Archive for the ‘San Francisco International Film Festival’ Category
Filed under: Foreign Language, Festival Reports, San Francisco International Film Festival
Though the Dogme 95 movement caused something of a stir in the film community at the time, the films made under its banner were, to put it mildly, a bit downbeat. Only Lone Scherfig’s Italian for Beginners (2002) could lift the fog. Scherfig had a talent for presenting depressing characters in a lighthearted way, and still managed to resolve everyone’s problems by the end of the film.
Her film was a Hollywood ensemble comedy wrapped up in an enjoyable, intelligent art house package. As a result, it grossed over $4 million; the second highest grossing film in the series was The Celebration (1998), which made just over $1 million. None of the rest even made it that far. Working within the Dogme manifesto required Scherfig to follow ten specific rules, which included not making a period piece or genre film, using only props found on the set, using only natural sound (music must emanate naturally from the set), using hand-held cameras, natural light, no special effects, etc. The idea was that the rules would restore “truth” to cinema.
Filed under: Foreign Language, New Releases, Theatrical Reviews, Festival Reports, San Francisco International Film Festival
If nothing else, Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astrea and Celadon raises many interesting questions about the nature of the auteur theory and film canons in general. Rohmer is a certified auteur, and a world master. He has made many, many good films and a few great ones, especially when adding entries to his three celebrated series: “Six Moral Tales” (in the 1960s and 1970s), “Comedies and Proverbs” (six films in the 1980s) and “Tales of the Four Seasons” (in the 1990s).
These films, which often have a relaxed, al fresco quality, mainly focus on young, smart, attractive contemporary French people who talk a lot get themselves into romantic situations. When he departs from this successful formula, as with his last two films, The Lady and the Duke (2001) and Triple Agent (2004), the results are considerably less. So when a filmmaker like Rohmer makes something as blatantly, painfully awful as The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, it brings such ideas into sharp relief.
Continue reading SFIFF Review: The Romance of Astrea and Celadon
Filed under: Documentary, New Releases, Sony Classics, Theatrical Reviews, Festival Reports, San Francisco International Film Festival, Cinematical Indie
With the rise of cheap digital video, some might claim that we’re in a Golden Age of documentaries, except for the fact that most documentary filmmakers aren’t really filmmakers. They copy a basic template over and over again, assembling footage rather than making a movie. Of course, some of this may qualify as great journalism: the 2003 film Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary, for example, or last year’s No End in Sight. But very few understand how to combine filmmaking and reporting, how to make the story speak on a personal level. For my money, then, Errol Morris is the greatest living documentary filmmaker. As his reputation has risen — he went from a guy who couldn’t get arrested at the Oscars to a guy who actually won one — his films have become more like events, like a story you can’t possibly miss from a reporter you know and trust. (He has become like a Walter Cronkite or an Edward R. Murrow of the documentary set.)
Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure screened this week at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival, where Morris received the festival’s Persistence of Vision award. The new film can be seen as the third in a trilogy of Morris’ war films, with Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999) taking on World War II and The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003) examining Vietnam. This one stumbles right into the current war in Iraq, and stares right into the face of the Abu Ghraib prison controversy. Of course, this story was extensively covered on the TV news and people have already seen the gruesome photographs, but Morris slows down the story a bit, taking a more careful look after the fact (many of his interview subjects have finished serving their jail time).
Filed under: Foreign Language, Festival Reports, San Francisco International Film Festival
Some filmmakers, like Chaplin and Kubrick, determined that they should release a film only every few years, to make it more like an event to be anticipated. Other filmmakers work faster and harder in an effort not to be forgotten, like Spike Lee or Woody Allen. It’s difficult to determine which method is more effective, but it seems like if a filmmaker turns in over fifty films of mostly high quality, their work is eventually taken for granted. Everyone loves Hitchcock now, but in 1976 when his final film opened, he must have seemed like a relic compared to Rocky and Taxi Driver. That’s how I imagine Claude Chabrol today. Now 77, he releases a movie a year, more or less, and passed the fifty-film marker some time ago. Unlike his French New Wave colleagues, he didn’t make a single masterpiece in his youth, and so has nothing to live up to. Rather, he’s consistently reliable and skillful, and it’s difficult to judge any one of his films up against another. Look through reviews of his most recent films, and for each one you’ll find at least one person claiming it’s his best film in years.
