The trailer for this movie (which is in itself a wonder) set up some expectations for me, and they were met: it's a melancholy film about a black man feeling pushed away from the city he loves. But the movie is so much something more that I'm still reflecting on it three days after viewing. The film is gentle and expansive, anything but divisive or self-pitying: a celebration of the unique, oddball, all-embracing quirkiness that San Francisco inspires and cultivates. It's just as much about a friendship between black men that endures because of San Francisco's peculiarly protective cover. I came away moved by the friendship story - the kind of friendship that the film itself suggests changes lives and can survive gentrification.
The trailer promises visual beauty and the film delivers, coming as close as a movie can to diagramming the cool, foggy spell San Francisco can cast - but the images on the screen are there to both break a heart and to inspire hope.
And man, are these images beautiful! This movie is a natural addition to the ranks of "Vertigo," "Bullitt," "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and "Tales of the City" - movies that lean on SF as more than a backdrop, but indeed as a co-star. It all works to underscore why the hero (Jimmie Fails, playing himself) is so compulsively distracted by, even focused on, his unsettled business with his hometown. Set to a dreamy score by Emile Mosseri and Michael Marshall's cover of "If You're Going to San Francisco," there are moments in the movie that well up and stir; that are flat out unforgettable.
The trailer promises visual beauty and the film delivers, coming as close as a movie can to diagramming the cool, foggy spell San Francisco can cast - but the images on the screen are there to both break a heart and to inspire hope.
And man, are these images beautiful! This movie is a natural addition to the ranks of "Vertigo," "Bullitt," "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and "Tales of the City" - movies that lean on SF as more than a backdrop, but indeed as a co-star. It all works to underscore why the hero (Jimmie Fails, playing himself) is so compulsively distracted by, even focused on, his unsettled business with his hometown. Set to a dreamy score by Emile Mosseri and Michael Marshall's cover of "If You're Going to San Francisco," there are moments in the movie that well up and stir; that are flat out unforgettable.