15 (2003)

WHO: Royston Tan wrote & directed this, his first feature film.

WHAT: Well known to Singapore moviegoers but practically unknown elsewhere is the fact that the city-state has one of the most restrictive motion picture rating systems around. As one of the producers of 15, Eric Khoo, puts it in an interview with Tilman-Baumgärtel (published in his book Southeast Asian Independent Cinema):

I only wish they would bring down the age for R-rated pictures. I don't think anywhere else in the world, you have to be twenty-one to see a film. You can have sex when you are sixteen, but you cannot watch Borat!

Under such conditions, it should be unsurprising that 15 had to endure a record 27 cuts by Singapore censors before it could be released theatrically in the country it was made, And even then, only those over 21 were allowed to watch it. Combined with a ban on local home video release, it meant that teenagers of the age depicted in the film (the title derives from the age of the adolescents we see on the screen- most of them non-actors recruited from real youth gangs) would have to wait six years to be old enough to legally view the film. 

It's perhaps even less surprising that filmmakers like Tan and Khoo (whose first feature as a director was the punk-rock-inflected Mee Pok Man) would begin their feature filmmaking careers with films that pushed censorship boundaries- the most passionate independent artists are often inclined to press against whatever boundary they feel constraining them, and if, as in Singapore, that boundary is the censor's razor they gravitate to material that gives it resistance. 15 features drugs, violence, and full-frontal male nudity, among other screen taboos. No wonder it became one of the most notorious - and internationally popular - films ever produced on the island nation.

WHERE/WHEN: A CAAMFest presentation at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, tonight only at 7:00.

WHY: CAAMFest is one of the Bay Area's great examples of a film festival loyal to the filmmakers it helps local audiences discover, and to the audiences who appreciate discovering them. Royston Tan's relationship with the festival is a great example. Though the festival hasn't shown every one of his films made over the years, in 2002 (back when it was called the SF International Asian American Film Festival) it screened his short Sons (which is now viewable legally and for free via Youtube), followed up by programming a 35-minute version of 15 the following year. By this time the feature version was in the pipeline and it was screened at the 2004 SFIAAFF; that's where I saw it. I barely remember it so it's clearly time to view it again and the CAAM programmers know it, bringing Tan himself to discuss it and the rest of his career tonight in conversation with Valerie Soe. It's the culmination of a mini-retrospective of Tan's work that also included a festival reprise of his biggest hometown commercial success 881 and the U.S. premiere of his latest film Old Romances. It's great to have the festival bring back its tradition of hosting career surveys of Asian auteurs after a couple-year hiatus.

15 is not the only case of CAAMFest/SFIAAFF screening a short film and later an feature-length remake or sequel version. I'm sure there have been many over the festival history but what comes to mind right now is the 2002 screening of SF Art Institute graduate Michael Shaowanasai's To Be...Or Not To Be?: The Adventures of Iron Pussy III, which foretold a 2004 showing of Shaowanasai's The Adventure of Iron Pussy, co-directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. I suppose I think of this example because the short video work that preceded Apichatpong's Mekong Hotel at CAAMFest screenings this past weekend, Jennifer Phang's Advantageous, is getting expanded into a feature-length film later this year. It's good news, because although the short is thought-provoking and emotionally powerful on its own, its science-fiction concept feels at times constrained by its 25-minute frame and deserves a larger canvas. Perhaps we'll see it screened at a future CAAMFest...

HOW: 15 shows via a 35mm print.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)

WHO: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

WHAT: A little over two years ago, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives played a brief run in Frisco Bay cinemas, and I was interviewed by Sara Vizcarrando for an episode of her much-missed show "Look Of The Week". You can hear what I had to say by viewing this (my segment begins shortly after the five minute mark), but here's a brief transcribed excerpt:

[Apichatpong is] really exploring veils. There's the veil between life and death, of course. All these ghosts coming back. And then there's the veil, which he's always been interested in in his films, the veil between cinema and reality...  

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive tonight only at 7:00 PM.

WHY: As pleased as I was that CAAMFest chose to bring Apichatpong's Mekong Hotel to the festival this year, I realize this pleasure comes as a loyal fan of the Thai director, interested in following him on any artistic journeys he decides to take. But Mekong Hotel is not a particularly good introduction to Apichatpong's oeuvre, or even as satisfying an experience for a confirmed fan; it's formally stripped-down and not nearly as aesthetically luxurious as a film like Uncle Boonmee. Watching it at the PFA Saturday was a treat, but left me wanting to see one of his more eye-popping films. Thankfully the opportunity has arrived just a few days later; it's unclear whether this is really a CAAMFest screening or not, however; the PFA site indicates it is, but it's nowhere to be found on the festival website or in its printed materials.

Both Mekong Hotel and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives deal with "hauntings"- a theme and a word that has characterized Apichatpong's filmmaking for much of his career, but find more explicit expression lately. The reason the filmmaker was unable to be present at this weekend's screenings is because he was in the United Arab Emirates, presenting films picked by himself and a number of other curators (including at least a couple familiar to San Francisco cinephiles: Tilda Swinton and Steve Anker) to screen at the eleventh Sharjah Biennial (yes, this year's iteration of the event that had a vexed interaction with Caveh Zahedi two years ago). For this event, Apichatpong asked curators to pick works that have "haunted them" and his own curatorial selections include "haunted" films by Georges Méliès and Osamu Tezuka among others I haven't myself seen; the full list is found here.

HOW: 35mm print.

Mekong Hotel (2012)

WHO: Apichatpong Weerasetkaul wrote and directed this.

WHAT: Mekong Hotel feels more like a conceptual piece, than an aesthetic work like Apichatpong's best-known films distributed on 35mm prints and commercial DVDs. Very static shots and simple blocking foreground thematic concerns over visual ones. Shot entirely in a hotel beside the titular river marking the border between Thailand and Laos, actors appear to play themselves, discussing current and past events calmly until, just as matter-of-factly, some of their bodies become inhabited by carnivorous "Phi Pob" ghosts. A plaintive guitar soundtrack may seem incongruous for a quasi-horror story, but its agreeability indicates just how normal spiritual visitations are considered in the region. The final shot of jet-skiers on the Mekong is reminiscent of James Benning.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens via CAAMFest twice this weekend: today at 4:00 PM at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, and tomorrow at 2:10 at New People.

WHY: It's a pretty good time to be a Frisco Bay fan of so-called "Thai New Wave" filmmakers. Not only are we getting two screenings of Mekong Hotel followed by one of Apichatpong's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives this Tuesday, in conjunction with access to his Emerald installation in Berkeley through next month, but Yerba Buena Center For the Arts has recently announced a sizable retrospective devoted to perhaps the second-best-known Thai filmmaker currently on the international festival circuit. Pen-ek Ratanaruang will be on hand for screenings of his two most recent features, Headshot and Nymph, and four more of his features will screen in 35mm prints (two of which, Ploy and Invisible Waves, will be making their local cinema premieres along with Headshot). Those of us who are fans of 6ixtynin9 and/or Last Life in the Universe will also be pleased to have opportunities to see them on the big screen again.

HOW: Digital screenings of a digital production, paired with local filmmaker Jennifer Phang's latest digital short Advantageous.

