Amour (2012)

WHO: Michael Haneke directed this.

WHAT: I know that earlier this week I said I don't do public Oscar predictions, but that wasn't meant to be a promise. I just can't resist going out on a limb with this one. Although Amour has been picking up prizes left and right starting with its Cannes debut and most recently at the Césars and the Independent Spirit Awards, is nominated in five Academy Award categories, and is widely expected to win in at least one of them today, Yet I predict the Amour team will go home empty-handed. If Amour does win an award. it won't be the one everyone thinks it will.

I'm not saying Amour doesn't deserve any Oscars. It's a very well-made film, and if I were an Academy voter myself I'd have strongly considered voting for it, at least in the only one of its five categories in which I've seen all of the nominees for: Best Director. But like most of Haneke's films its unblinking treatment of the illnesses of old age makes it an extraordinarily bleak viewing experience. To quote the tweet I typed after exiting the theatre, "You're riding a plane slowly crash-landing into Hell. With each cut the pilot makes you look out the window at the descent".

I would be thoroughly shocked if a film this harrowing is what a plurality of Oscar voters are going to want to present as the face of the film year by awarding it Oscars in top categories like Best Picture or Best Director. And although some believe there's a groundswell of support for the great Emmanuelle Riva to snatch the Best Actress in a Leading Role trophy, there's a lot of campaigning muscle being put behind other more bankable candidates, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who admires the performance of her (un-nominated) co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant more than hers. The Original Screenplay award is a tougher call; the Slant pundits make a good argument that this will break Amour's way in the absence of any other credibly viable candidates. Personally I'm rooting for Moonrise Kingdom here, but I wouldn't be so surprised to be wrong on this one. 

But I would be surprised, going completely against the tide, to see Amour take home the best Foreign Language Film Oscar. This bout of confidence will sound even more bizarre when I drop the other shoe: I haven't seen any of the other nominees in this category. I let A Royal Affair's theatrical run pass me by last year, and had to miss the Rafael's advance screenings of Kon-Tiki (which the Weinstein Company will release in April) and War Witch (which opens at the Roxie March 15th) and a press screening of No (which opens at the Embarcadero March 1st). So it's only a gut instinct that makes me feel that any of these other four films is more likely to win than the supposed frontrunner is. They all sound more up the Academy's alley than the film I watched last month.

Why would I know something all the pundits don't? I think some may be forgetting that a Haneke's last film the White Ribbon won quite a large number of so-called "precursor" awards on its way to Oscar night a few years back, and was widely predicted to win the award, but ultimately lost to the Argentine political thriller The Secret In Their Eyes. Some may remember that, but note that Amour has more evident support from the wider Academy, with its four nominations in other categories. But the same could be said about Pan's Labyrinth and Amelie, both of which also were multi-laureled frontrunners, but lost Oscars to The Lives of Others and No Man's Land, respectively. 

"Ah, but neither of those were also nominated for Best Picture," I hear some of you say. "Foreign Films nominated for Best Picture always win the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar". What about Grand Illusion, The Emigrants, Cries and Whispers and Il Postino, then? "Well, none of those Best Picture nominees were actually nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the same time." Fair enough, I'll concede. But that leaves precisely three data points for this pattern you're trying to establish. Z in 1969, Life is Beautiful in 1998 and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2000. It's just not enough of a trend for me to consider it significant, especially since these were all in the days of only five Best Picture nominees. I'm not so sure that Amour would have made the cut if there weren't nine slots in the top category this year.

Hype goes very far in awards season. But it can only go so far in the Foreign Language Film category, which is different from most Oscars in that, according to the rules, Academy members "can vote only after attesting they have seen all of the nominated films" in the category. Not only that, but historically, the films had to be seen at Academy-approved cinema screenings. I'm not certain if that's still the case, but the lack of most of the category's titles on lists of screeners received by Academy members makes me think it is. If the only Academy members voting in this category are the ones with the time and motivation to go to approved screenings, it's got to be a pretty small decision pool, and by the looks of recent lists of winners in this category, not one made up of fans of ice-cold clinical looks at the awfulness of the human condition. I think the collective consensus is much more likely to have picked a more inspirational or conventional movie, one they can take pride in 'discovering' for the rest of us to enjoy by anointing it with the priceless publicity of an Oscar.

WHERE/WHEN: Amour has multiple showtimes today through Thursday (and likely beyond) at the Clay, where it's been playing for many weeks (including when I saw it). Also playing at the Camera 3 in San Jose and other local venues.

