Movies set in San Francisco?

[Nergol]

Here's why this is stupid. If the star of the film isn't either a millionaire or the "pet" of a millionaire, they aren't going to have a residence around Russian Hill or Telegraph Hill. (If you see "The Crookedy Thing" - Lombard Street - as the street your character is walking around on, looking homeward bound, ditto for same reason.)

Not to get political or anything, but the way the economics of the city works, San Francisco is basically a city of the rich, the poor, and the gay. Basically, the city is expensive enough to live in that to live there you have to be at least upper middle-class (rich), be subsidized to live there by Section 8 or other government payments (poor), or have no expensive kids to support (gay).

That's why the city leans so far left. American politics has long had a flavor of "the top and the bottom against the middle" to it. The rich and the poor tend liberal, the middle class conservative; the highly educated and highly uneducated tend liberal, the moderately educated tend conservative, and so on. So set up a city that is, economically speaking, a city of the rich and the poor, and add in reasonably-sized portions of recent immigrants (lean left) and gays (lean left), along with a sprinkling of twentysomethings working at tech startups (young + tech-minded tends to = agnostic + leans left) and you have the perfect storm necessary to make a massively left-leaning city.

As for the thing in the Sunset, well... communities of recent immigrants tend to be insular and watch out for each other, no matter what race they are. Lots of illegal and semi-legal things happen in those communities, relatively unremarked-upon. The One-Hour Photo Nathalie gets her pictures taken at is in Little Saigon in San Jose, and the outside shots of it have at least two of Tully Road's notorious Vietnamese coffee shops in the background. Those got a few visits from the police, but only after some patron's wife found a cell phone video he took of the waitresses dancing on chairs and got pissed off enough to send it to the local city councilwoman with a demand that something get done about it. Before that, they went on quietly and unmolested.

Besides, San Jose is different from San Francisco. No mayor of SF in his right mind politically would go against the city's Chinese community. That's just how it is.

Actually, that's a good point too, when talking about noticing incongruous movement in the city. The Bay Area is kind of unique in that for a tri-city metropolitan area, none of the three cities that make it up look a thing like each other. San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose look totally different from each other on every level, and anyone who has any degree of familiarity with them could tell which one they were in virtually instantly just by looking around them (in fact, I've always said that San Jose actually looked and felt a lot more like LA than San Francisco). That's why the Birdemic thing was so funny - it's not like New York where you might have a shot that was supposed to be in Queens but was actually shot in Brooklyn, but where it's hardly noticeable unless you really knew the city because the two boroughs have basically the same kinds of streets, houses, and architecture. Rod and Nathalie are noticeably, definitely, unmistakably, jarringly in San Francisco one minute and San Jose the next.

Which brings up to the next great Birdemic Bay Area geography challenge. So let's say you're in Half Moon Bay when the Birdemic starts. You can: 1) Drive north to San Francisco, 45 minutes away, where there are great big concrete buildings that are good to hide from birds in, 2) Drive south to San Jose, 45 minutes away, where there are great big concrete buildings that are good to hide from birds in, 3) Drive east to San Mateo, 15 minutes away, or Hayward, 30 minutes away, where there are great big concrete buildings that are good to hide from birds in, or, if you really want to split, Reno, three hours away, which is far away from the angry birds, or 4) Drive aimlessly around Half Moon Bay and Pacifica all day until you run out of gas. Which would you choose? And which did RamRod choose?

And yeah - Johnny's trip home from work. He sure did the the scenic route, didn't he?

[MerryWanna]

Not to get political or anything, but the way the economics of the city works, San Francisco is basically a city of the rich, the poor, and the gay. Basically, the city is expensive enough to live in that to live there you have to be at least upper middle-class (rich), be subsidized to live there by Section 8 or other government payments (poor), or have no expensive kids to support (gay).

Gay - or just non-breeder because one just never had any maternal instinct for anything except felines. Weird thing is through my life here I've fit all three categories. When I was young and first came up here, it was on my upper-middle-class suburban parent's dime - or shall we say silver dollar? Then I supported myself for a while doing floristry (a bloody awful job) then giving that up and doing grey-area work to exploit that youth before it wilted: for three years my life was all phone calls, taxi rides to hotels (even the penthouse of the Westin St. Francis! Now that night's a story!) work that was more like play and lots of hundred dollar bills in my hands - and, unfortunately, Bad Things, which soon caused me to swan-dive into category two. I guess the bisexuality thing puts me in category three.