Emerald (2007)

WHO: Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

WHAT: As a long-time, loyal Apichatpong fan, I've been about as interested in seeing and engaging with his video works as with his better-known 35mm features. Luckily, local curators have been very helpful in helping me pursue this interest over the years. Yerba Buena Center For the Arts, for example, has screened his 2001 work Haunted Houses and programmed two sets of his shorts. And last year the Asian Art Museum included his installation Phantoms of Nabua as a centerpiece of a group show; I got to see it there many times. (It was also acquired for the SFMOMA collection as well though it has not yet screened there; my girlfriend Kerry Laitala recently highlighted it along with other works in the collection for the SFMOMA Open Space blog.)

But the above are all purely single-channel works, and I've until now only been able to read about Apichatpong's installations that involve more than just an image on a screen in a darkened room. Emerald (known also as Morakot, a transliteration of the Thai word for the gemstone) is the first I've been able to view. Named for the shut-down Bangkok hotel where it was shot, this 10-minute looped video is projected onto a screen across the room from its ingress. Between the screen and the entering viewer hangs a lantern emitting a low level of green light, "creating a focal point and a meditative portal into the space of the single-channel video", as Dena Beard writes in the exhibition brochure.

Not unlike in his 1999 work Windows, the images on the screen are evocative of abandonment; most contain no human figures but the traces of them in these hotel bedrooms remain. The air is filled with illuminated particles of dust and feathers; have birds made a home of this structure in the absence of tourists and travelers? The soundtrack is certainly human though: voices of a few of Apichatpong's favorite actors from his features, including Jenjira Pongpas (the facial-cream fanatic from Blissfully Yours) and Sakda Kaewbuadee (the soldier from Tropical Malady and monk from Syndromes and a Century), relate personal stories from their own lives in a conversation that recalls the first-person narratives the filmmaker elicits in his debut feature Mysterious Object at Noon.  

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at the Berkeley Art Museum during its gallery hours (11AM to 5PM Wednesday through Sunday) until April 21st.

WHY: As many associations as I've made above between Emerald and previous Apichatpong Weerasethakul works, it also seems to anticipate his most recent featurette Mekong Hotel, which is (as its title suggests) another video work shot entirely in a hotel, this time one in Nong Khai, a small city on the Thai bank of the river that delineates most of the border between the Thai region of Isan (where Apichatpong grew up) and the country Laos. It also features performances by Jenjira and Sakda, though not just voiceover in this case, and even makes reference the Emerald Buddha which changed hands between Thailand and Laos and back centuries ago, and whose tears some believe cause the flooding of the mighty Mekong.

I was able to view Mekong Hotel on screener in anticipation of its March 16 & 17 appearances at this year's CAAM Fest, which runs from March 14-24 in San Francisco and Berkeley (though not, for the first time in memory, in San Jose, which will have to make do with the currently-running Cinequest for its fix of Asian and other international and independent movies this month). Apichatpong's Cannes Palme D'Or prize-winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives also screens at the Berkeley Art Museum's conjoined organization the Pacific Film Archive during the festival, but I'm unclear whether or not it's actually an official festival screening or not; the PFA site seems to indicate it is, but the CAAM site doesn't include it.

Ill be previewing more CAAM Fest titles soon, but for now I'll just mention a few titles I'm excited the festival is bringing to Frisco Bay: 

Beautiful 2012, a portmanteau with contributions from the great Tsai Ming-Liang (The Wayward Cloud), Ann Hui (A Simple Life), Kim Tae-yong (Memento Mori) and Gu Changwei (cinematographer for Zhang Yimou, Jiang Wen, Robert Altman, etc. and now a director in his own right)

When Night Falls, a critically-acclaimed representative of the current crop of low-budget independent Chinese filmmaking, which has made its director Ying Liang (Taking Father Home, The Other Half) an exile from his own homeland.

Touch of the Light, a Taiwanese production about a visually impaired pianist that Wong Kar-Wai is credited with executive producing. 

A closing-night presentation of Asian-American home movies entitled Memories To Light. A brilliant idea for a closing night presentation that I suspect may start a trend among other festivals. New People seems far too small a venue for such an occasion.

HOW: The Emerald installation is made up of a video projection and a low-hanging lantern. I'm not sure why, but there are no subtitles projected as part of the piece for the Berkeley installation, but an English translation of the disembodied dialogue is available as a handout to museum guests.

September Song

My latest article for Fandor is about Uruguayan cinema, past and present, focusing particularly on three films from the South American country that have been made available by the Global Film Institute to watch on that site's streaming service: Whisky from 2004, Leo's Room from 2009, and A Useful Life, one of my favorite films seen in 2010. A film about the (fictional) closing of a cinematheque, A Useful Life has only grown more poignant in the 2 years since I first saw it, with the threat of mass closures of small cinemas and projectionist job loss looming ever larger on the horizon. The convenience of streaming services is a wonderful thing, especially for those who live in hinterlands where specialty cinema-going options simply do not exist. But I'm glad I live in a city which still cherishes diversity in its filmgoing options, and where this month I was able to once again watch A Useful Life in 35mm, this time on the Castro Theatre's giant, immersive screen.

Like many local cinephiles, I've been attending the Castro even more than usual in the past few weeks- at least considering that August has been a month with no film festivals there. I've made acquaintance with previously-unseen films like Phil Karlson's top-drawer noir Kansas City Confidential and John Huston's phenomenal boxing picture Fat City. I've revisited favorites like A Useful Life and Bruce Conner's explosive Crossroads. And those are just a few highlights I attended. The Castro kicked off its 90th 91st year of operation with its heaviest month of classic repertory in memory: dozens of golden-age Hollywood gems, with a smattering of foreign films and recent cinephile-bait. 3 of the films in the newest edition of the influential Sight & Sound Critics Top 10 announced this month have already played on this screen in August, and before the month ends the new #1 champ Vertigo screens- It plays in 70mm tonight through September 3, and there's no way I'm missing it.  In addition, a 70mm sneak-preview screening of Paul Thomas Anderson's new film The Master made a sell-out crowd of alert PTA fans happy on August 21- one day after the event was announced. If you missed it (like I did), you may be relieved to learn it was NOT the final chance to see Joaquin Phoenix in 70mm, as there is at least one Frisco Bay theatre with the capability to show the ultrasized format and that has it booked for a September 21st opening: Oakland's Grand Lake. And I wouldn't be surprised to see another Castro showing sometime in the future- though perhaps not for a few months or more.

If August's selections at Frisco's most beloved picture palace paid tribute to films from all nine decades of the Castro's history, the September calendar looks more to the recent past, present, and perhaps future, as it seems concocted to reach out to younger movie lovers with cult classics from their own lifespan. With the exceptions of the Vertigo booking (a holdover from August), a posthumous Ernest Borgnine double-bill (Bad Day At Black Rock & The Wild Bunch September 13), and a fascinating-sounding post-war, pre-Neuer Deutscher Film festival selection, every film playing the Castro next month was made after 1970. But it's not a return to the "bad old days" of giving underwhelming Hollywood franchise fodder (and the occasional quality mainstream movie) long runs  that edge interesting selections off the screen. No, the Castro is still programming creatively, like showing five square-offs between the films of Quentin Tarantino and the aforementioned Paul Thomas Anderson, in chronological order (reminiscent of a similar PTA vs. Wes Anderson series five years ago. Speaking of Wes, his latest Moonrise Kingdom plays in 35mm on Sep. 17-18).  There's also back-to-school Wednesdays, a brilliant pairing of new dance documentaries Sep. 25-26, and stints for a couple of festivals: Berlin & Beyond and the 3rd i South Asian Film Festival.

