Nothing else I saw at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival was as vividly out of its mind as the improbable sight of actor Robert Longstreet roaring across the neon-lit night in Shenzhen, China, rendered absurd in the Toni Erdmann-like drag of a white wig and dental prosthetics. The busy Texas character actor is part of the eccentric circus called Ghostbox Cowboy, which takes a satirical harpoon to the American Dream, parading its deflated form before the funhouse mirror of 21st century China. The writer-director-cinematographer John Maringouin (Big River Man) lathers the frame in a visual texture that captures the psychic […]
by Steve Dollar on May 7, 2018Oakland’s Grand Lake Theatre is a 1926 Art Deco show palace that first hosted vaudeville shows and silent movie screenings accompanied by the bass-note oscillations of a Wurlitzer Hope Jones Unit-Orchestra Pipe Organ. The classic venue is symbolic of its city, which made it the ideal spot for the Bay Area premiere of a the debut feature by another Oakland icon: activist, musician and now writer-director Boots Riley, who came of age as a moviegoer at the venue. “I saw Star Wars here,” he told an audience that packed the house during the recent San Francisco International Film Festival, where the […]
by Steve Dollar on May 1, 2018Each year, the Points North Institute magnetizes the fog-kissed landscape of coastal Maine to lure the best and brightest of the non-fiction universe to the towns of Camden, Rockport and Rockland. The Camden International Film Festival offers an immersive overlay of screenings, panels, workshops, virtual reality installations, parties and intensive personal encounters that elevate the proceedings far above the standard festival formula of films and frolic. Exhibit A: What other festival turns a pitch session into a kind of centerpiece presentation? Staged under the banner of the Points North Institute, the festival’s umbrella organization, the program invites a group of […]
by Steve Dollar on Oct 6, 2017