Volume 42 [2007–08]

“Why not do something really special?”

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

DIY fever is raging right now, racing across bridges like a maddening epidemic here in the Bay. It’s so damn thick that I can feel it leeching onto the back of my throat and sticking there like the unpleasant stench of some urine-soaked thrash pad where 20-odd squatters, each with a dog, are hiding out. But times are tough, as the Bay Area underground music community discovered earlier this month when 21 Grand, the Oakland grassroots platform for experimental art and music, shuttered its doors. It was a shocking blow — proving, after the closures of Mission Records and Balazo 18 Art Gallery before it, that the outlook continues to be challenging when it comes to maintaining an all-ages performance space without the unfriendly rap on the window.

The members of Didimao — three San Francisco transplants from different parts of the globe — make up a minute fraction of those mourning the perhaps temporary loss of the East Bay arts hub. In fact, they seemed somewhat reluctant to talk about their two-year-old project, instead filling in the spaces left by my questions by glorifying the old Mission punk scene or changing the subject and plugging away at their favorite local band at the moment.

During our two-hour conversation at the Inner Richmond ice cream shop where bassist Matt Chandler works, the trio continuously stressed the impact outfits such as Dory Tourette and the Skirt Heads, Curse of the Birthmark, and TSA have had on Didimao. Guitarist-vocalist Sergey Yashenko must have name-dropped Stripmall Seizures — a group Chandler plays with — at least 15 times and at one point even proclaimed that the Seizures are the best band in the country.

As our discussion unfolded, however, at least one thing became pretty clear: Didimao simply aspire to share their music, which works an unconventional vein similar to that of their predecessors yet feels out of touch with the current Bay Area music scene. "Scenes get so specialized in this city. If you go to a noise show, it’ll be strictly noise. If you go to a free jazz show, it’s only free jazz," Chandler said. "There’s so much shit going on that it almost acts against itself. I come from a small town in Indiana, and all the people who make noise or who are in a weird rock band are forced to hang out together and influence each other. Here it seems like people who are into noise are into nothing else. And they’re fascist about it."

Noise — at maximum abrasiveness and volume — nonetheless happens to be the key ingredient in Didimao’s repertoire. On its self-titled debut on the Cococonk label, the group heavily recalls the Butthole Surfers at their most acid damaged, mixing cow-punk riffs with improvised moments of dark, tripped-out electronics and pummeling tumult. Yashenko’s guitar buzz-saws harshly with loose, Middle Eastern–inspired arrangements and feedbacked clatter, while his buried Slavic yodel sounds as animalistic as a howling dog. Chandler musters hasty, fuzz-prone bass lines to match the breakneck tempos of drummer Miguel Serra, and the two of them fluctuate from slam-dance explosiveness to free-rock noodlings to western rhythms and back again.

Serra clued me in that Didimao’s songwriting process is informed by both their limitations and how they’d like to sound. "I feel like a lot of our songs right now are dictated by what we don’t want to sound like as much as what we do want to sound like," he explained. "None of us are virtuosos by any means, so it’s kind of hard to have an idea of what you want to sound like and just pull it off.

"We come up with something and try and make it as acceptable to our standards as possible," Serra continued. "Recently, we’ve really wanted to be kickass, so on a lot of our new songs we’re, like, ‘How do we make this song kick more ass?’<0x2009>"

In addition to all of the ass kicking in the recording studio, Didimao have one other goal they would like to tackle in 2008, an ambition Yashenko returned to repeatedly throughout our chat.

"In the future, what we really want to be doing is playing mainly all-ages shows outdoors for free, because we all have jobs and don’t really need the money," he said. "In the end you probably end up doing all kinds of different shit, but after doing it so many times you want the shows to be this special event. So why not do something really special, you know? Like start doing shows in Ocean Beach at 3 a.m." *

DIDIMAO

With Trainwreck Riders, Stripmall Seizures, Tinkture, and People Eaters

Fri/4, 8 p.m., $6

924 Gilman Street Project

924 Gilman, Berk.

(510) 525-9926

www.924gilman.org

There will be cocktails

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It’s a premiere night at the new Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, and publicists, requisite reporters, and lobby loiterers are looking for Robert Redford. After driving into the city from a stay in Carmel, he’s here — at least until he disappears down a hall or around a corner. While available, he sings the praises of Emile de Antonio (soon to get a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) but says he isn’t privy to odd rumors that — while some crucial and truly independent SF film spaces are struggling — one of the Sundance’s upscale theaters might be devoted to local and experimental film.

SFBG What connections will there be between the Sundance Cinemas and the large number of film festivals that happen in the Bay Area? For example, the American Indian Film Festival happens in San Francisco every fall, and I was wondering if it might take place here.

ROBERT REDFORD I can’t answer that — I would love it if it could, both from a personal standpoint and from a political standpoint in working to free Leonard Peltier, which hasn’t happened yet, which is a crime. I think the fact that [Bill] Clinton didn’t pardon him and yet pardoned Mark Rich was a complete failure on his part.

Two festivals that I can guarantee we’ll have a strong connection to, though, are the San Francisco International [Film] Festival and the [SF International] Asian American Film Festival. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Bubblin’ crude

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› johnny@sfbg.com

The Kodak Theatre is no country for old women — or for young women, based on the most archetypal American movies of this awards season. A few months after a Coen brothers’ bro-down brought the silencer heard ’round the world and the bowl cut seen ’round the world, Paul Thomas Anderson returns with There Will Be Blood, an even more male-dominated, United States–is–his story. False prophets and fatal oil profits entwine with murderous intent in Anderson’s latest act of three-act bravado: oligarch Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) and preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) engage in territorial pissings that span decades, while women are scarcely seen and heard from even less. In fact, No Country for Old Men almost qualifies as Douglas Sirk–ian melodrama next to Anderson’s maverick revision of Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!

My, what a big movie Anderson has made. There will be no doubt among viewers that this 158-minute epic has Orson Welles–ian aspirations, from its Citizen Kane–like dedication to the rise and fall of a megalomaniac to its less-focused portrait of a not-so-magnificent or Ambersonian family line. These are the post–Robert Altman years of Anderson’s relatively fledgling career, in strictly literal terms. Now that Altman is dead, Anderson no longer treats him as a prime well of auteur inspiration, instead favoring the sprawling likes of Welles, Elia Kazan, Terrence Malick, and Stanley Kubrick. He presides over some bizarre marriage of Welles’s and Kubrick’s spirits in There Will Be Blood‘s worst moment — a finale that searches for a version of Rosebud in a mansion that resembles the Overlook Hotel, only to find plentiful redrum in a bowling alley instead. Set between cowardly quotation marks, this garbled conclusion seems to prove a colleague’s remark that Anderson doesn’t trust his instincts as a filmmaker.

Yet Anderson taps into an instinctive talent in many, if far from all, of the mute passages and dialogue duels that precede that coda. He’s aided by the sick pull of Jonny Greenwood’s vanguard score and gonzo performances from both of his lead actors. While Day-Lewis is more consistently successful, it’s Dano who stokes the film’s intrigue, through subtle smiles during their characters’ early jousts, a brief spell of deflated defeat when he’s betrayed, and a hilarious (if only temporary) victory in his home court of the pulpit. When There Will Be Blood is a marriage or battle between Day-Lewis’s performance and Anderson’s imagery, it’s even better. The potent isolation and claustrophobia of the film’s first half hour are outdone by a tour de force sequence in which oil and its elemental force paint the future black.

There Will Be Blood is sneaking into theaters in a manner consistent with that of recent butt-numbing epics, such as Malick’s 2005 The New World, which appear more concerned about their potential place in film history than with what statuettes they might pick up in the spring. This outlook isn’t necessarily a virtue, nor does it automatically result in better cinema, as Malick’s goofy yet haunting recent effort proved. Anderson has made another great leap forward, or at least away from, the putrid stench of 1999’s god-awful Magnolia, but only those with a penchant for fanboy prose are claiming he’s used oil to paint an instant masterpiece. Amid the empty promises of Todd Haynes and others, it’s easy to see why they’re raving, though. Anderson’s audacity here is worth puzzling over — and probably praising more — in times to come. *

THERE WILL BE BLOOD

Opens Fri/4 in Bay Area theaters

www.therewillbeblood.com

1300 on Fillmore

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Ordinarily one would be distressed, though these days hardly surprised, by the news that a farmers market in the midst of the city was being displaced by a brand-new building full of luxury condos, with a fancy restaurant on the ground floor. Although farmers markets, like coyotes, have been modestly flourishing in the city of late, they are still a delicate species whose natural habitat — often parking lots — invites predation by developers. Then there is the horror of contemporary architecture, which reflects, simultaneously, our fetish for the industrial and our indifference to the touch of the human hand, the small but artful detail that gives warmth and life to big buildings with expansive spaces. Without that touch, too many of our just-raised edifices are nothing more than triumphal and simplistic tombs made of concrete, steel, and glass.

The Fillmore farmers market began in the spring of 2003, in a parking lot at the corner of Fillmore and Eddy, and was of particular value not least because it brought high-quality fresh produce at reasonable prices to one of the city’s less golden neighborhoods. One chilly evening a few weeks ago, I found myself at that corner and was completely disoriented; a huge building had sprung up in the parking lot, like a giant mushroom after an autumn rain, and the few blocks of Fillmore below Geary seemed more than ever like one of Manhattan’s canyons, with the valets at Yoshi’s smiling and motioning to passersby like those guys who try to lure people into girlie shows in North Beach.

We weren’t on our way to Yoshi’s, as it happened, but to 1300 on Fillmore, a quietly glamorous new restaurant that brings a touch of Mecca SF–like magic to a historic, jazz-inflected neighborhood. (Meantime, to end the suspense, if any: the farmers market, though displaced, survives nearby, at Steiner and O’Farrell.) Although the restaurant keeps a poker face to the street — just a succession of smoked-glass panels, like a display of the world’s biggest sunglasses — its L-shaped interior is both spacious and clubby. A wealth of wood glows with warmth under the halogen spot lamps, while all of those windows are hung with tall, gauzy draperies, ready to billow in a breeze that will never blow through.

If we were somewhere in the South, the absence of a breeze would grow oppressive at a point well before high summer, and we would stomp our feet and demand mint juleps or iced tea. But we’re here, in our blue state and ice blue city, so we must make do with the Southern touches chef and owner David Lawrence brings to his sophisticated menu, beginning with the triangles of corn bread that quickly appear at the table, ready to be spread with butter or, for those with a bit of derring-do, pepper jelly, or best of all, with both.

The smaller courses range from homey to urbane. An example of the first is a plate of hush puppies ($13), half a dozen peeled shrimp dipped in a peppery batter, deep-fried, and presented in a crock with a side pot of ancho chile rémoulade. The cosmopolite, tempted by but wary of deep-frying, might let his companion order this dish, and maybe the fat fries too ($6), with homemade ketchup, for overkill, while choosing for himself the oyster bisque ($9) — classy, but tasting at least as much of cream as of oysters — or the sautéed wild mushrooms ($9) seated on a bed of white polenta. These last two dishes were brought to us slightly underseasoned, but a handsome little tray of salt and ground pepper was already on the table, which made it easy for us to take corrective action and implied we were meant to.

Undersalting was a more serious issue with the maple-glazed beef short rib ($28), a thick disk of meat with a bit of bone sticking out of the middle. It looked like a wheel that had flown off a Weber kettle. We could taste the maple on the surface of the meat, which was fork tender and moist, but once we penetrated to the interior of the great disk, we found ourselves in dim lighting indeed. The beef’s enveloping sidekicks — fried onion rings on top, mashed potatoes underneath — were good but peripheral in every sense.

Better was arctic char ($25), a salmonlike fish presented as a breaded and crisped fillet, almost perfectly square, nested atop a tasty hash of roasted brussels sprouts, fingerling potatoes, bits of lobster, and balsamic gastrique. I didn’t detect much Southern influence, but the flavors and textures were beautifully integrated and the portion size was ideal, especially with the wheel of beef looming across the table.

If the savory courses seem as much Pacific as Gulf Coast, the dessert menu speaks with an unmistakable drawl. There are first-rate beignets ($8), three doughnut torpedoes lightly dusted with cinnamon and powdered sugar and ready for dunking into either warm chocolate sauce or coffee foam, which had a root-beerish fizz along with a hint of chicory: New Orleans coffee, we guessed. A gingerbread napoleon ($8), meanwhile, looked "like the de Young Museum," according to a tablemate with whom I’d been pleasurably commiserating about the de Young Museum. At least the napoleon — an elaborate modernist construct of wafers, gingerbread pudding, whipped cream, and a square of apple-caramel jelly — was edible, as opposed to bulletproof.

Service: attentive if slightly erratic (some dishes to the wrong people). These are usually teething troubles, and the best thing about teething troubles is that you outgrow them to have a long run, which you’re pretty sure you will. You’re jazzed. *

1300 ON FILLMORE

Daily, 5–11 p.m.

1300 Fillmore, SF

(415) 771-7100

www.1300fillmore.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Well-modulated noise

Wheelchair accessible

Free range

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Happy New Year. I was lying in bed one night toward the end of the old one with the lights on and my eyes open, thinking about the usual: death, emptiness, and whether or not dildos ever really break off inside people and get lost. Weirdo the Cat jumped onto my pillow, pawed my hair, sniffed my ear, sat there staring at me, and was all, like, "Meow."

Meanwhile in the coop, four little chickens huddled together for warmth — or, check that, three chickens huddled together for warmth and the fourth was off by herself in a nest, eyes wide open, thinking about death and dildos as if her sole purpose in life were to remind the chicken farmer of the chicken farmer. There’s one in every flock, usually at the punk end of the pecking order, and in case you were wondering, they’re the hardest to kill and the easiest to eat.

They were protesting outside KFC — people, not chickens. It was PETA, not CETA, I’m sure. Placards complained of poor working conditions for factory farmer chickens, something about broken wings and sawed-off beaks. I smiled and waved, honked my horn, and renewed my commitment never to eat at KFC, because Popeye’s is 10 times better.

Broken wings. Sawed-off beaks … Your chicken farmer shudders at the thought, but what really tears her up inside, besides death and dildos … I’ll take you back to bed in a moment, don’t worry. Or do, but please bear with me: it’s New Year’s, a time for bitching and moaning and, yeah, moaning. And bucking, but we’ll get back in bed, I promise; it’s just that you see these small-farm happy homeschooled organic free-range egg cartons that say "vegetarian diet" …

Are you kidding me? What greater cruelty can there be than to deny an animal its favorite thing in the world to eat? And if you’re a chicken, uh, that ain’t tofu. Hello. It’s not even salad or corn or grass. I’m sorry to have to be the one to inform you that chickens’ favorite food is pork. The other white meat. In fact, one reason they debeak the poor things is because they are not above eating the original white meat, or in other words, one another.

What turns chickens into cannibals? Lack of animal protein. Stress. General anxiety disorder, often accompanied by feelings of worthlessness, meaninglessness, and, in short, baconlessness.

You do the math.

Anyone who has ever seen a chicken light into a pork chop will join me, I trust, in boycotting vegetarian-diet chicken farming. There. I have taken my stand for ’08. PETA, I hope, will picket Rainbow Grocery and Whole Foods, a.k.a. Whole Paycheck. And by the way, to answer yet another rhetorical question, the only thing less ethical than denying an animal its favorite food is to then not put that poor animal out of its misery and onto my plate, where it wants to be and belongs. Trust me.

