Pixel Vision Archives — Page 113 of 133 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Christophe Honoré on liberty and Love Songs

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June 4, 2008

By Johnny Ray Huston

In this week’s Guardian I write about Christophe Honoré’s Love Songs. Honoré recently answered some questions about the film via email. Dive below for thoughts on cross-dressing and Jacques Demy, and also a contemporary booklist for young gay men who read.

SFBG: Gaël Morel has a brief Hitchcock-like cameo early on in Love Songs. Was this born from your experience working together?
Christophe Honoré: Gael and I regularly meet to talk about cinema and life. I co-wrote two of his movies, including Après lui. I found it funny to have him appear in the waiting line of a theater because he’s an avid filmgoer. Après lui is a film that keeps Gaël’s particular lyrical style, but this time and perhaps for the first time, it’s a more “adult” story, focused on Catherine Deneuve’s character. The script was closer to a thriller but I guess Gaël fell in love with Deneuve while shooting and made it more of a melodrama.

Louis Garrel and Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet in Love Songs

SFBG: Love Songs is structured like Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but elsewhere the similarities of spirit may not be obvious (or even exist). There is, to me, a bisexuality to Jacques Demy’s vision that one could say is extended or updated in your film. Would you agree?
CH: I do agree about the underlying homosexuality in Demy’s work. You could even say that his films deal mostly with cross-dressing. He always cast very handsome actors and filmed them in a way that made them look like icons. Love Songs is not an homage to Demy’s films but it definitely inherited something from them. And, of course, I can handle male sexuality as a filmmaker in a much more straightforward manner than what was possible in Demy’s time.

It’s pronouced “Oo-vuh:” Uwe Boll, Part Two

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June 4, 2008

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Postal is now playing at the Roxie — and will be there until Wed, June 11. It hasn’t exactly been taking the critical world by storm, but I enjoyed it, more or less. Still deciding? Read on for part two of my interview with director Uwe Boll and cast members Zach Ward and Larry Thomas.

San Francisco Bay Guardian: Do you think the fact that Postal makes light of terrorists and 9/11 will be a turn-off for audiences who would otherwise be into watching an over-the-top comedy?

Zach Ward: Why? I mean, why would you not make fun of terrorists? That’s like saying you can’t make fun of Nazis, or drug dealers. They’re douchebags. Terrorists are douchebags. Are you gonna sit underneath your chair and be worried about their opinion of you? I’ve been told that other actors turned [my] part down because they were scared of the controversy. If I’m gonna live my life in fear, I’m not living my life. If you’re gonna let a person in a foreign land with their own sets of values decide what you do on a daily basis, you might as well move there. South Park did this too — the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Get off your fat fuckin’ ass and stand for something. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t be the home of the free and then turn around and say, “Oh, we can’t do the Mohammed joke, because then the Islamic fundamentalists will be upset.” Well, fuck yourself. If you’re an Islamic fundamentalist, you’re not supposed to be watching fuckin’ TV in the first place, so you can kiss my rosy red freckled ass. And if I’m supposed to sit here and apologize to you, you need to be in my house. This is my country. I’m not gonna kowtow to another opinion. This is where the government is supposed to be afraid of us, we’re not supposed to be afraid of the government. We’re supposed to stand up and create this country around our ideals, not by what Viacom thinks. Not by integrated vertical corporate fuckin’ structure. No, that’s ridiculous. And the fact that we’ve gotten to the point where we have to defend that? That’s what made America great.

Lit: The illustrated Magazinester

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June 2, 2008

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This past week, Magazinester pledged its love for Edie Fake and Matt Furie, and threw a tomato at overpriced rags featuring the thin talents of Terence Koh. Somehow, it forgot to conclude with the message that Tila Tequila is on the cover of Blender — are ya interested?

The beauty of Fake’s and Furie’s recent zines means it’s time to expand Magazinester. It’s time for annotated examples of imagery!

