BY C.J. Hirschfield
Writer Pearl S. Buck said that “To find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth.”
Two of the remarkable Bay Area women featured in the 10th annual Legacy Film Festival on Aging have seemingly done just that, and they’ve used their collective 200 (!) years of rich experience to arrive at a place where they now choose to enlighten and inspire.
By Andrea Chase
SXSW 2021 went virtual. The group experience was missing, but the films were just as compelling. There were the headliners and award-winners that grabbed a lot of attention, and rightly so. Megan Park’s narrative THE FALLOUT won the narrative feature competition for laying out the impossibility of feeling secure in a world where violence can erupt at any time and any place, while Jeremy Workman’s LILY TOPPLES THE WORLD, winner of the feature documentary award, shares the virtual community surrounding the sheer pleasure of watching the dominos so carefully set up by its subject line topple with giddy, clacking rhythm.
Ideas for a Political Movies Festival
By Gary Meyer
I think it is much healthier to watch reruns (WEST WING, JOHN ADAMS or VEEP) than the returns on Election Night.
Or better yet revisit some great movies.
I actually started programming a series several years ago and updated it for 2020.
I suggest some double features or make your own festival. This was done too quickly to provide details or links to most films.
These are not in any special order but let’s start with a cartoon. BETTY BOOP FOR PRESIDENT.
Stanley Kubrick’s DR. STRANGELOVE plus THE MOUSE THAT ROARED both with Peter Sellars in multiple roles.
THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE: two takes from John Frankenheimer and Jonathan Demme.
Preston Sturges’ THE GREAT MCGINTY with Frank Capra’s STATE OF THE UNION
BULWORTH plus BLAZE
ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN and THE POST
BOB ROBERTS with THE IDES OF MARCH
Plus selected short cartoon. DAFFY DUCK FOR PRESIDENT
INDEPENDENCE DAY and MARS ATTACKS
WAG THE DOG plus THE CANDIDATE
MEET JOHN DOE plus MR SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON
THE CONTENDER and PRIMARY COLORS
IN THE LOOP plus THE CAMPAIGN
CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR with GAME CHANGE
IN THE LINE OF FIRE plus PARALLAX VIEW
FAIR GAME and NO WAY OUT
IDIOCRACY with TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE
THE LAST HURRAH and BEAU JAMES
Make your own Nixon Follies Film Festival from: NIXON, DICK, SECRET HONOR, ELVIS AND NIXON, and FROST/NIXON.
Before he was President Barack Obama, he had a bad story and these two fictionalized films explore that time in SOUTHSIDE WITH YOU and BARRY.
President Kennedy selection: JFK, PT 109, THIRTEEN DAYS, EXECUTIVE ACTION.
Franklin D. Roosevelt: SUNRISE AT CAMPEBELLO, HYDE PARK ON HUDSON, HELL-BENT FOR ELECTION ( a UPA allegorical cartoon directed by Chuck Jones designed to inspire voting for FDR) ELEANOR AND FRANKLIN and sequel ELEANOR AND FRANKLIN:THE WHITE HOUSE YEARS, WARM SPRINGS (and and exception to my docs rule: Ken Burns’ marathon THE ROOSEVELTS).
Abraham Lincoln inspired numerous films including
LINCOLN, YOUNG MR, LINCOLN, ABE LINCOLN IN ILLINOIS, ABRAHAM LINCOLN-VAMPIRE HUNTER, and THE CONSPIRATOR.
And there are other celluloid presidents to consider.
LBJ, , GIVE ‘EM HELL, HARRY!, and WILSON are a few.
I suspect Olive Stone and Michael Moore will take on Trump and I plan to stay far away.
Let’s take a break for BALLOT BOX BUNNY. Watch here.
To see what actors played real Presidents take a look here.
Try Ranker’s Best Political comedies, The Best Movies about Presidents, and The Best Political Movies. There are several more lists at the bottom of each group.
As the war in Vietnam raged, one of the largest and most successful youth-led resistance movements in American history was growing at home.
Hundreds of thousands of young men opposed to an unjust war said NO to being drafted into the military, risking up to five years in federal prison. Their individual courage and collective nonviolent actions helped end a tragic war and the draft.
By Andrea Chase
If there is a turning point in The Boys Who Said No!, it’s when a judge, decidedly not a part of the counter-culture of the 1960s and 70s, rules that a Vietnam War draft resistor should not go to prison for breaking the law. It is also a turning point in the history of the United States, albeit one far less high profile than the unrest and assassinations that dominated that era. And that is fitting in Judith Ehrlich’s enlightening and absorbing documentary that profiles the eponymous young men who used non-violence in their refusal to fight what they considered an unjust war. Successfully as it turned out. It makes for a film that speaks to the present as eloquently and as urgently to its audience as the resistors did to their audiences 50 years ago.
BY C.J. Hirschfield
About my home town of Oakland, a recent Washington Post article wrote: “Protesters want to defund the police. Homicides and violence are spiking. In Oakland, ideology and practicality collide.”
It was a wonderful juxtaposition shortly thereafter to watch the excellent new documentary Alice Street, which shows Oakland at its multicultural, peaceful, protesting best.
On making the movie Wilder Than Wild, excerpted from Stories Make the World, Reflections on Storytelling and the Art of the Documentary by Stephen Most.
People have always used fire to protect human life from nature and to alter what nature provides. A key sequence in the story of humanity and fire is the Industrial Revolution when energy from burning fossil fuels began to drive machines. Within vehicles and factories, generators and outlets, appliances, and innumerable devices, firepower is concealed. As people in increasing numbers leave rural areas and fill cities, they perceive fire more as a threat than a tool.
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By Frako Loden
The tagline for DocFest, the 19th San Francisco Documentary Festival, is “Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction”—a saying we all appreciate more than we’d like during these days of COVID-19, wildfires, racist domestic terrorism and unhinged presidential campaigns. But however much we might want to hide from some of these truths, we still relish a good documentary that tells it like it is—or at least when we’re feeling more fragile, brings back fond memories or confirms our biases. SF DocFest gives you a chance to do all that with 49 new documentaries, easy to watch from home with the website’s clearly worded instructions. Here are ten that you might choose from.
By C.J. Hirschfield
They ride all forms of public transit, lug around pounds of paper, eat on the run, stay in modest hotels where they practice alone in front of the mirror, and lament all of the time they have to spend away from their families. They are the unsung human rights superheroes, and the new documentary The Fight powerfully– and engagingly–tells not only their stories, but of four major court cases that have the potential to upend our most cherished and hard-fought rights.
