesting but I'm getting too old (in chronological age and spirit) to enjoy Xmas extravaganzas like Christmas in the Park. Still, I'm glad I checked it off my To Do list.

Aware that Christmas in the Park is within walking distance of the Camera Cinemas, I took the opportunity to see Sholem Aleichem. Further attempting to make the most of my drive, I timed it so I could swing by the Landmark Aquarius in Palo Alto to see The Descendants on the drive back.

Since discovering the Aquarius is around the corner from the Stanford, I've wanted to stop in to see what the theater is like. Not sure when a theater will close its doors permanently, I'm inclined to see a film in a new theater to see it while I can. The Aquarius has a ocean motif although the name was probably influenced by the hippies. Built in 1969, the Aquarius may be referring to the era or Age of Aquarius. Unlike the Stanford (44 years its senior), the Aquarius has about as much character as the twin screen theaters that would be built in the 1970s. It does have the underwater murals but beyond that, the design is less than utilitarian.

The theater (I was in the #2 auditorium, I believe) is long and narrow. There is a central aisle with three or four seats on the left and right. There are about 70 or 80 rows of seats. The theater seems to have been built to fit the space of the lot. The floor is raked so for me the best spot was about halfway down. Beyond that, the theater didn't have much going for it.

Looking to buy another Gold Book, I asked to purchase one. The cashier charged me $181.25 or $7.25 per admission. I was a surprised by the price since they sell for $193.75 or $7.75 per admission at the San Francisco Landmark Theaters. After the film, I confirmed they were valid at all the Bay Area Landmark Theaters and purchased another Gold Book. So if you are ever in Palo Alto, you may want to buy your discount books down there. I'm not sure if they sell at the same price at the nearby Guild Theater in Menlo Park.

The Gold (Book) Rush

2011-12-24T17:04:00.000-08:00

In my last post, I mentioned Landmark Theaters Gold Books. As if on cue, I was informed today of an upcoming change in the Landmark Theaters admission policy.

When I went to see Shame earlier today, I redeemed a Gold Book ticket for admission. The cashier told me that the Gold Books are being discontinued soon. They will be replaced by "Platinum Books" and will cost more. The cashier was a light on hard information such as when the Gold Books will be discontinued or how much the Platinum Books will cost but I was able to pin him down on one salient fact. The Gold Books will continue to be honored even after they stop selling them. With that nugget of information, I purchased an additional Gold Book at $193.75 even though I had more than 15 redemptions left on my Gold Book. I may go back and get myself a few more.

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Long, long ago, I received a pass for one admission from the Chistopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. I've only gone there for the Mill Valley Film Festival. The regular film programming at the Smith Rafael largely mirrors that which is available in the City. Given the $5 Golden Gate Bridge toll, I've been reluctant to drive up there to see something I could see in the City. However, this week, the Smith Rafael is screening a restored version of Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush (1925) which I don't see screening anywhere else. Given that the pass expires on January 31, 2012, I'll probably make my way up to San Rafael to see The Gold Rush which serendipitously is a film I have not seen before. It's fallen through the cracks of two Chaplin retrospectives in the Bay Area in the past few years.

The Gold Rush plays at 4:30 PM and 6:30 PM daily until Thursday, December 29. On Xmas day, there is only a 4:30 screening.

The Gift of Discounted Admission

2011-12-22T19:04:00.000-08:00

As a service and in response to a few conversations, I decided to list film theater admission price discounts in the Bay Area.

The 4 Star sells six film discount cards for $40 which works out to $6.67 per admission. That compares to their regular admission price of $10 and $8 for bargain matinees, seniors and children. The discount card can only be used for one admission at a time. Also, it is supposed to be used only once per day but I've used mine twice in a day. I cannot recall if the card expires and I don't have it near me. The card is good for all shows. The 4 Star discount card cannot be used at the Marina or Presidio theaters which are also owned by the Lee family. I know the Presidio has its own discount card (5 films for $40). I've never been to the Marina Theater and cannot tell from the website if there is a Marina discount card. I'm certain the 4 Star is cash only; not sure about the Presidio or Marina.

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The Balboa sells a five film discount card for $37.50 which is $7.50 per admission. That compares to their regular admission price of $10 regular admission and $7.50 for bargain matinees, seniors and children. The discount card can be used for two admissions at a time. The card is good for all showings. The discount cards can also be used for the ballets and operas the Balboa broadcasts. However, the ballet & opera admission requires two punches on the discount card which is a $5 saving to the $20 admission price. Also, the Balboa allows free admission on your birthday. The discount card expires six months after purchase. The Balboa is cash only.

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The Camera Cinemas in San Jose and Los Gatos sells a ten film discount card for $60.00 which is $6 per admission. That compares to a regular admission price of $10.50 (Camera 12/Camera 7) or $10 (Camera 3/Los Gatos), student/senior/children/matinee admission price of $7.50 (Camera 12/Camera 7) or $7 (Camera 3/Los Gatos) and a bargain matinee price of $5 (all locations). The discount card is good for all Camera locations and all showings except after 6 PM on Saturdays. The discount card can be used for two admissions at a time. There is no expiration date on the discount card. The Camera Cinemas accept credit cards so if you have a cashback credit card, you can get further savings.

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The Roxie Theater does not sell a discount card. It used to but does not anymore (presumably after the Stattons took over management). On Mondays, the admission price is $6.50 which compares to their admission price of $10 regular admission, $7 for bargain matinee and $6.50 for seniors and children. The Roxie is cash only although you can buy tickets on-line through their website with a credit card for a $2 service fee.

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The Stanford Theater sells a 4 film discount card for $24.00 which is $6 per admission. There is no expiration date on the discount card. That compares to their regular admission price of $7 regular admission and $5 for seniors and children. The Stanford is cash only.

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The New People (Viz)/San Francisco Film Society (SFFS) Screen does not sell a discount card. You can purchases an annual SFFS membership for as little as $60 (not tax deductible). At higher membership levels, SFFS membership is partially tax deductible. Membership entitles you to a $2 discount on admission. The general admission price is $11 vs. the member admission price of $9. Seniors/Students/Disabled are charged $10 admission. SFFS membership also gives discounts for tickets to the San Francisco International Film Festival and the SFFS Fall Season Film Series. The discount varies depending on the screening; most are a $2 discount vs. general admission but the discount is larger for opening night and special screenings which cost more.

The SFFS also sells a 10 film Cinevoucher which is can be redeemed for tickets to most festival screenings and regular screenings at the SFFS Screen at New People. The general price for a Cinevoucher is $125; the member price is $105. At first look that doesn't make sense for SFFS screenings. If the member admission is $9; why use a Cinevoucher if the effective cost is $10.50 per admission? The answer is service fees. If you buy on-line, you are assessed a service fee or ticketing fee of $1.50 per ticket. The member on-line purchase price is $9 + $1.50 = $10.50. The Cinevoucher redemptions are exempt from service fees. The Cinevouchers do not expire. SFFS accepts credit cards.

My strategy for SFFS is to flash my membership card at the box office to get the discount when I go to their regular screenings which rarely sell out. I redeem Cinevouchers on-line for the applicable festival screenings (which frequently sell out or go to rush). If you are hard core about optimizing your costs, I recommend loading up on Cinevouchers as your membership expires. You can buy up to 10 Cinevouchers (100 admission vouchers) per transaction. Let the membership lapse and remain inactive until you run out of Cinevouchers at which time you renew your membership.

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The PFA does not sell discount cards. You can buy a $50 annual membership which entitles you to a $4 discount on one screening per day. The regular price is $9.50 and the member price is $5.50. There are a bunch of other discounts for Cal students, Cal staff & faculty, seniors, disabled, non-Cal students, etc. If you buy a ticket, you can buy another ticket to the second half of the double feature (if it is a double feature) for $4. Everyone pays $4 for the 2nd film so there is no discount or benefit for being a member w.r.t the 2nd film admission price. The PFA accepts credit cards.

The $50 membership is tax deductible. In addition, the membership entitles one to free admission at the Berkeley Art Museum, discounts at the museum store and free admission at a number of reciprocal university art museums including the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford. Recently, members began receiving discounts through the PFA's East Bay Discount Club. All the participating retailers are located in the East Bay.

Last year, PFA had a membership sale where they allowed members to extend their membership for $40 per year. I took them up on that so my two year membership which expires in July 2012 was $90. I wish I would have bought two or three additional years because they didn't repeat that promotion this year.

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The YBCA does not sell discount cards, per se. They sell annual membership for as little as $65 (fully tax deductible). General admission is $8 and the member price is $6. YBCA membership also includes discounts to gallery admission and other performances. The YBCA accepts credit cards.

The YBCA does have what they call "discount cards" which is more like a rewards card. At no cost, you can ask for a discount card (no expiration date) which you present each time you purchase a ticket. They punch a hole in the card for each ticket purchase. After six punches, your next purchase is free. I'm not sure if they punch the card when you buy on-line. On several occasions, they were out of the cards at the box office.

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I previously mentioned the Landmark Theaters' discounted tickets. Summarizing the two types of discounted tickets:

1) Gold Book or Gold Cards which are sold in increments of 25 admissions for $193.75 or $7.75 per admission. There are no restrictions on time of use or expiration date. They can be used in any increment; i.e. one to 25 admissions at the time of redemption.

2) Discount Cards which are sold in increments of 5 admissions for $40 or $8 per admission. The Landmark Discount Cards are on good all day on Sundays through Thursdays and before 6 PM on Fridays & Saturdays. The Discount Card can only be redeemed at one or two admissions at a time. In other words, if there were three people, you would need two Discount Cards to cover the three people. Also, the Discount Cards expire six months after purchase.

The Gold Book and Discount Cards compare to a regular admission price of $10.50 general admission and $8 for matinees, seniors, children and students. The student discount is only good for Monday through Thursday. Landmark Theaters accept credit cards. The Gold Book and Discount Cards are redeemable at all Bay Area Landmark Theaters. I don't think they are valid nationwide as Landmark ticket prices vary among different markets.

Separate from this discount system, Landmark Theaters offers a free Film Club Rewards Card. You present the card prior to ticket purchase or Gold Book/Discount Card redemption. The cashier scans it and your account is credited with the number of admissions you purchased or redeemed. For every nine admissions credited to your Film Club Rewards account, you receive a free admission which is equivalent to a 10% discount. Combined with the Gold Book, if you are diligent about presenting your Film Club Rewards Card, you receive at least 27 admissions for $193.75 or $7.18 per admission. You have to spread it out over 9 Gold Books to realize the full 10% discount.

The nice part of Landmark Theaters Film Club Rewards Card is that if you forget to or cannot give the cashier the card at the time of purchase, you go on-line to credit your account. Each ticket issued by Landmark has a unique ID code which you enter to credit your account if needed. Each month there is a concession reward as well which entitles the card holder to discounted or free concessions.

Similar to the Gold Book and Discount Cards, the Landmark Theaters Film Club Rewards Card is not accepted at all locations nationwide.

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That only leaves the major chains such as AMC, Cinemark and Regal which are the three largest. All of them sell discounted tickets and have rewards clubs. I've never availed myself to them because I go so infrequently. I do have a Regal Crown Club Reward Card because the nearest movie theater to my father's house is a Regal. However, on recent visits we've been going to a Century Cinema which I haven't bothered to get a rewards card for. Having never reached a rewards level at Regal, I cannot recall what the rewards are. The first few rewards levels are for concessions; it's not until later that a free admission is part of the reward.

Balboa Theater Fundraiser

2011-12-14T13:31:00.000-08:00

I dropped by the fundraiser for the Balboa Theater last night.

A few tidbits I learned were:

The Balboa's facade is being refurbished starting today. The scaffolding should be up by the end of the day. The Balboa received a grant from the City to do the work but had to supplement it with donated funds.

Eddie Muller was there and announced that Angie Dickinson would be a guest at the upcoming Noir City (January 20 to 29). Tonight is the Noir City kickoff at the Castro featuring a Deanna Durbin double feature, the unveiling of the full film lineup and more.

The Balboa, stealing a page from the Stanford playbook, will screen It's a Wonderful Life on December 23 and 24.

It was confirmed that The Mostly British Film Festival will take place at the Vogue in February.

Gary Meyer confirmed that the annual Oscar telecast and Balboa birthday party will take place as usual. He even announced the silent film for the birthday party but I cannot recall it.

There are newly installed space heaters at the Balboa.

At the end of the evening, Gary praised the Roxie Theater for the courageousness of their film programming.

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As for the fundraiser, I would deem it a success. My estimate would put the total attendance at approximately 100 people. The fundraiser consisted of a $35 admission fee and the auctioning of several cinema and Sutro Baths related items. Most of the items were auctioned via silent auction but some of the big ticket items were auctioned Storage Wars style although no one was a boisterous as Dave Hester. The competition for a few items was intense. The live auction generated at least $4,000 as quadruple digit bids were accepted on a SF Giants tickets & autographed memorabilia package and private screenings at the Balboa or Vogue. For my part, I was the winner for three autographed books by Emily W. Leider - biographies of Myrna Loy, Mae West and Rudolph Valentino.

In addition, they screened a 12 minute documentary called "Then and Now" about old movie houses in SF. Gary emceed most of the evening but was assisted by some SF Neighborhood Theater Foundation Board members. After an intermission, Gary screened a short film which he thought would get a Academy Award nomination. I can't recall the name and walked in halfway through.

The evening ended with Gary Meyer discussing films and actors which he thought had strong chances to get Academy Award nominations. The Descendants, The Artist, My Week With Marilyn, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, We Need to Talk About Kevin and others were discussed and/or their trailer was shown. Meryl Streep's turn as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady was among the strong field of potential Best Actress nominees.

Gary also talked up two soon-to-be-released features, The Flower of War, a Yimou Zhang film starring Christian Bale and A Separation, an Iranian film.

Although schedule for 7 to 9 PM, I didn't get out of there until after 9:45. I didn't realize how tired I was until I woke this morning. Jostling with the crowds in the lobby during the silent auction and trying to get to the open bar/buffet table was exhausting.

The crowd was a little different. It definitely didn't seem like a film festival crowd. A man sitting behind me had no idea what "film noir" meant. The crowd was largely white and older although the $1,000+ bids were submitted by younger looking audience members.

The audience treated Gary Meyer with a mixture of adulation and reverence. From the way Gary spoke, it seems like he is going to continue playing a significant role at the Balboa for the foreseeable future. I left the Balboa unclear as to how or if the Vogue and Balboa's operations would be combined or coordinated. The Balboa seemed very much like it was still Gary's baby except it is being operated under a nonprofit umbrella now. My guess is that fundraisers will become a routine event at the Balboa.

At the silent auction, there were three original Sutro Baths signs which I coveted. Quickly, bidding escalated to the point which I was hesitant to trump the bid. When they closed the silent auction, I was trying to work up enough courage to snipe the Grand Opening sign. I have a bit of remorse today that I didn't "pull the trigger."

Among the local cinematic luminaries in the crowd were Eddie Muller, Judy Wyler Sheldon and John Stanley. When I paid for my auction items, John Stanley was standing behind me in line so he could pay for his merchandise. The young lady processing the payments had no idea who John Stanley was; she even made him spell his name. It reminds me of the time I was at the Muni Museum on Spear. Some tourists came in and asked the cashier who Herb Caen is. The young man was befuddled by the question. After fumbling for an answer, he responded "Does he play for the 49ers?" I think Caen would have liked that story maybe even included it in the three dot lounge...

Whofore Art Thou and The Time of Your Life

2011-12-05T23:49:00.000-08:00

I stopped by the 4 Star to catch a double feature yesterday.

Anonymous starring Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave & Joely Richardson; directed by Roland Emmerich; (2011) - Official Website
In Time starring Justin Timberlake & Amanda Seyfried; directed by Andrew Niccol; (2011) - Official Website

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Anonymous tells the oft debated "authorship question" with respect to William Shakespeare's works. I was familiar with the suspicions surrounding Shakespeare from an ACT production of The Beard of Avon from 2002. In a nutshell, there are many pieces of circumstantial evidence which would indicate that Shakespeare was not the author of the works attributed to him. These include his education, the mundane language used in his self-written will and his daughters' illiteracy. Speculation about the true authorship of Shakespeare's works focuses on Sir Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe & Edward de Vere. Anonymous goes with the theory that de Vere was the true author.

The political intrigue around Queen Elizabeth I serves as the backdrop for de Vere's nom de plume. Although a fan of conspiracy theories as well as this specific one, I found Anonymous surprisingly uncompelling. The political maneuvering of the Elizabethan court left me uninterested. The film also used a flashback device which I found confusing at times.

The performances were impressive at times including Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Elizabeth, Sebastian Armesto as Ben Johnson, Rhys Ifans as de Vere and Jamie Campbell Bower as young de Vere.

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In Time is a nice science fiction film. The premise is that human have been genetically engineered to stop aging at age 25. At that point, they must earn time in order to live which is the currency of the land. They are given one year at age 25 but everything such as groceries, bus fare, etc. costs time. Poor people are working day to day literally. If they run out of time, they die or "time out." Time remaining is conveniently displayed on an implant on one's forearm.

As you can imagine, this sets up many potential plot lines. Wealthy people have centuries on their forearm. It is easy to steal time (one simply grabs another's forearm and flip it over to take the other person's time). Also, since people stop aging, it is impossible to tell someone's age by appearance. Justin Timberlake plays Will Salas, a poor but hard working & honest guy from the "wrong time zone." Olivia Wilde, 3 years younger than Timbelake, plays his mother in a small role. It is her death combined with a chance encounter with a wealthy but suicidal man that sends on his journey.

That journey is ill defined at the start but moving several time zone to the ritzy New Greenwich puts Will in the big leagues. He encounters Philippe Weis at a Texas Hold'em match and takes him for millennium pot. Weis is an über-wealthy time lender with a rebllious and beautiful daughter, Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried). Quickly, Will & Sylvia become attracted to each other. Raymond Leon(Cillian Murphy), a timekeeper (aka cop) investigating the death of the 100 year old man Will encountered to get his first century, arrests Will on suspicion of murder. Will kidnaps Sylvia to make his escape.

Although initially hostile, when the rich girl sees how the other side lives, she quickly buys into Will's evolving plan which seems to be Bonnie & Clyde meets Robin Hood. The two start robbing time banks and distributing the time to the poor. Will has gone up against the world's financial system. Wealthy and powerful people need the poor to always be short on time to exploit them for their own profit and immortality. Using spectacularly monopolistic price fixing, the powerful simply increase interest rates and the price of goods and service such that the time Will has given for free is devalued. How's that for a New World Order?

Eventually, Will and Sylvia decide to steal a 1,000,000 years (also called an epoch) from Sylvia's father to destroy the financial system. This is where the wheels fall off for In Time. The film does a good job developing this dystopian world (not unlike Metropolis) where power is concentrated in the hands of the few. As Salas inches towards socialism, the film seems to decide that it can't quite utter the words or cross the threshold. At any time, I expected Salas to yell "Workers of the world, unite!" Rather than socialism, the ending veers towards anarchy as Will and Sylvia go on to rob bigger time banks, presumably to distribute the time free to the poor. It's like Jesus Christ and Joan of Arc in science fiction.

The selfless nature of Will Salas, a hardscrabble kid from the ghetto, is the chief complaint I have about In Time. That a rich girl would fall for him is not unusual. In fact, it's common enough to be a trope. Salas' behavior defies logic and convention and takes the film to the boundaries of socialist propaganda (right down to the Jewish cabal led by Weis). A more ambiguous hero and ending would have served the film much better. A little more exploration of a society where everyone is 25 years old on the outside but some unknown age on the inside would have also helped the film.

Still, I couldn't help but enjoy In Time. Its time premise was thought provoking and held up throughout the film. Timberlake has become a decent actor. Cilian Murphy as Timekeeper Leon and Vincent Kartheiser as Philippe Weis stood out. Kartheiser could play a young Steve Buscemi.

Eames: The Architect and the Painter

2011-12-04T00:24:00.000-08:00

With some unexpected free time on Friday night, I stopped by the Balboa to see Eames: The Architect and the Painter. I considered stopping by the Roxie to see the Midnite for Maniacs tribute to Greydon Clark but recall the last time I tried to see Midnite for Maniacs at the Roxie, it was sold out. The prospect of the Roxie being packed or even my not being to get a ticket was enough to send me home on a Friday night. Restless after a few hours, I looked online and saw Eames playing at the Roxie and recalled a recent San Francisco Chronicle article on the film.

Eames: The Architect and the Painter; directed by Jason Cohn & Bill Jersey; narrated by James Franco; documentary; (2011)

Going into the film, I wasn't sure if I had ever seen an Eames product or at least, knew it was an Eames when I saw it. As the film progressed, I realized I had seen many Eames designs. Charles and Ray Eames (husband and wife, not brothers), were influential furniture designers but as their fame grew, they branched out into films and exhibits for museums and world fairs. Although Charles and Ray were interesting people, their works are the true focus of the film.

Let's start with the Eames chair. Not a single design or model, Eames had a long and fruitful business relationship with Herman Miller which is the only chair company I can name off the top of my head. At work, I sit on perhaps the most famous chair design ever made - the Aeron by Herman Miller. The Aeron is not an Eames design but it was Eames' earlier collaborations with Herman Miller which established it as the most prominent chair manufacturer.

What about the Eames chairs? Well, I can't name them like the Aeron but recall seeing them ubiquitously in the 1970s and 80s. The following are Eames chairs which I recall distinctly from my youth. I still see the swivel chair in use but the molded plastic/plywood chair with armrests seems very 1970s to me now. The third chair, the wood finished one without armrests has a classic look but definitely feels like a Mad Men era piece.

The most memorable Eames work was a film. Eames and IBM had a long relationship where Eames produced short films advertising IBM. Many of the films were conceptual rather than selling a specific product. The Powers of Ten (1977) is perhaps the most famous film that resulted from the Eames/IBM partnership.

Unexpectedly and enjoyably, Eames (whose name I was unfamiliar with) was a nostalgic trip to my youth when these designs and films were all around me. At the time, I wasn't impressed but in hindsight, their works were special and memorable. Memory is a strange thing. You don't think about something as simple as a chair for many years. You see a photo and you recall these chairs from your school or a friend's house or when your father took you into his workplace. Charles and particularly, Ray Eames had interesting lives which shouldn't be overlooked but it's hard not to when their work is so iconic.

Eames: The Architect and the Painter, will be telecast on PBS on December 19 under their American Masters series.

Le Havre

2011-12-03T12:27:00.000-08:00

I was able to see Le Havre on the last evening it played at the Landmark Bridge. As I mentioned, I slept through a good portion of Le Havre when I "saw" it at the French Cinema Now series by the San Francisco Film Society. Le Havre is currently screening at the Landmark Opera Plaza.

I'm glad to say that I stayed awake through every second of Le Havre this time. I wish I had stayed awake the first time because the film wasn't worthy of a second viewing. It was middling fairy tale by noted director Aki Kaurismäki. The plot involved a Bohemian Frenchman in Le Havre who stumbles on an African boy (from Liberia?) who is in the country illegally. Intending to be smuggled into the UK in a shipping container, the container gets lost in paperwork and stranded in Le Havre. The boy runs from the police/immigration authorities when Marcel Marx (André Wilms) meets him. Quickly deciding to hide the boy, Marx takes him to his home. Marx's wife is in the hospital with late stage cancer.

As I watched the film, I though Marx's wife would succumb to her disease and Marx and the boy would form a family unit but Le Havre operates in a mystical realm. The sets look artificial, the dialog is delivered in stilted tones and the plot is idyllic. The "villain" are nameless and faceless people who report the whereabouts of the boy. Tracking the boy is Police Inspector Monet (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) who reluctantly follows up leads regarding the boy's whereabouts.

At times, looking and feeling like a French WWII movie with collaborators turning in Jews to the Gestapo, Le Havre is clearly a pro-immigrant rights film. That aspect is fairly easy to ignore that because of the sentimentality throughout the film.

Wilms, Darroussin and Kati Outinen as Marx's better half head a cast with a number of solid supporting actors. The performances perfectly matched the tone of the film. There was an incongruent sequence featuring a rock-n-roller called Little Bob which looked like 1980's music video but the song wasn't half bad.