Let’s start off with Furie’s boy’s club. Whenever I cross paths with a Bay Area-n stranger who has copious frazzled head and face hair — you know, like every time I step outside — I think of Furie’s drawings and paintings. I especially like the ones where someone removes his or her sunglasses to reveal no eyes beneath. Furie’s “Nature Freak” show at Jack Fischer Gallery this winter was like a fun version of The Ruins. More recently, he brought “Heads” to Adobe Books Backroom Gallery. Heads. Now there’s a good-ass topic or theme for an art show!

Some pages from boy’s club

Though they’re love at first sight as a viewing experience, I don’t immediately understand Edie Fake’s Rico McTaco and Gaylord Phoenix zines — in other words, I’m looking forward to re-reading and re-re-reading them. They don’t have many words, but they do have many worlds.

A page from Edie Fake’s Gaylord Phoenix

Edie Fake makes me happier than almost any SF artist right now. I’d long ago given up hope there’d be a gay feminist artist as talented as Edie Fake, and yet Edie Fake is here.

Another page from Gaylord Phoenix, by Edie Fake

Some zine makers just find the right topic and the hard work is already done. So it is for the people who bring you the stories, drawings, photos and lists in Dead Pets Zine.

Cover of Dead Pets Zine

What would a list of dead animal movies be without Gates of Heaven (back when Erroll Morris wasn’t a pompous windbag) and Pet Sematary (back when Mary Harron was making videos for Madonna)? Fish float up to the surface on many pages, but pet rodents fare especially poorly in Dead Pets No. 1. Try out deadpetstories@gmail.com.

A page from Dead Pets Zine

And yeah, Freddie Mercury deserves an illustrated book that celebrates almost every facet of his life. Until someone makes a Freddie Mercury book for 5-to-8-year-olds, Killer Queen: The Freddie Mercury Story will have to do. In fact, it’ll do fine for people those ages and people ten times older.

A page from Killer Queen

Big balls

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May 30, 2008

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By Marianne Moore

My friend’s rich older boyfriend—well, rich relative to my friend, who makes her living pretending to be a fairy at birthday parties (Her fairy name is Ginger-Snap. We know it’s a stripper name. We’re over it.)—is taking her to the Black and White Ball on Saturday, and I’ve been drafted into shopping. We’re now faced with a pretty awkward question: what do normal people wear to the fancy-pantsiest occasion on the San Francisco calendar?

Other people must have faced this problem before. After all, tickets to the party are $200, not cheap by any means but still well within the reach of many modest-living San Franciscans. Maybe some are kept away by the event’s reputation; personally, even if I had $200 to throw around, I would be way too scared to go. Whatever the case, there’s no information out there about how to dress for the B & W if you’re not immensely rich. One thing we know for sure: the boyfriend, while he may be shelling out $400 for tickets, isn’t about to spring for a $10,000 gown. That leaves us to dress on a fairy’s budget.

I figure we have three options:
(1) try and find a cute discounted dress a la TJ Maxx,
(2) go completely casual, or
(3) go vintage.

It’s pronouced “Oo-vuh:” Uwe Boll, Part One

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May 29, 2008

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Just so you know. It’s not “Oo-way.” This is the first thing I learned while gearing up to interview Uwe Boll last August, on the occasion of the uncut version of his film Postal‘s world premiere at the 2007 Dead Channels Film Festival. The film played to a small but enthusiastic Castro Theater crowd, many of whom were surely lured more by the Boll’s presence than by the film itself. Boll, who has embraced video games as cinematic source material the way other directors have embraced, say, Shakespeare, is so fond of controversy it’s difficult to read a news story about him that doesn’t include something ridiculous, like a Boll vs. critics boxing match or an anti-Boll petition. The first picture of him furnished by a Google search features a grinning Boll flipping off whoever’s behind the camera.

Postal, as a whole, is kind of an exercise in fuck-you cinema: in addition to making light of 9/11, it pokes fun at everything from new-agers to trailer trash to coffee snobs to midgets to Nazis … and more. (Read my shockingly positive review here.) The long-delayed film is finally getting a theatrical release; it rocks the Roxie starting tomorrow. Such an event affords me the chance to dust off my interview with Boll and cast members Zack Ward (who plays “Postal Dude,” and also appeared in 2007’s Transformers) and Larry Thomas, Seinfeld‘s “Soup Nazi” — who plays Osama Bin Laden. Read on for part one, if you dare.