WHY: If you don't care about Oscar season, I don't blame you. But if you haven't seen Amour yet you may want to do it soon, to get in the mood for the Pacific Film Archive's series devoted to actor Jean-Louis Trintignant that begins next Saturday. The aforementioned Z is one of the eleven films screening at the Berkeley venue.

HOW: Amour shows on 35mm at the Clay and the Camera 3, and (I believe) digitally elsewhere.

The Two Eyes Of Lawrence Chadbourne

If you didn't attend some wonderful repertory/revival film screenings in 2012, you missed out. As nobody could see them all, I've recruited Frisco Bay filmgoers to recall some of their own favorites of the year. An index of participants is found here.  

The following list comes from Lawrence Chadbourne, a film buff and video collector now avidly using Twitter.

2012 was the year where the pace accelerated for conversion of Bay Area theatres to digital projection, and with noble exceptions like the Stanford. most of our rep/revival venues which still showed 35 and 16mm, going along with the crowd, succumbed too frequently for my taste to the temptation to book a DCP. There were several series on film, however, that expanded my horizons and I prefer to focus on these.

In February the Pacific Film Archive included in its interesting "Dizzy Heights: Silent Cinema and Life In The Air," curated by grad student Patrick Ellis, a rare 1927 Julien Duvivier treat, The Mystery Of The Eiffel Tower, that had not been in Susan Oxtoby's superb 2009 retrospective there on that French director. I had looked at the movie before on a bootleg DVD, but it really came to life with a trio of local musicians. I wasn't aware that this work had been an influence on the Tintin graphic novels. Though much of this mis-estimated filmmaker's oeuvre is now under my belt, it still offers riches like this to be discovered.

In July and August the PFA under Kathy Geritz's supervision offered a larger program on documentarian Les Blank, who possibly because he has gotten a fair deal of exposure, as a local, I had somewhat taken for granted. These combinations of lively regional music and mouth watering ethnic food were pure joy and were appreciated by the savvy Berkeley crowd who knew their rhythms and their cuisine. My favorite of those I saw was In Heaven There Is No Beer, from 1984, which was co-directed by Maureen Gosling, 50 minutes of rollicking polka that had me tapping my toes if not dancing in the aisle. Blank and Gosling added their insights to the Q & A's at a number of the shows.

Starting in September, and continuing into the winter, Landmark Theatres brought a welcome return of Studio Ghibli Japanese anime, only a couple in the vulgarized English versions, many of course by Hayao Miyazaki but others by his less well known colleagues. My top choice was Ikao Takahata's Pom Poko from 1994, an environmental fantasy about some pretty wild raccoons. This cycle started at the Bridge (now closed) and moved to the California in Berkeley (now one of the digital conversions mentioned above) where it did well enough to be extended, but the memory of this entertaining event is touched with sadness at those changes.

In November the enterprising Joel Shepard at Yerba Buena Center For The Arts brought some treasures by the Czech surrealist master, Jan Svankmajer, whose achievement as with Les Blank I hadn't fully caught up with,. The highpoint here was his Lunacy, from 2006, a critique of an asylum based on the Marquis De Sade, with images of pieces of meat moving of their own accord that I try to forget when I am buying dinner at my nearby Andronico's!

In December the Rafael Film Center in Marin under the aegis of Richard Peterson seized the opportunity when a recent restoration of comedies by the gifted French clown Pierre Etaix became available. The series was unfortunately, unlike all the others I described, poorly attended, I spotted only one familiar fellow buff, the former coordinator of the Mendocino Film Festival, George Russell. Fortunately for those who missed the prints a Criterion box set of Etaixes is being prepared. I had seen a bit of his work way back in the 60s and 70s so was curious to find how it would hold up. These films, with the exception of one somewhat awkward documentary are so great it's hard to pick one but I would choose The Suitor, from 1963, one of the most devastating but also sweet of romantic comedies.

Last, while the purpose of Brian's blog is to celebrate our still rich local rep/revival scene, I wanted to mention a discovery of sorts I made, in this my first year using a computer, while streaming on the Europa Film Treasures web site: The French A Woman Has Passed, from 1928, where the director and the actors were so obscure I had never heard of any. It turned out to be a little gem, one of those later silents like Sunrise or Variety where the story may be relatively simple, even elemental, but the resources of style that had been developed by that point were incredibly expressive. In an ideal world, a movie like this would have turned up, instead of on a monitor, on the big screen at the Castro's silent film festival, instead of (as was the case this year) their umpteenth revival of Pandora's Box or video versions of Wings and Lubitsch.

