The Assassin (2015)

Screen capture from trailer.

WHO: The legendary Hou Hsiao-Hsien directed and co-produced this film from a screenplay he co-wrote with Xie Hai Meng, Zhong Acheng and his longtime collaborator Chu Tien-Wen.

WHAT: Although I was able to view Hou's first feature since 2007's Flight of the Red Balloon at a Mill Valley Film Festival-sponsored press screening, I'm not supposed to provide more than a brief "capsule" review until its commercial run a week and a half from now. Just as well, as I'd need at least one more viewing to feel comfortable talking about it in any depth. For now I'll just call it a visually sumptuous, anti-kung fu film that verges closer to "avant-garde" than anything else Hou has done. Ninety-nine percent of the film is presented in a square-ish Academy aspect ratio, which along with its black-and-white opening makes The Assassin seem more like a 1950s Akira Kurosawa film than like the wuxia pian made by King Hu and others (always in widescreen) in the 1960s and beyond. Though honestly Mizoguchi, especially a late color film like Princess Yang Kwei Fei, feels like a more relevant referent (and one I'm not surprised to see Danny Kasman had perceived long before I did). Hou has worked with square ratios before, but (I'm pretty certain) only in his framings-within-framings in widescreen films like City of Sadness and Good Men, Good Women. It's as if he's reclaiming 4:3 Academy as a more truly "cinematic" shape in this era of wide televisions and phones.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight at the Embarcadero Cinema at 6:30 and 9:15, and 8:30 on October 17th at the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. All these showings are "at RUSH", meaning advance tickets are sold out and would-be buyers must form a line in hopes of obtaining seats as they're made available. The Assassin opens a regular theatrical run at the Metreon, the Shattuck Cinema in Berkeley, and Camera 3 in San Jose starting October 23rd.

WHY: Although tonight's screenings will take some persistence to get into for those who haven't already secured tickets, it's fair to say they'll be worth it, as Hou Hsiao-Hsien himself is expected to attend at least the first one, a rare occurrence here in San Francisco indeed. An auteur of his stature visiting this city is cause for real celebration, and the SF Film Society has complied by making Hou a main focus of its entire Taiwan Film Days mini-festival tonight and tomorrow. In addition to the two showings of The Assassin there's a revival showing of what many consider Hou's first great film, The Boys From Fengkuei, and although Hou is not (as far as I understand) expected to attend this showing, he does make a cameo appearance in a very early-eighties perm. There are still advance tickets available for this screening as well as for the Flowers of Taipei: Taiwan New Cinema, a recent documentary about the 1980s and 1990s heyday of Taiwan's cinematic production history, focusing attention on famous names like Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-Liang and Hou (whose Flowers of Shanghai obviously inspired the doc's title) but also on lesser-knowns like Wang Tung, who employed a pre-Rebels of the Neon God Tsai as a screenwriter on multiple films. Director Chinlin Hsieh will be on hand for tomorrow night's showing.

