The Trauma miniseries, featuring the safety service personal – EMTs namely, and their experience of catastrophies (of which there are approx. 5 a day!)– is still going on in our fair city. It’s filming on my block in North Beach, and taking up a precious block of non-street cleaning parking. Neighborly tensions are high.

On my way back from a run I noticed about 5 really attractive people sitting outside Kennedy’s. Not to harsh on Kennedy’s, but these people were Tall and Skinny. I thought it was appropriate that they were dressed in brown and black.

“They call us down and then we have to wait 7 hours. It’s like this each time.” And a lot more grumbling from the extras and staff. Note: a little bird told me they’re not getting carried over into another session, so feelings may be low.

Some neighbors have been complaining, and from what they’ve seen on TV, it hasn’t lived up to the hype. Most of us are just shocked at the money that Hollywood is paying in location fees. For some reason I think it’s 10K/day per spot, but not including the cost of cops, actors, etc. of course.

But anyways, what do you *think* about the miniseries? Well I’ve watched it far too many times, and here are my thoughts.

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Wish I’d been paying attention to this before it happened so I could have gone, but the account by Bob Calhoun on the Open Salon site of the showing of Night of the Living Dead on the scoreboard at AT&T Park last Friday is still totally worth reading. Check out the appearance of Judith O’Dea, the film’s dumb blonde, who was interviewed at the event.

The film of the Michael Lewis book Moneyball, which is about the machinations of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, has been cancelled just days before shooting was to begin. The New York Times reported that the cancellation is a sign of a new level of nervousness in Hollywood; in this case even the casting of Brad Pitt to play the baseball brainiac, much less the fact that over $10 million had been spent on development, location scouting, costumes and other preparations, was not enough to keep the project going.

Previously: Book on A’s GM to lens; Brad Pitt will play Billy Beane

Lebowski Fest returns to the Bay Area on July 24th with the Bowling Party at the Classic Bowling Center and the Movie Party on July 25th at The Fox Theater. Two parties, two tickets… $28 for Bowling (includes shoes) and $22.50 for movie showing. More info…

Those of you who have enjoyed my posts on film here on SF Metblog over the past year or so are invited to check out the blog I launched this week about indie and festival film in San Francisco, called The Next Frame. For now, at least, it’s a component of my personal site, which will ultimately also feature a regular litblog and a blog about street art. Everything’s still a little beta, so please excuse the layout oddities for now: they should be ironed out in the next couple weeks.

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.]

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1966 film with Jane Fonda, Made in U.S.A., plays tonight at the Castro Theatre, 7:00 and 9:00 pm; Saturday and Sunday at 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9, and through April 7.

Meanwhile, the Belgian brewer Stella Artois launched a new ad campaign in which one ad spoofs Godard’s work circa Le Mépris and Pierrot le fou. It has that wonderful ability of European ads to be chic and tacky at the same time. 7.

In a bit of good news for filmmakers trying to shoot projects in San Francisco, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors today approved a major change to the rebate structure so that film projects can get up to $600,000 in tax rebates as opposed to the $100,000 maximum previously allowed (which Milk received). These sums represent taxes and fees that City Hall is forgoing. Here’s an article on Examiner.com that explains why this is a good idea despite the budget shortfall. The short version is that city rebates encourage filmmakers and TV producers to bring their productions to San Francisco, which stimulates the local economy. City Hall’s own Office of the Budget Analyst estimates that Milk — a $22 million production constrained to shoot on location for obvious reasons — brought $4.8 million in business to San Francisco.