Festival of Horror

There isn't a day between now and Thanksgiving in which at least one film festival can't be found somewhere here on Frisco Bay. This has actually been the case since the United Nations Association Film Festival began on October 18th. It ends tonight, while the Chinese American Film Festival ends tomorrow, and the San Francisco Film Society's French Cinema Now series runs until this Tuesday, October 30th (I can recommend the closing night selection Sister by Ursula Meier of Home notoriety, who will be on hand for the screening. Check Film-415 for more suggestions). The upstart Silicon Valley Film Festival comes to Santa Clara beginning Halloween night, and the venerable American Indian Film Festival begins here in San Francisco two days later. Before that's over, SF IndieFest's 11th Annual DocFest will have begun its two-week run at the Roxie and other venues. In the midst of all of these festivals are... more festivals, like the California Independent Film Festival in Orinda and Moraga, and the SFFS's Cinema By The Bay and New Italian Cinema here in Frisco proper. I count twelve in all, and that doesn't include Not Necessarily Noir III, the excellent series running through Halloween, where I've already seen brilliant neo-noir gems like To Live And Die In L.A. and Miami Blues as well as an extraordinarily rare 35mm print of Monte Hellman's 1974 Cockfighter. Perhaps I ought to think of that as a festival, as it self-identifies as on the Roxie website, as well. Anyway, after this dozen-festival (or baker's dozen?) streak ends on November 21st, we're likely to be in for a month or two of comparative festival drought, with only the Another Hole in the Head genre film festival and the touring Found Footage Festival detected by my feelers until Noir City opens in late January. Noir City's full line-up will be revealed at a December 19th Castro Theatre double-bill screening of as-yet-undisclosed titles. 

With two big writing deadlines (for forthcoming publications, more details later) and other activities, October's been busy enough for me that I haven't been able to go out to the cinema as much as I'd normally like, much less post on this blog. Because I've got big plans for celebrating Halloween with a family member's wedding on that day, I won't be able to see any of the horror movies playing during the last few days of October, like the double-features playing the final two days of Not Necessarily Noir III, the one playing Tuesday at the Castro Theatre, the screening of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (and the Cameraman's Revenge) with live organ accompaniment at Davies Symphony Hall that night, or the screenings of the original John Carpenter Halloween at the Balboa Theatre Tuesday and Wednesday.

Luckily for a busy groomsman like myself, there will be many opportunities to celebrate Halloween belatedly with plenty of special horror movie screenings throughout November and even into December. Of foremost interest is probably the Stanford Theatre, which has just extended its published calendar until the end of next month, continuing with the Universal Pictures centennial celebration it began in September by moving from the 1920s & 30s into the 1940s. As I mentioned in my last post, Universal horror rarities Werewolf of London and Secret of the Blue Room will screen on Halloween, but also on the following day before being switched out for a print of the famous Lon Chaney, Sr. silent Phantom of the Opera on Friday, November 2. Now we know that Universal's 1943 Phantom starring Claude Rains will play November 3-4 alongside Cobra Woman, a film that rarely gets labeled a horror movie, but that in my mind connects directly to RKO supernatural thrillers of its era like Cat People and The Leopard Man.   November 14-16 brings a double-bill of the Karloff-less 1940 reboot The Mummy's Hand and the Lon Chaney, Jr. star-maker The Wolf Man from 1941. The rest of November at the Stanford showcases Universal's range, bumping a Hitchcock thriller (Saboteur) up against a W.C. Fields farce (The Bank Dick), placing a Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes favorite (The Scarlet Claw) with an Ole Olson/Chic Johnson vehicle in which they make a cameo (Crazy House) , and devoting double-bills to Robert Siodmak noirs, or Abbot & Costello musical-comedies. A complete Deanna Durbin retrospective is promised for December at the venue.

