Lincoln Spector: IOHTE

The San Francisco Bay Area is still home to a rich cinephilic culture nurtured in large part by a diverse array of cinemas, programmers and moviegoers. I'm honored to present a selection of favorite screenings experienced by local cinephiles in 2015. An index of participants can be found here.

IOHTE contributor Lincoln Spector is the proprietor of the Bayflicks website. This commentary has been extracted and slightly adapted from a post on that site.

7. An entertainingly gruesome Halloween
Castro
35mm

On Halloween, my wife and i improvised costumes and headed for the Castro–not for the street party, but for the movies: a triple bill of Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Evil Dead. The show started with a hilarious selection of trailers–mostly of deservedly forgotten flicks. We skipped Massacre (I don’t care for it much) and enjoyed a very long intermission. The audience was rowdy and fun, and we ran into friends. Unfortunately, the print of Living Dead was badly battered.

6. Noir triple bill with the Stones (no, not those Stones)
Castro
Noir City
35mm (I think)
The Noir City festival is always fun. But in 2015, the festival’s highlight were three thrillers made by Andrew and Virginia Stone, a filmmaking team whose work I was completely unfamiliar with until this screening. None of them were masterpieces, but they were all well-made and enjoyable. The usual Noir City audience helped with the enjoyment.

5. Apu Trilogy 
Shattuck
DCP
I finally saw the Apu Trilogy this year, on three consecutive nights. It’s clearly one of the great masterpieces of cinema (or, arguably, three of the great masterpieces). And it has been beautifully reborn with one of the most impressive restorations in history. The original negatives were destroyed in a fire, but L’Immagine Ritrovata at the Cineteca di Bologna physically restored much of the melted negatives to the point where they could be scanned.

4. Visages d’enfants
Castro
San Francisco Silent Film Festival
DCP
I had never heard of this film before I read the festival program. It sounded interesting, but I didn’t know until it started that I was watching a masterpiece. Set in a small town high in the Alps, in what appears to be the last 19th century, Visages d’enfants follows the difficulties of what is now called a blended family–and–as is so often the case–it wasn’t blended very well. Beautiful restoration, and Stephen Horne‘s accompaniment–on piano, flute, and I’m not sure what else–just dazzled. Before the film, Serge Bromberg gave an informative and enjoyable introduction.

3. Oklahoma!
Elmwood
DCP
The new digital restoration allows us to enjoy the movie as it was meant to be seen–and that hasn’t been available for decades. Yes, the plot is silly and some of the cowboy accents are terrible, but when you see Oklahoma! on the big screen, with an audience, you discover what a remarkable piece of entertainment it is. The songs are catchy, the jokes are funny, and Agnes DeMille’s choreography is amongst the best ever filmed. And the new digital restoration allows us to experience it in something similar to the original 30 frames-per-second Todd-AO.

2. Piccadilly
Castro
San Francisco Silent Film Festival A Day of Silents
The last silent film I saw theatrically this year was one I’d wanted to see for years. The Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong finally gets the great part she deserved in this British drama about dancing and sex in a London nightclub. Musicians Donald Sosin (on piano and Macintosh) and John Mader (on percussion) put together an often jazzy, occasionally Chinese score that always served the story.

1.Three-Strip Technicolor Projection Experiences
Pacific Film Archive
35mm archival print & 4K DCP
In July, quite by happenstance, I was able to compare the old and new ways to project a film shot in Technicolor’s three-strip process. The first, Jean Renior’s The River, was screened pretty much as the original audiences saw it–in a 35mm dye-transfer print manufactured in 1952. The second, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann, has been digitally restored and was digitally projected. Each was wonderful in its own way.

Iris (2014)

A scene from Albert Maysles' IRIS, playing at the 58th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 23 - May 7 2015. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

WHO: The late Albert Maysles directed this.

WHAT: I'm allowed to write no more than a seventy-five word review of this film during the festival; because of its "Hold Review" status I'm supposed to wait until its upcoming commercial release to say more. So here goes:

Manhattan's fearlessly original, supremely quoteable, style maven-about-town Iris Apfel and centenarian husband Carl prove ideal subjects for Maysles' perhaps most poptacular documentary, the last released before his March passing. I doubt it's merely the theme of exuberance in the face of mortality that makes it seem like he's filming a mirror; the fly even comes off the wall for a few warmly unguarded moments. Wear your craziest outfit to this one.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 1PM today only in House 1 of the Kabuki, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF). It also opens commercially on May 8th for a (minimum) week-long engagement at the Opera Plaza, the Landmark Shattuck in Berkeley, and the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.

WHY: With this going into general release so soon, you may be tempted to schedule another screening in its timeslot and see it in a couple weeks. The main reason why this is not a perfectly good idea is that the day Iris is released commercially, the day after SFIFF ends, is the first day of a seven-day festival of Maysles documentaries at the Vogue Theatre, coinciding precisely with the seven days it's booked at the above venues. I mentioned this Maysles series in a post last month, but now the entire schedule of sixteen features and shorts has been posted online and tickets are already on sale. Although the series is all-digital, it includes many guest appearances by Maysles associates. I don't think any true admirer of Maysles life and work will want to go into this week-long event without having seen Iris first.

