Hong Kong Trilogy: Preschooled Preoccupied Preposterous (2015)

A scene from Christopher Doyle's HONG KONG TRILOGY: PRESCHOOLED PREOCCUPIED PREPOSTEROUS playing at the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival, on April 21 - May 5,2016. Courtesy of San Francisco Film Society

WHO: Christopher Doyle is known as the cantankerous but visionary cinematographer behind the camera for Zhang Yimou's Hero, Gus Van Sant's Psycho, Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe, Fruit Chan's Dumplings and the majority of Wong Kar-Wai's directorial oeuvre. But he's also a director in his own right. On this film he's credited as cinematographer, director and writer.

WHAT: I haven't seen this one yet so I'll excerpt a chunk of critic Michael Sicinski's Cinema Scope review from when it screened at last Fall's Toronto Film Festival:

This experimental nonfiction film—one can’t really call it a documentary, for various reasons—is easily Doyle’s finest work as an auteur, probably because he hasn’t saddled himself with the laborious task of following a narrative. Instead, Hong Kong Trilogy is an impressionistic consideration of three different contemporary populations in HK.

The first part allows a loosely knit group of children to speak of their interests, dreams and fears (bullying, animals, hip hop, Jesus, etc.) Part two is a somewhat more focused look at the Umbrella Movement, Hong Kong’s iteration of Occupy. Not only was it unusually successful, but the participants were much more invested in creating an alternate vision of a working society than other, more anarchist versions of the movement. (This is partly due to Hong Kongers having one clear rallying point: full voting rights.) The final section deals with the elderly, in particular a speed-dating service. This permits Doyle to cast a glance at the city’s more active seniors, providing a youth-to-old-age structural arc.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at 6:45 at the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: I don't usually like to dwell on films I wish SFIFF had decided to bring, but seeing Hong Kong Trilogy: Preschooled Preoccupied Preposterous on today's schedule reminds me of the most glaring omission from their line-up, given its absence from Frisco Bay screens up until now. It's Portuguese director Miguel Gomes's tripartite adaptation of Arabian Nights, and I'm not so surprised the festival deigned not to show it, as its structure and length (3 two-hour-plus movies that run a total of 382 minutes) would likely mean it'd have to take the place of three other programs in the festival. I just hope it finds its way to some local screen, and thought SFIFF was a good bet as it had shown a previous Gomes feature Our Beloved Month of August back in 2009. Doyle's triptych will have to suffice as a substitute for my desire for a three-part cinema experience.

HOW: Digital projection.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: It's a comparatively light day for festival screenings, with BAMPFA closed as a venue and much of the staff preoccupied with the Film Society Awards Night at Fort Mason. But tonight is the final showing of Italian veteran Marco Bellochio's Blood of My Blood, of the Brazilian prizewinner Neon Bull, and of political documentary Weiner.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: Purple Rain screens at the Castro Theatre twice tonight, at 7PM & 9:30. With the untimely passing of Prince, everyone seems to want to see this film on the big screen right now, with screenings selling out this past weekend at the Roxie and this week at the New Parkway. But the Castro has 1400 seats so you may have a shot at getting into this one.

The Arch (1969)

WHO: Cecile Tang Shu Shuen wrote, directed, and performed in this, her first film.

WHAT: I was hoping to get a chance to view a screener of this film before posting about it today, but a week of Jury Duty has screwed up my plans. Instead, I'll lean on a review by Kamran Ahmed from earlier this year, which I shall now excerpt from:

Cecile Tang Shu Shuen’s The Arch (1969) remains a visual masterpiece, whose formal rhetoric profoundly speaks to the inner dimensions of human existence. A film, in her words, about the “interior feeling of woman,” The Arch uses techniques and special effects, such as zooms and superimpositions/dissolves, to express the ineffable qualities of experiencing life as an isolated and repressed young woman in China during the difficult times of the Cultural Revolution.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Pacific Film Archive at 3:00.

