No, I’m not attending the Cannes Film Festival, which will be opening this Wednesday. I’m slowly working my way up there (I’ve made it up to Toronto), but for now I have to settle for what Noel Burch called “the role of the distant observer.” Which is too bad, because the lineup this year looks particularly tantalizing. All cinephile eyes will be on the Croisette as acclaimed auteurs unveil their latest offerings to world cinema. Cannes always struck me as a bizarre mix of hardcore art-house seriousness and shameless frivolousness, sort of like Ingmar Bergman stumbling into a glitzy bikini show on his way to a screening. But that’s what makes it so fascinating, this love/hate relationship between art and popular cinema while the rest of the world watches. For instance, the movie given the respected opening-night slot this year will be the new Pixar animated feature, Up. Opening with a cartoon, however, rings a deceptively light note for a festival that is noted for more than its share of disturbing stuff, and 2009 will be no exception. I mean, that’s The Piano Teacher herself chairing the jury, for Pete’s sake.

Isabelle Huppert, no stranger to playing changeling and disturbing characters, will preside over a jury that also includes Asia Argento (no maiden, she) and James Gray, who directed the awesome Two Lovers earlier this year. Which of the shockmeisters will they honor? Maybe Michael Funny Games Haneke, who directed Huppert in some of her freakiest roles and is back with The White Ribbon, surely another feel-good, uplifting story. Or maybe they’ll go in the opposite direction and go for Inglourious Basterds, the insane-sounding war thriller from my main man Quentin Tarantino. Other kinky veterans include Lars von Trier (Antichrist), Gaspar Noé (Enter the Void), and Park Chan-wook (Thirst). Old reliable like Pedro Almodovar (Broken Embraces), Alain Resnais (Wild Grass), Marco Bellocchio (Vincere) and Ken Loach (Looking for Eric) will return, along with such fascinating, restless filmmakers as Jane Campion (Bright Star), Tsai Ming-liang (Visage), Ang Lee (Taking Woodstock) and Johnny To (Vengeance). And that’s just the competition lineup. Elsewhere you have the Terry Gilliam movie Heath Ledger died in the middle of (The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus), Sam Raimi’s return to the horror genre (Drag Me to Hell), and a master class on directing by the Dardenne brothers. Talking about Cannes without attending it is sort of like watching a great buffet from the outside of a restaurant. But that doesn’t mean I can’t smell the aroma.

Every year the San Francisco film festival offers the chance to watch restored prints of vintage movies, and this year there were some juicy ones. Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence, and Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West were screened to show the celluloid restoration process in action. I had already seen those movies quite a few times, so I opted to catch the harder-to-find festival fare instead. Still, I couldn’t resist attending the silent classic The Lost World (1925), which played at the Castro with live musical accompaniment by the groovy Cambodian pop band Dengue Fever. It’s always heartening to see young people coming to see silent films, especially in an era when so many moviegoers don’t even think there were movies before Stars Wars. Directed by Harry O. Hoyt, The Lost World is not an early version of the Spielberg dinosaur flick of the same name, but a loose adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel. (Trivia: Conan Doyle reportedly attended the premiere with his family, and liked the flick.) The story is about an expedition (which includes Bessie Love, Lewis Stone and Wallace Beery) into a valley where pre-historical creatures roam, but the main attraction is animator Willis O’Brien first showing off his legendary, stop-motion creations. You have your T-Rex, your triceratops and your brontosaurus, all going at each other with enough fluidity and fierceness to have Peter Jackson furiously taking notes. In some aspects it’s a dry run for the effects O’Brien would pull off eight years later in the original King Kong, but it’s no less magical for that.