By the time the film ended, I was extremely mild about Le Havre. It was a well made film with nice performances which wasn't my cup of tea.

Southern (Dis)Comfort (Part 1 of 2)

2011-12-02T10:21:00.000-08:00

On Veterans Day, the PFA kicked off a series called Southern (Dis)comfort: The American South in Cinema.

As I mentioned, the Roxie picks up the series on December 10 and continues it until the 15rh. The Roxie's 12 films are Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Strange One, Two Thousand Maniacs!, God's Little Acre*, Moonrise, Swamp Water, Hurry Sundown*, Poor White Trash, Wild River, Spring Night, Summer Night, The Beguiled* and Shy People.

Films followed by an asterisk are also screened at the PFA. Elliot Lavine screened The Strange One last year at Not Necessarily Noir.

Unfortunately, the Roxie run of the series overlaps with the Noir City kickoff and the Balboa fundraiser. I'm not sure how many of the Roxie screening I will attend.

I saw three films in the series at the PFA in November.

House By the River starring Louis Hayward; directed by Fritz Lang; (1950)
The Fugitive Kind starring Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani & Joanne Woodward; directed by Sidney Lumet; (1960)
The Story of Temple Drake starring Mirian Hopkins; directed Stephen Roberts; (1933)

I can't say I'm overly impressed with the series so far. Of the three, House By the River stands out. It's the story of a writer (Louis Hayward) who kills his maid. I liked the scene where he hears water in a drainpipe which indicates his maid is taking bath upstairs. This sends him into a sexual frisson. The writer convinces his reluctant brother to help dispose of the body. Eventually, the body is discovered and attention focused on the writer's brother as the murderer. All this excitement inspires the writer's creativity and he begins to write the best work of his career...loosely based on actual events.

There was nothing particular impressive about the film. Hayward, Lee Bowman as the brother and Jane Wyatt as the writer's wife give decent performances and the plot is serviceable but the film was incredibly mediocre in my opinion.

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The Fugitive Kind is one of those weird films based on a Tennessee Williams play. The production code eviscerated Williams' film adaptations leaving the audience to look for "codes" and "hints" as to the film's true intent like some cinematic Where's Waldo. I don't know if that was the case with The Fugitive Kind which is based on pair of Williams plays. In the film, people behave in peculiar ways and speak in allegorical terms. Lumet seems to want to make a film that tells a story without actually telling the story.

At times, the film seems like a showcase for Brando's masculinity and smoldering sexuality. Joanne Woodward shows up looking like she stepped out of Lil Abner cartoon. Anna Magnani has the largest female part as the shop keeper, married to a bedridden Klansman who takes on Brando as an employee and to bed in the little storeroom in the back. For his part, Brando's character is tired of being treated like a prize bull by the women he meets.

I'm sure there was something beneath the surface of this film but I didn't find it. I will say that Brando was the female Marilyn Monroe. When he was on screen, you couldn't take your eyes off him. However, Magnani holds her own in her scenes with Brando.

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The Story of Temple Drake was based on a novel by William Faulkner. Steve Seid introduced the film and mentioned the film was pre-Code but so scandalous that it is partially credited with introduction of the Hays Code. The poster for the film is particularly artistic.

The film version portrays Temple Drake (Miriam Hopkins) as a coquette who falls in with some rough characters who don't understand what it means when a girl says no. Some may argue that Drake "got what she deserved" which would have made for a fine ending but they tacked on a feel good ending which soured me. I guess we are fortunate because Seid mentioned the producers considered tacking an epilogue that stated after her ordeal, Temple Drake devoted herself to missionary work in China.

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I will write about the rest of the films I see in this series at the PFA and Roxie.

Richard the Lionhearted, Sleeping Beauty, J. Edgar Hoover and Marilyn Monroe

2011-12-01T11:06:00.000-08:00

After posting 10 consecutive days and 13 or of the past 14, I'm mostly caught up.

There were a few films here and there which I watched.

The Crusades starring Henry Wilcoxon & Loretta Young; directed by Cecil B. DeMille; (1935)
The Sleeping Beauty starring Julia Artamonov; directed by Catherine Breillat; French with subtitles; (2010)
J. Edgar starring Leonardo DiCaprio; directed by Clint Eastwood; (2011) - http://jedgarmovie.warnerbros.com/
My Week With Marilyn starring Michelle Williams & Eddie Redmayne; with Kenneth Branagh & Judi Dench; directed by Simon Curtis; (2011) - Official Website

The Crusades was part of the UCLA Festival of Preservation at the PFA. The Sleeping Beauty was screened by SFFS at the Viz. I saw J. Edgar and My Week With Marilyn while visiting my father over the Thanksgiving week.

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Of those four films, My Week With Marilyn is head and shoulders about the others. It features a stunning transformation by Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe during the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl. Williams whom I mentally picture as rail thin and with a pixie haircut gained weight grew her out and curled it to look quite a bit like Monroe. Williams also found the babydoll voice but those are superficial items which 1000s of impersonators and imitators have mastered. Ammazingly, Williams captures some of Marilyn's on-screen sex appeal and a large part of her vulnerability.

The plot is well known and based on the memoirs of Colin Clark, who as young man was the 3rd Assistant Director on The Prince and the Showgirl. Clark's association with Monroe became a prodigious source of literary output which in turn became the source material for My Week With Marilyn.

My Week With Marilyn is filled with these big, audacious performances beyond Williams' turn as Monroe. Kenneth Branagh seems to be delighted to depict Sir Lawrence Olivier as a bully. In smaller roles, Dougray Scott is spot on as Arthur Miller and Dominic Cooper, Zoë Wanamaker and Judi Dench command attention as Milton Greene (Marilyn's partner in her production company), Paula Strasberg (Marilyn's acting coach) and Dame Sybil Thorndike (a respected theater actress who had a supporting role in The Prince and the Showgirl).

Eddie Redmayne as Colin Clark fades into the background as it he was meant represent the audience's point of view. Frequently, I found myself viewing the film as if I was Clark in the film. Indeed, I cannot recall a scene where we don't see Monroe from Clark's point-of-view. It's a thankless role.

Emma Watson of the Harry Potter series shows up as the wardrobe girl and Clark's erstwhile love interest. She looks a bit like Natalie Portman. In fact, she gets off one of the best lines. After everyone warns Clark to not fall in love with Marilyn because it will end badly, Watson asks him, "Did she break your heart?" Clark responds in the affirmative and Watson rejoins, "Good. It needed a little breaking."

How exhilirating it must have been to Clark. It must have seemed like he was touched by the hand of God. At age 23, out of absolute obscurity, Clark becomes a close confidante to Monroe and sees her at her most unguarded moments. It must have overwhelming like he being consumed by the fires of passion. How I envy Clark and admire this film for conveying that feeling.

I read that Michelle Williams is a strong contender for an Oscar for this performance and I can't disagree.

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Clint Eastwood was self-indulgent with J. Edgar. He employed repeated flashbacks to Hoover's early life but didn't really cast much light on what motivated the man. Fussy and quick to be offended, Hoover was strongly motivated by his mother to succeed but he willingness to not just violate people's constitutional right but act in monstrous ways remain unexplained.

Eastwood does a subtle pas de deux. As Hoover ages, his relationship Clyde Tolson emerges. Eastwood would have us believe Tolson and Hoover had fight while vacationing together when Hoover mentioned the possibility of his marrying actress Dorothy Lamour. After a knock down, drag out fight, Tolsom plants a wet one on Hoover's bloodied lips. Poetic license indeed. This portends the future as Hoover and Tolson become partners in their professional and private lives. Hoover's conflicted acceptance of his own sexuality and the unfulfilled (perhaps unconsummated) love towards Tolson gives the film a tragic quality which overwhelms the other aspects of Hoover's life.

DiCaprio is an earnest actor which suits the role of Hoover. It's costar Armie Hammer, last seen as the Winklevoss twins in Social Network, as Tolson who has the break out performance. Dedicated, debonair & selfless, Tolson is Hoover alter ego and Hammer conveys all this with verve and panache.

Also noteworthy is Christopher Shyer as Richard Nixon. Between his makeup and vocal intonations, he evokes Nixon but more strongly evokes a malevolence which Nixon has come to be associated with.

J. Edgar is not a great film. It is well made but not particularly inspired.

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The last memory I have from viewing The Crusades in early September is that of the raven haired Katerine DeMille. Cecil B. DeMille's (adopted) daughter and long-time wife of Anthony Quinn, Ms. DeMille has a scheming and dangerous look about her for her limited scenes in The Crusades. She definitely seems to be Berengaria's (Loretta Young) rival for King Richard's (Henry Wilcoxon) affection without every saying word. Her gaze is intimidating.

I was surprised at how accurate The Crusades was. I'm no expert on the Third Crusade but the film hits a few points I recall. As for the performances, Ian Keith as Saladin stood out. I was surprised at how positively Saladin and the Saracens (Muslins) were depicted in The Crusades.

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The Sleeping Beauty is the second time director Catherine Breillat has used a fairy tale as the source material. The first was Blue Beard. Allegedly working from the original stories, Breillat presents the more dark and seedy aspects of these stories which are now considered children's stories. For example, I don't recall Sleeping Beauty having a lesbian encounter.

I can't say I fully enjoyed The Sleeping Beauty (or Blue Beard) but it's kind of interesting what Breillat. She deconstructs the fairy tale and returns the story to its origins. Noting the differences between Breillat's version and the one we are familiar with through Disney movies and children's books is an enjoyable pursuit.

2011 French Cinema Now

2011-11-30T09:21:00.000-08:00

The last festival of the San Francisco Film Society's 2011 Fall Season was French Cinema Now. At least it was the last festival for me. Cinema By the Bay, the San Francisco International Animation Festival and New Italian Cinema followed French Cinema Now but I didn't go to any the screenings.

Running from October 27 to November 2, French Cinema Now screened 11 films. I attended six of the films. I didn't feel well during one and dozed off. I seem to write that a lot, don't I. If I doze off for 10 or 15 minutes I'm bored. If I doze for an hour I'm ill. Fortunately, the film was Le Havre which is currently playing at the Landmark Bridge and at the Opera Plaza next week. I recall falling asleep on Muni on the way to the screening when I took the bus out to Japantown which is very unusual for me. I liked the parts I could stay awake for so I plan on seeing Le Havre at one of the Landmark theaters. I save discussion of it for another post.

All the films I saw were screened at the Viz but the opening of the festival was at the Landmark Embarcadero.

Angèle and Tony starring Clotilde Hesme & Grégory Gadebois; directed by Alix Delaporte; French with subtitles; (2010)
Beautiful Lies starring Audrey Tautou, Nathalie Baye & Sami Bouajila; directed by Pierre Salvadori; French with subtitles; (2010) - Official Website
Le Havre starring André Wilms; directed by Aki Kaurismäki; French with subtitles; (2011) - Official Website
Goodbye First Love starring Lola Créton & Sebastian Urzendowsky; directed by Mia Hansen-Løve; French, Danish & German with subtitles; (2011)
Bachelor Days Are Over starring Benjamin Biolay; directed by Katia Lewcowicz; French with subtitles; (2011)
The Long Falling starring Yolande Moreau; directed by Martin Provost; French with subtitles; (2011)

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Despite receiving criticism in many quarters, my favorite film from the series was Beautiful Lies. The situations are contrived, the plot is predictable and Audrey Tautou and Nathalie Baye, as the daughter and mother respectively, give oversized performances as they struggle their dysfunctions but I still laughted repeatedly.

The premise is a staple of television sitcoms. Jean (Sami Bouajila who is the straight man in the film) plays a handyman at a hair salon owned by Émilie (Tautou). Jean yearns passionately for Émilie who seems disinterested if not hostile. Jean decides to write Émilie an anonymous love letter which Émilie promptly throws in the trash to Jean's disappointment.

Later Émilie meets her mother Maddy (Baye) for lunch. Maddy is a wreck having never gotten over her separation from Émilie's father. Feeling that Maddy needs some romance in her life, Émilie decides to readdress and transcribe the love letter she received and send it to Maddy anonymously. Maddy is initially overjoyed and shows marked improvement until time passes and she becomes depressed that her secret has stopped sending her letters. Émilie had not counted on her letters being an ongoing affair but trying to be a good daughter, she writes another love note to her mother. Maddy is even more disappointed upon reading the letter and tells Émilie that the latest letter shows her admirer has no passion left.

Accepting the challenge, Émilie decides the only way to write a passionate, anonymous love letter to her mother is for her get drunk. The result is one of the best comedic lines I've seen this year. Émilie's letter begins with "Your proud and arrogant breasts..." That still makes me chuckle.

Émilie sends Jean to the post office to mail a bunch of letters including the one to her mother. Jean stamps all the letters at the post office but runs one stamp short. You can guess which letter doesn't get stamped. He decides to drop the letter off since the address is so near. Maddy is now extra vigilant for letters and pounces on the letter as soon as it drops from the mail slot . Maddy quickly realizes what it is and runs to the street to see Jean walking away.

Maddy follows Jean to Émilie's salon and you can imagine the rest. Maddy think Jean is her secret lover, Jean loves Émilie and for reasons not recounted here, Émilie begins to feel hostile towards Jean but needs him to pretend to be interested in Maddy.

The French seem to like raucous and farcical comedies with broad brushstrokes and over-the-top performances. Tautou and Baye are too good as actors to stray too far off the reservations but they both seem to enjoy themselves playing these flawed and neurotic women. Their performances are what buoy the film which is otherwise clichéd.

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Bachelor Days Are Over is about a nervous and restless groom (Benjamin Biolay) in the days leading up to his wedding. Qui Qui (a childhood nickname) has a serious case of cold feet which is exacerbated by the stress of selling his place, overseeing the remodeling of the flat they are moving into, meeting the large contingent of non-French speaking inlaws-to-be, his brides unexplained disappearance and not least, the passionate affair he embarks on with a stripper from the club where his bachelor party is held. Constantly holding his feet to the fire are his sister (Emmanuelle Devos in a nice performance) and best friend who feel it is time for him to settle down.

There is a comedic element as Qui Qui juggles all these activites which goes wrong at every turn but as the film progresses, his internal conflict comes to the forefront. Qui Qui isn't a cad and doesn't want to hurt anyone but he is coming to the realization that the woman he is marrying may not be right for him...or maybe she is. He vacillates, it's agonizing and it struck as real as a heart attack. As a confession, I've been in a similar situation and these churning emotions can break you down. I didn't have sex with stripper to break up my relationship but this film struck a resonance with me.

The ending was particulary poignant. Did he make the right decision? Was the ending a tragedy or a triumph? The film leaves this purposefully ambiguous which is one more reason I liked this film.

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Angèle and Tony was an offbeat romance. Tony is a squat fisherman; salt ot he earth type. Angèle is a hustler. The audience's introduction to her is while she is having sex with a Chinese man in exchange for an action figure which he assure her is the hottest toy in Shanghai. That scene establishes Angèle's self-worth, motivation and desperation. Angèle wants the toy as a gift for her son who lives with his paternal grandparents. Angèle wants a husband to regain custody of her son. That's where Tony comes in. Angèle thinks she can seduce Tony into marrying her but Tony is not so dumb or self-deluded into buying what Angèle is selling.

The majority of the film is the two coming to terms with each other and gaining some mutual trust. Angèle could easily have been written to be more feral and Tony more willing to take Angèle's interest in him at face value but director Alix Delaporte created a more complex film which look under the surface of both characters. The film meanders in some unexpected ways as their relationship progresses. I was still a little disbeleiving that Angèle would have a change of heart and that Tony would trust her but they both had a certain sense that they both needed to find someone before it got too late. I would have preferred a more "mutual compromised" ending but I can overlook the conclusion of the film.

Clotilde Hesme & Grégory Gadebois are outstanding in the the title roles, respectively.

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Goodbye First Love reminded me in mood and tone to a film I saw at the 2011 SF Internation Film Festival, Living on Love Alone. They both followed young women in love who travel to the French countryside for passionate affairs.

Goodbye First Love features Lola Créton & Sebastian Urzendowsky, as Camille and Sullivan - two young people in love. Sullivan is little restless and immature. He decides to take a hiking trip to South America without Camille. At first, he writes frequently but as months pass, the communication goes silent. A great scene signifying the end of the relationship, or precisely the mending of Camille's broken heart, is when she pulls the pins out of the South American map which tracked Sullivan's travels.

Several years go by and we watch Camille become an architect. The film focuses on Camille so Sullivan is missing from her life and the film. When they finally reconnect, by chance, they quickly resume their passions despite Camille's existing romantic relationship. I won't give away the ending but will say Sullivan stays consistent to his character.

Goodbye First Love features a nice performance by Créton whom I saw in Catherine Breillat's Blue Beard.

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The Long Falling was my least favorite film of the series. The story of a battered wife who kills her husband and flees to the big city to live with her gay son.

After a strong start, the film lost my interest; enough said.

Not Sucking in the Seventies

2011-11-29T12:10:00.000-08:00

The PFA had a program in September and October called The Outsiders: New Hollywood Cinema in the Seventies. In a simultaneous but separate series, the UCLA Festival of Preservation, a few films from the 70s were screened. I list films from both series here under the banner of 1970s films screened at the PFA recently.

The Heartbreak Kid starring Charles Grodin, Cybil Shepherd & Eddie Albert; directed by Elaine May; (1972)
The Landlord starring Beau Bridges, Pearl Bailey & Lee Grant; directed by Hal Ashby (1970)
Hickey & Boggs starring Bill Cosby and Robert Culp; directed by Robert Culp; (1972)
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song starring and directed by Melvin Van Peebles; (1971)
Mean Streets starring Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro & Amy Robinson; directed by Martin Scorsese; (1973)
The Last Picture Show starring Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cybil Shepherd, Cloris Leachman & Ben Johnson; directed by Peter Bogdanovich; (1971)
The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover starring Broderick Crawford, Michael Prks and Rip Torn; directed by Larry Cohen; (1978)
Wanda starring and directed by Barbara Loden; (1970)
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean starring Sandy Dennis, Cher, Karen Black & Kathy Bates; directed by Robert Altman; (1982)

I know that Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean was released in 1982 but it feels like a 1970s film with its 1950 nostalgia. Besides, the source material (a play) premiered in 1976.

Some of these films are much celebrated. The Last Picture Show was nominated for 10 Academy Awards; Cloris Leachman & Ben Johnson won Best Supporting Awards in their gender categories (beating out co-stars Ellen Burstyn and Jeff Bridges, respectively. Mean Streets established Martin Scorsese's career. Sweet Sweeback's Baadasssss Song is credited with launching the Blaxploitation film craze in the 1970s.

Although I was anxious to see those films, the lesser known works proved to be a revelation to me. I have long had a wariness towards films from the 1970s. Selecting from programs at local rep houses over the past few years has improved my attitude towards 1970s films. This PFA program was impressive by showcasing a varied sample of films which kept my interest with one exception.

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Let's get the obligatory plaudits for the two classics out of the way.

I had never seen Mean Streets before. IMDB and the PFA notes listed Robert De Niro first in the credits so I was expecting him to have the largest role. However, it was Harvey Keitel who had the biggest role and whose performance shined the brightest. If anything, De Niro's Johnny Boy seemed out of place which indicates to me that De Niro has played these strong, silent, violent types for so often that I forgot he had any acting range. Johnny Boy is a flake, a small-time hustler looking skip out on his debts and get one over. You think of a guy like that and you think of Steve Buscemi type, not De Niro. Mean Streets was pre-Godfather II and pre-Taxi Driver.

De Niro had not yet performed the roles and sculpted the screen persona which the public would remember him for. So strong is De Niro's screen presence that I can recall two classic parodies. Of course, De Niro parodied himself in Analyze This (was there a sequel?). More entertaining was a Saturday Night Live skit with Alec Baldwin doing a De Niro impersonation on the fictitious Joe Pesci Show. That skit was over 15 years ago and I recall vividly.

The budget looked miniscule for Mean Streets but Keitel and De Niro make up for it. Charlie (Keitel) is a small time hood who seems destined to work in his uncle's business - his uncle just happens to be the neighborhood mafioso. Charlie isn't so keen on tht. A religious man, Charlie is consumed with Catholic guilt and that's before he even officially joins his uncle's crew. Johnny Boy (De Niro) is at the other end of spectrum. Charlie's best friend, Johnny is weaselly, violent and ultimately psychotic. There is a subplot involving Johnny's epileptic sisters and Charlie which makes 1973 seem a lot longer than 38 years ago.

Charlie wants to get off the mean streets of New York but his family, girlfriend and friendship with Johnny Boy work against him. Compared to some of Scorsese's later works, Mean Streets seems toned down and ineffective but clearly Scorsese had a notion of what he would later accomplish in films such as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas. Mean Streets is an interesting look at De Niro and Scorsese early in the career and the New York state-of-mind in the early 70s.

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I won't waste space recounting the plot of The Last Picture Show which was based on a novel by Larry McMurtry. The Last Picture Show is a tremendous film. The large cast gives uniformly tremendous performance. I mentioned Leachman, Burstyn, Bridges and Johnson were nominated for their performances. I thought Timothy Bottoms and, in particular, Cybil Shepherd, gave outstanding performances also. What was most striking about the film is the look. Bogdanovich and Cinematographer Robert Surtees shot it in black and white and recreated the flat look of films from the 1950s which is the era
Last Picture Show show was set it.

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Akin to a guilty pleasure, my favorite film of the series was The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover. Made a scant five years after J. Edgar Hoover's death, the film never received a full release. I'm amazed a film like this could be made so soon after Hoover's death. Broderick Crawford plays Hoover and he seems to be having a great time. Michael Parks, who would go on to be staple of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino films, revels in his role as Robert Kennedy. Full of "ums" and "ahs" and serving up a Boston accent thicker then any clam chowder, Parks just chews up the scenery every moment he is on screen. The two men square off against each other and they are evenly matched. If anything, Parks' RFK seems to be more a mischievious boy pestering an old man.

Having seen (but not blogged) about Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar, The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover covers much of the same ground with the sanctimony, heavy handed references to Bush's War on Terror or explicit scenes to Hoover's sexuality. The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover aimed for something lower than Eastwood but achieved something greater.

By the way, my favorite cinematic depiction of J. Edgar Hoover was his portrayal by Richard Dysart in a television movie called Marilyn & Bobby: Her Final Affair. In the film, Hoover's righ-hand man and FBI Associate Director Clyde Tolson receives a late night call which wakes him up. While never leaving his bed, he answer the phone on the nightstand. After listening for a moment, he hands the phone to the person next to him in bed...none other than J. Edgar Hoover.

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The Heartbreak Kid was a discovery. I had never heard of the film which was made by Elaine May, the director of Ishtar. Charles Grodin plays a self-absorbed and self-deluded man who begins cheating on his wife while they are on their hooneymoon. The temptress is none other than Cybil Shepherd who I'm discovering had a number interesting film parts in the 1970s. Shepherd is in Florida on vacation with her parents, played by Eddie Albert and Audra Lindley (who is best known as Mrs. Roper from Three's Company). When the family goes back to Minnesota, Grodin follows them with the goal of winning Shepherd's hand in marriage. The Heartbreak Kid is a hilarious comedy with dark overtones. Grodin's character is particularly dispicable although he has a certain tenacity that you can't help but admire and ridicule simultaneously.

May cast her daughter, Jeannie Berlin, as Grodin's irksome wife who nonetheless engenders sympathy from the audience. There is a love scene where Berlin is nude. Maybe the problem is with me but I found it peculiar that an actress would agree to a nude love scene in a film her mother is directing, but it was the 1970s afterall.

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The Landlord was an interesting film featuring Beau Bridges (who I thought looked a little like Brad Pitt) as wealthy WASP who buys a tenement building in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Park Slope is as ritzy as gets in NYC outside of Manhattan but in 1970, it was the ghetto. The literal setup is a preppy white guy, in a lavender shirt, driving up in convertible VW Beetle. His intention is to evict the tenants and remodel the building. However, the tenants (who include Pearl Bailey and Louis Gossett, Jr.) refuse to cooperate. In addition, Elgar's (Bridges) family is aghast at the thought of Elgar living in the slums.