You already know about "free range," right? That the joke is on us? Just because you open a chicken’s door for an hour or two a day, that doesn’t mean it will ever go outside and play. I swear, I had my chicken door open all day every day for a week before they ventured from the safe familiarity of the coop into beautiful Sonoma County, and then I had to lure them out, finally, with ham sandwiches.

So: Free-range chicken ? free-range chicken. Happy chicken ? vegetarian chicken. And a true free-range chicken can’t possibly be truly vegetarian anyway, because if it’s outside and can’t find pork chops, it will certainly scare up roly-polies, spiders, worms, locusts, cicadas, mice, centipedes, a dead hummingbird …

The other day I saw a tiny line of beetles marching in a line outside my chicken coop door with little BETA placards. I smiled and waved and honked my horn.

Grasshoppers, caterpillars, brick bugs, moths, larvae, ticks, termites, ants, earwigs. Hold on a second, I need more lube. Crickets …

My new favorite restaurant is Happy House Korean BBQ, and I didn’t even get the barbecue! Me! Cal kook soo with clams. That means noodle soup. It’s $9, $10 for just the noodles and slivered cucumbers in a starchy broth, but the clams were good, and they give you all the little bowls of kimchi and stuff too, so … *

HAPPY HOUSE KOREAN BBQ

Mon.–Wed., 11 a.m.–midnight; Thurs.–Sun., 11 a.m.–4 a.m.

1560 Fillmore, SF

(415) 440-1990

Takeout available

Beer/sake

MC/V

Hamster dance

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I have a friend a few years younger than me. We were recently at a bar talking about his girlfriend and my wife. After a time, he confided to me that in the past few weeks he has been having trouble getting it up and was very concerned that he would have to take erectile dysfunction meds for the rest of his life or that he was losing his edge. We are both in our early 40s and in good shape and health.

My answer to him was that he should not panic. It seems to me that as the weather gets colder, the days become shorter, and we set the clocks back, our bodies, which are much more attuned to nature than we are generally aware, prepare for winter and slow down. I noticed that my sleep patterns changed at the visible onset of winter. I’ve been less interested in sex and other physical activities. I also remember that in the spring, when the days get longer and the sun shines, I get really horny all of the time — or at least I did last spring.

Are there any studies to support my thesis? Is any of this quantifiable?

Love,

Regular Reader

Dear Reg:

Pretty much, yes. What a great question to get on a gloomy winter day just a few days shy of the solstice. Let us thank all the little gods and goddesses for the end of the %#@&*%@ darkness, with extraspecial gratitude reserved for Flora, Persephone, Maia, and anyone else who is usually depicted wreathed in posies and scattering petals through the newly verdant forest while the little animals frolic … ahem. Why do I have spring fever when it isn’t even spring?

I’m not sure if there has been any serious research done on humans and libido fluctuation through the seasons, but because the slightest fluctuations in reproductive capacity can cost high-stakes meat producers serious money, plenty of hormone-titer and testicle measurements have been done on bulls and boars and other large horned or tusky beasts, and yes, those characteristics do fluctuate with the seasons, and by quite a bit too. Mostly, though, males get all maleish during their breeding season, whenever that may be, but one of the most striking differences between ourselves and most of our animal cousins is our lack of an estrus cycle and corresponding male big-balls cycle. However …

It’s nice that I happened to mention little animals frolicking, because have I got a frolicking animals story for you: "Sex Ends as Seasons Shift and Kisspeptin Levels Plummet" (at www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-12/iu-sea122806.php). It concerns a neuropeptide most excellently named kisspeptin. Oh, and it’s about Siberian hamsters. Kisspeptin triggers the release of the important reproductive hormones gonadotropin-releasing hormone and luteinizing hormone, without which we (and the hamsters) would not experience puberty, libido (in the hamsters at least), or conception. Hamsters placed in a winterlike environment with short days and low light immediately experience a drop in kisspeptin and with it the hamster equivalent of mojo workin’. Happily, though, the winterized hamsters were just as sensitive to kisspeptin as the summer hamsters were; as the article emphasizes,

"What is really striking is the disappearance of kisspeptin in animals experiencing winter-like days, yet the ability to respond to kisspeptin when we provide it," said Timothy Greives, lead author of the study. "These data show that the disappearance of kisspeptin in the brain is likely critical in turning off reproduction during winter."

So is kisspeptin supplementation the answer to your problem? Oh, I wish, but hormone feedback loops are way too serious and complicated to mess with when we don’t know what we’re doing, and in this case we truly haven’t the faintest. Plus, seen any kisspeptin on the supplement shelves recently? So no, of course it isn’t the answer, but I think it’s worth paying attention to the fact that we are, as you say, "much more attuned to nature than we are generally aware." We might try adapting to the season by either simply expecting less of ourselves and our partners in the depth of winter — a winter break, as it were — or bringing our opposable thumb–having, tool-using human best to bear on the problem. Try (or rather suggest to your friend that he try) light therapy, as prescribed for seasonal affective disorder. And why do you think the midwinter tropical vacation is so popular? Surely froofy umbrella drinks are available in the frozen north; there must be another, better reason for heading to summerier climes with your sweetie as the days get short and dark. Failing that, we could do what sensible large fauna (and many types of flora too, come to think of it) do when the weather gets nasty: hibernate.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Staying power

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Looking back at the Bay Area art scene in 2007 affirms our perennial difficulty in holding on to ambitious players. It’s an oft-repeated story. Given San Francisco’s commitment to nonprofit and alternative models over commercial ones and the high cost of living, artists find it easier to start off than to build their careers here. Since the art world in general has been buoyed by brisk sales, art fairs, and biennials, the Bay Area’s condition applies as much to high-profile curators, dealers, and administrators as to artists.

Curatorial flux is particularly apparent. Madeleine Grynsztejn, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture since 2000, recently announced her new position as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. René de Guzman left his post as director of visual arts at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to become senior curator at the Oakland Museum of California. Daniell Cornell, currently the director of contemporary art projects and curator of American art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, will become the deputy director for art and senior curator at the Palm Springs Art Museum, while the Berkeley Art Museum — which is embarking on a capital campaign for a new building — saw senior curator Constance Lewallen and director Kevin Consey leave for various reasons. This means there are a number of key positions that, when filled, will change the directions of these important venues. Or will they? Such turnovers have happened before, and frankly, institutions rarely undergo radical makeovers.

In 2007 new curators began or continued their programs. In May, Liz Thomas, the Matrix curator at BAM, began her first slate of shows with Allison Smith’s participatory, craftsperson-based Notion Nanny project, Rosalind Nashashibi’s film installation, and Tomás Saraceno’s current "suspended environment" (through Feb. 17), revealing a solid and diverse range of emerging international practices. This curator’s strategy is to build slowly rather than open with a bang.

The program moves at a faster and flashier clip at California College of the Arts’ Wattis Institute, where in fall 2007 curator Jens Hoffman began his first season of programming with a sporty graphic identity and high-concept group shows. These include "Pioneers," a nod to Bay Area mavericks from gold rush groundbreakers to conceptualists; "Passengers," a long-term, rotating round-robin show; and "Apocalypse Now" (through Jan. 26), a political "attack" he curated with international biennial-favorite artist duo Allora and Calzadilla. The pair’s works were also highlighted as the main fall exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute’s Walter and McBean Galleries, which are programmed by curator Hou Hanru. Hou’s exhibits started in fall 2006, and in 2007 they included "World Factory," a two-part group show that boisterously explored conditions of global capitalism in various media while serving as a test ground for the 2007 Istanbul Biennial, which he also organized. Hoffman and Hou are key figures in an international circuit of curators that also includes SFAI dean Okwui Enwezor, and the three simultaneously work on projects here and abroad. (Full disclosure: I teach at both of the aforementioned schools.)

It’s been difficult, though, to gauge these projects’ impact on the doggedly localized Bay Area art scene — or how their curators will take to the regional climate. Such curatorial presence has provided an opportunity for a larger number of artists and other curators to pass through the region, and it’s offered platforms for provocative group shows that are rarely staged in museums around here. The bottom line, though, is that in the present model of international art, change is driven by the marketplace, and these institutional spaces exist outside the commercial gallery arena that makes certain cities more visible art hubs than others.

There was, however, movement in the local commercial realm. Catherine Clark broke from 49 Geary to open a Chelsea-style space in the shadow of SFMOMA. Ratio 3 unveiled a surprisingly large and cannily designed new space near 14th and Valencia streets, not far from Jack Hanley Gallery’s two spots on Valencia (another recently debuted in New York) and Southern Exposure’s just-opened second temporary site. Combined with other galleries nearby — Intersection for the Arts, Needles and Pens, Adobe Books, etc. — the neighborhood could be turning into a destination alternative to the exhibition spaces on the first block of Geary. The Dogpatch neighborhood shows promise of becoming another art zone with the ambitious Silverman, Ping Pong, and Ampersand galleries, which have all been staging interesting shows, though the area is still a bit under the radar.

All said, we’re at a transitional moment, and forward thinking seems in order. The year ahead offers huge potential for new faces, directions, and already scheduled programs at many of the aforementioned venues. I’m anticipating the Gilbert and George show at the de Young Museum, Lee Friedlander at SFMOMA, and a Paul McCarthy project at the Wattis, as well as the 2008 openings of the California Academy of Sciences and the Contemporary Jewish Museum. All provide plenty reason to stick around. *

GLEN HELFAND’S TOP 10


The following exhibitions, events, and films enthralled me with their winning combinations of joy, originality, and serious subtext.

Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal’s Ten Chi, Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley

The Book of Shadows," Fraenkel Gallery

Liz Larner’s lecture, San Francisco Art Institute

"© Murakami," Geffen Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Mitzi Pederson’s "Unlet Me Go," Ratio 3

Ratatouille, directed by Brad Bird

"A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s," Berkeley Art Museum

“Rudolf Stingel” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Weeds

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Unknown Forces installation, REDCAT, Los Angeles, and his film Syndromes and a Century

Technology in wartime

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION War changes everything, including technology. We are roughly six years into what the George W. Bush administration calls the war on terror and what hundreds of thousands of soldiers know as the occupation of Iraq. Gizmos that a decade ago would have been viewed entirely as communications tools and toys are now potential surveillance and killing machines.

Don’t believe me? Consider how much the Web has changed. Referred to naively 10 years ago by Bill Clinton and Co. as the friendly, welcoming "information superhighway," the Web is now the National Security Agency’s surveillance playground. Last year a whistle-blower at AT&T revealed that every bit of Internet traffic routed by AT&T was also being routed through an NSA surveillance system. Millions of innocent people’s private Internet information, including online purchases and e-mail, was being watched without warrants.

Cuddly consumer robots epitomized by Sony’s Aibo robot dog have changed too. The company that makes adorable Roomba vacuum robots, iRobot, just announced a huge deal with the United States military to make reconnaissance and killing robots called PackBots for use in combat zones. Already, 50 PackBots have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are the ground versions of crewless aerial vehicles, remote-controlled spy planes that can also shoot weapons.

Tech security expert Bruce Schneier describes technology as having "dual uses": one for peacetime and one for war. The Wii video game console, for example, is great for transutf8g physical movements into movements onscreen. That makes the Wii great for party games in which you swing your arms to move dancing penguins on the screen. It also makes a great interface for remote-controlled guns in a combat robot. Just move your arm to aim.

In a time of war you can’t enjoy a party game without thinking about your game console being used to kill people. I realize that sounds melodramatic, but looked at pragmatically it’s quite simply true.

Once you realize that every form of technology has a dual use, it becomes much easier to argue for ways of limiting the uses that aren’t ethical or legal. Consider that a roboticized antiaircraft cannon (similar to the PackBot) turned on its operators during a field exercise in South Africa in October 2007, killing nine people before it ran out of ammo. The software error that led this robot to slaughter friendly soldiers is no different from errors that make your Roomba crash. What do we draw from this analogy? Perhaps robots that are perfectly legal as vacuums should be illegal on the battlefield. Perhaps no weapon should ever be completely autonomous like the Roomba.

Questions like these led me and my colleagues at Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility to put together a conference at Stanford University on the topic of technology in wartime, focusing especially on ethics and the law. Coming up on Jan. 26, the conference will be a day packed with talks and panels about everything from dual-use technology (Schneier will be a keynote speaker) to what happens when robots commit war crimes. We’ll also hear from people who are appropriating military technologies for human rights causes — the very technologies that let military spies hide online also help human rights workers and dissidents shield themselves while still getting out their subversive messages.

We’ll also have a panel on so-called cyberterrorism, or destructive hacks aimed at taking down a nation’s tech infrastructure. But should fears of cyberterror lead to total government surveillance of the Internet? Cindy Cohn, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s legal director, will talk about how the NSA used AT&T to spy on US citizens and the suit the EFF has brought against AT&T for vioutf8g its customers’ privacy rights.

If you want to find out how to change the way militaries are appropriating consumer tech or just want to learn more about how war is changing the way we use technology, come to Stanford on Jan. 26 for the conference. It’s open to the public, and you can register at www.technologyinwartime.org. The cost of admission gets a you free lunch and a T-shirt, as well as a chance to talk to some of the smartest people in the field. See you there!

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who wants smart defense to replace buggy offense.

Cindy Sheehan’s SF values

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OPINION A major difference between Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s values and my values surfaced last month.

On Friday, Dec. 14, I learned that since 2002, Pelosi has been a silent partner in the George W. Bush regime’s torture policy. As a Bay Area resident for the past 15 years, I can say with confidence that the use of torture is not a San Francisco value.

According to a Dec. 9 Washington Post article, Pelosi was one of four members of Congress to witness a "virtual tour" of secret CIA detention sites. Officials have described the briefings as "detailed and graphic." The article, by Joby Warrick and Jan Eggen, revealed that the House Intelligence Committee received 30 briefings on the CIA’s torture chambers and the "harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk."

In 2003, Congressperson Jane Harman (D-Calif.), who was also present during the briefings, filed a letter of protest over the interrogation program. After the Democrats won control of the House in 2006, Pelosi passed over Harman, who was in line for chair of the Intelligence Committee, instead naming Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas) to the position. Harman, who publicly voiced her discontent at her demotion, was punished for speaking out when Pelosi would not.

Pelosi and I both know that the use of torture is outlawed under both the US Army Field Manual and the Geneva Conventions. I have chosen to speak out against the Bush administration’s use of torture. Pelosi has chosen to remain silent.

Through her complicity and her actions, Pelosi continues to support an illegal policy that harms our soldiers in the field and is counterproductive to winning the hearts and minds of the Arab and Muslim world. Even committed warmonger Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) realizes that the use of torture as a tool to garner information is a flawed and inhumane strategy.

Pelosi has used her position as Speaker of the House to protect the criminal Bush regime, and although she has pledged to hold the president accountable for the Iraq war, she continues to give him the money, and therefore the means, to wage it.

San Franciscan values are good values. We want every person to be guaranteed the very same basic human rights that Pelosi and her wealthy cronies enjoy: peace, shelter, nutritious and plentiful food, health care, education, and the right to live free from torture. I would add the right to marry whomever one loves regardless of gender or orientation.