WHY: Today's screening of this rare film, championed by French cinephile Pierre Rissient among other leading international figures, looks to be a highlight of the PFA's final week of 2013 screenings. The rest of the week is filled out with the last three films in the PFA's Rainer Werner Fassbinder series, a 35mm print of Johnny Guitar, and a five programs in my least favorite PFA series of the year, The Resolution Starts Now: 4K Restorations from Sony Pictures; nothing against the films but with the digital presentation. Check my post on one of the films showing Friday the 13th, Dr. Strangelove, for more details on that.

I've seen the PFA's January/February calendar and am pleased to report there are no series like that 4K series on the horizon. Though there are some DCP showings of photochemically-created works on the schedule of the one series available to view now on the venue website, Film 50: History of Cinema, they're balanced by rare 35mm showings of things like Douglas Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow and Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life. Otherwise, most of the upcoming films showing at the PFA will be shown using the medium of their creation: digital in the case of the African Film Festival, 35mm in the case of most of the selections in a focus on Golden-Age Hollywood comedy (from the Marx Brothers to Hepburn/Tracy to Billy Wilder), most of the screenings in the first installment of the PFA's year long Jean-Luc Godard series beginning January 31st with Breathless and Le Petit Soldat, and I believe all of the films in the first segment of an extended Satyajit Ray retrospective. I have a feeling Ray's cinematographer Subrata Mitra, who also filmed The Arch, would approve were he alive today.

HOW: 35mm print from the PFA's own collection.

The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter (1984)

WHO: Directed and co-written by Lau Kar-leung (a.k.a. Liu Chia-liang), who died of leukemia at age 76 this past summer.

WHAT: My favorite kung fu film of all time, which Zach Campbell has noted has "quasi-Brechtian sets and acting"; the fact that it contains particularly exciting action scenes goes without saying.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at 1:15 PM at the Vogue, presented by the San Francisco Film Society.

WHY: It's the final day of Hong Kong Cinema, the SFFS's first mini-festival of its Fall Season. Other screenings today include Wong Jing's The Last Tycoon, Kiwi Chow's A Complicated Story (executive produced by Johnnie To) and Oxide Pang's Conspirators.

Future Fall Season mini-fests include Zurich/SF October 18-20 and Taiwan Film Days November 1-3. The most recent announcement is the line-up of French Cinema Now, a November 7-10 showcase of Francophone cinema including the local premieres of acclaimed new films by directors such as Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Alain Guiraudie, Nicolas Philibert, Denis Côté, and Claire Denis.

HOW: Blu-Ray presentation.

The Grandmaster (2013)

WHO: Wong Kar-Wai directed this.

WHAT: The Grandmaster is, like all of Wong's prior feature films (at least those that I've seen; I confess to having skipped his previous My Blueberry Nights and never having caught up with his first film As Tears Go By), constructed of beautiful images. If there were such thing as a device that could project a single, held, 35mm film frame onto a wall constantly, without incurring its destruction through the melting heat of the projector lamp, there's hardly a frame in the film that wouldn't be a lovely adornment to a darkened space, ripe for study of color, lighting, and composition within the frame. Of course, such a method of looking at the film would be in conflict with what Wong does with editing here, namely that he edits the hell out of his action sequences, making them into a furious flurry of movement without compromising their narrative function.

That all said, the overarching narrative felt to me rather empty of emotion and import, unlike in his (according to me) best movies In The Mood For Love, Fallen Angels and even Ashes of Time. Watching The Grandmaster was unlike watching those films, or the "old-school" kung fu from filmmakers like Chang Cheh and Lau Kar-Leung who stripped down storytelling to archetypal forms to prevent plot complexities from overwhelming the urgency of their action. Wong is in dialogue with a very complicated history rife with Confucian and nationalistic themes, many of which I'm sure I couldn't discern on a single viewing. But watching it, at least on a 35mm print, was nonetheless extraordinarily pleasurable on a sensory level. I would like to re-watch the film after reading Shelly Kracier's persuasive review, in the hopes that I'd get more out of it on an intellectual level as well, knowing that even if I didn't, I would still have an eye-fortifying experience.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens multiple times daily at cinemas around Frisco Bay, including the 4-Star Theatre. The latter is closed for a private event on Tuesday, September 10, however.