Back to horror movies, the Napa Valley Film Festival is showing two of the scariest ones ever made alongside documentaries about them. Stanley Kubrick's The Shining screens November 7th just after the Frisco Bay premiere of Rodney Ascher's much-anticipated investigation into the film's cult and scholarly following Room 237, while George Romero's Night of the Living Dead screens after the last of three showings of what looks to be a more traditional making-of documentary, Year of the Living Dead. Less "traditionally" a horror movie, but no less horrific, and (in my view) no less great a film than Romero's, is Ted Kotcheff's Wake In Fright, which similarly finds one man up against a threatening army of individuals who want to turn him into one of their own (in this case brain-numbed alcoholic Australians rather than brain-eating zombies). It currently screens in 35mm at the Opera Plaza through at least November 1st. It also plays at the Shattuck in Berkeley, but I'm not sure that venue still has 35mm projection equipment on hand after a recent digital makeover, which I've been told has also left the California Theatre without 35mm capability, and the Embarcadero with only one of its screens 35mm-capable.

The films of Jan Svankmajer are frequently labeled as horror films, justifiably so, I think. There's little more cinematically unsettling than the visceral visions on display in films like Alice, Little Otik, etc. The Yerba Buena Center For The Arts devotes most of November in its screening room to the Czech animator, and is screening works by a perhaps-similar animator named Nathalie Djurberg in the galleries through January. The aforementioned Another Hole in the Head (HoleHead) festival has moved its festival from its traditional early-summer slot to bridge November and December, specifically in order to improve its position in the festival marketplace for for horror films particularly (undoubtedly the fest has made some spotty picks in the past), and is bringing such titles as The Killing Games, Road To Hell, and Deadball. The latter is HoleHead favorite director Yudai Yamaguchi's return to the scene of the crime of his first feature, Battlefield Baseball: the baseball diamond. San Francisco Giants fans should turn out in droves to see a splatter movie about a pitcher with a literally deadly arm, but note: one of Yamaguchi's previous film projects put him afoul of a Yomiuri Giant in 2005.

Atypically, the HoleHead offering I'm probably most curious about is actually not a film at all but the opening night party entertainment: a one-man Oingo Boingo cover act that goes by the name Only A Lad but is also known as Starbeast II. Oingo Boingo was one of the bands I saw perform live as often as I could in my high school and college days, seeing them six times before frontman Danny Elfman devoted his musical attention exclusively to composing film scores. It was a band formed out of the ashes of Los Angeles theatre troupe the Mystic Knights Of Oingo Boingo, whose sensibility was (so I understand) best documented by the 1980 cult-film oddity Forbidden Zone, which will screen at Terra Gallery before the opening-night party in a new colorized version. Director (and Danny's older brother) Richard Elfman will be in attendance to answer questions like: "why would you want to colorize Forbidden Zone?" He is known to be an excellent raconteur, and I confirmed this at an in-person screening (of the original version) at the Lumiere Theatre in 2004. Certainly one of the most memorable screenings I ever took in at the Lumiere, which sadly closed its doors as a Landmark-operated theatre just over a month ago, with no indication that it will find a new tenant to operate it in the time since.

Since Forbidden Zone really is no more a horror movie than The Rocky Horror Picture Show is (its relationship to the weirdest pop culture artifacts of the 1930s is not dissimilar to that of Rocky Horror's relationship to 1950s drive-in movies), let me steer back on the track I keep veering off of: horror movies showing after Halloween. The Pacific Film Archive's November-December calendar actually includes a number of horror or borderline-horror films on it. Barry Gifford will be on hand on the last Thursday in November and the first two Saturdays in December, for a five-program tribute to his screenwriting career including the often bone-chilling Lost Highway and more collaborations with David Lynch and international autuers. And the continuing fall tribute to pre-nouvelle vague French filmmaking includes a pair of eerie, supernatural-themed classics and one authentique horror movie, Georges Franju's unforgettable Eyes Without A Face. One last note: when I first saw that the PFA would presenting three new restorations of diverse, masterpiece-level works by avant-garde filmmakers on Halloween night I wrote it off as counter-programming. But I recently remembered that Vincent Price narrates one of the three, the lovely Notes On The Port Of St. Francis by Frank Stauffacher. It's good that the horror movie master's sonorous tones will be able to entertain an audience that evening, even if I'm going to have to miss it myself.

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?