The neocon hatemongers have tried to make the word liberal an obscenity. Fox News jester Bill O’Reilly has publicly stated that al Qaeda can "go ahead" and "blow up" San Francisco. We cannot allow our values to be marginalized and ridiculed any longer. Our values must spread across this nation because we care about people and we care about true freedom and real representative democracy.

Pelosi abdicated her role as defender of our values and needs years ago, but especially so when she countenanced torture and refused to impeach the Bush regime when San Franciscans voted overwhelmingly in a referendum for impeachment.

The choice is simple and clear in California’s District 8. If you want San Francisco values represented in Congress, vote for me in November. If you support torture and war crimes, then vote for Pelosi. *

Cindy Sheehan

Antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan is running for Congress as an independent.

Offies!

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

It’s gotten to the point where you don’t have to make fun of the president anymore — the rest of the country has gotten so insane that George W. Bush almost looks normal. Just think about 2007:

One presidential candidate said aborted fetuses could have replaced immigrant workers. One said he wanted to be sure to shoot Osama bin Laden with American-made bullets. One said he’d seen a UFO. One said he wanted to deport 400,000 immigrants but was too busy.

A prominent conservative writer said Jewish people need to be "perfected." A bathroom stall in Minneapolis became a tourist attraction.

And Gavin Newsom screwed his secretary, Ed Jew didn’t know where he lived, people ran naked for mayor, Halloween was cancelled … It was, by any standard, a banner year for the Offies.

YES, I SLEPT WITH MY SECRETARY. YES, SHE WAS MARRIED TO MY CAMPAIGN MANAGER. YES, I AM AN ASSHOLE. THE NEWSPAPERS GOT THAT RIGHT.

Gavin Newsom, faced with news of his sordid affair with Ruby Rippey-Tourk, told reporters that "everything you’ve read is true."

SISTERHOOD IS POWERFUL

Jennifer Siebel, Newsom’s girlfriend who said "the woman is the culprit" in the mayor’s notorious affair, posted a message on SFist.com insisting she’s a "gal’s gal."

GOOD ONE, JEN — WAY TO ACCUSE YOUR BOYFRIEND OF DATE RAPE

Siebel said Newsom’s affair with Rippey-Tourk "was nothing but a few incidents when she showed up passed out outside of his door."

THE TRUTH, NEWSOM STYLE

Newsom’s press secretary, Peter Ragone, admitted to posting fake pro-Newsom comments on the SFist blog under a friend’s name.

AND NOW HE CAN CLAIM HE’S REALLY A CELEBRITY

Newsom announced he would go into rehab.

YOU’D THINK A SECRETIVE MAYOR WHOSE PRESS SECRETARY LIES COULD AT LEAST MAKE THE TRAINS RUN ON TIME

The Muni Metro T line opened for business with delays that crashed the entire underground train system.

JEEZ, CAN’T YOU TV PEOPLE FIND A REPORTER WHO WILL STOP ASKING THE MAYOR SO MANY EMBARRASSING QUESTIONS?

Newsom announced on camera that he wasn’t going to talk to ABC’s Dan Noyes anymore, saying, "You just send some other reporters. It’s going to be a lot easier now."

WAIT — ISN’T THERE SOME STATE LAW ABOUT USING YOUR CELL PHONE WHEN YOU’RE DRIVING?

State senator Carole Migden crashed her state-owned SUV into another car in Marin when she took her eyes off the road to answer a cell phone call.

COME TO THINK OF IT, HE DOES HAVE THAT HOLLYWOOD SMILE GOING ON. AND THOSE EYES …

Sup. Chris Daly set off a press furor when he said Newsom was refusing to answer questions about his alleged cocaine use.

THAT’S OK — IT’S HARD TO GET THOSE COSTUMES OFF TO PEE ANYWAY

Newsom’s press office announced that Halloween was cancelled, and the mayor refused until the last minute to allow portable toilets to be set up in the Castro.

CHARITABLE ORGANIZATIONS NEED A LITTLE BRIBERY MONEY TOO

Suspended Sup. Ed Jew, who was charged with accepting $40,000 in cash from a tapioca store chain, insisted he was going to give half the money to a neighborhood parks program.

APPARENTLY, THE MONEY WASN’T THE ONLY THING THAT SMELLED

Jew insisted he lived in a Sunset District house that had no water service and said he showered at his flower store (where reporters were never shown an actual shower).

BY SAN FRANCISCO STANDARDS, HE’S EMINENTLY QUALIFIED FOR PUBLIC OFFICE

Mayoral candidate Grasshopper Alec Kaplan stole Jew’s house numbers, was arrested for playing his guitar naked on top of his purple taxicab, and was sentenced to nine months in jail for threatening a passenger.

AND FRANKLY, IT’S JUST AS WELL THEY GOT HIM OFF THE STREET; NOBODY WANTS TO LOOK AT THAT SHIT

Yoga instructor George Davis was arrested four times while campaigning for mayor in the nude.

UNFORTUNATELY, HE CAME IN FIFTH

Chicken John Rinaldi insisted he was running for second place and considered using the slogan "The other white mayor."

YOU HAVE TO GIVE IT TO HIM: THE GUY CAN PICK HIS ICONS

Paul David Addis was arrested for setting fire to the Burning Man icon four days before it was supposed to be burned, then was later charged with attempting to burn down Grace Cathedral.

POOR JERRY — CAN’T SOMEBODY DONATE SOME MONEY TO HAVE HIM PUT IN A HOME FOR THE TERMINALLY MORONIC?

Jerry Lewis created an imaginary character for his muscular dystrophy telethon called Jesse the illiterate fag.

UNLIKE LUNATIC RIGHT-WING CHRISTIANS, WHO SEEM TO BE DOING JUST FINE

Ann Colbert said that Jews need to be "perfected."

HEY MARTHA, CHECK IT OUT! LET ME POSE FOR A PHOTO! I GOT MY WIDE STANCE ALL READY!

The bathroom stall where Larry Craig was arrested for public sex became a tourist attraction.

AND NOW, THE CELEBRITY NEWS FOR THE SEVEN OR EIGHT PEOPLE WHO STILL ACTUALLY CARE

Britney Spears shaved her head. Paris Hilton went to jail.

THE WORLD JUST GOT A TINY BIT SAFER FOR HUMANITY

Spears’s mother lost her contract for a book on parenting after her 16-year-old daughter Jamie Lynn became pregnant.

NOW IF THE SCALPERS COULD JUST DO A JOB ON THAT WIG

Tickets to the Hannah Montana concert in Oakland were sold for as much as $1,000.

OF COURSE, SHE MAY HAVE SIMPLY BEEN TRYING TO FIT IN THOSE TINY SEATS

Southwest Airlines kicked a woman off a flight for wearing too short a skirt.

WAIT, WE MISSED THE ONE ABOUT FUCKING THINE OWN GENDER. MAYBE HE LEFT IT IN THE TENT

Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee said he would oppose same-sex marriage "until Moses comes down with two stone tablets from Brokeback Mountain saying he’s changed the rules."

WHY EXPLOIT IMMIGRANTS WHEN WE CAN EXPLOIT KIDS OF OUR OWN?

Huckabee announced that if all of the nation’s aborted fetuses had gone to term, the United States wouldn’t need low-cost immigrant labor.

OF COURSE, IF HE’D BEEN GAY OR HAD AN ABORTION, HE WOULD HAVE WOUND UP IN PRISON

Huckabee told Rolling Stone he’d pardoned Keith Richards for a 1975 traffic ticket.

WE LIKE A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE WHO HAS HIS PRIORITIES STRAIGHT

Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani said he would have liked to have kicked all 400,000 undocumented immigrants out of the city, but he was too busy fighting crime.

OF MAYBE IT WAS JUST THE VULCANS, COME TO MAKE FIRST CONTACT AND CONVINCE US TO SUPPORT SINGLE-PAYER HEALTH INSURANCE

Rep. Dennis Kucinich said he’d seen a UFO.

WE’D HAPPILY PAY $999 NOT TO HAVE TO KNOW

A Los Angeles company called 23andMe offered to test your DNA for $999 and tell you if you’re related to Marie Antoinette, Jesse James, or Jimmy Buffet.

WITH THE CUBAN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM, HE’LL PROBABLY OUTLIVE US ALL

Police in south Florida were put on alert after blogger Perez Hilton falsely announced the death of Fidel Castro.

KILL THE BASTARDS — BUY AMERICAN

Sen. John McCain told workers at a small-arms factory in New Hampshire he would "follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell" and "shoot him with your products."

OF COURSE NOT — THEY’VE ALL BEEN TORTURED, BEATEN, OR STONED TO DEATH

Iran’s president said there are no homosexuals in his country.

BUT THEN, SHE TORTURED US FOR 10 YEARS AS MAYOR

Sen. Dianne Feinstein voted to confirm Michael Mukasey as attorney general even though he refused to say that waterboarding is torture.

IT’S NOT IN YOURS EITHER

President Bush said democracy might not be in the "Russian DNA."

WHEN A SIMPLE "CUNT" OR "PUSSY" JUST ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH

A Florida production of The Vagina Monologues sought to avoid controversy by changing its name to The Hoohaa Monologues.

THE 41ST PRESIDENT STARTS WORKING ON HIS PLACE IN HISTORY

President Bush predicted a "nuclear holocaust" if Iran develops weapons of mass destruction.

QUICK, GIVE ME THE BUTTON BEFORE THE BOSS GETS THAT PROBE OUT OF HIS ASS

Vice President Dick Cheney had executive power for two hours and five minutes while President Bush was under sedation for a colonoscopy.

GREAT MOMENTS IN FOREIGN CINEMA

The European Commission put a video clip on YouTube promoting European films by showing 18 couples having sex with the tagline "Let’s come together."

STANCE IS TOO WIDE … STANCE IS TOO WIDE … MALFUNCTION … DOES NOT COMPUTE …

The mayor of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., suggested the city create a robot toilet to combat gay sex in public bathrooms.

COME ON, YOUR HOLINESS — THEY JUST NEED TO BE "PERFECTED"

Pope Benedict XVI declared that Protestants don’t have real churches and their ministers are all phonies.

PERHAPS THE KID CAN’T GO TO SCHOOL ANYMORE, BUT AT LEAST HE WON’T HAVE TO BE PERFECTED BY ANN COULTER

The Supreme Court ruled that a high school student could be suspended for displaying a sign that read "Bong Hits 4 Jesus."

THE OFFIES, OF COURSE, ARE PRODUCED LOCALLY, AND YOU CAN SEE THE QUALITY CONTROL …

A news Web site in Pasadena outsourced its local reporting to India.

BOOM GOES LONDON, BOOM PAREE

Former senator Mike Gravel announced during a presidential candidates debate that the other Democrats frightened him and asked Barack Obama whom he wanted to nuke.

WELL, AT LEAST WE KNOW WHO THE REPUBLICANS ARE GOING TO NUKE

Sen. McCain changed the lyrics of the Beach Boy’s "Barbara Ann" to "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran."

APPARENTLY, MEMBERS OF THE US SENATE DON’T GET OUT MUCH

Sen. Joe Biden declared Obama is "the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."

Godzilla versus Mothra

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› sarah@sfbg.com

When retired entomologist Jerry Powell caught two tiny light brown apple moths in a blacklight trap in his Berkeley backyard last winter, he had no idea of the furor his find would unleash — especially in the communities that were subsequently sprayed with female moth pheromones, a process that could come to San Francisco this spring.

Native to Australia and now found widely in New Zealand and the United Kingdom, the LBAM (or Epiphyas postvittana, as it’s known in bug circles) is classified as a plant pest, but it had never before been reported on the United States mainland, though it was found in Hawaii in the late 1880s.

So its discovery, first in Powell’s trap in February and then throughout the Bay Area and the Central Coast in March 2007, drove the US Department of Agriculture to declare a statewide emergency and issue quarantine and extermination directives.

The USDA’s problem, as Powell explained, is that unlike many moths, which only lay eggs on oak trees or eat holes in sweaters, the LBAM can lay eggs on and eat many, many plants.

"From each batch a hundred tiny caterpillars hatch and feed on a wide variety of shrubs and trees, using silk to tie the leaves up into bundles," Powell told the Guardian.

According to the USDA’s Web site, this pest could infest up to 80 percent of the continental US and attack 2,000 types of plants, causing huge economic and environmental damage.

Officials with the California Department of Food and Agriculture estimate the LBAM could cause up to $640 million annually in crop damage and control costs in California alone.

So starting last summer the CDFA required nurseries to either destroy infested plants or treat them with chlorpyrifos, an organophosphate pesticide derived from World War II nerve gas.

The agency also made ground applications of Bacillus thuringiensis (a genetically engineered bacteria) and hand-applied female moth pheromones in other infested areas, including Napa, Vallejo, and Mare Island.

But the agency’s most controversial act was the spraying of entire communities, including Santa Cruz, with Checkmate, a synthetic female moth pheromone made by the Oregon company Suterra. Since male moths use the real pheromone to detect females, flooding an area with similar-smelling stuff is supposed to confuse them and prevent mating.

The controversy, according to four lawsuits filed in Monterey and Santa Cruz counties, in which 73 percent of the moths have been found, began when the CDFA acted with minimal notice, without fully disclosing Checkmate’s contents until after the spraying occurred, and without adequately demonstrating that the moths were enough of an emergency to exempt the spraying from the California Environmental Quality Act.

Not to mention the sentiment, expressed by numerous members of the sprayed-on communities, that they felt as if they had been airlifted into Vietnam. For three nights in a row crop dusters, flying at 500 to 800 feet, traversed the skies, coating homes and gardens, parks and playgrounds with scentless, invisible, and largely untested female moth pheromones while freaked-out citizens were advised to remain indoors to avoid unwanted exposure.

Numerous health complaints were recorded after the spraying, along with questions about the scientific efficacy of the plan and the worry that the CDFA had paved the way to do an end run around due process — and next time could use heavy-duty pesticides.

Gina Solomon, senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the Guardian the spray’s contents are everyday chemicals, often labeled natural or organic, that degrade pretty rapidly into nontoxic by-products.

"But we did have a concern about tricaprylyl methyl ammonium chloride, a mild respiratory irritant, which could be of concern in a high dose to sensitive asthmatics," Solomon said.

Solomon gave the CDFA credit "for not picking a pesticide off the shelf," adding, "But it’s funny to see them trying to do the right thing, then tripping up over the public process. People don’t like planes going overhead spraying stuff and feeling like this is happening without their consent. I feel that if [the CDFA] is going to be inflicting this stuff on us, they need to let people know exactly why."

And with some scientists claiming that pheromones aren’t powerful enough to attract every single moth, Solomon is concerned the CDFA could decide to spray more toxic stuff.

"They could technically spray an insecticide, but I guarantee they’ll face a major protest, and it wouldn’t make any sense," Solomon said. "For all its nastiness, the moth is not a human health threat. It’s a threat to agriculture, nurseries, and gardens. We’re not talking about malaria."

Retired entomologist Powell suspects the LBAM was well established in California when he found it, given that it was trapped in a dozen counties within the next month.

