It’s hard to know where to start with a film as rich as A Christmas Tale (trailer), which opens tonight, November 21^st at the Bridge Theater for an exclusive one-week run. It’s under consideration for one of France’s top film honors, the Louis Delluc prize, and no wonder: in two and a half hours that never drag or bore, director Arnaud Desplechin explores every aspect of a crazy dysfunctional family, and takes us on a journey that, for all its length, almost feels a bit too short.

The heart of the story is Junon (Catherine Deneuve) and Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon), whose three adult children have been locked for years into a state of passive-aggressive feuding. Overshadowing their lives is the fate of their oldest child Joseph, who died of leukemia forty years earlier at the age of seven. When Junon develops the same disease — and there is a chance that one of her children may be able to donate marrow to save her life — they all return to the family home to be tested, and for the holidays. Merry Christmas!

It sounds like a depressing film — as Desplechin himself said of it, everything “in the scenario should scare a producer half to death” — but in fact it’s often quite hilarious, and all the tragedy is treated with a light touch that somehow doesn’t trivialize it. But in the end that’s very true to life. Add in the wonderful cast — Mathieu Almaric, Emmanuelle Devos, Hippolyte Girardot, and Chiara Mastroianni (the only actress I can’t stop thinking about and Deneuve’s real-life daughter) — and it’s a film you just can’t miss.

Desplechin visited San Francisco back in October to attend a screening of the film at the San Francisco Film Society’s French Cinema Now festival. We chatted in his hotel suite; his accommodations delighted him so much that he took us out onto the balcony to share the amazing view he had of downtown and the bay. We enjoyed a rich, wide-ranging discussion about this and his other films, about his process, his opinions about various films ranging from Fanny and Alexander to The Royal Tenenbaums to The Outsiders, his plans to make a film about the birth of hip-hop in France, and why he refuses to think about casting while working on a script — even if, as with the case of Catherine Deneuve in this film, there’s really nobody else who could do the role.

It’s a lengthy interview but well worth your time, if you’d like to get a glimpse into the mind of one of the finest directors working in France today. Full text after the jump.

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[Image from Black Sea.]

Another one of the many, many film festivals of late November, the San Francisco Film Society’s New Italian Cinema series continues at the Embarcadero Cinema tonight through Sunday, November 23^rd. If you haven’t been to any of the films since it started Sunday, don’t fret: you’ve only missed three out of the twelve features that comprise the festival. So don’t write it off!

There are a number of good-to-great films in the lineup, as KQED’s Michael Fox reports here. The films for this afternoon and evening include two that Fox reviews: A Night at 4:30, and Cover Boy: The Last Revolution at 6:15. (Each has another screening on the 22^nd and the 23^rd, respectively.) Don’t miss Black Sea, pictured above, which screens at 7:00 on Friday and Saturday night.

Above all, don’t miss the closing night reception on Sunday from 7:30 in the former Gallery One space of One Embarcadero. The reception offers “complimentary Peroni beer, wine from Siena Imports and delicious appetizers from Fuzio Universal Bistro,” and it will be followed by a screening at 8:45 by a film I’ve been advised no one should miss: Gomorrah, a “hyper-realistic drama” based on Robert Saviano’s groundbreaking expose by the same name: “far from the glamorized portrait of the Mafia common in American films, Gomorrah is grim, gritty, almost documentary-like cinema—an exposé of widespread corruption and an impassioned demand that something be done to halt its spread.”

In other words, if you are weak of stomach, don’t hit the Peroni too hard before viewing this one. But don’t skip it, either.

Full schedule here; all films screen at the Embarcadero Cinema, in Embarcadero One. Advance tix here.

This post is a little late, but if you’re still looking for something to do tonight, go check out the animated feature Fear(s) of the Dark, which will premiere tonight at the Embarcadero Center Cinema at 7:30 (general admission $12.50; discounts available). Check out the description of the film by Mike Plante of the Sundance Film Festival:

Spiders’ legs brushing against naked skin. Unexplained noises in the dark. A hypodermic needle getting closer and closer. A dead thing trapped in a bottle of formaldehyde. A growling dog running and on the hunt. A big empty house creaking . . . . Six amazing graphic artists and cartoonists lend their distinctive hands to stylize these dark nightmares with no color, only black, white and gray. With ultrarealistic techniques now possible, it is important to remember that animation is first and foremost art. Whether slick or rough, paint or pencil, or even originating from a computer, an image is carefully hand-designed for every single frame of film. It is the ultimate work of a creator, personally using the drawn frame, chiaroscuro contrast, the angle of the light and the line movement to tell a story. But it is also the duration of a shot, and what is and isn’t heard. It is the style of the art and the art of the storytelling that make Fear(s) of the Dark so wonderful. Since they come from the artists’ own phobias, you can trust a loving exploration into the surreal atmosphere of your creepiest dreams. As your emotions get worked over, you won’t jump up; you will sink in.

The animated shorts are by Blutch, Charles Burns, Marie Caillou, Pierre di Sciullo, Lorenzo Mattotti, and Richard McGuire.

