The Best Thing About ‘Up in the Air’ Was San Francisco in the Title Sequence
An effective title sequence can give a film a lot of good will in the mind of the viewer while the filmmaker tries to establish what's necessary to draw folks in. If there was an Oscar category for Best Title Sequence (it has been suggested, and was rejected in 1999), "Up in the Air" would have gotten a vote from me, were I a voting member.
And not just because it features San Francisco very prominently. (You may recall that there are a total of 3 shots of San Francisco from the air in this sequence - watch it here.) More after the jump...
Possibly the Best Use of San Francisco in a Film, Ever
Sure, we've got Bullitt, Dirty Harry, Streets of San Francisco, and Trauma. But hot damn, if this isn't the awesomest use of a San Francisco setting for a film sequence I've seen yet...
It's from the 1958 noir, The Lineup, and I challenge you to watch to the end of this 9-minute collection of clips. I promise you, if you haven't seen it before, the reward is tremendous.
Not only do you get to see the outside and inside of the Sutro Baths just 8 years before they burned down during demolition, but what's happening in these shots is downright fascinating. I won't spoil it except to say it involves one terribly sketchy Eli Wallach, a mysterious dude in a wheelchair, a cop, a blimp, and nuns.
Oh, and a climactic act of violence that has to be seen to be believed.
Part of me now wants to see the whole movie
Sutro Baths fire, 1966. Photo Copyright Brad Schram
(Video Spotted @)
“Playland at the Beach” Documentary Premier
This now-extinct amusement park at Ocean Beach was established in the 1880s and dismantled in 1972. It has a rich, weird history. Rick Prelinger unveiled some great amateur footage in his latest Lost Landscapes screening in December.
On March 16th, the Balboa Theater will premier a full-length documentary about the park by Tom Wyrsch.
Gone now for more than 3 decades, it remains one of the city’s lost treasures. Go back in time to see Laffing Sal, the Fun House, the Carousel, the Big Dipper, the Diving Bell, Dark Mystery, Limbo, Fun-tier Town, and much, much more, all through the eyes of the people that were there. The first and only documentary ever made about Playland.
(Spotted @SF_Explorers)
When She Had a Face
I really dig this close-up shot of the purple elven diva we linked to here. And I love seeing how she used to look (2007) before HATERS uglified her.
(Spotted @)
Heshy Fried is Sadly Not Gay
The Manhattan-based comic ventured into the Castro District (he even got off of his bicycle!) and, in the midst of his many observations about the diversity and wonder of queer taxonomy, worried that he wasn't good enough to be gay:
I felt like I was in Mea Shearim in Israel, where I would walk and just stare at all the people as if it were the first time I was seeing their type. In Castro, I did the same thing because everyone seemed to become super exotic and interesting...
I saw a butch lesbian with a green Mohawk wearing a leather vest. I saw a man with a handlebar mustache holding hands with a guy in a kilt. I saw a skinny little guy who walked like a girl and I wondered if he ever had trouble maintaining that act, or was it even an act? I noticed a guy that could have been a chabad Rabbi, had he not been wearing baggy jeans and a t-shirt. I saw a lot of men with facial hair. Though, wait, in retrospect, maybe they weren’t even males...
No one gave me a second glance and I began to think that I was not good looking enough for these men. Maybe they could tell I was straight — even though I was wearing a dirty yellow shirt and spandex pants.
What do you think, readers? Is Heshy completely out of the running, or does he still have a shot? Here's some video to help you decide:
Mariposaaah!!!
The artist Wayne Thiebaud is known for his paintings of "cakes, pastries...and toilets," but this 1977 interpretation of a mythical intersection at 24th Street and Mariposa, submitted by friend o' the blog Jacki, is our favorite - for obvious reasons.
Thiebaud once said:
"I was playing around with the abstract notions of edge - I was fascinated, living in San Francisco, by the way different streets just came in and then just vanished. So I sat out on a street corner and began to paint them." It was the "sense of edges appearing, things swooping around their own edges that I loved," he recounted (Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2000, p. 58).
(via Goldenfiddlr)
Now Online: Lost Landscapes of San Francisco 4
In case you missed Rick Prelinger's excellent screening of mostly amateur-shot archival footage back in December, Fora.tv has put it online in its entirety. Watch it:
To navigate a list of chapters, go to the Fora.tv site.
The Often-Missed Beauty of Graffiti Tags
Even folks who think of themselves as open-minded urbanoids who can appreciate a good "mural" - unlike these wankers - will often mutter about tags as being mere marking of territory - simple, unimaginative, unskilled fuck-you-ism.
The above visualization of the motion of tagging, however, seems to challenge this notion. Anyone who's ever paid attention to the kids on Muni as they swipe their markers and fill the bus with dizzying fumes has had a chance to see this, on some level. And yet most cannot get past the criminality (or the smell).