"They had probably been here a few years before they happened to bumble into my light trap," he said. "And whenever you have anything that feeds on all kinds of plants, it doesn’t become a general defoliator but gets scattered around and causes minor damage. The problem is for nurseries that were forced to shut down and fumigate, but it’s not likely to become a noticeable pest in the garden. It’s likely to attract parasites and predators of similar species in the area."

James Carey, a professor of entomology at the University of California at Davis, is not a specialist in the LBAM. But he does know about invasive biology, having worked on the Mediterranean fruit fly. And in Carey’s opinion, the moth can’t be eradicated. It’s already widespread, he said — and disruptive mating pheromones have never been able to eradicate anything.

"It’s not numbers that matters, but numbers of locations," Carey told the Guardian. "It’s like metastatic cancer, where it’s not a matter of a tumor but of tens of thousands of tumors. So any [pockets of moths] that are not 100 percent eradicated can repopulate entire areas."

He acknowledges the USDA’s valid pest-related concerns. "But their entomologists should be able to argue that eradication is feasible, or face the facts that without effective tools not only to eradicate but to detect the moth it’s not possible," he said. "Pheromones are weak tools; not all moths come or respond to them. Even in an orchard they don’t work that well."

Casey warned that the CDFA will try to say that if we can’t eradicate the moth with pheromones, we’ll have to spray more pesticides. "But what if you can’t eradicate it because it’s too far gone?" he asked.

As for the unlikely scenario in which fixed-winged aircraft fly sideways between high-rises and the Transamerica Pyramid as they spray clouds of pheromones across the Castro, Chinatown, and beyond, Carey observed, "These moths can live in little pockets, so San Francisco will become a reservoir for them."

The CDFA’s Steve Lyle told the Guardian that at this point the agency has completed treatment for 2007 and is evaluating what it will do in 2008 and where it will do it.

"It’s fair to say that the entire program is being assessed, but we have made no definitive decisions and made no announcements," Lyle said.

With the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment reassessing whether Checkmate causes harm to people, plants, and pets, Lyle added, "The moth is of serious concern to the feds. Unfortunately, this invasive pest is established in an urban area."

USDA public affairs specialist Larry Hawkins was a little less vague. "Since LBAM has been found in San Francisco proper and in the East Bay, these areas are likely to be treated in 2008," he said. "But we’re considering whether to treat them through ground applications or aerial application."

Hawkins said any control action "will be preceded by informational meetings with the public, so any actions will be fully disclosed."

David Dillworth, executive director of the nonprofit Helping Our Peninsula Environment, which is suing the CDFA over the Monterey spraying, advised San Francisco to get proactive and lean on its elected leaders.

"San Francisco still has time to get Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein, whose backyards will be sprayed, to put pressure on USDA to stop the eradication, since at this point all they can really do is control the moth," Dillworth said.

Pelosi’s press secretary, Drew Hammill, told the Guardian that Pelosi is "checking with state and city officials regarding the spread of this species.

"While the Speaker understands the consequences this moth can have on our precious ecosystem," Hammill said, "she is also concerned about the prospect of spraying any substance into the air in our city and its possible effects on public health and organic farming in our state."

Solar man

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› steve@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Two years ago Tom Price called me from the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast. We didn’t know each other, but he’d read some of my articles about Burning Man, including "Epilogue as Prologue" (10/4/2005), which culminated my seven-part series by looking at how burners were projecting their culture, skills, and ethos into the outside world.

The most obvious example I used was the group that went straight from Burning Man 2005 to Mississippi to help clean up after Hurricane Katrina, which hit during the event. "If that isn’t applying our ethos, I don’t know what is," Burning Man founder Larry Harvey said in my article. "The very skills needed to survive at Burning Man are the skills needed to respond to a disaster."

Price had been a little busy mucking out flood-damaged homes and rebuilding a Buddhist temple in Biloxi, Miss., but the he’d called home for the past five months had finally gotten an Internet connection, and he’d just found my article. "Dude, we’re still here," he told me excitedly by phone. "It’s happening just like you wrote. We’re doing it."

As I started to learn, Price was an accomplished idealist for whom "doing it" means working to save the world. In college in Utah he spent a year in a shanty he erected in the main college square urging the university to disinvest in apartheid South Africa, and his removal led to a court case that expanded free speech rights. He worked as a journalist chronicling threats to the indigenous Kalahari tribes in Botswana and as an environmental activist and lobbyist in Washington DC, where he eventually became the main contract lobbyist for Burning Man, an event he loves.

In Mississippi he turned an encampment of do-gooder burners into an organization he dubbed Burners Without Borders. Price spoke so passionately and eloquently about what they were doing that I just had to go, working with them (as both journalist and laborer) for a week and writing a Guardian cover story about the experience ("From Here to Katrina," 2/22/06).

It was a project and a moment that seemed to capture both the scale of the environmental problems facing this country and the enormous potential of motivated individuals to creatively deal with them.

From there Burners Without Borders went on to create a program that recycles the huge amount of wood used by the more than 40,000 people who now attend Burning Man every year, donating it to Habitat for Humanity for the construction of low-income homes. And the group has sent contingents to do cleanup work after floods in the Pacific Northwest and cleanup and reconstruction in Pisco, Peru, after the massive earthquake there in 2007.

Price became the first environmental director for Burning Man, reflecting its Green Man theme last year.

One of the most notable projects to grow from that endeavor finally came into full bloom Dec. 18, 2007, when a 90-kilowatt solar array — some of which was used to power the eponymous Man at last year’s event — was placed in the town of Gerlach, Nev., as a donation to the Washoe County School District.

It will give the school free, clean power for the next 25 years, saving the district about $20,000 annually — money that can surely be put to better use than paying for fossil fuels.

The project was a joint venture between venture capital firm MMA Renewable Ventures (which put up the money), Sierra Pacific Power (which offered a substantial rebate for the project), and the Price-led burners who donated their labor.

"MMA put up the money, and the rebate from the utility paid back almost all of it, with the difference made up by Burning Man and its volunteers," Price said.

Price said 10 volunteers — including Eli Lyon, Matt Deluge, and Richard Scott, who were in Pearlington, Miss., with us — worked eight hours per day for 51 days to do the work that made the project pencil out.

Matt Cheney, CEO of MMA Renewable Ventures and a resident of Potrero Hill, said he approached people he knew at Burning Man a year ago, wanting to help the event’s new green goals. "One of the simplest ways to do it was to green up the Man with solar," he said.

Price helped guide the project past the anticorporate sentiments of burners. "A lot of people were afraid that Green Man would spell the end of Burning Man because there was corporate participation," Price said.

Instead, this creative partnership has become a model for the future and a job for Price, who is now executive director of the new nonprofit Black Rock Solar, which aims to replicate the Gerlach project at schools, hospitals, and other public institutions in Nevada and other states.

"We’re taking fiscal capital and social capital and combining them in a way that’s really never been done before," Price said.

John Hargrove, who runs the rebate program for Sierra Pacific Power, agrees the burners have created an entirely new model.

"They’re able to do installations that wouldn’t get done otherwise," Hargrove told the Guardian. "Clearly, they are donating a tremendous value to the project. The Burning Man, Black Rock Solar people are very unique. They’re not in it to make money."

Yet the model they’ve created allows capitalists to make money, albeit at lower returns, by tapping into a universal sense of goodwill and a desire to save the planet.

"We call this not-for-profit work. We’re operating on metrics where we don’t have to make our typical returns," Cheney said, noting that the price points for this project were about 25 percent lower than for a typical big solar project. And he thinks the undeniable public benefits of projects like this will attract more support from powerful players in the public and private sectors.

"It was the right moment in time to do something like this," Cheney said. "It’s one of those good ideas that happened at the right time and has taken on a life of its own."

www.blackrocksolar.org

www.burnerswithoutborders.org

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

A hard line on 55 Laguna

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EDITORIAL In spring 2007, Assemblymember Mark Leno talked to Ruthy Bennett, the point person on the A.F. Evans proposal to build a major housing development on the old University of California at Berkeley Extension campus in San Francisco. Bennett was running into some problems: the site’s neighbors didn’t think the project included enough community mitigations. And Evans was looking for ways to fund a much larger community center and possibly some affordable housing.

Leno was interested in the project in part because it included plans for 80 units of housing for queer seniors. Open House, a local nonprofit, had been trying to find a site for an LGBT retirement complex for some time, and Evans had agreed to make that part of its project. The assembly member had a friendly relationship with the chancellor of the UC, which owned the land, and he told Bennett he might be able to intercede and help reduce the lease amount the UC wanted to charge the developer. Leno brought Sup. Bevan Dufty, whose district includes part of the site, to the meeting.

Leno told us he made some progress: the UC had wanted $20 million, but he talked the chancellor down to $18 million. "With that $2 million, we were able to substantially increase the size of the community center," he said.

But at the same time, UC representatives apparently walked away from the table thinking they had a final, done deal — that representatives of the city and the state had signed off on a price, which was now set in stone. "Unfortunately, UC’s position is predicated on a deal that doesn’t work well for moving this project forward," Sup. Ross Mirkarimi told us. Now that Mirkarimi is demanding greater affordability in the housing — which is largely high-end rentals — Evans is saying it needs a break from the UC, and the UC won’t budge an inch.

And somebody needs to budge, or this deal needs to be scrapped altogether — because it’s not good for the city.

Remember: this is public land that’s been used for public educational purposes for a century. Now the UC and Evans want to turn it into a private, for-profit housing complex. And only a minimal amount of that new housing will be available at a price that’s affordable to the vast majority of San Franciscans.

Of the 420 units, only 16 percent (roughly the legal minimum) will be affordable. None of the 80 LGBT units will be rented at anything but market rates unless Open House can raise the money to subsidize them. That’s not acceptable: building high-end apartments for the rich does nothing to help the city’s housing crisis, and while we agree there’s a need for supportive community housing for LGBT seniors, middle-class and poor queers need a place to retire too — and this will do nothing for them.

The project was on the fast track until state senator Carole Migden squeezed the UC and forced a delay until late January. The city has plenty of leverage here: not only does the site require rezoning, but the supervisors would also have to sign off on a plan to hand over a piece of Waller Street to the developer.

At this point city officials need to take a hard line: either Evans and the UC up the affordability level to, say, 40 or 50 percent and guarantee that some of the senior units will be subsidized, or the project dies. Period.

We agree with the neighbors of 55 Laguna who say the site has been empty for too long, is an eyesore, and attracts crime. It’s 5.8 acres of land in a central part of the city, and it shouldn’t remain a crumbling ghost of a former college. But the UC and a private developer can’t set all the terms here either — and the city can do a whole lot better than the deal on the table right now.

Amending the solar plan

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EDITORIAL San Francisco assessor Phil Ting wants to encourage more city residents and businesses to put solar panels on their roofs. It’s a noble idea, but the legislation he and Mayor Gavin Newsom have proposed needs work.

Ting told us he’s concerned that buying and installing solar panels is too expensive and that the cost is discouraging people from taking these steps toward putting the city on a path to greater reliance on renewable energy. So he’s put forward a two-pronged plan to lower the price: Using funds generated by the sale of Hetch Hetchy power, the city would offer cash payments of between $3,000 and $10,000 to residents and businesses that go solar. Then city bond money would be used to finance the remaining installation costs, and customers could pay back the city over 20 years.

The bond money Ting is eyeing comes from a measure passed more than 15 years ago, after the Loma Prieta earthquake, that makes money available for seismic upgrades to commercial property. For various reasons, including the complexity of the requirements, almost none of the $350 million in that bond fund has been spent, so with the approval of the voters it could be redirected to solar programs.

There are several problems with this approach.

We’re always a little leery of spending public money to benefit private property owners (and let’s remember that almost everyone who owns a home in San Francisco has seen its value increase dramatically in the past few years, despite the market slowdown). And while Ting and Newsom are right that the Hetch Hetchy money doesn’t come directly out of the General Fund, it’s still public money that could be spent on other programs — and the mayor is fighting against a plan to spend more city money on affordable housing.

But global warming and energy independence are important enough that we could live with the cash incentives — if the program were tailored to support community choice aggregation and public power. Instead, in its current draft, the plan would amount to a large incentive for electricity customers to snub the upcoming city program and stick with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. The language of the measure requires that applicants for the incentive program be eligible for a similar state program — but that state program is administered by PG&E and two other private utilities and is available only to their customers.

Starting sometime this year, if all goes well, San Francisco will be in the retail electricity business, competing directly with PG&E. Ting told us he’ll make sure the language is fixed to make the program available to all, but we’d go further: a city incentive program should help the city’s efforts. The first benefits should go to city customers, and they should be tailored as incentives for residents and businesses to stick with municipal CCA power and reject PG&E.

The bond money is problematic too. As it stands, landlords could pass along half of the costs of that money to tenants, many of whom don’t pay their own electric bills anyway and thus would get no benefits. That’s got to go: if the city is going to offer cheap loans to let landlords upgrade their buildings (and thus increase the value of their property), the supervisors shouldn’t pass any measure that sticks tenants with any of the costs.

The city of Berkeley is working on a similar program that seems much more simple: property owners can borrow money for solar panels and pay it back through increased property taxes. Sup. Gerardo Sandoval has suggested San Francisco pursue a similar plan, and Ting and the mayor should take that into consideration.

There’s the kernel of a good idea here — but the supervisors need to make some significant changes to what the mayor and the assessor are proposing before this plan moves forward.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

So you want the heartwarming Christmas story, and it almost happened: A 17-year-old girl in Los Angeles girl was dying of leukemia. She’d received a bone marrow transplant, and for some complicated and unexpected reason, her liver began to fail. The doctors at the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center said she’d die without a liver transplant.

As it turned out, a liver was available and the operation could have gone forward — except that the girl’s insurance company, Cigna, refused to pay. This set off a furor — the California Nurses Association organized a protest, word got out on Daily Kos (thanks to blogger Eve Gittleson), and hundreds of people jammed Cigna’s phone lines, marched in front of company headquarters, and generally made such a stink that after 10 days of delay, on Dec. 20, the insurance giant caved and approved the operation.

But there’s no happy ending here: on Dec. 21, Nataline Sarkysian died. The nurses say that if she’d had the transplant as soon as possible, the outcome might have been different. I’m not a doctor and I wasn’t there, so I’m not going to wade into that one.

Here’s what I’m going to say:

Anyone who thinks it’s possible to reform our health care system while leaving these kinds of decisions in the hands of private, profit-seeking insurance companies needs a transplant of the cerebral cortex.

There are cases like this one all the time — people who suffer because health insurance has become a big business that’s all about the bottom line. It’s not news that these big companies routinely reject valid claims and pay their employees bonuses based on how many people are denied health care.

There is no perfect way to provide health care for the entire population of the United States. Any structure that we create will by its nature be large and prone to bureaucratic snafus. There are always going to be limits on resources and hard decisions: Should an insurance pool cover liposuction for an actor who needs to lose 10 pounds for a starring role? (Probably not.) Should it pay for the same treatment for a morbidly obese person who is at risk of heart failure? (Probably so.) Should an 80-year-old person get a kidney transplant while a 23-year-old is left waiting? (I don’t know; do you?)

But I do know that if you leave those decisions in the hands of people who will make more money if they choose one path, then the path of one of the most important public policy issues in the nation will be selected on the basis of greed. That’s the fundamental flaw in our health care system.