Yes, September brings festival season upon us, and if you check my updated sidebar to the right of this page, you'll see that I've linked to programs for no fewer than twelve Frisco Bay film festivals occurring in this one month. If you wanted to attend a festival every day in September, you'd only be stymied on the 10th, 11th and 12th of the month (and who knows what my detection systems might pick up on before then?) There's no way I can do justice to all of these festivals, but I have seen a few of the features they're bringing already. I saw the 3rd i opening night film The Island President, a worthy primer on the tiny Indian Ocean nation of the Maldives, and its intertwined political and environmental challenges, at Cinequest in San Jose. Also at Cinequest, I saw The Battle of the Queens, a slick Swiss documentary record of cow-on-cow face-offs that's more interesting than it sounds. This unusual Alpine rodeo showcase is part of Berlin & Beyond along with Alexander Sokurov's unpleasant but eye-popping Goethe adaptation Faust, the latest romantic fable entitled Baikonur by quirky German helmer Veit Helmer (who has failed to recapture much of the magic of his feature debut Tuvalu in 3 subsequent fiction-feature tries, in my book), and the Rainer Werner Fassbinder masterpiece Lola, Lola screened the Castro in a 35mm print at Berlin & Beyond 2 years ago, as a last-minute addendum. This time it plays digitally at the Goethe-Institute as part of a 4-film tribute to actor Mario Adorf, who will be on hand for premiere screenings of a "director's cut" version of The Tin Drum and of his newest film The Rhino and the Dragonfly. Perhaps the Berlin & Beyond film I'm most curious about is 4th in this Adorf tribute, which I referred to in the prior paragraph: Georg Tressler's 1959 Ship of the Dead. I know virtually nothing about West Germany's cinema prior to the earliest Herzog & Wenders films, so a chance to see this on 35mm is very appealing. Also of note: opening-night film Barbara by Christian Petzold was just chosen as Germany's selection for the next Foreign Language Film Oscar contest. 

Another geographically-themed festival, the Hong Kong Cinema series, looks like an excellent set of films for both newcomers and aficionados of what some believe is still the Chinese-language cinema's most vibrant production center. 1990s landmarks (Fruit Chan's Made In Hong Kong, Peter Chan's Comrades, Almost A Love Story and The Longest Nite, from producer Johnnie To's Milkyway Studio) share space with enticing new films like To's Romancing In Thin Air, which has largely been shunned by American and European festivals, and Ann Hui's highly acclaimed A Simple Life. The latter played briefly at local multiplexes earlier this year, but I know I'm not the only Hui fan who found out about it too late, so I'm very glad the San Francisco Film Society, which hosts this festival as part of its Fall Season, is bringing it back. Along with a Brent Green installation in the Mission District, Hong Kong Cinema launches a new year of Film Society programming. Major changes are afoot for the venerable institution these days, as a new executive director (Ted Hope) fills the shoes left by Bingham Ray and Graham Leggatt, at the same time that one of Leggatt's most visible legacies, a year-round screening venue at New People Cinema, has been abandoned with the non-renewal of the lease. Nonetheless, several fall events including Hong Kong Cinema will occur at the venue.

Cheryl Eddy's fall film preview article from last week's SF Bay Guardian names more upcoming festivals not yet listed on my site, as their line-ups have not been announced. Her preview also hints at some of the seriously copious goodies revealed in fall screening announcements from institutions like the Pacific Film Archive, and SF Cinematheque. But I'm particularly intrigued by what her article mentions that doesn't appear on the internet otherwise. For example, hints from Craig Baldwin's yet-to-be-announced Other Cinema program (Damon Packard? yes!) and word from Yerba Buena Center For The Arts that in addition to the masterpieces by Luis Buñuel, Jacques Rivette, and Chantal Akerman listed (among other tantalizers) on the venue's website, they'll be hosting a retrospective of films by Czech animation demigod Jan Švankmajer in December. If it's like the retro recently concluded in Chicago it will include each of his feature films from his 1988 masterpiece Alice to his 2010 release (never before screened on Frisco Bay) Surviving Life (Theory and Practice), as well as several of his best short films. But we'll see,

Eddy mentions a venue I've still yet to attend (to my shame): the Vortex Room, which from what I can tell has no webpage other than its Twitter and Facebook presences. (Am I wrong?), and notes that the Rafael Film Center is gearing up for the Mill Valley Film Festival but is otherwise relatively quiet in terms of repertory & special events (as opposed to day-to-day arthouse). And she drops hints about the Roxie that have only appeared on that venue's website since publication. Now we know the full, jaw-dropping line-up for their Not Necessarily Noir III film series (or should I count it as a festival?) devoted to crime and horror films made between 1968 and 2005- "neo-noirs" one might say, if one thought such a term could apply to such diverse fare as John Woo's Hard-Boiled, Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia, Jonathan Demme's Something Wild, Carl Franklin's One False Move and Brian De Palma's Body Double -to list some of the better-known titles I've seen before. Rarities abound in this awesome set of films- nearly all sourced from 35mm prints.

What she must not have known before her article was put to press is that the touring series of 35mm prints of films from Japan's master animator Hayao Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli cohort, which has been making its way around the country all year, finally visits Frisco Bay in September. Starting September 7th, the Bridge Theatre plays 12 of these films over the course of a week- actually 13 prints, as the truly perfect My Neighbor Totoro will screen in both English-subtitled and English-dubbed prints on Sep. 8. Then, the California Theatre in Berkeley screens 11 of the films, as well as two others, between September 14th and 26th.  All nine of the Miyazaki-directed films, as well as Isao Takahata's Only Yesterday and Hiroyuki Morita's The Cat Returns screen at both venues. Takahata's My Neighbors the Yamadas shows only at the Bridge, on September 13, and his Pom Poko and Yoshifumi Kondo's Whisper of the Heart show only at the California Theatre, on the 25th & 26th respectively. The Bridge and the California are my favorite Landmark theatres in San Francisco and the East Bay, and knowing that the Landmark chain is planning to convert its theatres to digital projection only makes me wonder if this series may be a last hurrah for 35mm projectors at these venues. I hope not, but I plan to soak in as much of the series as I can on one side of the bay or the other.

One last recommendation before September arrives: if like me you are a fan of the films of Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul you must take advantage of the opportunity  to see his installation Phantoms of Nabua at the Asian Art Museum. Made during the process leading up to his completion of his Cannes top prize-winning film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, this single-channel work is just as mysterious, beautiful, and medium-specific as any of his feature films. It has been streamed online, and may still be available to view that way, but it really demands to be seen in installation form, where the figures are life-sized and approximately level to the viewer.  Several friends and acquaintances, including at least one who had never encountered an Apichatpong work before, have told me of being so transfixed they watched the approximately 9-minute piece over and over several times before moving on to another part of the museum. It's such an important work that it inspired the Asian Art Museum name of its contemporary Asian art exhibit: Phantoms of Asia. Unfortunately the exhibit must come down after September 2nd, but fortunately the museum is free of charge on that day, as it is on the first Sunday of every month. I plan to go back myself. See you there?