Although the Mill Valley Film Festival The Assassin screening on the 17th is also at "Rush" (as was its Frisco Bay public premiere via the festival this past Thursday), there is still a lot of this festival to go that has plenty of tickets available. There are still seats for tonight's second screening of the Hungarian prize-winner Son of Saul, for instance. I'll be attending this as consolation for missing Hou in person, thankful that the film's distributor insisted it be screened in 35mm. It's the only new film in the festival (and so far, to my knowledge, any 2015 Frisco Bay feature-oriented film festival) to screen in this format, but MVFF has also booked a couple of retrospective titles showing on actual film reels: The Sorrow and the Pity October 16th with director Marcel Ophuls on hand, and on October 18th Autumn Sonata, Inmgar Bergman's final made-for-the-cinema film and his only collaboration with Ingrid Bergman. A documentary about her, Ingrid Bergman - In Her Own Words also screens at the Rafael Film Center tonight, launching an eight-title series celebrating her centennial. I'm told than the program page for this series contains a typo and that the documentary will not screen in 35mm but that Autumn Sonata and Notorious definitely will (the latter is also newly booked to play the Paramount in Oakland in that format) . As will Confidential Report and F For Fake in the Rafael's upcoming Orson Welles centennial conclusion, and Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home on December 3rd. In fact, between the Mill Valley Film Festival (which is far more thoroughly explored at The Evening Class by Michael Hawley and by Michael Guillén) and the upcoming Rafael winter calendar, I feel safe to say the California Film Institute holds a commanding lead among local cinephile institutions stepping up their game in the absence of the Pacific Film Archive this Fall, at least from my perspective. No, the Stanford's current Rogers & Hammerstein festival is not going to cut it for me, and though the Castro and Roxie both have some interesting programs on their slates (I'm most excited by Ken Russell's The Devils October 20th, the Brothers Quay shorts in December and Audition Halloween week), neither venue is doing quite enough to prevent me from wishing it were as easy to get to San Rafael in public transportation as it was to get to Berkeley.

HOW: The Assassin screens as a Digital Cinema Package (DCP).

12 Years A Slave (2013)

WHO: Steve McQueen directed it, Chiwetel Ejiofor (above) starred in it, John Ridley adapted it from the original memoir, and Sean Bobbitt was cinematographer.

WHAT: I finally saw the film that most people who care to hazard guesses about future Academy Awards results think is likely to win to prizes such as Best Picture. I'm still sorting out my thoughts, but for the most part I was extremely impressed with the film. It's not the simplistic, pandering sainting of a historical figure that we often expect in films released at this time of year. It shows a segment of the kinds of horrors that my ancestors were in some way complicit in perpetrating upon people of African descent until less than a century and a half ago. But I found its greatest strength to be the set of questions it raises about the way different people (both blacks and whites) developed social strategies to survive the slavery system, and the moral, psychological and (for blacks) physical toll these different strategies might take on them.

Some interesting articles on the film that have been informing my post-screening thoughts on the film include Glenn Kenny's spotlight on dialogue present in Ridley's screenplay, Peter Malmud Smith's comparison of the film to Schindler's List that raises interesting points that I don't have the time presently to work on refuting, and Ann Hornaday's controversial article about modern cinematography- and videography- as relates to filming skin tones darker than Max Factor Pancake 101. Among its other problems, the latter article fails to note that 12 Years A Slave was in fact filmed on 35mm stock and not digitally.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens multiple times daily at least through Thursday at the 4-Star, Embarcadero, Sundance Kabuki, AMC 1000 and many other theatres throughout Frisco Bay.

WHY: Yesterday the San Francisco Film Critics Circle announced their awards, and the big winners were 12 Years A Slave and Gravity, which received three and four total awards, respectively. As usual, the most interesting selections were their "special citation", for the UFO-of-a-movie Computer Chess and, their (slightly diluted in impact due to a first-ever split decision) Marlon Riggs Award to Fruitvale Station writer-director Ryan Coogler and to Roxie Theatre E.D. Christopher Statton. This was also the first year the SFFCC decided to announce publicly their "nominees", a decision that for me also diminished ever-so-slightly the group's credibility as a collectively confident film-evaluation unit.  Perhaps a contradiction in terms, but you'll never catch the New York or Los Angeles critics groups releasing a memo-to-the-Academy-style listing of five finalists for each of their awards, I'd wager.

