I’ve been covering the San Francisco International Film Festival for ten years now for another web site. I’ve screened, reviewed and discussed well over one hundred films – some great, some good, and some real clunkers – and conducted numerous interviews over those ten years. This year’s festival, the 61st, runs April 4 through April…
To Sonoma County film fans — including roughly 100 Santa Rosa Junior College cinema students per semester — there is no movie-going experience quite like the Petaluma Film Alliance’s year-long movie-and-lecture series at Petaluma’s Carole L. Ellis Auditorium. Open to the public as well as to students, taking place every Wednesday evening during school term,…
For years now, a number of notable cable television stations and movie revival houses have marked St. Patrick’s Day by playing the John Wayne-Maureen O’Hara classic “The Quiet Man,” among other shamrock-flavored films. It makes sense. The 65-year-old film does still hold up, dramatically – for its charming small town setting and magnificent fist-fight-brawl at…
There’s a theory known as ‘Biophilia,’ says writer-director-filmmaker Marina Michelson. “It was first put out there in the 1980s, and it basically suggests that human beings possess this innate drive, this deep need or tendency, to want to connect with nature in really intense, intimate ways.” It was during a wedding two-and-a-half years ago, held…
There’s no doubt about it. Whenever Sonoma County residents talk about Alfred Hitchcock, and the extraordinary films he made here, the conversation almost always alights on “The Birds,” the classic shocker Hitchcock filmed in Bodega in 1963. That cinematic flight of horrific fancy is not the only movie Hitch helmed in the area, however. In…
“I like language,” says Amy Adams, addressing the audience at Corte Madera’s Century Cinema on opening night of the 39th annual Mill Valley Film Festival. A second after saying it, the award-winning actress smiles, then laughs lightly, as if suddenly aware that praising language while in the very act of using it, is, if nothing else, a symmetry worth…
“Growing up, I was always interested in ghosts and UFOs, Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, all of that stuff,” says filmmaker Tom Wyrsch, of Petaluma, writer-director of the soon-to-materialize “Haunted Sonoma County.” “But out of all of those things, ghosts always seemed the most possible. I think there’s something about the idea of ghosts,…