HOW: Digital presentations at each venue.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Today is the only festival screening of Bertrand Bonello's Saint Laurent, with director and star Gaspard Uillel both expected to attend the Castro showing. It's also the final showing of Joshua Oppenheimer's The Look of Silence, at the Pacific Film Archive, and the first showing of Tsui Hark's The Taking of Tiger Mountain at the Kabuki.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: The last double-bill in Yerba Buena Center For the Arts' Noir Westerns series may or not be noir, but it's a powerhouse: John Ford's masterful (yet somehow today undervalued) The Searchers and the first of Anthony Mann's cycle of gritty treatises on American civilization starring Jimmy Stewart, Winchester '73, both in 35mm prints.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

WHO: Joel and Ethan Coen wrote, directed, produced, and (under the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes) edited this.

WHAT: My favorite new Coen Brothers film since No Country For Old Men at least, and perhaps going as far back as their last folk-music-centric film O Brother, Where Art Thou? And though I've seen it only once, I rank it a tentative #10 on my top 10 list of films for the year (the first time a Coen film has made my annual list since I began compiling them, I think). See below for more on that, and for a link to a full-fledged review of the film.

WHERE/WHEN: Multiple showtimes daily for the foreseeable future at various Frisco Bay theatres including the Embarcadero, Kabuki & Empire in San Francisco, the Piedmont in Oakland, the California in Berkeley, the Camera 7 in Campbell, and the Sequoia in Mill Valley, among others.

WHY: I picked the above screen capture (from the trailer to Inside Llewyn Davis) not only because it was one of my favorite shots in the film, but because I knew I'd be using the occasion of this post to roll out my annual year-end-lists of new movies seen in 2013. And the sentiment seems apropos for a post that feels in some ways as thought-out, ill-judged, and pregnant with indeterminate permanence as a graffiti scrawl.

This post also completes my experiment of putting a post-a-day about a local Frisco Bay screening up on this blog every day in 2013- more on that endeavor in a future post, I promise, but for now I'll say that the process definitely altered my viewing patterns for the year.  I found myself watching even more repertory and experimental films to the exclusion of new films than I usually have, and more commercial US fare than foreign films. I also, for the first time since 2005, didn't venture out of Frisco Bay to any film festivals this year, which I suspect has had a hand in shaping the character of this list as a whole. Finally, I made less time to rewatch favorite new films, which makes this selection feel a bit more shaped by first impressions than usual. This means the ordering of the list beyond #1 is fairly arbitrary, and that the runners-up may have some claim on some of the lower-rung slots.

On the other hand, because I was filling content for my blog every day, I ended up writing at least a few words, and sometimes a few more than that, on each of these films placed on my top 10. I have linked the appropriate article, and, since these writings are basically informal musings of varying lengths, added a link to a particularly favored review by someone who has taken the time and thought to craft a serious critical piece on each in my top ten.

1. Leviathan (Véréna Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor) - Max Goldberg
2. Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach) - Vadim Rizov
3. Like Someone In Love (Abbas Kiarostami) - Kenji Fujishima
4. The Place Beyond The Pines (Derek Cianfrance) - Michael Sicinski
5. Drug War (Johnnie To) Hua Hsu
6. 12 Years A Slave (Steve McQueen) - ReBecca Theodore-Vachon
7. The Lone Ranger (Gore Verbinski) - Ryland Walker Knight
8. All Is Lost (J.C. Chandor) Dana Stevens
9. Upstream Color (Shane Carruth) - Cheryl Eddy
10. Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel Coen & Ethan Coen) - Adam Nayman

Runners-up, alphabetically by title: At Berkeley (Frederick Wiseman), Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski) Metallica Through the Never (Nimród Antal), Our Nixon (Penny Lane), Passion (Brian De Palma), The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese)

Ten (as far as I know) undistributed favorites, alphabetically by title: Big Joy: the James Broughton (Stephen Silha, Eric Slade & Dawn Logsdon) Bright Mirror (Paul Clipson), Dusty Stacks of Mom (Jodie Mack), Lost Landscapes of San Francisco 8 (Rick Prelinger), My Way To Olympia (Niko von Glasow), The Realist (Scott Stark), The Strange Little Cat (Ramon Zürcher), Tokyo Family (Yoji Yamada), Verses (James Sansing), Walker (Tsai Ming-Liang)

HOW: Inside Llewyn Davis has digital showings only, which is a shame because it was shot on 35mm by cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, and is rumored to be the last Coen Brothers film to be shot on film (Delbonnel has already stepped into the digital world with next year's shot-in-North Beach release Big Eyes). Or perhaps it's not such a shame after all, as the Coens note they edit digitally and in fact pioneered the use of digital intermediates with  O Brother, Where Art Thou?)

The Great Beauty (2013)

WHO: Paolo Sorrentino directed and co-wrote this film.

WHAT: I haven't yet seen this reportedly Fellini-esque film from the director of Il Divo and This Must be The Place. Here's a link to a review from a critic who loved it: Bilge Ebiri.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens multiple times daily at least through the end of 2013 at the Rafael in San Rafael, the Shattuck in Berkeley, and the Opera Plaza in San Francisco, and through this Thursday at the Aquarius.