I thought the comments of Rose Ann DeMoro, the head of the CNA, regarding the Sarkysian case were right on point. "Every politician who thinks the answer to our health care crisis is more insurance should stop and think about Nataline Sarkysian," DeMoro said. "Insurance is not care."

That’s exactly what’s wrong with the plan the governor and the State Assembly have passed.

Sure, it’s better to have people insured than uninsured. Universal insurance means fewer people getting very sick and dying for lack of primary care. It means fewer people jamming public hospital emergency rooms. But it doesn’t mean everyone’s going to get adequate or decent medical treatment — not as long as health insurance is in the hands of people who consider it first and foremost a big business.

The Year in Film: Rest in pieces

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Good-bye, movies of 2007, we hardly knew you. Auteurs to ashes, digital to dust. (Oh, wait — Dust is the title and subject of the documentary I’m most hoping to see in 2008.) Because this year brought the last days of some beloved directors (including Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Curtis Harrington), and because United States leaders and moviegoers have endorsed the American tradition of soldiering forward blindly into the future with no memory, it seems appropriate to render this year’s film issue as a memorial.

The past 12 months brought a pair of great films specifically devoted to memorials, Heddy Honigmann’s Forever and John Gianvito’s Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind. Honigmann’s sublime movie is largely set in the famed Paris cemetery Père-Lachaise, where the dead from many countries receive tributes from a world of visitors. Gianvito’s feature pensively visits monuments to US activist heroes and events, finding most of them alone and ignored, some in a state of disrepair. The final moments of Gianvito’s film rally hope, but the discrepancy between these two movies is telling.

This week’s cover stars are Richard Wong and H.P. Mendoza, the director-producer and composer-star of Colma: The Musical. A musical that sings and dances through an amazing and oft-ignored Bay Area zone where the dead outnumber the living by a ratio of a thousand to one, Wong and Mendoza’s movie sparks life from death instead of ignoring mortality. No surprise, then, that its life has been a long one. After more than a year of festival travels, Colma received a national theatrical release in 2007 — a truly rare feat for a no-budget film. It’s just been released on DVD, so now the whole world can come to Colma. (Johnny Ray Huston)

The Year in Film 2007

Johnny Ray Huston’s Top 12
A dozen keepers from 2007
By Johnny Ray Huston

Cinema 2007
Top 10s, rants, and raves from some of our favorites

Tonight we dine in hell
A look back at 2007, for better and mostly worse
By Cheryl Eddy

The other side of the mirror
The year the rock biopic swelled with self-awareness
By Max Goldberg

Cartooning the war
Transformers and 300 turn the conflict into comic book blockbusters
By Kimberly Chun

Things we lost in the theater
Score one for escapism, zero for political reality
By Dennis Harvey

Number nine — with a bullet
At least the fourth-best article ever about the folly of top 10 lists
By Jason Shamai

Western promises
Back from pasture — cinema’s cowboys of 2007
By Jeffery M. Anderson

Beauty lies
A look beneath the surface splendor of 2007’s most haunting documentaries
By Kevin Langson

Year in Film: Johnny Ray Huston’s Top 12

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1. En la Ciudad de Sylvia (José Luis Guerín, Spain). Pure cinema, and perhaps even lovelier than the women it watches and to whom it pays tribute.

2. You and I, Horizontal (Anthony McCall, UK) and Relaxation One and Relaxation Two (Sarah Enid, US). McCall’s installation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was once-in-a-lifetime-visionary; Yayoi Kusama would be wowed. The 3-D new age relaxation videos that Enid made using equipment from a day job at Zeum are similarly brilliant, on one-hundredth of the budget.

3. Agua (Verónica Chen, Argentina). Chen’s poem to male athleticism and study of masculine interiority is breathtakingly immersive, with the best retreating long take of the year. A female answer to Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait on a puny (by comparison) budget — detect a similarity with a number two pick? — it shows instead of tells. But there is a story there, one that’s as shallow as doping in sports and as deep as the pain carried in a body.

4. SpaceDisco One (Damon Packard, US). Heddy Honigmann went to Père-Lachaise, John Gianvito went to dozens of US monuments, and Damon Packard went to Universal City — to surreptitiously film a gorgeously genius, prismatic roller-skating-and-ranting sequel to Logan’s Run.

5. Useless (Jia Zhangke, China). Jia moves out of his comfort zone in this doc study of the lives and lies behind clothing and fashion, making a lovely but self-critical movie that is my favorite of his efforts to date.

6. Song Kang-ho in Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-dong, South Korea). Best actor in the world today? In Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder and The Host and now Lee’s brutal melodrama, Song has played the fool — in three entirely different ways.

7. Forever (Heddy Honigmann, Netherlands) and Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (John Gianvito, US)

8. No Country for Old Men (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, US) and There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, US). Todd Haynes on a top 10 list? Nope, he’s not there.

9. Foster Child (Brillante Mendoza, Philippines) and It’s Only Talk (Ryuichi Hiroki, Japan). It would be great if the Philippines’ Khavn de la Cruz, Lav Diaz, and Raya Martin’s inventive new wave found a place on US screens, but Mendoza’s more mainstream films this year are powerful. Cherry Pie Picache’s awe-inspiring performance in Foster Child (compared to the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder by Tony Rayns, who would know) is matched by Shinobu Terashima’s in a movie that reunites her with Vibrator director Hiroki, who continues to reinvent the women’s film.

10. Glue (Alexis Dos Santos, Argentina). Best teen movie in a long time, and most authentic — in tone and mood — sex scenes. Dos Santos’s movie flirts with the edges of a new generation’s bisexual freedom.

11. Honour of the Knights, a.k.a Quixotic (Albert Serra, Spain). Further proof that Spain’s best movies of the moment are all about more than Pedro Almodóvar.

12. Nightmare USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents (Stephen Thrower, Fab Press). The road to our cemeteries is lined with gore. Where else are you going to find out about The Deadly Spawn? *

Year in Film: Cinema 2007

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COVER STAR RICHARD WONG’S VIEW OF 2007


I feel like I’ve only seen about 10 films this year, so my list would basically be No Country For Old Men, I’m Not There, and Beowulf (two of those movies were painful, they were so aesthetically pleasing — guess which ones). But I’m going to say Paranoid Park was a huge influence on me this year. The risks it took and its loose narrative and utter disregard for convention were extremely inspiring. I saw it in Toronto at a press screening, among all the jabbering sales agents and distribution reps, and it still managed to drop my jaw — despite the guy next to me answering his phone midway through, telling the guy on the other line how "half baked" the movie was. Afterward I talked to a fellow aspiring filmmaker about the film, and he told me how much he disliked it because he thought it was a "mess." Exactly. It feels like a rough cut, only not — a work in progress, but that’s the point. Perhaps that’s why I identified with it so much. Besides, maybe a little messiness is not such a bad thing to embrace right now.

Richard Wong is the director and producer of Colma: The Musical.

JEM COHEN’S FAVORITE MOVIE MOMENT


James Benning’s Ten Skies at New York’s invaluable Anthology Film Archives: with a description like a parody of avant-garde impenetrability ("Ten shots of the sky — feature length"), it sounds daunting. Instead, it was an experience of mysterious joy that brought me back to why movies are entertaining and why seeing them can be so communal. After a few restless, fidgety minutes, both audience and film hit a groove so sublime that I kept laughing with pleasure. Each sky has its revelations and dramas, each viewer "makes" their own film, but in a shared hallucination that filmmakers and venues rarely allow, much less encourage. Sure, we’ve all seen the sky before, but when’s the last time you fell in so deeply and for so long, undistracted yet free to drift, stunned by both the thing itself and the amazing mirror of moving pictures? And I love that Benning says it’s a political film, "the opposite of war."

Jem Cohen (www.jemcohenfilms.com) is the director of Instrument, Benjamin Smoke, Chain, Building a Broken Mousetrap, and other films.

VAGINAL DAVIS’S FLESH FOR LULU: A LETTER FROM TEUTONIA


So glad I live in Berlin as an expat, far away from icky, tired Los Ang, that sad, pathetic film industry towne. When I worked for the Sundance Film Festival in programming I watched what seemed like a zillion of the same kinds of films. This year I created (with the art kollective Cheap) the Cheap Gossip Studio installation as part of the Berlin Film Festival. It was housed in the atrium of the Kino Arsenal. Film historian Marc Siegel brought Callie Angel out to show some rare, seldom-screened Andy Warhol films, as well as Jerry Tartaglia, who restored Jack Smith’s noted oeuvre. I even got to meet my sexy feminist heroine, Jackie Reynal of the Zanzibar movement, and Phillip Garrel, who brought his delicious young thrombone of a son, the actor Louis Garrel.

During the year, I started a new monthly performative series at Kino Arsenal called "Rising Stars, Falling Stars." It featured experimental silent classics from filmmakers like Louis Delluc, Man Ray, and the grandmama of the avant-garde, Germaine Deluc.

A lot of filmmakers send me rough cuts of their new films hoping I will write something on my blog, which gets a million readers a day. I just saw Bruce La Bruce’s allegorical zombie flick Otto; or Up with Dead People, and it’s beyond brilliant, and I am not saying that just because I have starred in Bruce’s other films Super 8 1/2 and Hustler White or because he directed my latest performance piece, Cheap Blacky. I am harsh on my filmmaker friends. I told Bruce that he shouldn’t act in his own movies anymore, just like Woody Allen and Spike Lee shouldn’t act in theirs. I even scolded Todd Haynes that Far From Heaven was overrated, but I adored Velvet Goldmine and his latest, I’m Not There. (Though I can’t stand Cate Blanchett; after seeing her as Queen Elizabeth yet again all I could say was, "Glenda Jackson, Glenda Jackson.")

I watched Superbad twice with the 14-year-old twins of my Cheap Blacky costar Susanne Sachsee, and I even got off on the ‘roid rage of Gerard Butler in the epic 300. No one does brittle white lady like my Tales of the City costar Laura Linney in The Savages. Tony Leung is so elegant and sensuous in Lust, Caution that everyone will want a Chinese boyfriend as the hot new fashion accessory this year. And if Sweeney Todd doesn’t bring back the musical genre, nothing will.

Vaginal Davis (www.vaginaldavis.com), who now lives in exile in Berlin, will be in the Bay Area on March 29, 2008, for the opening of her installation Present Penicative at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; it will also feature her performances "Bilitis — A Lesbian Separatist Feminist State" and "Colonize Me."

DENNIS HARVEY’S ALPHABETICAL DOCUMENTARY TOP 10

1. Absolute Wilson (Katharina Otto-Bernstein, US/Germany)

2. All in This Tea (Les Blank, US)

3. King Corn (Aaron Wolf, US)

4. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (Seth Gordon, US)

5. Manufactured Landscapes (Jennifer Baichwal, Canada)

6. My Kid Could Paint That (Ami Bar-Lev, US)

7. No End in Sight (Charles Ferguson, US)

8. Protagonist (Jessica Yu, US)

9. Romántico (Mark Becker, US)

10. Zoo (Robinson Devor, US)

DENNIS HARVEY’S ALARMING PORN TITLES, 2007 EDITION


All thanks to the Internet Movie Database, without which we would remain in blessed ignorance.

Brad McGuire’s 20 Hole Weekend

5 Guy Cream Pie 29

Abominable Black Man 8

Ahh Shit! White Mama 4

Anal Chic

Apple Bottom Snow Bunnies

Be Here Now

Blondes have More Squirt!

Bore My Asshole 3

Bring’um Young 23

Campus Pizza

Catch Her in the Eye

Even More Bang for Your Buck

Go Fuck Yourself

I Scored a Soccer Mom 3

Old Geezers, Young Teasers

Seduced by a Cougar 4

Swallow My Children

Thanks for the Mammaries

Trantasm

You’ve Got a Mother Thing Coming

Dennis Harvey is a Guardian contributor.

JESSE HAWTHORNE FICKS’S PICKS


1. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, Romania). This debut feature possesses a nonjudgmental flow reminiscent of a Dardenne brothers film as it follows two young women who negotiate for an illegal abortion during the final days of Nicolae Ceausescu’s Communist regime.

2. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, UK/Canada/US). Uncovering the layers of human identity has been a career-long, disturbing theme of Cronenberg’s. But with his most recent films he’s figured out how to deconstruct our psychotic and schizophrenic patriarchal society in a minimal, confrontational manner.

3. Cassandra’s Dream (Woody Allen, US/UK). This minimasterpiece follows the downward spiral of two nice, middle-class brothers (Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell), both of whom loosen their moral codes just to better their lifestyles. Striking camera work (by Vilmos Zsigmond) encloses the characters in an unrelenting nightmare.

4. "Made in America," The Sopranos (David Chase, US). Forever you’ll be able to bust out the statement "What did you think of the end of The Sopranos?" and people will get all lit up.

5. Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach, US). Thanks to audacious writing and powerful acting (especially by Jennifer Jason Leigh), the bittersweet sincerity is pitch-perfect.

6. Californication, season 1 (various directors, US). David Duchovny is alive and hilarious. Creator Tom Kapinos cuts right through our progressive relationship era, devilishly developing each character over 12 episodes. This is heavy-duty stuff mixed with dirty, dirty sex.

7. Year of the Dog (Mike White, US). White brings heartfelt storytelling to his directorial debut.

8. Manufactured Landscapes (Jennifer Baichwal, Canada)

9. The Hills Have Eyes 2 (Martin Weisz, US). This Wes Craven–produced Iraq war allegory deserves more attention than Brian De Palma’s patronizing Redacted.

10. Hostel 2 (Eli Roth, US). Baddie Roth again makes social commentary on America’s xenophobic world colonization by torturing the pathetic children of the apathetic parents who make our lovely world go round.

11. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany). Reygadas updates the transcendental religious overtones of Carl Theodor Dreyer by way of a Mennonite community.

12. At Long Last Love (Peter Bogdanovich, US). Never released on VHS or DVD, this throwback to the musicals of Ernst Lubitsch — featuring Burt Reynolds, Cybill Shepherd, Madeline Kahn, and Eileen Brennan — was dismissed and despised on its only theatrical release in 1975. All of the Cole Porter musical numbers were filmed live, with the actors using their own voices. Not only are these numbers brilliantly executed (inspiring realistic musicals like Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark), but the film also attains the rapid-fire interaction and casual kookiness of late ’30s screwball comedies. Did critics really overlook the fact that this is clever cheekiness? It’s a true treasure that serves as a ’70s time capsule and should inspire future filmmakers to take their chances all the way. It may have taken 32 years, but your time has come, Mr. Bogdanovich. Thank you.

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks teaches film history at the Academy of Art University and curates Midnites for Maniacs (www.midnitesformaniacs.com) at the Castro Theatre.

JAMES T. HONG’S TOP 11, STARTING FROM 0


0. The 70th anniversary memorial of the Nanjing Massacre in Nanjing, China, and especially survivor Xia Shuqin’s reaction to her re-created wartime house, where most of her family was raped and killed by Japanese soldiers.

1. The passing of House Resolution 121 (the "Comfort Women" resolution) on C-Span, July 30.

2. Yasukuni (Li Ying, China/Japan). The power of the shrine isn’t fully captured, but this is the closest an outsider has come to doing so that I’ve seen. All captured on a Japanese mini-DV video camera, in American NTSC.

