BANG BANG: Julian Tran and Cuyler Ballenger

BANG BANG is our week-long look back at 20!!, or "Twenty-bang-bang," or 2011, with contributions from all over aiming to cover all sorts of enthusiasms from film to music to words and beyond.

Julian Tran and Cuyler Ballenger Present: Crime

Netflix doubled our monthly fee this year. What a crime. Here are the best crime movies we saw on Netflix this year.

1. Carlos (Mini-Series), 2010, Olivier Assayas. Carlos is an interesting movie because the entire six hours is comprised of five repeating scenes: Cars driving up to a place; Johnny Walker Red being consumed; Shooting into a ceiling with an automatic weapon; Deboarding planes; The Cure. Because of, not despite, this simplicity, Carlos is irresistible, like (see picture). Don’t let the six hour running time dissuade you – Assayas burns through scenes with the naïve recklessness of a true Marxist. In a good way.

2. The Robber (Der Räuber), 2010, Benjamin Heissenberg. Further proof that rich people run. Madoff probably ran 5 miles, 5 days a week, before going into the office and robbing half the eastern seaboard. The Robber runs before and after his job. He also amasses a sizeable fortune, although his main asset is physical endurance. Unfortunately, even the best marathon runners tire and shit themselves, which is probably exactly what Madoff is doing these days.

3. Army of Shadows (L'armée des ombres), 1969, Jean-Pierre Melville. Not a crime movie exactly, unless you count Nazis as criminals, which basically nobody does anymore. Vive la Résistance.

4. Body Heat, 1981, Lawrence Kasdan. Body Heat is about a lawyer played by William Hurt who has an affair with the wife of a wealthy businessman. He is quickly ensnared in a plot to kill her husband. See, lawyers are people too. It’s the single largest act of betrayal perpetrated in Miami-Dade county pre-Lebron James. And the sex. Oh, the sex. It’s so inappropriately graphic, it’s like watching your parents do it. Great performances by Hurt, Kathleen Turner and Ted Danson, and Kasdan captures the fetid, damp rot of south Florida perfectly, which is fortunate, as I personally have no desire to visit.

5. Revanche, 2008, Götz Spielmann. We all know one of the dumbest crimes is trying to turn a Ho into a Housewife. Thankfully, Revanche knows this too. By killing off the female lead, the film is allowed to move onto more interesting relationships, like that of an aging father and his wayward son. Alex (played by Johannes Krisch) contemplates revenge numerous times: against his lover’s killer (gun), against his own father (Oedipal), and against many logs of firewood (axe) but manages to find a sort of redemption.

6. VOICEOVER: The Only Thing More Dangerous Than a Bartender Serving You Drinks is One That’s Feeding You LIES. The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a 1973 Film by Peter Yates.

[cut to: A MASKED MAN FIRING A SHOTGUN. The screen goes black.]

V.O. (CONT’D): With Friends Like This, Who Needs Enemies.

[title: NOW PLAYING.]

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Julian Tran and Cuyler Ballenger are writers living in New York. But they're friends, just like California. Julian can be found here and Cuyler writes at http://cablesports.blogspot.com

BANG BANG: Adam Hartzell

BANG BANG is our week-long look back at 20!!, or "Twenty-bang-bang," or 2011, with contributions from all over aiming to cover all sorts of enthusiasms from film to music to words and beyond.

by Adam Hartzell

I spend most of my time watching movies out of sync with my time and place. Since I prefer cinema from elsewhere, only one U.S. film makes my Top Ten, though it does make the top spot. Work and financial constraints keep me from traveling abroad for film festival premieres, which means I have to wait until they make it here to San Francisco. So my Top Ten lists usually say something about my cosmopolitan dreams that are anchored awake by my restricted finances and mobility. But here are 10 films which were released this year, or made their way to Bay Area festivals in 2011, about which I have found myself still ruminating in a positive way since they shined their light and heat on my eyes.
　
10. Passion (Khusel Shunal) (Byamba Sakhya, 2010, Mongolia) I knew nothing about Mongolian cinema until this documentary about said cinema, told through a lonely road movie, found its way into the program of this year's San Francisco Asian American International Film Festival. Now I want to know more, which is ironic since the film presents a pessimistic view of Mongolian cinema's future. But it's at least caught the fascination of one viewer even more isolated from this nation's cinema than the Mongolian residents portrayed in the documentary.