‘REN’-membering Matthew Barney in LA

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May 29, 2008

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Heave ho at Matthew’s Barney’s REN. Photo courtesy of www.lipsticktracez.com/reggie/.

By Glen Helfand

How any artist follows up a large scale, career-making project is accompanied by the same critical pressure that greets the sophomore album of a hot new band. Matthew Barney made it through his post-Cremaster days with Drawing Restraint 9, which took over a whole floor at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art a couple of summers ago, though many would agree that while it stayed the course, it was a film and exhibition that didn’t quite rival the five part film/sculpture extravaganza that preceded it.

In an interview before that show, Barney said his next works would be in the realm of live performance, and true to his word, he’s been mining that vein. He staged a typically perverse work at the 2007 Manchester International Festival, an adults-only performance that involved a bull, a self-fisting female contortionist and Barney wearing a live dog on his head. (The reviews were mixed.) Another performance, staged in New York, was shown as a video as part of an exhibition at Los Angeles’s Regen Projects last year.

I can’t say I wasn’t thrilled to get an invitation to a recent Barney performance, titled REN, that took place on May 18 in not so beautiful Norwalk, a south-of-LA suburban flatland populated by convenience stores and auto dealerships. Here’s some of what the invite promised: “’Ren’ represents the first stage of the soul in its journey through the afterlife in which its ‘Secret Name’ is revealed, and subsequently lost. REN will reference the Cremaster Cycle, linking Barney and [music collaborator Jonathan] Bepler’s earlier project to the iconography and mythology of ancient Egypt. REN will feature the return of the 1967 Chrysler Imperial and Aimee Mullins from Cremaster 3, a Southern California drum and bugle corps, ranchera singer Lila Downs, and British performance artist Mouse. Performance is approximately one and a half to two hours in duration.”

Step down, Sexual Harassment Panda

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May 28, 2008

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Part One of a multi-part series on ill-conceived Public Service Announcements by intern Marianne Moore

On a Richmond-bound train the other day I noticed a sign at the end of the car, reading: “Los líquidos calientes queman como el fuego,” which means, “Hot liquids burn like fire.” I confess that I laughed — really, really loudly.

Lit: Erick Lyle on rehab for Newsom and SF, the awful flair of Willie Brown, book box mansions and life in the City

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May 28, 2008

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This week’s Lit features a review of Erick Lyle’s new book On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City (Soft Skull Press, 272 pages, $14.95). Liam O’Donoghue recently talked with Lyle, who will be appearing at Get Lost Travel Books on June 4th and AK Press Warehouse in Oakland on June 5th:

By Liam O’Donoghue

SFBG: The phase “secret history” is in the subtitle of your book and the term “urban archeology” is used to describe it. Did it feel like an archaeological project — like you were digging up this buried history of the city — when you were compiling the book?
Erick Lyle: When I moved to San Francisco I was lucky enough to be around a lot of older folks who told me their stories about the city and I fell in love with this place instantly. I feel like I’ve got all those stories filed away in my mind, so that when I’m out, riding my bike around the city, if I’m at a certain intersection, for example, I’ll think, “Oh, this is where that punk club was in 1988, but it’s also where so-and-so broke up with her boyfriend in 1995 and there was that one time when a guy tried to hit me with a 2×4.” But I can see all these layers simultaneously in my mind, and for me, part of the enjoyment of living here for awhile is seeing how these layers fit together over time. It gives an added dimension to, for example, a protest event you might be doing, to understand how that event fits into the longer history of the area.

Erick Lyle, in his secret mansion enjoying the high life

As far as thinking about it as archeology at the time, I wouldn’t say that we were so self-conscious that we would do generator shows in the street so we could say, “This is history.” But if we don’t write this shit down, no one is, it’s not making it in the Chronicle or anywhere else. The things that happen in the doorsteps of the Mission or on the dance floor at the punk club or are spray-painted on the walls: these are the things that make up our lives. That’s the fabric of life in the city.

