SAGEBRUSH: Méliès At The Flicks

With one cinephilic foot placed squarely in the San Francisco Bay Area and the other in Boise, Idaho, I'm feeling somewhat of a conduit today whereby the movies themselves—not geographical locations—prove where I truly am. As has probably always been the case and certainly continues through today, audiences worldwide constitute a broadened albeit dispersed community united in spectatorial delight. In this, there is no difference in desire; a desire that spans across the past century. There's no requirement to be roped into the regional when the global is at hand.Filmbud Brian Darr's well-r

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AIR, Brian Darr, Carole Skinner, Dr. Mariah Devereux Herbeck, Eric Lange, Fandor, Georges Méliès, IFF, Serge Bromberg, The Flicks,

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#OCCUPY THE CINEMAS

Just yesterday I was reading Mark Cousins' introductory essay "The Point of Criticism" in his collection of essays Widescreen: Watching. Real. People. Elsewhere. (2008, Wall Flower Press, London & New York) wherein he declared: "I follow in J.K. Galbraith's footsteps in believing that in capitalist societies, products have a built-in obsolescence. I want a new phone or new trainers not because my previous ones are done, but because their latest versions are slightly more up to date, more me. Writer Benjamin Barber thinks of this as infantilizing taste. ...[Mainstream cinema] inflames d

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#Occupy the Cinemas, Anthony Kauffman, Mark Cousins,

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CENTAUR (2011)

J.P. Allen's Centaur (2011) is less a film than an intermedial experiment with the digital image. One could say it doesn't quite work as a narrative feature—whose conventions it, in fact, resists quite honestly—but it does succeed on its own creative terms, which lie somewhere between a theatrically staged recitation, a video diary, a tone poem, and a visual embrace of familiar Bay Area locations. Most importantly, it disregards the necessity of a big budget or a production crew to tell its story through admirably economic means and—with a one-week run scheduled in late March at Landmark's

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Amy Mordecai, J.P. Allen, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Michael Slattery, Shoulders,

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YBCA: BROS BEFORE HOS—Strongman (2009)

A strange sadness and profound hopelessness pervades Strongman (2009), Zachary Levy's unflinching yet amazingly non-judgmental portrait of Stanley "Stanless Steel" Pleskun, The Strongest Man in the World at Bending Steel and Metal. It's a sadness appropriately grouped under masculinity and its discontents because it's about a man who is weakened by his self-delusions of strength and his frustrated attempts to somehow make a name for himself, or even a living, at being able to bend pennies with his bare hands or lift 10,000-pound dump trucks with his legs. An aging strongman without a circus

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YBCA, Zachary Levy,

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PSIFF 2012—ENDNOTES

"The film festival is a parallel universe: detached from reality and more fictional than the sum of its constituent narratives."—Jay KuehnerJay Kuehner's wry observation holds especially true for the Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF) for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the weather. When I attended previous editions of PSIFF, it was to get away from fogbound San Francisco. Now it's to get away from snowbound Idaho. Either way, walking around in short sleeves and sandals feels decadent and irreal, though most welcome. Not that it's always been beautiful when I've be

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Christoffer Boe, Dragan Bjelogrlić, Eric Khoo, João Canijo, Karim Aïnouz, Loy Arcenas, Nicolas Provost, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Pablo Giorgelli, PSIFF 2012, Roschdy Zem, Tomáš Lunák,

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