WHY: As I intimated in my recent piece on Drug War, the universe seems just a little bit closer to balanced whenever there's a Chinese-language film playing at the 4-Star. That goes double when it's a film by someone whose work I fell in love with there, like Johnnie To or Wong Kar-Wai (it's there that showings of In The Mood For Love and Ashes of Time and to a more intermittent extent 2046 made me swoon). And it goes triple when there's (unlike Drug War) one available to screen in a 35mm print, as the 4-Star is among the last Frisco Bay theatres keeping its actual film projectors running when possible. And The Grandmaster is indeed screening there that way this week (as well as English-language films The Way, Way Back and Fruitvale Station.) I don't know if the next Hong Kong production to come to the venue will be on 35mm, but I do know it's called Ip Man: The Final Fight and it comes from two key member of the team behind another film I first saw at the 4-Star, The Untold Story. That queasy film's co-director Herman Yau is the solo director behind this, and it reuintes him once again (they've worked together a dozen times) with that film's star Anthony Wong.

More Chinese-language films are being brought this fall to the Pacific Film Archive, and to the Vogue, which, thanks to the San Francisco Film Society will be hosting two brief mini-festivals devoted to films from Hong Kong (October 4-6) and from Taiwan (November 1-3). The line-up for the latter is as-yet unannounced, but I wonder if it's hoping too much for me to imagine it to be an opportunity to see the new Venice prize-winning film from one of Taipei's best filmmakers, Tsai Ming-Liang's Stray Dogs. Possibly, since we still haven't had a chance to see Tsai's prior feature Face on Frisco Bay cinema screens.

But the Hong Kong Cinema series has its line-up set. Johnnie To fans won't have to wait any longer to catch up with the prolific director, as his Blind Detective screens opening night of the festival. Another film fresh from Cannes 2013 is Flora Lau's feature debut Bends, which was shot by Wong Kar-Wai's former cinematographer Christopher Doyle, and which competed in the Un Certain Regard section of the French festival. 

Johnnie To's production company Milkyway Pictures also lent support to a film made by students at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts called A Complicated Story, which debuted at this year's Hong Kong International Film Festival and whose director Kiwi Chow is expected to attend his screening at the Vogue. I'm also interested in the new film from Oxide Pang called Conspirators; Pang made a splash early in his career as one half of the co-directing team behind the original Bangkok Dangerous and The Eye but I was less impressed with the films he made without his brother Danny Pang (and vice versa) at that time. But ten years and a pair of forgettable Hollywood films later (including the Nicholas Cage-starring remake of Bangkok Dangerous) and it may be time to take another look at the Pang Brothers solo again.

Finally, and perhaps most excitingly, Hong Kong Cinema will bring two of the best kung-fu movies made by the great director Lau Kar-Leung (a.k.a. Liu Chia-liang), who died at age 78 this past June after two decades of battling with cancer. Lau's most famous work, the action-packed but near-avant-garde in its minimalistic plot 36th Chamber of Shaolin, will screen Saturday afternoon of the festival while Eight Diagram Pole Fighter, my own favorite martial arts movie of all time, screens Sunday. I believe these will be digital screenings, but it will be hard for me to resist attending anyway as I've never seen either film on a cinema screen with an audience. I hope the booking encourages the Roxie to book 35mm prints of Lau's films (of Dirty Ho and Eight Diagram Pole Figher, at the very least) that I hear are in the possession of Dan Halsted, who brought two kung fu double-bills to that venue last year.

HOW: The Grandmaster screens in 35mm at the 4-Star but digitally elsewhere. It was shot mostly on film, but high-speed action shots used a digital camera.

Drug War (2012)

WHO: Johnnie To directed and co-produced this.

WHAT: In his essay in the 2007 book Hong Kong Film: Hollywood and the New Global Cinema, Peter Rist proposes that Johnnie To is "the most prominent Hong Kong film director/producer not to have tried his luck in Hollywood". If prominence is measured in critical acclaim and festival acceptance in Euope and North America, it's hard to think of another candidate for this title. (If there are other measurements, then Stephen Chow, Ann Hui, and other possibilities might be considered.) Though Rist's piece suggests the director could fit right into the Hollywood filmmaking system, in six years after publication, To has still resisted such a call. Instead, he's been making advances into mainland China and its rapidly growing theatrical market, Drug War is, like Romancing In Thin Air,  a Hong Kong/China co-production, and was filmed in China, in this case in the cities of Jinhai and Erzhou.