Putting the “Van” in “Van Morrison”

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May 27, 2008

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By Phil Eil

I was walking down Mission Street the other night, just South of Cesar Chavez, when I saw something that made my heart skip. No, it wasn’t another ex-girlfriend lookalike (they’re everywhere, I swear), it was a 1991 white Toyota Previa — a doppelganger of my first car — parked in front of The Knockout.

The Previa, if you don’t know, was a Toyota minivan produced from 1991 to 1997 (their popularity followed roughly the same arc as Soundgarden’s). With a name derived from the Italian word “to preview” or “to look ahead,” Previa enthusiasts, past and present, agree — the Previa was a visionary feat of engineering.

A triumphant ‘Thirty Seven Isolated Events’ combines butoh, digital imagery at CounterPulse

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May 27, 2008

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Eyeing Blindsight. Photos by Byian Winters and design by Paige Sorvillo.

By Dina Maccabee

It feels a little overblown to say that Thirty Seven Isolated Events, conceived by choreographer Paige Sorvillo with her company Blindsight and presented at CounterPulse with the San Francisco International Arts Festival, is a triumph of independent experimental performance. It’s a relatively lean production, well-scaled to maximize CounterPulse’s somewhat Spartan interior. Still, for this audience member, there were so many successful aspects in what might have been a risky venture that triumph is the word I’ll use.

Though promotion for Thirty Seven Events uses spiffy words like “intermedia,” dance fans wary of fancy gadgets edging out real-life rippling muscles needn’t be scared off. In fact, displacement of human intimacy and desensitization to violence enabled by ubiquitous modern media are the kernels of Sorvillo’s exploration, and they provide a rich source of imagery and metaphor. The Blindsight company members slithered, twitched, and struggled with determination, fluidity, and tight control, sculpting their own flesh into an unforgettable reminder that real human contact, whether caressing or brusque, is utterly irreplaceable.

Sorvillo’s training in contemporary Japanese butoh clearly played into both the conception of Thirty Seven Events as a platform for dealing with fairly abstract emotional material, and in the style and mood of the movement itself. In the opening passage, Sorvillo writhed in a single column of yellow light, seeming to test the power of her joints and limbs against the pull of gravity in an alternately lyrical and frenzied monologue. But as she pointed out in an after-show panel discussion, the ghostly white body paint and gruesome facial contortions are parts of the butoh vocabulary she’s deliberately left out.

Lit: Rediscovering Philip Lamantia

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May 23, 2008

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An upcoming article will feature Tau by Philip Lamantia and Journey to the End by John Hoffman (City Lights, 138 pages, $12.95), the latest — and 59th — volume in City Lights’ Pocket Poets Series, edited by poet, hip-hop devotee and Guardian contributor Garrett Caples. For now, I’d like to get the word out, if it ain’t too late, about a reading and book party this Sunday. Caples hosts the event, which justifiably celebrates the publication of the lost second book by the influential surrealist Lamantia, who in turn was devoted to the writing of the comparatively obscure Hoffman, who died at the age of 25. Here’s the info, and after the jump, a choice Hoffman poem from the book.

Sun./25, 5 p.m., free
City Lights Books
261 Columbus, SF
(415) 362-8193

SECA ’08, ‘Bay Area Now 5’ unveiled

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May 23, 2008

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A work from Tauba Auerbach’s book, How to Spell the Alphabet.

By Glen Helfand

New York Times art critic Roberta Smith began her review of the current Carnegie International in Pittsburgh with a pulse-taking statement: “Lately, it seems, biennial exhibitions don’t do much except sit there, looking good and offending no one. Instead of being shows that people ‘love to hate,’ or vice versa, these big, often international affairs now inspire mild interest or resigned indifference.” That statement may resonate a bit more in biennial-intensive towns like Manhattan or Venice, Italy. In San Francisco, where the arts are less widely celebrated, the biennial concerns seem to coalesce around issues of regionalism or the perpetually problematized thing we call “Bay Area art.”

So it seemed fitting that Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art made back-to-back announcements yesterday, May 22, as to the inclusions in, respectively, “Bay Area Now 5” and the “2008 SECA Award” – both the most high-profile exhibitions of artists living and working here. The Yerba Buena folks threw a press lunch, at the fittingly titled new wine bar, the Press Club, and an evening member’s soiree in their theater to celebrate their forthcoming show, actually a triennial, which opens on July 19 and runs through Nov. 16.

