The Language of Drums: Director Damien Chazelle and Metallica’s Lars Ulrich Discuss WHIPLASH

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by Eat Drink Films

The successful commercial run of Whiplash  continues at the Clay Theatre in San Francisco and the Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley. Director Damien Chazelle’s first feature made its Bay Area debut at the Mill Valley Film Festival earlier this fall as part of the fest’s Artist in Residence series, presented by Metallica’s Lars Ulrich, who introduced the movie and conducted a Q&A with Chazelle afterward. Continue reading →

Win-Win: James Benning and Richard Linklater talk sculpting time in DOUBLE PLAY

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by Max Goldberg

First a word for Cinéma, de notre temps , the longstanding series of filmmaker studies of which Gabe Klinger’s Double Play  is the latest. Launched as Cinéastes de notre temps  in 1964 by André Labarthe and Janine Bazin (André’s wife), the program presented critically engaged, in-depth interviews of film directors akin to The Paris Review ’s celebrated “Art of Fiction” feature. Unabashedly auteurist, the French series was dedicated to the notion that cinema is best understood by its singularities. Continue reading →

Arc of Flight: Judy Irving on PELICAN DREAMS

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by Ned Viall and Eat Drink Films

Cinematically speaking, the words birds  and Bay Area  once automatically conjured Hitchcock images of Tippi Hedren fighting off a flurry of claws and beaks. But in recent years, documentary filmmaker Judy Irving’s personal, journalistically persistent films have flipped the script of Hitch’s dystopian vision of people besieged by birds, presenting strikingly real (as opposed to surreal) images in the process of telling true stories abut the struggles and resilience of birds in the modern world—more specifically, San Francisco and its surrounding environment.
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New Visions: The Bay Area ReelAbilities Disability Film Festival

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by Tom di Maria

Can you imagine never having seen somebody like you in a movie? If you are a person with Downs Syndrome or Cerebral Palsy, this may very likely be the case. But that is part of the power of film … it has the ability to transport us into a world beyond what we have experienced, through compelling narrative structures and enticing visual language.  Continue reading →

Try This Path: John Sayles on Arhoolie Records and THIS AIN’T NO MOUSE MUSIC

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by John Sayles

The use of prerecorded music in movies is a form of alchemy. Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme come to mind as two of the most accomplished alchemists still working, the success of their efforts not in creating a name-that-tune familiarity with the track, but in finding the chanson juste that lifts a moment or a sequence in spirit and either comments on or cements the meaning of the on-screen action.

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THIS AIN’T NO MOUSE MUSIC: You Never Know — Greil Marcus on Chris Strachwitz

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by Greil Marcus

THIS AIN’T NO MOUSE MUSIC opens at theaters in New York, Los Angeles and around the country during September and October.

Everyone who has encountered Chris Strachwitz knows his generosity of spirit, his quiet eagerness to share sounds he’s long treasured or just discovered, and his easy sense of humor, which is mostly present in a grin. Continue reading →

THE DOG: Love Is a Dog from Hell

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by Dennis Harvey

The Dog  (7 pm) and Dog Day Afternoon  (8:55 pm) screen Thursday, September 11 at the Castro Theatre.

Very well-received at the time, Sidney Lumet’s 1975 Dog Day Afternoon  still personifies for many people what was so great about 1970s “New Hollywood” cinema: a gritty urban crime tale with depth and humor, stressing character over thrills or FX, aimed squarely at adults. Adding additional frisson was the fact that the story, which might have seemed ridiculous in less capable hands, was, in fact, based on a real-life incident. Continue reading →