Surrogate Valentine

As promised in my previous post, a video of me discssing Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives on the new cinema program "Look Of The Week" was posted on Friday. Check it out and tell me what you think. What I didn't know at the time was, the film would be extended for at least another week in San Francisco; it currently screens at the Presidio Theatre in the Marina. Meanwhile, the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival is well under way. I'll be heading to the Pacific Film Archive this evening to attend the award-winning Vietnamese film Bi, Don't Be Afraid, preceded by CAAM director Stephen Gong's discussion with Yunte Huang, author of a fascinating new cultural history/biography of Chang Apana, the real-life inspiration for the Charlie Chan character. A screening of a rare 35mm print of the 1937 film (not discussed in the book, so I'm excited to hear Huang's comments) Charlie Chan At The Olympics is the centerpiece of that talk.


The SFIAAFF is, quite commendably, probably the most conscientious of all Frisco Bay festivals when it comes to placing information about screening formats in their program guide, but there are almost inevitably a few changes that occur after the guide is printed. The Film On Film Foundation calendar has the most up-to-date information on which SFIAAFF (and other locally screening) films are projected on film rather than video. A good 35mm print can help make a mediocre film worth watching, as I remembered Friday night when I watched When Love Comes Friday at the Clay. Although I wouldn't advocate a festival itinerary that totally avoids digital screenings, as that would mean missing out on the terrific festival closer Surrogate Valentine, which would be a shame. It's my favorite of the (admittedly few compared to, say, Michael Hawley) SFIAAFF selctions I've seen so far.

Surrogate Vaentine is named after a song by local acoustic rock up-and-comer Goh Nakamura, who plays an up-and-coming acoustic rocker and guitar teacher named Goh in the movie. The meta-cinematic layering doesn't end there though, as the on-screen Goh is hired to play a "technical consultant" on a feature film made from a friend's screenplay, loosely based on incidents from his own life. Initially, he's asked to teach guitar-playing basics to the film's star, a well-known TV actor named Danny Turner (played by Chad Stoops, making his feature film debut). It soon becomes apparent that Danny is less interested in music lessons than in hanging out and finding clues to playing his Goh-inspired character. He accompanies the performer on a short West Coast tour, getting recognized everywhere for his hospital-soap character, and playing over-eager wingman when he recognizes Goh's attraction to a former flame met on the road.

The morass of plot detail I just recounted only scratches the surface, yet may obscure the fact that, though Surrogate Valentine never lacks a dramatic motor, it's really not a plot-heavy film, but a modern (musical) comedy and a character portrait. As writer-director Dave Boyle plays it out in its brisk 75 minute running time, there's nothing arch about the multi-leveled biographical blurring; rather the stark contrast between Goh and his would-be doppelgänger provides opportunities for a steady stream of satirical humor and pathos. Stoops makes Danny an ingratiating figure as if on excursion from a Todd Phillips bro-fest, while Nakamura portrays himself as the kind of almost stereotypically sensitive, aloof but endearing hipster seen on San Francisco streets more commonly than on San Francisco screens. His romantic interest Rachel (played by Lynn Chen of Saving Face and White On Rice, the latter also directed by Boyle) stands out as the best of a mostly-excellent supporting cast. Goh's world includes the orbits of many varieties of satellites -- from starstruck groupies to aging ex-rockers to the friends who "knew you back when".

Despite authentic location shooting (in Seattle, San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles), it's easy to lose track of exactly what leg of the physical journey the wandering characters are on at a given moment, but any such confusion surely mirrors the discombobulation a touring musician experiences while on the road. The essence of the film comes not from its road-movie exoskeleton but from the interior journeys of Goh and Danny, though this is expressed without resorting to the screenwriter-guru-approved clichés. The open ending makes for a more aesthetically satisfying conclusion than found in a typical studio product. The penultimate shot, a close-up of Goh foregrounded against an out-of-focus but entirely static Portrero Hill panorama, provides an example of digital cinematography underlining an emotional state perhaps even more precisely than 35mm film stock could. Ultimately Surrogate Valentine earns more heft through its understatement than one might expect from a fun comedy. And its oblique, never finger-wagging, underlying critique of the shameful Hollywood trend of erasing Asian faces from the stories it wants to repurpose as mass-market entertainments comes off as more effective than a hundred disproportionately bilious critical pans of the Last Airbender could ever be.

On The Air

Yesterday I went to San Jose, where I taped a segment for a new film discussion series hosted by Sara Vizcarrondo of Box Office Magazine and Rotten Tomatoes. Honored to follow in the footsteps of the terrific Slant Magazine critic Fernando F. Croce, who discussed the Hollywood films of Fritz Lang on the first episode of the series, I was recruited to speak about Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul, presumably because I can pronounce his name without butchering it (having taught English in Chiang Mai for a year and a half has resume applications after all!) I watched his new film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives twice at the Kabuki last Friday in preparation, and hope to see it again at least once more before it departs from the San Francisco Film Society Screen this Thursday. It will open for a week at the Elmwood Theatre in Berkeley on Friday. I don't want to give away anything I might have mentioned on the program, but I will say this: if you haven't already, you should see Uncle Boonmee too! Watching this on a computer or even a large television screen is simply not going to do justice to Apichatpong's visual strategies, which I feel are so important to the film as a whole.

Another guest interviewd by Vizcarrondo on this episode was local filmmaker Jarrod Whaley, whose new picture The Glass Slipper is part of San Jose's Cinequest Film Festival line-up this year; it plays March 9th and again on March 12th. I have not yet seen The Glass Slipper, but I was impressed by Whaley's feature-length debut Hell Is Other People, as I wrote last year. The episode with Whaley and I in it should be edited and posted by the end of the week; keep an eye on my Twitter feed for a link as soon as it's ready for viewing.

I'm actually not too familiar with much of this year's Cinequest program, in fact, but there are a couple of noteworthy films I've seen that will be playing the last few days of fest. F. W. Murnau's silent Nosferatu, of course, is always a treat on the big screen, and sure to be particularly so at the California Theatre March 11 with Dennis James performing at the organ to a color tinted 35mm print. I know I'm not the only one to feel that Nosferatu is particularly necessary in today's vampire movie landscape; people need to be reminded to feel frightened when they encounter the undead, not lustful.

Another Cinequest film I've had a chance to preview is Raavanan starring India's most famous actres Aishwara Ray Bachchan. She plays Ragini, the wife of a law enforcement official named Dev (played by Prithviraj) who falls into the clutches of his arch-nemesis Veera (played by Vikram), who takes her as a hostage while he mounts a popular insurrection against the government authorities. Of course Ragnini develops a Stockholm-Syndrome-like attachment to her rugged and powerful captor, which raises the stakes on the inevitable confrontation between law-maker and law-breaker. Bound by conventions of Indian popular cinema (plenty of action, musical numbers that stand in for love scenes, an anything-goes approach to filming technique, etc.), Raavanan nonetheless surprised me on more than one occasion, thanks to its toying with audience sympathies for its various characters. It helped that, if I had learned its classical source material prior to viewing, I had forgotten it (i.e., don't look it up unless you're completely unfamiliar with ancient Indian literature or else don't mind missing out on the surprises I was pleased to experience.)