In the late period of international biennials, it seems that institutions are upping the ante a bit with higher concepts and more elastic geographical borders. In recent years YBCA has been working with tiers of themes and structures – a standard gallery show plus four guest-curated shows at various venues – that tend to muddle the excitement with structural complications. BAN is no exception. A glance at the press release doesn’t suffice: you’ve gotta look deeper to figure out the scope. “Bay Area Now 5,” which was curated by Kate Eilertsen and Berin Golonu, has the attached subtitle “Inside/Outside,” referring to the not-so-provocative premise that “artists are influenced by their experiences both inside and outside the Bay Area.”

Books by the pound? Green Apple closes their warehouse with that weighty proposition

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May 21, 2008

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The latest massive to drop onto Shopping Spy’s radar is this announcement from Green Apple Books – who are not – repeat – not going out of business:

“We only have a few weeks left to sell off the last 30,000 used books at our Warehouse Clearance Sale, so they’re all priced to move: Gold is $13,859.36/pound; filet mignon is $20.00/pound (at Guerra’s on Taraval); the current issue of The New Yorker is $14.40/pound; jujubes are $9.44/pound; Uncle Ben’s brown rice is $3.36/pound; and all used books at our Warehouse Clearance Sale are $0.99/pound.

“If you agree that books are more valuable than Jujubes, please come browse the grand finale of our sale store at 248 Clement at Fourth Avenue. The store is better organized than it has ever been, and a quick check this morning showed many good reads still on the shelves.

“P.S. Please help staunch any rumors you may hear about Green Apple Books going out of business; only our temporary Warehouse Clearance Sale at 248 Clement is closing.

“Check back for even further reductions as this final fortnight or so turns into the final days.”

Love songs and Benjamin Biolay

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May 20, 2008

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I walked past the 200 white roses (no exaggeration) outside of my Mission shack’s front window this morning. A lot more fallen petals on the bricks. Don’t go, spring. My path was to a morning screening of Christophe Honore‘s most recent film Love Songs. What can I say — for much of the first half of Honore’s tribute to and update of the one and only Jacques Demy, I was skeptical. Thirty or even forty minutes in I was ready to chalk it up as a failure. But somehow by the end I was just about totally seduced. I’ll write more about the film when it’s released.

Trailer for Love Songs

If you’re at all tempted to see Love Songs, take a listen to “Bien Avant,” the opening track of Benjamin Biolay‘s most recent album Trash Yeye. This static fan vid hasn’t garnered the 20,000+ views that some of Biolay’s performances and promotional videos have, but it pairs my favorite song on the album with some images from the album’s Bruce Weber sleeve art. There’s about one degree of separation between Biolay’s chansons and Honore’s chansons d’amour. Her name is Chiara Mastroianni, and when she finally sings in Love Songs, the movie really blooms.

Cannes can’t — specific views from afar

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May 19, 2008

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As I use spare change to pay off medical debts, they both seem further away than ever, but I swear that one day I’m going to roll directly from the Cannes Film Festival to the French Open. This spring, I may not be there in person (cue violins) while Rafa Nadal tries to make it four titles in a row at Roland Garros and the Dardenne brothers compete for another Palme d’Or, but that doesn’t mean I won’t enjoy some specific aspects of both events from afar.

When the films in Cannes’ Official Competition were first announced, the best news for me wasn’t that Jia Zhangke, Lucrecia Martel and Nuri Bilge Ceylan had new works competing against the Clint Eastwoods and Charlie Kaufmans of the world. It wasn’t even that one of Philippe Garrel‘s rare films had also landed a coveted Official Competition slot. I was happiest about two things:

Still from El Cant dels Ocells

1: Albert Serra’s new movie El Cant dels Ocells — co-starring my colleague and pal (and sometime Guardian contributor) Mark Peranson as the Christ child’s dad, Joseph — was playing Director’s Fortnight. Peranson first told me about his role in the movie last fall, after I’d expressed love for Serra’s previous film Honor of the Knights, aka Quixotic. I’m as eager to see Cinema Scope editor Peranson in a biblical role as I am to see Serra’s next move (and next bouts of stasis). What with this and Nadal’s Roland Garros campaign, everything’s coming up Catalan.