WHY: With Hollywood flooding the market with supposed "Oscar contenders" and local film festivals on hiatus for the holidays, it's the time of year when characters speaking languages other than English tend to get squeezed off of Frisco Bay screens. Right now there are just a handful including the French-language Blue Is the Warmest Color, the Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, and Telugu-language movies playing at the Towne 3 in San Jose and the Big Cinemas Fremont 7, and Dhoom 3, the Hindi car-racing picture which has crossed over out of those venues into multiplexes. And The Great Beauty, which was just announced as one of the nine finalists for the Foreign Film Academy Award along with Rithy Panh's The Missing Picture, Wong Kar-Wai's The Grandmaster, Felix van Groeningen's The Broken Circle Breakdown, Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt and (I believe) four titles that have yet to screen in Frisco Bay cinemas. One of these, the German submission Two Lives will open the Berlin and Beyond festival on January 15th at the Castro, the night before the official announcement of this year's Oscar nominees is made.

As fundamentally flawed as the Academy Awards are as a methodical process for the determination of quality films, the flaws in the system are hardly more evident than in the Foreign-Language Film category, as is always noted at this time of year. Still, its convoluted elimination procedure sheds attention on films that might otherwise be ignored, and nominated films generally are able to see distribution in this country that might elude a merely shortlisted or submitted title. But sometimes the submitted titles that fail to be nominated are just as interesting or more interesting than those that aren't. Yet for every example like The Past, the Iranian submission that has officially failed to make the cut for a Foreign-Language Film Oscar, but has secure distribution (it open at the Clay and the Aquarius, where it replaces The Great Beauty, this Friday, and will arrive at the Rafael January 10th) there are a handful or two of films that, because they failed to achieve a coveted nomination slot, will soon become difficult to see, especially in cinemas, in this country.

This makes the Rafael Film Center's annual For Your Consideration series, which runs from January 10 through 17 at the restored Art Deco theatre in downtown San Rafael, a very welcome one for foreign film fans. Of the fourteen films screening in the series, only one has a shot at being Oscar-nominated: the aforementioned Two Lives, which screens at the Rafael the evening after its Berlin & Beyond premiere. Berlin & Beyond fans should note that German-language submissions The Wall from Austria and More Than Honey from Switzerland play at the Rafael, but not at the San Francisco festival. Other FYC films come from the Czech Republic (Jiri Menzel's The Don Juans), New Zealand (Dana Rotberg's Maori-focused White Lies), Australia (Kim Mordaunt's The Rocket, set in Laos), Argentina (Lucia Puenzo's The German Doctor), Georgia (Nana Ekvtimishvili's In Bloom), Japan, Poland, Romania, Afghanistan, Sweden and Canada.

The Rafael is of course committed to showing foreign language films that don't make a big impact on the Academy Award nomination process as well, and sometimes these can be the most interesting films of them all. I don't know if that's an accurate description of the Brazilian film Reaching For the Moon, which opens there Friday (and at the Opera Plaza that day as well), but from my point of view it definitely does describe A Touch of Sin, the latest from Jia Jaing-Ke and one that was never eligible to even be considered in the Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination process because it has never been screened in its country of origin, China. It opens for a week at the Rafael January 3rd, the same week it screens at the Roxie.

In fact, I feel as though I didn't really start seriously appreciating foreign films until I started paying more attention to films that had nothing to do with the Oscar nomination process. I don't think it's a coincidence that, when it comes to films screening at Berlin & Beyond, I'm far more intrigued by Thomas Arslan's Gold, Pola Beck's Breaking Horizons and Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel's The Shine of Day than the Oscar contender. We'll see what I'll be able to make it to in January.

HOW: The Great Beauty screens on DCP at the Shattuck and Rafael, and on Blu-Ray at the Opera Plaza. It's a bit of a shame that these are the only options for local moviegoers as the film was shot on 35mm, and is being made available for screening on 35mm by its U.S. distributor at at least one venue.

Le Joli Mai (1963)

WHO: Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme made this documentary.

WHAT: One of the earliest Chris Marker films I've seen, and one of the best, it's also at 165 minutes one of the longest he made, certainly the longest he'd directed up to this point in his career. A documentary record of Paris during May of 1962, it's a beautiful work that is finally getting more attention after a recent restoration and Cannes screening.  Richard Brody has written an excellent contextualizing piece.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens multiple times daily at the Opera Plaza and the Shattuck, through this Thursday.

WHY: The first of Marker's films to get a full theatrical release in this country since his death last summer, Le Joli Mai is now fifty years old and as relevant as ever. With the Pacific Film Archive in the middle of a retrospective of work by Marker's friend Agnès Varda and this Wednesday showing the latest feature by his one-time collaborator Lynne Sachs (in case you missed it Saturday at Other Cinema, screening along with her Marker-assisting project Three Cheers For the Whale), it's a good week to fan interest in the so-called "Left Bank" filmmakers on bay Area screens.

HOW: The latest restoration is available only digitally.

Inequality For All (2013)

WHO: Robert Reich is the focus of this documentary.

WHAT: This breezy documentary addresses a weighty topic, the causes and ill effects of the enormous gap between the wealth and income of a few very rich Americans, and that of the rest of us. Some have lamented that the film doesn't go far enough in arguing for effective solutions to the economic mess we find ourselves in, and it's a fair point to be sure. But clearly the filmmaker (Jacob Kornbluth, a local) felt his film would be more powerful as a tool to raise awareness about the magnitude of the issue, and perhaps even convert some skeptics. To that end, he doesn't go overboard on hammering political points but rather centers his film on one eloquent and tireless advocate of the importance of this issue, UC Berkeley professor and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, whose biography, it turns our, mirrors his chosen cause in poignant ways. Kalvin Henley has written a more complete review I can recommend reading.