Get a preview of the magic watching The Lost World’s trailer at the official site for the San Francisco International Film Festival - 2009

The festival may be winding down, but there’s no way I could go home without catching at least one unsettling horror film. And, oh man, does Grace fit that bill. Jordan Ladd delivers quite a brave performance in a demanding role, that of a young woman whose maternal instincts lead her into pretty gruesome territory. After a car crash kills her husband, pregnant Madeleine (Ladd) gives birth to a stillborn baby but miraculously wills it back to life. Her baby daughter seems to be healthy, yet increasingly bizarre details (flies are always buzzing around her, for instance) hint at something rotten in the crib, something that Madeleine can no longer ignore when the infant starts demanding blood in order to survive. You can guess where this is going, especially with a neurotic mother-in-law and a nosy doctor trying to get into the heroine’s house. Imagine a mix of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion and Roger Corman’s Little Shop of Horrors, and you get a rough idea. It’s quite effective, with moody atmosphere to get the nerves rattled even before the viscera is spilled on the floor. Writer-director Paul Solet was at the screening for a brief Q&A, and spoke of the film’s breakneck shooting schedule, the use of inventive camerawork to hide a couple of subpar special-effects, and the film’s hilarious yet heartfelt dedication (“For Mom”). It’d be interesting to see what he does next. If he can get so much of female queasiness, what would he do with male anxiety? (I’m crossing my legs in terror just thinking about it.)

For a sneak preview, check Grace’s trailer at the San Francisco Internationl Film Festival web site.

For me the highlight of the San Francisco Film Festival was last Friday’s event at the Castro Theater, when the great Francis Ford Coppola received this year’s Directing Award. The house was packed, and the trailer for Coppola’s new movie Tetro (in arresting black and white, with a few ravishing color shots) got everybody excited; when festival organizer Graham Leggat brought the maestro on stage, the walls positively shook from the sustained applause. Coppola turns 70 this year, yet he’s the most energetic guest I’ve seen all festival: Voluble, bursting with anecdotes and jokes, he looks like he still has several films in him. There was a brief interview, in which the director spoke of Tetro’s production in Argentina and his beginnings as a screenwriter in the changing Hollywood of the late 1960s.

The big attraction, however, was the conversation that the honoree would be having with a few “friends,” who were just waiting in the wings. Turns out the “friends” were none other than fellow filmmakers George Lucas (Star Wars), Carroll Ballard (The Black Stallion), Matthew Robbins (Dragonslayer), and Walter Murch (the redoubtable sound designer from Apocalypse Now, among many others). All members of the original Zoetrope Studio, there to remember the scrappy early days of the New Hollywood. Coppola did two marvelous things: He asked for the lights to come up so they could see the audience as well, and then asked for their wives, who were in attendance, to join them onstage, because they had as much to say about the movies as the directors.

For anybody who’s read Peter Biskind’s Easy Rider, Raging Bulls, much of the material talked about was familiar. The genesis of The Godfather (originally seen as a commercial chore to make money for more personal projects) was recounted, but Coppola is such an engaging storyteller that even often-heard stories like the studio’s reluctance to use Marlon Brando gain energy in his telling. After the event, the audience was treated to a screening of a restored print of The Rain People (1969), Coppola’s third feature film and one that he said is very close to his heart. James Caan and Robert Duvall are in it, but the tone and style is completely different from The Godfather a couple of years later. The main character is a New York housewife (beautifully played by Shirley Knight) who feels entrapped by married life and, upon learning that she’s pregnant, goes on an impulsive, aimless trip across the country, where she meets a brain-damaged football player (Caan) and a highway cop (Duvall). The film is an uneven but very affecting mixture of narrative looseness and emotional intensity, and very symptomatic of those years in which American directors were scrambling to break old Hollywood conventions and create their own art-house. It’s worth tracking down, if only to catch some of the first stirrings of Coppola’s unique sensibility.

Here are a few pictures from the event, courtesy of a cellphone by yours truly.

The Godfather himself, talking to good friend George Lucas. Both started out as young artists at around the same time, but Coppola was always the boldest member of their pack.

The fellas, joined onstage by their wives. The gentleman to the left of Coppola is Matthew Robbins, who has a special place in my movie-going heart for the great Dragonslayer.

Lucas described those early, heady days under Coppola’s fervent tutelage this way: “Imagine every day that you’re being blindfolded, spun around, and pushed in every direction. Then we’d stop, remove the blindfolds, and realize that we’re at the edge of an abyss. And Francis would yell: ‘C’mon guys, let’s hold hands and jump!’” It’s the kind of experimental courage that’s missing in much of today’s movie industry, they agreed.

Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna in Rudo y Cursi play characters who are told they’re too old to be soccer rookies, but the sad truth is that the two actors are also too old to play bumbling bumpkins who try to get by on adorability. Or at least it’s just the duo’s cute-idiots act, which is by now even less fresh than that obnoxious-jock bit Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn used to do. Anyway, they play dim-bulb half-brothers in rural Mexico. García Bernal is Cursi, who dreams of a career across the border in Mexico, and Luna is Rudo, older and married but not any more mature, a gambler and something of a bully. They practice together on the soccer field until Cursi impresses a scout from Mexico City and is whisked off to the big-time. Will Rudo follow? Will the two engage in improvised bits that were already worn when Cantinflas was in diapers? Will a Spanglish version of “I Want You to Want Me” be played for what feels like an hour? The director, Carlos Cuarón, has none of big brother Alfonso’s technical finesse (Children of Men) but plenty of his self-satisfied coarseness (Y Tu Mamá También). I talked to a Mexican critic at the festival, and he told me he was offended that audiences might think of Gael ‘n’ Diego as representatives of the country’s culture. Jeez, c’mon. Every nation has its goofy jesters, and I doubt they’re seen abroad as cultural templates. I mean, international audiences don’t see Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen as stand-ins for the entirety of American culture. Or… do they?

As one of the three or four people in the world for whom Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is a solid space flick rather than a transcendental experience, I must say I was quite impressed with this one, a science-fiction tour de force that’s been wowing folks all over the festival circuit. Sam Rockwell, who sometimes can be a dash too squirrely for my tastes, gives a powerful performance here as an astronaut who’s made his home at the lunar base where he mines a form of helium that’s the hope for Earth’s fuel crisis. Working methodically and unemotionally, he finds peace and meaning in this rigorous routine—a peace that crumbles away as his retirement draws nearer and strange visions and thoughts start to penetrate his mind. It’s amazing to think that this is director Duncan Jones’s feature debut, because his visual storytelling skills (much of the film’s impact comes from its slow, elaborate tracking shots) and unrushed pace are those of a much more experienced filmmaker. Comparisons with Blade Runner and Silent Running have been cropping up, but to me, oddly enough, it was P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood that kept coming to mind: The rhythm, the loneliness, the visual expressiveness, the feeling of a void transforming the psyche. Would love to watch it again. It’s bound to be this year’s great sci-fi film. (What’s the competition? J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek? Hah!)

This year’s festival has been kind of a gloomy one, with plenty of movies about alienation and poverty. I’m all for reflecting the spirit of the times, but c’mon. So that’s why Easy Virtue, flaws and all, is a pleasant surprise. I like Jessica Biel. Easy on the eyes, decent actress, and at home in period pieces like The Illusionist and this one, where she plays Larita, a gorgeous American divorcée who comes to visit his British lover John Whittaker’s (Ben Barnes) aristocratic family after they get married on a whim. Suffice it to say that her stay takes some interesting turns, as the Whittaker matriarch (Kristin Scott Thomas) makes it her duty to pester the winsome woman in subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways, while Mr. Whittaker (Colin Firth) has plans of his own. After wadding my way through movies about child killers and societal disintegration, this one comes as a hit of fresh air. It’s flawed, of course: It’s perhaps a little too determined to be peppy and jazzy, and whoever had the idea to rework “Car Wash” as a Cole Porter-style number gets no Christmas card from me. Still, its effervescence is welcome. Trivia: The basis, Noel Coward’s play, was reportedly directed in 1928 by none other than Alfred Hitchcock. I haven’t seen that one yet, but a silent social satire from the Master of Suspense sounds fascinating.