3. Nanking (Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman, US). AOL + Iris Chang = Woody Harrelson and the Nanjing Massacre.

4. A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila (various, US). The alpha and omega of Asian America. For those with the required assets and skills, Playboy and the Internet can make you, regardless of race, a bisexual American celebrity — the end and a new beginning for all the so-called angry Asian Americans.

5. Summer Special Olympics in Shanghai, China. Globalization was transformed into music by Kenny G during the opening ceremony.

6. Pride: The Moment of Destiny, or Puraido: Unmei no Toki (Shunya Ito, Japan). Finally found a good DVD copy of this, in Canada of all places. This could also be called Tojo: The Hero.

7. Inside the Brookhaven Obesity Clinic (various, US). Pride and Prejudice for the heavyset, on the Learning Channel.

8. Major League Eating’s Thanksgiving Chowdown (various, US). The purest American professional sport and the fall of Japan’s greatest hero, Takeru Kobayashi, on Spike TV.

9. Mock Up on Mu, in progress (Craig Baldwin, US)

10. Blockade (Sergey Loznitsa, Russia)

The works of San Francisco filmmaker James T. Hong (www.zukunftsmusik.com) include Behold the Asian: How One Becomes What One Is, The Form of the Good, Taipei 101: A Travelogue of Symptoms, 731: Two Versions of Hell, and This Shall Be a Sign.

JONATHAN L. KNAPP’S TOP 10


1. Black Book (Paul Verhoeven, Netherlands/Germany/Belgium)

2. Brand upon the Brain! (Guy Maddin, Canada/US)

3. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, UK/Canada/US)

4. I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-liang, Malaysia/China/Taiwan/France/Austria)

5. I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, US)

6. In Between Days (So Yong Kim, South Korea/US/Canada)

7. Makeshift 2007 grindhouse double feature: The Hills Have Eyes 2 (Martin Weisz, US) and Black Snake Moan (Craig Brewer, US)

8. The Wire, season four (various, US)

9. Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

10. Zodiac (David Fincher, US)

Jonathan L. Knapp is a Guardian contributor.

MARIA KOMODORE’S 10 WORST


In addition to bringing some very good movies to the screen, 2007 was also a really good year for bad films. But among them all, these are the ones I feel had lack of intelligence, conservatism, and conventionality on a whole different level:

1. Hitman (Xavier Gens, France/US)

2. Good Luck Chuck (Mark Helfrich, US/Canada)

3. License to Wed (Ken Kwapis, US)

4. The Brothers Solomon (Bob Odenkirk, US)

5. Hot Rod (Akiva Schaffer, US)

6. P.S. I Love You (Richard LaGravenese, US)

7. The Final Season (David M. Evans, US)

8. The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (Jay Russell, UK/US)

9. The Perfect Holiday (Lance Rivera, US)

10. P2 (Franck Khalfoun, US)

Maria Komodore is a Guardian contributor.

CHRIS METZLER AND JEFF SPRINGER’S TOP 10 DOCS


With a very special mention and heavy props for the fantastic TV doc series Nimrod Nation.

1. Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) (Jason Kohn, Brazil/US)

2. Lake of Fire (Tony Kaye, US)

3. Summercamp (Bradley Beesley and Sarah Price, US)

4. This Filthy World (Jeff Garlin, US)

5. A Man Named Pearl (Scott Galloway and Brent Pierson, US)

6. King Corn (Aaron Wolf, US)

7. An Audience of One (Mike Jacobs, US)

8. Crazy Love (Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens, US)

9. Big Rig (Doug Pray, US)

10. Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa (Jeremy Stulberg and Randy Stulberg, US)

San Francisco filmmakers Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer codirected the award-winning documentary Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea (www.saltonseadocumentary.com).

SYLVIA MILES’S TALES OF GO GO TALES


Go Go Tales was filmed at Cinecittà, so I had a location like I did in the ’60s. Cinecittà was thrilling. When the film premiered in Cannes, you would have thought I was the lead from the reviews. What’s her name in the New York Times gave it a wonderful review that got picked up by the International Herald Tribune.

Abel [Ferrara] got mad at Burt Young, who played my husband, and cut him out of the film. Be that as it may, we still managed to keep that story together The irony is that the rap that I do [at the end of the movie] was ad-libbed at 10 o’clock on the last night of filming. I give my all and know that something good will happen.

From what I hear, [Bernardo] Bertolucci is the one who chooses the film from Italy that gets into the New York Film Festival. Because they were renovating Alice Tully Hall, Go Go Tales had one of its screenings at the Jazz Center. It was exciting to look out my apartment window and see the lines of people outside [Frederick P.] Rose Hall waiting to see the movie. People even came to the 4 p.m. Sunday screening. At 4 p.m. on a Sunday they should have been out to tea instead of at that film!

Two-time Academy Award nominee Sylvia Miles has starred in Midnight Cowboy, Andy Warhol’s Heat, Evil Under the Sun, She-Devil, and Abel Ferrara’s soon to be released Go Go Tales.

JACQUES NOLOT’S TOP 10


1. The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akim, Germany/Turkey)

2. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, Romania)

3. The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Germany)

4. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, UK/Canada/US)

5. Le Dernier des Fous (Laurent Achard, France)

6. The Duchess of Langeais (Jacques Rivette, France/Italy)

7. Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, France/US)

8. Water Lilies (Céline Sciamma, France)

9. La Graine et le Mulet (Abdel Kechiche, France)

10. Love Songs (Christophe Honoré, France)

Actor-director Jacques Nolot’s latest film, Before I Forget — John Waters’s second-favorite film of 2007 — will be released theatrically in 2008.

DAMON PACKARD’S TOP 10


I have no shortage of rants about the sad state of cinema. Of the 25,000-plus films released each year, it’s impossible to keep track or be aware of anything above the overrated Oscar contenders or mindless mainstream crap that floods the market. Anything slightly worthwhile not on this list would be a smaller independent (foreign or documentary) film, such as Larry Fessenden’s The Last Winter or The Life of Reilly.

1. Paris, Je T’Aime (various, France/Liechtenstein)

2. No Country for Old Men (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, US)

3. Notes on a Scandal (Richard Eyre, UK)

4. Sicko (Michael Moore, US)

5. Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog, US)

6. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, US)

7. Goya’s Ghosts (Milos Forman, US/Spain)

8. Ratatouille (Brad Bird, US)

9. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (Seth Gordon, US)

10. Death Proof, driving sequences only! (Quentin Tarantino, US)

Damon Packard (www.myspace.com/choogo) is the director of SpaceDisco One, Reflections of Evil, and other films.

JOEL SHEPARD’S TOP 11


1. Bug (William Friedkin, US)

2. The Kingdom trailer (Peter Berg, US; editors Colby Parker Jr. and Kevin Stitt)

3. Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (Wang Bing, China)

4. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany)

5. Into the Wild (Sean Penn, US)

6. An Engineer’s Assistant (Tsuchimoto Noriaki, Japan)

7. Saw IV (Darren Lynn Bousman, US)

8. "Made in America," The Sopranos (David Chase, US)

9. The Pastor and the Hobo (Phil Chambliss, US)

10. You and I, Horizontal (Anthony McCall, UK)

11. Kara Tai in the Front and the Back (Bangbros.com, US)

Joel Shepard is the film and video curator at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

MATT WOLF’S TOP 5


1. Following Sean (Ralph Arlyck, US). Thirty years after making a legendary short film about Sean, the lawless four-year-old son of Haight-Ashbury hippies, filmmaker Arlyck reconnects with his subjects. The result is the most complicated study of baby boomers and their kin ever made.

2. Artist Statement (Daniel Barrow, Canada). Winnipeg artist Barrow uses an old-school overhead projector and layers of transparent drawings to create manual animations with music and live narration. His second US performance brought to life his imaginative, queer, literary, and delicate personal manifesto.

3. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/France/Austria). Apichatpong’s latest radical narrative film focuses on a rural Thai hospital and its inhabitants. Among its meditative episodes is an unresolved love story between a female physician and an orchid farmer.

4. Real Housewives of Orange Country (various directors, US). Bravo’s reality television program about a contrived community of rich middle-aged women living in Coto de Caza is unexpectedly compelling. Because their lives are so boring, there’s nothing left to explore in this show except their complex emotions.

5. Zodiac (David Fincher, US). Crushworthy Jake Gyllenhaal, genius cinematography from legend-to-be Harris Savides, and incredible reconstructions of a beautiful and scary San Francisco in the 1970s.

Matt Wolf (www.mattwolf.info ) is the director of Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell (premiering at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival) and Smalltown Boys.

Miette Confiserie

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REVIEW To the casual consumer the difference between a genuine candy store and the checkout aisle at Walgreens is a small one. For others, however, the sweets palate is discriminatory indeed and will only be satisfied by the very best. Both can find a home at Miette Confiserie.

Walking into the store is like walking into a childhood fantasy. There are trees made of gumdrops, huge jars full of brightly colored treats of all types, and even a cotton candy machine. The staff are as sweet as the wares, and the prices for bulk candy are more than reasonable if you don’t insist on stuffing yourself diabetic. Some of the chocolate bars are as expensive as $30, but they’ve come halfway around the world and are pretty big. On the other end of the financial spectrum, there are individual bite-size treats like caramels and torrone for as little as 25¢ a morsel.

Most important, there’s a wall dedicated entirely to black licorice, which is kind of like the zany, crystal-gazing aunt of the candy family — she smells good, but nobody can quite gather the courage to talk to her, because she looks a little intimidating. Miette, however, manages to demystify black licorice, making it accessible — desirable, even, after you’ve scarfed down a few free samples.

No doubt about it, Miette accomplishes its goal of making candy even more fun than it inherently is. Willy Wonka, watch out.

MIETTE CONFISERIE Mon.–Sat., 11 a.m.–7 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.–5 p.m. 449 Octavia, SF. (415) 626-6221, www.miette.com

Year in Film: Tonight we dine in hell

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

Ah, 2007: as of this writing, the five top-grossing movies of the year were three-quels (Spider-Man 3, Shrek the Third, and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End), a chunk of Harry Potter’s golden calf (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix), and the world’s flashiest ad for eBay (Transformers). That the biggest box office hit (Spidey raked in more than $336 million) was also the biggest disappointment is only fitting in a year that was characterized by new heights of hype. Did anyone really like 300 beyond its campy and mockable aspects, or did they just think they liked it because the Internet told them to?

I’ll admit I’m crabby, but I’m a victim of hype as much as anyone else. (The trailer for Iron Man and hell, even just the poster art for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull are making me greet 2008 with giddy anticipation.) I probably saw more than 300 movies (including 300) this year, many from the Tinseltown factory — a place that saps originality, force-feeds us things like fat suits and the Rock, and still leaves us frantically panting for more. And when I say us, I mean me. But although the overriding trend for 2007’s mainstream movies was mediocrity and there’s a feeling as December ends that the past 12 months were full of a whole lotta nothing, there were also some thematic similarities worth noting. (Note: there might be some spoilers here, so if you’ve been eagerly awaiting Death Sentence‘s cable debut, you’ve been warned.)

BUNS IN THE OVEN As I noted in my Juno review ("Birth of a Sensation: Ellen Page and Juno," 12/12/07), that film, combined with Waitress and Knocked Up, made 2007 the year the ever-popular celebrity-baby trend jumped from the pages of US Weekly to the big screen. In Waitress an unhappily married small-town gal is impregnated by her surly hubby; she soon falls for the hunky new guy in town, who happens to be her doctor. In Knocked Up a hot, mysteriously single TV reporter decides she’ll pop out the kid of a one-night stand she can barely stand to look in the eye. And in Juno a tart-tongued high schooler — in a family way after an experimental dalliance with her best friend — plucks her kid’s adoptive parents from the PennySaver. Each of these films have unique moments: Keri Russell’s Waitress postbirth epiphany; Knocked Up‘s awkward baby-on-board sex scene; and Juno‘s simple acknowledgement of the fact that abortion is a safe, legal option for women who find themselves unprepared for motherhood. By contrast, check out Romanian import 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, opening in early February 2008. A harrowing look at the illegal abortion trade in that country’s Communist 1980s, it well earned the top prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and contains nary a hamburger phone.

WESTERNS First the pirate movie made a comeback, and now we’ve got all kinds of westerns filling up our eyeholes — including the year’s best film, No Country for Old Men, a contemporary spin on the genre that imagines the Wild West as not just a place but a state of mind. More cut-and-dried was 3:10 to Yuma, which featured good guys, bad guys, shoot-outs, stagecoach robberies, and some seriously old-school hat fetishizing. Harder to classify: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a hypnotic, arty, lengthy study of the western myth from within the myth. The title characters — portrayed in great turns by Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck — are neither heroes nor villains, but rather men with guns and very few morals, those they have applying to loyalty, decency, and respect for human life. In short, fascinating.

SCREAMING FOR VENGEANCE It’s true, I’m a Charles Bronson fanatic who has often and loudly praised the wonders of the Death Wish films, including my personal favorite, Death Wish 3. So I anticipated the double-decker revenge sandwich of Death Sentence and The Brave One with a certain gruesome glee. Too bad neither movie really rocked it. Death Sentence — directed by Saw‘s James Wan and starring Kevin Bacon — went the distance by offing women and (oh god, no!) children. The Brave One offers a few pleasures, namely that scene on the subway in which Jodie Foster pops a guy for, basically, getting up in her face. Mostly, though, both films spent way too much time showing how their protagonists felt after committing acts of violence: fear, guilt, elation, excitement, or otherwise.

True vengeance films don’t bother with that shit — they start with a grievous act (in Death Wish 3 it’s the senseless killing of Bronson’s military buddy, whose biggest crime is living in a crummy neighborhood overrun with cartoonish gang members) and move right into the payback’s-a-bitch phase. Cops who secretly support the good work of heavily armed vigilantes are also a traditional staple; I don’t think Terrence Howard’s sad-eyed, Foster-followin’ Brave One detective really qualified. I can see updating the vengeance film for these more sensitive times, but — wait, no I can’t. Vengeance films with morals bad. Who needs ’em?

OH YEAH, THAT WAR THING You know when you turn on the news, and you see that story that was on yesterday, and last week, and last year too, about that business going on in Iraq? Wait, you don’t watch the news? Nah, neither do moviegoers, who didn’t give two poops about movies with Iraq war themes (I’m including everything from In the Valley of Elah to The Hills Have Eyes 2 here). I suppose if Blades of Glory can’t heal a broken nation, neither can Paul Haggis.

HORROR IS DEAD I almost forgot about The Hills Have Eyes 2 until I typed it above. There was no singular horror sensation this year, or even a really good sleeper, like 2006’s The Descent. Other releases that underwhelmed the horrorati: 1408, Resident Evil: Extinction, 30 Days of Night, Halloween, The Reaping, Vacancy, 28 Weeks Later, and Saw IV (already in the works: Saw V). As usual, the best horror films were in limited release (The Last Winter) or foreign — spooky Spanish thriller The Orphanage, which pays homage to Poltergeist among others (including The Others), hits theaters Dec. 28.