WHERE: Screens at 9:00 tonight and at 6:30 tomorrow and Thursday at the Camera 3 in San Jose, and multiple times daily at the California Theatre in Berkeley at least through this Thursday. UPDATE 11/12/2013: The Balboa is also screening the film multiple times daily through Thursday.

WHY: Whether you feel you've heard Reich's arguments enough or feel you could never hear them enough (or more likely, fall somewhere in between those points on the scale), you may be interested in seeing Inequality For All simply for the local angle. A great deal of the documentary was shot in the Bay Area, including the above image of downtown Oakland's majestic Paramount Theatre (which screens The African Queen for $5 this Friday, incidentally).

Reich appears (with much less screen time, I'm led to believe) in another documentary coming to Frisco Bay soon: Frederick Wiseman's latest institutional investigation At Berkeley, which takes a more comprehensive view of the workings of the University of California's flagship campus. Since I last speculated about where it might screen, I've learned it will come to UC Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive December 3rd that Wiseman will be on hand for, but that will  be open only to the University's students, faculty and staff. A second PFA showing will occur January 18th, 2014 (dare I hope along with a retrospective of Wiseman films? It's been over ten years since the last), but before that both the Elmwood and the Roxie will screen At Berkeley for at least a week starting December 6th, with opening night screenings accompanied by a Skype q&a with the director.

HOW: Inequality For All was made and will screen digitally.

Thérèse (2012)

WHO: Starring Audrey Tautou, this was the last film directed by Claude Miller before his death last year, and it features cinematography by Gérard de Battista.

WHAT: Here's a case in which another critic has written such a thorough review of a film, contextualizing it within French cinema history and insightfully identifying its strengths and limitations, that to do much more than link would seem extraneous. Without further ado, please read Julian Allen, or at least this excerpt:

Miller, aware of the audience’s expectations, opts for a more robust, risky, and modern view of Thérèse’s personality. The implication is that even if you don’t agree with or even like Thérèse, her oppression is symbolically unconscionable. In this respect at least, the film wins its bet. The final sequence, like the novel, shows Bernard battling to understand her still, but she gives us no easy reasons because she does not have them herself—she is left alone, free from the social constraints of her past life, but still in hock to her own impulsive and rebellious nature.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens multiple showtimes daily today through Thursday at the Opera Plaza in San Francisco and the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.

WHY: Thérèse is the kind of film that once populated Frisco Bay cinema screens en masse but now has become rare enough almost to become a major event: a foreign film with a literary pedigree, a familiar (if not exactly box office gold) star, and a lack of "hip" or "high art" pretensions of any sort. It's the kind of film whose existence on American screens owes a debt of thanks to the film festival circuit, where publicity and word-of-mouth have a better chance to build than if the film simply opened cold for a week-long run. When I attended there weren't so many fellow theatregoers, but it at least posted solid enough numbers its first week at the Opera Plaza to be held over for a second. A third appears unlikely, as a brand new calendar (pdf) is coming onto Landmark's San Francisco screens (essentially the Opera Plaza, as the Clay usually books higher-profile titles and the Embarcadero is expected to remain closed for remodeling until November).

Of the nine titles on this week-by-week calendar, three (Populaire, Museum Hours and Let the Fire Burn) arrive, like Thérèse, after successful showing at the 2013 San Francisco International Film Festival. A fourth, The Trials of Muhammad Ali, was one of the most widely-appreciated titles at the SF Jewish Film Festival. And a fifth, Zaytoun, (quite possibly the most currently topical of the bunch, as it's a Middle-Eastern war-set drama directed by Eran Riklis, who made the terrific The Syrian Bride) arrives October 18th after two screenings on the final two days of the upcoming Mill Valley Film Festival, which runs October 3-13 in cinemas all throughout Marin County.

You may have noted that my sidebar has exploded with links to upcoming film festivals beginning this weekend after a relatively slow late summer. The most established and most widely anticipated of them is the Mill Valley Film Festival, which announced its full program at a press conference this morning (that thankfully didn't include any poorly-presented preview clips- perhaps someone read my comment on that last year?). Now in its 36th year, MVFF has become best-known as the Northern California launch pad for Oscar-seeking Fall and Winter releases hot from their continental debuts in Colorado and Ontario. This year is no exception; if you haven't heard the "buzz" yet on titles like Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue Is The Warmest Color or Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave let this be your first warning: you'll be hearing about these films a lot unless you hide under a rock in the next few months. Both are slated to play MVFF this year along with other films whose distributors have a budget to try to push them into the various year-end "Best of 2013" conversations. The Marin festival doesn't shy away from playing up its possible role in these conversations; press materials note that four of the last five Best Picture Oscar winners (all but The Hurt Locker) had their Frisco Bay debuts in front MVFF audiences.

But with over a hundred features and shorts in the festival line-up, most of the titles in the program have little or no chance at joining Argo, The Artist, The King's Speech and Slumdog Millionaire in future almanacs the world over. There's plenty of moviegoing available for fest-goers interested in avoiding "Oscarbaition" (to re-use a term I applied last year), whether they're interested in fiercely independent voices like MVFF regular Rob Nilsson (here with his new Collapse, while his first feature Northern Lights screens at the PFA November 7th) or aesthetically innovative documentarians like Rithy Panh (whose Khmer Rouge miniature piece The Missing Picture should be a festival highlight), or rediscoveries and retrospective titles like Roger Christian's long-lost Star Wars-related short film Black Angel, or Raoul Peck's 2000 biopic Lumumba.