Adam Hartzell: I Wish

Summer moviegoing in a city like San Francisco doesn't have to mean check-your-brain trips to the mall. Alternative screening venues abound in this town- their schedules linked on my sidebar a click away. I'll make special mention of the particularly strong programming at the Roxie, the Yerba Buena Center For The Arts, and the SF Film Society Screen over the next month or two, before mentioning a pair of special events featuring local musicians picking favorite locally-made films (Foul Play and The Conversation) at the Vogue this weekend. Also opening this weekend? A return-to-form from one of Japan's most internationally-esteemed directors right now, Hirokazu Kore-Eda. Adam Hartzell reviews the new film. All photos courtesy Magnolia Pictures:

It speaks to the power of cinema, and Hirokazu Kore-Eda's story-telling in particular, that the director's latest film had my wife and I changing our minds so quickly with such strong re-commitment.  The morning before we sat down to watch I Wish at the 55th San Francisco International Film Festival, we had made the difficult decision that traveling to see our family in Japan this summer probably wasn't the best for us financial-wise.  But once the credits closed the film, my wife was first to exclaim, and I was quick to second, "I really want to go to Japan now!"


This is, of course, exactly what the folks of jeki want to hear. jeki, (I've only seen it officially referenced in lower-case), is the East Japan Marketing & Communications advertising group, which is a subsidiary of the East Japan Railway Company.  And jeki partially funded I Wish.  If an international audience wasn't the intent, at least it can be assumed that they hoped to inspire their fellow Japanese citizens to travel to the most southwesterly island of Japan's archipelago, Kyushu.    Although my wife and I won't be heading that far south this time, (we went to Oita during our past visit), we are definitely heading to other prefectures along other railway lines after witnessing this engaging story of kids rallying around something bigger than themselves.

What was it that so transfixed us?  First, a quick plot summary.  The film follows two brothers who are amicably apart after the separation between their mother and father.   The two brother characters, older Koichi and younger Ryonosuke, are played by two real life brothers, Koki and Oshiro Maeda.   Koichi feels stuck in the ash-y air of Kagoshima where an active volcano (Sakurajima) brews and occasionally spews ash, resulting in daily habits particular to Kagoshima residents such as vigorously brushing off the ash upon arrival at school or wetting ones finger to see if ash collects on the upright phalange.   (My wife was born there and these Kagoshima gestures resonated with her memories of visiting her grandmother.)


It appears the younger Ryonosuke got the better deal in the bargain.  He is having the childhood most can only dream of, running around the more bustling Fukuoka with his posse of mostly girls, all while helping sell the merch at concerts for his dad's rock band.  Ryonosuke is truly the hyper one that walks ever so closely towards that annoying line, but never fully crosses it.  The plot consists of the possibility of the family reuniting and Koichi's attempts to assist in this re-cleave post-cleave by conjuring up a story that if you make a wish when two bullet trains pass each other, your miracle (the literal Japanese title of the film) will come true. 

Simply watching the wonderfully expansive train system of Japan and the freedom it provides is advertising enough for someone like me who is stuck in the backward-thinking highway-bounds of a car-dependent nation. But the director's deft story-telling makes sure I Wish is so much more than an ad for the railroad industry.  Kore-eda shows us the joy of watching kids throughout their day, wandering around their respective cities unchaperoned, creating adventures for themselves, from as complicated as their journey to make a wish to as simple as rushing to a favorite food stall.  To me, this was precious without being sickeningly kawaii. 


In this way, I Wish further solidifies Kore-eda's reputation of being one of the best directors of young actors and actresses.  What particularly transfixed me was just the importance of that less self-conscious time of childhood when if you can dream it, you can do it, at least in your head.  For my wife, it was nostalgia for what her adult self is no longer permitted to enjoy.  She and I can enjoy it vicariously now by watching our nieces engage in these privileges of youth, and by watching I Wish again when it is released this weekend at the Lumiere in San Francisco, Shattuck Cinema in Berkeley, and the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.

I cannot recommend I Wish enough, but it is important to point out something missing from the narrative that comes off chasm-atic if you are aware of it, as Japanese citizens would be.  


The opening celebration for the northern section of Kyushu extension noted in the film takes place on the 12th of March, 2011.  This should have been a momentous event that further solidified Japan's forward-thinking in establishing a railway network envied by many.  But the celebration was canceled by an incident of world-wide proportion that happened one day before the opening - the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that led to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.   Neither the earthquake, nor the tsunami, nor the nuclear disaster enters into the plot of I Wish.  This can be argued as a major omission.  Even though kids can go about their days without knowing much of the wider world, this was an incident of such devastation to the country it ought to have been mentioned somewhere.


And, arguably, it is indirectly mentioned.  But to flesh this out, I have to ruin the plot.  So your time here is done if you hold onto the view that 'spoilers' spoil a film.  (Recent evidence suggests otherwise.)