Slowly, Elgar involves himself with the tenants' lives; even going so far to have light-skinned African American girlfriend and a one-night stand with another, albeit darker skinned, African American. Elgar may have gone native but he is still Whitey as far as most of the tenants are concerned. The film has a couple twists before it is over.

The Landlord was Hal Ashby's first film. Best known for Harold and Maude, Ashby starts The Landlord as comedy and moves into some serious race issues. Along the way, Ashby adds some dreamlike sequences which gives the movie a film school feel. I'd grade it an A but Ashby could have benefited from a little more experience in making films.

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Speaking of film school projects, both Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and Wanda gave me the same feel although neither was a polished as The Landlord.

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song was an independent, micro-budget film whose box office success led studios to capture the same audience with what became known as Blaxploitation films. All the elements of Blaxploitation are present in Sweetback: prodigiously endowed black man (I liked the sex off showdone with the female motorcycle gang leader), evil white cops, oddball cast of ghetto characters, blatant misogyny, etc. Director Melvin Van Peebles changed the rules with Sweetback. Evoking images of slaves chased down by their white masters, Van Peebles has Sweetback running all over Los Angeles, encountering outlandish situations along the way. The ending has Sweetback coated in white dust and sand trying to make his way to Mexico (how ironic is that?). The coda states clearly that Sweetback will come back and kick ass on The Man.

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song wasn't a great film but it was entertaining within its context. If it wasn't one of the first film of its genre, I may not be so charitable but I think Van Peebles skills and vision would win out regardless. The biggest impediment Sweetback faced as a miniscule budget and compressed shooting schedule.

Wanda was directed by Barbara Loden who was the wife of Elia Kazan and passed away at the early age of 48 in 1980. Wanda was Loden's only feature film as a director. She borrows from Italian Neorealism and uses the depressed Pennsylvania coal country to convey the world weariness of postwar Italy. Loden plays the eponymous character who divorces, abandones her children and falls in with an abusive armed robber. A little dim witted or perhaps unwittingly nihilist, bad decisions keep Wanda wanding around the country and through her life with no apparent meaning or goal.

Wanda is one of these films (which seem prevalent in the 1970s) where there is no moral or lesson to be learned. Wanda seemed lost and aimless at the beginning of the film and the ending sheds little insight into how the events that have transpired will effect.

Wanda was a bit of a slog for me although Loden and Michael Higgins (who plays the bank robber) shine in the scenes they have together.

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Hickey & Boggs reunited Bill Cosby & Robert Culp who costarred in the television series, I Spy. The film was also Culp's sole feature film director credit. The film reminded me a bit of Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye except it was a bit more stylish. I'm surprised Hickey & Boggs isn't better known.

Hickey & Boggs (I can't remember which one is which & I'm too lazy to look it up) are two low rent LA detectives hired to track down a missing woman. The trail leads to large sums of cash and dead bodies. Unwilling to drop the case, Hickey & Boggs run afoul of gangsters, black militants and the cops. Hickey & Boggs are two sad sack, world weary private dicks in the 70s who won't drop a case even if their lives are at risk. In that sense they are cut from the Phillip Marlowe mold.

In the middle of the film is one of the most visually impressive scenes I can recall. Film at the LA Coliseum, Hickey & Boggs are money drop or maybe surveilling a money drop. Culp and DP Bill Butler use the open space and grandeur of the Colesium to incredible effect. They use the geometric patterns made by the seats as the backdrop and the steps to the lip of stadium as the gauntlet. The shootout is exciting and makes full use of the framing shots. The shots make the people look tiny which is also the way Hickey & Boggs feel about themselves as they slowly discover what they are up against.

Hickey & Boggs is a very good film. Since it is largely unknown, it's one of those films you recommend to people and it impress them after viewing it that you knew about the film.

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Finally, Altman's Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean...this is the kind of film which makes Altman inaccessible to the pubic at large. Like a bad Tennessee Williams play, Five and Dime is a lot of talk about secrets that I just couldn't care about. There is a plot twist which is surprising but not enough to salvage the film. Completely set within a diner/drugstore, Five and Dime could have benefited from some addition locations and camera angles.

2011 Taiwan Film Days

2011-11-28T12:27:00.000-08:00

In October, the San Francisco Film Society continued their fall season with Taiwan Film Days. The three day festival consisted of eight films. I was able to watch four of them.

Formosa Mambo; Mandarin with subtitles; (2011)
Pinoy Sunday; directed by Ho Wi-ding; Tagalog and Mandarin with subtitles; (2009) - Official Website
Ranger; Mandarin with subtitles; (2010)
You Are the Apple of My Eye; Mandarin with subtitles; (2011) - Official Website

All films screened at the Viz which is now officially referred to as SF Film Society/New People Cinema.

By the way, even though SF Film Society exhibits at New People, there are apparently opportunities for New People too independently show films at the venue. The SFFS calendar shows December 17 to be empty. However, the New People website shows a triple bill on that date consisting of Eatrip, a documentary on AKB48 and Gantz II: Perfect Answer.

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Unlike the Hong Kong series, the quartet of Taiwanese films I were uniformly stronger entries.

My favorite film was You Are the Apple of My Eye, a quirky coming-of-age comedy set among classmates in high school and follows them for the next decade. Featuring a few Porky like momemnts including a masturbation contest in a classroom during instruction and character with a perpetual erection whose nickname is "Boner," Apple the spirit of youthful energy including the arrogance, innoncence, naïveté and highs & lows of first love.

Capturing just the right amount of oddness to feel plausible, Apple follows the love/hate relationship between the mischievous and underachieving Ko-Teng (Ko Chen-Tung) and the studious but popular Shen Chia-Yi (Michelle Chen). The evolution of their relationship would be ordinary enough if not for the pecularities of Ko-Teng and their classmates. Besides the aforementioned masturbation contest, Ko-Teng likes to walk around naked at home and there is the frequent minor dramas of any high school. Ko-teng's male cohorts are highly attracted to Shen Chia-Yi to the quiet exasperation of her best friend. The scenes set in high school were my favorite.

In the second half of the film, the classmates go their own way as they are accepted to different universities. Ko-teng & Shen Chia-Yi maintain a long-distance relationship until she discovers his passion for Fight Club style bouts. They have a contrived argument which was the low point of the film. After that point, I thought they would reconcile at some point in the future. The entire film is told in flashback as the opening scene is of an adult Ko-teng dressing for a wedding. The audience (me) assumed it was Ko-teng's wedding. I won't completely give away the ending but I was pleased by it.

The performances by the two leads were outstanding. The script was strong and based on director Giddens Ko's semi-autobiographical novel of the same name. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed You Are the Apple of My Eye.

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I also enjoyed Pinoy Sunday, a comedy about Filipino immigrant workers in Taiwan. Bayani Agbayani and Jeffrey Quizon play Dado and Manuel, a pair of Filipinos who live in their employer's dormitory for foreign workers. Dado is the mature one - married with kids at home, he needs the job because the pay is better. He dutifully sends a portion of his paycheck home and regularly sends gift boxes to his daughter. He's not so dutiful that he doesn't have a relationship with a Filipina maid but of the two, Dado is the even-keeled one. Manuel yearns for a Filipina karaoke queen who is little more than a bar girl. Although she shows no interest, Manuel is too much of a romantic and optimist to let her disinterest discourage him.

After their romantic prospect diminish, the two use their day off from work (Sunday) to wander the city which I assume was Taipei. They spot a wealthy, nouveau riche, Taiwanese couple having an argument in front of their fashionable flat which they are moving into. The couple abandons the moving crew who in turn respond by abandoning a couch. The couch is a red, leather, low back number which looks like it came out of French whorehouse. My taste in furniture is not as sophisticated as Manuel's as he think it would look perfect on the roof of the dorm. Unfortunately, they are all the way across town without a motor vehicle. If they want the couch in their dorm, they are going to have to carry across Taipei.

The best part of the film is this journey as the two pinoys seem to encounter every small-minded and bigoted Chinese person in Taipei. Although focused on the two men, the films pivots to become more representative of the immigrant labor experiences of Filipinos in Taiwan. We become aware of the obstacles and indignities faced by Dado & Manuel and their Quest for the Holy Couch becomes an allegory for the spirit of perserverance longed for by "guest workers" everywhere.

The film firmly remains in comedic territory until the end when it takes a flight of fancy. Rather than being preachy, the film shows the pettiness of the foreigners and natives with good-natured sense of humor. Pinoy Sunday is an outstanding comedy about an issue that I had never even considered. At the risk of trading in stereotypes, I have heard Filipinos called the Mexicans of the Orient so it's not surprising this film easily be transplanted to the US with Dado & Manuel replaced by a pair of Mexicans.

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Formosa Mambo is one of those films (which the Chinese seems to make in abundance) where a series of coincidences, interdependencies and contrivances occur to bring various story lines together. I didn't enjoy Formosa Mambo as much as You Are the Apple of My Eye and Pinoy Sunday...and it has been six weeks. If I recall correctly, there was a trio of kidnappers who hold a bespectacled boy for ransom. Sadly (and humorously), the ransom demand is misidentified by the boy's mother as a telephone phishing scam. Later, when she realizes her son is missing, she gets a real phishing call which she assumes to be the kidnappers. The paths of the two criminal gangs crisscross and the fraudsters recruit a new member who conscience bothers him.

Formosa Mambo is a dark comedy which detours into tragedy on occasion. Formosa Mambo was an ok film but as you can read, not very memorable.

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Ranger was my least favorite film about a gangster who gets out of prison after 20 years or so. Upon release, he immediately,if not reluctantly, falls in with his old gang buddy who is now a mob boss. Wu Pong-fong gives a quiet performance as man who has spent his entire adult life in prison but retains some compassion (or perhaps he rediscovered it in prison). His performance won him the Best Actor Award at the Taipei Film Festival. At the other end of the specturm, Huang Jian-wei goes all out to portray a frightening brute of a man, the mob boss whose child unwittingly becomes the catalyst for violence. Ranger had a plot twist that I thought was unnecessary. In fact, I suspected it before it was revealed based on the child's wailing. Otherwise, Ranger was a solid drama.

Spanish Maids, French Priests and Crazy Siblings

2011-11-27T18:10:00.000-08:00

In October and November, I saw two films at the YBCA.

Diary of a Country Priest starring Claude Laydu; directed by Robert Bresson; French with subtitles; (1951)
Love Streams starring Gena Rowlands & John Cassavetes; directed by John Cassavetes; (1984)

Diary of a Country Priest is a celebrated film. It lost the Golden Lion Award at the 1951 Venice Film Festival to Kurosawa's Rashōmon.

Country Priest is a lean and spartan film. Set in Ambricourt, a small town in the French countryside, the new parish priest (Claude Laydu) encounters apathy, hostility and disinterest from his parishoners. Determined if not enthusiastic, the priest attempts to overcome their detachment, his own physical ailments and spiritual doubts to minister to their secular needs. He is unable to overcome these obstacles. Indeed, his limited diet of bread soaked in wine gives rise to rumors of alcoholism. Laydu, who was devoutly Catholic, fasted during the filming to achieve the pallid appearance of the dying priest.

The priest suffers quietly through the indignities and calamities until the end when faced with his mortality. This gives the film a somber and introspective mood which can be difficult to sustain. I'm Bresson was up to the task but I wasn't. My attention flagged towards the end although the films finale was memorable and heart-rending.

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My attention also flagged during John Cassavetes's Love Stream. The loosely plotted film features a tremendous performance by Gena Rowlands as Sarah, a woman with some type of attachment disorder. She goes around visiting sick & dying relatives with her young daughter in tow. She is prone to fainting when faced with separation from her family and loved ones.

After her divorce, she goes to stay with her brother Robert (John Cassevetes). Robert, a fiction writer, favors gay bars, is a staggering alcoholic and incapable of accepting responsibiity. The two develop a quick codependency. It's interesting to see the interaction between Robert and Sarah, brother and sister in the film but husband and wife in reality.

A few scenes are quite funny such as Robert driving drunk and Sarah buying two minature horses, a goat, a dog and some fowl. For most of the 2 hour, 20 minute duration, there was a lot dialog without much in the way of plot development. That's a hallmark of Cassavetes' films so I wasn't surprised.

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I also saw The Women on the 6th Floor at the Landmark Opera Plaza.

The Women on the 6th Floor starring Fabrice Luchini & Natalia Verbeke; directed by Philippe Le Guay; French & Spanish with subtitles; (2010)

Also titled Service Entrance, the film is set in Paris in the early 1960s. Jean-Louis Joubert (Fabrice Luchini) is a wealthy stockbroker who owns a six story apartment building. The concierge is on the ground floor; he, his family and other wealthy tenants occupy the other floors. That is except the sixth floor which is more like an attic. That floor has been subdivided into small bedrooms for maids in the building and neighborhood.

At the beginning of the film, the long-time Joubert family maid leaves due to personal conflict with Mrs. Joubert (Sandrine Kiberlain). Noting a trend towards Spanish maids, the Jouberts hire Maria (Natalia Verbeke), a beautiful and intelligent new arrival with a built-in support network since her aunt has been a domestic in Paris for many years. Maria quickly wins over the fussy Jean-Louis who likes his morning boiled for precisely 3½ minutes. Mrs. Joubert appears more formidable but is more interested in her bourgeois pursuits.

As it turns out, Maria's the most well adjusted of what becomes an unrequited love triangle. As Jean-Louis becomes attracted to Maria, his behavior and attitude change to the point where his wife believes him to be having an affair with a wealthy divorcée who is a client of his. Rather than deny the accusation, Jean-Louis takes the opportunity to break free from his regimented life. He moves up to the sixth floor and lives among the maids. The social barriers are so entrenched that his wife isn't even aware he has moved up there.

I won't give away the ending but will say I found the film delightful. It required some disbelief as Maria is presented as a stunningly attractive, poised and well adjusted young woman. Also, the fastidious Jean-Louis undergoes a startling personality change. Putting that aside, The Women on the 6th Floor is a well made romantic comedy which comments on serious issues of attitudes towards immigrants and class warfare. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Watching Woody Allen's Films Can Be Really Kafkaesque

2011-11-26T08:41:00.000-08:00

In November, the Castro Theater had a Wednesday night series called Woody Wednesdays. For three consecutive Wednesdays, they had a Woody Allen double feature. I caught the first two Wednesdays when they screened:

Annie Hall starring Woody Allen & Diane Keaton; directed by Woody Allen; (1977)
Hannah and Her Sisters starring Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey, Dianne Wiest, Michael Caine; with Max von Sydow, Sam Waterston, Woody Allen, Maureen O'Sullivan and Lloyd Nolan; directed by Woody Allen; (1986)
Crimes and Misdemeanors starring Woody Allen, Martin Landau, Mia Farrow & Anjelica Huston; with Alan Alda, Sam Waterston, Jerry Orbach & Joanna Gleason; directed by Woody Allen; (1989)
Deconstructing Harry starring Woody Allen; with Kirstie Alley, Billy Crystal, Elisabeth Shue, Tobey Maguire, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Demi Moore, Stanley Tucci, etc.; directed by Woody Allen; (1997)

I missed the final Wednesday night of the series where they screened Stardust Memories and Vicky Christina Barcelona.

I suspect the series was programmed to coincide with the two part Woody Allen documentary on PBS on November 20 and 21. I caught the first night of the documentary which ended with criticism of and backlash from Stardust Memories.

I run hot and cold for Allen's films. The four films I saw as part of Woody Wednesdays encapsulates my attitudes towards his films. I loved Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors. I liked Annie Hall. I dozed off during Deconstructing Harry.

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Annie Hall was the transitional film in Allen career as a director. Prior to it, Allen was known for broad comedies and Annie Hall is romantic comedy. At times, Allen applies a deft touch in showing the slow and inevitable disintegration of the relationship between Allen's Alvy and Diane Keaton's Annie. Annie Hall won an Academy Award for Best Picture, Diane Keaton won an Academy Award for Best Actress and Woody Allen won an Academy Award for Best Director. Obviously, Annie Hall was a well received film. My only nitpick is that Allen fell into rapid fire joke mode too often. Sometimes he delivered; sometimes the jokes fell flat. At times, it threw off the pacing of the film.

Still there were portions that made me laugh out loud. Christopher Walken shows up as Annie's younger brother who has dreams of crashing his car and creating a fireball - cut to a scene where Walken is driving, Keaton is in the middle and Allen is white knucked in passenger seat. A little overkill as Waken's soliloquy was enough.

Shelley Duvall shows up long enough for Alvy to bed her after which she announces, "Sex with you is really a Kafka-esque experience."

Annie requires some marijuana before having sex. It is unclear if it is before sex with anyone or just Alvy. Annie claims the grass relaxes her before having sex. Alvy rejoins, "Well, I'll give you a shot of sodium pentathol. You can sleep through it."

I will say that the film is very good on its own merits. Compared to some of his later works, I thought it didn't measure up. Annie Hall is often considered the seminal moment in Allen's directorial career but to me it seems like the end of his run of farcical comedy films. In some ways, I would think more of Annie Hall if it were directed by someone else. Annie Hall suffers in retroactive comparison to Allen's future films. That's unfair to Allen as he must have been growing by leaps and bounds as director in the 1970s and 80s.

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Annie Hall was Allen's 7th feature film as a director. Many people consider it their favorite film by Allen. Hannah and Her Sisters was Allen 15th film. He filmed several acclaimed films between the two including Manhattan, Stardust Memories, Broadway Danny Rose and The Purple Rose of Cairo. Having seen all those films, Hannah and Her Sisters seems like the seminal film in his career.

His previous films (excluding Interiors) were clearly comedies but Hannah is a drama with out any of the gags from his previous films. The comedy in Hannah derives from the situations which were very realistic. Allen does yuck it up some when he is faced with the possibility of a fatal illness but even he tones it down some.

The main story is about Hannah's (Mia Farrow) husband, Elliot (Michael Caine) and the affair he has with Hannah's sister Lee (Barbara Hershey). The affair, which Hannah is unaware of, has an theraputic effect on Lee who uses it end one dysfunctional relationship and start another, presumably more stable, relationship by the end of the film. The effect on Elliot is more debatable. Elliot is not such a bad guy as he shows definite signs of guilt resulting from sleeping with his sister-in-law. All told, the entire family is dysfunctional (Hannah is exception although she enables bad behavior in others).

Hannah and Her Sisters is a wonderfully made film about flawed people living flawed lives; not unlike most of us.

For those who didn't know or forgot, Maureen O'Sullivan plays Mia Farrow's mother in Hannah and Her Sisters and was her mother in real life. Soon-Yi Previn, Farrow's adopted daughter, is in the film as one of the extras during Thanksgiving scenes. Allen would gain notoriety for his relationship with Previn, 35 years his junior. The relationship allegedly began five years after Hannah was released.

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Crimes and Misdemeanors is a much darker film. It's actually two films. One story deals with Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau), a successful ophthalmologist and respected member of the Jewish community. A pillar of the community, Judah has a secret. He's having an affair with Anjelica Huston's character. She threatens to expose the relationship; he has promised to leave his wife. Judah can't stand the thought of the shame that would result so he engages his ne'er-do-well brother (Jerry Orbach) to set up a hit. That's right; the pillar of the community decides the best way to deal with the situation is to kill his mistress.

The other half of the film deals with Clifford Stern (Woody Allen), a struggling documentary filmmaker. Cliff's wife (Joanna Gleason) arranges for Cliff to get a paying gig filming a documentary of her brother Lester (Alan Alda), a successful and insufferable television producer. This requires Cliff to follow Lester to get candid shots and interviews. While filming, he meets Halley (Mia Farrow), a staffer for Lester. Alda hits a home run with his part. His pompous behavior irritate Cliff no end and the result is a first cut of the documentary which compares Lester to Mussolini and Francis The Talking Mule.

It's not until the end that Judah & Cliff meet and share a scene. By that point, Judah has "made peace" with what he's done and Cliff is hit rock bottom. The journey the two men take to get that point is entertaining and enlightening. Crimes and Misdemeanors is a very dark film which is fitting since it is based on Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. Strong performances from the entire cast, the anguish which Judah feels and the humiliation which Cliff endures makes this dramedy one of Woody Allen's best.

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Deconstructing Harry has an interesting hook. The scenes keep shifting from Harry's (Woody Allen) life to Harry's novels. Harry uses his own life experiences to inspire his novels. It's kind of fun see these coarse, vulgar and embarrassing events transpire in the "fictional" realities of Deconstructing Harry and then see the "real-life" consequences of Harry writing thinly veiled accounts. At various points, Richard Benjamin, Tobey Maguire and Stanley Tucci play Harry's alter ego. At times, the film was funny and enjoyable.

Over 90 minutes, the plot device begins to wear thin and by the end, Allen is mixing the two universes in confused mélange. My main complaints with Deconstructing Harry is that it is much more crass than his typical films. Second, he becomes two literal and obvious in his humor. Thus we get Harry descending to hell a la Dante's Inferno. We are treated to Woody Allen and Billy Crystal (as Old Nick) trading flat quips, in deadpan style. I lost interest before that point but lost consciousness during that scene.

Deconstructing Harry is saying something serious and insightful about Allen's misanthropy and self-loathing but he tells the story with such literal interpretations that it is lost on me or more accurately, I could not sustain my interest long enough to grasp what he is saying. Woody Allen's comedy has a tendency towards the obvious as shown in his depiction of hell in Deconstructing Harry, his rabbi garb in Annie Hall or his caricatures of Lost Generation expats in Midnight in Paris. For my taste, it's a fine line that he crossed over by too much in Deconstructing Harry.

Not Necessarily Noir II

2011-11-25T10:49:00.000-08:00

In November, the Roxie brougt Elliott Lavine and Johnny Legend back to program Not Necessarily Noir II.

The film I most wanted to see was The Killers (1964) with Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, John Cassavetes and Ronald Reagan in his last role. Based on a Hemingway story and a remake of the classic Burt Lancaster/Ava Gardner film (1946), this was a made for TV film which was deemed too violent and released in the theaters. It was paired with Clint Eastwood's directorial debut Play Misty For Me (1971) which I had seen before. Unfortunately, I was more tempted by a Jeanne Moreau double feature at the PFA.

Actually, I had seen a number of the films at Not Necessarily Noir II before including Blow Out and Johnny Guitar.

I ended up seeing four films.

Brainstorm starring Jeffrey Hunter, Anne Francis and Dana Andrews; with Strother Martin; directed by William Conrad; (1965)
Female on the Beach starring Joan Crawford & Jeffrey Chandler; (1955)
Girl Gang; (1954)
Teenage Gang Debs; (1966)

The series closed with three Ed Wood film (Jail Bait, Glen or Glenda? & Plan 9 From Outer Space) and Johnny Legend's Woodworld, a documentary on Ed Wood. I didn't think I was up for four hours of Ed Wood so I passed on the final evening's program.

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None of these films were what you would call masterpieces. Each of them had some serious flaws.

Brainstorm (directed by the actor William Conrad) was about a man (Jeffrey Hunter) who pretends to be crazy to justify a murder but then actual becomes insane with a little help from roundheel Anne Francis. The setup was solid but the film lost my interest midway.

Female on the Beach star Joan Crawford as a vulnerable widow living in a beach house next to some cardsharks and beach bum Jeffrey Hunter. I've noted before that Crawford plays the weakling or the bitch. In this one, she tried go half and half but the film had B picture written all over. A predictable script with Jan Sterling looking beautiful and future Gilligan's Island co-star Natalie Schaefer looking out of place. Girl Gang was notable for its explicit depiction of heroin use; I would even say it was a tutorial on how to mainline coke.

That leaves Teenage Gang Debs which was by far my favorite. Even at a modest 75 minutes, the film had a lot of filler in the form shots of motorcyclist riding around and dance sequences. The plot was essentially Lady MacBeth Joins a Motorcycle Gang. Actually, she (Diane Conti) is just the girlfriend of the gang leader but she is one pulling the strings and acting Machiavellian. Conti shines in the film. I'm surprised she didn't go on to bigger and better things.

