My most recent post is a review of Anvil! The Story of Anvil!, a really great doc that’s opening tonight at the Bridge Theater over on Geary. The upcoming reviews and interviews include Enlighten Up! (the yoga doc), Tyson, and Tulpan; along with those, I’ll be reviewing a batch of upcoming Landmark films and other stuff showing at SFIFF52 in the next two weeks, so stay tuned if you’re interested in all that!

Okay, I’ll stop with the blatant self-promotion now; thanks for indulging me. And huge props to Metblogs for letting me obsess about film here for the past twelve months! I’ll be sticking around here for the foreseeable future, but posting quite a bit less about film, and more about stuff like Muni and the weather. You know, news!

In a Dream, which screens at the Roxie starting Friday night, is a film about the mosaic artist Isaiah Zagar, who has become an icon in South Philadelphia due to his long, intensely local career and the massive scale and extent of the mosaics he has created there. They include, by his description, about “a hundred murals” and “seven buildings, top to bottom, inside and out.” His best-known work is Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens, which represents the transformation of two derelict buildings into a labyrinthine complex that covers half a city block with winding mosaic-covered passageways and sculptures.

Zagar’s mosaics are bright, colorful, and complex, rich with a celebratory spirit towards physicality and sensuality. But the surface cheerfulness of these mosaics belies the deeper obsession and the narcissism that makes such vast, intricate works possible in the first place, and Jeremiah Zagar — the director of the film and the artist’s younger son — uncovers that darkness here with unrelenting economy. All the father’s past secrets rapidly come out in the open, culminating when one of his most shameful episodes plays out right in front of the camera: his self-centered pursuit of “passion” with his assistant, which ends with a brief separation from his wife Julia, right when their oldest son is separated from his own wife and having drug problems.

Jeremiah describes the moment: “I went home to film my parents as they picked my brother up from rehab. The stress from the situation boiled over, and my father suddenly admitted [the affair] to my mother and me … that same night, my parents separated for the first time in 43 years.” Isaiah’s admission is made directly into the camera, and it’s a moment of remarkable drama. Amazingly, Jeremiah retains his composure — he coughs and the handheld camera shakes for an instant, but that is all — and he goes on to capture every instant of what ensues. “I shot 16 hours that day and hated myself for every minute of it,” he writes. What happens next is unsurprising but not predictable, and the film ends with a brief epilogue, highly effective in its simplicity, that shows how the family continues on into the next adventure.

For all the darkness that Jeremiah reveals, it’s an affectionate film. He shot his footage over the course of seven years, filming “whenever something significant happened,” and he describes the result like this: “what started as an exploration of my father’s life has exposed the secrets of our entire family. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing. … We know now how imperfect we really are, but also how much we need and love each other.”

The film is highly recommended. In a Dream screens at the Roxie starting Friday night. [This review was originally published, in somewhat different form, on October 25th, 2008.]

[Peter Sarsgaard & Jon Foster contemplate The Cloud Factory. Courtesy Peace Arch Films.]

Michael Chabon’s first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, has been made into a feature film (website here) opening this Friday evening at the Embarcadero Center Cinema. It stars Jon Foster as Art Bechstein and Nick Nolte as his gangster dad, Sienna Miller as the love interest, and Peter Sarsgaard as the jealous semi-ex boyfriend. To quote the plot summary from the ticket page:

A coming-of-age story set in the faded glory of early 1980s-era Pittsburgh … the story opens with Art Bechstein (Foster) floundering in his new-found post-college freedom, opting to take the job with the least amount of responsibility he can find (at the appropriately titled Book Barn), while sleep walking through the Series Seven prep courses that will speed him into a job chosen for him by his father (Nolte), far away from the security of his childhood Pittsburgh. Art’s fortunes begin to change when a chance encounter with freshman roommate and part-time drug dealer Mohammed (Omid Abtahi) lands him at a swanky summer party where he falls for the beautifully tipsy Jane Bellwether (Miller). The two quickly connect over a late-night plate of pie, but Jane’s on-again off-again boyfriend Cleveland (Sarsgaard) has other plans for the pair. Taking Art hostage from the dreary Book Barn, Cleveland threatens to throw Art off the top of an abandoned steel mill, a hide-out that Cleveland romantically calls “The Cloud Factory.” Suspended high above Pittsburgh, Art realizes that his summer has finally begun, what would become the last true summer of his life.