I know: TMI to the max.  But it's sure been an interesting life...there've been moments I'd never trade for a stable normal life, here or anywhere else...

That's why the city leans so far left. American politics has long had a flavor of "the top and the bottom against the middle" to it. The rich and the poor tend liberal, the middle class conservative; the highly educated and highly uneducated tend liberal, the moderately educated tend conservative, and so on. So set up a city that is, economically speaking, a city of the rich and the poor, and add in reasonably-sized portions of recent immigrants (lean left) and gays (lean left), along with a sprinkling of twentysomethings working at tech startups (young + tech-minded tends to = agnostic + leans left) and you have the perfect storm necessary to make a massively left-leaning city.

The young tech minds are no longer leaning left automatically.  Lots of 'em came from Very Christian Midwest or Southern families, rushed to this City for the access to Silicon Valley and/or the still-kinda-existing "Media Gulch" not far from where I live.  Then they ran to the more conservative neighbourhoods, rented houses together, and this is probably why a lot of my liberal friends are packing off for Portland or Vancouver, since they have clout.  And so do the Asians, who tend to not like Those Dirty Filthy Homeless (or just outdoors without change for a damn bus) Druggies, polluting the streets with their...their non-like-themselvesness...which translates to "getting into trouble" when all they're doing most of the time is loitering about,  trying to figure out where to go to the bathroom. We used to have public toilets, self-cleaning, then these were removed "because someone might use one of them to do drugs in". ///headdesk/// Prohibition, therefore, leads to yet another health problem. And now that we have an Asian mayor, it's going to probably get worse.

I have nothing, NOTHING against Asians.  It's the other way around.  I don't know what to think.  Hippies and racism do not mix.  I just can't think like that. My head explodes, just like Ro-Man in Robot Monster.

As for the thing in the Sunset, well... communities of recent immigrants tend to be insular and watch out for each other, no matter what race they are. Lots of illegal and semi-legal things happen in those communities, relatively unremarked-upon.

San Fran has a Little Saigon too.  And my last apartment before I came here was right in the middle of it.  I'm lily-white, even technically Aryan I guess, since my grandfolks were mostly German. The Vietnamese didn't give me attitude, or shut me out on sight, at all.  For a very short time, I was living in North Beach.  The Italians were friendly as could be.  This Chinese-vs.-counterculture-white thing is weird.  In this building, though, there's a couple of elderly Chinese ladies that smile every time they see me, and talk to me at our monthly house breakfasts, and they know enough about me to know I'm One Of "Those People", but they're as friendly as can be.


I don't think it's a race thing, it's a community thing.

Actually, that's a good point too, when talking about noticing incongruous movement in the city. The Bay Area is kind of unique in that for a tri-city metropolitan area, none of the three cities that make it up look a thing like each other. San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose look totally different from each other on every level, and anyone who has any degree of familiarity with them could tell which one they were in virtually instantly just by looking around them (in fact, I've always said that San Jose actually looked and felt a lot more like LA than San Francisco).

Having grown up in LA - the suburban north part of it, at any rate, but I saw plenty of LA itself visiting aunts, grandparents and friends of my folks - and later on, having spent a few months between living situations staying with a friend who was married to the owner of a plant nursery in San Jose, on Evergreen Street or aroundabouts...I completely agree.  I used to call it "LA without that all-important ocean".  Sacramento's even worse.

That's why the Birdemic thing was so funny - it's not like New York where you might have a shot that was supposed to be in Queens but was actually shot in Brooklyn, but where it's hardly noticeable unless you really knew the city because the two boroughs have basically the same kinds of streets, houses, and architecture. Rod and Nathalie are noticeably, definitely, unmistakably, jarringly in San Francisco one minute and San Jose the next.

I figured out the big secret! The secret to their unswaying love for one another even though Rod is such a douche-nozzle. THEY BOTH SHARE AN "AUTO"-EROTIC FETISH! (There is, of course, such a thing. Good ol' Rule 34.  I wonder what the first 33 were?) Anyway, they somehow discover, off camera, the amazing coincidence, and immediately dive into consummation.

So...They dig sex in cars. Therefore, when they go on dates, it is the driving around that IS the date, and the dancing and food are just intermissions.  When Nat is dropped off in her San FriscJose apartment, and says she's "not that kind of girl" she really means "Rod, I find sex indoors really boring".