David Bordwell has published a detailed analysis of Drug War with special attention given to several of its most memorable scenes, but I'm equally thankful for his publication of Grady Hendrix;s analysis of the film as a viewpoint on China vis-a-vis Hong Kong. An excerpt from his analysis (published as an addendum to Bordwell's article) follows:

The cops in the film are China personified: they have unlimited resources, massive numbers, infinite organization, but they are heartless towards outsiders, unforgiving, and they don’t trust anyone. The criminals are all the stereotypes of Hong Kong-ers: they are family, they are stylish and chic, they eat meals together (Hong Kong people love to eat, after all) but they are only interested in money.

Drug War is one of the best new movies I've seen all summer, and is highly recommended if you can squeeze in a showing.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens through this Thursday at the 4-Star at 1:00, 4:50, and 8:40 daily.

WHY: When I hear the term "neighborhood theatre" I think first of the 4-Star, located in the heart of the Richmond District, where I grew up. There were other theatres in my old 'hood, including the Balboa (which still survives and is currently running a Kickstarter campaign in the hopes of extending its survival for at least another decade), the Alexandria (which has been closed for nearly a decade now but still stand), the Bridge (which just closed last December), the Coliseum (which was gutted in 2000 and is now virtually unrecognizable as a Walgreens) and the Coronet (which was shut in 2005 and has since been demolished). But the 4-Star was the closest to my house and the one I walked past just about every day on the way to school. Mostly it played art films of no interest to an average kid, but I do remember occasionally attending for a special repertory screening of something like The Wizard of Oz. When I first began reading newspaper movie reviews and articles as a teenager I remember being thrilled to learn that my neighborhood theatre was to be showing Vincent Ward's The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey and I determined to be among the crowds lining up for a first-day showing as I had for Tim Burton's Batman a few weeks (if I remember the timeline correctly) before. I was surprised to be one of a small handful of people in the theatre at all. I didn't quite get that there was a difference in public awareness and acceptance of a Hollywood fantasy film vis-a-vis a foreign-made, independently distributed one.

In 1992 the theatre operation was taken over by Frank Lee, who had grown up in the business of operating Chinatown theatres and was looking to expand Chinese-language cinema to a neighborhood sometimes called "New Chinatown" or "Second Chinatown". Since then Lee has frequently screened Chinese-language classics and new releases sent directly from Asian distributors, along with films distributed by American outfits. This is where I saw my first Milkyway Production, Too Many Ways To Be #1 (directed by Wai Ka-Fei), which instantly made me a fan, as well as many Johnnie To films including several which never had "official" US distribution but played for a week or more at the 4-Star: My Left Eye Sees Ghosts, Throw Down and (for my money To's greatest masterpiece) Sparrow come to mind. In the past several years the 4-Star's programming of Chinese-language films has become more sporadic than consistent, but I'm always glad to see when they program Asian films. I'm especially pleased that after Drug War's expected run ends Thursday, Wong Kar-Wai's latest film The Grandmaster will open for at least a week starting this Friday August 30th, in a 35mm print. I'll be surprised if this martial arts film, which was shot mostly on 35mm cameras, will be showing on 35mm anywhere else in the Frisco Bay region.

HOW: Drug War was shot digitally and is being projected digitally.

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?

You Wish To Go To The Festival(s)?