Superfans of the book should know that the director and screenwriter, Rawson Marshall Thurber (Dodgeball) has substantially reworked the material to make it more cinematic; you may already have noticed that one major character is entirely gone from the summary above, and a lot of other stuff has been dropped, added, or otherwise changed. But in spite of all that, it really captures the essence of the book — which isn’t surprising, as Michael Chabon himself was intimately involved with the development of the film, giving a great deal of support to Thurber and feedback on his script, and he has approved of the final product.

Incidentally, last year I wrote about how Oakley Hall prompted Chabon to turn that dad into a gangster, so in a way, we have Oakley Hall to thank for this nice movie.

Tickets available here; engagement begins Friday night at the Embarcadero Center Cinema.

[Above, Marina Abramovic and her posse dare the ocean to hit them with its best shot.]

Our City Dreams chronicles the careers and lives of five female artists, now based in New York City, who have been drawn there by everything the city represents — all its chaos, romance, and the advantages of being at the center of the art world. It opens with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge — from a car driving on it, presumably into Manhattan — a jazz soundtrack, and an apt epigraph from Susan Sontag, whose own career was inextricably bound up with the city: “I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.” The words well suggest what is to follow: a documentary about five women who have each been able to realize their “dreams,” by which is meant both their ambitions and their artistic visions.

Director Chiara Clemente (herself the daughter of a famous painter, Franciso Clemente) followed each of these artists for a year, documenting some key moments in their lives. One artist opens her first solo show and another opens a 25–year retrospective. The women are profiled in order of age, so that in the course of the film you develop a sense of what an entire lifetime in art might mean for a woman. But since each artist started her career about a decade earlier than the one previously interviewed, we also get a brief history of contemporary art in reverse order, a series of personal views into some of the major currents in art over the past half-century, starting with street art and moving backwards through performance art, art explicitly informed by feminist criticism, and Expressionist art.

More than that, though, we get a clear insight into what it means to be a female artist in our society after the feminist movement — and something of what it meant to be one before. Near the end of the film, the painter Nancy Spero (born 1926) celebrates her eightieth birthday, and recalls, of the 1950s and early 1960s: “I was dying for people to ask me what I was working on,” as it didn’t happen much in those years. That memory makes for a sharp contrast with the first woman profiled, the street artist Swoon (born 1977; incidentally, you might have gone to this recent event) who seems to have the world before her: she says she feels lucky to be working “at a moment when women are being really encouraged” to be artists — and as if to prove the point, we’re shown footage of her first solo show, given when she was twenty-eight, at Deitch Projects. In between these two, we get studio visits and some time spent with Ghada Amer, Kiki Smith, and the self-described “grandmother of performance art” Marina Abramovic.

Altogether it’s a fascinating film and a good introduction to five of the most significant artists of our time.

The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is presenting this film at 7:30 on four evenings starting on April 9^th and continuing through the 12th. Tickets and trailer available here.

[Note: When originally published, this article incorrectly stated the opening night as April 8th.]

By the way, a film about Ferlinghetti’s life and works is going to premiere at the upcoming San Francisco International Film Festival on April 28. Film site here. Tickets are available now to SFFS members!

UPDATE: Streetsblog has this great article about Ferlinghetti’s proposal to create an Italian-style piazza on Vallejo Street (near Trieste).

UPDATE: SFist reports that it’s also Frank Chu’s birthday. Well, how about that?

