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.

The San Francisco Film Festival had its premiere last night at the redoubtable Castro Theatre. Did the economy result in a shortage of tickets, or were more people than usual scrambling to catch the opening movie? Either way, the lines seemed longer than they have seen in the four years I’ve been attending the event. We were standing in the icy wind for almost two hours in hopes of being admitted into the Castro, which on the inside is still as opulent and old-school glamorous as ever, bless it. The long wait was soothed by anecdotes from folks who vividly remembered the old days (the Seventies, for you Young Turks) in San Francisco’s Mission District and were there “to represent, man!” Another treat came in the form of a parade of authentic lowrider cruisers down the street, one of which brought none other than actor Benjamin Bratt to the red carpet. Girls (and more than a few men) swooned, flashbulbs went off… It was a bit of Hollywood glamour well worth the gelid air.

As for the film itself? La Mission is the kind of movie festivals often pick for the opening: It’s appealing, crowd-pleasing despite its gritty surface, and with a local hook (that being, of course, its portrait of the Mission District a couple of decades back). It is also a very personal project for Bratt, whose brother Peter also wrote and directed the film. He plays Che, an ex-con with a passion for lowrider cruisers and prone to sudden bursts of violence. Covered with tattoos, he’s actually a gentle soul, proud of his studious son Jess (Jeremy Ray Valdez) and starting a romance with his neighbor (Erika Alexander). No drama can live on warmth alone, of course, so it’s not long before secrets from the past shatter Che’s tentative trajectory from badass to responsible citizen. La Mission is so earnest and well-intentioned that one feels almost guilty for pointing out how many cliches rest under its colorful hood. Almost. It’s nevertheless a solid opener, hopefully leading the way to more discoveries for the next two weeks. We’ll see.

You may watch La Mission’s trailer at the San Francisco Internationl Film Festival web site.

Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-1977) is often seen as the French Hitchcock. Both are stunning craftsmen who create worlds of fear and suspicion, but where Hitchcock’s view of life is basically (if blackly) a comic one, Clouzot’s is bleaker, more abrasive, more disillusioned. It’s small wonder that his career started in France during the German Occupation, a time when to bring out the worst in people. Indeed, his breakout film, Le Corbeau (1943), made for a Nazi film company, was such a thorough excoriation of malignant life in a French village that, after the end of the war, the director was accused of traitorous malice and suspended for a couple of years from filmmaking. He came back in 1947 with Quai des Orfevres, a musical-mystery that’s supposed to be lighthearted but is nevertheless filled with blackmailers, pornographers, and murder.

Clouzot’s great international hit came in 1953 when The Wages of Fear won the Palm d’Or in Cannes. Controversial and heavily censored upon release, the film (about desperate men carrying a cargo of explosives through a jungle) is still exciting, suspenseful, and a splendid summarization of the filmmaker’s sardonic take on life’s struggle. Les Diaboliques (1955) was another box-office smash, with as dark a vision—reflecting the horror movies of Mario Bava, it similarly suggests that the treacherous nature of human relationships is much scarier than any supernatural fright. His career afterwards is rather hit-and-miss: A documentary on Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso), an imitation of Fritz Lang (The Spies), and a study of youthful amorality with Brigitte Bardot (La Vérité). His last film, La Prisonniere (1968), was accused of pandering to nihilistic fads, but the truth is that Clouzot’s bitterness was always his own, identifiable in masterpieces as well as disappointments.

The San Francisco International Film Festival, the country’s longest-running film festival, will be opening this week (on April 23rd) and running until May 7th, offering a vast variety of film premieres, special events and guests for movie buffs in the Bay Area and beyond. I’ve been frequenting the festival for the past few years, and I’m always pleasantly surprised by the number of worthy discoveries available for the public, with marvelous films that often don’t get released until the end of the year, and sometimes don’t even get a proper release at all. I was a bit nervous regarding this year’s offerings, especially with news of cinema venues not being immune from the economic climate (goodbye, New Yorker Video), but it looks from the roster like the SFIFF 52 will be provide a no less invigorating collection of jewels this time around.

The festival strikes a nice mix of new artists building up their vision and established filmmakers being recognized for their achievements. This year the Godfather himself, Francis Ford Coppola, will be in town to receive the Founder’s Directing Award for his remarkable career. Expect the filmmaker to chat on stage Friday, May 1st, with fellow Zoetrope mavericks George Lucas and Walter Murch, and also present a clip from his latest film, the highly anticipated Tetro. Another screen icon to get his due is Robert Redford, who will receive the Peter J. Owens Award. Redford’s career has been a noble balancing act of solid film roles, political engagement and artistic encouragement (his Sundance Film Festival remains a launching pad for struggling artists); this award is long overdue, and, as an added bonus, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid will be screened that night (April 29th). But you can’t have a director and an actor without a writer, so we shouldn’t forget the Kanbar Award for screenwriting, which this year is going to the erratic, brilliant, volatile James Toback. The event will include a screening of his new film, Tyson, on May 2nd.
 
