North Beach

Rating:
Summary: A GREAT MOVIE!
Review: I saw this at the Cinequest Film Festival a few years ago and have been waiting for it to come out on DVD. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is either young or young at heart. It's a little rough around the edges, with a lot of language, but if you can handle that it's a great little movie. The DVD is just as good as the film, serving up a variety of entertaining extras, like a hilarious director's commentary that's just as funny and irreverant as the film, a fantastic trailer, and the not-to-be missed "North Beach, the condensed version". A great home video find for any collection!

Rating:
Summary: A MUST HAVE!!
Review: I saw this at the San Francisco Film Festival a while back. A great story about the lifestyle of North Beach with a humorous story. The story takes place the morning after the protagonist cheats on his girlfriend. The protagonist, after doing his daily rounds of visiting local cafes, etc. quickly realizes that there is no such thing as a secret in North Beach. The sound on the DVD is great and the movie has a kick ass soundtrack with SF local bands like the Uninvited and Vinyl.

Rating:
Summary: "Everyone Here Knows Everything"
Review: Imagine a movie about a strange utopian nether-realm in which no one over the age of 35 exists; in which privacy of deed and thought is not an option; in which the greatest threat to social order is one's growth as a human being; in which food has been entirely replaced by coffee and cigarettes. No, it isn't a remake of 1984 or Logan's Run -- it's this movie, this really good comedy about a community in San Francisco called North Beach.

At a glance, it chronicles the misadventures of a guy named Tyler, whose girlfriend Paige puts the screws to him after he messes around with a 19-year-old stripper from New Orleans. It's a well constructed plot, certainly worth the price of the DVD to watch it unfold firsthand, but perhaps more interesting (for the purposes of this review, at least) is everything else this movie is at the same time: a heartfelt tribute to the North Beach community itself, and a heartfelt tribute to that other strange utopian nether-realm: the one between leaving school and embarking on real adulthood.

Any fact-based setting has two potential onscreen personalities: the one synthesized by a team of L.A. location scouts, and the one revealed by people who know and love the place, who understand its real chemistry and know how to capture it -- the good, the bad, and the ugly. The latter has been achieved with such easy humor by director Mortenson and company that within fifteen minutes you feel like you're watching old friends in a place that's somehow very familiar. If you find yourself rolling your eyes in exasperation -- either from Tyler and/or his oddball friends, or from the chronic Bay Area parking menace (a problem finally given the screen time it deserves) -- it is because these characters are flawed the way real friends are flawed, and so is this funky little neighborhood.

You can shrug your shoulders and forgive these flaws so readily, as is true with real friends, because they are portrayed with such honesty and genuine affection. You've seen some of the faces before: "Robbie the Lush" is a haunted overnight courier in a DHL commercial; "Pete the Rock Star" appears in everything from IBM Small Business ads to Doritos ads to HBO's Band of Brothers; Gabrielle Anwar (Scent of a Woman, The Three Musketeers) lends her big-screen clout in a role heralded simply as "The Cameo". This kind of who-are-we-trying-to-fool sensibility belies the confidence and understated skill of the filmmakers and performers alike: it's easy to forget that you're watching a movie, no small feat for a first feature-length effort.

(The camaraderie so evident onscreen carries over behind the scenes as well: director Mortenson and company provide an entertaining commentary track over a few rounds of beer, and finally confirm for audiences everywhere that yes, people do take restroom breaks when they record those things.)

But the real heart of the movie lies in its portrayal of the stasis and claustrophobia that can occur when friends know each other too well, when the routines that carry us through school and the first few years after begin to feel less like freedom and more like prison. At the heart of Tyler's floundering around and f***ing things up is the understanding that he needs to move on to the next step, no matter how scary or unpredictable that can be. It is interesting that, in a movie so intently focused on the ins and outs of the North Beach community, specific mention is made that the stripper Tyler has embraced is from somewhere else; his attempt to escape what North Beach has become to him is misdirected, but he knows escape is necessary. It is painful truth that the solution to Tyler's problem lies in his relationship with Paige all along, and that he doesn't realize it until it may be too late. As Tyler's dialogue with "Veronica the Player" brings to light, his crime isn't necessarily his indiscretion with the stripper; everybody in this group has been in bed with everybody else. His crime lies in the fact that Paige is beyond that kind of casual silliness, and therein lies the path to adulthood that he knows he needs, but has probably lost.

But that's a lot more film-school crap than is really necessary here. The bottom line is, North Beach is a funny movie, well crafted and well acted; it's a great portrait of this interesting place and its offbeat population; let's hope to God this ain't it for Morty and friends, because I sense many more good movies up their sleeves. Do yourself a solid and click that "Add to Cart" button up there.

Rating:
Summary: North Beach-- the never seen MUST SEE
Review: This movie is HI-larious. I have been waiting for a DVD to come out once I heard that it might not get a full national release (I heard it had something to do with the physical film format, not content).

This is a real person's comedy. Excruciatingly funny, mostly because it doesn't try too hard to be so. That and Richard Speight, Jr. (who did a dramatic turn in "Band of Brothers") is brilliant here as (co) director and actor.

For anyone who has lived in an urban setting and understood the idea of 'people in the neighborhood," you'll get it. Also, if you've ever hooked up while drunk and hoped your girlfriend would never find out, yeah-- you'll get it too.

Oddly, this is one of the only modern San Francisco movies I can think of that doesn't feature the gratuitous gay character. But then again, that left me thinking: "They live in SF and don't have any gay friends? Not even the girls?" Then again, we hardly hang out in the same clubs late night, which sort of starts this roller-coaster.

I feel special that I only got to see this by chance at a local film festival. And I feel the film-makers and film-goers have been robbed. This would have been a hit in wide release, as it is so far removed from the lowest-common-denominator romantic-comedy scholck the major studios churn out, and so far above.