In his communiqué to Cineaste magazine from last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Richard Porton noted that André Bazin had already observed in an essay for Cahiers du Cinema “that the contemporary film festival resembles nothing so much as a religious order”, especially as most “cinephilic members of the press and the public are tied to a relatively monastic regime—seeing four to six films a day and grabbing what are inevitably inadequate amounts of nourishment and sleep.” This apt prediction for next week’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival ("SFSFF") is underscored by Michael Hawley’s own admitted anticipation.

Until I began attending the SFSFF, I perceived watching silents as somewhat akin to a duty or chore. Perhaps it stemmed from being forced to view Battleship Potemkin‘s Odessa steps sequence over and over again in a university film theory class? Over the years I’d occasionally catch a new print of some indisputable classic of the era, such as the mega-event of Abel Gance’s Napoleon at Oakland’s Paramount Theater in the early ‘80s. These experiences were rarely unpleasant or unrewarding, but watching silent films never became the kind of thing I’d seek out.

That all changed in 2006 when, after having ignored the festival for the first decade of its existence, I attended four programs at the 11th edition, followed by six programs last year. With their impeccable prints, sublime and eclectic musical accompaniments and scholarly program notes (not to mention taking place in one of our nation’s few remaining silent movie palaces), the festival has definitively proved the validity of its motto that “True art transcends time.” With the 13th edition looking to be its most wildly varied yet, I’m happily resigned to spending the entire weekend of July 11 to 13 holed up in the Castro Theater. So whenever you’re ready, Mr. Peabody, please set the Wayback Machine to 1920’s San Francisco, as we prepare to indulge ourselves in 30-plus hours worth of these glorious images from the past.

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We are big fans of American indie film maker John R Hand around these parts.  His debut feature Frankenstein’s Bloody Nightmare has a sort of raw, lo-fi power to it that plays like a fusion of Shinya Tsukamoto and John Sayles, his short film work is very strong and the early stills for his sophomore feature, the post-apocalyptic Scars of Youth were fascinating.  Hand is proving to be a very restless and challenging talent, someone with a broad range of influences who creates compelling, off kilter words for virtually no money on the strength of his own potent imagination.  So we are very, very pleased that Hand has given us a first look at the trailer for Scars of Youth, a film he says is largely influenced by Tarkovsky and Zulawski.  Here’s how he describes it:

In a post-apocalyptic world 200 years from now, a young man living in a decaying wreck of a cabin in the woods struggles to come to terms with his bleak existence while trying to save his mother from a strange, deathless world.

You can check out the trailer in the Twitch Player below the break.

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My thanks to the fine lads at 24fps for spotting this one.  Dorothy Mills is an upcoming paranormal horror flick that’s been largely flying under the radar so far but has a growing wave of buzz around it.  The picture has already found a US home and judging from the responses of a handful of people I know who saw market screenings of the film in Cannes this could well be one of the sleeper films of the year.  It’s the story of a psychologist sent to a remote community to treat a troubled young girl at the center of a series of disturbing events but when the doctor arrives it doesn’t take her long to realize that whatever is troubling the girl is well beyond the scope of her schooling and that the the locals may well be correct in fearing the girl has been possessed.

Though the film was shot in English the French are the first to get a trailer out there and it features a dub in that language.  So you don’t get the full impact of the actual performances but you do geta good sense of the look and feel of the thing and that is impressive indeed.  Check it out in the Twitch Player below the break.

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Don’t shoot me, I’m just the messenger.  The first trailer for the Keanu Reeves-starring remake of classic 1951 scifi fable The Day The Earth Stood Still has arrived and can be seen below the break in the Twitch Player.  I’m ducking and running from the wrath of the anti-remake brigade ...

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Yep, kicking you over to my column at Showcase again for detailed thoughts on Hancock.  Didn’t hate it but it’s safe to say that The Visitor liked it a whole lot better than I did and the weaknesses in this film raise very serious doubts for me about whether director Peter Berg will be able to handle the scope of his upcoming Dune adaptation.  I like Berg just fine with certain films - The Rundown is one mighty fine action picture - but he seems to have bitten off more than he could handle with this one.  Either that or he got focus-grouped to death along the way, either is possible.

Damnit! Damnit! Damnit! Very rarely will I gripe that I live in the wrong country or city or province but holy hell do I want to be at one of these dates! Edgar Wright announced yesterday the SPACED: INVASION USA Tour. In conjunction with the July 22nd release of his landmark television series SPACED on our side of the pond for the first time, Edgar, along with creator-stars Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes (nee Stevenson), will be coming to New York, Los Angeles, Comic-Con and Austin for special screenings, a marathon, panel sessions and signings for fans. Details about all the dates after the break.

And for us Canucks Edgar will be at the JUST FOR LAUGHS festival in Montreal musing about comedy with Jason Reitman [Juno] on Friday, July the 18th
2:30-3:30 ‘Wright and Reitman Unplugged’ Grand Salon, Hyatt Regency, Montreal. Jason, please don’t be upset if no one asks you to sign their copy of Juno. 

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Did you have any misgivings about how Chinese people would perceive the portrayal of their culture in Dreamworks’ Kung Fu Panda? Cause clearly they don’t have any. In just ten short days Kung Fu Panda became the highest grossing animated film EVER in mainland China. Killed it! It has done so well on the mainland that the film is also the first animated feature film that has grossed over RMB100m, which is generally seen as a benchmark for blockbuster films in China. Clearly the mainland population has embraced Kung Fu Panda‘s ‘awesomeness’. I personally thank them for bumping Garfield 2 out of the top spot.

