SFBG @ 40.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian turns 40, and publisher Bruce Brugmann and editor Tim Redmond have more than a few words to say about it, to which we'll add one: Congratulations!

Tommy Amano-Tompkins surveys 40 years of arts coverage.

Also:

• Dennis Harvey: "The Last Movie isn't the balm for stoner egos that Easy Rider offered. It incriminates everybody - colonialists, swingers, industry suits, the greedy (like our hero's covetous Indio girlfriend), and filmmaking itself. Periodic 'scene missing' titles help make this a deconstructive metamovie well ahead of its time. It's an antiaudience picture, now more breathtaking than ever in sheer gall."

• Also, Running With Scissors: "[Ryan] Murphy's "first directorial feature is a tad uneven... But overall it does a pretty fine job with tricky material, especially within the all-important area of casting.... It's particularly cheering to see [Jill] Clayburgh, who hasn't had this significant a big-screen part in 20 years - and owns it."

• Julien Poirier on I Like Killing Flies: "[Matt] Mahurin's film makes this clear: genius has something to do with food if the cook is a genius and everything to do with doing what you must do."

• K Tighe talks with Crispin Glover about What Is It?, which "he describes as 'being the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are snails, salt, a pipe, and how to get home. As tormented by an hubristic racist inner psyche.' However tenuous a tagline that may seem, it hits the mark dead-on."

• Chuck Stephens: "Few American independent features in recent memory have seemed as truly capable of turning something old into something surprisingly new as Old Joy."

• Cheryl Eddy on Marie Antoinette: "Coppola is 100 percent sure of herself, her vision, and her eye for hipster glamour... it's pretty, but pretty vacant." More from Max Goldberg at SF360 and Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly.

Posted by dwhudson at October 18, 2006 12:41 PM