So why did they stop at that cheap motel to schlang one another? It's just because they'd needed to get showers, since by then, their bodies would've been covered with Nacho crumbs, cola spills, the odor of "Eu d' Little Tree" and other things as gross as the sheets of that bed.  More proof of my theory: their passion in bed was pretty damned muted, and by this I don't just mean the Bad Sound Guy cutting out all the bass and treble of their vocalisations.

Future prediction: When they get married, the wedding pianist will play a sweet, horrendous rendition of a certain Gary Numan number which is, of course, "their song" - and everyone in attendance will wonder how she managed to get pregnant twice and wait about 6 years before bothering to wed. When Nathalie explains about the eagles and the sudden decision to adopt the kids, no-one will believe her since the Birdemic only seemed to happen to a few folks on the highway betwixt Frisco and San Jose.

And when the birds flew off, they headed north, and became prey for polar bears.  Such as seals.

Which brings up to the next great Birdemic Bay Area geography challenge. So let's say you're in Half Moon Bay when the Birdemic starts. You can: 1) Drive north to San Francisco, 45 minutes away, where there are great big concrete buildings that are good to hide from birds in, 2) Drive south to San Jose, 45 minutes away, where there are great big concrete buildings that are good to hide from birds in, 3) Drive east to San Mateo, 15 minutes away, or Hayward, 30 minutes away, where there are great big concrete buildings that are good to hide from birds in, or, if you really want to split, Reno, three hours away, which is far away from the angry birds, or 4) Drive aimlessly around Half Moon Bay and Pacifica all day until you run out of gas. Which would you choose? And which did RamRod choose?

What his penis chose...along with its "partner":  To stay...IN CARS...IN CARS.

And yeah - Johnny's trip home from work. He sure did the the scenic route, didn't he?

Well, if you can call the trip between San Francisco and LA scenic.  I'm fairly familiar with the non-scenicness of Bakersfield, and all points north until...you turn left around Truckee and drive for another hour and start seeing water. Yuck.

See, "That Room" did not even exist in Frisco.  Even the building was in LA. Lisa seems like she's an "LA Woman" herself, actually.

Stupid, stupid movie.  People throw spoons at its showing because they've all had to shoot heroin to deal with it, and they're just chucking their paraphernalia after they're done with it.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

Big concrete buildings for protection?  From birds that have become dive bombers and acid sprayers?  I don't think so...  Although the dive bombing, exploding, and acid spraying were the "power glove" of the movie, our heroes would have been toast if the birds had used those abilities during their attacks on the van.

[Tripe]

If you're not doing anything tomorrow The Castro Theatre has a double feature of Zodiac and The Game, so you can watch two SF set movies in a nice old theatre.

[Relaxing Dragon]

If you're not doing anything tomorrow The Castro Theatre has a double feature of Zodiac and The Game, so you can watch two SF set movies in a nice old theatre.

The Castro is my favorite movie theater out there, and this double feature is one that I am legitimately sad I'm missing out on (what with the 6,000 mile difference and all). I can't wait to get back to this place in January.

And yeah, that feature is pretty much San Francisco in a nutshell (as well as Fincher's best and Fincher's most underappreciated). Can't go wrong.

[MerryWanna]

If you're not doing anything tomorrow The Castro Theatre has a double feature of Zodiac and The Game, so you can watch two SF set movies in a nice old theatre.

I love the Castro, particularly because of my singularly wonderful, possibly personally-involved viewing of Cinematic Titanic's showing of Rattlers there in 2011. It was particularly special even AFTER considering it was possibly my heartrending letter to the team in 2009 which may have influenced their choice of movie - I didn't have the guts, or the politesse, to ask, when I was getting my postcard signed, but I did get a smile from Joel when I explained who I was...and the Rattlers show was a tack-on that they didn't do at every show, but did do in their SF one.

I almost missed it. I had tried to pre-order my ticket, but the order got loused up by some stupid detail and so at the last minute I found myself ticketless.  I shrugged and swore and then swore louder, but something inside me seemed to electrically communicate DON'T STAY HOME RUN TO CASTRO NOW DON'T WASTE A SECOND JUST MOVE!

