Author: bookmarcus

We saw Zidane at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room last night. The room is not large, maybe 200 seats, and was packed, largely with soccer teams and their coaches. We were two of a few “civilians.”

I expected to see the familiar number 10 of the French national team, and of course, the famous head butt. But no, seventeen cameras focus on Zinedine Zidane for an entire, regular season soccer match, Real Madrid vs. Villareal, April 23, 2005. Zidane wears number 5 for Real Madrid.

This is an amazing film. For me, it defines the art of the motion picture. IMDb mentioned it as a “conceptual art installation.”

What we see on the big screen is Zidane; his face, his head, the back of his neck, his torso, his feet, sometimes his whole body. He stands, jogs, runs, handles the ball, whatever the match situation calls for. He sweats, spits, blows his nose, says very little. His expression rarely changes. We see Zidane assist on a goal as he kicks the ball across the face of the goal, to be scored on a header by a teammate. It is one of the few instances where the camera follows the ball. We see a few brief shots of a black and white video monitor and a few brief shots from the stadium roof, otherwise we don”t see the match, just Zidane. From time to time, quotes from Zidane interviews are shown as subtitles.

The film is in real time, and at half-time, news clips of things going on in the world on that day, are shown.

The sound may be even more amazing. We hear in turn, silence, the roar of maybe 80,000 rabid soccer fans, the thunk of his foot against the ball, the skidding sound of the ball on the turf, footsteps digging in the turf, a musical monotone building and fading as the action warrants.

I found the film a joy; I delighted in the clarity of the pictures moving before me. I felt as if I were in a photo gallery, passing from one photograph to the next, always thrilled by the image at hand. I was mesmerized. Carol was bored silly.

Zidane played at Sundance last year, but has not secured distribution in the US.

Here is a review from the Guardian, and a Wired review from Sundance.

Thanks to the San Francisco Film Society, Carol and I just saw 2 outstanding films in two days and they couldn”t have been more different.

Below are plot summaries of each and there are compelling reviews of each on the internet. I will simply say see them when you can.

We saw 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days in the Dolby Screening Room, and the room was an experience in itself. It’s in a renovated brick industrial building South of Market, exquisitely detailed with oak in a crisp art deco style. It seats about 120 in individual armchairs, and since the chairs are large, the room is big enough for a full blown screen. We formed an intimate relationship with the characters during the film and it was a privilege to see it in such a venue.

The New York Times synopsis:
In “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” a ferocious, unsentimental, often brilliantly directed film about a young woman who helps a friend secure an abortion, the camera doesn”t follow the action, it expresses consciousness itself. This consciousness — alert to the world and insistently alive — is embodied by a young university student who, one wintry day in the late 1980s, helps her roommate with an abortion in Ceausescu’s Romania when such procedures were illegal, not uncommon and too often fatal. It’s a pitiless, violent story that in its telling becomes a haunting and haunted intellectual and aesthetic achievement. “4 Months” deserves to be seen by the largest audience possible, partly because it offers a welcome alternative to the coy, trivializing attitude toward abortion now in vogue in American fiction films, but largely because it marks the emergence of an important new talent in the Romanian writer and director Cristian Mungiu. — Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

In Bruges

The Film Society held a special screening of Martin McDonagh‘s new film IN BRUGES at Landmark’s Embarcadero Center Cinemas on Tuesday, January 29, at 7:30 pm. Martin McDonagh was in attendance and participated in a Q+A after the film.

The film follows two hit men (Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson) who, after a botched job, are sent on extended leave to Bruges, where they find themselves forced to interact with the townspeople in intriguing and funny ways. The feature debut from Martin McDonagh, the award-winning Irish playwright and Academy Award winner for his short Six Shooter, opened this year’s Sundance Film Festival, which described it as “deliriously funny, pointed and perverse, yet sad, thoughtful and infused with a moral vision that resonantly reflects today’s surreal world.” The film opens in the Bay Area on February 9.

PARANOID PARK
A San Francisco
Film Society Benefit
Plus a book signing for CINEMA NOW

On December 8, join us for a benefit screening of Gus Van Sant’s new film, Paranoid Park, which won the 60th Anniversary Award at the Cannes Film Festival this year. At once a dreamlike portrait of teen alienation and a boldly experimental work of film narrative, Paranoid Park finds Gus Van Sant at the height of his powers. Alex, a withdrawn high-school skateboarder (Gabe Nevins) struggles to make sense of his involvement in an accidental death: He recalls past events across tides of memory, and expresses his feelings in a diary that is, in fact, the movie we are watching. The extraordinary skating scenes, filmed by cinematographers Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy Li in a lyrical mixture of Super 8 and 35mm, depict their subjects soaring in space, momentarily free of the earthly troubles of adolescence. The screening will take place at 7 pm at the Letterman Digital Arts Center Premiere Theatre in the Presidio. Tickets are on sale now ($12 SFFS members, $15 general). The screening will be preceded at 6:15 pm by a personal appearance of author Andrew Bailey signing copies of his new book, Cinema Now, a Taschen publication that examines the work and key themes of 60 filmmakers working around world today, from the cream of the crop of young Hollywood to the new wave of Asian mavericks to burgeoning auteurs from Europe and Latin America. Special thanks to IFC Films. [From SFFS publicity] Continue reading “Three Films, Five Days” →