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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In 1999, Chris Baty had the harebrained idea to write an entire novel in a single month. The reasoning was simple: if you could write about seven double-spaced pages a day, for thirty days, you’d end up with about 215 pages. And how hard could that be?

Baty told all his friends and enemies about his plan, and somehow, he got twenty other people to join him on the journey. They had a lot of fun and talked about doing it the next year, in November (”to more fully take advantage of the miserable weather,” as he writes in this detailed history). And that is really where the whole thing should have ended.

Except, it didn’t. The next year, when Baty enlisted his friends, they enlisted theirs, and 140 people signed up for the ride. The same kind of thing happened the next year. Except: instead of 140 people, five thousand people signed up, overwhelming Baty and those who had agreed to help him manually process the signups. (They learned how to automate things in a hurry.) And those numbers have grown larger every year: last time around, there were more than 100,000 participants, and there’s no reason to expect any fewer this time. In fact, the contest has attracted so many participants that Baty and his colleagues have been able to build an ambitious nonprofit organization around it: the Oakland-based Office of Letters and Light. In addition to NaNoWriMo, the organization sponsors a script-writing event and a youth-oriented version of each contest.

Tens of thousands of people have met the basic challenge — technically, you must tell a complete story in at least 50,000 words to win — but more than two dozen of those winners have gone on to achieve something a little tricker: publication of their manuscripts by commercial publishers. Unbelievably, one of those, Sara Gruen, wrote a book that actually became a New York Times #1 Best Seller (after much revision, I’m sure): Water For Elephants.

However, the best thing about NaNoWriMo is that it’s not about publication; it’s about being creative and having as much fun as possible. And that can mean getting to know your fellow “novelers.” If you sign up on the website to participate, you’ll have access to the regional forums, where people are already planning “write-ins” (group writing sessions) all over San Francisco and the East Bay. Maybe I’ll see you at one of them.

The contest begins Saturday, November 1st, and participation is free. Happy noveling!

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!

First noticed it walking back from Union Street and Leavenworth- we were on top of the hill, it was shocking and stopped us in our tracks. Then a crowd gathered, we all phoned around trying to figure out what was happening. It was around 10PM then, and the fire looked tall and light red, in the south and center of the island. It looked like a volcano crater, across the top in a line- which someone in our crowd said looked like a “lava line.”

A small crowd gathered and we all were chatting- with of course the usual drunk person screaming “It’s not OK! It’s not OK!” Later on, another person in our group yelled, “It’s armageddon!” not to sound too weird, a lot of us were just silently watching it, or muttering to ourselves little nuggets of info we’d picked up somewhere.

The weird thing about being up on Russian Hill was that we smelled the smoke really keenly, and ash even fell on my phone. We also didn’t see any emergency vehicles - just one after a half hour- on the access road on the South side. Not to say there weren’t any, we just didn’t see it form oru vantage. Also, only 1 helicopter before I left.

Later, walked out to (as far as I could get on) Aquatic Pier and it seemed pretty under control. Not really true though- as news showed later. Small groups were gathered on the steps at the cove, or out near the fenced off area near the MacDonnell road.

Just checked tv and it looks like the HD camera on the roof of the ABC news building, a 1/2 mile East showed a lot more damage. Lots of drunk sailors & partiers out- but also people with telephotos, on bikes, trying to capture the island on fire.”

More pictures here, at SFist from the souther, Yerba Buena Island angle, on SF Gate

Tonight and tomorrow only, mugwumpin’s theater piece super.anti.reluctant is performed for the last times before they take it to the International Theater Festival in Cairo. Call 415-621-7978 for tickets.

The Treasure Island Music Festival is happening, with Justice headlining. But you don’t drive there; you to to the parking lot by AT&T Park and take a bus from there.

Tom Stoppard’s Rock and Roll, a play about would-be rock stars in Stoppard’s native Czecholslovakia, opened last night at American Conservatory Theater.

An article about San Francisco’s restaurant scene opens:

There’s nothing wrong with the restaurants in San Francisco except that so many of them serve pretty much the same Northern Cal-Mediterranean menu.

Yeah, that’s what the whole “eating local” thing is supposed to be about, dude. It’s a Northern California menu because this is Northern California. I wonder if he goes to Paris and then writes that the only thing wrong with Parisian restaurants is that they all serve French food.

Meanwhile, this isn’t SF-related, but is on the topic of restaurant criticism. Courtesy Girl Friday: A wine expert hoaxed Wine Spectator magazine into giving an non-existent restaurant its Award of Excellence. Pretty funny.

Courtesy SFist — which provided a huge public service by untangling the stupidity of Muni publishing dozens of proposed route changes on dozens of separate PDFs — here are all the proposed changes to Muni routes posted to SFist’s Flickr set. SFist rules today.

Among the several radical changes:

• Bryant Street is totally out of luck. No more service in the Mission District or South of Market. That means that if you wanted to take a bus to or from the Hall of Justice — like if your car was towed and you wanted to get it back — you have to catch a bus on Folsom and then walk two blocks.

More changes after the jump

Many San Franciscans have waited a long time for utilities to move underground, at great expense of time and money to each homeowner who was lucky enough to have the utilities undergrounded in their neighborhood. The effort to underground utilities has made the city safer and cleared the skies of overhead wires.

Now AT&T would like to nullify that effort by “upgrading” their services and placing utility boxes above ground, in every neighborhood of the city. AT&T intends to upgrade its telecommunications network to a high-speed data transmission technology referred to as “Lightspeed.” In July 2007 AT&T posted flyers in the Inner Sunset neighborhood notifying residents of its intention to install above-ground utility boxes.

Subsequently the San Francisco Planning Department issued an environmental impact report finding that AT&T could move forward with its plans. AT&T immediately requested a permit from Public Works to begin installation. However, the permit was appealed by a neighborhood organization forcing a hearing before the Board of Supervisors. The Board will hear the appeal at its meeting on Tuesday, July 29th. The Board has the authority to deny the appeal or refer the matter back to the Planning Commission for review.

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While the idea of getting on the Treasure Island shuttle kept me away last year (who would want to go to a place that doesn’t even have a grocery store when there is so much wonder cityside?), I was excited to see the lineup for this year’s music festival. September will bring Justice, my favorite Canadians Tegan & Sara, and the somewhat dark sounding and delicious Okkervil River. Consider me in line at AT&T park.

THIS is one of the things I LOVE about living in San Francisco!

Right when I’m in a debate that has included some of the following items:

A) Public Health issues
B) Germs Spread by Humans
C) The EXTRA dirty things that happen IN San Francisco
D) Breaking the Law in San Francisco
E) Flyers posted on utility poles being illegal

…I’m walking to work… and while I’m following THE LAW (which is suddenly so important to some SFers) waiting for the light to change, I SEE THIS FLYER, POSTED TO A UTILITY POLE, illegally; detailing a beautiful example of the germ-spreading habits of humans.

In this case, someone else’s germs will be on someone else’s FACE for charity…

Ahh…. I love it…

** NOTE: For the record, I love that people are giving away their dirty jock straps for charity and have no problem with them posting their flyer. It is merely an absolutely perfectly placed example of some of the highlights of a previously posted blog. ***