9. Aurélie Laflamme's Diary (Christian Laurence, 2010, Canada) A French language film from Quebec that was part of the NY/SF International Children's Film Festival that ran from October 21-23 at Viz Cinema, it ended up winning an audience award. I would have voted for it as well, had I seen it in the theater along with that awarding audience rather than on DVD for an sf360.org overview I wrote on the festival. It's a teen film that doesn't have to throw an American-Pie in our faces thinking that will entertain the kids and kidults. Marianne Verville is a refreshing presence in the lead role, allowed to be awkward in what is an awkward time of our lives. Plus, although she gets the boy the genre demands, she isn't swan-ed away from her duckling beginnings.

8. The Trip (Michael Winterbottom, 2011, United Kingdom) I am still laughing about the scene where Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon are riffing on announcing the inexact time of an ancient battle. Adding to this comedic pleasure was that I got to laugh at this scene along with a friend I hadn’t seen in some time whom I randomly ran into in the lobby of The Bridge theatre before the screening. It was a nice day in the Richmond neighborhood thanks to the run-ins such local establishments afford.

7. Oki's Movie (Hong Sang-soo, 2010, South Korea) I got to see three of my favorite director’s films for the first time this year. (The others were Ha Ha Ha on DVD because I couldn't make the screenings at the San Francisco International Film Festival and The Day He Arrives on screen at the Starz Denver Film Festival in mid-November with the proprietor of the Coffee, Coffee and More Coffee blog, Peter Nellhaus.) Thanks to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, I was able to watch Oki's Movie in the theatre in late June after having already seen it on DVD to prepare a piece for sf360. I'm biased in that I always find something to ruminate on endlessly in a Hong film (even with my least favorite, Woman Is the Future of Man). But Oki's Movie seems to have won over those who haven't been fans of his work. I think a big reason is the auditioning of men in Oki's movie nested within "Oki's Movie" that Andrew Tracy expertly analyzes in the Fall 2010 issue of Cinema Scope magazine.

6. The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls (Leanne Pooley, 2009, New Zealand) Finally getting the theatre release it deserved, The Topp Twins graced our local screens outside of the film festivals that started the momentum (Frameline in 2010 and Mostly British in 2011). I own the DVD and saw the film in the theatre three times, once each at those festivals and once in Berkeley at Shattuck Cinemas with my cousin when it was released. Even after all these screenings, I'm still moved by how much major moments of the lives of these yodeling, country singing lesbian twins are tied up with major political successes in New Zealand history. I am still giddy about getting to meet them for an interview for sf360, the most nervous I have ever been for an interview.

5. Poetry (Lee Chang-dong, 2010, South Korea) Poetry definitively represents what I have been appreciating lately about South Korean cinema - how much it has opened up cinematic space for its senior actresses. Yun Jung-hee came out of retirement for this virtuoso performance of Lee Chang-dong's as he continues to explore the life of the outsider in South Korea. During my first draft of this brief commentary on Poetry, I went into a rant about how, if there failed to be a Best Actress nom nod to Yun, the Oscars would continue to be irrelevant in my cinematic life. But after writing that draft, I went to talk with Brian Darr of Hell on Frisco Bay blog and he informed me the Los Angeles Critic Circle gave Yun their Best Actress award. As a result, I put my seething rage at the Oscars as a failed institution back into its cage to be unleashed some other day.

4. The Salesman (Sébastian Pilote, 2011, Canada) I am someone upon whom car commercials fail to make the intended impact. I don't desire the products they advertise. And I don't buy into the false sense of freedom the commercials purport to symbolize. (The streets are usually much more crowded than as portrayed in the commercials and buying a car shackles you with debt, high gas prices, and vast acres of asphalt requirements for roads and parking.) That said, I'm primed to appreciate the tragedy in The Salesman, a perfect example of a genre I'm calling 'Post Peak Oil Cinema', where the life of a successful car salesman is turned on its head by the very products he sells so successfully. The Salesman is a sad, sad film that doesn't pummel you but rather slowly piles upon you like the snow that surrounds this little Quebec town.