Teenage Gang Debs is an unusually rough-edged, juvenile delinquency film featuring not one but two gang rape scenes, multiple murders and a biker gang that dresses like they're in a college fraternity.

Although the film was clearly padded out to get to 75 minutes, one dance sequence deserves a mention because the tune was great. Lee Dowell's The Black Belt had me tapping my feet and smiling.

Teenage Gang Debs deserves cult film status.

Sumo Wrestlers and Katharine Hepburn

2011-11-24T20:37:00.000-08:00

I drove down to Palo Alto twice in November.

I had my maiden encounter with the Silicon Valley Jewish Film Festival when I saw A Matter of Size.

A Matter of Size starring Itzik Cohen, Irit Kaplan & Togo Igawa; Hebrew and some Japaense with subtitles; (2009) - Official Website

A Matter of Size is a relatively old film. I believe it's scored the hat trick of Bay Area Jewish Film Festivals. It played at the 2009 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival and the 2010 East Bay International Jewish Film Festival but I missed the film both time. Not only that but A Matter of Size screened at the 2010 SVJFF. It was with some surprise I saw it on the program for the 2011 Silicon Valley Jewish Film Festival. Typically, a film festival won't screen a film it screened the previous year nor at two other local festivals in the past two years. I was eager to see the film at previous screenings but my schedule wouldn't cooperate so I marked my calendar early for the November 17th screening.

The venue was the theater at the Cubberley Community Center on Middlefied. Cubberley is a massive facility including Foothill College, extensive sports facilities, a library, a day care center, etc. The theater looked state of the art and was suitable for stage productions. That's appropriate because A Matter of Size was preceded by a sumo wrestling demonstration. Prior to the event, I was not aware that there was organized sumo wrestling outside of Japan. It turns out there is a US Sumo Wrestling Championship. The demonstration at Cubberley featured the first and second place finishers in the 2011 Men's Heavyweight Division. Did you know there were weight classes or a women's division? US Champion Byambajav Ulambayar (known as Byamba) and runner-up Siosifa Isamau (known as Big Joe) showed some moves. There was an emcee who looked as though he could be a sumo wrestler because he was very knowledgeable and large but I cannot recall his name.

After the entertaining demonstration and photo op, the film started. A Matter of Size deals with a group of obese men and women who gather at a dysfunctional Weight Watchers type group in Israel. The group facilitator is belitting Herzl (Itzik Cohen) for his weight gains. Having lost his job and leaving the obesity help group in huff, Herzl gets a job a Japanese restaurant. He discovers that the Japanese employees at the restaurant are fanatical about sumo wrestling and look upon Herzl as having the ideal physique for the sport. Not only that but the restaurant manager, Kitano (Togo Igawa), is a former sumo trainer. Herzl convinces his overweight friends to form a sumo wrestling group and have Kitano train them. The group includes a closeted gay man, a TV news cameraman, a plumber who suspects his wife is cheating and Zehava, the lone woman, who is counselor in women's prison and is sweet on Herzl.

I won't give away to many of the plot twists but the laughs come fast and furious as A Matter of Size mines for fat jokes, relationship jokes, gay jokes and fish out of water jokes. At one point, Kitano tells Herzl he is too small to be a sumo wrestler which is the first time anyone has ever told him that.

Cohen as Herzl is pretty much the straight man as his fellow heavyweights and typically Jewish mother get most of the funny lines. I thought the relationship between Herzl and Zehava (a surprisingly sexy Irit Kaplan) elevated the film to something more than a one trick pony. Kaplan was awarded Best Actress by the Israeli Film Academy for her performance. The interplay between Herzl and Zehava made me care about them whereas the directors could have gone for cheap laughs.

Togo Igawa, who appeared in the French language The Hedgehog appears here and speaks Hebrew. His performance in The Hedgehog leads me to believe he speaks French. I'm not so sure about Hebrew based on A Matter of Size. However, his role is fairly small.

I greatly enjoyed A Matter of Size although it was a bit lowbrow at times but if you burn off all the fat, it's a heartwarming romantic comedy. Big, fat guys wrestling while 98% naked is just a bonus.

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I went to the Stanford Theater earlier this week to see a Katharine Hepburn double feature.

A Bill of Divorcement starring Katharine Hepburn, John Barrymore & Billie Burke; directed by George Cukor; (1932)
Morning Glory starring Katharine Hepburn, Adolphe Menjou & Douglas Fairbanks Jr.; directed by Lowell Sherman; (1933)

I've never seen the word "divorcement" before. It means the same thing as divorce. Perhaps in the 1930s, divorcement was the common term and as the years progressed, so many people ended their marriage that they shortened it, colloquially, to divorce.

A Bill of Divorcement was clearly based on a play because the entire film takes place in a large, English manor. Two rooms are used extensively. In addition, the dialog sounds like some parody of theater speak; like Jon Lovitz's Master Thespian. Hepburn as the headstrong daughter and Barrymore as the crazy-but-cured father deliver their lines in affected manner. Billie Burke, who I am appreciating more and more as I see her in non-Wizard of Oz roles, is the only one who delivers a performance which doesn't look archaic. Although her performance is not archaic, her character's motivation is.

In nutshell, Sydney Fairfield (Hepburn) is a unruly, young woman who is madly in love. Her mother (Burke) has divorced her father (Barrymore) and is engaged to be married in a few days. Sydney has never met her father as he has spent her entire life in an insane assylum. Out of the blue, Hilary (you know it is a British play if a male character is named Leslie, Hilary, Carol, etc.) shows up at the manor and unaware of his divorcement, expects to resume his marital relations. The rest of the film shows how the family deal with the Hilary's return.

A Bill of Divorcement was Hepburn's screen debut. She was 25 years old and coming off a hit Broadway play (The Warrior's Husband). Hepburn already had "the voice" but she looks impossibly young. Seeing her in the later films (even e Philadelphia Story), one forget how sexy she was as a younger woman. She's tall, lithe, has angular features and a natural confidence which is incredibly sexy. Then she speaks in that much imitated voice and it ruins the appeal. How wonderful it would have been to be introduced to Hepburn on screen for the first...before she became a legend.

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For her role as Eva Lovelace in Morning Glory, Hepburn won her first Academy Award. Morning Glory looks like it originated as a screenplay but it is set in the world of Broadway theaters. It is essentially a three act play. Act 1 - Lovelace arrives in New York, naive but full of confidence. Act 2 - Lovelace has some of the air knocked from her sails as she experiences the hardships of being a working actor and swimming with the sharks but remains confident in her skills. Act 3 - Lovelace gets her breaks and makes the most of it although the ending is left ambiguous as to whether or not success will spoil Eva Lovelace.

Morning Glory is a prototypical Broadway story. In it, you see traces of future films like All About Eve and The Producers. Although Hepburn is the star of the film, she is helped immeasurably by her supporting actors. Adophe Menjou plays the cynical Broadway producer, C. Aubrey Smith plays the veteran actor who takes Lovelace under his wing and Mary Duncan (in her final film credit) plays the Broadway superstar with just the right combination of vanity, arrogance, insecurity and bitchiness. After seeing Duncan, I wondered what else she has been in. I was disappointed so see she stopped making films in 1993 after marrying a wealthy, polo-playing industrialist.

Hepburn thought the role of Lovelace was a perfect match for her. Her acting looks contrived 80 years later but the plot is so strong that it makes up for it. At one point, she recites the soliloquy William Shakespeare's Hamlet (To be or not to be...). The characters in the film thought her performance to be stupendous but it left me unimpressed. Also, for some reason, Hepburn seemed to be doing a Betty Boop impersonation in the first act. Later in the film, Hepburn's lilting but gravelly voice makes it familiar and expected appearance.

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When I left the Stanford Theater, I got lost trying to get onto El Camino Real. It took me three tries to correctly navigate that Caltrain station underpass on University Ave. On one pass, I drove down Emerson Street and saw the Landmark Aquarius. It's just around the corner from the Stanford which is on University between Emerson and Ramona. I never knew it was so close. When the Varsity Theater (most recently a Borders Books) was in operation, there were a lot of rep house/art house choices in the downtown Palo Alto area. It's highly ironic that a bookstore moved into a failed single screen movie theater. Maybe the site was a buggy whip factory before the Varsity opened.

As I mentioned, the Balboa will be having a fundraiser on December 13. The tickets start at $35 per person. Starting at the $75 level, the tickets include a copy of Theaters of San Francisco by Jack Tillmany. I remember seeing Tillmany's Theaters of the San Francisco Peninsula on sale at the Stanford when Dennis James performed there a few months ago.

I remember reading a San Francisco Chronicle article many years ago about all the movie theaters on Mission Street. They were all closed or repurposed. The article had this great photo of several marquees which showed how densely located the theaters were. I drove Mission St. out to Daly City of few weeks afterwards and was amazed by how many theater were on that street. At the time, I didn't see as many movies as I do now. I regret not seeing a film at the Alhambra, the Royal or other old time movie houses.

Since then, I'm always attuned to movie marquees while driving, riding or walking down a street. Books like Theaters of... provide history and context for a neighborhood. Looking narrowly through the prism of old movie theaters, I satisfy my wide ranging natural curiosity and indulge in my hobby.

I think I'm going to go with a $75 VIP ticket for the Balboa benefit. I can buy the Theaters of San Francisco for $21.99 at Arcadia Publishing but I feel like I should help the Balboa out. I'm usually too pragmatic to do something like that. I like my charitable donation backed up by written acknowledgement so I can deduct them from my income taxes.

In addition to the December 13 event, the San Francisco Neighborhood Theater Foundation has announced a Sponsor A Seat and a Second Century Capital Campaign fundraising drives for the Balboa and Vogue Theaters.

2012 is 38 Days Away

2011-11-23T13:11:00.000-08:00

The first quarter of the year has long been the busiest for me in terms of film festivals. The 2012 festival schedule has already been lined-up.

German Gems - January 14 at the Castro Theater and January 15 in Point Arenas
Noir City - January 20 to 29 at the Castro Theater
SF IndieFest - February 9 to 23 primarily at the Roxie
Cinequest - February 28 to March 11 primarily at the Camera 12 in San Jose
San Francisco Asian American Film Festival - March 8 to 18 in San Francisco, Berkeley and San Jose

If the Mostly British Film Festival stays on schedule, it should be held in early February at the Vogue Theater.

German Gems has cut back to one day at the Castro. Festival Founder Ingrid Eggers received a Goldies Lifetime Achievement Award from the San Francisco Bay Guardian. In the profile, the SFBG states "Her current film festival project — the smaller-scale German Gems — is set to screen for a third year in January 2012. After that, Eggers is not so sure. 'It's incredibly expensive to put on even such a small festival,' she admits ruefully..." To paraphrase Churchill, "Now this may not be the end. It may not even be the beginning of the end. But it is, most assuredly, the end of the beginning."

Noir City's December 14 kick-off double feature has been announced: Lady on a Train (1945) and Christmas Holiday (1944). Deanna Durbin is the common thread.

Also, there is a series currently at the PFA called Southern (Dis)comfort.

The South has never shaken its past. It sits like mist on the land, seeping into the drawl of the everyday. Secession, the cotton gin, a God-fearin’ people, slavery, pecans and poke salad, moonshine, hounds and possums, a big Rebel yell—there’s enough cultural ammo here to fight the Civil War all over again. Those munitions will never run dry as long as Southern artists (and a few carpetbaggers) plow the fertile fields of Dixie mythology, milling it into a genre all its own, the Southern Gothic. This genre wallows in the grotesque, prefers the randy to the restrained, knows Jim Crow isn’t the national bird, considers blood for an old debt paid, plunders the plantation, and imagines it all residing inside a delirious melodrama like one big corn mash-up.

I've seen a few of the films in the series at the PFA. Curator Steve Seid said that there were so many films that he and fellow curator Peter Conheim wanted to include in the series that they couldn't fit them all in at the PFA. A dozen of the overflow films will be screened at the Roxie in December. Neither PFA or the Roxie have announced the Roxie titles although Seid said they saved the more sleazy ones for the Roxie's run. I think he mentioned the Southern Fried exploitation classic, Two Thousand Maniacs! would get a screening at the Roxie.

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Since I haven't reported it in awhile, I have seen 371 films or film programs year-to-date. The cost is $3,144 but that's a little inaccurate. Some of the money was in the form of charitable donations which are tax deductible. On this date in 2010, I had seen 359 films so I'm running ahead of last year's pace.

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Another digression is that I've noticed that AMC has been showing John Wayne films on Saturdays. I've always been a fan of Wayne and having watched so many portions of his films the past few months, I can see why. In the 1950s and 1960s, Wayne didn't so much play an icon as poke fun at the icon he had become.

In particular, his Western films show Wayne blending his heroic persona with a fair amount of humor (occasionally at his own expense). Among the films of the era I enjoy are Rio Bravo, El Dorado, The Cowboys, The War Wagon, The Sons of Katie Elder and True Grit. In these films, Wayne toyed with his own film persona which was firmly established by the time. I also note that Wayne certainly wasn't worried about being shadowed by his co-stars who include Dean Martin, Robert Mitchum & Kirk Douglas. There were also two outstanding films from his final decade and a half in which Wayne played his parts without much humor creeping into his performances: John Ford's classic, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence and Wayne's final, elegiac film, The Shootist.

All in all, the Duke made some entertaining films as he was winding down his career. I read that Quentin Tarantino asks his dates what they think of Rio Bravo. If they don't love it, he assumes they are not a good match. If I were a woman, I'd pass Tarantino's test which is appropriate because I have a man-crush on Tarantino based on his films.

Less than 4 Stars

2011-11-22T22:04:00.000-08:00

For the past several years, I have gone to the Chinese American Film Festival at the 4 Star. At least twice (maybe three years running), the film I go to is not subtitled. I recall sitting through Ip Man and Shanghai Red without subtitles. So it was no surprise that I when I arrived at the 4 Star at Saturday to see Humble Soul and read a sign at the cashier's windows that stated Humble Soul was not subtitled. Actually, that's an improvement because in past years, I paid my admission and they didn't mention it. Perhaps they thought I spoke Mandarin.

The lineup for the 2011 Chinese American Film Festival didn't appeal to me. Humble Soul was the only one I planned to see. Since it was unsubtitled, I looked for an alternate. I tentatively set my sights on If You Are the One 2; mainly because Qi Shu starred in it. However, I couldn't get over to the 4 Star tonight so I missed the film and tonight is the final day of the festival.

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I did go the 4 Star a few weeks ago to see the latest Ip Man film.

The Legend Is Born: Ip Man starring Yu-Hang To; with Sammo Hung; Cantonese with subtitles; (2010)

For the second time in my life (that I can remember), I saw a film in the theater by myself. It was the 8 PM or 8:30 PM show on a Tuesday night. The Legend Is Born: Ip Man (aka Ip Man 3) played in the big theater at the 4 Star. That's an awfully large theater to sell one ticket for but that's what happened.

As for the film, Ip Man 3 is not officially affiliated with the Donnie Yen series. Neither Donnie Yen or director Wilson Yip was involved in the production of Ip Man 3. Sammo Hung who co-starred and choreographed Ip Man 2 returns, in a different role, in Ip Man 3. Suet Lam, who frequently appears Johnny To films, makes an appearance in Ip Man 3. Finally, Ip Man's actual son, 87 year old Ip Chun, appears as one of Ip Man's masters.

Recently, I've seen a number of Chinese films where the Japanese are the villains. That's been a staple of Chinese cinema for years but Ip Man 3 takes it to ridiculous extremes. A prequel set in early part of the 20th century, Ip Man 3 posits that the Japanese were placing sleeper agents in China in the form of kidnapped Japanese boys, smuggled into China, placed as orphans in prominent Chinese families and called to action as adults. If the movie is to be believed, Ip Man's "brother" is one of these Japanese sleeper agents.

Sammo plays Ip Man's Wing Chung master. He dies from natural causes fairly early in the film. Ip goes off to Hong Kong for university studies. While there, he encounters the ancient Leung Bik (Ip Chun) who teaches him a nonstandard (even sacrilegious) form of Wing Chung. When Ip Man returns to the Wing Chung school where his brother, Ip Tin-Chi (Fan Siu-wong), is now a respected master. Ip Man's deviant Wing Chung puts him at odds with his brother but by the end of the film, it's clear that Ip Tin-Chi is a tool of Japanese operatives.

Like any good kung fu film, Ip Man 3 goes through some motion to set up its fight scenes. Kenya Sawada and Bernice Liu play the Japanese father-daughter duo who look to take down Ip Man. They get in some of the best fight scenes (especially Liu).

Dennis Yu-Hang To plays Ip Man. He bears some resemblance to Donnie Yen and acquits himself satisfactorily. Having seen all the Ip Man films, I think the second one was my favorite; in no small part due to Sammo's choreography. Ip Man 3 is my least favorite but it's still not half bad. I've certainly seen worse Chinese kung fu flicks.

The German Ulysses and Biberkopf Fever

2011-11-20T19:08:00.000-08:00

When I was in high school, my English Lit teacher announced to the class that she had never read James Joyce Ulysses. However, she promised herself and the class that she would do so before she died. I never followed up to see if she kept her promise. My encounters with Ulysses have left me empathetic. Joyce's steam-of-consciousness style leaves me bewildered. So it is with some trepidation that I checked out Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). Referred to as the German Ulysses, I have not yet started the book. I am finishing up Don DeLillo's Running Dog about a fictitious search for a porno film with Hitler made in Berlin bunker as WWII ended.

My interest in the novel is spurred by recently seeing the film at PFA.

Berlin Alexanderplatz starring Günter Lamprecht; directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder; German with subtitles; (1980)

At 15½ hours long, Berlin Alexanderplatz was screened in four installments.

I'm not sure what to write about Berlin Alexanderplatz. It's so epic (in length and ambition) that a blog post seems particularly inadequate. The film follows its protagonist (Franz Bieberkopf) as he endures tribulations of biblical proportions. By the end of the film, Bieberkopf loses his true love, his kindred spirit, his right arm, his mind, etc.

Giving the briefest of synopses, Franz Biberkopf is released from prison in 1927 and reintegrates himself into his old neighborhood (the Alexanderplatz district of Berlin). In fact, Franz moves into his old flat...the same flat where he killed his lover/prostitute for which he was imprisoned. For the next 15 hours, a rogues gallery comes through the flat - whores, killers, deviants and the morally bankrupt. By comparison, Biberkopf is a saint although he does rape a woman in the first episode. Slowly but surely, Biberkopf is drawn into the moral quicksand.

Berlin Alexanderplatz focuses on the ups and downs of Biberkopf's life. Given the length of the film Fassbinder is able to show Biberkopf in many different moods. Günter Lamprecht as Franz Biberkopf gives an incredible performance if for nothing else sustaining Biberkopf for so long. The key relationship in Berlin Alexanderplatz is not between Franz and one of the number of women who share his bed but rather between Biberkopf and the stuttering Reinhold Hoffmann. Gottfried John's performance as Reinhold is stupendous. A truly pathetic character, Reinhold is more weak and cowardly than evil although the end results are the same. Despite bedding a steady stream of women, Reinhold is vaguely homosexual which is confirmed in the epilogue. This shades the Biberkopf/Reinhold relationship with a homo-eroticism which left me wondering if I was imagining it or it was deliberately included by Fassbinder.

There were 13 episodes and a dreamlike epilogue. Most of the episodes were 60 minutes long. I enjoyed all of it although the epilogue veered into the surreal as we see Franz's madness brought to screen. Fassbinder did a nice job recreating Weimar Germany. Fassbinder skills are on full display as he keeps the plot moving while accretively building a masterpiece. Scene by scene, Fassbinder and
Lamprecht flesh out Biberkopf and add nuance and insight into the character. At 15 hours, it is easy to say that Fassbinder could not help but develop a complex character. However, Fassbinder takes the audience for a roller coaster ride as we rise and fall with Franz Biberkopf. I cared for Franz, was frustrated with him, disappointed with him, et al.

At 15½ hours, many people will find Berlin Alexanderplatz plodding. There were time where I felt that way. If one commits to the film, I think it will be a rewarding experience.

Haight Sex and Hate Sex

2011-11-19T21:33:00.000-08:00

I am so far behind in detailing the films I've seen. I've seen at least 30 films that I have not mentioned.

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I mentioned in the last post that Noir City is having a kick off event on December 14 at the Castro Theater. The Balboa Theater is hosting "a fundraising event on Tuesday, December 13... We will show photos of San Francisco theaters 'then and now,' expanding on Peter Hartlaub’s recent study. We’ll preview the holiday movies and their awards chances. And have a great auction of movie goodies and more."

"Peter Hartlaub's recent study" is an interesting series on SF Gate showing photos of old San Francisco movie theaters. I recall two installments on November 3 and November 10 in his SF Gate blog, The Big Event.

My favorite photo is this one. The caption reads "HAIGHT THEATRE (Aug. 8, 1964): The theater in the Haight/Ashbury District showed first-run movies for decades, then became a counter-culture haven. The protest in this photo was during a brief attempt as a gay cinema house. (John McBride / The Chronicle)"

I particularly like the dark haired boy holding a sign that reads "Down with the 'ladies' We want Walt Disney!!!!" Whereas as the other boys look vaguely amused, this boy looks despondent; not to mention androgynous. Nothing invokes old fashioned American values than children picketing while holding anti-gay signs and demanding movies from an reputed anti-Semite. Another interesting aspect of this photo is that I don't see any adults encouraging the boys. Nowadays you see children at protests but they seem to be there at the behest of their parents or for publicity reasons. This trio of boys seem self-motivated.

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After seeing Rita Moreno's performance last weekend, I walked a few blocks to the Landmark Shattuck Cinemas to see The Skin I Live In.

The Skin I Live In starring Antonio Banderas & Elena Anaya; directed by Pedro Almodóvar; Spanish with subtitles; 2011 - Official Website

I came away from the Castro Theater's August retrospective of Pedro Almodóvar's films with a greater appreciation for his work. Nothing I've seen prepared me for The Skin I Live In. Nominally a horror film, Almodóvar brings his considerable directorial skills to the genre. It progresses at its own pace and is told in non-linear fashion. It has the pacing and feel of Almodóvar best films but he brings a mad scientist to the plot this time. Antonio Banderas as Dr. Robert Legard (a plastic surgeon) suffers several tragedies as the film progresses and puts his medical skills to use.

I don't want to give away the plot twist but you don't realize until two thirds into the film how deranged the good doctor has become. The film implies that cloning of human cells is the extent of Legard's misbehavior but it goes much further than that. I guess the shapely woman, in the bodysuit, locked in a bedroom and constantly watched via close circuit television is an indication of Legard's insanity. The film kept me guessing about which twist was coming next. The only hint, I'll give is that in the end, Almodóvar remains true to his cinematic (and personal) roots. Actually, the blog title alludes to surprise also.

Antonio Banderas is getting old - he is 51. I'm not sure if he is aging gracefully but he is developing this craggy face which is well suited for the role. Banderas looks like he has been to hell and back which his character has been. He still retains a certain rugged handsomeness that masks (but not completely) the ugliness of Legard. Banderas seems much more capable an actor in Spanish than he did in any of his American films although I am a huge fan of Robert Rodriguez' Desperado.

Elena Anaya plays the woman in bodysuit. The character's name is Vera Cruz which provides insight into the plot. It is noted that Vera bears a resemblance to Legard's late wife and Almodóvar has fun developing that plot thread. Anaya played the pregnant wife in Point Blank. Vera Cruz is a bigger role. It's not a flashy role (until the end) but Anaya handles it satisfactorily.

Jan Cornet as Vincente has the best part in my opinion. He shows a wide range of emotions. As the film progresses Vincente's character is shaped into many dimensions and Cornet plays them all well. His is the pivotal role in the film but I won't say more.

Marisa Paredes, who has appeared in many of Almodóvar's film, shows up as the housekeeper in a small role but quietly impressive performance.

The Skin I Live In is not deeply satisfying but it is highly entertaining which can be said for many of Almodóvar's films. It feels a bit lightweight for Almodóvar who imbues his melodramas with a little bit extra. Still, The Skin I Live In is a film I can recommend without reservation.