It was 10 minutes before nine PM.  I was pretty far away from Castro and Market, here on Mission and 7th Street, but I don't ignore signals like this.  I grabbed my bag with 40$ in cash and limped as fast as I could for the Muni Metro, a sort of mini-subway that pokes aboveground in the outer City but runs under the street but over the BART train tunnels downtown. I jumped the fence, taking no time to dicker with the fare machine, staggered down the stairs, and saw a train that ran Castroward pulling right up the moment my feet hit the floor of the station.  That bus whizzed me to the corner in about 4 minutes, dropped me off, then I flew across the street up to the box office and, dizzy and out of breath, managed to "rattle" off my problem to the ticket-fellow, and he said "Well, it's sold out, but give me your forty bucks and go on in."

The show started the very second I entered the theater. Had the Metro been one minute too slow, he would have already closed the booth.  Had I hesitated one minute after the 'signal', same story.  But I was meant to see it, and I did, and got to see one of my favourite bad snake movies riffed by my favourite riffers, live. And meet the whole crew after it, which was awesome.  See, MST3K was something I discovered kind of late, but just when I needed it. I watched it over and over while recovering from the 'breakdown after the bad breakup', and it made me stop having nightmares, and be able to sleep, and laugh, and was my first step towards sanity.  That was something I'd been really thankful for.  I guess this may have really been appreciated.

I watched Zodiac already, for Halloween. Interesting, but now I want to know what REALLY happened, since apparently, this was partially fictional.

[MerryWanna]

Last night, my foray into Frisco Filmistry continued with the famous 48 Hours, so I got to finally see what Nick Nolte was supposed to be like when they called him the "sexiest man in America". And naturally, with the Nick Nolte running RiffTrax joke, that probably made it seem even funnier, where it wouldn't have originally. And I saw Eddie Murphy, too, before his career as a comedian - I guess this was one of the first movies to make him famous. I feel like I'm the only person who never saw this movie until just last night, that everyone else in the USA had seen it in the eighties or later on cable or VHS.  But in case this is not so:

We have a cop (Nolte) with a perpetual attitude problem and a flask he perpetually swigs from even while driving, and he makes a deal with a convict (Murphy) that if this jailbird can help him catch a particularly difficult crook, he can have some time shaved off his sentence...or something: this was never really made clear.

But what is clear is the Department isn't happy with the arrangement, so they've given the pair only two days to pull it off. And as a pair, they are not exactly friendly to one another - at first.  Lots of N-bombs and fistfights and other face-punch stuff quickly ensue - but coincidentally, this same crook happens to have stolen a bunch of money from the convict, so he has Other Motives for catching him. And it turns out Nolte's character decides he wants the money himself, and since it be ill gotten gains, he'd have no trouble stealing it...so each is trying to "help" the other, but in as convoluted a way as possible. The whole thing came off like a parody of Streets of San Francisco, only with all that 'fuck off' cop attitude being so ridiculously caricatured, it came off as the sort of comedy that's hard to gauge the intentionality of.  Would it have seemed like that when released? I dare not even hazard a guess.

Just like they do in Streets, the car chases are impossibly twanging from place to place as if there'd been edited-out scenes of the baby blue Convertible Caddy hover-car flying overhead before it would've then landed somewhere blocks and blocks away, or on the other side of the whole city, even.  And lots of the scenes took place in areas that were supposed to be dingy and run-down, but since it's some sort of cinematic LAW that car-chases and cop action in San Fran movies MUST have at least one or more hill-leaping, wheels-off-the-asphalt roller coaster rides down Russian Hill, the sort of apartments that would normally be found in the Tenderloin show up as if existing around that area...and to a resident, this looked just as ridiculous as it always does. 

I have absolutely no clue what EDTv is about.  I think that one shall be hauled up onto the 'Max Invicta Theatre' spool wheel next. Not sure when 'next' will be. They're gonna be messing with the damn power at odd moments all day today, meaning lots more than the usual unexpected 'screen-go-blankety' experiences, and the heat is even worse than yesterday. I'm tired, and just want to sleep, but they're making too much noise. If I can't pay attention to a movie I don't want to watch it until I can. If that proves unwatchable (which probably won't considering all the recommendations) or I end up feeling like a double-dip, I'll try something older - possibly Barbary Coast or The House on Telegraph Hill.

[mrbasehart]

I like EDTV.  It got kind of overlooked by The Truman Show which has a vaguely similar premise, but it's actually more prescient than that film about Reality TV.