06/04/08
Some of my favorite movie memories involve trying to stay up past midnight on Saturday nights to watch Channel 2's Creature Features with my dad. If you weren't living in the Bay Area in the 1970s, you wouldn't remember this late night horror showcase, hosted by Bob Wilkins, and later, John Stanley. They would show all forms of the horror genre, from masterpieces like Night of the Living Dead and Texas Chainsaw Massacre to lovable lesser fare, like Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space. They also showed tons of cool vampire movies from Britain's Hammer Studios.
If I could stay awake, which wasn't often, I was allowed to watch until there was graphic nudity or graphic ritual violence, or both, at which point I was sent to bed. In the morning,...
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05/29/08
Driving home from work last night, I pulled off at the Pleasant Hill Cinearts to watch Roman de Gare, a French crime thriller that I knew nothing about. It's always a treat to walk into film with no baggage or expectations, and I was really impressed by the movie. Roman de Gare is a crazy mishmash of genres, red herrings, and Hitchcockian suspense, that teases you into thinking you're watching a conventional Hollywood-style serial killer movie and then continues to pile twist upon twist until you're not sure what hell you're watching. But in a good way. It was directed by Claude Lelouch, whose 1966 movie A Man and a Woman is a classic, but I've never seen it. While I'm thinking...
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05/19/08
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull comes crashing into theaters this Thursday at 12:01 a.m., and its certain to be a box office behemoth, crushing Prince Caspian and Speed Racer in its massive wake. I went to an early screening on Sunday morning at the Castro Theater and am pleased to report that the Indy 4 is a total blast. I don't want to give away any plot details, because part of the fun is watching the crazy action unfold. Since my screening was spoiler-free, I'm not about to reveal any of the secrets director Steven Spielberg and producer George Lucas have in store for this fanboy spectacular.
The original Indiana Jones adventure, Raiders of the Lost Ark, was one of the great cinematic thrills of my childhood. I was...
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05/01/08
Last weekend I was at a party for the Town Hall Theatre and someone told me that the Rheem Theater had closed. I felt a sharp, sickened pang in my side, a jab I had not felt since I received similar news about the adorable Lafayette Park Theater's closing a few years back. The Rheem Theater is a little gem, a throwback to the old days of cinema, when towns built movie palaces in their downtowns for the community to enjoy. Too many of these cinema treasures have been shut down by the massive megaplexes, that make up for a lack or personality by showing commercials and too many previews before their mainstream flicks.
Fortunately, the information i received about the Rheem was innacurate. Apparently, the theater has changed ownership, and the theater was simply shut down for...
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04/08/08
I'm really excited about the California Independent Film Festival next week. This is a fantastic event, every year, but this year's lineup is particularly good. I'll be moderating discussions with legendary football coach John Madden and filmmaker Penny Marshall, actor Mary Stuart Masterson (Some Kind of Wonderful, Fried Green Tomatoes) who will be screening her outstanding directorial debut The Cake Eaters, and film producer Michael Cerenzie, who is receiving the festival's Maverick Award for producing the criminally-underseen crime caper masterpiece, Before the Devil Knows Your Dead.
Devil is a beautifully written, sensationally acted, masterfully directed nailbiter about two brothers (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke) who plan to...
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04/04/08
If you're looking for a laugh, you're in luck: two of the funniest people on the planet are headlining in the East Bay this weekend. I went to see Chris Rock's show last night at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, and it was nothing short of brilliant. Rock, a former Saturday Night Live player, is best known for his HBO comedy concerts and has booked four nights at the Paramount. The shows sold out quickly, but Craigslist has lots of tickets available for the weekend shows, and I was able to get a great seat for under the face value outside the venue just before the show. The box office also had a few open tickets left.
Rock is as good as stand-up comedy gets—smart, hilarious, and not afraid to talk about very serious topics, including riveting segments about...
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03/09/08
We've gotten an amazing response to the East Bay's Greatest Hits story and the cover image, featuring Counting Crows. I was particularly pleased to find that the article has been posted on the Counting Crows' message boards, and that the interview with Duritz was well received as interesting and informative. (As a frequenter of artist-related websites, www.expectingrain.com, www.goldensmog.com, I've noticed how much fans know about their favorite artists, and how frustrated they get when an interview makes a mistake with a song title, asks a stupid/redundant question, or, Hendrix forbid, disses their band). Anyway, the interview I did with Adam Duritz had lots of extra meat to it that had to be cut from...
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02/26/08
I've always been a huge fan of midnight movies—cult favorite films shown at the midnight hour to the delight of film geeks. When I was very young, Channel 44 in San Francisco used to play the old Sherlock Holmes movies starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce at Watson, late on Saturday nights. I'd do my best to stay awake, but rarely made it to the end of the film. A few years later, I'd watch Bob Wilkins host midnight movies on his Creature Features program on Channel 2. I recall that The House That Dripped Blood was particularly chilling.
As the years rolled on, my film geek instincts turned me onto various other movies that play best at midnight. Liquid Sky. Mad Max. But the mother of all midnight movies has to be the 1975...