A list of world-renowned elder statesmen directors with new features in this year's MVFF might start with Hayao Miyazaki (who says The Wind Rises will be his final film) and continue with Andrzej Wajda (Walesa, Man of Hope completes a political trilogy begun with Man of Marble in 1975), Jan Troell (who will be on hand for screenings of The Last Sentence), Yoji Yamada (who began his career working under Yasujiro Ozu and now updates that master's most famous masterpiece into Tokyo Family, which I'm told will be one of the few 35mm screenings of the festival), and Costa-Gavras (here with his latest Capital). I could go on, but let me instead turn to a younger generation of well-established filmmakers like Connie Field (her new doc is Al Helm: Martin Luther King in Palestine) and Hirokazu Kore-eda (represented with Like Father, Like Son). And then there are brand-new directors like Françoise Charpiat; her Cheba was shot by veteran French cinematographer Gérard de Battista, who also shot 1995 MVFF hit French Twist, 1997 Chris Marker documentary Level Five, and four Claude Miller features including Thérèse.

All of the above MVFF titles may sound like they have strong pedigrees, but it will take audiences to decide whether they're actually as good as they promise to be. I haven't had a chance to see any of them myself yet. But I did see Big Joy: The Adventures of James Broughton in a packed Castro Theatre at Frameline, and have been eagerly awaiting a chance to send Frisco Bay friends and readers who missed it this past June to an enthralling, accessible, and un-hagiographic documentary on one of Frisco Bay's most independent spirits among filmmakers. Broughton was born November 7, 2013, so the October 6 & 9 Mill Valley and San Rafael screenings are just in time to get ready for his centennial. Whether you're totally unfamiliar with the poetic, personal films he made in San Francisco, Mill Valley and all over the world, or have memorized every last one of them, you won't want to miss out on this complicated portrait of a fascinatingly complicated man.

HOW: Thérèse screens in 35mm at the Opera Plaza and via DCP at the Rafael.

The Act of Killing (2012)

WHO: Joshua Oppenheimer directed this film, along with Christine Cynn and another, anonymous, co-director.

WHAT: The Act of Killing is not just a movie. It's a starting point for discussion, understanding, and hopefully transformative political change- and not just in the country where it was filmed. It's a very 21st-century documentary, in that it cannot be fully comprehended by an audience unfamiliar with Indonesia's political history. If you don't know this history at all (and perhaps even if you do), you are likely to walk away from a viewing of the film with some serious misapprehensions about it.
But watching is a powerful experience no matter what your level of foreknowledge. Complaints that the film needs more context ignore two things: the fact that in 2013 it's increasingly easy for many if not most viewers to do enough basic research after being moved by a screening that they'll have sufficient ability to understand what they missed, and the fact that a less-informed viewer might be able to better apply the universal themes about the nature of humanity to contexts outside Indonesia, than an informed viewed might.

Part of the paradox is that the film's power to shock us out of complacency comes in part from its strangeness and surprises. Which means it's probably best for a fresh viewer not to do much if any reading about the film before viewing it, especially if they're not well-versed in Indonesian politics. Thus I'm avoiding saying much about the film at all. But if you absolutely must read about the film before watching it, I'll point to Arya Ponto's review as one I really appreciated reading after my own viewing.

WHERE/WHEN: Multiple showtimes daily through Thursday at the Opera Plaza Cinema, the Shattuck in Berkeley, and the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. It will remain for another week at the Opera Plaza starting Friday, but disappear from the other two venues. It will return to the East Bay September 13-19 at the New Parkway in Oakland.

WHY: Mid-August is the time of year when film festivals are few and far between and mainstream Hollywood films aren't even expected to be very good by their most ardent fans. So it's a perfect time to catch up with new arthouse releases, of which this is probably the most "important" and unusual currently in local cinemas.

HOW: All three venues currently screening this digitally-produced documentary are doing so digitally and in the 122-minute version. I'm hoping the all-digital New Parkway or another local venue will consider showing the 159-minute extended cut (which I believe has not screened at any Bay Area venue).

Free Angela and All Political Prisoners (2012)

WHO: If you watched Sesame Street in the 1970s, you may remember Shola Lynch as one of the kids who interacted with Muppets like Kermit the Frog, Bert and Ernie during segments of that show. Now Lynch is a grown woman and a director of documentaries like this one.

WHAT: I haven't seen this, but Sam Adams has a favorable review I'll quote from:

Lynch, who profiled black presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm in 2004’s Unbought And Unbossed, has slicked up her game considerably in the intervening years, deftly interweaving archival footage and new interviews. (Having Jay-Z and Will and Jada Pinkett Smith on board as executive producers doubtless bought her plenty of time in the edit room.) There’s less vintage footage of Davis addressing crowds than one might like, but in the present day, Davis remains a beguiling and charismatic speaker, even if the temperature of her rhetoric has cooled significantly.

WHERE/WHEN:  Tonight at 6:30 PM and Wednesday at 7:00 PM at the New Parkway in downtown Oakland.

WHY: There are five fewer arthouse screens in San Francisco this month than last month thanks to the current renovation of the Embarcadero Cinema. A total of ten SF screens have now gone essentially dark in the past year, after the permanent closure of the Lumiere and Bridge and the relegation of New People's screen to occasional festival rentals (like the upcoming Japan Film Festival). Under such conditions it's almost inevitable that certain documentaries and other commercially risky movies will start to get runs in Alameda County but not in San Francisco more frequently than before. Free Angela and All Political Prisoners is an example, and though its East Bay-centric subject matter makes this perhaps understandable, it's a reminder that movie lovers on this side of the Bay Bridge may need to keep closer eye on what's playing at cinemas on the other side if they want a full array of moviegoing options.