3. The Life of Fish (Matías Bize, 2010, Chile) My wife and I caught this film during our yearly Caltrain trip to Cinequest in San Jose because it fit with our schedule and it's one of those happy accident, eeny-meeny-miney-mo(e)ments where you select a film with no real sense of what you are getting yourself into and you realize the programmers have made an excellent choice for you. In this film, we travel through a party held in a single house as our main character relives his younger self through his memories and those of others. Simple, poignant, and delightful.

2. Nostalgia for the Light (Patrico Guzmán, 2010, France/Chile/Germany) This was a truly amazing film I saw in the Dolby screening room as part of the press screenings for the San Francisco International Film Festival this year. Guzmán’s pairing of professional astronomers with amateur archaeologists works on so many levels. Even though the archaeologists are searching for the remains of family members killed by their own government, somehow, in spite of all this, Guzmán leaves us with tremendous hope for humanity.

1. Deaf Jam (Judy Lieff, 2011, USA) I have not had the experience with a film for a long time like I had with Lieff’s documentary about high school Deaf poets venturing out into the venues of a (hearing) poetry slam. Cinema transfixed me again at the Mill Valley Film Festival like it did the first time I could not stopping about the impact a film had on me. Lieff captures the vibrancy of American Sign Language through several tactics of translation. Her willingness to mess with the text of subtitling the poems in the opening sequence is mesmerizing. At the same time, she even took the risk not to translate the ASL later in the film and it is just as powerful sans subtitles. Mixed in with this story of the life of young Deaf folk is a story about the struggles of immigrant children whose parents’ citizenship comes after they enter adulthood and a friendship between a young Israeli Jew and Palestinian Muslim. Lieff and the subjects of her documentary show us how ASL is as perfect a language of cinema as any other, leaving you hoping Lieff and the students she films don’t stop here. We need these stories. We need this kind of active, engaged cinema.

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Adam Hartzell is totally bummed that sf360.org is no longer publishing because he had a blast writing for them for three years. He continues to write for Brian Darr's San Francisco film blog, Hell on Frisco Bay, and the premier English language website on South Korean cinema, Koreanfilm.org. He began this year as a guest on an episode of the VCinema podcast where he discussed the original version and the recent re-visioning of the South Korean classic The Housemaid (MP3). He has had a few magazine pieces in Kyoto Journal, a chapter on The Power of Kangwon Province for The Cinema of Japan and Korea (Wallflower Press), and next year he will have a bunch of essays in the upcoming publication of World Directory of Cinema: Korea (Intellect, Ltd.).

The BANG BANG Wagon

Year's running out. Holidays are closing in. Frisco Bay movie theatres wrapping up their 2011 programming with annual traditions like Wizard of Oz at the Paramount December 30 and It's A Wonderful Life at the Stanford December 24th, although it's already sold out there. Not at the Balboa or (on the 25th) at New People though, both theatres hoping what's proven popular in Palo Alto can be so here in SF too. New People's also trying a late Friday holiday screening of the Finnish monster movie (with Santa as monster) Rare Exports: a Christmas Tale, as well as a run of the wintry Silent Souls and a new 35mm print of the cold, cold Truffaut classic The Bride Wore Black from now until Thursday, December 22. The Rafael in Marin has another snowbound film starting December 23: Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush with a newly adapted version of Chaplin's score (the occasion for the new 35mm release). The Castro is counter-programming all this chilliness with a full week of heart-warming musicals, starting with a knockout Vincente Minnelli double bill of Meet Me In St. Louis and The Band Wagon December 26th, and winding up with a "sing-a-long" (that is, lyrically subtitled) 35mm print of West Side Story. And this Friday's Oddball Films program is simply a must-see for anyone into Georges Méliès, or Warner Brothers cartoons not on DVD, or the films of Charles & Ray Eames, or all of the above (like me!)