Hart & Kaufman, Mamet & Muller, Moreno & Mom

2011-11-18T00:18:00.000-08:00

In this post, I mentioned three stage performances I wanted to see. I was only able to see two out of three.

Once in a Lifetime was a comedy by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman; the first of their eight collaborations. It was showing at the American Conservatory Theater (ACT) on Geary. Premiering in 1930, Once in a Lifetime is partially set in Hollywood during the dawn of the talkie era. They screened clips of old-timey films between scenes. I recall one of Al Jolson singing. I was mild about Once in a Lifetime. It looked every bit of its 81 years and some of the plot devices have become tropes (assuming they were fresh in 1930).

I was more enthusiastic about David Mamet's Race which just closed at the ACT - I have a season subscription at ACT. Race premiered on Broadway in 2009 with James Spader, David Alan Grier, Kerry Washington and Richard Thomas which is outstanding casting in my opinion. Spader seems perfect for the role of Jack Lawson.

Race tells the story of two partners at a law firm (one white and one black) and their African American associate attorney who become involved in the case of a wealthy white man accused of raping a black woman in a hotel room. Over the course of the 90 minute play, the four of them examine their attitudes towards race through their interactions. Lawson views the associate (Susan) through the prism of being attracted to the younger woman. Susan is more adept at navigating through the world The Man controls. Not militant but with just-under-the-surface black pride and white bigotry. Henry Brown, the African American partner, is the cynical one. Strickland, the accused, has a serious case of jungle fever but seems to be the least racist of them all despite his decades old derogatory comparison of tropical humidity and a black woman's genitalia.

If I had to give a thumbnail description of Race, I'd call it a sophisticated and racially charged Glengarry Glen Ross transplanted to the legal arena. The ACT production featured strong performances by Anthony Fusco and Chris Butler as Lawson and Brown, respectively.

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The Thrillpeddlers' production of Eddie Muller's three plays, collectively called Fear Over Frisco, closes this weekend. The final shows are sold out so I will not be able to see the production.

Speaking of Eddie Muller, Noir City has announced that Noir City 10 will be held January 20 to 29, 2012 at the Castro Theater. The film line-up will be announced December 14 at the Castro. If it's like last year, the December 14 announcement will be accompanied by a double feature.

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On the day before her show closed, I caught Rita Moreno's one woman show at Berkeley Rep. Titled Rita Moreno: Life Without Makeup, the "play" featured Ms. Moreno reminiscing, singing and dancing along photos and with clips from her films and television appearances. Actually, she claimed an injury so two male dancers did most of the dancing while she moved around a little. A month shy of 80 years old, Ms. Moreno looks incredible. From my seat in the audience, she could easily pass for 30 years younger.

The audience ate up every word that she said but I was largely familiar with he life story. I recall several of the details from a San Francisco Chronicle story earlier this year and one from (amazingly) seven years ago (I recall the portable CD incident).

For a woman who dated Brando for eight years and ended the relationship with her suicide attempt, Life Without Makeup is largely devoid of any hint of the churning emotions which must have played such a major role in her youth. I was left wondering how someone survived Brando could look and sound so good (in every sense of the word) 50 years later. I suspect Ms. Moreno was holding back some of the more intense memories and emotions. Her relationship with Brando merited less than three minutes of monologue. She sums up the relationship with a joke at Brando's expense. Indeed, she used humor exclusively. I thought the show could have benefited from some more raw emotions from Ms. Moreno. From the program notes, I suspect getting her to open up as much as she did was an accomplishment for director David Galligan and writer Tony Taccone.

However, Rita Moreno didn't win an Oscar, an Tony, two Emmys and a Grammy for no reason. If not a natural, she is a skilled raconteur. She has a knack for accents. Her comedic talents were on display for all to see so it was an enjoyable two and half hours.

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I've long been a fan of Rita Moreno but I couldn't point to a specific performance(s) that justified my outsized admiration. During Life Without Makeup, I had a eureka moment. Seeing her old photos and seeing her up on stage, it dawned on me that she bears a resemblance to my late mother. Born two years after my mother, both were petite and dark skinned. For the last 30 years of her life, my mother kept her hair short like Ms. Moreno wears it now. In fact, there is a famous Life magazine cover photo of Ms. Moreno that looks like photos of my mother from the era. I think Ms. Moreno looks a bit silly in it and I've never seen my mother in such a pose but the haircut reminds me of old photos of my mother.

It also struck me while watching a clip from The Electric Company that I watched the show as a child and still associate it with my childhood. Given the resemblance to my mother and her association with The Electric Company, I must unconsciously have transferred maternal (hopefully not oedipal) feelings towards her. They did show a clip from The Lieutenant Wore Skirts (1956) with her in a swimsuit, doing a Marilyn Monroe impersonation, which resulted in decidedly non-maternal feelings towards her.

I miss my mother but without her around anymore, I guess Rita Moreno is the next best thing.

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This Saturday (November 19), the El Rey Theater celebrates its 80th Anniversary. It has been operating as a church for several years. I recall that the church at the El Rey was the subject of Audience of One, a documentary I saw at Indiefest a few years ago. They are screening The Smiling Lieutenant starring Maurice Chevalier on Saturday. That film was the first one screened at the El Rey in 1931.

The El Rey is located at 1970 Ocean Avenue in San Francisco. The one night event is limited to 400 seats. All proceeds go to the Geneva Car Barn and Power House. Buy tickets through the event website. There was also a recent SF Chronicle article on the event.

2011 San Francisco DocFest

2011-11-15T18:57:00.000-08:00

I caught 10 programs at this year's DocFest. I bought a festival pass but Berlin Alexaderplatz, Taiwan Film Days and a bad cough kept me away from Doc Fest. It would have been more cost effective to get a 10 film voucher but I don't mind too much. I try to support the scrappy Jeff Ross and his crew as they put on three film festivals or six weeks of independent cinema programming every year.

DocFest screened some films at the Landmark Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley but I went exclusively to the Roxie and Little Roxie. The festival ran from October 14 to 27.

The 10 feature documentary films I saw were:

Dirty Pictures; (2010) - Official Website
With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story; (2011) - Official Website
The After Party; (2010) - Official Website
Back to the Garden; (2010) - Official Website
Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters; (2011) - Official Website
Holy Rollers; (2010) - Official Website
Left By the Ship; (2010) - Official Website
Peep Culture; (2011) - Official Website
Scenes of a Crime; (2011) - Official Website
Scrapper; (2010) - Official Website

In addition, I saw three short film documentaries.

The Love Police: Social Controls - YouTube
Pot Country; (2011) - Official Website
The Yodel Within; (2011)

I couldn't find an Official Website for The Yodel Within but I did find the YouTube video which inspired the film. Franzl Lang's performance in the video was the best part of The Yodel Within. I particularly like the hip-shaking action Franzl gives towards the middle of the video. You have to love the Germans. Where else to could a big, beefy, orthodontically-challenged, Fred Flintstone look-alike, yodeler make a video and be crowned the king of anything?

I didn't see as many films as I hoped for. I watched approximately a fourth of the programs screened. I was not too impressed although I don't think I saw enough films to have a valid sample size. However, this isn't a random draw. The films were selected by a programming committee so they should have represented the cream of the crop. As it was, I can only recommend two of the feature films.

Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters drew comparisons to The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, a 2007 documentary about some master Donkey Kong players. At first glance, Ecstasy of Order seems to be to Tetris what The King of Kong is to Donkey Kong...right down to the designated bad guy and the use of a colon in the title. I enjoyed The King of Kong and looked forward to Ecstasy of Order. I was surprised by the sportsmanship exhibited by the Tetris players. Apparently there is more camaraderie between elite Tetris gamers than DK.

Ecstasy of Order follows a group of skilled Tetris players in the months before the 1st Annual World Tetris Championships in 2010. Somehow all the players know about each other despite never having met. They know each other by reputation like gunfighters in the Old West. The one that invokes the most awe is Thor Aackerlund who at the age of 13 won the 1990 Nintendo World Championships. Robin Mihara, who placed third in the 1990 NWC, is organizer of the World Tetris Championships and spends much of the film visiting elite Tetris players for the documentary (which largely doubles as a promotional video for the 2010 tournament). Throughout the first half of the film, Thor is presented as this mythical figure - unbeatable, mysterious and master of the "vibrating thumb" which is a technique used on the controller to move the Tetriminos faster than they could otherwise be moved.

However, when Thor shows up, he appears to be a man humbled by life. It turns out that Thor's video game earnings from tournaments and appearance engagements were his family's only earnings in some years. I believe his mother was seriously ill during his youth and the family had no health insurance. That's a lot of for a 13 year old to handle. Later, Thor had a car accident which seriously injured him. Thor's behavior leading up the 2010 tourney appear to be less mysterious and more reclusive. Indeed, Thor's presence among his fellow Tetris players seems to buoy his spirits.

Although Thor plays a pivotal role in the film, the spirit of the film lies with the effervescence of the gamers and their serious intonations of Level 30 and Kill Screens. These gamers are serious about Tetris but yet they seem to understand it's kind of silly or at least, they are viewed as kind of silly. They all are dead serious about winning the tournament though. Ecstasy of Order has a joie de vivre that I found very appealing.

A step below Ecstasy of Order is Holy Rollers. Not to be confused with the 2010 Jesse Eisenberg film by the same name, Indiefest's Holy Rollers is closer to 21. It's about a blackjack team made up of churchgoing folk. The subtitle to Holy Rollers is The True Story of Card Counting Christians. Several of the team members are pastors.

It may seem difficult to reconcile gambling and Christian morality...and it was. The team members seem to go to great lengths to rationalize their behavior. For example, they keep their winnings or working capital in cash - in the icebox, under the mattress, in a safe in the bedroom closet, etc. They hide the cash when they go through airport security on their way to a casino destination. They present it as part and parcel of their "business." I don't understand why they didn't deposit the money in a bank and withdraw it at their destination city instead of carrying it around in cash. One explanation could be that the "team" and/or "investors" weren't reporting the winnings on their income tax forms.

Like everyone else, the team is happy when winning but as they go through multiple losing steaks, they begin to turn on each other in unchristian ways. First, the team managers question if the team members are following the betting algorithms, so they test the team members. Later, one of the team members accuses another team member (conveniently the atheist on the team) of stealing money. The team operates on a lot of trust giving the team members significant quantities of cash and taking their word that they a) played blackjack and b) won or lost the amounts they claim. The accusation has divine providence though; the accuser claims God told him that his teammate was stealing.

Ultimately, the whole thing appears to crash around the two managers who are the de facto team captains. After a particularly disastrous trip to Southern California, you think the two have sworn off gambling for good. The next scene is the two of them essentially holding a blackjack team seminar. Frankly, Ben Crawford (one of the two team managers) seemed more like a internet salesman than a devout Christian; more of a huckster than a churchgoer. He seems like the type of guy that spends all his time trying to hit on something big instead of getting a steady job. Nothing wrong with that but it just doesn't jibe with being a devout Christian. There must be more to being a Christian than going to church and praying.

The two team managers, Crawford and Colin Jones, have Executive Producer credits on Holy Rollers which initially bothered me. I thought the film was biased because of their, presumably financial, involvement. After thinking about it, I thought the film portrayed them in a morally ambiguous light. Of course, the audience doesn't know what was left on the cutting room floor (that's figurative since the "film" was digital) which may have tipped the scales against Crawford and Jones. Leaving their characters' true nature inconclusive made for a better film. I left Holy Rollers with a confused case of spiteful glee. Them self-righteous Christians got what they deserved...except they weren't that self-righteous and they didn't quite get what they deserved.

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Other films which I can't completely dismiss include:

With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story - almost a complete hagiography. I particularly liked the part where Stan Lee Media declares bankruptcy. The filmmakers completely absolve Lee of any wrongdoing (indeed he wasn't prosecuted by the SEC like some executives). To show that Lee is a such a great man, the film played an audio excerpt where Lee calls a fired employee and leaves a message on his answering machine telling him how sad he is that the guy has lost his job. Oddly, With Great Power is silent about he legal troubles Lee has subsequently had related Stan Lee Media. Still, it's tough to not like or admire Lee.

Scrappers - meth addicts and paranoid schizophrenics trespass on a US government bombing range to collect scrap metal from spent and unexploded ordnance. The only other people willing to risk their lives on the bombing range are coyotes smuggling people and drug runners. Categorize this as strange people doing strange things but not strange enough to hold my undivided interest.

Left By the Ship - surprisingly unaffecting documentary about orphans in the Philippines. Specifically, these people are the children of African American servicemen and Filipinas (in one case, a bar girl/prostitute). There was some law denying the kids US citizenship. As I recollect, this is not the case elsewhere but there was a specific law withholding citizenship for the children of US servicemen at Subic Bay and Clark Air Field. I recall reading somewhere that in every culture, the lighter skinned people are held up as the standard of beauty or that lighter skin is more desirable than darker skin. I wasn't expecting Left By the Ship to address the reasons but I will say that its odd that children of African Americans are discriminated against given how dark some native Filipinos are.

Back to the Garden - a bit of a bait and switch. The filmmaker filmed some isolated hippies in Washington state in the 1980s. He returns to interview them 20+ years later. The copy on the Indiefest program implied that the hippies had sold out or had dissension amongst themselves but with few exceptions the old guard were still fighting the good fight. The most notable exception was the woman who went from hippie to Microsoft employee. The second generation or the children of the hippies were more varied and interesting. My takeaway was that even if you could create heaven on earth, you still need to some interaction with the outside world and the kids born into this utopia will be anxious to see what lies beyond.

The other feature films left me bored or underwhelmed. The three short films I watched were interesting enough but, even the great Franzl Lang's performance in The Yodel Within is not enough to give it more than mild recommendation.

San Francisco Artifacts in the Richmond District

2011-11-07T00:38:00.000-08:00

I stopped by the Balboa to see Tom Wyrsch's latest documentary.

Sutro's: The Palace at Lands End; directed by Tom Wyrsch; documentary; (2011) - Official Website

First, the Balboa & the San Francisco Neighborhood Theater Foundation (SFNTF) announced that SFNTF "has reached an agreement to lease the theatre to 2024 - thus securing the future of one of San Francisco's oldest operating cinemas." In his weekly newsletter, Gary Meyer characterized the announcement as "good news...But not good enough news to assure the theater can operate that long." On November 5, the Balboa Theater and SFNTF hosted an open house discussing topics such as "creating a realistic long-term plan for the future of the Balboa Theatre."

I was aware that SFNTF was interested in the Balboa three months ago. I'm not sure why it took so long to finalize the agreement. I did not attend the November 5 open house so I have no idea what was discussed. I've never seen a regular screening at the Vogue Theater, the theater SFNTF's currently owns and operates. My sense is that it is not well attended but for all I know, they are are packing them in every night. I'm more partial to the programming at the Balboa which is similar to the Vogue. They both program select general release films (with an eye towards their neighborhood's tastes) but the Balboa includes more special events or art house films from time to time. Of course, this programming has led the Balboa to the brink of closure so perhaps a change in programming is necessary "to assure the theater can operate."

To be honest, a 13 year lease on an 85 year old movie theater doesn't make much sense to me but bless SFNTF for taking the risk.

Now that the Balboa has "been saved," I wonder if a theater can close down in San Francisco again. Having pulled off this trick twice (with the Vogue & Balboa), I can't help but think that the SFNTF would be expected to save remaining movie theater's from the classic era such as the Clay, Bridge, Castro, 4 Star, Presidio and Marina.

The Red Vic (which closed in July) was formerly a furniture showroom as recently as the early 1990s. It didn't have the label of being a "movie palace" or "neighborhood theater." In other words, the building seems as important as the function. Buildings designed to be movie theaters need to be preserved as movie theaters to allow future San Franciscans to enjoy the unique pleasure of seeing a movie in a building designed to watch movies. At least, that's the line coming from movie theater preservationists.

Coincidentally, the Red Vic announced the next phase of its existence recently. The Alembic Bar (next door to the Red Vic) will expand into the lobby area. The actual theater will be split into a "marketplace" featuring "four to six food-related start-up entrepreneurs and retail businesses." They are also carving out space for a 49 seat screening room available for private rental.

Also, I recently saw a film at the 4 Star (in the larger screening room) where I was the only person in the audience on a weeknight screening (8:40 PM, I believe). That auditorium can probably seat approximately 200 people. That can't last for long. However, the Lees moved heaven and earth to "save" the 4 Star. I can't see them closing the theater after working so hard to abrogate the lease and purchase the building.

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Sutro's: The Palace at Lands End is directed by Tom Wyrsch who directed Remembering Playland at the Beach which I also saw at the Balboa. Sutro's is cut from the same cloth as Playland which is appropriate; Sutro Baths was just up the hill from Playland at the Beach and owned by the same person (George Whitney). Sutro Baths was originally built by Adoph Sutro in 1896, a San Francisco mayor who made his fortune in developing mining techniques for the Comstock Lode.

I called Playland a "barebones documentary." I recall thinking it was a little amateurish. Both documentaries relied on talking head interviews, still photos, home movies and minimal narration. However, Wyrsch seems to have upped his game as a documentarian. At nearly 90 minutes, Sutro's is twenty minutes longer than Playland but Wyrsch keeps the film moving much better. Whereas Playland felt like a substandard History Channel documentary, Sutro's has the look of one of those better made KQED documentaries.

That's not really very important though. Like Playland, Sutro's is targeted for people with an interest in San Francisco history. They'll lap up the photos and reminiscing. In addition, Sutro Baths seems more interesting than Playland. Sutro Baths was a impressive engineering feat and to this day, its ruins look like some Roman baths. The Playland site is now condominiums. Actually, epic plans for condos on the site of Sutro Baths was proposed after a fire destroyed the site but never came to fruition.

Wyrsch has set the table for a trilogy - Playland at the Beach, Sutro Baths and the natural finale could be a documentary on the Cliff House which still exists. I've always been interested in history and particularly San Francisco history so count me as a fan of Sutro's.

Existential Cool, Chinese Revolution, Jean Harlow's Pair and Myrna Loy is the One

2011-10-24T20:02:00.000-07:00

I went to the 4 Star on two consecutive nights. I saw:

Drive starring Ryan Gosling; with Carey Mulligan, Ron Perlman, Bryan Cranston, Christina Hendricks & Albert Brooks; directed by Nicolas Winding Refn; (2011) - Official Website
1911 starring Jackie Chan & Winston Chao; with Bingbing Li, Joan Chen & Jaycee Chan; directed by Jackie Chan & Zhang Li; Mandarin with subtitles; (2011) - Official Website

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I've read Ryan Gosling's performance in Drive described as "existential cool." After seeing his performance, I'm not sure if it was his performance or the film which was "existential cool." Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name or Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator was "cool." Gosling's unnamed character is more somber than cool. I guess at some level, he is cool as in ice water in his veins. Even while stomping someone's face in or slapping around Christina Hendricks, the Kid doesn't lose his temper. Gosling gives a measured performance which is a little too measured for my taste. It gives the film an austere feel which may not have served the film the best possible way.

The premise is that Gosling plays a stunt driver/mechanic who moonlights by driving getaway cars. He is extremely disciplined in this endeavor - 5 minutes (no more, no less), never work with the same person twice, etc. The Kid, as he is referred to by some, falls into the most obvious trap. He gets involved with his next door neighbor (Carey Mulligan). She is a single mother who husband soon is paroled from prison. To ingratiate himself with Mulligan, the Kid agrees to drive the getaway car for a job the husband has to pull off to square it with some gang members. However, a double cross is pulled and the Kid finds his life is at risk.

At the screening I was at, three young ladies were in the audience. After the showing, I passed them on the sidewalk outside the theater. I overheard them saying that the film was "profoundly disturbing." I just shook my head. Today, I read that a Michigan woman has filed a lawsuit against Drive's distributors for misleading trailers. She was expecting something akin to Fast and the Furious. According to the suit, Drive exhibited "Extreme gratuitous defamatory dehumanizing racism directed against members of the Jewish faith, and thereby promoted criminal violence against members of the Jewish faith." I didn't sense any anti-semitism in the film. I guess the biggest jerk in the film was Ron Perlman's character who was Jewish and ripped off the East Coast mob "for calling [him] a Kike to [his] face." Honestly, I thought that was just a self-serving statemen on his character's part although he did exhibit signs of Italophilia.

I don't think that is what the three ladies in my audience were referring to. The film has, apparently, been marketed as a fast paced action film. Instead, it's more of a character study with the aesthetics of film noir and Michael Mann films. However, the Kid doesn't have much in the way of character so he is blank slate for other more volatile character to react to. Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman take turns outdoing each other in the violence department. Bryan Cranston is a desperate mechanic looking to score as the Kid's sponsor on the racecar circuit.

The best scene was in an elevator. A hitman has been sent to kill the Kid. In slow motion, the Kid is aware of the hitman's identity while Carey Mulligan is not. The Kid lays a extended and passionate kiss on Mulligan. Upon releasing her from his embrace, he stomps the killer's face in. Mulligan looks on in shock.

I thought Drive was a remake of Walter Hill's The Driver (1978) but found out it was based on a James Sallis novel by the same name. Frank Lee described Drive as the best film of the year in his weekly newsletter. I'm not sure if I agree with that but I was impressed by the film and its style.

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1911 was timed to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Xinhai Revolution in China. I can't recall the films I've seen before which depict the revolution but I was familiar with several of the plot points (perhaps I read something). 1911 reminded me of another Chinese film The Founding of a Republic (2009). The latter film told the story of the founding of the People's Republic of China upon its 60th anniversary. Both films featured large casts with a perfunctory and superficial exploration of important events and people. Anyone not familiar with the actual events quickly became lost among the abridged scenes and numerous characters. I did not enjoy 1911 for these reasons.

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Earlier in October, the Castro screened a Jean Harlow double bill.

Dinner at Eight starring Marie Dressler, John Barrymore, Wallace Beery, Jean Harlow & Lionel Barrymore; directed by George Cukor; (1933)
Libeled Lady starring Spencer Tracy, Myrna Loy, William Powell and Jean Harlow; directed by Jack Conway; (1936)

Jean Harlow, The Blonde Bombshell, is part of Hollywood lore. The first bad girl of the talkies era, Harlow consorted with gangsters, posed for nude photographs, slept in the nude, believed underwear to be unnecessary and died young at age 26.

I've never been an admirer of Harlow's beauty. There is something crass about her on screen but that is probably the roles I've seen her in. Her face has an indifference about it which suggests casual cruelty. Lauren Bacall had the same look but I'm drawn to Bacall like a moth to a flame whereas Harlow is constantly overshadowed by her co-stars. Some women get in my head and some don't.

Dinner at Eight was one of those MGM star vehicles. Released during the lowest depths of the Great Depression, Dinner at Eight is set among the moneyed class in New York. If I may digress for a moment, during the Great Depression, these stories about the wealthy and glamorous were quite popular among the masses. MGM made a cottage industry filming them and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about them during the 1930s. During the Great Recession, the masses are protesting them with Occupy protests. Putting aside the politics of the current situation, I find it extremely interesting how the wealthy are portrayed and judged by the rest of society.

Back to Dinner at Eight...I found the whole affair to be a bore. Some people are losing money & prestige, others are gaining them (with the same savoir-faire), love affairs, death, etc. I thought I would enjoy the film based on the synopsis but I just couldn't get into the film. I fell asleep for an extended period of the film - that means the film was not to my liking or I was becoming ill.

I think it was the former because the next film on the double bill, Libeled Lady, kept me awake despite having seen it before on television. Spencer Tracy plays Haggerty, the editor of a New York newspaper. The paper is slapped with a libel suit by Connie Allenbury (Myrna Loy), the heiress to a fortune. The best defense against libel is to the tell the truth. Haggerty's paper is being sued because it wrote that Allenbury was having an affair with a married man. Haggerty hires Bill Chandler, an unscrupulous newspaper reporter, to seduce Allenbury and deliver the scandal to Haggerty's rag. The problem is that Chandler isn't married. Not a problem; Haggerty is engaged to Gladys (Jean Harlow) but the wedding keeps falling through because of pressing newspaper business diverting Haggerty's attention. Haggerty coaxes Gladys into marrying Chandler. After they bring down Allenbury, she'll take an extended vacation in Reno to get a divorce at which time she'll become Mrs. Haggerty. They don't make screwball comedies like they used to...