But here's some non-plot spoilers regarding how the new northern Kyushu lines connect the dots of the plot.  Koichi is so bummed about living in Kagoshima, he takes one of the things that bothers him about it, the ash-spewing Sakarujima volcano, and melds a fantasy in his mind where an eruption of Sakarujima will force his family to leave Kagoshima.  The wish he plans to plead for once the bullet trains pass is that Kagoshima be destroyed.  Now, Koichi isn't evil in that he hopes people die.  It's just that he's a kid, living in his often selfish world.  If he really thought his wish through, he'd realize folks might die in the process of living his fantasy. 

And Koichi does seem to realize that his dream is selfish, because he lets go of it and doesn't wish for a disaster when the trains pass.  He resolves to accept his present plight and will make the most of life in Kagoshima.  If we read Koichi's disbanded disaster as the triple disaster that actually shook Japan the day before the launch of the new northern Kyushu line, even though neither the earthquake, the tsunami, nor the nuclear plant disaster are mentioned, perhaps that is partly an unspoken motivation for Koichi to relinquish the disaster in his mind.  (The reasons the film presents are more pedestrian, but still virtuous.) 

Unfortunately, this reason for exclusion is not an argument I find too convincing.  It makes me feel like I’m stretching it.  If you are going to place a fictional world within the borders of a real-life event, it's hard to justify silence on a national tragedy.  (By the way, I am not implying at all that jeki encouraged such silence.  And let’s also keep in mind that the funding and story line were probably well solidified prior to the horrible disaster that inflicted Japan.)  Still, I wish Kore-eda would have found a way to make note of what's excised from the narrative.  Such is the only flaw in an otherwise wonderful film.

Does Netflix Cause Cancer?

Short answer: probably not. Not any more than cellphones, power lines, microwave ovens, and the other accoutrements of the modern world, anyhow. But that heading got your attention, didn't it? Remember when your mother told you that sitting too close the television screen would wreck your eyesight or worse? She was probably wrong too, but her overall point that getting too transfixed by home appliances may be unhealthy for us (intellectually and emotionally, if not physically) still has validity.

Don't get me wrong- it's impossible to deny the utility and convenience of home delivery systems for our entertainment, and though I haven't personally embraced streaming or downloading video, I do watch DVDs with some frequency. However, I hope I never get so habituated to doing so that I no longer feel like going out to see a movie playing on a shared screen.

One argument made by some of the proponents of digital delivery systems in favor of traditional 35mm film distribution has been the environmental benefits of moving away from the chemical processes required to make film prints, and the necessity to ship heavy film cans long distances. These benefits are hard to dispute, but the idea that technology is bringing us to some sort of entertainment eco-topia is even harder to swallow. Can we remove the desire to use new technologies to watch movies from the factors encouraging us to buy endless personal computers, media players, and screens, all subject to the little tyrannies of planned obsolescence? Would the impoverished peasants living and laboring in the so-called "e-waste villages" where they come into constant contact with the toxic components of discarded electronic devices, shipped from overseas, consider the decrease in photochemically-based film delivery an environmental boon? I think not. From a certain point of view, the popularity of Netflix, whose streaming services are often said to make up 30% of this country's internet traffic during peak periods (though that figure's been contested), indeed may contribute to increased cancer rates in other countries.

Accepting that we live in an age of ever-expanding personal screens (and typing this on my computer, it would be the height of hypocrisy for me to pretend I don't accept it, albeit with reservations) doesn't necessarily mean that we should celebrate when traditional film distribution methods disappear. I'm a little heartsick that the greenest cinema in town is almost certainly going to close before the end of the month. Barring some kind of deus ex machina intervention by a well-funded angel, the Red Vic Movie House, which has solar panels on its roof and sells its popcorn and drinks in reusable bowls and cups rather then industry-standard disposable containers, is set to close after its 31st anniversary and annual screenings of Harold And Maude July 22-25. The theatre's July calendar is filled with the kinds of wonderful films that a group of passionate programmers might want to bring to audiences one last time before finally shutting the theatre doors: Vertigo July 5 & 6, Babe on July 10 & 11, What's Up, Doc July 12 & 13, Stop Making Sense July 15 & 16, Touch of Evil July 17 & 18, and (sadly fittingly) The Last Waltz Jul 19 & 20. They're also holding one last poster sale, and having cinephile-musician Jonathan Richman perform and present a screening of Romani filmmaker Tony Gatlif's Vengo.

