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.

So Many Festivals It's Almost Scary

Read of the week: Michael Guillén's piece inspired by the latest issue of the Film International journal, guest-edited by Dina Iordanova. I can't wait to get my hands on this issue myself. Michael cherry-picks quotes from its articles that help crystalize questions modern-day film festivals must tackle in the face of audiences who are finding other ways to see the stock-and-trade of certain kinds of fests; he believes "new strategies must be devised if these festivals are to survive." I half-wish Michael hadn't quoted me -- a big surprise midway into the article -- because it would have kept this paragraph from seeming a bit like an appeal to join a mutual admiration society.

But I'm ultimately glad he pointed to my piece on October's film festival glut here on Frisco Bay, for one because it provides an opportunity to point out that most of November is looking hardly less glutted with appealing festgoing options. DocFest and the SFJFF continue into the month, and I've also already mentioned that third i and the San Francisco Film Society are both bringing festivals the weekend of November 13-16. In addition, the SFFS's Animation Festival leads right into their New Italian Cinema presentation November 16-23, ending with the festival-lauded Gomorrah. After a chance to catch a Thanksgiving breath, it's followed by Quebec Film Week (titles as yet unannounced) December 10-14. 2008 has been the first year that I've sampled the SFFS's fall offerings, at the successfully-inaugurated French Cinema Now where a rare opportunity to see two early films by Arnaud Desplechin has sparked a re-evaluation of the filmmaker on my part. More on that on another day...

Two more November festivals begin on the same date: the Latino Film Festival and the American Indian Film Festival both start on the 7th day of the month. The AIFF has at least one program I really don't want to miss: Kent MacKenzie's the Exiles, a highly-praised 1962 film set in the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles, that played for a week at the Castro Theatre this summer while I was out of town. The LFF brings the reputedly Guy Maddin-esque La Antena from Argentina and is tributing Gregory Nava's extremely significant El Norte (hopefully in a new 35mm print). More suggestions of titles from either of these festivals would be welcome.

Frank Lee is bringing back his Chinese American Film Festival to the Four Star on November 14-20 with titles including Johnny To's Sparrow, and an additional November 8th Marina Theatre screening of Ganglamedo, a Tibet-themed musical which also plays on the last day of the festival at the main venue.

Looking further into the festival crystal ball, the Berlin and Beyond film festival will run January 15-21, 2009 at the Castro and include an in-person tribute to Wim Wenders along with a presentation of his newest film Palermo Shooting. And it's already time to anticipate Noir City 7 (January 23-February 1st), a "newspaper noir"-themed special edition promising some of the most cynical print-stained newshounds ever to have collected a kill fee. Like Chuck Tatum from Ace in the Hole, or JJ Hunsecker from the Sweet Smell of Success. Lesser-known films from Fritz Lang and Anthony Mann (two apiece) and a repeat Noir City presentation of the 1946 B-picture Night Editor (did Joe Eszterhas see this before he wrote Basic Instinct?) are additional cursory highlights, but this is one festival in which its worth looking beyond the filmmaker pedigrees, so easy is it for all but the most committed noir-heads to feel like they've unearthed a forgotten gem (Night Editor was one such gem from Noir City 4, and I'm glad it's being brought back, this time on the Castro screen.)

In the meantime, other notable screenings and events not connected with film festivals keep popping up on the calendar. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts has announced some more screenings through mid-December, including brand-new 35mm prints of five Alain Robbe-Grillet films (Last Year in Marienbad, which he wrote, and four he also directed) December 4-18. The new Pacific Film Archive calendar starts this weekend with the first films in a tremendous Japanese cinema series, beginning with post-war films from Kon Ichikawa, who died earlier this year, and Akira Kurosawa. Then it continues with screenings of career highlights from most of the major figures of the Japanese New Wave (Shindo, Oshima, Suzuki, Imamura) and beyond. I hope to say more on the November-December PFA calendar soon.

But I'll just wrap up this post with a shout-out to the Balboa Theatre, which is bringing some special-events to the Richmond District just in time for me- I've moved back to this corner of Frisco myself. This Sunday there will be two appearances by animation wizard Richard Williams. He's best known for his Oscar-winning work as animation director for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but has an extensive filmography in both theatrical and television, feature-length and short-form animation. He also created title designs for films such as Murder on the Orient Express, Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?, and the 1967 Casino Royale -- and when Friz Freleng's outfit passed the torch after putting together the beloved title sequences for the first three Peter Sellers Pink Panther features, it was Williams who picked it up. Williams will be on hand for a noon show and another at 7PM, though the latter is already listed as sold out. Future special events at the Balboa also include an opportunity to watch Tuesday's election results on the big screen with an enthusiastic crowd (free admission to this one), and on December 10th, the horror host documentary Watch Horror Films, Keep America Strong will have its Frisco premiere (it's shown in Oakland, Sacramento and elsewhere but not in this county yet) with a set of as-yet-unannounced guests in attendance.

Speaking of witch, Happy Halloween!