At tonight’s show, Charles Burns himself will be on hand to do a Q&A session after the film.

If you can’t make it out tonight, don’t worry: it will be back on screen at one or more of the Landmark Theatres (they haven’t determined the venue yet) starting October 31st, Halloween. Appropriately enough!

Brock Keeling just got his wish for a massive hog ride through SF: Papa Guardado’s funeral must be over, because at least five hundred (and up to one thousand) big guys on big bikes just rumbled down Market Street towards the Ferry Building. Wow. I was having lunch at Azteca on Church at the time and almost everybody in the place — staff and patrons alike — abandoned the place to watch the unending stream of motorcycles go by. Even most of the kitchen staff came out for a quick look before running back in. The only exception was one jaded soul, a San Francisco old-timer who has undoubtedly seen everything already, knew what it was, and probably thought “so it’s a bunch of guys on motorcycles, so what.”

It was such an impressive sight I completely forgot to take out my cell phone and shoot video; I forgot that I had a cell phone. I went back in and finished my lunch, and when I came out, the motorcycles were still going past.

I walked up to the corner of Market and Church, outside the bank there, to get a better look; the procession was followed up by a couple of awesome, low-slung 50’s convertibles, one glossy black and the other candy-apple red — don’t ask me what make or model, I’m not a car guy — and one poor soul in a red minivan who probably didn’t really mean to get ahead of the convertible and was probably just trying to get to Highway 101 before 12:30.

Once the whole procession had passed, I looked back down Church: people were standing outside of every business, still gaping. The people on my corner, mostly bank employees, looked worried; on the corner on the other side of Church stood the manager of Crepevine. In contrast to the bank people, he was smoking a cigarette and grinning the biggest grin I’ve seen on anybody’s face for quite a while.

Well, let’s hope that whatever they do downtown, it stays peaceful. I haven’t heard sirens yet.

[I'll post video if anybody uploads something to YouTube. Wait, did I say "if?" I meant "when."]

A very warm day in the middle of a heat wave. I spend much of the day working on my book in a borrowed room, and at the end of the afternoon I go to the Atlas Cafe in the Mission District to have a cappucino and make a few notes.

As I circle to find a parking place, which is difficult in the Mission even on a Saturday afternoon, I notice an unmarked police car with a plainclothes driver keeping an eagle eye out for something. And a couple minutes later I see three cop cars come roaring up the street. They turn the corner by the cafe.

When I reach its front door I see the cops have detained two Latino teenagers dressed in the baggy, neutral uniform of the neighborhood: white t-shirts and black shorts. There are now five cop cars for these two kids, whom I had idly noticed walking quietly along a block away when I was looking for parking.

Inside the cafe, most of the tables are occupied with people studying or working on laptops. A young woman and young man are playing guitars — mostly ragtime and songs from the 1920s. They play a few choruses and then the woman sings one of those old songs in a clear tenor voice. (Their names, I found out when I looked at the CD they had for sale, are Craig Ventresco and Meredith Axelrod, and here’s a YoutTube video of them performing at the Atlas earlier this year.)

The cops let the two kids go and the police cars drive away. Almost no one in the cafe noticed the roust taking place across the street.

After several songs, the woman’s place is taken by a young man, who plays instrumentals while the woman passes a hat. Then a couple in their thirties — the man in a straw fedora, a woman in a sundress — stand up and begin to dance the tango. The guitarists are still playing ragtime but the dancers are good enough to do the tango to ragtime anyway.

I was invited last night to attend a rather San Francisco¹ event — live tag-team nude model wrestling at the Fortress of Pornitude, Kink.com. The local web porn provider — whose purchase of the early 20th century Armory building caused a small stir in early 2007 — streams and webcasts more than a dozen porn channels² featuring nubile women (mostly) and men doing forceful, lascivious things to themselves and one another.

NB: Most of the links in this post from here on are NSFW and shouldn’t be clicked if pornography offends you. The language in this post after the jump also contains NSFW descriptions.

The all-girl wrestling match was held, with a live audience³, as part of kink.com’s Ultimate Surrender channel, which consists exclusively⁴ of this wrestling-as-porn subgenre.

Like many, I was curious about the Armory, a former National Guard facility which sat as an abandoned hulk over Mission Street for thirty years before the porn company moved in and cleaned up the building. And the prospect of watching several naked women cavort wasn’t unpleasant either, so I was quick to accept the invitation of Thomas Roche, an acquaintance from the erotica-writing game, who works there.

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[Click the image for a larger version. Photo by Jeremy Hatch.]

The picture above is of a moment in the sun in Union Square Tuesday afternoon, as seen from out in front of Macy’s.

One of my favorite cafes was located in the Sir Francis Drake Hotel at the corner of Sutter and Powell. I never learned its name, but it was a European-style cafe, good for a salad, sandwich, or pasta, with espresso, tea, or a glass of wine. When I was new in town I went there all the time. For no particular reason I stopped going earlier this year, and sometime between my last visit and yesterday afternoon, they replaced it with a Starbucks. Damn. You look away for a second, and there goes another one.

