The 65th Cannes Film Festival is currently underway and I thought it would be fun to take a trip down memory lane and share some early photos of the classic film stars and directors who have attended this prestigious event. Cannes is one of the oldest film festivals in existence and undoubtedly the most glamorous. Photographers from around the world converge on the French Riviera every year to snap photos of well-heeled celebrities who are eager to sell themselves and their latest movies to their adoring public.

Just like today, the Cannes Film Festival of yesteryear was attended by high-profile Hollywood couples often more in love with the cameras than one another as well as sexy starlets willing to bare all in order to get noticed and directors engaged in ridiculous publicity stunts for profit. The only things that have really changed in the last 65 years are the hairstyles and the fashions but while browsing though these old photographs it’s easy to become mesmerized by the charismatic faces that stare back at you. As Norma Desmond famously said in SUNSET BLVD. (1950), “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!” Norma may have been talking about silent film stars then but those infamous lines haunted me while I was compiling these images. Of course there’s an element of nostalgia in my opining because these are some of the faces that made me fall in love with the movies and they’re faces that I never get tired of looking at.

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San Francisco is home to many notable film festivals but next month the City by the Bay will play host to a new noteworthy event, The San Francisco Fashion Film Festival. This style-conscious affair takes place April 7 – 8 at the Roxie Theater and it will feature screenings of documentaries, shorts and chic films that contain fabulous costume designs including ZIEGFELD GIRL (1941), BARBARELLA (1968), THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN (1995), THE MATRIX (1999) and MARIE ANTOINETTE (2006).

The San Francisco Fashion Film Festival was the bright idea of three innovate women bloggers who recently gave me the inside scoop on this exciting event. What follows is an insightful Q&A about the festival as well as some discussion about the hurdles they faced putting it together and their hopes for the festival’s future.

Movie Morlocks: Can you tell our readers a little bit about yourselves? How did you all meet and when did you get interested in fashion and film?

Annie: We are Adelle McElveen, Kim Mitchell Stokes & Annie Wilson. All three of us are San Francisco style bloggers, and we met about 3 years ago at different events around town. Between the three of us, Adelle & Kim know the most about contemporary fashion, technology, & trends, while I really love fashion history and classic film.

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SXSW was founded in 1986 as a music forum and later, in 1994, added film and multimedia events to their yearly shindig. Attracting, as it does, artists from all walks of life introduces new elements every year to add to its ever-changing melting pot ethos that is pivotal to both its popularity and vitality. It also translates into a cacophonous tangle of insane traffic interweaving through the milling crowds and pedicabs that populate all the downtown intersections. This year the dates of SXSW are March 9 – 17. These are days on the calendar marked by an acute housing shortage for the throngs of people traveling to Austin to view or participate in this multi-media circus. Having a film pass but no lodging, I decided to drive the 900+ miles on a wing and a prayer, figuring that I could sleep in the car if need be but, preferably, staying with kind souls who will let me stake a tent in their backyard or crash on their floor.  READ MORE

The 12th edition of Film Comment Selects concluded this past week at Lincoln Center, having screened 32 films from all over the cultural map. The stoned dropout to the New York Film Festival’s Ivy League grad, the films chosen by Film Comment magazine’s editorial staff tend towards the spectacular and the underground, and occasionally underground spectaculars. Plucking from the festival scene (Hirokazu Kore-eda’s I Wish), genre titles (Alexander Zeldovich’s Target) and experimental multi-projection performances (J. Hoberman’s Land Passion War of the Dead Christ Worlds), it has something for everyone. That is, if everyone was a creepy cinephile shut-in.

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For my birthday, I treated myself to the 31^st Annual B-Fest, a 24-hour marathon of b-movies held each year in January at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. “B-movie” is a generous distinction for most of the films, some of which are so bad they stupefy. But, fans of B-Fest revel in the ridiculous because attending is a participatory experience in which audience members yell, cheer, and shout a running commentary at the screen. As my friend Al explained, “It’s like Mystery Science Theater 3000 on steroids or cocaine.”

Al, who has attended B-Fest for 14 straight years, is fairly perceptive about its appeal to regulars, noting that audiences are simultaneously in awe and aghast at how bad, cheesy, insipid, or tedious the films are. The worse the film, the more inspired or inventive the commentary is. Also, watching nonstop movies into the wee hours of the morning with like-minded movie lovers inspires a camaraderie that is infectious, an observation made by Spencer, a 14-year B-Fest veteran who has made a tradition of attending.

I was delighted to see that the audience for B-Fest was a mix of males and females, with an age range from teens through seniors. Some come for the old creature features from the 1950s; some come for the classic bad movies, like the perennial Plan 9 from Outer Space; others prefer famous flops. Though Becky, who has attended B-Fest for three years, is a science fiction fan, she really enjoys those legitimate Hollywood movies that turned out to be “train wrecks,” like Cool as Ice, the Vanilla Ice vehicle that showed at least year’s B-Fest.