But since the SFFCC has given us the data to play with, I'll do a little. It is sometimes somewhat interesting to notice what was strongly considered, and what wasn't, by a critical consensus. I'm not going to do much second-guessing, because although I've seen all but one of the award-winning films (American Hustle) I haven't seen many of the "nominees" that ended up going home empty-handed, such as yet-to-screen-publicly-in-Frisco-Bay titles like Inside Llewyn Davis and The Wolf of Wall Street. That said, there are only a few categories in which a "nominated" title that I've seen seems to me measurably superior than a winning title that I've also seen. Splitting the Best Picture/Best Director category seems odd to me when coming from a critics' group (I guess they're not all auteurist critics, I might jokingly aside) and maybe odder when the Director winner (Alfonso Cuarón for Gravity) has more mainstream appeal than the Picture winner (12 Years a Slave). And I'd probably go along with Mick LaSalle's public disappointment that Adèle Exarchopoulos in Blue is the Warmest Color failed to beat Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine in the Best Actress category, even though I was not that excited by either movie as a whole.

The most passionate armchair critiquing of the SFFCC picks this year I'm going to engage in, which I'd probably bring up even if their nominees had not been made public, is in the cinematography category. I've mentioned before that I think the visual achievement of Gravity is better termed as "visual effects" or perhaps even "animation" than as "cinematography", and having seen Sean Bobbitt's work on 12 Years A Slave makes me feel strongly that there's an award-season "victim" of this miscategorization. Bobbitt's images, captured (like Bruno Delbonnel's for Inside Llewyn Davis) on 35mm film, are stunning. It makes me wonder how many of the critics who helped pick Gravity in this category had seen 12 Years A Slave projected on film rather than digitally.

HOW: 12 Years a Slave screens digitally everywhere except for at the 4-Star, which shows it on 35mm until Thursday, after which it will be replaced by American Hustle.

The Missing Picture (2013)

WHO: Cambodia's great documentarian Rithy Panh co-wrote, co-edited and directed this,

WHAT: As a fan of Panh's films since seeing Land of the Wandering Souls back in 2001, I jumped on the chance to see his newest, and perhaps already most acclaimed film, a soulfully autobiographical account of his days as a youth experiencing the horrors of Pol Pot's regime told using poetic narration, hand-carved figurines, and the propaganda footage created by the Khmer Rouge. The latter became the only motion picture record of that terrible time in the nation's history, as a relatively thriving film industry was completely obliterated, its practitioners often killed or at least driven to disguise their affiliation with what was seen as a damningly modern and intellectual pursuit.

There's a "hold review" on The Missing Picture until its local commercial release (date TBA, but hopefully before the end of the year), so I'll just say I was not disappointed in The Missing Picture as a Rithy Panh fan, and link to Jordan Cronk's excellent review, which fruitfully contrasts the film against others by the director, as well as The Act of Killing.

WHERE?WHEN: Screens today at 4:45 at the Lark Theatre and 5:30 tomorrow at the Rafael Film Center, presented by the Mill Valley Film Festival.

WHY: MVFF only has a couple more days left in it, but the majority of the films I'm most interested in seeing, whether at the festival or upon general release, are packed into these final days. Unfortunately a large number of showings are at Rush status which means braving lines and hoping for luck, but not all are. This afternoon's screening of The Missing Picture, tomorrow's 5@5 shorts showcase featuring Black Angel and three other favorites, and the last screening of the only 35mm print of a new film in the entire festival, Yoji Yamada's Tokyo Family, are among those that still appear to have available tickets. Of course, waiting in a rush line may require less patience than waiting to see a film like top Cannes prize-winner Blue is the Warmest Color when it arrives on local screens. (That one is currently set to come to the Embarcadero November 1st, presuming that theatre's remodeling and reopening goes according to schedule.)

HOW: The Missing Picture screens digitally.

Frances Ha (2012)

WHO: Greta Gerwig co-wrote and stars in this film directed by Noah Baumbach.

WHAT: I'd heard this was a comedy, and perhaps it is in the grand scheme of things; there's is a lightness to the tone of the film and, at least externally, to the character of Frances, around whom the entire film revolves. But I'm not sure I laughed out loud once, although I appreciated the liberal-art-educated wit exhibited by most of the characters. No, what I felt instead of mirth while watching this was the pang of recognition -- though I'm not much like Frances in many ways, I've certainly been 27 years old and felt the kind of anxiety about becoming "truly" adult that she exhibits. Followed by the heartbreak of her self-sabotaging instincts, and finally the joyful relief of seeing her edge towards growth.