Six months ago I wrote a blog post focusing on the impending fate of the Red Vic, as well as on the VIZ a.k.a. New People Cinema. Last week, the San Francisco Film Society announced a plan to bring year-round film programming to New People starting this fall. It's very welcome news, as the state-of-the-art venue has been underused in the half-year since my post. There is a current set of weekend matinee screenings of Japanese classics by Yasujiro Ozu (the Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice and, as seen in the top image on this post, Good Morning, neither of which have shown theatrically on Frisco Bay since 2003), Akira Kurosawa (a 35mm print of Red Beard and a digital showing of Scandal) and Shohei Imamura (a 35mm print of Vengeance Is Mine and a digital showing of The Pornographers) and upcoming showings of Das Boot and of K-20: the Fiend with Twenty Faces, the latter as a Japanese earthquake and tsunami benefit. But, with a few exceptions, these screenings peppered throughout the month represent more cinematic activity than New People has seen of late. Michael Hawley has written a characteristically thorough post on the deal that I suggest reading for more context.

One question that Hawley brings up is how this deal impacts upon the Film Society's historical use of Landmark Theatres for many of its Fall screening activities (French Cinema Now, New Italian Cinema, et cetera. September 2011 brings a Hong Kong series into the Film Society fold.) Another that he hints at is what this may mean for the future of Frisco's most venerable art house, the Clay, which has been regularly playing foreign films since the 1930s (when films by Marcel Pagnol, Sascha Guitry and Fei Mu, for instance, had runs) and midnight movies since the 1970s, and which was expected to close nearly a year ago. The SF Film Society's expressed interest in using the Clay for year-round-programming seemed to delay its closure. But now that this New People deal has made clear that Film Society negotiations with the Clay property owner went nowhere, I once again must wonder how long the latter venue will remain open. For now, Landmark has Michael Winterbottom's The Trip playing there, and it's expected to open French comedy The Names of Love Friday, July 29 and host a screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show the next Saturday at midnight. Then, Sam Sharkey is to bring his popular monthly midnight screenings of the bizarrely, brazenly bad cult movie The Room from its former Red Vic home to the Clay on the second Saturday of August, September and October. We'll see.

Landmark is certainly the theatre chain that brings the most film titles of interest to a Frisco moviegoer weary of Hollywood sequelitis and remake fever. Recent Landmark hits include Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris and Terence Malick's the Tree of Life, and I expect upcoming bookings of Errol Morris's Tabloid (opening July 15) and of the Rialto Pictures revival of Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth (opening September 9) to do well also. The chain also screens a lot of titles that you have to closely follow the independent film and film festival world to recognize. (What will we do without David Hudson?) That's why I was actually rather excited to learn that local Landmark Theatres (along with most local AMC Theatres, a San Jose theatre devoted to South Asian cinema called Big Cinemas Towne 3, and the South Bay's Camera Cinemas mini-chain) were on the list of theatres participating in the pilot program called MoviePass, announced as launching this month as a kind of Frisco Bay beta-test. For $50 a month, moviegoers were to be admitted to any film playing at any of the participating theatres, as long as they didn't go to more than one movie per day, or (presumably as a precaution against fraud) go to any movie more than once. The thing is, these "participating theatres" weren't really participating-- the deals had been arranged through their online ticketing partner movietickets.com without input of the chain owners. Soon it was announced that the program would be canceled before it began, with theatre staff instructed not to honor tickets purchased through the MoviePass program. Still, it seems like a similar plan along such lines, if it ever were to be enacted, would hold great appeal to a segment of Frisco Bay cinephiles (though perhaps not the same segment that owns smartphones) and might even be effective in luring bargain-hunters not normally attracted to documentaries and foreign films into expanding their cinematic horizons. Lets hope future endeavors on the part of MoviePass are more thought-through.

Thanks for indulging on this rambling ride through a number of issues that have been on my mind lately. I managed to work in references to some of the notable screenings on Frisco Bay's horizon, but continue on with me and I'll share a few others I'm excited about.

