July 29, 2003

Summer Reading. 8.

The directorial profession is wide enough to encompass wanderers and regionalists, pastoralists and city rats. "We're all gypsies," the nomadic David Lean said in a 1985 interview, but some directors repeatedly gravitate toward their old metropolitan haunts, even if most eventually range beyond them.

Manhattan

Spike Lee, Hal Hartley and Abel Ferrara are other directors proffering radically opposed visions of New York. John Waters presents a camp alternative to Levinson's Baltimore and Gus Van Sant a poetic Portland, Ore., Further afield, there is Pedro Almodóvar's melodramatic Madrid, Terence Davies's working-class Liverpool and Wong Kar-Wai's kinetic Hong Kong. In the past, there was René Clair's studio-rendered Paris; Marcel Pagnol's Marseilles of boule, pastis and the waterfront; Federico Fellini's circuslike Rome and Yasujiro Ozu's middle-class Tokyo.

Some film cities are best represented by one or two indelible visions: Carol Reed's labyrinthine postwar Vienna in The Third Man; Alfred Hitchcock's dreamy, deceptively manicured San Francisco in Vertigo; Francis Ford Coppola's illusory Las Vegas in One From the Heart and Mike Figgis's Stygian equivalent in Leaving Las Vegas; Volker Schlöndorff's Beirut of political and sexual treachery in Circle of Deceit and Ziad Doueri's version of the same wartorn city in the recent West Beirut; Goran Paskaljevic's necropolitan Belgrade in The Powder Keg, and Wim Wenders's celestial Berlin in Wings of Desire.

Graham Fuller, "When the City Steals the Show," New York Times, November 14, 1999.

GreenCine Daily online tip:
An online tip: For the next week Ian Whitney will be highlighting a story that's been bugging us, too. Mouseamax (aka Disney's "indie" company) will be releasing their mutilated version of Shaolin Soccer. On his site, he lays out out the argument for a boycott. "I don't expect it to be highly successful," Whitney says, "but I've been a fan of these films for too long to see one as good as SS be abused (not to speak of Miramax's treatment of "Hero" or a dozen other HK films)."

So go down to his blog site and check out the discussion.

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Posted by dwhudson at July 29, 2003 11:30 AM

Comments

Nice Graham Fuller article. But he forget Albert Brooks as the West Coast Woody. Or John Hughes and David Mamet in Chicago (at least in their early work). And he left out San Francisco entirely.

But, seriously, I'm shocked that there isn't a bona-fide San Francisco chronicler outside of Rob Nilsson or dunderheads like Chris Columbus. San Francisco, so gloriously celebrated in "What's Up, Doc," "Bullitt," "Dirty Harry" -- even von Stroheim's "Greed," seems to have nabbed a bad rap. And I suspect it has something to do with the dot com stigma or the nutty SF-LA rivalry. Perhaps too many people fled the riches for the relative security of SoCal. The last Hollywood film that attempted to use this glorious place as a locale was "40 Days and 40 Nights," a terribly unfunny Josh Hartnett comedy that presented the City as some incredibly unreal Bizarro universe in which you could get from Media Gulch to Chinatown on foot and in which any unskilled twentysomething could not only own a spacious apartment, but find a parking spot in North Beach. An unintentionally hilarious tableau that ties with "I Married a Communist" as one of the silliest movies ever set in San Francisco.

But why is this when there's so much confined with so few square miles? Hell, even the Star Trek universe wants Starfleet Headquarters to be located here. Even so, we see the same cliched La-La locales, the same lack of strugglers and Bohemians, the same dearth of Edwardians and Victorians. In a word, current cinema doesn't know what the hell it's missing.

Posted by: Ed at July 29, 2003 4:14 PM

lots of docs shot here. lots and lots.

as far as features, isn't san francisco kind of a movie in and of itself? maybe spike lee will break through that a little with his bayview/hunters point teevee series.

anyway between the new lucas shop and the studios out on treasure island this could become a good place again. the problem might be the vegetation... not enough like the desert, not enough like the rest of america.

Posted by: "chirp" at July 30, 2003 10:24 AM

Yeah, I was just thinking of that new SF-shot Spike Lee TV series, too! That one was written by a young San Franciscan and utilizes real locations in neighborhoods rarely shown onscreen. There are also quite a few low-budget indie films coming out of here, some of them even pretty good, like: Groove, Finn Taylor's Cherish and Dream with the Fishes, Mission (http://www.greencine.com/webCatalog?id=31040), etc.

SF's always had a better success rate in documentary production, though, and it is in this area that it shines more clearly than in features.

I, too, get tired of mainstream Hollywood productions having their story "set" here, then coming up for a few days of location shooting, mostly unrealistic, and then that's it. My favorite moments are always those geographic impossibilities, like in EdTV, where McConaughey runs from North Beach, turns a corner, and is in the Castro(!). Then he goes into the Castro movie theater and into the bathrooms, which are nice and new(!) But then Taylor's Dream/Fishes had moments like that too, including people walking on the Bay Bridge.

But anyway, yeah, for such a photogenic city, it's surprising there hasn't been an "auteur" come forth that uses it the way Woody uses NYC. (Although he did choose SF as his locale for Play It Again Sam -- when a garbage strike forced them out of NY for the shooting. We're #2! We're #2!)

C

Posted by: Craig P at July 30, 2003 10:49 AM

i did not know that. hey waddaya know, we're not the trashiest city in the USA!

my fave "dreamland san francisco" flick so far is woman on top. not only does it nip-tuck the geography, it offers a glimpse of what could have been a delightful spanish colony town.

Posted by: "chirp" at August 4, 2003 4:54 PM