I managed to stay for about for five features, one short, and the raffle before bailing on B-Fest in the wee hours of the morning. I scribbled a rough diary of my observations and impressions, which I hope captures the spirit, fun, and craziness of B-Fest.

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Yesterday I got an email from IFC that promotes the latest Stephen Dorff film with a quote from the actor himself. The film is called Brake, and it’s about a guy trapped in the cargo compartment of a car. Dorff describes it as “Die Hard in a trunk,” which made me laugh. It reminded me of the beginning to Robert Altman’s The Player when movie pitches are being tossed around with such gems as “It’s like The Gods Must Be Crazy except the coke bottle is an actress.” To which the other person responds: “Right. It’s Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman.” This practice, long a Hollywood cliche within an industry that has has no problems with navel-gazing, has its place. Who among us hasn’t resorted to such cheating short-hand ciphers in order to succinctly convey the spirit of a film when we’re too lazy (or tired) to otherwise suss out the details whilst in a hurry? Here’s my own stab at such cop-outs to describe a few of the films that I favored at Sundance, which wraps up today, followed by brief elaborations.  READ MORE

Last week I offered an overview of the Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF) as a sort-of “taste of the fest.” This week, I will tout the three films that I enjoyed the most so that our movie-loving readers can seek them out in theaters, on cable, or on DVD.

The first film I caught at the festival was an American indie called Thin Ice, which opens in limited release on February 17. I knew nothing about the film, selecting it because it was convenient to my schedule. I consider myself lucky because it turned out to be one of my favorite films of the entire week. Thin Ice tells the story of Mickey Prohaska, played by Greg Kinnear, who is a less-than-honest insurance agent in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Mickey is always looking for a big score via his insurance racket and is willing to lie, scheme, and cheat his small-town customers to land it. At an insurance convention, Mickey hires an additional agent, Bob, played by David Harbour (also in Madonna’s upcoming W./E.), simply because he doesn’t want a rival agency to land him.  Bob introduces Mickey to Gorvy Hauer, a lonely, old man who lives alone in a farmhouse filled with old furniture, knick-knacks, and junk. Mickey visits Gorvy regularly to persuade him to buy insurance he doesn’t really need, but he switches tactics when he discovers that Gorvy owns a rare violin. Mickey decides to steal the violin, replacing it with a worthless fiddle believing that the foolish old man won’t notice. One of the pleasures of this film is Alan Arkin’s performance as Gorvy. Near the end of the film, he will break your heart as his defeated character ruminates on the cold-hearted nature of contemporary society; and yet, there is more to Gorvy than Mickey—or, the viewer—realizes. My advice is to recall all of Arkin’s roles and characters as he skillfully pulls you into Gorvy’s world so that you do not take the character at face value.

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The 23^rd annual Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF) concluded today with its Best of the Fest—the movies voted as audience favorites.  After attending for the second year in a row, I have decided the PSIFF is my favorite film festival because it makes every effort to program the best in foreign-language films. This year the festival screened 188 films from 73 countries, including 40 of the 63 entries for this year’s foreign-language Academy Award. Though its strong suit is foreign narratives, the fest also offers an excellent slate of documentaries from all over the world, a shorts program, and a handful of American independent films. Naturally, some films were better than others, and some spoke to my tastes more than others, but I can honestly say that I did not see a bad film. This year, I caught films from Columbia, Finland, Denmark, South Korea, Jordan, Israel, and Slovakia, among other countries.

It occurred to me after watching nonstop films for a couple of days that one reason I was enjoying these films so much was because many featured interesting and complex women characters. Some of these women were protagonists; others were secondary characters. Some were beautiful and glamorous; others were natural looking, even ordinary. Some were positive role models; others dark and disturbing. It is interesting to compare the women characters in these highly touted films to those in the Hollywood movies from 2011 that are currently in hot contention for awards. It seems the best chance for actresses to land a high-profile role in a Hollywood film is to play a historical figure (The Iron Lady; My Week with Marilyn) or to play extreme characters who deny or defy being women (Albert Knobs; The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). Also, there are so few complex roles that decent performances by well-known actresses in rather ordinary films are winning awards or garnering nominations (The Iron Lady; Young Adult). I recognize that I am generalizing because there are exceptions to this observation regarding the lack of multifaceted female characters in Hollywood films, but wouldn’t it be nice to be able to generalize in the opposite direction.

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I always work better with a deadline. Since the world is ending on December 21st, 2012, I expect to have the most productive movie-going year of my young, super-handsome life. In preparation for these blessed final hours in darkened theaters, I’ve drawn up a list of new releases I wish to see before my anticipated demise, those which I expect would give me the most pleasure in my twilight year. I hope it is also some help for you, dear reader, usefully arranged in descending order of preference.

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