While no deadline was laid down for making these cuts, and their scope was not quantified, it’s clear that Hearst means business. SFist has published a memo sent to Chronicle employees by Chairman and Publisher Frank Vega, in which he intimates “a series of cost-saving initiatives designed to alleviate” the continuing losses at the paper. Well, we all know what that means.

Vega goes on: “First and foremost of these cost savings will be a significant reduction in force across all areas of our operation affecting both represented and non-represented employees. We will shortly begin discussions with union leadership on proposals. Our current situation dictates that we accomplish these cost savings quickly. Business as usual is no longer an option. If we are unable to accomplish these reductions in the immediate future, Hearst Corporation, which owns the Chronicle, has informed us that it will offer the newspaper for sale or close it altogether.”

The San Francisco Business Times also reported on the story, adding that the paper lost $50 million dollars in 2008, and possibly that much every year going back to 2001.

And SFGate itself posted a story — byline, Hearst Newspapers — giving the story the predictable, rolling-up-the-sleeves angle that the company would have: it’s a venerable institution amidst industry turmoil; this’ll hurt, but it’s got to be done.

However, some have suggested that the “if” phrase in the memo makes the subtext read like this: if the unions don’t cave to our demands, we’ll shut the paper down, and then where will they be?

This is distressing news to me for personal reasons: I know a number of people who are now employed, directly or indirectly, by the paper. But I can’t help but think it might be for the better, in the long run, if the Chronicle did shut down. As a San Francisco reader who really cares about the news, it’s impossible not to have noticed that the Chronicle has been a sub-par news source for many years. SFGate always seems to be the last site to publish breaking stories, San Francisco itself appears almost not to exist in its pages apart from shootings, City Hall, and entertainment, and much if not most of its content is taken straight from the AP wire. I keep checking the page out of a sense of duty, but I’m not sure what it gets me, when I get such excellent national news from the New York Times, and most of my local news from Streetsblog, Missionlocal, Eater SF, Curbed SF, SFCitizen, and San Francisco Business Times — all of which routinely feature original reporting. As for arts stories, you can’t go wrong with KQED. And I haven’t even mentioned the sites that are less about news per se but which are fun to read and are often useful, such as SFist, Mission Mission, and this blog. I’d probably feel differently if it were my job at stake, but somehow I think that journalism in San Francisco has a future with or without the Chronicle — and it just might have a brighter future without it.

[Thavisouk Phrasavath and his mother, Orady Phrasavath in Ellen Kuras’ documentary, The Betrayal. Courtesy of The Cinema Guild.]

[Disclosure: I haven’t seen this film, so I can’t recommend it on that basis. But I got a quick glimpse of it and heard good things about it at Landmark’s Film Club Spring Preview a couple of weeks ago.]

The Betrayal is a documentary about one Laotian family’s flight from Laos and their journey to NYC, and their struggles to survive. Thavisouk is the eldest of 10 children, and responsibility for the family fell upon him when his father was arrested in 1975 by the Pathet Lao. His father’s crime? Working for the Americans. Allow me to quote the press release:

[Director Ellen] Kuras and Phrasavath have created a lyrical film that fluidly incorporates archival footage, cinema verite, interview material and visually poetic montages. The result is a story of what it means to be in exile, of the far-reaching consequences of war, and of the resilient bonds of family. Thavisouk’s unforgettable journey reminds us of the strength necessary to survive unthinkable conditions, and of the human spirit’s inspiring capacity to adapt, rebuild, and forgive.

Twenty-three years of filming and research went into this film. Director Ellen Kuras is a famed cinematographer; she has won the Best Dramatic Cinematography award at Sundance no fewer than three times, and she also shot Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The Betrayal is her directorial debut.

The film opens at the Lumiere this Friday, February 27^th, and will run until March 5^th. Showtimes: Fri-Sun (2:20 4:45) 7:10 9:20. Mon-Thu (4:45) 7:10 9:20.