The festival always tries to promote local visions, so it’s no surprise that the opening picture, Peter Bratt’s La Mission, largely takes place in the streets of San Francisco’s Mission District. By contrast, the closing night picture, Alexis Dos Santos’s Unmade Beds, comes all the way from Argentina, which gives you a sense of how far the SFIFF goes for international voices as well. There will be new films by such directors as Atom Egoyan (Adoration), Claire Denis (35 Shots of Rum), Peter Greenaway (Rembrandt’s J’Accuse), Catherine Breillat (Bluebeard), Hirokazu Kore-eda (Still Walking), Olivier Assayas (Summer Hours) and John Boorman (The Tiger’s Tail). There will also be new imports from France, Bulgaria, Japan, Australia, Israel, Mexico, Greece, Portugal, and South Korea, among others. The revivals session is always wondrous, and this year we can expect spanking new prints of the Federico Fellini favorite Nights of Cabiria (1957), Sergio Leone’s awesome Western Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), and John Cassavetes’s grueling masterpiece A Woman Under the Influence (1974), with the great Gena Rowlands expected to be in attendance.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Real movie lovers are always out for discoveries, and few festivals in the country are as dedicated to finding new visions as the San Francisco fest. Check back with us for later reports as the events unfold.

It is said the opposite of love isn’t hate, but indifference. At least hate can have a similar intensity. Unfortunately, indifference is the strongest emotion that’s worked up over the course of State of Play, a very routine, ultimately obsolete thriller that manages to make conspiracies dull while wasting a lot of good actors. Russell Crowe, still shaggy and paunchy from all the sitting around and eating he did in last year’s Body of Lies, plays here an impetuous Washington Globe reporter who decides to investigate the connection between a pair of brutal occurrences, and the trail of bread crumbs leads to an ambitious young U.S. Congressman (Ben Affleck). Before you can even say All the President’s Men, there are shadowy figures skulking around the corridors of power, reminding the hero that the zones where politics and journalism intersect can be pretty deadly. The film’s pedigree (directed by Last King of Scotland’s Kevin MacDonald, co-written by Michael Clayton’s Tony Gilroy) promises urgency and corporate skullduggery, yet the results are forgettable and slack, like a pricked balloon that keeps deflating for two whole hours. Crowe shambles about, Rachel McAdams is practically invisible in a flavorless supporting role, and even seasoned pros like Helen Mirren and Jeff Daniels look like they’re waiting for intrigue that never comes. Affleck, surprisingly enough, is not bad as the shady conglomerate stooge. When his stiffness fits the role, he can be useful, like when he played that Superman dude in Hollywoodland. Just keep casting him as bad actors and politicians (what’s the difference?), and you’re fine.

Few of cinema’s pioneers remain as modern as Fritz Lang (1890-1976). A guiding light of Germany’s great silent period, this notorious Teutonic genius-despot became more focused, more intense and even more experimental as his work pushed toward the 1960s, with many of his later films (Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse) edging into breathtaking abstraction. After WWI shifted his interested from painting toward motion pictures, the young Lang worked as a screenwriter before graduating into directing, often with his wife Thea von Harbou writing the scripts. James Bond could hardly exist without Spies (1928), and anybody who’s seen Star Wars or Blade Runner knows how much the science-fiction genre owes Metropolis (1927). Still, the greatest creation in Lang’s silent period may be Dr. Mabuse, the master criminal who terrorized Berlin in Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922) and then voiced the future horrors of the Nazi Party in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933). A deadly manipulator who changes identities as easily as he changes costumes, he’s integral to Lang’s vision of evil as something liquid, impossible to pin down and able to flourish within a helpless, pathetic character like Peter Lorre’s child-killer in M (1931).

Lang’s transfer to Hollywood helped him prune the excesses of German expressionism, achieving a purified style that tightens around his doomed characters like the wheels of Fate. Fury (1936) and You Only Live Once (1937) are “social conscience” tracts without an ounce of preachiness in them, while Man Hunt (1941), Hangmen Also Die! (1943) and Ministry of Fear (1944) are wartime thrillers in which patriotism never overwhelms the director’s analytical architecture. “Architecture” isn’t used gratuitously here, because Lang’s films are impeccably built mazes that mix an awesome feeling of mechanical gears at work with compassion for the people caught between them. Escape is elusive, and indeed sometimes the characters seem to be engineers of their own doom, like Edward G. Robinson in The Woman in the Window (1944), a meek man trying to cover up the murder he’s committed, absent-mindedly leading his friends back to the scene of the crime before. Scarlet Street (1945) is one of two times Lang crossed paths with Jean Renoir (it was a remake of Renoir’s 1931 film La Chienne, and in 1954 he would also remake Renoir’s La Bete Humaine as Human Desire). The two directors represent the polar poles of film, both equally great but completely different in approach, style, and worldview.

The 1950s saw such masterpieces as Rancho Notorious (1952), The Big Heat (1953) and While the City Sleeps (1956), and a return to the exoticism of the early pictures with a pair of wondrous Indian adventures (The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb, both in 1959) that are worth more than a thousand Indiana Jones escapades. Finally, a return to Germany the next year with The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), a final summarization of Langian aesthetics that’s so rich in invention that you’d never think the director was born at the turn of the century. Lang was a fascinating character, supposedly a terror in movie sets and fond of ballooning personal stories into myth, like his meeting with Goebbels before leaving Nazi Germany. The image of him as a monocle-wearing tyrant is contradicted by the unexpected tenderness of his films, and also by his appearance in Jean Luc-Godard’s Contempt (1963), playing himself (or a character named “Fritz Lang”) as an charming sage passing the torch on to a younger visionary.