As you can imagine, Allenbury falls for Chandler. Unfortunately, so does Gladys. Chandler (played with comic zeal by Powell) tries to find a middle ground but both women are pressing him along with Haggerty who suspects something is amiss. Not surprisingly, Powell and Loy shine in their roles. In the fifth on-screen pairing of Powell and Loy, they spar with each other throughout the film. Allenbury suspicious of Chandler's intentions and Chandler falling in love with his mark. Loy's beauty and radiance are stunning. To hell with Jean Harlow, give me Myrna Loy everyday of the week and twice on Sundays. In a juicy bit of on-set romance, Powell and Harlow were an item during the filming. Indeed, Harlow wanted Loy's role but mindful of the success of The Thin Man and other Powell-Loy pairing, the studio insisted Allenbury's role go to Loy.

The film ends on odd note. Instead of tidying up the loose ends, it gives closes with the somber note that someone has committed bigamy; no way to make a joke out of that! Not unusual as a lot of films in the 1930s ended abruptly with a head-scratching moments. Up until that point, the comedy in Libeled Lady was sparkling with Tracy and Harlow giving strong performances in secondary roles. Libeled Lady is the film that reminded me how much taken I am with Myrna Loy.

Japanese Summer: When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice & Good Morning

2011-10-09T20:35:00.000-07:00

Still riffing on some of the Japanese films I saw this summer...

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960) stars one of my favorite Japanese actors of the period - Tatsuya Nakadai. However, the star of When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is Hideko Takamine, the schoolteacher in Twenty-Four Eyes, in quite a different role. Here, she is Keiko, a Tokyo Ginza bar hostess who unlike her colleagues, keeps a professional distance from her clients. By professional distance, I mean she doesn't have sex with them. The memory of her late husband may be her motivation but regardless, her professionalism only adds to her allure in the eyes of her customers and bar manager (Nakdadai). It comes at a cost. It seems every bar hostess' dream is to own her own bar. Keiko could get bankrolled by one or more of her clients...if she'd just play the game. Her steadfast refusal establishes her character in a morally ambiguous environment.

Keiko has been saving her money so she can start her own place without any assistance. A former co-worker's failed attempt at starting her own place plants the seed but an illness and extended stay with her no-good brother, shrewish mother and sick nephew pushes her over the edge. Keiko spends her savings bailing out her brother and paying for her nephew's medical care. This defers her dream of opening her own bar...or does it.

In an about face, Keiko first accepts a marriage prosposal from a man who turns out to be fraud (and already married) and later sleeps with a businessman who agrees to bankroll her. He turns out to be a cad as he is being transferred away for work and partially reneges.

After Nakadai admits his lost desire for her and disappointment by her out-of-character actions, Naruse sets up one of the best moments of the film when Keiko goes to the train station to see the businessman off. The man is concerned by her unexpected appearance and worried his wife will find out what happened but Keiko takes the high road by giving him back his money disguised as a present. The film ends with Keiko seemingly back to her old self as she ascends the stairs to the bar she works at and serves as the perfect bar hostess again...just like the film started. However, the audience is more aware of the sadness and disappointment behind Keiko's smile, more impressed with her constantly polite demeanor and a little sad about the life lessons she has learned.

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is a very effective film. It's very dark at its heart. Keiko's future is very uncertain and her hardened heart will only make it more difficult to change her attitude. Regardless of the inner turmoil, the audience is certain that Keiko will be able to regain the professional detachment she showed earlier in the film. If not for her husband's death, Keiko's life would be much different (presumably better). The film showcases an excellent performance by Takamine. It was an excellent by the acclaimed director Mikio Naruse.

Instead of subtitles on the print, PFA projected laser subtitles and there was a "malfunction." The subtitles became unsynchronized with the film and they had to stop the film. I didn't ruin the experience but it did lessen my enjoyment which was still considerable. That's the second or third time I've seen problem with the laser projector. PFA may want to explore other options with un-subtitled prints are the only ones available.

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The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice, a 1952 Ozu film, features a married couple for the cinematic hall of fame. Shin Saburi & Michiyo Kogure are Mokichi & Taeko Satake, respectively. Comfortably off, childless & settled in their way, the couple coexist. There doesn't seem to be much passion in their relationship; if there ever was. Taeko is a shrew and not above lying to her husband whom she considers a dullard. Mokichi is taciturn to the point of giving grunts instead of speaking and seems disinterested in his marriage or his wife. Of the two, I found Mokichi more sympathetic but they were quite a pair.

Green Tea Over Rice follows a particularly turbulent period in their lives including a Taeko lying to go on an overight trip to the spa, being tasked with finding a husband for their niece and Mokichi being transferred overseas for his job. Ozu trains his camera on the nuances of marriage or a weary couple. It's not so much a complacent marriage as it is two people living separate live but still married.

The key scene is at the end when Mokichi unexpectedly returns and they share a simple meal as the title indicates. Mokichi has simple tastes which his wife has mocked and criticized throughout the film so her sharing the meal is a pleasant surprise.

Ozu had his finger on the scale though. I think it's obvious his sympathies were with the husband. The only time the wife was a bitch or lying was at the end when she thought he had left for South America. The film may not appeal to everyone as the subject foreign or pedestrian but I thought it was one of the wonderfully narrowly focused films by Ozu. Ozu almost exclusively trained his eye on family dramas. Frequently, the conflicts were generational but in Green Tea it was gender and without the sensationalism of an affair or unrequited love.

Best suited for fans of Ozu or these kinds of films, The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice was elegantly simple. I can't quite say it was satisfying because the focused on the couple whereas most Ozu films focus on an extended family & the dynamics at work. By focusing on the couple, Ozu invited the audience to take sides which is uncharacteristic for Ozu.

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The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice and Good Morning screened at Viz/New People over Independence Day weekend or two weeks before the 2011 San Francisco Silent Film Festival. I note the relative dates because the Silent Festival screening I Was Born But... Good Morning (1959) is a loose remake of I Was Born But... (1932). Both films were directed by Ozu. I had not seen either film before the July screenings but I was aware of the relationship between the films.

Having seen both films, I thought Good Morning also bore a strong resemblance to Ozu's Early Summer (1951). In Good Morning, the boys run away from home because their father won't buy a television; in Early Summer they run away because he won't buy more model train tracks.

Trains are a recurring theme in Ozu's later films. Scenes take place on traveling on trains, Ozu uses train stations as establishing and exit shots, people walk along train tracks, exterior shots with moving trains are frequently used, etc..

The television set or lack thereof is the central plot point in Good Morning. The Hayashi family (husband, wife, two sons and their aunt) live in a Tokyo suburb. Their son's primary wish in life is to have television. Their "alternative lifestyle" neighbors (he lounges in his pajamas, she is cabaret singer) have one the boys go over to watch sumo wrestling. The boys pester their parents for a television until the father loses patience with them. In response, the boys go on silent strike. They refuse to speak to anyone until they get a television. They claim that adults say meaningless things and they refuse to grow up into that kind of adult.

Eventually, they run away from home but are found by their English tutor who fancies the boys' aunt. Upon their petulant and forced return, they are delighted to see a television set their father has purchased. What they don't know is that small talk adults engage in is part of a larger set of social customs. It's this same set of customs which accounts for the television. A neighbor gets a new job as a salesman and taps their parents to make a purchase (kind of like being hit up for money at work for coworkers' children's school donation drives). The parents seeing an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, buy a television from him.

Ozu stalwart Chishu Ryu plays the father. Only six years earlier, in Ozu most acclaimed work, Tokyo Story, Ryu portrayed Sugimara's father. Koji Shigaragi, 13 years old at the time, does a masterful job as the eldest child. His younger brother is played by Masahiko Shimazu. Another Ozu regular, Haruko Sugimura, plays the gossipy neighbor who stirs up trouble in the neighborhood.

Primarily a comedy, the film is a slight departure for Ozu in other ways as well. His films are usually internally focused on family dynamics but in Good Morning the attention is drawn to larger societal norms which I associate as secondary or external forces at work on the family. The silent strike sets off gossip in the neighborhood as Sugimura's character interprets the boys' silence as a having their root cause in a disagreement she with their mother. Despite the boys' insistence that small talk is meaningless, a simple "Good morning" serves as a password for social interaction. It's utterance may be reflexive but it's absence is noticeable. The boys' selfishness and youth hinder their understanding of this.

The second major plot point is the television. The father could easily afford a television but he is against it on principle. He considers it an idiot box. Like America a few years earlier, Japan was in the midst of television boom. 1959, the year Good Morning was released, was also the high point for ticket sales in Japan. The next year began a decline in film attendance which was largely attributed to television. The fact that Ryu's character eventually buys the television is a commentary on Japanese society as much ss a plot device. The penetraton of television sets into Japanese households was unstoppable. Regardless, of Ryu's opposition, the boys (like the rest of Japanese society) were clamoring for a television. To deny them would only cause continued strife so Ryu relented.

I have yet to encounter an Ozu film (talkies) that I didn't thoroughly enjoy. I'm not so enamored by his silent films. I notice that Ozu seemed to have a fascination with Western society in his silent films. He seems to have lost that in his films from the 1950s and beyond. In Good Morning, the jazz and TV loving couple next door exhibit signs of Western influence. Ozu portrays them as misfits and looked upon askance by Japanese society. I'm not sure if that reflects Ozu's view of them or if he is relating his own experience through them.

Anyway, Good Morning only burnished my high opinion of Ozu and his films.

Japanese Summer: Love Exposure, Cold Fish & Twenty-Four Eyes

2011-10-08T09:30:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned, I saw quite a few Japanese films this summer.

Many of them were tremendous; others no so much.

One film which was a wild ride and guilty pleasure was Sion Sono's Love Exposure. At nearly four hours, I was skeptical going in but Sono's keeps the soap opera plot going without let. I'm certain one vignette lasted the entire length of Ravel's Bolero. Sono explores Christianity, organized religion in general, identity and sexuality but it's clear that those are secondary. Sono's first order is to get the massive plot in motion. That includes a widower cum Catholic priest having an affair with a parishoner, his son Yu who becomes the king of upskirt photos and the parishoner's daughter Yoko who falls in love with a woman who helps her fight off some punks. It turns out the woman is actually Yu in drag (he lost a bet). Actually Sono must be paying homage to Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion, a manga and film from the early 1970s starring Meiko Kaji. Yu's drag get up is a spot on match for Kaji's costume in Scorpion.

Yoko questions her sexuality and falls in love with the mysterious woman in black while simultaneously living at home with her step-brother who is frustrated by that Yoko dislikes him but can't stop talking about his alter ego. At this point, a mysterious, tennis dress wearing Aya appears to wreak havoc in their lives. The film goes on for about another 2 hours after this point. The film is trashy fun (although it does have some interesting things to say about Catholicism) although it loses steam about three hours in. I loved Love Exposure and considered seeing it a second time but the time commitment was too great.

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A few weeks after the Roxie screened Love Exposure, they screened Sono's Cold Fish (2010). Whereas Love Exposure had a certain whimsical feel, Cold Fish was a very dark film. The movie poster reminded me of the poster for Straw Dogs. Cold Fish is about a tropical fish store owned who falls in with serial killers. A lot of thing happen up to that point but the film really gets going once he becomes an accomplice. Sono even allows the unassertive man to find his courage and self-respect (in a perverted way) through the repetitive dismemberment. Nice performance by Denden as the rival fish store owner and killer.

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Those two Sono films were the only Japanese films I saw from this century. All the other films were "classic" Japanese films mostly from the 1950s and 1960s.

At the top of the "classic" list is Twenty-Four Eyes which is a beloved film in Japan. The 1954 film directed by Keisuke Kinoshita frequently makes the top 10 all-time list of greatest Japanese films. It screened ae the PFA.

Set in the years leading up to WWII, Twenty-Four Eyes refers to the 12 children in a small village. Hideko Takamine plays the teacher who watches them as they grow up. Most of the film revolves around the children's lives and Kinoshita plucks our heartstrings like a violin. One girl is so poor she can't go on the school trip and has to moves away. Another girl is forced to leave school so she can work at her father's restaurant. Several of the boys go off to war and most do not return; the one who does is blinded. The teacher goes through her own travails. The local villagers think she is a sophisticated and rich city girl because she rides a bicycle. In fact, she had to borrow to get the bike and it's the only way she can travel the distance between her home and the school.

Describing the plot lessens the film. This film is really about the harsh realities of life made even more cruel by war. The sweet kids at the beginning are in for rough ride and Kinoshita doesn't pull any punches. It's a tearjerker and unabashedly so. Every so often, he induces a little smile as when a couple is in love or in the simple joys of childhood.

MMA and Pythagorean's Theorem Perverted

2011-10-07T09:28:00.000-07:00

While visiting my father recently, I saw two films with him.

Warrior starring Joel Edgerton & Tom Hardy; with Nick Nolte; directed by Gavin O'Connor; (2011) - Official Website

Moneyball starring Brad Pitt; with Jonah Hill & Philip Seymour Hoffman; directed by Bennett Miller; (2011) - Official Website

My father wanted to see Warrior. Neither of us were keen on Moneyball but it fit our schedule.

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Warrior was surprisingly enjoyable for me. The story is about two brothers from Pittsburgh, PA. Interestingly, Australian Joel Edgerton (Animal Kingdom) and Irishman Tom Hardy (didn't he write Tess of the d'Urbervilles?) are cast as Brendan and his younger brother Tommy, respectively.

The two brothers enter a $5 million, winner-take-all, MMA tournament. When I was chatting about this film at work, I mentioned MMA to two of my colleagues. They were not familiar with the term. MMA stands for Mixed Martial Arts. The most well known organization is UFC or Ultimate Fighting. I'm not sure if my familiarity with MMA puts me in a certain demographic or marketing category. Subsequent conversations with friends and coworkers lead me to believe I associate with people who don't appreciate (or are even aware of) MMA.

MMA combines boxing, wrestling and martial arts into a competition. The fighters compete in a boxing ring with some modifications - a chain link fence instead of ropes and the shape is closer to a circle than a square. As a result MMA fighters are sometimes called cage fighters or are said to compete in the octagon.

The tagline gives the impression that one fights for country and one fights for family. That's not entirely true. Brendan fights for money. He's a UFC fighter turned school teacher. His Philadelphia house mortgage is upside down. His wife works as a cocktail waitress in a sketchy club. Brendan moonlights as a bouncer; at least that's what he tells his wife. In reality, he competes in "smokers" which are basically unsanctioned MMA bouts in the parking lots of bars and strip clubs.

When his MMA activities are discovered by school administrators, he is suspended for the semester. That gives him the opportuniuty to train full time and travel around to smokers with larger prizes. The only problem is he promised his wife he would quit the fight game when he got into teaching. She's not too happy about the situation but their choices are limited. Brendan is quite adamant about not losing the house.

Back in Pittsburgh, Tommy returns from Iraq and looks up his father Paddy (Nolte). Paddy was a drunk and a terror during his sons' youth. Tommy's amazed to see the old man is on the wagon and listening to motivational tapes (with an old school Walkman too!). Tommy is the more interesting brother by far. Tommy & his mother ran away from Paddy and kept their location a secret. Brendan (the older brother) stayed in Pittsburgh with his father. By appearance, he stayed to be with his girlfriend (now wife) but he later admits he was jealous of Tommy because he thought Tommy was Paddy's favorite.

I'm not sure why Tommy looks up Paddy. He's still angry and resentful and has no desire for reconcilliation. Tommy makes no attempt to look up his brother in Philly as he is still angry towards him for not going with him and their mother. There's a lot of anger and resentment in this film. Both sons refuse to forgive their father; Brendan only allows telephone and letter contact between him and his father. Tommy is angry at Brendan although the feeling is not reciprocated.

Tommy begins to train at a gym when he gets into it with a top MMA contender who also trains there. Tommy knocks him out and the sparring session is caught on a cell phone camera. It goes viral and Tommy's KO becomes an internet sensation. Lured by Sparta, a $5 million, winner-take-all, MMA tournament, Tommy begins to train in earnest and solicits the help of his father who trained him as a champion wreslter as a boy. Paddy hopes that training his son will lead to a rapprochement between the two but Tommy is having none of it.

The top rated figher at the gym Brendan trains at goes down with an injury. He was scheduled to compete in Sparta. Brendan begs the trainer (who trained Brendan when he was in UFC) to get him into Sparta as the last minute replacment. He reluctantly agrees and the stage is set for brother vs. brother. No one knows their brothers because Tommy is using their mother's maiden name.

Tommy turns out to be a war hero. While in the Corps, he saved some drowning marines. Also, he keeps tabs on his best friend's widow (in my hometown of El Paso). If he wins, he pledges the $5 M prize to the widow. It appears he is fighting for altruistic reasons but in reality is fighting because it is the only release for his rage and guilt. He has rage towards his family for abandoning him. He has survivor's guilt because his brother-in-arms was killed. Not only that but Tommy's gone AWOL which is the real reason for using an alias.

Hardy's performance and appearance are striking. At one point, a fighter mocks him by asking "Yo! Where's Paulie and Mick?" Hardy looks a little like Stallone (more like Michael Paré in my opinion). Hardy must have lifted weights like a fiend for the role. He has massive trapezius muscles which give him this hunched over, no-neck thuggish look which matches his ring performance. Despite being a champion wrestler, Tommy is a one-punch, knockout artist. He channels his rage into his fists and the onslaught is terrifying.

Brendan's matches are closer to Rocky. Brendan absorbs massive punishment but can take a punch and refuses to tapout. Eventually, he finds a way to win using a submission move such as getting an arm or leg in position to bend it in painful and injurious ways.

That synopsis wasn't very brief. I must have liked the film and action more than I initially thought. As I mentioed, Tom Hardy shines. Joel Edgerton's character is more well adjusted so he suffers in comparison. Nolte does well as the repentant father. Frank Grillo as Brendan's charismatic, Beethoven preaching trainer also captures attention. Kevin Dunn, one of the most prolific character actors today, shows up as Brendan's principal. Strong performances all around.

The acting was strong, the plot was somewhat predictable and lacking explanation as to what causes all this anger. The fight scenes were hyper-realized but not so much as to be distractng. Hardy, a serviceable plot and some well choreographed fight scenes make for a worthwhile film.

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Moneyball was well reported in the Bay Area. Many of scenes were shot in Oakland. I recognized many of shots filmed at the Oakland Alameda County Coliseum (or whatever it's called now). Brad Pitt's comings and going were also reported. I'm a casual baseball fan to boot. My father doesn't like baseball and has never been to the Coliseum. He told me at after the film that he was quite bored by it.

I found the film a little more interesting although living in the Bay Area and enjoying baseball probably helped. The premise of Moneyball (based on a nonfiction book by Michael Lewis) is that the Oakland A's could not compete because their financial resources were so limited. They were being outbid for the best players. General Manager Billy Beane (Pitt) hires Paul DePodesta (Jonah Hill and his surname was changed to Brandt in the film) to revolutionize the way baseball players are evaluated. Paul has a degree in economics from Yale and use statistic analysis and computer modeling to evluate players in more sophisticated ways than traditional baseball scouts. One entertaining session involved A's scouts discussing a prospect. They agreed that the "ugly girlfriend method" was sound. If a prospect had an ugly girlfriend, it meant he lacked self-confidence.

I knew where the film ended - the A's win 20 in a row setting an American League, they lose in the playoffs and Beane's approach is copied by the Boston Red Sox who break an 86 year title drought. Putting aside the facts of the situation, Moneyball was a limp film. Brad Pitt tried to portray Beane as this driven man frustrated by the ignorance of his underlings. If Beane was so smart, why did he not put a manager in place to optimize the talent he assembled. Brandt's methods uncovered undervalued players which Oakland could sign but manager Art Howe looked to play traditional players who played traditional baseball.

From a purely logical perspective, the film was frustratingly inconsistent. Beane & Brandt were the smartest guys in the room but couldn't convince the manager and players of their method. Cinematically, drawing a walk is not that exciting even they did put a slow motion scene in where David Justice takes four balls.

The film also seemed to have severely edited. Beane has a wife (he wears a wedding band) but she is never seen or mentioned. The scenes with Beane's teenage daughter from his first marriage (whom he has joint custody or extended visitation rights). Her character seemed superfluous. The ballplayers only get cursory character development. Instead, we get a bit of buddy flick/mentor film between Pitt and Hill. The third most screen time goes to Philip Seymour Hoffman who plays Art Howe as dyspeptic foil for Beane. The real Art Howe has criticized the depiction of him in the film. I'm sure that liberties were taken but Hoffman's performance is about the best thing in the film. He wears a perpetual look of shock, disgust and disdain and he speaks in measured tones like a man who doesn't like his boss but figures it's more professional & better for his future employment in baseball to keep a lid on his frustrations.

Moneyball has a few smile inducing scenes but otherwise only A's fans or hardcore baseball/Brad Pitt fans should go see it.

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Before it became a fad, I was a member of SABR (Society of American Baseball Research), which is the organization that pioneered the statistical analysis featured in Moneyball. Their periodic publications were like mathematical journals. There was a whole bunch of formulas and I always wondered if it was valid to divide by a number or add two numbers together. "Sabermetricians" are like alchemists adding a little of this and subtracting a little of that to come up with golden numbers.

Bill James who is lionized in Moneyball, invented the Pythagorean expectation or Pythagorean winning percentage. When compared to actual wins, the Pythagorean expectation measures how lucky or unlucky a team is. The formula is

Pythagorean expectation = (Runs Scored)^2/[((Runs Scored)^2)+({Runs Allowed)^2)]

Why square the runs scored or the runs allowed? It doesn't make sense. However, James basically backed into the formula. He analyzed the data and observed the relationship through statistical tools. If the numbers needed to be cubed to make the correlation higher, the formula would have been different.

Sabermetrics is kind of fun. I had a professor who would have called sabermetrics "mathematical masturbation" - you play with the numbers because it's fun, you keep playing with the numbers because it feels good and eventually you have to stop playing with the numbers because you have other things to do. I admit I like to play with numbers. Eventually, I had to move on because I got playing with baseball numbers; especially when the coefficients and exponents don't have real world meaning; when you're finished you haven't accomplished anything but you feel better. Now I watch films..

Bertolucci and The Meatrack

2011-10-06T10:29:00.000-07:00

In July and August, the PFA had a series called Bernardo Bertolucci: In Search of Mystery. They screened 13 Bertolucci films including his well known films such as 1900 and The Last Emperor.

I was more interested in his earlier works and the infamous Last Tango in Paris. I saw four Bertolucci films in July. I was considering some of the August screenings but wasn't able to make it over to Berkeley.

Before the Revolution starring Francesco Barilli & Adriana Asti; directed by Bertolucci; Italian with subtitles; (1964)
The Grim Reaper; directed by Bertolucci; Italian with subtitles; (1962)
The Spider’s Stratagem starring Giulio Brogi; directed by Bertolucci; Italian with subtitles; (1970)
Last Tango in Paris starring Marlon Brando & Maria Schneider; directed by Bertolucci; some French with subtitles; (1972)

According the PFA program notes, Bertolucci was an Assistant Director on Pier Paolo Pasolini's Accattone which I saw in December 2010 at PFA. Pasolini was co-wrote and was to direct The Grim Reaper but chose to direct Mamma Roma (which I saw in June at the YBCA) instead. Bertolucci inherited the project with Pasolini's blessing and made his directorial debut with The Grim Reaper. That's quite a cinematic pedigree and I'm always looking for coincidences like the trifecta. When I saw Accattone, I didn't know Mamma Roma would be screened six months later. Although I knew the The Grim Reaper would be screening a month after Mamma Roma, I didn't know that Pasolini's involvement with the film. Those kinds of scheduling coincidences happen to me frequently enough that I think it must the provenance of astute film programmers. How many people see as many films as me? Are programmers screening films for the handful of people that would see such a connection?