Stills from Serbis

2. Brillante Mendoza’s new movie Serbis is part of the Official Competition at Cannes, making it the first Filipino film in 24 years up for the Palme d’Or. The Guardian has spotlit some film activity in the Philippines in recent years, and Mendoza is just one current of a creativity that ranges from independent narratives to the more experimental works of Raya Martin (also present as part of the Director’s Fortnight, with his fourth film, Now Showing) and others. A few months ago I raved at length about the melodrama of Mendoza’s Foster Child and the politicized action of Slingshot. It’s great to see him reaching an even higher profile now via a film that sounds like it is confrontational and far from mainstream in content.

Trailer for Slingshot

Thai transvestite-friendly light bulbs winner

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May 19, 2008

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OK, it may ruffle some feathers and it’s not exactly global warming friendly, maybe, but I’m getting a little kick this Monday afternoon out of this. The Clio Awards, the Oscars of advertising, happened recently, and this ad spot from Thailand, a font of advertising genius lately, took home a Silver:

Gangway! B.A.D. Girls Roller Derby returns

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May 16, 2008

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Oakland Outlaws vs. San Francisco ShEvil Dead at the last match in Oakland in April. Photo by Boss Hogg.

You’ve been warned. Women’s roller derby is back, big time, Saturday, May 17 when B.A.D. Girls, the Bay’s only all-female flat-track league, present SF’s ShEvil Dead battling Richmond’s Wrecking Belles at Dry Ice in Oakland.

Promoters say, “The face-off is a rematch of the teams that fought it out last December for the Bay Area Derby Girls (B.A.D.) 2007 championship. In that bout, Richmond clinched the league title in front of hundreds of frenzied fans. But both ShEvil and the Belles lost their last bouts and are eager to draw fresh blood and recuperate the thrill of victory.

“San Francisco and Richmond have not met for a public bout at their home venue, Dry Ice, in more than a year. The Oakland location is neutral territory where more than 600 fans from the opposing cities can sit on the periphery of the track, or snag a couch on one of two vista platforms, for an eye-of-God view of the action.

Fun for Flash geeks

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May 14, 2008

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How meta.

Bienvenidos to the jungle: munchies Italiano in Costa Rica

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May 12, 2008

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A little bit of Italy down south: La Puerta Negra. Photo courtesy of Zancudo Times.

By Erik Morse

A-way down south past Baja, Calif., and the Rio Grande, through Mexico and the mountain ranges of Central America, which blossom into the fiery petals of Arenal volcano, there’s a tiny fishing village near the border of Costa Rica and Panama called Playa Zancudo. Along the town’s one gravel road that travels through the swamps and palm trees to the edge of the Osa Peninsula, passing shotgun shacks and mercados, sits one of the most delicious Italian restaurants this side of the Adriatic.

Christened La Puerta Negra according to the plywood sign near the dirt path entrance, this small trattoria is a simple concrete slab and garden just off the beach. But the chef and owner Alberto Ferrini has taken great care to make it his own: a colorful assortment of fresh flowers, white tablecloths, and twinkling lights sit beneath a quilted patio covering.

Photographs of forgotten guitar heroes from the American delta are pinned above the entrance to the open-air kitchen, and the constant rotation of jug bands and blues troubadours playing from the stereo portray an ardent musical soul. A small advertisement written in marker reads: Live Blues on Saturday Night. Later on I find out that Ferrini often brings his git box from the room above the restaurant to give his customers a lesson in old-fashioned gut bucket.

Garbage to gold: SF Dump’s new artist

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May 12, 2008

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By Justin Juul

When boring people think about heaven they envision angels and wings and clouds and gold and stuff like that. Other people, cooler people you might say, imagine a world where everything is free, where alcohol flows like water, where cigarettes provide nourishment, and where orgasms last for hours. And then there are people like Paul Cesewski, a well-known Bay Area artist who’s been making bicycle-powered carnival rides, kinetic sculptures, and other weird machines for something like a decade and a half. His vision of paradise is a sprawling landfill of garbage, scrap metal, and castoff PVC tubing. What a weirdo.