HOW: Video projection.

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.

Before Midnight (2013)

WHO: Richard Linklater directed and co-wrote, with his lead actors Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, this  feature.

WHAT: What started out as nothing more than a particularly fortuitous mid-nineties Indiewood feature (Before Sunrise) and nine years later became an audacious experiment in sequelization (Before Sunset) is now, with Before Midnight, well on its way to turning into a monumental reinvention of that long-buried, little-regarded cinematic genre: the Saturday matinee serial. Only these films aim at adult audiences, feature more talk than action (or perhaps it's more accurate to say talk as action), and neither compress nor extend time between one episode's cliffhanger and the next's opening moment, but rather allow the audience and the actors as long to wonder what's befallen beloved characters Celine (Delpy) and Jessie (Hawke) in each nine-year interim. So real does this snapshot-moment approach feel, that most critics bypass making comparisons to Pearl White or Buster Crabbe, and head straight to Michael Apted's 49-year, 8-segment (and counting) documentary epic the "Up Series" when making cinematic comparisons in their reviews.

I found Before Midnight to be an incredibly satisfying part three in this (so far) trilogy; it keeps the spirit of the originals (neither of which I've revisited in more than brief clips since 2004) while making some serious structural departures that feel like perfectly logical extensions of the project. But I don't feel I have the words in me to write a review that truly does justice to the achievement here. So instead I'll link to the film's Metacritic page, wherein you'll find plenty of other reviews by some of the country's better critics. I'll note they range from the mostly positive to the wholly positive; I haven't seen any well-argued pans of Before Midnight yet.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens multiple times daily at various screens around Frisco Bay this week, including the Embarcadero, Shattuck, Kabuki, Sequoia, Guild, and Camera 7 Theatres.

WHY: You should know, if you haven't already figured it out, that Linklater is not just a filmmaker but a real cinephile. In the 1980s he co-founded the Austin Film Society and befriended one of the real titans of American experimental film, James Benning; this friendship is the subject of a currently-in-production film by one of the smartest young cinephiles around, Gabe Klinger.

Linklater's devotion to the underseen masterpieces of cinema history is well-documented as well; he recently had a piece on Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running published in a book and excerpted in Movie City News (that film screens the Stanford Theatre this Thursday & Friday). Another Minnelli film The Clock came up as an acknowledged influence on the "Before Trilogy" in his on-stage appearance at the San Francisco International Film Festival with Julie Delpy and Mike Jones a month ago. (And a lovely clip from it came up in Christian Marclay's The Clock during the early, coffee drinking hours of the installation.)

Delpy was on the verge of revealing another classic film influence on the trilogy, and on Before Midnight in particular, during that SFIFF conversation, but was pulled back by her director, who apparently wanted to keep it a surprise for the audience, most of which had not seen their film yet but would the following night at the fest's designated closing screening. In that spirit I won't reveal the title on this blog other than by linking to the Castro Theatre and Rafael Film Center pages for its upcoming screenings at those venues. So click if you've already seen Before Midnight or don't mind having one of its cinephile references spoiled in advance.

HOW: I believe Before Midnight, the first in Linklater's/Delpy's/Hawke's trilogy to have been shot digitally, is only available to screen as a DCP right now.

The Big Lebowski (1998)

WHO: Joel & Ethan Coen wrote, directed, co-produced and co-edited (under the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes) this picture.

WHAT: I first saw The Big Lebowski the way most people I know did: on home video. I remember renting the videocassette fifteen years ago and thinking, "hey that's better than most Coen Brothers movies" and then thinking little of it for quite some time. Until this weekend I had not seen it on the big screen.

But this film slowly and surely developed a following like few other films of its era. I'm pretty sure it's the only Coen Brothers film that has inspired its own religion (founded by an old acquaintance of mine, no less), and probably the one that has inspired more DVD editions (including one worked on by another friend) and more books than any other, as well.

Even Josh Levine, who published a book about the Coens in 2000 (when The Big Lebowski was their newest completed film), seems oblivious that it might be the one that would develop the most cultish fan attention, focusing his chapter on the film's preparation, and when talking about its reception limiting his observations to that of the critical consensus, and to the fact of its box-office disappointment in the wake of Fargo. But he does, in his final chapter, put his finger on why The Big Lebowski may be different from the other Coen works, calling it an exception to the rule that "every one of their films leaves the viewer feeling distinctly uneasy ... Even the comic Raising Arizona has a nightmarish quality, and the hero and heroine may have had their lives ruined by their own uncontrollable impulses."

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Clay Theatre at 11:55 PM.

WHY: The Clay is set to replace its 35mm projection equipment with DCP next Friday. They already have a lower-quality digital projector in place, which is being used to show this week's regular booking, the biopic Renoir, about the great French filmmaker's famous father. This means that tonight's midnight screening of The Big Lebowski will be the last time 35mm reels will be shown publicly at the venue.

The Clay is one of San Francisco's oldest movie houses, and has been projecting 35mm prints from all over the world for over a hundred years. In the 1930s, it showed a great many French imports; just just the widely-known ones by Renoir but still-relatively-obscure titles like Anatole Litvak's Mayerling, Sascha Guitry's Pearls of the Crown and Robert Siodmak's Personal Column. It also showed films from countries such as (for example) Russia, Sweden, Austria, China, and the U.K.

