SFFILM

San Francisco International Film Festival: fest preview

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This year’s San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILMFestival) – the 60th edition – opens on April 5 and runs through April 19. As always, it’s a Can’t Miss for Bay Area movie fans.  This year’s program is especially loaded.  Here are some enticing festival highlights:

  • The indie smash Patti Cake$, which rocked Sundance and SXSW.
  • A screening of Citizen Kane with William “Will” Randolph Hearst III discussing his family.
  • James Ivory (Remains of the Day, Howards End) will receive an award and present a 30th anniversary screening of his Maurice. (Ivory isn’t British, he was born in Berkeley – who knew?)
  • Noted film historian David Thomson will discuss what really frightens him in that San Francisco treat, Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
  • Speaking of Hitchcock, there’s also the new documentary 78/52 on the 78 set ups and the 52 cuts in Psycho’s iconic shower scene.  Talk about a Deep Dive…
  • Ethan Hawke gets an award and presents his new film, Maudie.
  • Prolific writer John Ridley (12 Years a Slave and a multitude of TV show) introduces his new miniseries Guerilla.
  • Amir Bar-Lev (the Tillman Story) will present his documentary on the Grateful Dead Long Strange Trip (but, just like a Dead concert, it’s four hours long).
  • That roguish 72-year-old sex symbol Sam Elliott will attend a screening of his new movie, The Hero.
  • A critical favorite, director James Gray (The Lovers, The Immigrant, The Yards) will attend the screening of his newest film, The Lost City of Z.
  • The new film from the Dardennes brothers (The Son, The Kid with a Bike, Two Days One Night), The Unknown Woman.
  • The world premiere of the experimental film Discreet from Bay Area writer-director Travis Mathews. I’ve seen it, and it’s strangely compelling.
  • The latest from Oscar-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple (Harlan County USA, Miss Sharon Jones!) – This Is Everything: Gigi Gorgeous.
  • Sieranevada, the latest from Romanian director Cristi Puilu (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu).
PATTI CAKE$ photo courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society
PATTI CAKE$
photo courtesy of SFFILM

 

The calendar of this year’s festival includes a rich program of indies, documentaries and foreign films. Among the foreign choices, I liked the little Irish self-discovery movie A Date for Mad Mary.

And, I don’t know anything about this film, but my favorite movie title in the fest is Donkeyote.

The 60th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILMFestival) opens this Wednesday.  Here’s SFFILMFestival’s information on the program, the calendar and tickets and passes.

Throughout SFFILMFestival, I’ll be linking more festival coverage to my SFFILMFestival 2017 page, including both features and movie recommendations. Follow me on Twitter for the very latest coverage.

DISCREET photo courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society
DISCREET
photo courtesy of SFFILM

THE BANDIT: a buddy movie about a buddy movie

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Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham in THE BANDIT. Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

Writer-director Jesse Moss describes The Bandit as “a buddy movie about a buddy movie”, and he’s right. The buddies are mega-star Burt Reynolds and his stuntman/friend/roommate Hal Needham, who directed the enormously successful Smokey and the Bandit franchise.

Needham, one of only two stuntmen with an Oscar, is arguably cinema’s greatest stunt performer and stunt coordinator. Reynolds did many of his own stunts, and we we see some hard, hard falls in The Bandit. But Burt did nothing to nothing to match Needham, whose FIRST career stunt was jumping off an airplane wing to tackle a rider off his horse. We see many instances where Needham became a LITERAL car crash test dummy.

One of The Bandit’s highlights is the Needham stunt that broke his back – jumping a car off a dock and onto a barge – and slamming into the barge a little short.

There’s rich source material here from Burt’s garage (Reynolds calls it “King Tut’s Tomb for documentarinans”), which stored tapes back to 1956.

For added color, Needham and Reynolds were epic partiers, who embraced and exemplified the Mad Men era. Needham was a vivid character and lived a helluva life. I strongly recommend Terry Gross’ Fresh Air interview with Needham.

Hal’s widow told Bay Area filmmaker Jesse Moss that Needham hated documentaries because they were boring, so Moss aimed to make a documentary that Hal would enjoy. Indeed, The Bandit opens with the sly Reynolds, in maroon leisure suit with flared pant legs, mocking his own image outrageously. And, it’s a hoot throughout.

(Moss’ first movie was at San Francisco’s Castro Theater in 1979, when his dad took him a double feature of Erroll Morris’ Gates of Heaven and Hardware Wars, a documentarian born!)

I saw The Bandit at its premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM). It played on TV channel CMT, and now can be streamed on Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.