After playing Cinequest, Raavanan will also play at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, which opens this Thursday with a screening of West Is West. After 29 years of operations, more than a decade of it under the sure stewardship of former festival director Chi-hui Yang, the programming team for the SFIAAFF now has new faces of leadership in Masashi Niwano and Christine Kwon, who have brought together a set of 108 films and videos, most of them from young Asian and Asian American filmmakers. Though the lineup may include fewer "known-quantity" directors than I've come to espect from this festival, there are a number of new films by relatively established artists that I've admired, leading off with China's critically-acclaimed master Jia Zhang-Ke, whose controversial I Wish I Knew plays twice at the festival, on March 12th at the Kabuki and on the 15th at the Pacific Film Archive. Other filmmakers I'm personally excited for the opportunity to follow are Zhang Lu, whose Grain In Ear impressed me at the 2006 SFIAAFF, and Chang Tso-Chi, whose The Best Of Times was a favorite at the 2003 San Francisco International Film Festival. Their new films are Dooman River and When Love Comes, respectively. Add in new documentaries on Anna May Wong and Mongolian film history, and archival screenings of Charlie Chan At The Olympics (with author Yunte Huang on hand to contextualize that film's complex racial issues) and Nonzee Nimibutr's 1999 hit Nang Nak (the first Thai film I ever saw, and part of a three-film focus on South-East Asian horror), and there's plenty of attractions to fill a film lover's viewing schedule.

The festival's closing night selection should appeal not only to cinephiles but to Frisco Bay's many indie music enthusiasts. It's called Surrogate Valentine, and it's a comedy about a musician performing in coffee houses and other small West Coast venues, and though I must admit I had low expectations going into the press screening (perhaps leftover from the bland taste I had in my mouth from the last SFIAAFF gala presentation I saw, last year's opening night film Today's Special), these were very pleasantly upended. I will publish a full review of Surrogate Valentine after a press embargo lifts this Saturday, when it makes its world premiere at the South By Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, but for now I'll just recommend it. It plays the last SFIAAFF night in San Francisco on March 17th, and the festival's last day in San Jose on March 20.

Fans of Surrogate Valentine's star Goh Nakamura who are intrigued by his prominence in one of the highlighted features might find themselves checking out other SFIAAFF programs as well. Music and film are often seen as competing forms of entertainment, but Frisco Bay's festivals have become saavy about finding ways to involve passionate seekers of out-of-the-ordinary music in their events. In a particularly brilliant move, the San Francisco International Film Festival has announced (among a few other early SFIFF program indications) that the Castro Theatre stage will play host to the Tindersticks on May 2nd, where the group will perform live under a screen showing excerpts from six of the Claire Denis films they've provided the musical score to. This makes attendance at the Pacific Film Archive's current Denis retrospective all the more imperative as preparation for this one-of-a-kind film/music event. Of the six films to be excerpted for this performance, only White Material has already had its PFA screening. Nénette et Boni plays March 25, Trouble Every Day on April 2nd, L'Intrus on April 8th & 9th, Friday Night on April 15, and 35 Shots of Rum on April 16th.

It wasn't so long ago that I considered myself much more of a music aficionado than a cinephile myself. The first film I tried to buy a ticket for at the SFIFF was Iara Lee's electronic music documentary, Modulations. It was sold out, and I ended up seeing it during its theatrical run, and waiting another year before actually attending SFIFF. I've recently been reminded that my first excursions to truly independent movie theatres the Red Vic and the Roxie were facilitated by frequent ticket giveaways from my favorite radio station I've ever regularly listened to, 90.3 KUSF-FM. Without my interest in keeping on top of exciting independent music curated by the KUSF DJs, I might never have gotten into the habit of attending these alternative screening venues. Even after my attention to music became eclipsed by my attention to movies, I became a loyal listener to the Movie Magazine International radio program produced by Monica Sullivan out of the station. It was a great way to keep on top of festivals, revivals, new releases, etc. And yes, they had ticket giveaways on that weekly program as well.

In case you haven't heard about the University of San Francisco's decision to sell off the 90.3 frequency earlier this year, here's a good primer. At the end of last month, I was one of many who sent a letter to the Federal Communcations Commission in Washington, D.C., asking that they deny the premature transfer of the frequency the public had entrusted the University to operate in the interest of the local community (which KUSF had, with great panache, as it hosted over a dozen foreign-language broadcasts and partnered with countless local businesses and non-profit organizations to get the word out on important activities.) While KUSF supporters wait to hear what will happen next on the legal front, they continue to rally support for their cause by organizing events to benefit the cost of fighting the transfer. Tomorrow night, a special screening of the punk rock documentary A History Lesson, part 1 will be held at the 9th Street Independent Film Center, and this Saturday at midnight, a screening of a surprise film (perhaps you can figure it out from this blurb) will be presented at the Red Vic (whose March and April calendars are as strong as any two months at that venue as I can remember). Proceeds from both screenings will go to the Save KUSF campaign. Of course, if you can't make it to either screening, the fight to keep San Francisco airwaves locally-controlled in the face of media consolidation can also be aided with a direct donation.

No Day Off and the Jeonju Digital Project

Eric Khoo's No Day Off introduces us to Siti, a 24-year-old woman who uproots herself from her home in Sulawesi to attend a two-month training institute on another Indonesian island, so that she can become a live-in maid in one of the world's per capita richest countries, the city-state Singapore. She leaves behind a husband, a new baby and a mountain of debt, which she hopes she will be able to pay off by sending her salary home to the family. However, Siti's debts will grow before they shrink, as the recruiter, trainer and placement service demand such a large cut of her first year's worth of paychecks, that she'd barely be able to afford busfare downtown, even if she did have a maid's day off. As the title indicates, she doesn't; her entire existence is shown to be structured for the convenience and whim of the three distinct families she slaves for over the course of this 39-minute video work.

We catch nothing more than fragmentary glimpses of these employers, as the camera is always trained either on Siti or on the houses and objects she must attend to. The Singaporeans in the film are for us no more than disembodied voices, making demands on or insulting Siti in a language she barely understands. The first family is English-speaking and imperiously wealthy; a bottle of wine costs them more than their maid's salary. As alienating and confining as their mansion must feel to Siti, at least she doesn't have to subsist on unfinished scraps from their dirty dishes, as she does at her second set of employers, a financially struggling Chinese-speaking family that eventually cannot afford to pay her at all. Siti's third and final placement is in the home of a terminally ill father and his often-absent daughter. By far the most benign of the three employers, this household speaks a language Siti can comprehend (presumably Bahasa Melayu, one of Singapore's four official languages, and which I understand is similar, if not essentially identical, to the lingua franca of neighboring Indonesia.) A genuine bond is developed between the maid and the dying man, but it only makes more heartbreaking the moment when Siti must stand by emotionless as the daughter mourns her loss.

