SFBG. SFIFF.

Like presidents, festival directors get honeymoons. It's only fair. Relatively late last year, Graham Leggat was tapped to head up the San Francisco Film Society, meaning he's also now overseeing the Americas' longest-running film festival, the SFIFF. The 49th edition opens tomorrow and runs through May 4, and as you'll see in an upcoming entry, Leggat's got plans so big we're really only likely to see the first effects of them next year, when the fest hits the big Five-0. For now, even the San Francisco Bay Guardian is more than willing to cut Leggat - and the fest itself - some slack. Johnny Ray Huston:

The SFIFF has gotten a bum rap lately - scrape away the public image of a fest like last year's and you'd find an excellent, deep, if sometimes overly solemn, array of movies. San Francisco suffers from no shortage of film festivals, but its oldest still has a depth and breadth others can scarcely match, and Leggat's arrival gives SFIFF a much-needed boost of energetic, idea-driven intelligence. Now, when it turns 50, perhaps it can go toe-to-toe with the near simultaneous Tribeca fest helmed by ex–SFIFF executive director Peter Scarlet. Programming wars ain't pretty, but they're sure to yield some drama.

So the SFBG writes up over 20 highlights of this 49er plus:

• Dennis Harvey: "The first musical to open the festival in 20 years (1986 had Absolute Beginners) is Peter Ho-Sun Chan's lavish Hong Kong confection Perhaps Love, a Jacques Demy-meets-Moulin Rouge exercise in decorative, sentimental self-consciousness." Notes on Seijun Suzuki's Princess Raccoon, Tsai Ming-liang's The Wayward Cloud, John Turturro's Romance & Cigarettes and Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion follow. Huston's related piece: "One of the first thoughts I had while watching The Wayward Cloud was this: Matthew Barney can eat Tsai's shorts."

• Cheryl Eddy calls up anthropologist Sam Dunn to chat with him and co-director Scot McFadyen (another is Jessica Joy Wise) about Metal: A Headbanger's Journey. Also: "Believe the hype: British import The Descent is the scariest movie since The Blair Witch Project, thanks to a killer premise, flawless pacing and casting, and writer-director Neil Marshall's unconcealed love for the horror genre. Here we present a flowchart of The Descent's predecessors and influences."

• B Ruby Rich talks with Sarah Watt about her award-winning Look Both Ways.

• Max Goldberg on Philippe Garrel's Regular Lovers: "In its reconsideration of the chaos that was 1968, the film is, in part, a response to Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers; there was a time when European art cinema mattered enough for this kind of exchange to turn heads, but such is not the case in today's film culture."

• Jonathan L Knapp on Harry Smith and his 1962 film, Heaven and Earth Magic: "He was an American original, an artist difficult to categorize and impossible to ignore."

Posted by dwhudson at April 19, 2006 4:52 AM