The 14th annual SF Indie Fest celebrates everything cinema and more with Roller Disco and Spinal Tap parties; an anti-Valentine’s Day sing-along; an “Everything is Terrible” found-footage stage show; and a free Super Bowl comedy bash – not to mention over 80 films from every genre known to humankind (and some still uncategorized).
The fun starts Thursday, Feb. 9 and runs through Feb. 23 at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. Here’s a small sample:
Girl Walk // All Day
Roll over Beethoven. Tell Chuck Berry the news. Director Jacob Krupnick is coming to town with a reel that really rocks, a 21st century "Ode to Joy" that will have ‘em wiggling like glow worms and dancing in the aisles like spinning tops.
Girl Walk // All Day is based on a 71-minute mashup by Gregg Gillis (aka “Girl Talk”) entitled “Girl Walk.” The piece is composed of 372 pop-music samples, loops and beats interwoven into a sonic montage for the ages, or at least the next seven generations.
The result: a dizzy dancin’ celebration of life on the streets of New York starring the impossibly talented Anne Marsen, who appears in almost every frame of the film. The 23 year-old’s study of ballet, modern dance, improv and acting is incandescently evident. It is, as they say in a different context, all up there on the screen.
John Doyle, Dai Omiya and swarms of dancers, some incorporated off the street, propel the semblance of plot forward, but that’s not what Girl Walk // All Day is all about. Rather, the story is the universal appeal of music, art and movement – and their potential to revitalize the human spirit.
When Krupnick unleashes his improvisational cavalcade upon the streets of New York, it’s like watching a somnambulant culture unexpectedly punctured by an alternate universe. People are annoyed, amused, defensive – Marsen really is evicted from Yankee Stadium. Others are so afflicted by attention blindness that Marsen and her cohorts are rendered invisible.
Girl Walk // All Day is much more than a long-form video; it is a must-see event that reawakens the joy of being alive.
4:44 Last Day on Earth (see interview with Abel Ferrara and Shanyn Leigh HERE)
What if everybody in the whole web-connected world knew the exact hour, minute and second life on Earth would end?
Director/writer Abel Ferrara casts a restrained pall on this doomsday scenario, focusing on Cisco (Willem Dafoe) and Skye (Shanyn Leigh, Ferarra's real-life girlfriend) during their last 24 hours on Earth, mostly in their New York City apartment.
The couple make love. Cisco visits his brother; he tries to reconcile with his ex-wife via Skype. Skye works on a painting. Night falls. It is the last time they or anyone else will see the stars again. The context of impending doom intensifies every moment, every gesture.
Most everyone seems to have come to a surreal sense of collective acceptance, beyond denial, panic, anger, or depression.
Last Day on Earth is not a special effects movie, and that is a good thing. It also isn’t a scientifically rigorous film, which unnecessarily distracts.
The once preventable but now irreversible damage to the ozone layer supposedly will cause of the instantaneous destruction of the Earth at 4:44 p.m. EST. As a news announcer put it, “Al Gore was right.”
Not to nitpick, but if the world ends with a bang instead of a whimper, it will be due to a huge impact event – like the 2009 asteroid that ripped an Earth-sized hole on the surface of Jupiter – not manufactured bromine and chlorine-containing substances.
Bad Fever
Eddie (Kentucker Audley) is a 20-something woodcutter and aspiring comedian. He lives with will his ailing, taciturn mother (Annette Wright) who hates every girl he’s ever brought home.
At night, Eddie wanders the desolate streets of Salt Lake City by car and on foot, talking into his tape recorder more than to other human beings. According to director/screenwriter Dustin Guy Defa, Audely improvised many of his lines.
Eddie likes to talk, although “rapid mumble” better describes his uniquely fractured form of non-standard English – a river of formal clichés and stale stand-up patter delivered in painfully arrhythmic cadence.
In other words, he sounds like someone whose head got in the way of a wrecking ball.
Eddie meets Irene (Eleonore Hendricks) outside a convenience store. She orders him to buy her cigarettes. When he passively complies, she knows he’s the kind of guy she’s been hunting for. Irene invites him to her abode, an abandoned elementary school classroom.
Eddie is looking for love; Irene is casting the next role for her kinky, unsexual series of amateur videos she shoots and sells to “some guy in Iowa.”
Yoko’s (Allison Baar) entrance at the end provides a reprieve from the film’s unrelentingly bleak, black-and-white decent into loneliness. Or does it?
Bad Fever is a small gem of micro-budget cinema.
Gandu
Gandu was presented at the 8th annual 2010 South Asian Film Festival as an adults-only midnight movie. No one under 21 was allowed entrance, even though San Francisco was the first U.S. city to comercially screen an X-rated film over 40 years ago.
Director Qaushiq “Q” Mukherjee, West Bengal’s answer to Gaspar Noé, has whipped up an experimental concoction of sex, drugs, rap and despair in stunning black-and-white, accentuated by unexpected bursts of color.
Explicit sex and drug scenes kept Gandu (2010) from being screened in India until last summer at the Naya Cinema Festival in Mumbai – but not before the film was initially pulled because festival organizers couldn’t secure a censorship exemption.
Mother Country
Written and directed by Maria Breaux, Mother Country bravely traverses a minefield of race and class issues while sidestepping cliché. She and the film manage to emerge miraculously intact.
Dwight Porter (Thomas Galasso) gets caught up in gang violence in Austin. He escapes the heat by embarking on an unscheduled (and highly unorthodox) road trip to California in search of Miss Dupree (Cindy Pickett), his high school teacher from what seems like another lifetime. He remembers her as one of the few adults who ever made him feel worthy of a place in society.
What happens between Texas and California takes an organic trajectory untainted by focus groups and marketing studies.
Kill List
Ben Wheatly’s oddly-paced concoction of genres won’t please everyone. Kill List starts out as a family drama, turns into a progressively more violent hired-assassin yarn, unspooling into a horrific finale that might have been stitched together from the cutting room floor of Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
Neil Maskell and Michael Smiley’s provide superbly effortless performances as the hit men who may have taken on one assignment too many.
See showtimes, parties and locations for the 14th San Francisco Independent Film Festival HERE.
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