I had to get that paragraph out of the way before coming to the main purpose of this post: to announce, and to provide an index for, a year-end-project cooked up by my buddy Ryland Walker Knight and myself to be cross-posted here at Hell On Frisco Bay and on Ryland's blog Vinyl Is Heavy this week. BANG BANG refers to the double vertical numerals we've been living with since January. We've asked a number of fine folks to weigh in with various year-end-wrap-up articles. Top tens, mostly, though not exclusively. Movies, mostly, though not exclusively. We'll wrap-up the week with our own top ten new releases of 2011. Watch this space!

On The Wagon:

Adam Hartzell offers his top ten with commentary
Julian Tran and Cuyler Ballenger share six crime movies they loved seeing last year
Dave McDougall's selected 2011 discoveries, briefly noted and across various media
Matthew Flanagan gives a quick rundown of stuff he loved from last year
Eric Freeman walks us through some things he found interesting in some things he saw this year
Akiva Gottlieb's got some love for Poetry
Jenny Stewart offers notes on storytelling, and how Breaking Bad's so good at it
Durga Chew-Bose loves ladies
Ryland Walker Knight gabs on some stuff about impermanence
My own entry

Lonely Boy

Most of the specialized cinemas in town have announced their programming for the rest of the year, and some of them (like YBCA) into early 2012. December themes at the Roxie, PFA, Castro & New People include Southen (Dis)Comfort, classic musicals, and François Truffaut.

The screening space at SF Museum of Modern Art has been relatively quiet in the past few months, but December it becomes more active. A three-film series in conjunction with the ongoing exhibit devoted to designer Dieter Rams includes Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and a documentary featuring Rams, Objectified. This Thursday's George Kuchar tribute offers a chance to see restored prints of many of that dearly departed teacher & maker's most influential, beautiful films, including Hold Me When I'm Naked and Wild Night In El Reno.

And today at noon, SFMOMA hosts a free screening of six films selected by Goldie-awarded filmmaker Paul Clipson. Three by Peter Kubelka, one by Nagisa Oshima, one collaboration of Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, and one by the comparatively lesser-known Canadian documentarians Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor. Yesterday Brecht Andersch ably previewed the full program on the SFMOMA blog, reminding that I was sitting on an unpublished piece of my own on one of the selections: Koenig & Kroitor's Lonely Boy. Here it is:

The 1962 film Lonely Boy, directed by National Film Board of Canada filmmakers Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroiter, may seem at first glance like a piece of fluff, unworthy of a place in the annals of great documentary history. It's a portrait of pop singer Paul Anka on tour in New Jersey and New York, told through fans-eye views of his concerts, a certain amount of backstage access, and largely self-aggrandizing interviews from Anka and his manager Irvin Field. But it's a testament to the importance and influence of the new technologies becoming available to non-fiction filmmakers in the early 1960s that Lonely Boy looks as familiar and modern as it does to us today. The music and hairstyles may date the film as a fifty-year-old artifact, but the technological (and philosophical)-driven techniques are recognizable as some of the same ones dominant in documentaries of 2011.

When Lonely Boy was made, cameras and sound equipment were becoming available in easily-portable versions. Technologies developed for usage by war photographers and others during World War II became crucial in the development of "civilian" filmmaking. Perhaps none was more crucial than the increased infrastructure for the production and distribution of 16mm film stock, which is only about a quarter the width, resolution and weight of the 35mm standard in use in industrialized film production around the world. Most feature films and studio-produced shorts still used this standard (and indeed, the most lavish productions were now beginning to regularly utilize the even-more cumbersome 70mm film format) but avant-garde and independent work, as well as documentaries, found 16mm cheap and convenient enough that it proliferated. Film stocks were becoming more light-sensitive as well, freeing filmmakers from the necessity of bringing bulky electric lighting equipment everywhere they wanted to shoot.

16mm cameras themselves were more light-weight and portable than ever. I'm not sure there's a single shot in Lonely Boy which uses a tripod or dolly. Zoom lens technology improved significantly, giving filmmakers access to images far beyond the range of previous cameras -- a valuable asset when shooting "in the field." Audio recording equipment had become far lighter and more easily transportable as well, and improvements in synchronization technology meant that for the first time, a modestly-budgeted documentary could capture picture and image simultaneously on location, unshackling filmmakers from the tyranny of the voice-over narration. Interviews could be gathered on the street, or wherever the action was, and not just in a specially-prepared studio.

