Bastards (2013)

WHO: Claire Denis

WHAT: I haven't seen this film yet and I haven't read any reviews yet. I'm sold on seeing this film just on the basis of its director alone; all I really know is that it's her first feature film made on digital video. (Does this mean that White Material will stand as her last shot on film?) But I'm glad to know that, once I've seen the film and an ready to read reviews, David Hudson has been collecting links to them since its first US showing last month.

WHERE/WHEN: 8:30 PM tonight only at the Clay Theatre.

WHY: It's the final day of the San Francisco Film Society's annual French Cinema Now showcase, and some of the heaviest-hitting directors have been saved for last. The day starts with House Of Radio, the newest documentary from the maker of To Be And To Have and many other popular non-fiction imports. That's followed by the weekend's second showing of Anna Novion's Rendezvous in Kirina, which the Film Society gave pride of place on its festival marketing materials. I'm also very excited to see Vic & Flo Saw A Bear, the latest from French-Canadian filmmaker Denis Côté, who made the wonderful Curling in 2010. Bastards closes the program, and then the SFFS does it all again at the Clay next week with its longest-standing mini-festival, New Italian Cinema.

HOW: Digital screening.

In A Lonely Place (1950)

WHO: Nicholas Ray directed this

WHAT: A top contender for the title of "best movie about Hollywood ever made in Hollywood". Noir City honcho Eddie Muller put it at the top of the list of his all-time favorite films noir and who am I to argue with that? (In fact I think I'd come to the same or at least a very similar conclusion independently.)

WHERE/WHEN: Screens today and tomorrow only at the Stanford Theatre at 4:05 and 7:30 PM.

WHY: Speaking of Eddie Muller and Noir City, there's already a good deal of online speculation about the possible programming at the 12th edition of that beloved Frisco festival, which will occur at the Castro Theatre January 24th through February2nd, 2014. There are rumors that the Film Noir Foundation, the non-profit that grew out of the festival, should finally be ready to premiere its long-promised restoration of Byron Haskin's Too Late For Tears starring Lisabeth Scott and Dan Duryea, for instance. And since the reveal of the festival poster, some (yes, including yours truly) have been wondering if the next Noir City might be the first edition to expand its focus to include noir filmed in languages other than English. I've heard a rumor that seems to confirm such guesswork: that Noir City 12 will include a film directed by Mexico's Golden Age auteur Roberto Gavaldón. I've only seen one Gavaldón film before, the excellent but only somewhat noir-ish Macario. I wonder if this means we'll be seeing The Other One starring Dolores Del Rio at the Castro in a few months? Or perhaps another title- I don't really know how many noirs Gavaldón made. To what extent might the full program be spiced up (don't any of you Hollywood purists dare say diluted in front of me) with some international depictions of desperate criminals?

At least we know when we'll know the answer: December 18th, 2013, when the Castro will host Noir City's fourth annual Noir City Xmas double-bill, this time of the only known projectable 35mm print of the 1947 George Raft vehicle Christmas Eve and of a 35mm print of the 1961 independently-produced Blast of Silence. Way better than a press conference as a method of revealing a festival line-up, Noir City X-Mas has quickly become one of my favorite holiday traditions.

HOW: 35mm screening, on a double-bill with Joseph H. Lewis's Gun Crazy.

Walker (1987)

WHO: Alex Cox directed and co-edited this.

WHAT: The first American (co-)production to be shot on location (for the most part) in Nicaragua.  A truly bizarre film about a bizarre piece of 19th-century history, it stars Ed Harris as William Walker, the mercenary filibuster from Tennessee who tried to make Nicaragua become one of the United States the way Texas (among others) became one: through Anglo settlement and conquest.

Such a brutal history makes for a sometimes brutal movie, and director Cox drew inspiration from violent Western epics like The Wild Bunch and Once Upon a Time in the West to create his most lavishly morbid film.  But he also broke all the rules of period pieces by connecting the historical events to the contemporaneous Reagan-era policies in the region, in a way I wouldn't want to spoil for those who have not yet seen this.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Roxie, at 11:59 PM.

WHY: Walker is the capper to the next-to-last MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS triple-bill of 2013, and it's a doozy. Starting this summer with the MiDNITES showing of Dario Argento's Tenebrae these three-prong events have involved a crawl from a Castro Theatre double-bill to the nearby Roxie for the final show. This will be my first time embarking one of these crawls, and I couldn't be more excited for the line-up.

First up is my favorite big-budget Hollywood movie in recent memory The Lone Ranger, which I wrote about when it was still in cinemas this past August. I very much look forward to an upcoming piece on the film by my friend and fellow fan Ryland Walker Knight, but in the meantime I'm excited to attend the my first 35mm viewing of a film that was shot largely on 35mm by Bojan Bazelli (cinematographer for Paul Schrader's Patty Hearst and Abel Ferrara's King of New York and Body Snatchers among other films on his very interesting resume), but that has until tonight only shown at digital-only theatres within San Francisco.

The second program in the trio is Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, one of my favorite films of all time but one I have never seen on a truly huge screen like the Castro's (it frequently played at the Red Vic when that was still a going concern). It was Jonathan Rosenbaum's 1996 article on this film that made me first aware of a sub-genre known as the "acid western" that describes it, Walker, Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie, Monte Hellman's The Shooting and other films, and that tonight's MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS event borrows for its title.

As far as I know, Rosenbaum has thus far not weighed in (or perhaps even seen) The Lone Ranger, so I don't know how he would react to it being grouped with the other two films. But I think it might just work. It has a hallucinatory quality and a sense of existence as a counterpoint to mainstream filmmaking (though its status as a highly-budgeted Disney release surely complicates this quite a bit; the friction here may help account for its poor showing with critics).

