Results tagged “pacificfilmarchive”

-- Magic Bullets: Along with Bonde do Role and JuiceBoxxx, this local outfit (heavy on the bass lines, rhythmic keyboards, and melancholic vocals) performs tonight at 9 p.m. at The Independent, 628 Divisadero; $13.

Last week's winner, the Bay Guardian. More problems with the construction at Hunters' Point (this time: asbestos). Chris Daly is on it. A construction worker falls off the Golden Gate Bridge and his employer avoids liability because they used the wrong legal name on the OSHA citations it received. Send all legal paperwork to FSist, everyone! More taxi permit shadiness. Man vs. Wild -- who cares if he stayed in a hotel, he drank water from elephant dung. KUSF! Some bands playing this week. Cover article: Photography in SF. The Guardian doesn't hate the new Mission Italian joint Farina. And an Iranian filmmaker retrospective at the Pacific Film Archive.

-- a French movie about jailbait 15-year-old Livia and her dangerous longing for the hot-fireman-old-enough-to-be-her-father, Jean.

SFist interviews David and Edie Ichioka, makers of the documetnary "Murch" about film editor Walter Murch, now showing at the San Franicsco International Film festival

The SF Int'l Film Festival isn't just about great national and international movies -- they've got music events, gala events, talks about the state of cinema, an online presence through SF360.com, and -- what we stopped by to see this afternoon -- a series of panels about the state of cinema today.

Your mainstream release pick: The Namesake. The saga of a family that journeys from homeland India to wintry New York, Mira Nair’s newest film is based on the titular bestseller by Jhumpa Lahiri and features Kal Penn (Kumar from Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle), Jacinta Barrett and Indian singer/actress Tabu. It’s a beautiful and sensitive look at identity in the context of a cross-cultural family. Nair’s known for bringing insight to her subject matter and this movie appears to be no different

Last night we featured the cross bay rivalry of Taste events, and tonight, we've got two art auctions. When we see things like this, we wonder whether the organizers of said events check each others' calendars, as we have learned through painful experience that we can't be everywhere at once. Perhaps an evite is called for in these circumstances.

cultural offerings on this side of the Bay.

Faithful readers, you've probably noticed that this SFist watches the same types of movies over and over again: Is it a documentary about something weird and/or in San Francisco? Gosh, who could SFist possibly get to watch that? So we figured we'd mix it up a little bit and go watch something a little less provincial for a change -- which is how we ended up at the 9:00 p.m. screening of the Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela at the SFIFF. First of all, the audience for a historical and personal documentary about South Africans in exile from 1960-1990 as apartheid was being dismantled is very different from the usual scruffians we see at our wacky movies about, say, the history of the Mission hipster told through burritos used as puppets -- there were a lot of earnest expressions on faces, internationalist people carrying Global Exchange backpacks, and in the audience, we ran into a friend from New York who's devoted her life to public interest law. Boy, we're usually pretty shallow in our movie picks, aren't we? Filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris told the audience that the documentary itself is a eulogy to his stepfather, who fled South Africa with a group of 11 friends and helped found the African National Congress, and an attempt to tell his story and to resolve posthumously the sometimes-strained nature of their relationship. His stepfather's story is pretty amazing (he fled, mostly by foot, from South Africa to Tanzania, and then emigrated to the Bronx). We started out dubious about the premise, and even more dubious about the dramatic "reenactments," but as the movie progressed, it all of a sudden didn't really matter. It's a great story. We wish there'd been a little more information about modern African history (the movie presumes a fair amount of knowledge) and we also got the sense that Harris was pulling some punches about the conflicts between him and his stepfather, but that's all pretty minor stuff. 12 Disciples plays again tonight at 6:30 at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, and it'll also be airing on PBS in September.

Saturday: We're heading over to the Pacific Film Archive for the Women of Color Film Festival. We're especially interested in the documentary feature , A documentary about a Chinese American man mistaken for Japanese and beaten to death by unemployed white auto workers, who were convicted with the lightest possible sentences. See the complete schedule here.

We've got quite a diversity of recommendations this week - from the politically conscious, to the "sick and twisted", to the, well, sick and twisted and Russian. Check it out!

The loud crass holidays impeding your Oprah-like search for your spirit? Perhaps some time spent without the distraction of dialogue would help you clear your mental palate. Until the gentlemen come along and steal the voice of every damn Macy's shopper, perhaps a silent film or two this weekend would do the trick?

Starting tonight and running until September 27 in SF venues including El Rio, Artist's Television Access, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, with two additional programs at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive, Oct 6 and 13 MadCat is where it's at this week and next.

Look, SFist is covering the Pacific Film Archive's Trouble In Paradise: Pre-Code Hollywood series because we think you should know about it and because (disclosure) it means we can walk past a "Sold Out" sign and a crowd of disappointed Berkeleyan film buffs at showtime, claim our free tickets and watch the movie. But our only real complaint about the series so far is that each film is only screening once, so if you weren't with us on Saturday night in the first West Coast audience to see the restored version of Baby Face, reader, you missed it and that's on you. We told you about it, twice.

Of I'm No Angel (1933), which screened Sunday at the Pacific Film Archive, film critics like to write that if star Mae West had spoken only one line in her career--"Beulah, peel me a grape"--she would still have been one of her era's brightest screen stars. That's always seemed hyperbolic, but the film itself makes a pretty convincing case. West (at right), more imposing than coquettish as Tira the Lion Tamer, wields physical presence like a boxer and sexuality like a gunslinger throughout the film. From her opening scene, where she's introduced to a carnival crowd as "the girl who discovered you don't need feet to be a dancer," until the end, when she gets her man (Cary Grant, 29 years old and looking about 14, as upstanding society fellow Jack Clayton), Tira owns the screen.