No Day Off takes on aspects of a polemic, evidenced by Khoo's insertion of title cards bearing data on the proliferation of the maltreatment of Singaporean immigrant maids between certain segments of the narrative. But, because of the matter-of-fact, diaristic storytelling (each scene is marked by a timestamp indicating how many days Siti has been away from her home and son) it's a remarkably humane one, not a surprise from the director of the lovely Be With Me. Siti's story becomes the empathetic stand-in for all the situations aggregated into the data Khoo periodically presents.

Khoo's short is one of thirty-six thus far commissioned by South Korea's Jeonju Film Festival, each a digital "film" created on a low budget by a one of the modern era's most intriguing filmmakers. The new batch of commissions premieres in Jeonju in April, and includes shorts by Jean-Marie Straub, Claire Denis (who is getting a full retrospective at the Pacific Film Archive next month), and José Luis Guerín. All thirty-three of the other shorts commissioned over the past eleven years of the festival have been screening at the Yerba Buena Center For The Arts screening room over the past week or so. No Day Off plays this Saturday at 7PM, along with shorts by Thailand's Pen-ek Ratanaruang (Last Life in the Universe, Nymph) and Kazakhistan's Darezhan Omirbaev (Kairat, Kardiogram). Later in the weekend there will be entries by Pedro Costa, Eugène Green, Hong Sangsoo, and six other acclaimed filmmakers.

Unlike my friend Adam Hartzell, I haven't been able to attend each and every one of these screenings, but I have seen a sampling, including a rare few that have screened locally before this year. Hong's Jeonju-set Lost in the Mountains was seen at last spring's San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, and feels connected to the three vignettes that make up his latest feature Oki's Movie (I caught this excellent Hong film in Toronto, and hope it appears soon at a Frisco Bay festival or other venue). The version of Shinya Tsukamoto's Haze that screened Thursday night as part of the YBCA series is a condensed (though hardly less intentionally grueling) version of the hour-long existential horror movie that was presented here by IndieFest back in 2006. Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Worldy Desires screened at YBCA a couple years ago as well, and I was very pleased to be able to revisit it in anticipation of the week-long release of Apichatpong's outstanding, entrancing new feature Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives at the San Francisco Film Society's dedicated screen at the Kabuki theatre, surely this season's theatrical release most eagerly awaited by the cinephiles in my circles. Worldly Desires takes place on a film set using day-for-night technique in the jungle, just as Uncle Boonmee uses day-for-night filters to achieve a sense of the eternal.

What the Jeonju project provides its filmmakers with is a kind of carte blanche they might have trouble obtaining in the increasingly commercialized world of film financing. The results are as varied as the directors themselves, but what they all surely have in common is that they represent a distillation of the fundamental desires each harbors as an image-maker. In the case of Eric Khoo, and perhaps also of James Benning, whose Pig Iron is a compelling single-shot portrait of the back end of a German steel factory, a socio-political point can be made, whether about immigrant labor or the environmental impact of our species' industrial processes. In the case of Apichatpong, or of Tsai Ming-Liang, whose A Conversation With God is a documentary compilation of Tawianese religious rituals and urban landscapes, the opportunity to purposefully create low-budget video work helps put into relief the filmmaker's approach to 35mm feature filmmaking. In all cases, these filmmakers' works are scarcely if ever shown here on Frisco Bay, which makes YBCA's initiative in showcasing the Jeonju Digital Project a real boon for local cinemagoers.

Season of Light

It's truly Winter on Frisco Bay now, with temperatures to prove it. What better time to spend inside a movie theatre, being warmed by the heat of artistic achievement? Though it may be tougher to find time for culture in a December packed with holiday parties and shopping trips, the potential psychological and, dare I say, spiritual rewards, of seeing a good or great movie seem to be ramped up at this time of year. Why else do so many film companies release so many of the films they think will resonate with adult audiences during this season? (So they can position their films for critics' top tens and Academy Awards, you say? Don't be such a Scrooge!) This week Frisco Bay hosts at least two screenings likely to have a profound mood-altering effect on religious and secular cinephiles alike. I mentioned both in my last post but they're worth repeating. There's Thursday's screening of Carl Dreyer's 1928 The Passion of Joan Of Arc at the glorious Paramount, with a 22-piece orchestra and full chorus performing Richard Einhorn's Voices of Light composition as underscore. Seeing the trial of the Maid of Orleans enacted (almost entirely in facial close-ups) on such a large screen with such glorious music accompanying is likely to be the cultural highlight of the month (if not year) for anyone no matter what their religious affiliation, or lack thereof. Then on Saturday the Rafael Film Center screens Apichatpong Weerasethakul's very spiritually-attuned new film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives as part of a week-long International Buddhist Film Festival Showcase.

I haven't seen any of the other selections in the Rafael program of Buddhist-themed films (though I should note that the documentary Saint Misbehavin': the Wavy Gravy Movie will begin a week-long engagement at the Red Vic this Friday, before it screens at the Rafael on Sunday), but I have previewed DVD screener copies of two hour-long films playing together as part of the International Buddhist Film Festival's December 9-19 stint at the Yerba Buena Center For The Arts. Titled The Inland Sea and Dream Window: Reflections on the Japanese Garden, these two Nipponophile documentaries from the early 1990s will be presented in rare 35mm prints, and the cinematographer for The Inland Sea, Hiro Narita (who also shot Never Cry Wolf and La Mission among many other titles) will be present at the films' December 12 pairing.

The Inland Sea ties nicely into the Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives screening because the latter film's director Apichatpong has reportedly been planning to follow his Cannes prize-winning film with a project on Donald Richie, who narrates and briefly appears in The Inland Sea, quite appropriately since he wrote the 1971 travel memoir upon which it was based. Richie is of course best known to cinephiles for his writings on Japanese film, but in fact his writing on the country he's lived in since the late 1940s investigates more than just its cinema. The Inland Sea, both in book and film form, seeks a traditional Japan fading from view in the latter part of the 20th century, by journeying between the coastal towns bordering the Seto Inland Sea that separates the islands of Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu. One gets a good sense of the subject and tone of the documentary from Vincent Canby's New York Times review from 1991. But perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the film is how it straddles the line between time capsule and period piece. Richie wrote the following for a 1993 reprinting of the memoir:

It has now been over twenty years since The Inland Sea was first published, and nearly thirty since I began the journals on which it is based. During this time the area has much changed. Last year, when the book was made into a film, the crew could no longer follow all of my original route since large portions of it were now unrecognizably developed.

Yet, they discovered that by jumping one island over, as it were, they could parallel my journey of three decades before; they could find places where, mirroring the words of my text, the past had not vanished, not quite. The Inland Sea I wrote about yet exists--it is there, if you know where to look.

I do wonder if the same could be said today, now that nearly another twenty years have passed.

Both The Inland Sea and suitably titled Dream Window: Reflections On The Japanese Garden are enriched by a musical score from 20th century Japan's arguably greatest composer, Toru Takemitsu, who wrote music for films by Nagisa Oshima, Masaki Kobayashi, Masahiro Shinoda, Shohei Imamura, Akira Kurosawa (though not for any of the Kurosawa/Toshiro Mifune collaborations, like the seven playing the VIZ over the holidays), and many other directors before his 1996 death. His contribution to Dream Window is much stronger than to The Inland Sea, however. Not only is there more music, featured more prominently, but Takemitsu is interviewed on camera, and even the title Dream Window was taken from the title of one of his serialist compositions. Any Takemitsu fan should consider this film a must-watch; it's especially enlightening to be able to hear the man speak about the affinity he feels between music composition and gardens, and then hear a passage from one of his Messaien-influenced pieces, while an image from the garden at Sai-Hochi appears on screen.