Obviously tonight's triple-bill is meant to highlight the approaches toward portraying the clash of Anglo-Saxon and indigenous American cultures in the eighteenth century, in ways that draw from and rebel against the traditional ways Hollywood filmmakers have portrayed this topic in Westerns during their heyday in the 1910s through 1970s. It's probably a coincidence that this triple-bill is occurring in the middle of the 38th annual American Indian Film Festival, which is one of the country's best showcases for films made by and about the modern descendents of native peoples from this continent. If you've never sampled this excellent festival, I highly recommend doing so before its screenings end tomorrow. Also probably a coincidence is the Sunday evening 16mm screening of Kent MacKenzie's unique 1961 film The Exiles at the Berkeley Underground Film Society. I recommend that too.

HOW:All films tonight screen via 35mm prints.

Last Tango In Paris (1972)

WHO: Bernardo Bertolucci directed this.

WHAT: If it's not the most well-known film I've never seen, it's at least got to be the most well-known foreign film made before I was born that I've never seen. Why haven't I at some point checked it out? I'm not quite sure but I don't feel so bad about that after reading these lines from Roger Ebert's addendum to his oriiginal review after revisiting the film in 1995:

I once had a professor who knew just about everything there was to know about Romeo and Juliet, and told us he would trade it all in for the opportunity to read the play for the first time. I felt the same way during the screening: I was so familiar with the film that I was making contact with the art instead of the emotion.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Yerba Buena Center For the Arts at 7:30 PM.

WHY: Marlon Brando, were he still around, would probably prefer I didn't feature this film on my blog today. He'd probably rather I point out the ongoing American Indian Film Festival, one of the longest-running yet the most consistently overlooked of all Frisco Bay film festivals. (I only attended for the first time in 2012 and returned to see a couple films this year, but so far I've yet to see something there that wasn't worthwhile.) Or perhaps another local festival happening this weekend that I'm probably not going to be able to squeeze in a mention of, worthy as it might be: the 3rd i South Asian Film Festival for example, or the California Independent Film Festival or the Transgender Film Festival or the Poppy Jaspar International Short Film Festival.

But I can't resist. Last Tango In Paris is what's really on my mind today. It's one of those I'd always wanted to get around to seeing, but put off until another day. With a 35mm print coming to town and no other major plans I think that might just be today. The occasion is the launch of YBCA's X: The History of a Film Rating series investigating films that have been at one point or another given the MPAA's most restrictive rating. Lincoln Spector has offered an excellent summary of the series and its historical basis (though if he thinks Fritz The Cat, which screens at YBCA next Thursday, is really the only X-rated cartoon and not just the first one, he must be lucky enough to have avoided director Ralph Bakshi's follow-up Heavy Traffic and the wave of other adult-oriented animation that came in their wake.)  I suspect this series was organized with at least half an eye on the expected controversy coming with the release of the NC-17 top Cannes prize-winner Blue Is The Warmest Color this past week. 

HOW: All programs in the YBCA's series screen from 35mm prints.

Breathless (1960)

WHO: Jean-Luc Godard directed this.

WHAT: Godard's first feature film. Only one of the most famous and influential art/independent/foreign films ever made. A masterpiece that I find grows in stature with each viewing (maybe that's the very definition of masterpiece). David Hudson collected a large number of excellent articles about the film when it had its 50th anniversary in 2010.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Castro Theatre at 7:30 PM.

WHY: Though (at least in 2013) we're not getting anything close in size to the giant Godard retrospective that New Yorkers were able to see last month, at least local cinephiles get to see at least five of Godard's best features in local cinemas this month, four of them on the giant-sized Castro screen. The Castro plays a Godard every Wednesday in November: Breathless tonight, Weekend on a 35mm double-bill with David Cronenberg's Crash on the 13th, Contempt as a newly-prepared DCP on the 20th, and Band of Outsiders alongside Vincent Gallo's Buffalo '66 on November 27th, both in 35mm.

The fifth Godard coming to Frisco Bay is perhaps my favorite of all his films: Vivre Sa Vie, his signature collaboration with his wife Anna Karina, screening as part of the Pacific Film Archive's Fassbinder's Favorites sidebar to its retrospective for that director. That'll be November 22nd, the same evening as the final screening in the PFA's current Agnès Varda series, Cléo From 5 to 7. It's an appropriate pairing because, although Varda last night said she was didn't feel particularly close to the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd (of which Godard must certainly be considered a member), she did recruit him and Karina to perform in the short film-within-film Les Fiancés du pont Mac Donald ou (Méfiez-vous des lunettes noires) appearing in Cléo.

Varda also noted last night that, although she was alone among female filmmakers to gain notice during the 1960s heyday of the French New Wave, she's become heartened that there are so many French women directing, shooting, and taking other once-male-dominated roles in filmmaking nowadays. Of the nine contemporary French films screening in the San Francisco Film Society's French Cinema Now series opening at the Clay tomorrow and running all weekend, female directors outnumber males five to four (only by counting French-Canadian director of Vic & Flo Saw A Bear Denis Côté does the ratio even up to five-five), and the series includes five films shot or co-shot by women cinematographers, including two by Claire Mathon, two by Jeanne Lapoirie, and of course Bastards, directed by Claire Denis and shot by superstar DP Agnès Godard (no relation to Jean-Luc). For a full preview of the French Cinema Now series I direct you to the excellent article by local Francophile and cinephile Michael Hawley.

HOW: Breathless screens in 35mm, on a double-bill with the local DCP premiere of one of Godard's favorite films, Otto Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse. This was the film that inspired Godard to cast Jean Seberg.