And so comes A Girl Cut in Two, which recently screened at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival. I loved it. It’s another superbly-made, highly enjoyable Chabrol film, but you probably won’t see it on any top ten lists, nor will Chabrol be collecting any awards for it. I think “consistent” is a bad word among film people; we’re more easily impressed by change and diversity, or by the newest, latest thing. Actors like John Wayne were routinely overlooked in favor of actors like Marlon Brando, though Brando could never in a million years have pulled off what John Wayne accomplished in The Searchers. Brando could do lots of things, but John Wayne was the best at being John Wayne. That’s my standard rant, and that’s how I feel about Chabrol. Now, onto the new film:
Filed under: Fandom, Exhibition, San Francisco International Film Festival
The 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival, announced its massive 150-film lineup this week. The world’s oldest film festival (Federico Fellini showed his film La Strada here when he was just a pup will open with Peter Bratt’s La Mission — starring brother Benjamin Bratt — and closes with Alexis dos Santos’ Unmade Beds, with Marc Webb’s 500 Days of Summer — with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel — as a Centerpiece. Francis Ford Coppola will receive the festival’s directing award (previously awarded to Mike Leigh, Spike Lee and Werner Herzog) and will hopefully screen a trailer and some bits and pieces from his upcoming Tetro. Robert Redford will be honored with the Peter J. Owens award (for actors whose work exemplifies brilliance, independence and integrity). James Toback will receive the Kanbar Award for excellence in screenwriting, and the festival will screen his new documentary Tyson. Other guests include Evan Rachel Wood and Elijah Wood (no relation).
Continue reading San Francisco Film Festival Lineup Announced
Filed under: Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows, San Francisco International Film Festival
400 Screens, 400 Blows is a weekly column that takes an in-depth look at the films playing below the radar, beneath the top ten, and on 400 screens or less.
This week begins the 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival. It’s the oldest film festival in the world, and one of the largest, though it never gets as much publicity as Cannes or Sundance for two reasons: one is that it doesn’t usually have the world premieres of the latest Hollywood blockbusters, and two is that it doesn’t choose a “winner.” No matter. Each year I choose my own winners, such as the following two.
When Mexican-born Fernando Eimbcke made his directorial debut with the wonderful Duck Season (2004 — released here in 2006), he immediately earned comparisons to Jim Jarmusch with his black-and-white cinematography, deadpan humor, and a distinct lack of forward momentum in the plot. He probably won’t shake that comparison with his second feature, the full-color Lake Tahoe, but it doesn’t matter. This film is equally wonderful, and besides, how many good Jarmusch imitators are there?
Continue reading 400 Screens, 400 Blows – San Francisco International Film Fest, Part I
Filed under: Comedy, IFC, Celebrities and Controversy, San Francisco International Film Festival, Summer Movies
I tend to be skeptical of anything pitched as “an Evening with…” someone, because I don’t generally melt from simply being in the presence of someone famous or talented — they’ve got to, you know, do something. But when the San Francisco International Film Festival announced “An Evening with Robert Redford,” they had a trump card: a brand new print of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, one of my favorite films that I had nonetheless never seen on the big screen. That seemed like a fair trade: you give me Butch Cassidy and I’ll sit through the clip reel and onstage interview. Deal.
It was pretty painless, actually. The interviewer, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Philip Bronstein, manages to just be mildly sycophantic, and Redford was thoughtful and articulate — as charming as you’d expect. The audience questions were typically gushy and occasionally inappropriate (someone tried to pitch a documentary project, prompting a groan from the entire room — who really thinks that a 1500-person Q&A is a good venue to talk business with Robert Redford?) but the man answered (or deflected) them with the aplomb of someone who has done this a gazillion times. At one point, we learned that Redford has not seen Butch Cassidy in the 40 years since its release, which is kind of remarkable when you think about it.