A few words on negative reviews, which are not hard to come by. I'll leave aside Armond White's axe-grinding and skip to Nathan Heller's eloquent expression of disappointment, which reads alternatingly like the voice of a twenty-something finding something fraudulent in this portrayal of his  age group, and like a "middle-aged man" wanting to hammer down all the film's most distinctive traits (unusual pacing, time and story compression) into something more "mature" and palatable. (It turns out Heller is older than Gerwig but younger than Baumbach and than me- but not by much.) And although I of course sensed that the film is evoking a French New Wave spirit, I didn't get as much of a sense that it was being glib or overly specific with references; I didn't think of any of the films Ben Sachs mentions; the only Nouvelle Vague film title that entered my mind while watching was Jacques Rivette's Paris Belongs To Us, and I'm not quite sure why that one felt invoked.

I should note I haven't seen the film that the greatest number of reviews I've found (including perhaps my favorite, Fernando F. Croce's) mention as a directly-quoted referent: Leos Carax's 1986 Mauvais Sang, which is apparently quoted in the pictured-above scene of Frances dashing across Manhattan to the piano-grand rhythm of of David Bowie's "Modern Love". Between this and Holy Motors I'm now desperate to see more of Carax's work, hopefully at a retrospective at a local cinema, some time soon.

WHERE/WHEN: Multiple showtimes daily at various Frisco Bay theatres including the Embarcadero, the Kabuki, the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, the Shattuck in Berkeley, the UA Emery Bay in Emeryville, and the BlueLight Cinemas 5 in Cupertino, at least through Thursday. On Friday at least one of these engagements (the Embarcadero's, see below) ends, and Francis Ha will move to the Opera Plaza for a couple shows daily.

WHY: I saw Frances Ha at the Embarcadero knowing it would almost certainly be my last film watched there before it shuts down thus Friday. No, this is not another closure like that of the Bridge and Lumiere last fall, but rather a four month renovation to the downtown five-screener, rumored to include an upgrade to stadium-style seating and to be unveiled in early November.

I've never had a great attachment to the Embarcadero Cinema as a structure; it lacks the charm of the single-screen arthouses it helped put out of business after it was opened in 1995. But since then it's been the most convenient and consistent place for anyone living near a BART or MUNI Metro stop or working in the financial district to see a high-profile independent film on a decent-sized screen. I must've seen over a hundred films there myself, starting with John Sayles' Lone Star. Perhaps most memorably I once watched a noontime matinee of Run, Lola, Run on an only-slightly extended, adrenaline-packed lunch hour while temping in a nearby office tower.

The main impact this closure will have is in reducing by half (and compared to this time last year, nearly two-thirds) the number of the Landmark Theatre chain screens showing indie fare in San Francisco. Almost undoubtedly this will mean fewer real "niche" titles will get  even week-long releases in the city proper, as the Opera Plaza (which is expected to convert from 35mm film & Blu-Ray presentation to DCP any week now) will likely have its screens full handling the kinds of films that might have played the Embarcadero this summer and autumn if it were open. Nothing could make this clearer than the fact that the entire slate of films currently at the Opera Plaza, including Mud, Kon-Tiki and Kings of Summer in 35mm prints, will be pulled after this Thursday to make room for most of the titles currently screening the Embarcadero, including Before Midnight (which will be brought in as a 35mm print), The East, A Hijacking, and Frances Ha. 

HOW: Frances Ha was shot digitally and will screen in DCP, I believe, everywhere listed above, except for the BlueLight Cinema 5 and the Opera Plaza, which are not yet equipped for DCP. Staffers I talked to at both venues were incredulous when I told them that Camera 3 in San Jose reportedly (as per the Film on Film Foundation's Bay Area Film Calendar) screened this in a 35mm print last week.