Though keeping its reputation for foreign film exhibition through the following decades, in the 1970s the Clay became a stop on the burgeoning midnight-movie circuit, screening fare like John Waters's Pink Flamingos to a late-movie-hungry crowd in an age before home video and widespread cable television. The Rocky Horror Picture did not make its original local debut at the Clay but, according to Gary Meyer, the Metro II, before moving to the Powell as a midnight movie. Now it screens monthly at the Clay, along with other periodic midnight screenings such as The Room, The Big Lebowski, etc. I've seen 35mm midnight shows of films from The Shining to Johnnie To's The Mission to Donnie Darko over the past ten years or so. 

But now it's time for the Clay to go "on hundred per cent electronic" as Jackie Treehorn might say. It's unfortunate that  the DCP industry has figured out a way to strong-arm most theatres to adopt a "no turning back" policy, removing 35mm projection equipment even from booths with the room to accommodate both. For a theatre like the Clay, the philosophy seems to be "adapt or die". For a 103-year-old movie house which has survived plenty of closure scares over the years, maybe it's good news as it seems to reflect confidence in future survival of the venue to invest in new technology for it. Hopefully it will mean the Clay can continue to show an increasingly diverse selection of midnight movies and foreign films to appreciative crowds for some time to come.

It seems a good time to mention the final three 35mm screenings happening at SFMoMA before their closure in just over a month, since they all seem to connect to The Big Lebowski in some (perhaps oblique) way. The museum's final 35mm showing will be May 23's The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman's Raymond Chandler adaptation that seems to have held more influence on the Coens' approach to reinterpreting that author than other films by Howard Hawks, etc. May 16 they screen Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show, the film that essentially launched Lebowski lead Jeff Bridges's stardom. And on May 9th SFMoMA screens The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese's documentary record of The Band's farewell concert, an event that Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski might well have attended a good decade or so before his days as a roadie for Metallica. No, no members of The Eagles are invited.

HOW: The Big Lebowski will screen from an excellent if not pristine 35mm print, accompanied by an assortment of rare, vintage trailers and other odds and ends prepared by the Clay projectionist to run through the gate one last time.

To The Wonder (2012)

WHO: Terence Malick wrote and directed.

WHAT: Let's just say this is the first time a single viewing of a Terence Malick film hasn't blown me away.

I absolutely loved The Thin Red Line. When it came out I saw it three times in the theatre. When I went back to look at Malick's earlier films Badlands and Days of Heaven I loved those too. When The New World arrived I though it was tremendous, perhaps his best yet. It felt like a privilege to see it in theatres. And though I had quibbles with The Tree of Life (surfacing whenever Sean Penn, who I normally like, showed up on screen) they were overshadowed to the point of being almost invisible in the grand scheme of the work, which felt like another sprint forward for a filmmaker who could have kept running in place and still lapped most of his fellow directors.

There's definitely a sense of the treadmill to To the Wonder however. Don't get me wrong. It's beautiful, and I wish I'd loved watching it as thoroughly as Nick Pinkerton and Bilge Ebiri and Richard Brody clearly did. Times like these, I wish I had the generosity of Roger Ebert, who in his final published review before his death admitted to having been put off at first by the film's opacity, yet was able to find enough to like to write an honest three-and-a-half (out of four) star assessment. I don't generally tinker with assigning star ratings to films, but my first instinct is that this is a two-and-a-half star film for me, with room for at least half a star of movement in either direction. Not so bad, really. If a lesser director (say, Jason Reitman) had made a film this good, it would be his best one yet. But Malick's other five features are all easily four-star masterpieces. I hope to revisit this one soon, in the hopes of something 'clicking' for me that helps me realize what I wasn't seeing (beyond the gorgeous visuals) the first time around.

I realize I've been terribly vague up to now, so here's what I think is the crux of my problem with To the Wonder: Ben Affleck. It's not his performance that's a problem, but his casting is, I think, a big one. The role that is essentially that of an unknowable cypher, representing as much a part of the American strangeness that the film's central Frenchwoman character (played marvelously by Olga Kurylenko) cannot overcome, as the romantic impetus for her decision to come here in the first place. But Affleck's star persona automatically fills in the blank spaces Malick has left in his drawing of the character. Kurylenko might as well be in love with Jim Young, the ruthlessly cocksure capitalist from Boiler Room or A.J. Frost, the none-too-bright oil driller from Armageddon or even Ben Affleck, the self-serious film director who talks about the "poet's truth" on Fresh Air. None of these personalities compute as someone who would attract a French single mother to live with him in Oklahoma, and since this love affair and resultant uprooting are the central concerns of the film, everything in the film threatens to crumble into uninvolving banality. Sometimes it really feels like it has.

WHERE/WHEN: Multiple daily showtimes all week at the Embarcadero and the California in Berkeley. If you attend the latter, try to catch one of the shows in the downstairs, handicap accessible theatre, which seems likely to be the biggest Frisco Bay screen to show this. 