1. Kung Fu Panda – $15.01m
2. Garfield 2 – $7.25m
3. The Lion King – $5.13m
4. TMNT – $5.02m
5. Ice Age 2 – $ 4.44m
6. Finding Nemo – $4.35m
7. Toy Story – 3.92m
8. Cars – $2.86m
9. Ratatouille – $2.85m
10. Secret Of The Magic Gourd – $2.75m

You just knew with Aja at the helm that there had to be a good bit more blood in the upcoming Mirrors than what had been tipped in the trailers so far.  And here it is.  The red band trailer for the film has just taken a bow over at IGN and it earned that red band the good old fashioned way:  it painted it that color with blood.  I still think Aja’s kind of slumming it with his big Hollywood projects but, that said, I’m really liking the look of this.

You can check the international trailer in the Twitch Player below the break and hit the link below for the red band version.

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A few people I know who saw the trailer for Hancock thought it revealed everything in the movie. They boasted that they can write an accurate review of the movie just from the trailer.

If you think you know what the story is about, well think again. Seriously.

Hancock is simply one of the very rare Hollywood blockbusters today that can still surprise. Nothing you already know about superhero movies will prepare you for this. I assure you.

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I don’t know if a science-fiction movie should be judged by the casting of its fictional president, because well that would make Deep Impact (Morgan Freeman) or Independence Day (Bill Pullman) seem like half-way decent entertainment. But I have to admire the chutzpah of placing Fred Willard as the President/CEO of Earth in Pixar’s WallE. Rare that an actors face shows up in one of Pixar’s CGI films, even if it is ‘archival footage.’ Nevertheless, Willard’s all-smiles, no brains (but really there is a brain) vintage comedy fits perfectly into the science fiction tale where big box stores, privatization and consumer detritus have made life on earth forfeit. That all is left is a single garbage handling unit (well and his cockroach companion, natch) who is all the lonelier for having as his only emotional anchor the innocent and saccharine Hello Dolly! If holding hands while staring into your partners eyes is the ultimate physical expression of true love, then WallE, with his large grips and larger puppy-dog eyes seems born to do so.

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“We don’t need no piece of paper from the City Hall keeping us tied and true…”—Joni Mitchell, “My Ol’ Man”

Historically, the California Supreme Court’s recent decision affirming gay marriage—while good news—doesn’t take away much from the countless couples who committed themselves without sanction in decades past; the intergenerational partnership of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy being perhaps one of the most infamous, if not controversial.  That lifelong partnership is affectionately documented in Guido Santi’s and Tina Mascara’s Chris & Don: A Love Story (site), which Variety’s Robert Koehler describes as “focusing on the texture and sweetness of a particularly beguiling real-life gay love saga.”

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As Kate Carroll details for the Frameline program, Jonathan Lisecki’s short Woman In Burka “follows real-life actress Sarita Choudhury through fictionalized auditions for a new film. Is it a drama or just a cheap horror flick? None of the auditioning actresses (each of whom, it seems, have appeared in Law & Order at some point) really know. But who cares? It’s a job! This darkly comedic short shines a spotlight on race, aging, gender and the actor’s eternal quest for validation—and a paycheck.” As part of the “Don’t Go” program of shorts, I was alerted to Woman In Burka by filmbud Barry Jenkins (Medicine for Melancholy).

Winner of this year’s Spirit of Slamdance Award and the Arizona Film Festival Merit Award, Woman In Burka is—as Nick Haramis accurately describes it for Black Book—"a real knee-slapper.” One might say it’s a post-9/11 sandwich served on dark wry. I joined the appreciative throng who poured into the AT&T Festival Pavilion to take part in the program’s Q&A.

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A Double Life—the working title of Ruby Yang’s Tongzhi In Love—boasted its West Coast premiere at Frameline32, screening with Yang’s Oscar-winning documentary short The Blood Of Yingzhou District at the Roxie Film Center.  Although unable to attend the festival proper, Ruby Yang was recently in San Francisco and we were able to discuss her “latest and most lyrical film yet.” That conversation is up at SF360.

Tony An has written that—riding the waves of rapid social and economic progress in China—many gays (tóngzhì, as they are called in China) are beginning to enjoy a more tolerant atmosphere, tasting newly found freedom in such big cities as Beijing.  However, most of them cannot come out to their parents.  They continue to live a double life because—besides the conservative views toward gays—they also face an immense pressure unique to Chinese culture based on Confucian teaching.  He quotes prominent Confucian scholar Mencius: “Among the three major offenses against filial piety, not producing an heir is the worst.” More than two thousands years later, Tony explains, a billion Chinese people still take Mencius’s words close to the heart, creating an obvious challenge for tóngzhì, many of whom—due to the one child policy in modern China—are the sole carriers of their family bloodline.

Cross-published on The Evening Class. 

With the release of Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy2 just a couple weeks away and the early reviews all positively glowing the PR machine is ramping up into high gear.  Want new stuff?  Right-o ... a brand new featurette, an animated comic-style intro and a third full trailer have all been added to the film’s official trailer site at Apple.  Yummy.

Big thanks go out to Mike Leeder for the following interview.

July 29th sees the North American DVD release of American martial arts movie “’Adventures of Johnny Tao’’, written and directed by Kenn Scott, a former “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle”, and star of the classic “Showdown”alongside Karate legend Billy Blanks. For “Johnny Tao”, Scott assembled a cast and crew whose credits include ‘James Hong from “Big Trouble In Little China”, Johnny Nguyen from “The Rebel”, Jason London from “Dazed & Confused”, Chris [sister of Donnie] Yen from ‘Protégé de la rose noire’’, Matt Mullins from the new “Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight’’ series, JJ Perry from “Wolverine’’ and Undisputed 2: Last Man Standing’’ and Marcus Young from ‘The Scorpion King’.  Prior to the films DVD release, Mike Leeder Hong Kong based editor for http://www.impactmoviemagazine.co.uk caught up with Kenn for the following chat.

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