THE MAGIC NUMBER? This was the year of third sequels, some already mentioned above, of which only The Bourne Ultimatum did anything interesting. The slate for 2008 is pretty much locked in — this time next year, Avatar! — and it’s choked with a fair amount of sequels. Batman, Hellboy, Harry Potter, the Mummy, Indiana Jones, James Bond, Rambo, the Narnia kids, and the Star Trek crew are all poised to lead you back into butter-flavored temptation. Now, I don’t think the fact that a film is a sequel automatically means it will suck: I’m willing to sit through just about anything, because no matter how much crap I see, or how many films start off great and veer horribly off course (here’s lookin’ at you, I Am Legend), I never give up hope for the movies. And if that makes me no better than one of 300‘s digitally enhanced Spartans facing certain doom, so be it. See you next year! *

CHERYL EDDY’S TOP 10

1. No Country for Old Men (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, US)

2. Grindhouse (Robert Rodriguez, Eli Roth, Quentin Tarantino, Edgar Wright, and Rob Zombie, US)

3. Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, France/US)

4. I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, US)

5. Zodiac (David Fincher, US)

6. Superbad (Greg Mottola, US)

7. The Wizard of Gore (Herschell Gordon Lewis, US, 1970) with Lewis in person, Clay Theatre, Nov. 2

8. Mister Lonely (Harmony Korine, UK)

9. Control (Anton Corbijn, UK/US/Australia/Japan) and Joy Division (Grant Gee, UK, 2006)

10. SpaceDisco One (Damon Packard, US)

Year in Film: The other side of the mirror

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Is defining I’m Not There the same thing as defending it? Todd Haynes’s kaleidoscopic antibiography of, to quote the tagline, "the music and many lives of Bob Dylan" has inspired all sorts of platitudes since it premiered at the Venice Film Festival, so many that it’s hard not to feel late for the party only a few months after. Still, the fact remains: from listening to Biograph cassettes in the backseat of my mom’s car to reading Greil Marcus’s visionary accounts of The Basement Tapes and "Like a Rolling Stone," I’ve had Dylan on my mind, always prepared to apprehend another side of him.

It’s hard not to feel privileged watching I’m Not There as both a Dylan enthusiast and a cinephile. You can read it between the lines of an erudite review like J. Hoberman’s — didja catch the references to Suze Rotolo and Masculine Feminine? So then, a solipsistic designation for a solipsistic movie: I’m Not There is a catalog and a critique, a hall of mirrors, multivalent and prismatic, like Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983) turned inside out. It is epigrammatic rather than evocative, and made to be written about.

It is also a twisted kind of biopic, something worth noting with everyone from Ray Charles to Scott Walker getting the treatment. The fad for music biopics and documentaries isn’t unrelated to the tendency toward remakes and tie-ins now apparent everywhere in the entertainment business. Only a couple of years after Walk the Line and Ray, some biopic conventions are already brittle enough to encourage both a throwaway parody like Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and a hardcore dissertation like I’m Not There (the films have more in common than you might think). Haynes takes the biopic’s tendency toward flashback-reliant storytelling, for instance, and transforms it into a looping, fractured portrait. Name-dropping is the biopic’s natural territory, but Haynes’s esoteric (Moondog in the opening credits) and cryptic (it’s alright, Ma, it’s only Ritchie Havens) references only add to his film’s foggy rendition.

This is as it should be with Dylan, the singer who at the tender age of 22 began a protest song with the lyric "Oh my name it is nothing, my age it means less." The feedback loops produced by the film’s strategy of quotation and fragmentation work to elucidate Dylan’s critical velocity, the way his different eras seem both terminal (the electric Dylan played by Cate Blanchett is shown in a morgue, and there are intimations that other versions of him are dead too) and porous. Where other music biopics seek to ground a singer’s aura in terms of biography and motif, Haynes runs in the opposite direction, prioritizing an abstract organizing principle like that of D.W. Griffith’s innovative 1916 foray into multiplanar cinematic storytelling, Intolerance.

It should be noted that Weinstein’s ad campaign pointedly undercuts Haynes’s game. Dylan only materializes twice — in text during the opening credits and in person for the movie’s final, mesmerizing close-up — but the I’m Not There poster lists the main cast with the misleading line "All are Bob Dylan."

Blatant Oscar pandering? Perhaps. But what does it say that some of my favorite sequences in I’m Not There are the most conventional? Haynes accesses the "romantic" Dylan of Blonde on Blonde–New Morning–Blood on the Tracks with an interesting Russian-doll trick — Heath Ledger’s Robbie Clark is introduced as an actor portraying Jack Rollins (The Times They Are A-Changin’ Dylan, played by Christian Bale) in a biopic within the biopic titled Grain of Sand. With the exception of an Arthur Rimbaud insert, Robbie is the only Dylan facsimile who never plays a guitar, and this makes sense since the Dylan of "I Want You," "Shelter from the Storm," and "Idiot Wind" always seemed more man than musician. Meanwhile, Robbie’s thorny relationship with Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) provides I’m Not There with some desperately needed warmth. A François Truffaut–ish meeting in a diner, a montage of bohemian New York, and a divorce in the late-day light of the Richard Nixon era: they’re all strands of a singular story, which is exactly what I’m Not There is not.

I felt fully prepared to dig Haynes’s panoply, and after seeing the movie three times I’m pretty sure I do. In its constant double-edged critiques and heady invocations of the nonexistent, I’m convinced the film represents one of the most energetic (and perhaps cathartic) directing performances of the year. And yet something’s lost in I’m Not There‘s reshuffling of the biopic deck. Dylan has indeed spent much of his career putting us on, but this is only one part of his impact, with the other more elemental component encompassing the sound of his voice, the exciting bite of his phrasing, and the lightning crack that opens "Like a Rolling Stone."

These sparks of electricity are, after all, the kind of thing rock biopics were made for. The brute power of cinema is such that with a Dolby soundtrack, heavy close-ups, and a gliding camera, even the hammiest dramatization can achieve moments of rock ‘n’ roll bliss. Insofar as Anton Corbijn’s portrait of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis (Control) prizes re-creation over fragmentation, it might fairly be seen as the polar opposite of Haynes’s broken mirror. Corbijn takes the biopic conceit of mimicry to dizzying, self-aware heights thanks to location shooting, a performer (Sam Riley) who learned to match Curtis’s every twitch, and brilliant cinematography evocative of Corbijn’s own iconic photographs of the band.

Control is very good, with excellent acting and convincing performance scenes (two things that go a long way toward making a satisfying rock biopic), though it fails where biopics typically do. Indeed, it’s always a bad sign when a voice-over is introduced more than an hour into a movie. As Curtis shuts down, Corbijn flails to unpack the singer’s psychology, and the voice-over contrivance only fudges the moment of Curtis’s maximum anguish. Still, there is at least one unforgettable scene here — when Curtis stalks the street toward his day job, the soundtrack raw with punk, a graceful camera turn revealing the back of his jacket, emblazoned in chalky white with the word "HATE" — that offers the euphoric, sexy blast that is so often lost in I’m Not There‘s complex din.

There are other forms of music biopic, including the kind that’s genuinely happy to take liberties (see: 8 Mile, Almost Famous). Kurt Cobain about a Son sounded like an interesting experiment on paper, with a soundtrack culled from Michael Azerrad’s late-night interviews with Cobain jutting up against lyrical images from the Pacific Northwest. But the film is ultimately soured by its unresolved discrepancies (it’s hard to make out what such self-consciously pretty images are doing running under Cobain’s gravely, often vitriolic voice-over) and its discussion-ending lack of original Nirvana music. Cobain relates his thrill at hearing "Love Buzz" on college radio for the first time, and we listen to … Iggy Pop?

What does it say about Cobain’s legacy that both cinematic attempts at his life (the other being Gus Van Sant’s evocative 2005 Last Days) have been narrated from such a remove? For one thing, that the slightest morsel of Kurt is good enough to buy distribution. The parade continues, leading one to compile a wish list of future biopic subjects. Arthur Russell, maybe, or perhaps Nina Simone? Cat Power, a.k.a. Chan Marshall, is certainly building toward a good one with all of those onstage breakdowns behind her, and I’d like nothing better than for Haynes to take an honest crack at Karen Dalton or Judee Sill. What of Big Star, John Fahey, Tropicália’s icons, Elizabeth Cotten, Galaxie 500 (directed by Andrew Bujalski), or the Mamas and the Papas? And won’t someone think of poor Donovan, patiently waiting his turn ever since being put down by you know who in Don’t Look Back? *

MAX GOLDBERG’S BAKER’S DOZEN

ON BEAUTY


•<\!s>Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, US/France)

•<\!s>Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany)

•<\!s>En la Ciudad de Sylvia (José Luis Guerín, Spain)

•<\!s>Boarding Gate (Olivier Assayas, France)

•<\!s>In Between Days (Kim So-yong, US/Canada/South Korea)

REMNANTS OF THE REAL


•<\!s>Useless (Jia Zhangke, China)

•<\!s>My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, Canada)

•<\!s>V.O. (William E. Jones, US)

•<\!s>The Unforeseen (Laura Dunn, US)

NERVOUS NIGHTMARES


•<\!s>Zodiac (David Fincher, US)

•<\!s>Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, UK/Canada/US)

•<\!s>Black Book (Paul Verhoeven, Netherlands/Germany/Belgium)

•<\!s>No Country for Old Men (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, US)

Year in Film: Cartooning the war

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

Oh! What a lovely war! At least that’s the overall tone of the most popular movies reflecting our current conflict, surge, or however we’re marketing it this week as it conveniently combusts so far from all of the happy $3.50 a gallon gas-guzzling Best Buy shoppers, out of ear- and eyeshot on the other side of the world.

Moviegoers have been avoiding Iraq’s realities in droves — this much the producers of The Kingdom, Lions for Lambs, In the Valley of Elah, Redacted, and others can attest. This year Americans liked their war with a good dose of comic book fantasy and clearly fictitious spectacle, their tongues teasing the CGI-enhanced teat, preferably attached to the too perfectly uniform six-pack abs on one of those hunka-hunka-burning-Spartan tough-love monkeys in 300.

While Grindhouse‘s bio-experiment rogue troops were banished to fiscal limbo, Hollywood blockbusters like 300, Transformers, and even Beowulf — stemming from comics, toys, and cartoons and steeped in the stuff of a distended childhood — turned out to be the only way Americans would swallow warfare. Fusing digital animation and live actors to produce spectacles that would have made Cecil B. DeMille reach for his next merchandising tie-in, those hit movies tacitly acknowledged the war we’re in and offered candy-colored, action-packed escapism for the inner fanboy and fangirl. Six years into the war on terror, we can’t feel good about imminent outright victory; hell, even the most fervent right-winger realizes, in his or her reptilian back brain and in the dark of the multiplex, that the real-life shoot-’em-ups are depressingly, futilely, infuriatingly misguided. But we still want our war to be a great ride — despite the fact that ambiguous reality finds a way of inserting itself into the metal-crushing, knuckle-skating mise-en-scène.

Picking up the air of suicide-mission doom suffusing 2006 Oscar contender Letters from Iwo Jima, 300 started the year with blood-spattered, heroic fatalism. Like Beowulf and even the tongue-in-cheek Transformers, the Zack Snyder–directed epic, based on a graphic novel by draconian edge maven Frank Miller (Batman: The Dark Knight Returns), self-consciously frames its narrative — and its uses as propaganda — from the start by revealing the bard or narrator telling the tale. Here the story is recounted for the distinct purpose of leading the Spartans into battle against the Persians.

Miller may have penned the original comic in the late ’90s, yet it’s hard to read 300 as anything more than emotionally skilled, cinematically compelling, and blatantly racist support for a US invasion of the country most associated with ancient Persia, Iran — little surprise that Javad Shangari, a cultural adviser to Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, described 300 as being "part of a comprehensive U.S. psychological warfare aimed at Iranian culture," according to Variety. Certainly, stereotyping is nothing new in the realm of the sword and the sandal, and 300‘s Spartan heroes are pale faced and peppered with accents from throughout the United Kingdom (though not the evilly aristocratic upper-crusty tones pushed by Romans of yore) — a case for multiculturalism and inclusiveness they ain’t.

The film, however, firmly positions these "free" people versus the dark-skinned "slaves" of the Orient, holding their noble defenses against the dusky masses. According to 300, it may be futile to battle the hordes of the Persian empire — tellingly, an imperial array of warriors from Asia and the Middle East that resembles a mindlessly blood-thirsty "It’s a Small World After All" — but dying a good death and fighting for one’s supposed freedom is the right and noble path to take. Freedom is a word that’s bandied about repeatedly here and in Transformers, but it’s obviously the privilege of a select Darwinian few.

Snyder resorts to the ignorant and offensive tact of visually equating the forces of evil and darkness with the dark skins of the Persian forces. And the empire’s pierced, proud, and power-hungry leader Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) — painted as perverse and ensconced in a polymorphic harem — comes off as a fetishy freak next to the Spartans’ King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) and Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey), who are fiercely straight (judging from Leonidas’s odd and likely historically inaccurate disparagement of bookish Athenian "boy lovers") and, by implication, straight shooting and Spartan-soldier tough. Which isn’t to say there aren’t vulnerabilities in the Spartan armor: Leonidas and his too meticulously CGI-embellished troops live and die by standards that doom the weak and disabled, and when a rejected Spartan hunchback is denied entry into their ranks, the scene is set for their final destruction, one that rhymes with that of Toshiro Mifune’s Japanese Macbeth in Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 Throne of Blood.

Able-bodied elite fighting forces take an even more artificial turn with Transformers. Though its production was aided and abetted by the US armed forces, preening military hardware in displays that rival those of the alien robots, the movie nonetheless exhibits a conflicted relationship with warfare that reflects the mood in the country. At moments its scenes precisely echo the visuals of those ubiquitous "Army of One" recruitment commercials; at others it reveals a wariness of its very exhibitionism. It’s no marvel that director Michael Bay (Pearl Harbor, Armageddon) can ape those ads as adeptly as a ‘bot can mimic a sports car: in early 2006 he wrote on the MichaelBay.com forum, "The military looks like it is going to support the film, which is a big deal in giving the movie scope and credibility. The Pentagon has always been great with me because I make our military look good."

In keeping with that two-way support system and setting Transformers clearly in the Persian Gulf, Bay applies a veneer of salable heroism to his scenes of military machinery in action by battling the nefarious Decepticons and hastily dabs a quick layer of humanism on an identifiable, multilingual, and diverse clutch of everyday grunts. Jon Voigt’s defense secretary makes his share of wrong moves, but he’s no Donald Rumsfeld. This is likely Bay’s most successful film, thanks to the self-mocking humor of the script, which extols the bond between "man and machine." After all, he knows and we know Transformers is all about toys — our hardware versus their hardware — and what makes them go, a.k.a. energy — whether it’s the magical, Energizer Bunny envy-inducing all-spark cube or that oil the film’s military is battling over when it isn’t strafing robots.