Now they can. (There is, of course, an iPhone app.)
Ed Hardy Went to the SF Art Institute?
Ouch.
The SF Examiner pinned him down recently and asked him about his art:
If it makes you think — takes you outside yourself and opens yourself to the mystery of life — that’s great.
And if it single-handedly empowers jagoffs all around the world to all-new heights of spike-haired scrotitude? That's great, too, I guess!
Maybe I should have gone easier on the SF Weekly's current cover story. Any city worth its salt would have been able to prevent such a gigantic train wreck of pop culture.
Views of the Rain
I'm usually not a fan of paintings that take their compositions from photographs in an obvious way, but these impressionistic rainy San Francisco scenes by local artist Jeremy Mann just feel right this weekend.
Tree Angel
Reader Anna Spektor found this by accident at a private residence at Shrader and Belgrave. She says:
the house name is "Ursa Minor Dacha", which is pretty cool in itself, but they also have this sculpture carved out of a dead tree.
Thanks, Anna!
Ticket Giveaway Winning Images
Erik Wilson, known as Generik11 on Flickr
Igor Uriarte, known as 20R3Mun on Flickr
They each get a ticket to Rick Prelinger's Lost Landscapes of San Francisco.
Thanks to everyone who submitted images and helped to get our Flickr pool started with a bang.
If you haven't bought your ticket to the screening yet, hurry up, because they're going fast.
Tokyo Pop Culture Exhibit Coming to Japantown
New People's Superfrog gallery in Japantown will host an exhibit, "Tokyo Creators Market," that includes cut out artist Mikito Ozeki. Check him out using his Exacto, free-hand, to make pieces out of vinyl records:
Follow Us via…
Recent Posts
- Name That Spot
- The Best Thing About ‘Up in the Air’ Was San Francisco in the Title Sequence
- Possibly the Best Use of San Francisco in a Film, Ever
- Snow on Mission Street!
- Albion Brewery & Castle
- Pony Express Turns 150
- Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-27
- Name That Spot
- Curbside Brick-Oven Pizza
- Tipped & Smashed Streetcar, circa 1920
- Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-20
- “Playland at the Beach” Documentary Premier
- Dear MUNI, Maybe Switch Back to the Roman Alphabet Now?
- San Francisco Girls on Bikes
- Google Teases SF With Promise of Fiber Internet Roll-out
Most Commented
- Love It or Leave It, SF Weekly 31 comment(s)
- Fantastic 1958 Film Footage of San Francisco 21 comment(s)
- San Francisco Opium Den Photos circa 1889 9 comment(s)
- Name That Spot 9 comment(s)
- Snow on Mission Street! 9 comment(s)
- Who Is This Bearded Legend? 8 comment(s)
- Google Street View Blackout 6 comment(s)
- Submitted: Pet Cemetery in the Presidio 6 comment(s)
- The New Beauty Bar 6 comment(s)
- Name That Spot 5 comment(s)
Recent Comments
- Jeff Diehl on The Best Thing About ‘Up in the Air’ Was San Francisco in the Title Sequence
- CK on The Best Thing About ‘Up in the Air’ Was San Francisco in the Title Sequence
- theCara on Name That Spot
- Jeff Diehl on Name That Spot
- theCara on Name That Spot
Archives
Categories
- Art
- Booze
- Creeks
- Drugs
- Events
- History
- I Love SF
- Infiltrations
- Just Photos
- Maps
- Mass Transit
- Name That Spot
- Not San Francisco
- Parks
- Politics
- Quake
- Spots Explored
- Tech
- The Mission
- Uncategorized
- Urban Wildlife
- Video
- Visitors
- Watershed
Check These: Blogs
- 10 Zen Monkeys
- Burrito Justice
- Eye on Blogs
- Golden Gate Beer Blog
- Laughing Squid
- Mission Mission
- Muni Diaries
- Olde Nasty
- Sexpigeon
- SF Sewers
- Sunnyside Herald
- Tenderblog
- Wolf! Not Wolf
Check These: Other Sites
- CounterPULSE
- David Rumsey Historical Maps
- FoundSF
- H Plus
- I Live Here
- Nature in the City
- ParkScan
- Secret San Francisco
- SF City Guides
- SFPD Scanner
Twitter Feed
- [pic] Name That Spot. http://bit.ly/a5pQUi 22 hrs ago
- and the Oscar for Best Title Sequence goes to... http://bit.ly/bATbpD 1 day ago
- [vid] San Francisco Soapbox Derby, 1975. http://bit.ly/dD0Utl @swissmiss 2 days ago
- [vid] best-ever use of San Francisco in a film? http://bit.ly/dCIkiE 2 days ago
- [pic] it snowed on Mission Street just now. http://bit.ly/cwL8hS 3 days ago
- More updates...