Accattone, Mamma Roma & The Grim Reaper - I see a pattern developing. All three films are about prostitutes and depict their lives in realistic (although sympathetic) terms. Accattone & Mamma Roma portray the pimps in a bad light. The Grim Reaper is about a john who robs and kills his whore. Men come off poorly in the three films.

Accattone had a gritty feel to it, Mamma Roma had Anna Magnani and a lyrical feel and The Grim Reaper feels like a gimmick. Evoking Kurosawa's Rashōmon, The Grim Reaper tells the story of a prostitutes's murder. Told from multiple viewpoints, the film closes in the killer's identity and climaxes with his capture at a dance. By making the murderer's identity known, The Grim Reaper moves away from weighty issues such as the meaning of "truth" towards a crime story with some interesting ways of moving the plot - like a Hitchcock or De Palma film (Blowout comes to mind). I guess it is unfair to expect a 21 year old Bertolucci to top, arguably, the greatest director of all-time.

Judged on a curve, The Grim Reaper is an auspicious debut for Bertolucci. It's an entertaining whodunit. The reenacted murder scene was notable for the indifference shown by the killer.

Bertolucci's second film, Before the Revolution, was more satisfying for me. In that film, a young man (Francesco Barilli) embarks on a torrid love affair with his aunt (outstanding performance by Adriana Asti). This forbidden love plays against the backdrop of Marxism, class warfare and Italian political unrest in 1960s. The turmoil and passion Fabrizio (Barilli) feels towards his aunt is mirrored by the turmoil and passion he encounters in Italian society.

Before the Revolution has an latent energy which must have seemed vital if you lived in Italy in the 1960s or are a political student of the era. Being neither, I was more fascinated by the relationship between aunt & newphew. Asti dresses and slightly resembles Audrey Hepburn but her performance hints at inner demons in ways I cannot recall from any Hepburn performance. Asti and Barilli careem from scene to scene with subtle and obvious desperation as their affair waxes and wanes. The end shot at Fabrizio's wedding is a classic as it appears the woman has moved on her younger newphew.

Before the Revolution has a French New Wave and the early 1960s vitality when Italian directors were all the rage. Allegedly semi-autobiographical, Before the Revolution was not Bertolucci's debut but it must have heralded his potential as a film director.

In The Spider’s Stratagem, Bertolucci achieved something closer to Rashōmon. Released the same year as his more celebrated The Conformist, The Spider’s Stratagem tells the story of Athos Magnani, Jr. (Giulio Brogi). Magnani returns to the town of his father's death. Magnani Sr. was killed before Jr. as born and his murder remains unsolved. Invited town to by Senior's mistress, Junior returns to the town where his father is revered by street names & statues and spoken about with reverence by all who knew him.

Bertolucci does something interesting though. Frist off, he has Brogi play both Jr. and Sr. but more interesting is that he blurs the line for the audience. The audience becomes increasing less certain whether the character is father or son. The actors who are elderly (almost everyone in the town is elderly) play their characters at a younger age when they are in scenes with Sr. Bertolucci plays with time and identity. The revealed circumstances of Senior's death are secondary. Bertolucci seems to excel in telling a story in innovative ways as opposed to telling great stories.

For any criticisms I have about Before the Revolution, The Grim Reaper & The Spider’s Stratagem, I'm gland I saw the films. Last Tango in Paris is a horse of a different color.

The infamous film is one I've heard about for years and long wanted to see...if for no other reason than to cross it off my cinematic bucket list. In Paris, Paul (Marlon Brando) and Jeanne (Maria Schneider) meet while looking at the same apartment. Paul may have followed Jeanne; it's not clear. After their encounter, they inexplicably embark on an anonymous sexual relationship. It's anonymous in the sense that they don't details about their personal life. They meet weekly at the apartment (which Paul has rented but remains unlived in) and have kinky sex. Jeanne has a boyfriend (I think they may be engaged) but is fairly unsatisfied by the relationship.

The exact root of Jeanne's motivation is unclear. Paul, on the other hand, is still mourning his wife's suicide. If taken literally, he keeps her corpse in their bedroom with an abundance of flowers. Presumably to mask the odor but visually, Bertolucci makes the most of the scene. There was a later scene at a tango competition where Paul reveals his personal life to Jeanne which was masterfully shot. As for the controversial sex scenes, they were surprisingly lacking of eroticism. In fact, they were at time comical. I'm thinking of one scene regarding a finger nail clippers and Brando.

Brando's performance was uneven but I guess that's consistent his character. Schneider showed a some range in the portrayal her character and I'm surprised she didn't go on to bigger and better. Schneider portrayed herself in the media as wild child of 70s but in later years she was critical of Bertolucci, Brando and her experience on the set of Last Tango.

Perhaps if I had seen this film earlier in my life, I would have thought different. However, given the 40 years since it was released and my own life experience, I find the film to be passé. Unlike the other three Bertolucci films I saw, it seemed that Bertolucci's attempts at being overtly sexual lessened the film. The world changed drastically from 1962 to 1972 and I can imagine how filmmakers were trying to keep pace with the changes. Last Tango has the look and feel of a director in transition or perhaps more accurately, a world in transition and a director trying to find his way in that world. A lot of films from 1970s have that same feel. That's probably one reason I've fully appreciated films from that decade.

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The YBCA had a series in July and August called Smut Capital of America.

According to YBCA Film Curator Joel Shepard, Though [Smut Capital of America] has a lurid title, and some lurid films, this is not a porn series. Only two of the films in the eight-part program could accurately be called “porno movies,” and they are radically different than contemporary pornography. The last thing I wanted to do was screen hours of close-ups of grinding genitals. It doesn’t get much more tedious.

This is a look back at a specific place (San Francisco) and time (1969 to around 1974) and the truly unbelievable explosion of sex culture here. Though many similar things were happening in Copenhagen, San Francisco was the center of the sexual revolution in America. And it wasn’t just about the exhibition of sexually explicit film. Strip clubs, live sex shows (there were dozens of them at one time), nude encounter groups, erotic restaurants, adult bookstores, and more, all played huge roles.

For some reason, my blog gets of hits for search keywords such as "Japanese hot sex," "hot roman women," "adult video," etc. I write about a few pinku eiga films, stalag fiction or penis dismemberment and I get labeled a porno site. Although Smut Capital looked kind of interesting (including an Alex de Renzy film), I largely stayed away. I only saw one film.

The Meatrack directed by Richard Stockton; (1968)

I can't remember who introduced The Meatrack. He gave the most scholarly and extended lecture on gay porn in San Francisco which made me wonder if he actually got paid to research the stuff. It was if he was lecturing on European Royalty. He explained the relationships between the key, local porn figures of era. I was transfixed by talk in which he did seem to use notecards. All this spoken extemporaneously!

To be honest, I don't know why I went to see The Meatrack. The program referred to it as follow, Shot mostly on the mean streets of San Francisco, this is a gritty, brooding tale of a bisexual hustler who’ll go to bed with any man or woman who offers him enough money and sexual kicks. Using both sexploitation and art film aesthetics, The Meatrack is an essential and compelling artifact of pre-hardcore adult cinema.

No matter how much it is dressed up, The Meatrack was essentially soft-core porn. Richard Stockton was an alias the director used so that's a good indication of how the film was intended. When Shepard wrote of close-ups of grinding genitals, "it doesn’t get much more tedious," he clearly saw something I missed. At 65 minutes, The Meatrack bored me to slumber. I don't mean catnapping either. I slept without interruptions for the last 40 minutes of the film.

The protagonist had two or three sex partners in the first 25 minutes and the film was just not sexy or even very interesting. It reminds of Last Tango except at least Bertolucci put a few interesting interlues between the sex scenes. It as kind of interesting to see the Tenderloin from 40 years ago but otherwise, it bored me senseless.

It's a Mixed Up, Muddled Up, Shook Up World Except for My Lola

2011-10-05T09:23:00.000-07:00

The title refers to a line from The Kinks' famous song. It took me a decade or more before I listened to the lyrics closely enough to understand what the song was about.

Lola also means grandmother in Tagalog and is the title of Brillante Mendoza's latest film which screened at the YBCA last week.

Lola starring Anita Linda & Rustica Carpio; directed by Brillante Mendoza; Tagalog with subtitles; (2009)

The films of Brillante Mendoza have received quite a bit of screen time in the Bay Area over the past few years. I've seen Slingshot, Service and Kinatay in Bay Area theaters in past few years. Those three films and Lola were released consecutively between 2007 and 2009. Mendoza's latest film, Captured (with Isabelle Huppert), was released last month in France.

Lola is a simple film. The premise is that one young man robs and kills another young man. The audience doesn't see the crime but instead, sees the aftermath. Specifically, we see how it affects the two men's grandmothers. Lola Sepa (Anita Linda) is grieving her grandson's death but doesn't have enough money to pay for the burial. Lola Puring (Rustica Carpio) is beside herself worrying about her grandson who has been arrested for the crime.

The two Lolas do not know each other although their circumstances are similar - they both are matriarchs of extended families, appear to be widows and live in abject poverty. Sepa seems to live in a swamp although it might be an area flooded by torrential rainstorms. In some ways, her neighborhood resembles a Venice ghetto as people travel via boats between locations. Puring lives with her disabled son and another grandson who sells fruits and vegetables (without a license) from a makeshift cart outside their house.

The most interesting aspect of the film for me was the Philippine criminal justice system. The film implies that if the defendant and the victim (or family of the victim in cases of murder) can reach a settlement, criminal prosecution will be declined. In practice, that means the accused settles with the victim by monetary means. The film also implies this is a common practice in the Philippines.

The four Mendoza films I've seen are set in the slums of Manila or some other Philippine city. One thing Mendoza drives home repeatedly is that the poor cannot afford to have principles. So it is for our lolas. Sepa won't meet with Puring because she is too upset about her grandson's death and wants the accused to be prosecuted. At first, Puring doesn't have enough money to offer a settlement. Slowly, the two women change in reaction to the stress of their situation.

Puring embarks on a money making expeditions - hocking her grandson's prized television, begging neighbors, shortchanging customers at the vegetable stand and seemingly taking out a loan against her family's farm in the countryside where her younger sister's family lives. Sepa is literally living with her dead grandson as the coffin takes up significant space in their shanty. She is encouraged to consider a settlement by her daughter and the constant presence of the coffin reminds her that she must somehow find a way to pay for the burial.

Eventually, the two lolas reach a settlement which they've both become resigned to. Far from being happy, they seem relieved that the ordeal is over.

What I also found interesting about the film is the way the crime was secondary to the plot. The actual guilt of Puring's grandson is never explored nor the relationship between the two men. It's implied the crime was a drug deal gone bad. Puring's other grandson seems to seethe at his grandmother's efforts to help his cousin as though they had been through this before (addicts will keep relying on their families to bail them out of trouble).

Mendoza tells the story with a detached, almost documentarian style. For the most part, he doesn't favor one side over the other. There was a seen where Lola Sepa had to use the restroom at the courthouse. The restroom was closed for repairs and unable to hold her bladder, she urinated in the hallway. I thought that scene was gratuitous. Lola Puring comes off worse because we see her lying about her grandson's circumstances and behaving dishonestly but her unconditional support for her grandson is touching if not slightly frustrating.

With Lola, Mendoza adds to his noteworthy filmography. Not as graphic as Kinatay or as sleazy as Service, Lola show yet another side of the Filipino underclass and the poverty in which they reside. Whereas previous films called into question the characters' moral poverty to varying degrees, Lola nearly rationalizes their actions and puts aside the notions of right and wrong.

Lola is a grim film. It's worth seeing if you're a fan of Mendoza. It's like he's channeling Italian Neorealism across 60 years and 6,000 miles.

Japanese Summer

2011-10-04T10:13:00.000-07:00

There were two significant film series focusing on Japanese films this past summer and a few other screenings. All told, I saw 19 Japanese language films in less than four months at three different venues between June and September.

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At the PFA, they had a two month series titled Japanese Divas. There were 23 films (by my count) in the series but I had seen several of them before. In fact, I saw many of them in the Summer of 2010 at New People/Viz. The only film I missed which I had not previously seen was Immortal Love (1961; directed by Keisuke Kinoshita).

I ended up seeing 11 films.

Odd Obsession starring Machiko Kyo & Tatsuya Nakadai; directed by Kon Ichikawa; Japanese with subtitles; (1959)
Dragnet Girl starring Kinuyo Tanaka; directed by Yasujirō Ozu; silent with intertitles; live piano accompaniment by Judith Rosenberg; (1933)
Twenty-Four Eyes starring Hideko Takamine; directed by Keisuke Kinoshita; Japanese with subtitles; (1954)
Carmen Comes Home starring Hideko Takamine; directed by Keisuke Kinoshita; Japanese with subtitles; (1951)
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs starring Hideko Takamine & Tatsuya Nakadai; directed by Mikio Naruse; Japanese with subtitles; (1960)
Woman of Tokyo starring Yoshiko Okada; directed by Yasujirō Ozu; silent with intertitles; live piano accompaniment by Judith Rosenberg; (1933)
A Hen in the Wind starring Kinuyo Tanaka; directed by Yasujirō Ozu; Japanese with subtitles; (1948)
The Face of Another starring Machiko Kyo & Tatsuya Nakadai; directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara; Japanese with subtitles; (1966)
Equinox Flower starring Kinuyo Tanaka; directed by Yasujirō Ozu; Japanese with subtitles; (1958)
A Wife Confesses starring Ayako Wakao; directed by Yasuzo Masumura; Japanese with subtitles; (1961)
Seisaku’s Wife starring Ayako Wakao; directed by Yasuzo Masumura; Japanese with subtitles; (1965)

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Over at New People/Viz, the reprised the Summer 2010 success and had a Japanse Classics series. From late June through August, they screened ten films. Again, I had seen some of the films in the series so I skipped those and saw five films for the first time. Actually, I forgot that I had seen Vengeance is Mine in late 2008 at the PFA's Cinema Japan series.

The Woman in the Dunes starring Kiyoko Kishida; directed by Hiroshi Teshigawara; Japanese with subtitles; (1964)
The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice starring Shin Saburi & Michiyo Kogure; directed by Yasujirō Ozu; Japanese with subtitles; (1952)
Good Morning with Chishû Ryû; directed by Yasujirō Ozu; Japanese with subtitles; (1959)
Vengeance is Mine starring Ken Ogata; directed Shôhei Imamura; Japanese with subtitles; (1979)
The Pornographers; directed Shôhei Imamura; Japanese with subtitles; (1966)

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Although not officially part of the Japanese Divas series, PFA screened The Makioka Sisters twice during the series.

The Makioka Sisters starring Keiko Kishi, Yoshiko Sakuma, Sayuri Yoshinaga & Yuko Kotegawa; directed by Kon Ichikwawa; Japanese with subtitles; (1983)

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Finally, the Roxie screened two newer flms by Sion Sono in September.

Love Exposure starring Takahiro Nishijima, Hikari Mitsushima and Sakura Ando; directed by Sion Sono; Japanese with subtitles; (2008) - Official Website
Cold Fish starring Mitsuru Fukikoshi, Denden & Asuka Kurosawa; directed by Sion Sono; Japanese with subtitles; (2010) - Official Website

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I know I should say a few words on at least some of the films but I'll postpone that to a later date. My procrastination has gotten the better of me again...

Trodding the Boards in October

2011-10-03T11:13:00.000-07:00

There are three stage performances I want to see in October.

I am a season ticket subscriber to American Conservatory Theater. Their first production of the season is Once in a Lifetime by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman. The play, which premiered in 1930, is a comedy about the transition from silent films to talkies. ACT has partnered with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival to present screenings of short silent films before select Friday night performances (October 7 and 14). The performances are at the Geary Theater at 415 Geary Street in San Francisco.

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Across town, a more modest theater company is presenting works by the Czar of Noir, Eddie Muller. Thrillpeddlers is presenting their annual Shocktoberfest production for the 12th year in a row. This year's theme is "Fear Over Frisco." Muller penned the three short plays being performed and directs two of them.

If you are unfamiliar with Thrillpeddlers, it is a troupe which performs Grand Guignol plays. What is Grand Guignol? This website should help.

As used today, the term 'Grand Guignol' (pronounced Grahn Geen-yol') refers to any dramatic entertainment that deals with macabre subject matter and features “over-the-top” graphic violence. It is derived from Le Theatre du Grand Guignol, the name of the Parisian theatre that horrified audiences for over sixty years.

The three plays being performed are:

The Grand Inquisitor - an odd young woman with a cache of used books comes calling on an elderly recluse that she believes is the widow of San Francisco’s most notorious serial killer. Twenty real-time minutes culminate in an unexpected and shocking climax.

An Obvious Explanation - a daring heist goes awry when the crook who stashed the loot suffers amnesia. An ambitious doctor intends to solve the problem with her untested “memory” serum. The results are more dramatic than she expected – which is not a good thing.

The Drug - a promising young deputy DA’s efforts to crack the case of a celebrated artist’s disfigurement are thwarted – by the prosecutor’s own desire for the prime suspect. René Berton’s classic two-act Grand Guignol, originally set in Saigon, is transposed and adapted by Muller to 1929 San Francisco.

The Grand Inquisitor is based on a short film Muller made in 2008 with Marsha Hunt. He premiered it at the 2009 Noir City, I believe.

The performances will be Thursday, Friday ans Saturdays at 8 PM through November 19. Thrillpeddlers perform at the Hypnodrome at 575 10th Street in San Francisco. Tickets can be purchased on Brown Paper Tickets.

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Across the bay at the Berkeley Rep, Rita Moreno is performing a one-woman show where she "recounts her improbable life in an irreverent and entertaining new show that features a lively band and two expert dancers." If I haven't mentioned it, I'm a Rita Moreno fan. The show is titled Rita Moreno: Life Without Makeup.

Most weeks (but not this week) until November 6, the performances are Tuesday through Sunday. Tickets can be purchased on the Berkeley Rep website.

Irish Cops and Portuguese Lovers

2011-10-02T19:04:00.000-07:00

For reasons which are not clear to me, I've been going to Landmark Cinemas quite a bit in 2011 compared to previous years. In many ways, Landmark is old school regarding tickets. It's owned by Mark Cuban who put it up for sale earlier this year. I don't know the status of the sale but I know the Landmark website looks a little dated.

I have been using Discount Cards which are five admissions for $40. The cards cannot be used on Friday and Saturday nights. The cards are a piece of thick paper with perforations. Each time you use the card, the box office employee tears off one of the perforations. The system worked fine for me although there were times I wanted to see something on Friday or Saturday night. Regular prices for evening screenings are $10.50 and matinees are $8.25. Frequently, I'd use the discount cards for evening screenings only to get a bigger savings. If I went to a matinee, I'd pay full price ($8.25). The Discount Cards expire six months after they are sold. Sometimes, as I approached the six month mark, I'd use the card to see a matinee or a film I didn't really want to see.

On a visit to the Embaracdero Center Cinemas a couple months ago, they had a handwritten sign at the box office advertising their Gold Tickets, Gold Book or Gold Cards. These Gold Tickets were sold in increments of 25 at $7.75 per admission or $193.75 for 25. I chatted with the box office employee and he said the Gold Tickets could be used for all performances including Friday and Saturday nights. Also, they had no expiration dates. The Discount Cards could only be used for two admissions per screening whereas the Gold Tickets could be used in any increment. He pointed to a group milling about the lobby and said they just bought one and used it for 17 or 18 admissions for a screening about to start. The only restriction was an occasional film which did not allow discount cards. He said the only film he could remember in the past year or so which was restricted in that manner was Terrence Malick's Tree of Life.

Based on this information, my increased patronage and the knowledge I could get 1% cash back on my credit card purchases ($7.67 per screening!), I purchased a Gold Book recently. It's old school too - 25 small piece of paper stapled together with perforations at the top of each page. Tear off a page or ticket and submit it to the box office for admission.

The reason I mention all this is because I can't find either mentioned on the Landmark Theater website - no mention of the $40 discount cards or the $193.75 Gold Books.

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In the past month, I saw two films at the Embardero Center Cinemas:

The Guard starring Brendan Gleeson & Don Cheadle; (2011) - Official Website
Mysteries of Lisbon; Portuguese & French with subtitles; (2010) - Official Website

The Guard is a comedy about a small town Irish cop (Garda
for those familiar with Irish law enforcment). Brendan Gleeson plays Sergeant Gerry Boyle. Sgt. Boyle enjoys a pint of ale, pharmaceuticals and the services of prostitutes. He sees no reason to keep his recreational habits a secret...I guess there are no secrets in small towns. Don Cheadle plays FBI agent Wendell Everett, an American heading up an international drug task force which has indications that a major drug shipment is coming ashore in the small town Boyle polices.

The film is set up as a cop buddy movie as well as stranger in a strange land. Everett is a straight-laced, by-the-book cop who is in disbelief of some of Boyle's behavior. The film also makes clear that small town folks in Ireland don't like outsiders, particularly English speakers and Yanks. Everett could benefit from a little more blarney whereas Boyle probably committed career suicide by adhering to his picaresque lifestyle.

On the other side of the ledger are a trio of ruthless, Nietzsche quoting, introspective drug dealers (Mark Strong, Liam Cunningham & David Wilmot). One is weary of the job, on is more committed and other is a sociopath. The film sounds very dark and it broaches some serious subject - Boyle's mother is dying and a fellow cop is killed leaving Boyle to deal with the widow. However, the film is a comedy through and through. Anti-Irish, anti-American and gallows humor permeate the film. Several scenes stand out in my memory - Boyle drinking a milkshake while declining a bribe, Boyle mistaking the cop's widow for a prostitute and Boyle's initial meeting with Everett. I thoroughly enjoyed The Guard.

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Mysteries of Lisbon allows me to digress some more. When I was in high school (a public school, mind you), I recall my English teacher giving some context to the works of Charles Dickens before we embarked on Oliver Twist. She said that Dickens published his works serially in newspapers or literary anthologies. As a result, he was paid by the word or chapter length. As such, he frequently had to pad out the chapters or the entire novel to 1) fulfill his contractual obligations and/or 2) maximize his income. It took more than two years to publish Oliver Twist. This fact explains a lot about Dickens' writing style.

The reason I mentioned this is because Mysteries of Lisbon is described as a cross between Dickens and Victor Hugo. I doubt Mysteries of Lisbon was required to be a certain length but I'm not sure how else to explain the 4 hours and 40 minutes of runtime (including a 10 minute intermission). An employee of the theater introduced the film before it started and mentioned the length. Several audience members let out audible signs of disbelief and surprise. At the intermission, several people left and did not return. I saw the 7:30 PM screening and around midnight more people left before the film was complete. I suspect they were worried about missing the last East Bay BART train. The film let out around 12:15 AM and I strolled to the Embarcadero BART station (knowing Peninsula bound trains run until nearly 1 AM). Not more than 5 minutes after I got to the platform, the last East Bay train was pulling into the station.

I'm not going to go over the plot of Mysteries of Lisbon. It's a bit of a roundelay as each character experiences love (or unrequited love), jealousy and death. Let's see if I can name all the characters this happens to - a beautiful Countess, her true love, her husband (not her true love), the priest who gives her shelter, the monk at the monastery where she becomes a nun, an assassin who killed her love and took pity on her infant son, her son and the assassin's lover. I may have missed a few. As a young man, the monk cuckolded an aristocrat who sounded like Sean Connery speaking Portuguese.

There was a definite similarity to each story. As each character launched into their story, the audience responded with knowing laughter. Many of the scenes appeared to be on the same set - doors at the right and left of the room and the action taking place in the middle. As each character made the same or similar mistake as one of the others, the point was driven home. Also, even though each character had a secret, there were no secrets as there was always someone outside the door listening. Many times, the camera angle made the theater audience the eavesdropper. The film moved backward and forward in time as flashback scenes unfolded - plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

At two hours, the film was kind of fun; at three hours, it was pretentious; at four hours, it was arduous. I stuck it out because I wondered how they were going to wrap things up.

I can think of better ways to spend 4.5 hours than Mysteries of Lisbon but the film is not completely without merit. The performances of Adriano Luz as the priest, Ricardo Pereira as the assassin and Clotilde Hesme as his lover were colorful and multifaceted. Like a "good" trashy novel, I became engrossed in the liaisons and revenge plots. Although anathema to admit, Mysteries of Lisbon is one of those films that is better on a DVD or streaming so that one can digest it in serial format (like Dickens).