Fall festivals are flying fast and furious, as Frisco Bay film organizations jockey for the attention of eager movie lovers. Two local film festivals are already winding down as I type this (Michael Hawley has details), and undoubtedly at least one or two more will send an announcement into my inbox before I finish writing this post. Tonight marks the beginning of a pair of weekend-long festivals I've never attended, the SF Irish Film Festival at the Roxie, and the Oakland Underground Film Festival at various venues in that city. The former screens new work from the Emerald Isle along with some retrospective entries like Once, In The Name of the Father (both, according to Film On Film, on 35mm prints), and artist-turned-film director Steve McQueen's Hunger. As for the OUFF, if their Friday night selection Marimbas From Hell is any indication of the festival's spirit, expect a weekend of wonderfully weird films unlikely to find commercial distribution. Marimbas From Hell is Guatemalan filmmaker Julio Hernández Cordón's first film since his low-budget scorcher of a debut Gasoline, and it bursts with humanity and eccentricity as it follows an unemployed xylophone player who joins forces with an aging heavy metal god to create a musical fusion that blurs documentary and fiction as much as Julio Cordón's style seems to.

Tonight is also the Sf Film Society's kickoff party for its 2011 Fall Season, a nearly nonstop parade of themed collections of international film selections at its new home New People Cinema (and a few other venues as well). Festivals announced so far include: Hong Kong Cinema (September 23-25) with recent films by directors Ann Hui, Johnnie To and others; read Adam Hartzell's write-up for more. Taiwan Film Days (October 14-16) including the goofy cross-cultural comedy Pinoy Sunday. The NY/SF International Children's Film Festival (October 21-23) features at least one 3-D animation with serious potential to impress, French silhouette master Michel Ocelot's Tales Of The Night, to be screened at the Letterman Digital Arts Center in the Presidio rather than at New People as most of the rest of the Children's Fest will be. This is a rare opportunity to experience perhaps what's probably the most technically perfect screening venue in town.

Though Cinema By The Bay (Nov. 3-6), the San Francisco International Animation Festival (Nov. 10-13) and New Italian Cinema (Nov. 13-20) have yet to be unveiled on the SFFS website, they'll have to be pretty impressive to displace French Cinema Now (October 27-November 2) as my most anticipated of these Fall Season series. Three of the most talked-about films from this year's international festival circuit (Cannes, Toronto, etc.) get their Frisco Bay debuts during this series, and I can't wait to see all three of them: Goodbye, First Love, young director Mia Hansen-Løve's follow-up to her stunning second feature Father Of My Children, The Dardennes Brothers' The Kid With A Bike, which won the Grand Prix (essentially second prize to Terence Malick's Tree of Life) at Cannes back in May, and Le Havre, the new feature by Finland's most famous director, Aki Kaurismäki, his first in more than five years. The original mission of French Cinema Now is stretched by the inclusion of films from Finland and Belgium along with France, but if we interpret the "French" in the series title as a reference to the language of the dialogue and not the nationality of the crew, all three films are equally at home here. As are the other French-language films in the program, none of which I've heard much about as of yet. Mathieu Amalric's The Screen Illusion is the only one of these directed by a filmmaker I've seen other work by: his On Tour closed the the last SF International Film Festival. That screening was the final public appearance of Graham Leggat, who ran the Film Society brilliantly for more than five years until stepping down shortly before he succumbed to cancer late last month.

Leggat's recent passing was solemnly mentioned, along with local legendary filmmaker George Kuchar's, at a press conference announcing the line-up of the 34th Mill Valley Film Festival last week. Kuchar was subject of a MVFF tribute in its second year of operation, back in 1979. (He'll be subject of a pair of posthumous tributes by SF Cinematheque this December. Jordan Belson, another recently departed Frisco filmmaking giant, will be posthumously honored at the Pacific Film Archive in October). These days MVFF tributees are less likely to be dedicated underground filmmakers like Kuchar and more likely to be individuals in the early stages of an Oscar campaign. This year the festival tributes Glenn Close with a screening of Albert Nobbs, and spotlights Michelle Yeoh, Ezra Miller and Jennifer Olson, all year-end-awards possibilities for their new films, The Lady, We Need To Talk About Kevin and Martha Marcy May Marlene, respectively. One 2011 MVFF tributee is most definitely not stumping in hopes of hearing his name mentioned by Eddie Murphy next February. Gaston Kaboré is one of the top film directors from Burkina Faso, the country that hosts Sub-Saharan Africa's most prestigious film festival, the biannual FESPACO. Though his films are known to some cinephiles, they are rarely revived and, apart from his brief contribution to the international omnibus Lumiere And Company (all I've seen of his work), not easily found on DVD. So it's wonderful that two of his most acclaimed films Wend Kuuni and its sequel Buud Yam are being brought to Marin along with their maker next month. Unfortunately tickets to Buud Yam are already at "Rush Status" so make sure to buy tickets in advance for Wend Kuuni if you don't want to have to wait in line on a Tuesday night for a sample of Burkinabé cinema.