Anyone who avoids film festivals in dread of getting stuck with a sloooooow tour of a desolate foreign country should check out Javor Gardev’s Zift. Whatever else it may be, this Bulgarian neo-noir at least moves like a bullet. In fact, in its combination of weird characters and cinematic tricks (freeze frames, sped-up motion, parallel editing), it suggests a black-and-white, Eastern Bloc version of Guy Ritchie’s Snatch. There’s even a missing diamond everybody’s after, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves. The main character is a convict nicknamed Moth (played by Zahary  Baharov) who is released from the penitentiary in the 1960s, only to enter a society he doesn’t recognize and be chased around by former associates who are after the loot he stole 20 years earlier. Cue flashback to the 1940s, when Moth’s romance with a girl nicknamed Mantis (Tanya Ilieva, channeling Rita Hayworth) leads him to rob the mansion where the priceless jewel is stashed. Shot in black-and-white and paced like a busy day at the sideshow carnival, it’s full of bizarre people peeping out of shadows, Communist anthems belted at top volume, and self-conscious tropes stolen from those old gumshoe yarns with Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell. If it’s some kind of metaphor about Bulgaria’s political identity, it was lost on this viewer. The camerawork is really fun (Gardev throws the camera around with glee), though any film that cuts back and forth between a sex scene and mating insects isn’t giving the audience much credit.

Check Zift’s trailer at the official web site for the San Francisco International Film Festival - 2009.

It’s no surprise that French director Catherine Breillat, most famous for such disturbing portraits of female anxiety and sexuality as Fat Girl and Anatomy of Hell, would want to tackle the old fairy tale about a wife-slaughtering ogre. What is surprising is the way she does it. Two young sisters, Anne (Daphne Baiwir) and Marie-Catherine (Lola Creton) return home from the convent upon news of their father’s death, and, finding themselves in poverty, consider the courtship of Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas), a mysterious local aristocrat. He chooses Marie-Catherine to be his wife, and she moves into his castle. Their marriage goes by normally, until Bluebeard leaves one day on business and Marie-Catherine ventures into the mysterious downstairs chamber that’s always kept locked. You’d expect Breillat to tear into this chestnut and wring all the blood and sexual horror out of it. Yet as last year’s The Last Mistress showed, the director has somewhat mellowed with age, and is now able to examine her obsessions while telling a graceful, visually beautiful story. Bluebeard is languid, often ravishing to look at, and weirdly innocent. Heck, it even uses a pair of modern-day little girls (one giddy, the other spooked) who read the story to each other, a framing device that would be too cute by half if it weren’t for Breillat’s sardonic edge. It really makes you wish she would hurry up and direct Red Riding Hood already.

Don’t miss Bluebeard’s trailer at the San Francisco Film Festival official web page.

John Boorman’s The Tiger’s Tail was made in 2006 and is only now premiering in the West Coast, after playing in such other venues as New York and Toronto. The delay might suggest a disaster that studios are dragging their feet to have shown, but in reality this is a canny thriller from an underrated near-master, well worth discovering. Brendan Gleeson, who was memorable in Boorman’s The General (1997), does double duty here as Dublin businessman Liam O’Leary and his long-lost twin brother, an unnamed, angry doppelganger who wants to take over Liam’s privileged place in life. When Liam is left behind after a confrontation, the brother smoothly replaces him at the office and by his wife’s (Kim Cattrall) side while the protagonist is sent to a loony bin, telling a story too ridiculous to be believed. There are shades of Dostoyevsky and The Prince and the Pauper, of course, but Boorman keeps things consistently fresh by imposing a subtly satirical veneer over every scene, at times edging the film toward a pokerfaced lampoon of a mistaken-identity thriller. Gleeson pulls off the two roles with his usual ruddy élan, and there is strong support from Sinead O’Connor and Ciaran Hinds. (In fact, even Cattrall handles herself gracefully with a good Irish accent—remember, Sex and the City aficionados, she was born in Liverpool.) Boorman is responsible for classic films (Point Blank, Deliverance) as well as some inexplicable ones (Zardoz, Where the Heart Is); The Tiger’s Tail sits solidly in the middle, tilting toward the former category.

Don’t miss The Tiger’s Tail tailer at the San Francisco Internationl Film Festival web site.