So I satisfied myself with Cafe Fresco at Hotel 480, which will probably be my future Union Square hangout. It definitely deserves better than this Yelp review. (But what do I know, I only had a Pellegrino Limonata.) Once I was inside, I realized that I’d actually been there before, years earlier. It was a cold rainy day, and I was playing hooky from high school in a town about a hundred miles to the south. (Gas was cheap back then.) I got a double espresso, and sat down next to two guys a little older than me; maybe they’d just graduated from college and had gotten jobs downtown. In their black raincoats and ties and fashionable glasses, they looked so damn sharp, and I have to admit I felt a little intimidated. It seemed that I could never live up to that level of effortless cool, and that possibly I’d never really “make it” in San Francisco. That was some fifteen years ago. By now those once-intimidatingly cool guys are probably thickening into sedate middle age, and I learned a long time ago that San Francisco is not all like Union Square. Thankfully. I can “make it” here; in fact, it seems likely that I couldn’t anywhere else.

On the positive side of change: the Disney Store at Powell and is going away for good. I really, really hated that store — and my hatred intensified whenever I had to wait on that corner for the light. This Yelp review pretty much sums it up, if you’ve never had the displeasure.

Wholphin — the popular DVD magazine of short films — is back with issue 6 this summer, and tonight SF360 is putting on an advance screening of much of the DVD at the SoMa club Mezzanine. Doors at 7:00, show at 7:30. From the Wholphin page about the event:

Join us as SF360 presents the debut screening of Wholphin No 6 at Mezzanine on Thursday, June 19th. We will be screening a selection of films including a documentary about a class of Chinese third graders who hold a democratic election for classroom monitor and in the process end up hilariously, if unintentionally, mocking 300 years of American politics; a beautifully black, comic exploration of 70s England that isn’t, but could easily be, the prequel to A Clockwork Orange; a surreal dating short starring Michael Cera, with alternate audio versions featuring John Cleese and Daniel Handler; stunning footage of rarely-seen tropical reptiles and insects that are amazingly beautiful to watch, even when they’re eating each other head first; as well as films featuring great white sharks, America’s leading Bigfoot researchers, and a miniature seeing-eye horse.

You can reserve up to two tickets in advance by emailing sf360@sffs.org with your name; reserved tickets are $8; it’s $12 at the door. It’s a 21+ venue; a limited amount of complimentary vodka will be offered by Kissui Vodka from Japan. (I’m not big on repeating corporate slogans, but I have to admit that the Kissui slogan makes me smile: When the Rising Sun Finally Sets.)

I must admit that Zuni Café is an old stand-by for me. It is my go-to restaurant for late-ish dining, for entertaining out-of-town guests, for enjoying a meal with hard-to-impress friends, and it seems, for constructing sentences with lots of hyphenated phrases.

I’m hardly breaking new ground by reviewing Zuni, but more and more, I’ve run into people who’ve lived in San Francisco for at least a couple of years and have never eaten there. My advice: invite some out-of-town guests to visit and take them to Zuni.

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By chance the other day I met Kevin Gordon, the filmmaker behind the 11-minute documentary Tellin’ It Like It Is: The Work of Elouise Westbrook. Mrs. Westbrook has been active on behalf of the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood since she moved there in 1949, and it’s clear that even at the age of 92 she remains a force to be reckoned with. She was thrust onto the national stage when, in 1973, city officials failed to get the release of allocated federal funds to tear down the old barracks at Hunter’s Point and build housing there. In response, Mrs. Westbrook took a delegation to Washington, determined not to leave without getting the funding her neighborhood was due. Eventually she succeeded, and the city received its $30 million for the project.

However, Mrs. Westbrook’s greatest ongoing success probably lies in the clinic she helped to found, the South of Market Health Center, which now has three active facilities. A fourth facility is in development, with plans to break ground in the fall: Westbrook Plaza. The Plaza honors Mrs. Westbrook’s vision of affordable healthcare and affordable housing for all, by combining the two in a single development.

The short screens tonight at 9:00 at the Kabuki, and opens for the feature Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans. Tickets available at the theater.

Earlier this afternoon I got Mr. Gordon on the phone and we talked a bit about this film and his aims as a filmmaker. Our Q&A starts below and continues after the jump.

So, how did you learn about Mrs. Westbrook in the first place?

Well, I totally lucked out: I was actually approached with the film. Another filmmaker I’d just met called me about how the South of Market Health Center wanted a tribute made for their founder, and that she (the other filmmaker) was too expensive for them, but thought I might do it for a lot cheaper. Of course, that was the case. But when I met Mrs. Westbrook, I knew that I had no choice but to make the movie. She struck me immediately as an amazing person and an amazing subject, but it wasn’t until I was really into the research that I realized how significant she really was. So everything kind of happened backwards to how you’d normally expect it to happen.
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