Though Lonely Boy makes use of all these technologies, providing an easygoing, behind-the-scenes look at a popular star that would have been simply impossible (especially on a NFB budget) only a few years before, perhaps it's most fascinating because it doesn't stick purely to new, often considered "realer" techniques, unlike the Direct Cinema films being made at around the same time with the same kinds of equipment. A key moment of the film is at a concert in New York, filled with female Paul Anka fans. For a time we experience the scene as if we are amidst the crowd, hearing Anka's music only when it cuts through the din of the near-constant youthful screaming. But when Anka brings a young woman up onto the stage with him, the soundtrack smoothly switches from the synchronous sound recording of the event, to the hit record version of the song he's singing, "Put Your Head on My Shoulder." Skillful matching of the camera-captured lip movements to the studio-recorded lyrics reminds us of the role of technology in selling pop music to mass markets, and the pop singer's mandate to sonically recreate a specific performance every night. But the transition also may be read as an entry into the young fan's head, where the sounds of the other concert-goers can be blocked out and only the emotion and the music (its ingrained memory as much or more than its physical sound) exists.

Adam Hartzell on Curling

Two weeks ago I took a two-day jaunt away from Frisco Bay, down to Hollywood to watch six films at the AFI Fest. I got to see Pedro Almodóvar and Antonio Banderas introduce my favorite of their collaborations, Law Of Desire at the famous Grauman's Chinese (digitally- the only dint on my first trip inside this genuine movie palace), and see five films new enough not to have reached Frisco Bay yet, including the latest films by Chantal Akerman, Alexander Sokurov, Hong Sangsoo, and Béla Tarr. All four of these were excellent (Sokurov's Faust less decidedly so than the other three) and I hope and expect to get chances to re-watch them with local audiences some time next year, assuming local film programmers are wise enough to bring them to town.

I also saw the California premiere of Silver Bullets, one of the half-dozen features the prolific young director Joe Swanberg has completed since his third one Hannah Takes The Stairs played here nearly four years ago. If Silver Bullets (my own first encounter with his directing work) is at all typical, I can understand why he polarizes audiences (and perhaps programmers as well); though there's evidence of conceptual brilliance, it's overshadowed by a half-heartedness of execution that asserts itself as a visual style. Or perhaps in place of one.

I believe I keep track of the Frisco Bay screening scene well enough to assert that Canadian DIY director Denis Côté's exhibition history here is on track to becoming the mirror image of Swanberg's. If the latter's work has been absent from local screens after seeing his first three films brought to town, Côté has had a steady increase in global acclaim for his first five films, none of which have shown locally. Finally, he broke through when his fascinating short Les Lignes Ennemies screened earlier this year at Yerba Buena Center For The Arts (which has a terrific December-January lineup by the way). And this week (for only one and a half more days, "thanks" to the holiday Thursday) his latest feature Curling is playing New People Cinema. I saw it in Toronto last Fall, and can highly recommend it, but my friend Adam Hartzell is much more attuned to particulars of the cinema of Canada, so I'm proud to host his review here on my blog. Adam:

In my continuing project to companion books with films, I found reason to read André Loiselle's Cinema as History: Michel Brault and Modern Quebec before the San Francisco Film Society's week long run of Denis Côté's Curling at their new home in the New People theatre. The retrospective of director and director of photography Michel Brault's work at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley in March of 2006 made me a huge fan of Brault specifically and solidified my interest in French-Canadian cinema generally. Loiselle's book would have been required reading for that retrospective, but since it was published in 2007 by the Toronto International Film Festival Group, adding it to my personal syllabus was impossible without breaking laws of physics. So Loiselle’s excellent book on Quebec’s history and Quebec Cinema’s history as told through the work of Michel Brault became the reading rock I slid towards the house of the wider cinematic sheet that is Cote’s Curling.
　
Loiselle's argument is that Brault has "never ceased to reflect, and reflect on, Quebec society" (page 182) as consistently, prominently, and for as long as any other Quebec filmmakers. With a couple exceptions (which Loiselle notes being the topics of queer culture and the media panopticon that made themselves present in Quebec cinema of the 80's and 90's), Brault was involved in echoing and projecting every major aspect of Quebec history activating during his time behind the camera - from early commercial cinema (Little Aurore, the Martyr Child, on which Brault was assistant director to Jean-Yves Bigras) to the emerging direct cinema (Les Raquetteurs with Gilles Groulx and the classic Of Whales, the Moon and Men, with Pierre Perrault); onward to auteur cinema (Mon Oncle Antoine, directed by Claude Jutra); to the rise of feminist cinema (Scream from Silence, directed by Anne Claire Poirier); to delayed acknowledgment of non-Quebec, francophone populations in Canada 9Éloge du Chiac) and Quebecois minorities (Les Noces de papier, Paper Wedding); and finally to the shift from film to digital cinema (his 2002 film La Manic). Denis Côté's Curling reflects what appears to be a recent evolution of Quebec Cinema that Brault would possibly have touched on himself were he still making films - the sadness of the suburban, exurban enclaves of Quebec in the age of the post-peak oil slide, something that can resonate throughout similar establishments in North America.
　
Curling follows the claustrophobic and creepy disturbing life of Jean-François that he imposes on his 12-year-old daughter Julyvonne (played by the real-life father-daughter team of Emmanuel and Philomene Bilodeau). We are first exposed to the prison around both our characters when Julyvonne is told she has astigmatism and that she must have realized something was wrong by not seeing the chalkboard at school. It is here we learn she doesn’t attend school. And it is here that her father is brought into the frame and focus is retained on him while Julyvonne, in the center of the image, becomes slightly blurry, offering a wonderful moment of breaking the fourth wall so we can better identify with Julyvonne’s plight while metaphorically visualizing through an astigmatic image the askew view her father nests Julyvonne within. The rest of the film develops this dysfunctional world Jean-François has created for himself and his daughter while other individuals, such as his bosses and co-workers, try to pull him out of his paranoia and open up the world to him and his daughter. The title of the film relates to the brief moments in a curling club where Jean-François finally gets, as Côté puts it in an interview with Jason Anderson in the Fall 2010 issue of Cinemascope, “a spark in his eye”. Curling the movie extends the arguments in the book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community where Robert D. Putnam describes the decline in ‘social capital’ or the active civil engagement that makes for strong democracies, by having Jean-François working in a bowling alley and later discovering a brighter social world in the heavily lit dome of a curling club. “People ask me,” says Côté in that same interview, “’Why curling?’ Well, first of all, curling is a collective sport, so he could get closer to his community if he would curl.” Côté clutters this cinematic curling house with several stones obstructing Jean-François from making better choices for himself and his daughter, but it’s a different type of curling that finally further feeds the initial spark in Jean-François‘ eyes.
　
There is a striking similarity in the winter scenes of the abandoned economy of this Quebec town to the one we found in the excellent debut film The Salesman by Sébastien Pilote at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, where it deservedly won the FIPRESCI Prize. Both these films highlight the ennui and socially-distant communities we have created through our cheap-oil-fueled, car-dependent housing developments beyond our denser, socially-networking urban centers. Marcel Lévesque (played powerfully by Gilbert Sicotte), as a successful car salesman, represents the person who thinks he’s benefited from this community that cheap oil built in The Salesman, whereas Jean-François is, from the very beginning, the self-perpetuating victim of this development of isolated housing. (After the visit to the eye doctor, Jean-François is actually ‘pulled over’ by a cop for not driving, as if being without a car is suspect. Whereas part of the plot of The Salesman is Lévesque pushing greater car dependency and financial ruin on a soon to be laid-off factory worker.) This is one of the developments in Quebec cinema that can resonate with those of us outside of Quebec who are experiencing the social isolation our suburbs and exurbs cause, either for ourselves, or for our elders who have retired within these cul-de-sac-ing mazes that falsely pass for community. And this is one of the developments in Quebec cinema Brault may have touched on were he still behind the camera in some way in the same way he chronicled the history of Quebec in the era of cheap oil.