WHY: Despite my rather sour experience watching this the first time around, I definitely think anyone who has enjoyed previous Terence Malick films, particularly The New World and The Tree of Life, its closet thematic and stylistic cousins, respectively, should see it. As I noted above, there are plenty of intelligent and passionate cinephiles and critics who have found more merit in it than I did, and reading their eloquent arguments has convinced me to have at least one more go of it. I'm not sure that this time I'll like it better than the spate of recent Malick-indebted releases I've seen recently. I'm thinking of Upstream Color (which opens for a commercial run at the Roxie today and is to my mind a far more surprising and satisfying feature) or Beasts of the Southern Wild (you might call Javier Bardem's character in To The Wonder a "Priest of the Southern Wild") or even Spring Breakers (which for me benefitted from featuring stars mostly of a generation I'm wholly unfamiliar with.) At the very least I'll be able to bask in cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezski's images on a big screen once more.

HOW: So far all Frisco Bay screenings of To The Wonder are expected to be digital. I've been told that there are at least one or two 35mm exhibition prints of this film struck, and hope we Frisco Bay audiences get a chance to see one at some point. Perhaps at the Castro sometime?

No (2012)

WHO: Directed by Pablo Larraín, completing a sort of trilogy of films made about Pinochet-era Chile.

WHAT: The Wikipedia article on Cinema of Chile suggests that filmmaking within the country's borders from 1973 through 1989 was negligible. If true, it's understandable, as dictatorships can produce a "brain drain" of artists with distinctive voices; the two best-known names of the "New Chilean Cinema" movement, Raúl Ruiz and Patricio Guzmán, fled their homeland and made their names internationally known while working in exile. Tony Manero, the first in Larraín's trilogy, involves a Chilean obsessed with a cinematic icon not from his own country but from one of the Hollywood imports that dominated Chile's cinema screens in the seventies (Saturday Night Fever). I have not seen Post-Mortem yet, but based on Tony Manero and No Larraín's trilogy is clearly interested in exploring dialogues between moving images and citizens living under dictatorship. In both cases television becomes the arena for local image production.

I don't want to recount a plot summary of No other than to say its drama concerns the political use of television advertising. There are a lot of recent reviews of it out there, and probably the most thoughtful and thorough one I've come across is by Roderick Heath. I just want to comment on Larraín's aesthetic strategy of shooting the entire feature on the very outmoded analog video format of 3/4-inch videotape. Though there are examples of movies shot using this medium (also known as U-Matic) such as Rob Nilsson's 1986 feature Signal Seven and some of George Kuchar's video diaries, its domain was really the world of television. It seems safe to call No the first feature film made in this format since the advent of digital video in the 1990s.

This use of analog video cameras certainly makes Larraín's film stand out visually. Artifacting makes forms appear to have softer edges, often with unnatural color interference. Color is muted and made pastel throughout the film (making bright yellow subtitles stand out all the more), and when Larraín lands his camera on a light source, whether a lamp or a reflection or even the sun, color can be blown out almost completely, a screen-whitening effect very different from that of filmic looks cinemagoers have grown accustomed to. But this aesthetic choice is not a mere gimmick, as it reduces distinctions between the film-world diegesis and the frequent television imagery incorporated into the film, much of it real archival video that was shot on 3/4-inch tape and broadcast into Chilean homes in the late 1980s. On a few occasions Larraín's editing rhythms give viewers the disorienting sensation of not being sure if the image we're seeing is part of a broadcast being watched by characters, or part of the world they're existing in at that moment. This boundary blurring, impossible to achieve had Larraín used more conventional technology, plays right into No's themes of political image vs. political reality, of observing vs. taking action, etc. There are few films that can have characters use a word like "semiology" and get away with it without coming across as hopelessly academic. In fact, No may be the only one I'm aware of. 

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at many venues around Frisco Bay through April 4th, from the Camera 3 in San Jose to the Summerfield in Santa Rosa, including the Rafael in Marin, and at Landmark cinemas in four cities: the Embarcadero in San Francisco, the Shattuck in Berkeley, the Piedmont in Oakland, and the Aquarius in Palo Alto.

WHY: Though I haven't heard much new on the topic in several months, last year there was a lot of discussion about the impending transition away from 35mm distribution towards digital. For habitues of multiplexes, the change wasn't impending, as a great many of them had already made the change by 2011. But last year was when traditional "art houses" began tearing out their 35mm projectors to make room for digital systems. Last fall, the Landmark Theatre chain turned several of its most frequented local theatres into digital-only ones, and ceased operation on two others, the Lumiere and the Bridge, leaving the company with only (by my count) the Opera Plaza and the Clay in San Francisco, the Guild in Menlo Park and the Aquarius as venues for 35mm presentation.

I've begun to hear rumors that another wave of transition is coming to Landmark theatres in the next few weeks or months. You know rumors, they can be awfully unspecific. But anyway I wouldn't be surprised if the Opera Plaza isn't the last remaining Landmark venue running a 35mm projection system before summer. According to the Film On Film Foundation the Clay is expected to screen Rocky Horror Picture Show in 35mm at least twice more: this Saturday and April 27th. But The Guild and the Aquarius could make the changeover at any time. Right now the Guild is screening Quartet, directed by Dustin Hoffman, while the Aquarius has No and the Walter Salles adaptation of On The Road; the latter will be switched out for Australian crowd-pleaser The Sapphires, but No remains.

HOW: Via the afore-linked Bay Area Film Calendar, No screens in 35mm right now at the Aquarius and the Camera 3, and presumably digitally elsewhere. I saw it via DCP at the Embarcadero but I'd be curious to catch it in 35mm to compare how its analog video look translates to an analog (non video) format rather than a (non analog) video one.