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The recently departed Red Vic Movie House is holding a "final" poster sale on Saturday, October 8 from 1 PM to 5 PM.

Hong Kong Cinema

2011-09-29T19:49:00.000-07:00

The San Francisco Film Society has moved into their new venue at New People/Viz. SFFS has also kicked off their fall season with a new series called Hong Kong Cinema. They screened seven HK films in three days (September 23 to 25).

HK Cinema is the newest addition to the SFFS Fall Schedule. It augments established fall series such as Taiwan Film Days , (October 14 to 16) French Cinema Now (October 27 to November 2) and New Italian Cinema (November 13 to 20).

French, Italian, Hong Kong & Taiwan? Can't we get a Japanese series going at the Japanese owned and themed theater in the heart of San Francisco's Japantown?

I caught four films during the HK series.

Mr. and Mrs. Incredible starring Louis Koo & Sandra Ng; Cantonese with subtitles; (2011)
Punished starring Anthony Wong & Ritchie Jen; Cantonese & Mandarin with subtitles; (2011) - Official Website
Don’t Go Breaking My Heart starring Louis Koo, Yuanyuan Gao and Daniel Wu; directed by Johnnie To; Cantonese & Mandarin with subtitles; (2011)
City Under Siege starring Qi Shu & Aaron Kwok; directed by Benny Chan; Cantonese with subtitles; (2011) - Official Facebook

Johnnie To produced Punished and shares directing credits with Ka-Fai Wai on IMDB for Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.

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I didn't like Mr. and Mrs. Incredible. The premise was that two Chinese superheroes meet and fall in love. They move to a small village and live quiet lives while hiding their superpowers. A martial arts tournament is held in their small town which results in them having to come out of retirement.

That premise seems ripe with possibilities but Mr. and Mrs. Incredible mainly went for slapstick comedy. The didn't have much in the way of wire action or general action scenes. There was some CGI, jokes about getting old and a lot of gaudily dressed Chinese kung fu masters bickering with each other. I wasn't too impressed with Mr. and Mrs. Incredible so I won't spend much time on it.

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Punished is a revenge flick. It reminded me of any number of Korean films where revenge seems to be a genre. It was not as graphic as the Korean films (although programmer Rod Armstrong said the film skipped the Chinese film ratings process). The film was predictable but had a few things going for it. First, Anthony Wong plays a real piece of work. He plays Mr. Wong, a shady businessman who drives away his family, tries to bully some villagers so he can get their land cheap and carries a grudge.

Wong's college-age daughter, Daisy (Janice Man), is in her rebellious phase as she snorts coke, hangs out with the wrong crowd and torments her stepmother. Daisy is kidnapped and eventually found murdered. This results in Wong dispatching his bodyguard/driver/security chief (Richie Ren) on a bloody revenge spree.

Punished isn't bad and has a few heart-poiunding scenes. Considered as a whole, it comes up short compared to other Chinese action films. The gold standard for gritty Chinese action films is The Beast Stalker (2008).

The villains in Punished were one-dimensional. Daisy was an interesting character. Her behavior was such that I thought she may have been involved in her own kidnapping but her early death limited her role.

That leaves Anthony Wong running roughshod over everyone and Richie Ren dutifully avenging Daisy's murder. There were also some visually stunning scenes set at Salar de Uyuni, a Bolivian salt flats.

I can't say I disliked Punished but it feels like a near miss to me. If Johnnie To had directed (as opposed to produced), the film may have closer achieved its potential.

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For the most part, I liked City Under Siege. An immoral circus troupe come into contact with gas cannisters left by the Japanese in WWII. The gas gives whoever is exposed to it superhuman strength, aggressiveness and transforms their bodies. The performers decided to use their new powers to rob banks and commit mayhem. Sunny (Aaron Kwok), the good natured clown is only partially affected by the gas. He teams up with Qi Shu (Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen, Blood Brothers, Confession of Pain, Three Times & The Transporter) as a television news reporter and Wu Jing & Zhang Jin Chu as a romantic pair of government agents who are trained to fight superhuman opponents.

City Under Siege was directed by Benny Chan who also made Shaolin which I was lukewarm about. Chan shows an aptitude for action scenes. City Under Siege delivers many entertaining fight sequences. Kwok shows some comedic skills Colin Chou as the leader of the circus gang shows some range as a psychotic killer with a desire for normalcy.

Although something of a lightweight film, City Under Siege achieved what it intended to achieve...namely numerous action scenes, Qi Shu looking radiant, a dash of comedy and more action scenes.

Why did I expect more of Mr. and Mrs. Incredible than City Under Siege? I'm not sure.

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Johnnie To directs a romantic comedy! That sounds like a joke; like Quentin Tarantino directing a children's movie. However, as SFFS head programmer Rachel Rosen stated while announcing the film, To has directed romantic comedies before. I'm too lazy to look them up on IMDB but it doesn't surprise me. To's action films usually have a bittersweet romance as a subplot.

To discards all his typical tropes for Don’t Go Breaking My Heart. He does cast Suet Lam in a supporting role. They heavyset Lam is usually cast as a heavy (literally and figuratively) gangster with a sense of humor and soft spot in his hearts. I guess To is casting against type when he casts Lam as the nervous #2 of the company where suave Daniel Wu is the CEO and Yuanyuan Gao is the ernest staffer who is the object of his affection and jealousy. For her part, Gao vacillates between her boss and the sensitive but recovering alcoholic architect she has befriended (Louis Koo).

As Gao allows both relationships to develop, the men get anxious and frustrated. I won't give away the finale but Wu and Koo mutually escalate their mating rituals in an attempt to marry Gao. The film portrays one character better than the other but Gao's character was ambivalent towards the two which leads to some uncertainty in my mind.

Don’t Go Breaking My Heart is a sweet comedy. At times, it was a little too cloying. Gao's inability to make a decision (the decision was obvious to me) began to irritate me a little. Most of all, I was surprised at how comfortable To appeared in the romance/comedy genre. There wasn't a gun or gangster to be seen. Don’t Go Breaking My Heart is my pick of the series.

On the Brink?

2011-09-27T18:19:00.000-07:00

As we enter the last days of September, I note Gary Meyer is still at the Balboa Theater. By the way, the Balboa has at least two URLs - www.balboamovies.com and www.balboasf.com.

When we last heard from Gary on the topic (doesn't that sound like an intro for a serial installment?), he wrote "I hope that the theater can stay open and I have extended my operation through September." As September closes, I know I'm curious as to whether the Balboa can stay open. I note that their website is advertising the opening of George Clooney's latest film - The Ides of March on October 7 and and Programming the Nation on October 28. The last time I was at the theater, I noticed a poster advertising the opening of Ben Stiller's next film, Tower Heist on November 4. It appears Meyer is programming for at least another month.

So as a small number of Bay Area film goers anxiously await the fate of the Balboa, I thank Meyer for his dedication and loyalty to the Balboa and its patrons. My favorite theater of all time was when he was programming rep house/art house at the Balboa a few years ago.

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Also interesting is that J. Moses Ceasar posted several back issues of newsletters after I wrote about it. My opinion after reading the latest newsletters is that things are not looking good for the New Parkway. He has broken off negotiations with the owners of the Parkway property. He seems to have given up on leasing a space as each space he has explored has issues.

I wasn't sure how to react to this paragraph in the August 16 newsletter.

Looking for an Angel—Keeping the religious theme going, in lieu of finding a landlord who’s willing to put some money into his or her building, I think that one of our best bets is to find a Parkway angel out there who’s got $2 million in a bank account—I know that this clearly doesn’t apply to most people on this distribution list—and would like to help get the Parkway back on its feet. We need this angel to buy a building (and we’ve found a good one) in the $1.5M range, pump another half million into it, and then we’ll arrange for the rest of the improvements and pay a fair rent for the next twenty or so years. Oakland gets its beloved theater back and the angel makes more money in rent than what he/she is getting from the bank, and we’ll even throw in a lifetime of free movies. Is there someone out there who can help salvage the Parkway? Anyone? Anyone?

Good luck trying to find someone willing to invest $2,000,000 in a single screen movie theater in Oakland. Also, he seems to indicate that the New Parkway would sign a "twenty or so year" lease. That is unusually long lease duration for commercial or retail real estate nowadays. To be frank, as much I love going to the movies, I would not invest in a single-screen theater anywhere much less Oakland.

Ceasar devoted part of one newsletter to debunking what he considers myths about the dangers of living in Oakland. As Mark Twain said, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." However true or not, Oakland suffers from an image problem - crime is out of control, laying off police officers, dysfunctional city government, school district under state receivership, etc. It's not the kind of community reputation that makes an investor confident.

Still, you have to admire Ceasar's boldness. If he can't find a suitable facility to lease then he thinks about buying one!

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It appears the futures of the Balboa and Parkway are uncertain so I wish Messrs. Meyer and Ceasar the best of luck in the current efforts.

Eastern Monks & Detectives, Southern Ladies and Maids

2011-09-26T19:13:00.000-07:00

Before I dutifully chronicle the films I've watched, I want to report that I gobbled up The Help by Katheryn Stockett in three days. The film followed the novel quite closely. There were a few differences but I think I enjoyed the novel and the film equally.

In the novel, Skeeter was described as unattractive - 5'11", skinny legs and arms & a beak nose. She was called Skeeter because she looked like a mosquito which created a pun when the black maids would address her as "Miss Skeeter." I didn't pick up on that in the film but reading it over and over reinforced it. I find actress Emma Stone, who portrayed Skeeter, to be quite attractive so it never dawned on me that her character was considered unattractive. The film had numerous flashbacks to Skeeter as a child and I thought her character was a late bloomer.

Miss Hilly came off worse in the book. Hilly was more snooty in the film but downright evil in the film. The character was gaining weight due to stress but Bryce Dallas Howard (the actress who played Hilly) is slender. Hilly's husband was running for office in the novel; I don't recall that from the book.

I recall a scene towards the end of the film where Skeeter or her mother says something about her mother's cancer going into remission. That was the first mention I recall of cancer in the film. I thought it was a plot point which was cut from the film. I did go to the bathroom during the film so I may have missed it but Skeeter's mother's illness plays a prominent role in the novel.

Skeeter's maid, Constantine, was part white in the novel and her daughter was sent away to Chicago because she was "high yellow." It is strongly implied the father was white and for awhile, I thought Skeeter's father would be identified as the father. In the film, my recollection is that Constatine's daughter used the front door of Skeeter's house and that was why Constatine was fired. In the novel, Constatine's daughter passes herself off as white at the DAR meeting which upsets Skeeter's mother and precipitates the firing.

I could continue to list the differences but they aren't important enough to affect the story or plot. The casting was quite effective because I imagined the actresses in their roles as I read the novel (with the exception of Cicely Tyson as Constatine who was described as 6'1" tall).

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I saw two big budget, Chinese action films.

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame starring Andy Lau, Bingbing Li, Carina Lau & Tony Leung Ka Fai; directed by Hark Tsui; Mandarin with subtitles; (2010)
Shaolin starring Andy Lau & Nicholas Tse; with Bingbing Fan & Jackie Chan; directed by Benny Chan; Mandarin with subtitles; (2011) - Official Website

Detective Dee featured the fight choreography of Sammo Hung.

I saw Shaolin at the 4 Star but it is screening Wednesday and Thursday at the Viz. I saw Detective Dee at the Landmark Embarcadero where it is still playing.

I can imagine the pitch line for Detective Dee - let's do Sherlock Holmes in Chinese! I wasn't a big fan of the 2009 Robert Downey film but it was entertaining enough - long on special effects, short on character development and plot. It was kind of neat seeing Big Ben as it was being built and Downey can be likable enough given the role. At times, I thought Sherlock Holmes was channeling Tony Stark but Downey plays the wiseacre well.

Detective Dee seems to go for the same formula except with Andy Lau in the title role. Lau acquitted himself as well as the role allowed. At two hours, I thought the film a little self-indulgent. Regardless of the length, the film relied too heavily on special effects and ponderously long action sequences.

The plot, in a nutshell, features cases of spontaneous combustion involving people building a huge Buddha which reminded more of how I imagine the Colossus of Rhodes looked. China's greatest investigator, Detective Dee, is released from prison by the queen (whom he rebelled against years earlier) to solve the crime. I'll give you one clue: fire turtles...at least, that's what the subtitled translation said.

Andy Lau and Bingbing Li have a love-hate relationship which is kind of cute and they choreographed a scene of the two of them which was sexy, exciting and humorous. That scene (which is in the trailers) is my favorite from the film. Chao Deng shows up as a blonde or albino rival investigator. I'm not sure why the character looked the way he did. Detective Dee is based on Dí Rénjié, a real-life government official who died in 700 AD. I'm not sure if the Deng character was based on a real person. Chao Deng turns in one of the better performances of the film as Dee's rival and grudging ally.

Detective Dee is about as much fun as Sherlock Holmes with its giant Buddha statue, spontaneous combustion and high energy action sequences. I'm not sure if Spaniards were in China the 600s but they were in the film.

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Andy Lau got to show more range in Shaolin. In this film, Lau plays an arrogant general who is betrayed by his colonel and forced to seek sanctuary in a Shaolin monastery which he had previously violated by killing someone the monks had given sanctuary to and then vandalizing their sign.

Lau shows the audience arrogant to abject and gets to interact with Nicholas Tse (the Colonel) and Jackie Chan (the cook at the monastery). Marginally more interesting than Detective Dee, Shaolin still seemed interminable at 2 hours, 11 minutes. Chan performs his screen magic in one scene where he uses cooking utensils to defeats his foes. Chan's frenetic style of on-screen fighting is more to my taste than anything else in Shaolin.

Taking itself seriously than Detective Dee, Shaolin lacks some of the exuberance and joy which go into great Chinese action films. Nicholas Tse as the villain certainly goes over the top in convincing us how evil he is. Tse is quite a popular working actor now. I've seen four of his films in recent month - The Stool Pigeon, Bodyguards and Assassins and the fabulous The Beast Stalker.

Yu Hai is memorable as the abbot of the monastery and comes full circle as he had a role in The Shaolin Temple (starring Jet Li) which Shaolin is nominally a remake of. About the only thing which is the same in the two films is that the temple is destroyed.

Now that I think about it, a giant Buddha statue plays a major role in the climax of Shaolin also.

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Seeing these two films leads me to believe the Chinese are making big budget films in the style of Hollywood action films. I hope they can do better.

Taxi Driver & Blast of Silence

2011-09-22T19:28:00.000-07:00

The Castroscreened an interesting double bill earlier this month.

Taxi Driver starring Robert De Niro; with Albert Brooks, Cybil Shepherd, Harvey Keitel, Peter Boyle and Jodie Foster; directed by Martin Scorsese; (1976)
Blast of Silence starring, directed and screenplay by Allen Baron; (1961)

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There is not much to say about Taxi Driver. I think it is the third time I've seen it all the way through although the first time in a movie theater. I've seen portions of the film countless times. I can't add much to the chorus regarding this film. I hold it in high regard and that evening's screening confirmed my memories. There were a few things that I had forgotten. If you have never seen Taxi Driver, I'd skip to the next section as I freely discuss the ending and key plot points.

The relationship between Albert Brooks and Cybil Shepherd is more comical than romantic. There may be some mutual attraction but they are hiding it behind banter and silly behavior. It's not clear to me why Shepherd's character succumbs to Travis Bickle's hard sell request for a date.

Robert De Niro turned in a performance as Bickle which only gets better over time. Compared to his performances Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Casino, De Niro's Bickle really is a case of still waters running deep. If you haven't seen the film, it's not obvious what De Niro is going to do. His actions and behavior hint at someone with serious issues but not someone who will go on a killing spree. Insomnia, taking a woman to a porn film on their first date (you always wait until the second date!) and consorting with underage hookers are disturbing but not outright frightening. De Niro & Scorsese don't go over the top with Bickle unlike many films since then. As a result, when Bickle emerges with a Mohawk, it comes as a shock and is disorienting. Bickle intended to murder a presidential candidate but was foiled by security so he goes with plan B which is rescuing the 12 year old hooker.

Keitel is more slimy than frightening as the pimp and the scene where he is dancing with Jodie Foster is really creepy but sheds great insight into the dynamics of their relationship.

Bickle seems to have issues with black pimps throughout the film. He gives them hard looks throughout the film. Keitel's character was originally black but changed to accommodate Keitel and avoid put racial overtones into Bickle's actions.

Scorsese shows up in a memorable scene. I recalled his performance as a cuckolded husband stewing in Bickle's taxi but he is more menacing and troubled than my recollection.

My memory of the film is that it ends with Bickle dying after the rampage with an overhead shot. However, the film indicates that he survived the shootout, was hailed a hero and has another encounter with Betsy (Shepherd). It has been long debated whether that scene represents Bickle's dying thoughts or should be taken as literal. Given that Bickle was identified with a gun near a US senator and presidential candidate (who wins the nomination) as well the short period of time between the shootout and the time setting for his meeting Betsy, I think it was a dream sequence or a representation of Bickle's fantasy before the shootout.

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Blast of Silence is a low budget film (more than a little noirish) about a Cleveland hitman in New York for a job. Frank Bono (Allen Baron) grew up in New York and has staked out a target for assassination. He has procured his weapon from a fat, sleazy and vaguely effeminate middle man (Larry Tucker in the best performance). Frank just has to lay low over Christmas, pull off the job and skip town. Rather than remaining holed up, Frank goes out and trouble follows him.

First, he is reunited with a childhood friend and his sister (who Frank is sweet on). They insist that he come over for a Xmas party. By the way, at the party, I'm positive I saw an actor who later appeared in Jacques Tati's Play Time (1967) - in the restaurant scene. I can't figure out the actor's name from IMDB. Anyway, being in close proximity to a woman he yearns for has awakened feelings of loneliness in Frank which dulls his killing instincts.

More problematic is that Frank's fat gun dealer figures out why Frank needs the gun and asks for more money or else he'll tip of the target, a mid-level mafioso. This spooks Frank and he tries to call off the job but his client refuses and threatens Frank. I wont' give away the ending but I will say I predicted it.

Two scenes stood out in my memory. One is an ax murder and the other takes place during a hurricane. Both scenes are powerful and elevate Blast of Silence beyond its meager budget. On that count, part of the film captures New York in the Mad Men era. I recognized the ice skating rink at Rockefeller Plaza. There was an extended scene where Frank wanders around the city which looked like pure filler for the 77 minute film. The opening scene where a train emerges from a tunnel is also visually memorable.

At its rotten core, Blast of Silence is a bleak and unforgiving film. Frank is morally bankrupt and he is just beginning to realize that there won't be any happy endings for him. To punctuate the film, there is narration by an unseen Waldo Salt whose voice sounds like a raspy and cynical version of Jack Webb. Salt, a blacklisted screenwriter, would go on to write the screenplays for Serpico, Midnight Cowboy and The Day of the Locust.

I'm surprised that Blast of Silence hasn't screened at Noir City. Blast of Silence reminded me of two films I've seen this year - On the Bowery, a 1957 psuedo-documentary about men living in the Bowery section of Manhattan and Dementia, a 1955 no-dialog film which I saw at I Wake Up Dreaming about a woman encountering some shady characters in the big city.

There is nothing original in recommending Taxi Driver but I'm also bullish on Blast of Silence which I consider an unearthed gem, albeit unpolished. Discovering films like Blast of Silence is why I love going to the movies.

The Man Who Fell To Earth

2011-09-20T19:43:00.000-07:00

I stopped by the Landmark Lumiere last week to see The Man Who Fell To Earth.

The Man Who Fell To Earth starring David Bowie & Candy Clark; with Rip Torn & Buck Henry; directed by Nicolas Roeg; (1976)

Nicolas Roeg is a well known director despite a modest output. I saw his latest feature, Puffball (2007), at the 2008 Dead Channels.

Dead Channels was the festival former Indiefest programmer Bruce Fletcher tried for two year after he left Indiefest. I heard Bruce Fletcher was programming the Idaho Film Festival. Idaho? On the festival's website, Executive Director Lyle Banks states "In 2009 Bruce Fletcher and I made the decision to move the Film Festival to March to offer the festival a greater ability to attract films that are otherwise unavailable during other times of the year...It is necessary to announce the suspension of the film festival until our executive and leadership teams are reconstituted. Our plan is to have a team in place and ready to produce the festival for March 2012, and possibly a smaller showing in Boise in 2011." I notice Bruce's name is not among the staff listing. I also recall he was programming the Vortex Room too.

How did I get on this subject? I remember...Nicolas Roeg. Looking at his credits, I see that I'm unfamiliar with his films (at least when he is the director). There is Puffball which I was less than enthusiastic about (although I can remember it clearly 3 years later) and The Man Who Fell To Earth which I'm familiar with because I'm a modest fan of David Bowie's work. It makes me wonder how I'm familiar with Roeg's name.

The Man Who Fell To Earth pretty much says it all. David Bowie plays the alien who has come to earth in search of water to ship back to his drought-stricken home world. He uses his planet's superior technology to take out patents and create a powerful and successful tech company. His goal is to use the company to finance regular shipments of water and ultimately himself back to his planet. While on earth, he encounters various humans. There is Candy Clark as Mary Lou who becomes his girlfriend, Buck Adams as Farnsworth - his patent lawyer and eventually president of his tech firm and Rip Torn as Dr. Bryce, a bored and unethical college professor who comes to work for the firm. Bowie's character goes by the name Thomas Newton (from England).

The film follows Netwon's efforts and I noted a few things. First, television and alcohol are the ruin of Newton. Earth's television signals emanate into outer space and presumably that is how Newton came to choose Earth. Newton likes to watch TV with a dozen sets going at once. Although initially abstinent, close interaction with Mary Lou leads Newton to indulge in sex and alcohol to a destructive degree. I also noticed that Newton seems to hold Japanese culture in highest esteem.

Eventually, Newton's success and eccentricities (and perhaps Bryce's perfidy) attract the attention of a quasi-governmental agency which holds Newton captive and performs experiments on him. By this time, the effects of the alcohol and TV as well as extended absence from his family and home, have rendered Newton dysfunctional.

The plot definitely seems secondary to Roeg's innovative flare for visuals. A few scenes are inspirational. In one scene, Newton transforms from human to his natural state and Roeg frames the transformation with montage of water and human/bipedal forms in something closer to performance art than film. Towards the end of the film, in a scene I read was original censored out of the US release, Newton handles a large handgun before having sex with Mary Lou. The audience thinks he will shoot her but it turns out to be loaded with blanks and the scene moves to the surreal as darkness is punctuated by the flashes of the gun being discharged and their naked bodies writhing. Both scenes were enhanced with the musical soundtrack.

Speaking of naked bodies, I sometimes forget how provocative the 70s were. Rip Torn does the full monty despite having a middle-aged spread. In some well-simulated sex scenes, the audience discovers that Mr. Torn is circumcised. Far from gratuitous (although there were two comely actresses in the scenes), Torn's sexcapades were actually important to the development of Bryce's character.

At nearly 2 hours, 20 minutes, The Man Who Fell To Earth could have benefited from some edits. I scratched my head for certain characters. Bernie Casey shows up as a government agent, goes for a nude swim in his pool and then gets it on with his white wife. Farnsworth is gay for no particular reason and his death is comically absurd. The Man Who Fell To Earth has some personality and flavor which seemed de rigueur of films in the 70s and painfully absent from films today.

I can't give a blanket recommendation of the film or say I fully enjoyed The Man Who Fell To Earth but I'm glad I saw it and there is a lot to appreciate in the film. Roeg's skills as a director, the editing, the soundtrack and the performance of the main cast are all exemplary. Bowie's appearance can be startling which anyone who has seen Ziggy Stardust knows. At other times, the plot and film seem to take on affectations. Also, some of the special effects probably looked cheesy 35 years ago much less today. On the whole, I'm glad I saw The Man Who Fell To Earth and hold it up as an example of a certain type of film which is, unfortunately, no longer made. I'm also eager to see some of Roeg's other films.