Supplemental Material: San Francisco Flicks
Tuesday, October 12th, 2004 at 10:14 pm
While I’m posting, I might as well add a List of Works Consulted to the San Francisco report. The following films were highly useful in gathering supplemental information… Dark Passage (1947) with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The first half of the movie is a little show, and is shot from a weird first-person perspective — a device that needed to be employed because midway through the film Bogey gets radical plastic surgery to escape the law. When the wraps come off he looks exactly like Humphrey Bogart. There are some nice 1940s views of the city in the film, and the obligitory “throw someone from a high place” shot. This time it’s the Golden Gate bridge overlook. Rating: 7… Bullitt (1968) features Steve McQueen as the original no-rules cop. The chase scenes on urban San Francisco hills are crazy. Much of the film is silent, or at least dialogue free. It is all very stylish too. Rating: 8… Dirty Harry (1972) is the other legendary San Francisco action flick, and clearly borrows a lot from Bullitt. San Francisco is used very well in the film - to the point where it feels like one of the characters. Rating: 9… Live Nude Girls Unite! (2000) is a documentary about a SF peep show’s struggle to become unionized. It provides an interesting glimpse at the relationship between San Francisco’s bohemian past (and present), exploitation, and progressive politics. Rating: 7… Vertigo is the other required SF film, but you don’t need me to tell you about it’s creepiness and falling from high places-ness. Rating: 9.
Categories: the cinematical, the geographical
February 14th, 2005 at 9:26 am
[...] across ice floes up against that car chase on San Francisco hills in Steve McQueen’s Bullitt as one of the greatest of all time. Related: Libby Rosof was there, too This ent [...]
May 20th, 2005 at 6:06 pm
[...] ), and the gulf between modern life and the physical, natural world we overlook. Related: San Francisco Movies
This entry was po [...]
March 29th, 2006 at 2:12 pm
[...] The film is gorgeous from start to finish, alternating between blue and white arctic landscapes and orange-black, fire-lit interior and night scenes. The plot line is essentially a classical heroic epic with brothers, lovers, rivals, elders, love, violence, murder, rape, cheating, good and evil, etc. The richness of the tale illustrates just how far mainstream cinema has gotten from the basics of storytelling. You don’t need me to tell you that most of the films screening at your mutliplex are all visual candy with nothing human to hang on to. There are few contrivances in Atanarjurat, unless you consider violence, static cameras, removed locales and props to be contrivances. Much of the action is everyday and mundane (at least for the Inuit). Tearing apart and eating meat is a recurring image - which serves both as an illustration of the difficulty of survival and a nice mirror for the human-on-human brutality in the film. And finally, I’ll put the chase scene across ice floes up against that car chase on San Francisco hills in Steve McQueen’s Bullitt as one of the greatest of all time. [...]