Perhaps Toru Takemitsu's most fruitful if not frequent composer/director relationship was the one he had with Hiroshi Teshigahara, director of Woman In The Dunes, Antonio Gaudí, and Rikyu as well as other films Takmitsu scored. Teshigahara, too, appears prominently in Dream Window: Reflections On The Japanese Garden, not in the role of film director but as grand master of his father's Sogetsu school of Ikebana (flower arranging), and as a budding outdoor garden designer as well. Since the documentary was released between Teshigahara's final two films Rikyu and Basara: Princess Goh, the only two jidai-geki (period films) the multitalented artist made in his career, it's particularly interesting to hear him advise, "we have to think of what we can create for today's world. It would be pointless just to copy what went before."

Ultimately both The Inland Sea and Dream Window are likely to be satisfying viewing for anyone with a natural interest in Japanese culture, with added excitement for cinephiles curious to see legendary figures associated with Japanese cinema (Richie, Takemitsu, Teshigahara) speaking of matters separate from their involvement in film. They certainly make sense paired together (perhaps this was first done in a 1993 issue of the Buddhism journal Tricycle) by the International Buddhist Film Festival. Though neither film addresses Buddhism in a sustained and direct way (Shintoism is in fact more prominently dealt with in The Inland Sea), they both invite a kind of contemplative observational style that may appeal to Buddhist viewers, especially those who remember that the festival programmed Thomas Riedelsheimer's documentary on artist Andy Goldsworthy Rivers And Tides at a previous event. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Riedelsheimer had encountered Dream Window in particular before developing the rhythms he employed in that film.

Before I sign off, let me point out that Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is equally devoted to the sacred and the profane in December, as in addition to their Buddhist film series, the venue is also hosting a devious horror film series called Go To Hell For the Holidays From December 2-18. Dennis Harvey has previewed most of the titles, including Wolf Creek (the Australian film that was released on Christmas Day 2005 in the US). The only selection I've seen myself is the Thai film about the cannibalistic-minded noodle vendor, The Meat Grinder. I'll simply say it was just as gory and twice as atmospheric as I expected it to be.

In-fest-ed

If quantity is a measure of riches we live in a Golden Age of film festivals. According to Mark Cousins, writing in last year's Film Festival Yearbook 1: the Festival Circuit, "the film festival regulation body FIAPF (Federation Internationale des Associations de Producteurs de Film) reckons there are 700 of them in total, the New York Times reckons there are over 1,000. The numbers have rocketed in the last decade." Knowing how many film festivals occur here over the course of a year, and how many other places in the world are increasing their own film festival counts, both the FIAPF and NYT numbers seem grossly outdated or otherwise underrepresentative. It seems I learn about a new festival somewhere in the world at least once or twice a month, and I'm not necessarily pricking my ears for such news (most recently I learned of new festivals in Luang Prabang, Laos and Oaxaca, Mexico), unless it concerns festivals sprouting here on Frisco Bay.

And sprout they do, in defiance of advice from protectors of cinema like Simon Field and James Quandt, who in an interview in another recent publication in the new field of film festival studies, dekalog 3: On Film Festivals, agree that "generally...festivals should be in anonymous cities with few distractions," something that San Francisco has never been accused of being. The many local film festivals (I count at least eighteen occurring here right now, or in the next six weeks, alone!) often interact with these "distractions" by involving them- integrating cinema screenings with live music performances, museum exhibits, book readings, etc. Perhaps most of the festivals that occur here don't qualify under the criteria Field and Quandt had in mind during that moment of their interview, as unlike a Cannes or a Sundance, they generally don't compete for red carpet world premieres of the most critically and/or commercially anticipated films on the calendar, functioning as glittery news events with the entire world of cinephilia eagerly observing from afar. Instead, they exist as one form or another of "audience festival", that is, the kind of festival that exists in order to provide paying audiences with opportunities to see films and meet filmmakers they otherwise would not be able to see or meet. As long as there are audiences looking for films they wouldn't ordinarily run across at the multiplex or elsewhere, these audience festivals will remain an important matching service.

Currently running are the 14th Annual Arab Film Festival, the 9th San Francisco Documentary Festival, the 17th Silicon Valley Jewish Film Festival, the 34th(!!) Marin County Italian Film Festival, and the Artists' Television Access Film and Video Festival, which ends tonight with Kerry Laitala's dazzling Afterimage: the Flicker of Life. Opening tonight are the Petaluma International Film Festival, the United Nations Association Film Festival in Palo Alto, and here in Frisco proper, the Berlin & Beyond festival of German-language films, previewed extensively at the Evening Class this year as it moves to October from its traditional slot in January, and the first of four geographically-centered showcases being put on by the San Francisco Film Society, Taiwan Film Days.

After shining its key light on Taiwan, the SFFS brings French Cinema Now to the Embarcadero Cinema October 28-November 3, closing with two screenings of the eagerly-awaited new film from Abbas Kiarostami, Certified Copy. Then they turn attention to locally-produced filmmaking at Cinema By The Bay at the Roxie November 5-8; this event marks the first time any motion picture by the South Bay's Alejandro Adams, in this case his recent Babnik, will be publicly screened here in San Francisco. New Italian Cinema is the Film Society's longest-standing autumn companion to its San Francisco International Film Festival in April, and it runs at the Embarcadero on November 14-21, right on the heels of a methodologically-, rather than geographically-organized event, the SF International Animation Festival.

The 3rd i South Asian International Film Festival runs November 3-7 and includes a Castro Theatre 35mm screening of the Bimal Roy classic Madhumati (pictured in the topmost image in this post), featuring a screenplay by Ritwik Ghatak. Then on November 5-13 there's the American Indian Film Festival, the longest-running such showcase of its kind and one that is frequently overlooked by local cinephiles (including myself- I regretfully have never been). Frank Lee brings his Chinese American Film Festival back to the 4-Star Theatre November 17-23. That does it for festivals within the San Francisco city limits, for now. More are certain to be announced in the coming weeks, so check my sidebar or my twitter feed, both of which I update more frequently than I actually post.

Upcoming festivals I'm aware of coming to other Frisco Bay counties include the Poppy Jaspar Short Film Festival November 12-14, and the return of the prodigal International Buddhist Film Festival to the region after a five-year absence. It lands at the Rafael Film Center in Marin (which incidentally just played host to the 33rd Mill Valley Film Festival), and it includes the Frisco Bay premiere of one of the most talked-about films of the current year, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives, which won the top prize at the last Cannes Film Festival. I was lucky to be able to see the film at the Toronto International Film Festival last month, but as a confirmed Apichatpong fan, there's no question whether or not I want to see it again as soon as I can. The Rafael's website is promoting this screening as the "US West Coast premiere", though it's placement in Los Angeles's AFI Fest contradicts that claim. Nonetheless, I'm excited that the Buddhist Film Festival is likely to bring attention to the film from outside the usual cinephile quarters. The festival will also have a stint at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts here in Frisco December 9-19, but there's no word yet on which titles will be available at that venue as well.