Material!

The cool thing about Cesewski’s version of heaven is that, unlike the angel and harp deal, it actually exists. It’s called the SF Dump and after years of trying, Cesewski has finally scored the Dump’s coveted artist-in-residence gig. He’s been wallowing in scrap metal, garbage, and PVC piping for the past three months and he’s about to let loose with a show. It’s only going on for two days so don’t miss the boat.

Paul Cesweski, clownin’

Paul Cesweski
SF Dump
503 Tunnel Ave. SF.
Free
May 23 (5:00 – 9:00)
May 24 (1:00 – 5:00)

Dolores Park Movie Night — it’s people!

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May 9, 2008

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By Justin Juul

Thursday nights usually suck, but they just got a whole lot better. That’s right ya’ll, Dolores Park Movie Night is back in action. Last night’s screening of Soylent Green marked the second show of 2008, but there are plenty more to come. So get your BBQ grills, your mini-kegs, and a blanket; and don’t forget to bring a few bucks for the pot-brownie dude. You might not be able to hear the sound and you probably won’t be able to see the screen much, but you can rest assured you’re going to see some fresh costumes and drink a lot of beer. Plus, popcorn!

Dolores Park Movie Night
Free from April to October
The Second Thursday of Every Month @ 7:00pm
doloresparkmovie.org

SFIFF notebook: Ludivine Sagnier x 2

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May 8, 2008

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By Jeffrey M. Anderson

That blond firecracker Ludivine Sagnier, 28, turned up at the festival to accompany her new film A Girl Cut in Two, directed by the French new wave filmmaker Claude Chabrol, and she was gracious enough to sit down with me for a chat. Sagnier is happy to talk about her character Gabrielle Deneige (or “Gabrielle Snow” in the English subtitles), a television weather girl who becomes torn between two men, an older, married author and a younger, rich, spoiled brat. But she’s tickled to tell stories about her legendary director.

Ludivine Savignier times two.

“It was amazing,” she says. “I thought I would never work with him because I didn’t have that high society profile. I wasn’t bourgeoisie enough to work with him. I actually felt like I was suddenly printing my name in the history books. Chabrol is such a monument in France. Not even working with him, but only talking with him was amazing. He would talk to me about Alfred Hitchcock: ‘Oh Alfred asked me if I wanted to shoot a sequence in this movie.’ Suddenly he’s speaking about something that’s far away, that belongs to history, but it’s next door. Those were privileged moments to be able to share all those stories with him.”

SFIFF award winners: Up the Yangtze and Ballast

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May 8, 2008

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The SF International Film Festival’s Golden Gate Awards ceremony took place last night. Below, Jeffrey M. Anderson sounds off on two films that nabbed honors: Best Documentary Feature winner Up the Yangtze, by Yung Chang, and FIPRESCI winner Ballast, by Lance Hammer:

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

The documentary Up the Yangtze is a perfect companion piece to Jia Zhangke’s Still Life. Both deal in specific ways with China’s humongous Three Gorges project, although neither film ever goes into detail as to what the project — which will displace some 2 million people — is supposed to accomplish.

A trailer for Yung Chang’s Up the Yangtze.

Lit and Film: Mostly True and Who is Bozo Texino?

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May 8, 2008

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“I hear you callin’, baby, but you ain’t gettin’ me. Not today, anyhow.”

This week’s Guardian features a trio of railroad-related stories. On the Lower Frequencies author Erick Lyle writes about the train-hopping photos of the Polaroid Kidd and the words and images of William T. Vollmann. Cinema Scope chief and film programmer Mark Peranson talks with James Benning about his new movie RR. And Bill Daniel talks about the passions and motivations behind his new book Mostly True, which mixes a wealth of new and vintage print material with excerpts of his beautiful train-tagging movie Who is Bozo Texino?.

The epic account of the improbable discovery of the world’s greatest boxcar artist.