The Pacific Film Archive's new calendar for July & August begins tonight withthe first of a set of American films noir set at least partly in Mexico, from rarities like Anthony Mann's The Great Flamarion to classics like Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (which also features on the Castro Theatre's July calendar on a double-bill with another amazing Robert Mitchum starrer Night of the Hunter). Check what Dennis Harvey and Max Goldberg say on the series. The calendar continues with a great, if incomplete, series of Bernardo Bertolucci films, all in new prints, and a very welcome Jerzy Sklomowski series including what I believe to be Frisco Bay premieres of at least two films, his latest Essential Killing, starring Vincent Gallo, and Four Nights With Anna. I saw Essential Killing in Toronto last September and was both mightily impressed with it and embarrassed I'd never seen any of Skolimowski's films, other than a few he wrote for other directors (Roman Polanski & Andrej Wajda) early in his career. The Berkeley venue also presents a set of films written (and sometimes directed) by the previously mentioned Marcel Pagnol, programs presented by animator John Musker and animation scholar Karl Cohen, Kon Ichikawa's The Makioka Sisters, and a free outdoor screening of It Conquered The World. And the Japanese Divas program continues on from June. Jason Sanders has been putting together beautiful collections of images of the featured actresses from classic Japanese fan magazines on the BAM/PFA's own blog. Looking ahead to September and October, it's been learned that the PFA will play host to a series of films directed (some of them from inside prison walls) by persecuted Turkish filmmaker Yilmaz Güney.

The Roxie is playing host to a number of smaller film festivals this summer, and has announced a number of interesting screenings. Most interesting to me are the July 29-August 4 run of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's World on a Wire, which I saw at the last SF International Film Festival, a two-night stand of Surrogate Valentine, my favorite film of the last SF International Asian American Film Festival, and perhaps most exciting of all, a small Monte Hellman retrospective including the only one of his films I've seen thus far, Two Lane Blacktop, his well-regarded Cockfighter, and two films singled out as "Acid Westerns" by Jonathan Rosenbaum, Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting. Hellman will even be on hand July 22 to introduce his new film Road To Nowhere; he'll be at the Rafael Film Center in Marin County the next evening introducing the latter two films. Ride in the Whirlwind and Two-Lane Blacktop (though not Cockfighter) will play the Rafael that week as well.

The Rafael is also one of five screening venues for the 31st edition of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. This year, I'm particularly intrigued by the archival selections playing the festival, all at the Castro Theatre. Most impressively, Kirk Douglas has agreed to come to a Sunday afternoon, July 24th screening of Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus. How many legends of his stature still have the ability to make personal appearances? Suffice to say this is an incredible coup for the festival. If you're wondering what the overt Jewish content in Spartacus might be, let me just divert your attention over to the festival's other Kirk Douglas film The Juggler, directed by blacklist victim Edward Dmytryk in 1953. A third archival selection is a newly-subtitled 1939 Yiddish-language film Tevye, based on the same set of stories that inspired Fiddler On The Roof years later. I first heard of the film when I learned it had been inducted into the National Film Registry, and I'm excited to finally have a shot at seeing it, especially at the Castro.

The Castro is well worth frequenting in July as well. In addition to already-mentioned events, there's a 9-film tribute to the year 1984 hosted by Jesse Hawthorne Ficks as part of his MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS programming. July 20 brings a Todd Haynes double-bill: Poison and Safe. And the month bleeds into August with the first in a while of the Castro's now-trademark series devoted to great film composers, this time Max Steiner, which gives an excuse to show an astonishing array of beloved Hollywood classics: the original Mildred Pierce, Gone With The Wind, White Heat, King Kong and The Searchers are just some of these.

Of course July 14-17 are my own favorite days in the Castro's upcoming programming; it's the weekend of the Silent Film Festival, with which (I feel compelled to frequently mention, in the interest of full disclosure) I've been tangentially associated with, as a researcher and writer, for five years now. I'm very impressed with their program this year, and plan on discussing it in more detail at a future date. In the meantime, I notice that the Stanford Theatre is planning to bring back a summer silent screening series for the first time in several years. Buster Keaton films yet to be determined will be screened, and I'd bet that the July 15 date will feature organist Dennis James, who'll be in San Francisco July 16-17 to perform for the rediscovered Douglas Fairbanks comedy Mr. Fix-It and the Lois Weber-directed drama Shoes, and to share his perspectives on performing for silent films at the SFSFF's July 16 Variations on a Theme panel hosted by experienced silent film accompanist Jill Tracy. Silent film enthusiasts should also note that the Niles Film Museum also has its July-August calendar available as a pdf on its website. I'm most excited by the chance to see Leap Year, the final feature starring Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle made before his famous scandal.