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02/20/08
I love watching the Oscars every year, so I'm pretty psyched that the writers settled and the big show will go on. I like to stay home, wear pajamas, and snack on some comfort food during the show—but some people like to go out to a big party. If you're looking for something to do on Oscar Night, there's going to be a cool party at Danville's Village Theatre, benefitting the Danville Children's Film Festival.
Information below:
Local film enthusiasts are invited to celebrate Hollywood’s biggest night at the Village Theatre Oscar-Viewing Party, a benefit to support the Danville International Children’s Film Festival.
Evening gowns and tuxedos are NOT required at this casual, fun-filled event on Sunday, Feb. 24 at the Village Theatre, 233 Front St....
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02/08/08
This has been a big rock 'n'roll week. First, my all-time favorite band, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers rocked the halftime show of the greatest Super Bowl in history. Then, we finished work at Diablo on an awesome package about the greatest rock groups to come from the East Bay. Look for it in the upcoming March issue. After the final pages were done, I celebrated by going to see the spectacular new concert film, U23D at the Dublin IMAX Theater.
U23D rockets up the list of all-time great concert films, as well as the somewhat shorter list of great IMAX films. Released by National Geographic Entertainment, the film was shot at a U2 show in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in an enormous soccer stadium toward the end of the Vertigo tour. I saw this concert at the...
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02/04/08
I'm supposed to be taking the week off, to catch up on the few outstanding Oscar nominees I still have to see (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is coming from Netflix) before I blog my Oscar picks. Meanwhile, here's a great tip for film buffs: check out the Contra Costa public libraries for an amazing selection of dvds. You can check the movies out for free, the borrowing time is a full week. Also, you can search the entire library system for the titles you want to see, then place a hold on the item AND have it transfered to your local branch. I've been visiting the beautiful Hercules branch frequently, and have picked up a bevy of great films.
Tonight, I watched the director's cut of
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01/25/08
Yeah, baby, Noir City is back with a vengeance. The annual Film Noir Festival is my very favorite cinematic event of the year (I've scheduled overseas vacations around it, to make sure I didn't miss any of its black-and-white glory.)
Back to the festival. Every January, Alameda resident Eddie Muller hooks up a film geek's buffet of the rarest of rare movies from the 1940s and '50s. Often, these films have never been released on DVD or VHS, and never show up on TCM—so the only chance film buffs have to see them is on the giant silver screen of the glorious Castro Theater in San Francisco. Muller is the go-to guy for noir—his books, Dark City and Dark City Dames, among others, lovingly extol the virtues of the...
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01/20/08
On Sunday night, I noticed that THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY, the acclaimed new film by director Julien Schnabel* has an East Bay exclusive engagement at the Oaks theater on Berkeley’s Solano Ave. I’ve been meaning to go to the Indian restaurant a few doors up the street from the Oaks, so I whipped together dinner and a movie plans, lickety-split. It was easy to get a parking spot on the same block as the Oaks.
Khana Peena is a well-loved Indian restaurant with three East Bay locations, another on Oxford in Berkeley, and the newest on College in Oakland. The restaurant chain makes several beers, and the Solano location has three very private closed off booths in the back that have been recognized by East Bay Express...
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01/16/08
Just got home from an early screening of CLOVERFIELD, the first big buzz movie of 2008. For the uniformed, the first trailer for this film was attached to last summer’s Transformers blockbuster, and created a firestorm of interest on the Internets.
In terms of over-hyped scare flick, Cloverfield is closer to The Blair Witch Project than Snakes on a Plane. Cloverfield is produced by JJ Abrams, the wunderkind behind TV’s Lost, a show I still have never seen (All I know is that they’re on an island, there are Others, and viewers are always complaining about how infrequently the new episodes are shown).
Working with director Matt Reeves, Abrams brings his sci-fi...
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01/07/08
I just got back from a matinee of THERE WILL BE BLOOD at the California Theater in Berkeley. Grrrrrrrreat movie, featuring a Mount Everest of a performance by the sensational Daniel Day-Lewis, as Daniel Plainview, a greed-obsessed oil man. Day-Lewis creates a character that is at once evil yet empathetic, bigger-than-life yet believable. It’s the kind of performance that has Oscar written all over it—hell, Day-Lewis’s moustache should be nominated as best supporting actor on its own.
Director P.T. Anderson has been a great talent since his first film, the underseen gambling melodrama Hard Eight (Netflix it). He followed that with Boogie Nights and Magnolia (I loved both), then gave Adam...
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01/03/08
Just heard from Julie Rubio, an Orinda resident I wrote about last February, when she was finishing principal photography on her independent feature film Six Sex Scenes and a Murder. Rubio recently announced that she got a distribution deal through Panorama Entertainment, which means her movie will be coming out on dvd, and possibly in a limited release in movie theaters.
I watched a cut of the film recently and was impressed with Rubio's work. Six Sex Scenes and a Murder is an erotic thriller involving a cast of characters all offer alibis to a nightclub murder—each suspect was involved in a kinky liaison at the time of the shooting, so they couldn't possibly have killed that man (even though he had it...
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01/02/08
5 great comedies from 2007
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12/21/07
2007 was a great year for gangster, noir, and underworld movies
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