Andy Lau, Jet Li, and Takeshi Kaneshiro in The Warlords If you enjoyed the balletic elegance of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or the epic scale and outrageous haute couture of Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower, you might still enjoy director Peter Chan’s The Warlords, a Chinese historical drama from 2007 only […]
Movies
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Thousand Oaks Theatre to reopen with new focus
By Jane Tierney Thousand Oaks Theatre on Solano Avenue has changed hands, and current owner Metropolitan has been replaced by a partnership that also runs Serra Theaters in Milpitas which specializes in ethnic, particularly Bollywood movies. The transfer took place on March 30. The theater has been dark since Sunday and there has been no announcement on when it will […]
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Big Screen Berkeley: (Almost) locally grown produce
Ruth Gordon and Bud Cort in Harold and Maude This is the second post in an occasional series by John Seal on movies made in Berkeley. Read the first, on Hall Bartlett’s Changes, here. I’ve read for years that Harold and Maude was partly shot in Our Town. It’s demonstrably true that director Hal Ashby’s […]
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Will “American Idiot”, the musical, become a movie?
Just days before American Idiot, the musical based on the Green Day album of the same name, makes its Broadway debut, rumors are swirling that Tom Hanks wants to turn it into a film. Hanks already has plenty of experience turning musicals into mega-hits. Playtone, his production company, turned ABBA’s Mamma Mia into a movie […]
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Big Screen Berkeley: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Noomi Rapace in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo First things first: the new Swedish thriller, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, has been re-titled for American consumption, and done so in clumsy but understandable fashion. Based on a novel by Stieg Larsson entitled Män som hatar kvinnor — Men who Hate Women — the […]
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Big Screen Berkeley: Up close in North Korea
On rare occasions, the North Korean government has granted European filmmakers permission to film inside The Hermit Kingdom, and the results are almost always fascinating. In Austria’s Hana, dul, sed, a new documentary screening at Pacific Film Archive this coming Thursday at 7:00 pm as part of the ongoing San Francisco International Asian American Film […]
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‘The Art of the Steal’ has it all, or just about
Money, power, race, a mansion stuffed with treasure, a city plagued by scandal — about all that’s missing from “The Art of the Steal”, a hard-hitting documentary about a high-cultural brawl, is a hot woman with a warm gun… So begins Manohla Dargis’s New York Times review of The Art of the Steal which is showing […]
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Big Screen Berkeley: In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee
Deann Borshay in 1966 The 28th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival gets under way this Thursday, March 11, with a gala opening at the Castro Theatre. Though the focus of this year’s festival is on Filipino cinema, it also features an impressive selection of films from other Asian countries, while the Asian diaspora […]
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Big Screen Berkeley: Pick of the flicks
Maria Heiskanen in Everlasting Moments If you’re in the mood for an old-fashioned drama bereft of flashy gimmicks and nausea-inducing shaky-cam, you may want to plan on spending the evening of Thursday March 4 at Pacific Film Archive. The Archive will be screening director Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments, a Scandinavian co-production with primary funding supplied […]
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Top honor for Rita Moreno
Berkeley’s own Rita Moreno yesterday received the nation’s top cultural honor, the National Medal of Arts. President Obama presented the award to the star of stage and screen after spending the day in healthcare lock-down mode. Moreno is the only Latina actress to win an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony for her dance and acting […]
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Now showing: Berkeley Oscar nominee
A friend of Berkeleyside writes in to lament that she tried to go to the Shattuck screenings of Oscar-nominated The Most Dangerous Man in America last weekend but it was sold out. Our film writer, John Seal, pointed our readers to it last week. But don’t despair, it’s running all week at the Landmark Shattuck. […]
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Big Screen Berkeley: Locally grown produce
Filmmaking has a long, rich history in the East Bay, extending from the World War I-era silent comedies produced at the Essanay-West Studio in Niles (now incorporated in Fremont) to the present-day animated blockbusters created by Emeryville’s Pixar Studios. Despite the best efforts of the Wayans Brothers, however, Oakland has never had its own film […]