Also gone to "Rush Status" at MVFF are opening night Sequoia Theatre screening-only tickets to Jeff, Who Lives At Home, the latest from the Duplass Brothers, who made The Puffy Chair, Baghead and Cyrus. This was screened at the festival press conference, and from the moment early in the film when they start to make reference to M. Night Shyamalan's Signs I knew the film was going to be a lot smarter than the average contemporary comedy about unlikable man-children. I'm not supposed to say too much about the film until its general release next Spring, but I found it a very satisfying exercise in enjoyable audience manipulation. It's still possible to buy tickets to the film+party package, though they're quite expensive. The closing night film is another one I'm hotly anticipating: Michel Hazanavicius's neo-silent The Artist. More MVFF titles are commented on in Jackson Scarlett's SF360 article.

Since I mentioned silent cinema, let me step away from film festivals for a moment to note the Niles Silent Film Museum's current calendar. October brings, along with many other films, a pair of classics I've seen and can comment on: A Fool There Was is not a very good film, but it's a very important one as it's among the only features still surviving of superstar sex symbol Theda Bara's prodigious output. The Man Who Laughs, meanwhile, is a really wonderful film to see with an audience; it stars Conrad Veidt as a disfigured nobleman striving against a lifelong conspiracy against him. His make-up famously inspired Batman creator Bob Kane's vision of The Joker. The final Niles show of September 2011 reunites Mary Pickford and Cecil B. DeMille, who had acted together on the New York stage, but who came to Boulder Creek, CA to make Romance of the Redwoods with Pickford in front of the camera and DeMille behind it. Also on this Saturday's program are a Max Linder short and my favorite of all of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's films, the two-reel Fatty and Mabel Adrift. Earlier this month, I wrote an Indiewire article on Arbuckle, informed by my last trip to Niles, to see a film he made just before the scandal that destroyed his career ninety years ago: Leap Year. I hope you take a look at the piece and let me know what you think.

I could go on, but I really ought to wrap this post up. So I'll just mention the other Frisco Bay festivals coming up in the next month or so, and hope that you can tell me whether there are films screening at them that you're interested in, or think I might be. There's the brand-new Palo Alto International Film Festival (which includes what may be your last chances to see Werner Herzog's Cave Of Forgotten Dreams in "Real D" 3-D before the inevitable stereoscopic retrospectives come along), the Arab Film Festival, the 10th SF DocFest, the 14th United Nations Association Film Festival, and the ATA Film & Video Festival.

Passeridae

I feel remiss in not having mentioned it here before, but it's still not quite too late to let my readers know about a terrific film now playing at the 4-Star Theatre: Johnny To's Sparrow. Like Robert Bresson's Pickpocket, it finds inspiration in the criminal art of sleight-of-hand to provide viewers with a pure cinema experience. Quite unlike that fifty-year-old film, however, Sparrow is full of brightness, color, and jaunty music- so much that it has been likened to a musical without singing. Let me quote from Peter Nellhaus's recent review:

Simon Yam almost dances his way out of his dump of an apartment in the film's first scene. The grand set piece could well be called "The Umbrellas of Hong Kong". Credit To for further undoing genre expectations by having the final confrontation between Yam and his gang against their rivals as a slow motion stroll in the rain. Replacing the bullet ballet is choreographed movement of umbrellas, hand movements, razors cutting cloth, and splashes of water.

For my part, I think this is quite possibly Johnny To's best film of the dozen or so I've seen, certainly his best since 1998's a Hero Never Dies. It is down to only one 4:40 PM showing per day from now until Thursday January 22, but I can think of no better way to cinematically ring out the Year of the Rat than to watch these sneak thieves in action on the 4-Star screen.