Hope you enjoyed them!

If they didn't play in the box above, you can click the button below to be taken to the right place on YouTube.

The Filmmaker confounds … expectations, while remaining a love letter to San Francisco.

Filmmakers love making films about filmmaking, and the fact that San Francisco filmmaker J.P. Allen has made a new film called The Filmmakersuggests the inward spiral that 2014’s Love and Demons and 2016’s reVISIONS hinted at has possibly resulted in him finally disappearing inside himself. Thankfully, The Filmmaker confounds that and other expectations, while remaining a love letter to San Francisco. Kevin (Allen) is a still photographer who becomes the victim of identity theft, and soon finds himself embroiled in a revenge plot masterminded by the mysterious Las Vegas camgirl Michelle (Ashley Rain Turner).

… who is the filmmaker in The Filmmaker? The answer may surprise you.

The number of fucks Allen gives about feminist film criticism was made clear in reVISIONS — by a character also played by Ashley Rain Turner, no less — so suffice it to say that Allen’s view of gender politics in The Filmmaker is very old-school film noir, and noir is the only thing more sacrosanct than drag in this town, so there’s nothing more to be said about that. Although Allen gets the de rigeur under-the-Bridge Vertigo shot out of the way early on, there’s also a deeper, more welcome cut in the form of an homage to the opening of Coppola’s The Conversation. And at long last, who is the filmmaker in The Filmmaker? The answer may surprise you.

Not rated.
Opens Friday at the Presidio Theatre.

Be there 10/26 to 11/3

The Filmmaker will compete in the feature competition at the Sofia Independent Film Festival in Europe next week, and opens in SF on 11/2.
soindependentfilmfest.com

See it now!

'The Filmmaker' opens in San Francisco on Nov. 2.

In an intriguing coincidence, the latest works by the iconoclastic American independent auteurs Orson Welles and JP Allen open opposite each other in the Bay Area this weekend. One director has written, directed and (with one exception) acted in seven films, all of which he financed himself. The other is Orson Welles.

… American independent auteurs Orson Welles and JP Allen …

Welles hardly needs elucidation, other than to say that he started filming The Other Side of the Wind in 1970 and was never able to finish it before he died in 1985. Film buffs had resigned themselves to the probability that the movie would never exist in a completed state. It does now, thankfully, and opens at the Roxie and debuts on Netflix Nov. 2. However, The Other Side of the Wind is not the film to start with if you’re just discovering Orson Welles. That would be Citizen Kane, or one of his other masterpieces.

… juicily cerebral films …

JP Allen, on the other hand, should be far better known—certainly in San Francisco, where he’s shot all but one of his juicily cerebral films. His recurring theme is the sexual and psychological dynamics that heat and power romantic relationships, but he’s equally passionate about reconfiguring narratives and subverting movie formulas and clichés.

The Filmmaker (opening at the Presidio Theater on Nov. 2), like many of Allen’s films, presents its protagonist and the audience with a mystery. A solitary photographer and sometime video maker (played by Allen) discovers that his apartment’s been broken into and his identity compromised. Starkly alone in the deserted, canyon-like half-block of Stockton south of the Broadway Tunnel, he gets a cellphone call entangling him with a woman half his age (Ashley Rain Turner, giving a raw and brave performance) who’s traced him from Las Vegas.

As is invariably the case in Allen’s work, the agent of the man’s torment holds the key to his evolution (and, just maybe, redemption). And, as is also typical in his films, the man writhes and wrestles to retain control of the situation to the point of absurdity (though not tragedy). What happened in Vegas many years ago, between our now-jaded and faded hero and a beguiling woman he met at a trade show, can’t stay in Vegas—or his lacquered memory—anymore.

… Daniel Teixeira-Gomes’ shimmering cinematography, depicts San Francisco as a mixture of Lonely Avenue and Sin City …

The Filmmaker, which was inspired by rather than adapted from Allen’s 2008 novel of the same name, questions our responsibilities—debts, if you will—to others, and the degree to which we can alter the paths they’re on. Entwined with that altruistic or guilty impulse is the imperative to come to terms with the misunderstandings and desecrations of one’s past. Allen, abetted by Daniel Teixeira-Gomes’ shimmering cinematography, depicts San Francisco as a mixture of Lonely Avenue and Sin City. If you live here, you’re home already.

by Michael Fox