Whew!

That's a lot of festivals, but of course festivals make up only a part of what makes Frisco Bay such a special place for cinema-going. There's also theatrical releases of films that don't always get a fair shake in other markets, and a strong repertory film scene. Some highlights from the latter:

The Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto has revealed its programming plans for the rest of 2010; it's a typically strong set of Hollywood classics of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, featuring a diverse set of actors and directors. This season they're holding a special focus on films noir; the most popular of revived genres blackens the Stanford screen with double-bills every Thursday and Friday until December 10th. There's also a few noirs scattered into the Saturday through Monday programs, including a December 4-6 stand of Eddie Muller's favorite noir In A Lonely Place. Outside the noir line-up I'd heartily recommend the November 6-8 pairing of two of my favorite, sometime overlooked Preston Sturges comedies the Great McGinty and Hail the Conquering Hero, and the December 16-17 placement of two films (Charulata and Mahanagar) from one of the few foreign-language filmmakers the Stanford favors, India's Satyajit Ray.

The Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley also has a brand new calendar to show off; it includes continuations of its recent big series on Italian Neorealism and Bay Area Alternative Film & Video. These are joined by: a Burt Lancaster series that provides big-screen opportunities to see the hunky star as directed by Carol Reed, Jules Dassin, John Cassavetes, Frank Perry, and others. By a weekend with Kelly Reichardt in conversation with critic B. Ruby Rich, which allows us to catch up with her entire filmography in preparation for the eventual (who knows quite when, as of yet) Frisco Bay release of her stellar Meek's Cutoff, another film I was able to catch in Toronto. And by rare screenings of the legendary Flaming Creatures, of Every Man For Himself (for my money Jean-Luc Godard's best film from the last 35 years), and more. But for many cinephiles the pièce de résistance of the PFA's November-December calendar will be the all-but-complete Carl Theodor Dreyer retrospective including a PFA-presented screening of the Passion of Joan of Arc in Frisco Bay's grandest movie palace, the Paramount. All of Dreyer's other silent films will be shown at the PFA with Judith Rosenberg accompanying on piano. Six of his sound films with screen there too, joined by two films he did not direct but which he certainly affected in a major way; Lars Von Trier's 1987 television work Medea, made from a previously unrealized Dreyer script, and the Passion Of Joan of Arc-inspired Vivre Sa Vie (for my money Jean-Luc Godard's best film, period.)

Between the PFA's Dreyer series, its December 5 screening of Rossellini's Voyage in Italy, and the Ozu films recently brought to the VIZ Cinema (as i mentioned in my previous post), nearly all of the film titles mentioned in Nathaniel Dorsky's slender but splendid book Devotional Cinema will have screened in a Frisco Bay cinema this year. Just in time for an SFMOMA showing of Dorsky's four most recent films (the same four that played last month in Toronto to great acclaim) on December 16th. The rest of 2010 at the musuem provides only a few other opportunities for film viewing there, but each of these few seems worth taking. Next Thursday's double-bill of witch films by George Romero and Dario Argento is the ideal way to cinematically ring in Hallowe'en, especially for only $3 per ticket. Christmas holidays get more obliquely celebrated with a pair of Red & White-themed screenings of French films directed by Albert Lamorisse and Hou Hsiao-Hsien. I'm not sure what holiday the November 18 SFMOMA program Bay Area Ecstatic might be observing, if any, but it promises to be one of the most compelling of the season. I say this not because the films were selected by my friend Brecht Andersch, with whom I've been collaborating on an investigation of Christoper Maclaine's seminal The End (have you seen the latest installment of our project yet?), but because he's selected some great and/or rarely seen films. Perhaps my favorite Kenneth Anger film Invocation of My Demon Brother and perhaps my favorite Bruce Conner film Looking For Mushrooms (contrary to prior expectations, the superior short version which prompted a correspondence between Conner and John Lennon will be screened) will be joined by Larry Jordan's mysterious Triptych In Four Parts and Timoleon Wilkins's The Crossing, which I've only seen once apiece, and four other films I've never seen at all. Mark your calendars and tell your friends!

A number of first-run theatres have realized that an occasional repertory film on their program adds visibility to their venue, and may even be able to turn a profit on its own merit. The Cerrito, the Alameda Theatre and the UA Berkeley have evening screenings; I recently attended Luc Besson's the Professional at the latter, and though I didn't much like the film, I was impressed with the size of the audience for a 35mm print of a 1994 action movie on a Thursday night. Other theatres opt for the midnight movie route; Camera Cinemas in the South Bay has a midnight series I was just recently made aware of, and of course the Rocky Horror Picture Show couldn't celebrate its 35th Halloween without screenings in local Landmark Theatres this weekend and next. And the Piedmont Theatre in Oakland has just jumped on board the modern midnight movie phenomenon the Room, now showing there every third Saturday of the month.

Of course the first Frisco Bay venue to host regular screenings of the Room was the Red Vic, which still plays the bizarre cult object on the last Saturday of every month, including October 30th. Come in costume (you can do better than Patton Oswalt can't you?) The Red Vic has a new calendar out too. Zombie action movie Planet Terror plays Halloween and the day after. This is the first time I've noticed a theatrical booking for the Robert Rodriguez half of Grindhouse on its own- his latest film Machete, which germinated in that 2007 extravaganza, plays Dec. 10-11. Werner Herzog's Aguirre: Wrath of God seems an ideal way to end Thanksgiving weekend. And the second half of December becomes almost pure repertory, with screenings of Breathless, Triplets of Belleville, the Seven Samurai, and more.

The Roxie celebrates Halloween with three events: a double bill of 1950s horror/sci-fi October 29, another double-bill the next day featuring archive prints of David Cronenberg's the Brood and the Hammer studio's Corruption, and a third on Halloween night consisting of two films by director Alex Cox -- who will be present at the screenings! (and at the Rafael Film Center the following night). November 19 at the Roxie brings a "punk rock double bill" of the extremely rare Surf II and Times Square. There's also an intriguing animation showcase November 19-25, and on November 20th, a trio of After-School Specials presented by Jesse Ficks of MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS.

Ficks also has events upcoming at his usual venue, the Castro Theatre, again on Halloween where he brings an afternoon matinee of Creepy Disney films. He's also engineered a five-film marathon of robot movies November 20th. The Castro's in-house programming staff have scheduled a Ray Bradbury adaptation double-bill October 29th. They've also brought back Club Foot Orchestra to play live scores to silent movies on November 14th- when I attended their performance of Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu a couple years ago, the inventiveness of their music almost made up for the fact that they sourced their images from truly lousy digital prints. Here's hoping for a better presentation this time around. I'm more (cautiously) optimistic about the San Francisco Film Society's December 14 pairing of a silent film I've never seen before (Mauritz Stiller's Sir Arne's Treasure) with a musical act I first saw perform in a quiet coffeehouse in 1996, the Mountain Goats. It's hard to imagine how such a lyric-focused musician as Mountain Goats frontman John Darnelle will translate his musical skills which work so well in an intimate venue (whether a coffeehouse or a small nightclub like the Independent) to the grand Castro stage, working in concert with a reputed masterpiece like Sir Arne's Treasure. Which is why I just have to see and hear it for myself!