The question is, who is to be trusted? Intriguingly, the Decepticons hide in plain sight on Earth by assuming the guise of US Air Force jets, Army tanks, and police cars, while the good Autobots change into civilian big wheelers, trucks, and cars. If a car makes a man, the machines in Transformers are giving out conflicted signals. *

KIMBERLY CHUN’S POP TOPS

•<\!s>Most valuable hair: Javier Bardem’s do in No Country for Old Men (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, US)

•<\!s>Most versatile player: Christian Bale in I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, US), Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog, US), and 3:10 to Yuma (James Mangold, US)

•<\!s>Thug life: Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, UK/Canada/US) and American Gangster (Ridley Scott, US)

•<\!s>Horrific kicks and sick twists: Grindhouse (Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, et al., US), Black Sheep (Jonathan King, New Zealand), Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright, UK/France), The Host (Bong Joon-ho, South Korea), Sicko (Michael Moore, US),

•<\!s>Geek love: Rocket Science (Jeffrey Blitz, US), Eagle vs. Shark (Taika Waititi, New Zealand), Superbad (Greg Mottola, US)

•<\!s>Little love: Control (Anton Corbijn, UK/US/Australia/Japan), Broken English (Zoe Cassavetes, US)

Year in Film: Things we lost in the theater

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The economy: Apocalypse Now — or at least soon. Iraq: No End in Sight. Israel: "Putting Out Fire with Gasoline (Theme from Cat People)." China, in its role as the principal backer of our colossal national debt: I Spit on Your Grave. Our president: National Lampoon’s Permanent Vacation.

In 2007, as life increasingly resembled lurid or delusional fiction, movies stepped up to the social-responsibility plate and started presenting a franker version of reality.

That is, the movies nobody saw.

The ones everyone did see, in quantifiable box office terms, were Spider-Man 3, Shrek the Third, the third Bourne and Pirates flicks, a fifth Harry Potter, and … Transformers. In other words, movies whose major reference points are other movies, comic books, and video games. (The Bourne films are refreshingly low-CGI, but they offer only a pretense of institutional critique.) If most multiplex patrons’ level of caring or knowledge about international and domestic politics was turned into a film, it could be titled Whatever-Man 3.

The summer — that silly season of things blowing up and boob jokes — is likely to spread even wider across the calendar henceforth, because this fall and winter offered serious year-end awards-bait stuff, and nobody wanted it.

Europeans have branded this the best year for United States cinema in a long time. But the ambitious, uncompromising two-and-a-half-hour-plus dramas released late in the year — 1970s ambling-epic throwbacks such as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Into the Wild, and There Will Be Blood — are against-the-wind efforts. Even intelligent dramas wrapped in easy-access thriller form, like Eastern Promises, Michael Clayton, Zodiac, Rescue Dawn, and Gone Baby Gone, have attracted few takers. (You could deem the long, self-important American Gangster an exception, were it not so derivative. Check out Larry Cohen’s 1973 Black Caesar.)

Commercially speaking, this fall’s glut of somber dramas — including Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Things We Lost in the Fire, Reservation Road, We Own the Night, and Lions for Lambs — collapsed like a row of dominoes. Their failure was variously blamed on an overcrowded marketplace and being pushed prematurely off screens by the latest CGI extravaganzas. Several of them just weren’t good, but even the best expired quickly.

Two films likely to face off for Academy Awards, No Country for Old Men and Atonement, have drawn larger numbers, though in their different ways neither has much to say about the world we live in now. No Country turns a minor Cormac McCarthy novel into a major Coen brothers effort that’s still just a great genre piece at the end of the day. Atonement turns a brilliant Ian McEwan novel into a sumptuous Merchant-Ivory-like affair, muffling the book’s bitter heart.

Every movie that did try to wrestle with our extremely precarious, morally compromised place in the scheme of things basically tanked. Maybe that’s less surprising than the fact that so many filmmakers actually got to make works dealing in one way or another with the current American realpolitik, if only on the relatively neutral, empathetic trickle-down level of grieving military spouses (Grace Is Gone), traumatized soldiers readjusting to civilian life (Home of the Brave), or World Trade Center widowers (Reign Over Me).

The Crash crowd shunned scenarist Paul Haggis’s much better (though not politically daring or even pointed) second film as director, In the Valley of Elah. It fictionalizes a real-life case (Iraq vet Richard Davis’s 2003 murder), as did Brian De Palma’s Redacted, drawn from a 2006 incident in which several US soldiers gang-raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and then killed her entire family. An atrocious movie because of its ill-chosen mockumentary form, loutish tone, and garbled message, Redacted ironically attracted widespread notice due to the loud protestations of Bill O’Reilly and other conservative pundits who proclaimed it treasonous. They didn’t say it was fraudulent — as Republican saint Ronald Reagan once told us, "Facts are stupid things."

Despite the lure of Angelina Jolie and the publicity stumping of her producer–spouse–love slave Brad Pitt, Michael Winterbottom’s more overtly fact-based A Mighty Heart — about kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl’s murder by Pakistani jihadists — got no audience love. Ditto Rendition, with America’s sweetheart Reese Witherspoon as another agitating spouse with a missing husband, this one an Egyptian-born US citizen imprisoned and tortured by the CIA on dubious terrorism charges.

That the year’s better feel-bad dramas didn’t take off despite their star power is disappointing, if not unexpected. But it truly depresses that Charles Ferguson’s No End in Sight, the year’s best documentary — and arguably best movie, period — failed to break out despite universal raves. This engrossing, incendiary, genuinely balanced chronicle of how the George W. Bush administration destroyed and betrayed Iraq — and probably doomed everyone to a general fucked-up-ness only global warming might trump — doesn’t even bother indicting the reasons we attacked in the first place. It’s busy enough simply detailing the arrogance and ineptitude that have turned our supposed reconstruction of the nation into a lit match hovering beside the tinder of pissed-off former allies worldwide.

No End in Sight should have been a must-see that marshaled voter-taxpayer opposition to the freaks in the seats of power. It should at least have ignited as much enthusiastic outrage as An Inconvenient Truth and Fahrenheit 9/11. But it was an intended bombshell that landed like a softball on Astroturf.

There are a few more politically charged movies in the pipeline, notably director Kimberly Peirce’s first feature since Boys Don’t Cry, Stop Loss. But given the commercial cold shoulder such films have received lately, what can we expect from a post–writers’ strike Hollywood that will be looking to restore its brief income slowdown as safely as possible? Gems like Norbit, Because I Said So, Bratz, Good Luck Chuck, Daddy Day Camp, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, Halloween, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, License to Wed, Saw IV, and Wild Hogs — not to mention the three- to fivequels. Even when those movies bombed, they landed softly enough (often redeemed by profitable DVD releases) to affirm the wisdom of sticking to strict formulas.

Escapism: good. Wholesale obliviousness: better. Will there be a 2010 equivalent to 2007’s finest narrative flick, The Assassination of Jesse James (estimated cost: $30 million; domestic gross: $3 million, despite a career-best Brad Pitt)? Not likely.

DENNIS HARVEY’S ALPHABETICAL NARRATIVE TOP 10

1. Adam’s Apples (Anders Thomas Jensen, Denmark)

2. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, US)

3. Colma: The Musical (Richard Wong, US)

4. Gone Baby Gone (Ben Affleck, US)

5. Grindhouse (Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, et al., US)

6. Lars and the Real Girl (Craig Gillespie, US)

7. The Last Winter (Larry Fessenden, US/Iceland)

8. Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach, US)

9. Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy, US)

10. Ten Canoes (Rolf de Heer, Australia)

Year in Film: Number nine — with a bullet

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There is something pretty silly, it seems to me, about knocking the concept of the top 10 list. Not in the way that it’s silly to knock year-end awards and nominations, which is kind of like taking the bold position that Joseph Stalin was a prick. No, top 10 lists, being the choices of individuals (sort of — I know I at least can be easily influenced), are not nearly worthless enough for that. What’s silly about knocking them is that doing so requires a denial of the fact that clearly, at some point in human evolution, we were hardwired to appreciate the level of informational tidiness that corresponds to the top 10 list, a smart little package that says unequivocally, "Here’s the deal right here. Now leave me alone." It may not be the best feature of our nature, but by God, it’s ours.

Also silly is the strange assumption that the author or the reader of the top 10 list attaches more importance to it than to the body of considered criticism the writer has composed during the other 364 days of the year. Oftentimes authors knock their lists in their introductions, probably to preempt any charges of presumptuousness or reductionism.

And yet I’m always disappointed when an anticipated top 10 shows up unburdened by commentary, the critic bowing out of delivering some cleverly wrought statement of the obvious. As much as I love the tidy little lists, it is this by-product, this fuzzy mold of qualification growing around the tradition, that, for me, is the real joy of the annual verdicts.

For an undertaking so often characterized by noncritics as arrogant and autocratic, criticism is awfully well saddled with caveats and contingencies, and there are certainly no shortage of self-directed smirks. I used to be terribly impressed by all of this mutinous talk about fuzziness, the perennial anti–top 10 two-step around the idea of inherent artistic worth. But although I’m certainly no less a fan of these pieces than I ever was, I find that these little rebellions tend to lose their sense of urgency as they continue to accumulate. The more of them there are, the more it seems like knocking top 10s is its own charmingly musty, imperfect tradition.

There are a variety of ways to knock the top 10. The safest and probably most respectable is to accessorize such a list with a self-effacing wink, as in this barely registered sigh from a Village Voice blog: "Most of us labor under the delusion that people actually care about what we think, that people will painstakingly scrutinize our top-ten lists and judge us accordingly." (My falsely modest sentiments exactly.) This low-stakes approach can lose respectability, though, with the addition of uninspired aggression, as in Anthony Kaufman’s kvetch from a 2005 top 10 that Indiewire.com apparently bullied him into writing: "As I have written before, I believe the process of creating a top 10 list is a fickle pursuit. And ranking films is even more slippery. But in our hierarchical America’s Next Top Model world …"

I hope I’m not sounding snide — I really am a fan. And I don’t want to imply that I think the list-making practice is (exclusively) onanistic. It is, after all, a key component of the system of checks and balances that tempers an artwork’s rise to historical indestructibility. But I will say it’s the element of solipsism in top tennery I’m attracted to, the peek into the part of the critic’s brain that isn’t worrying about the legacy of the films (I never trust all that crusading rhetoric) so much as just getting it right in his or her own head. All of this refining and complicating what it means to produce something so straightforward as a list feels to me like the critic at play. There’s almost a meditative quality to it.

In 2004, Louis Menand wrote an enjoyably snotty New Yorker article about the absurdity of year-end list making, a piece that is practically a list itself of the list maker’s crimes. It bats at the tradition like a toy mouse, playing the game by proudly working out the rules: "In a mass-market publication, a movie list should contain one foreign-language film that few readers have heard of…. Conversely, in an "alternative" or highbrow publication the movie list needs one blockbuster — one film the critic liked despite the fact that everyone else liked it."

This stuff is like the wrapping paper that ends up being way more interesting than the actual gift. I do get excited over the lists, and I do find them extremely helpful in a limited way, but after about 20, I hardly register them and instead head straight for the disclaimers.

Of course, Menand’s piece is hardly self-effacing. It’s closer to the carnivorous end of the spectrum, where the critic doesn’t worry too terribly about the value of listing itself and is primarily interested in pouncing on the bountiful stupidities the activity has incubated. The takedowns of other critics’ opinions are part cultural quality control, part self-serving bullying, and just good clean fun all around.

You can see all three shining through in one of this year’s early and distinguished offensives, carried out on the blog of one of my favorite film sites, Reverse Shot. (The main page can be pretty ornery, but something about the blog brings out the John Simon in the writers, causing them to rip into people with a wit that’s almost pathologically cruel. Their readers regularly tsk-tsk them in the comments section.)

The Reverse Shot attack was directed at Richard Corliss, who’d pretty much painted a target on his face by writing in Time that Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, number three on his list, is the finest film ever made by a black director. "That’s right," Reverse Shot crows, "the ‘finest film … by a black director’ (note: NOT ‘black American’) is the third best movie of the year behind No Country for Old Men and The Lives of Others. Sorry Spike Lee and Ousmane Sembene, you’ve made some good movies, but nothing quite as good as The Lives of Others." A quality blow, though I have to say the same syllogistic scrutiny would likely topple the logic structures of plenty of worthier top 10s than Corliss’s — you can almost see how the whole concept of the top 10 could be discredited with a simple mathematical proof.

In previous years Corliss has also had to put up with smart-ass crusader S.T. VanAirsdale, who’s made a name for himself over at the Reeler site — both for quality control and for bullying — with his annual "Top 10 Top 10s" list, in which he compiles the year’s most inane examples. It’s been a hoot of a bloodbath the past couple of years, and it should be again (no doubt Corliss will make the team in ’07 too — there was a lot to observe in his Time piece). This year’s list wasn’t posted by press time, but VanAirsdale has written that he’s already prepared to take on "the high tide of hype that washes out entire habitats of superb cinema built throughout the year — and start the clean-up." Hyperbolic and a touch messianic, yeah, but the man gives me something to look forward to when I’ve reached my list threshold, so he can go ahead and have himself a little complex as far as I’m concerned. It’s funny, though, that we have opposing metaphors for all of this list talk. He thinks of it as cleaning up, while I see it as reestablishing the mess.

A wise reader of top 10s already knows this mess is implied and doesn’t need all of the attendant eye rolling. But we don’t need Christmas, either.

JASON SHAMAI’S TOP 10

To avoid condemning syllogisms, the order of the following list is scrambled, and only I have the code. Even the alternates could have been number one. Also, I couldn’t think of a whole lot of movies this year that didn’t bug me at least part of the time, so here is a highly unsatisfying, subjective-like-you-know-your-momma-is (and yet still surprisingly safe) list of what would be the best films of 2007 if I were allowed to have a go at them with my Windows Movie Maker.

1. No Country for Old Men (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, US) Minus Javier Bardem’s weirdly praised performance of the same old "enigmatic," blaringly quiet psychopath, and the mariachi band, and the unhelpful car thing at the end.

2. Blade Runner: The Final Cut (Ridley Scott, US) Minus the tonally jarring bits of the score.

3. 12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania) Minus the reminder of its elusive transatlantic travel buddy, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, still unseen and waiting to be loved.

4. Away from Her (Sarah Polley, Canada) Minus the roles of Marian and the ultrainformative staffer, the lame "clusterfuck" joke, and Gordon Pinsent’s sweater.

5. Superbad (Greg Mottola, US) Minus the stuff that wasn’t as funny as the really funny stuff.

6. 28 Weeks Later (Joan Carlos Fresnadillo, UK/Spain) Minus Planet Terror‘s having already killed off zombies this year with a helicopter blade, diminishing with its curatorial kitsch a set piece that was shocking and beautiful.

7. Zodiac (David Fincher, US) Minus Chloë Sevigny’s reprisal of every 2-D role in Hollywood calling for a disapproving, killjoy wife.

8. I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, US) Minus the Heath Ledger–Charlotte Gainsbourg Blood on the Tracks strand (see Chloë Sevigny above), the performance of Marcus Carl Franklin, and the vague, uneasy feeling that the movie didn’t really need to be made.

9. Red Road (Andrea Arnold, Australia) Minus the closure.

10. Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, US) Minus nothing.

Alternates

• The Simpsons Movie (David Silverman, US) Minus everyone’s requirement that it be as brilliant as the show once was.

• Once (John Carney, Ireland) Minus the shitty music.

• A Mighty Heart (Michael Winterbottom, US/UK) Minus the uncomfortable politics of making such a movie.

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