Continue reading Live from SFIFF: Evenings with Robert Redford and the World’s Angriest Scotsman
Filed under: Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows, San Francisco International Film Festival
400 Screens, 400 Blows is a weekly column that takes an in-depth look at the films playing below the radar, beneath the top ten, and on 400 screens or less.
The world’s oldest film festival, the San Francisco International Film Festival, continues this week. Diving through the myriad of titles, I came up with a couple of winners, neither of which has a U.S. distributor as of this moment. I’ll start with the latest from the infuriatingly brilliant French director Claire Denis. Following her baffling, free-flowing, poetic epic masterpiece L’Intrus (The Intruder), Denis returns with a relatively simpler, more narrative-based feature, 35 Shots of Rum, though without sacrificing any of her unique flow. The new film focuses on an all-black Paris community of friends, relations, former and current lovers and colleagues. Lionel (Alex Descas) is a train engineer and lives with his beautiful, grown daughter Jo (Mati Diop). They don’t speak very often, but they share an obviously tender relationship full of hugs and kisses on the cheek. Near the film’s beginning, Jo buys herself a rice cooker, and Lionel coincidentally brings one home as well. Jo opens her father’s and cooks rice, keeping her own in the package and hidden away.
Continue reading 400 Screens, 400 Blows – San Francisco International Film Fest, Week Two
Filed under: New Releases, IFC, San Francisco International Film Festival
James Toback is a charming dude. You hear about the man’s infamous lifestyle – the sex and drugs and gambling to absurd extremes – and you expect to see a hipster jerk, but the guy is genial and matter-of-fact. The highlight of the festival may be his deadpan description of participating in near-daily orgies at former Cleveland Browns quarterback Jim Brown’s residence – he first made a fleeting mention of these events in an unrelated context, then elaborated colorfully in response to a brave audience questioner. He’s sharp, articulate, surprising, and readily recognizable as the mind behind his singular, volatile films. And he has a charisma that sneaks up on you.
The on-stage conversation with Toback was followed by a screening of Tyson, which is already playing in some cities and will expand to more in the coming weeks. The documentary, narrated by Mike Tyson himself, also sneaks up on you. At first, Toback’s perspective seems clear: Tyson narrates his well-known history with the embarrassment of a reformed man who looks back on his reckless youth with disbelief that he could be so dumb, so crazy. We feel for him. But as the film plays, we become more and more uncomfortable as the events Tyson recounts with the same sheepish regret become more and more recent. Before long, he’s looking back at 2003, 2004, 2005, still shaking his head at himself. The chilling subtext of Toback’s otherwise sympathetic film is that Tyson’s attempts to attribute the crazy outbursts that have punctuated his career to temporary insanity – and the implicit assertion that he is a changed, newly rational man — are not altogether credible.
Click through for thoughts on The Age of Stupid, Still Walking and (500) Days of Summer.
Continue reading SFIFF Report: The Escapades of Toback and Tyson, and More
Filed under: Foreign Language, Independent, San Francisco International Film Festival, Cinematical Indie
My other two San Francisco International Film Festival dispatches focused mostly on mainstream business: popular documentaries, future commercial releases, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But it’s a sin to spend a festival only watching – and talking about – commercial fare. So for my farewell SFIFF post, here’s a look at two off-the-beaten-track entries I was able to catch.
Sadly, neither indie quite worked for me, which makes me feel like a philistine, I assure you. Ursula Meier’s Home, for example, exposed one of my most enduring weaknesses as a cinephile, namely my intolerance for movies that operate entirely on an abstract level – as pure metaphor. Home, a French-Swiss co-production with good arthouse buzz and a wagonload of foreign Oscar equivalents under its belt, tells the “story” of a family that lives peacefully by the side of an abandoned highway, until the highway reopens and all hell breaks loose. The family’s response bears no resemblance to the way real human beings would act, and Meier does not make any attempt to render any of it plausible – within the universe of the film or otherwise. And so you’re left trying to decipher Meier’s big metaphor, which I ultimately decided was either Israel-Palestine or more generally human stubbornness in the face of transformative change (e.g. global warming). It’s all very intriguing, even interesting – but deeply unsatisfying as a cinematic experience, at least for me.
Continue reading Live from SFIFF: Wrapping Up with the Indies
