Arts & Culture

Arts & Culture

Assassination character

-
0
Assassination character

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Starting in the late 1960s, it was noted that Hollywood no longer necessarily required actors who were conventionally handsome. Dustin Hoffman, George Segal, and others were hailed as representatives of a brave new system in which the idiosyncratic character actor of another generation could now be the star. This was an oversimplification, given that the movies had already made room for the likes of Lon Chaney, Humphrey Bogart, and Bette Davis, among others who wouldn’t be considered conventionally beautiful. Nonetheless, the cult of beauty remains a huge factor in movie stardom — even more so now that we live in an era where the principal cinematic heroes are primarily superheroes of one sort or another, defined by their physical perfection.

Nevertheless, sometimes sheer, striking talent forces someone into the front ranks without their having the benefit of looking like a former model. A case in point is Michael Shannon, who has simply been too intense to ignore in movies since at least 2006’s Bug — through indelible performances in Revolutionary Road (2008), Take Shelter (2011), TV’s Boardwalk Empire, last month’s Mud, and more. He’s such a Method-y changeling that it’s hard to believe he’s six-foot-four — he’s so often, so effectively shrunken himself to play flawed men whose souls are in danger of being shrunken further by irresponsible actions.

He’s pretty much the whole show in The Iceman, about a real-life hitman who purportedly killed over 100 people during his career. Despite some scarily violent moments, however, Ariel Vromen’s film doesn’t show much of that body count — he’s more interested in the double life Richard Kuklinski (Shannon) leads as a cold-blooded killer whose profession remains entirely unknown for years to his wife, daughters, and friends. The waitress he marries, Deborah (Winona Ryder), isn’t exactly a brainiac. But surely there’s some willful denial in the way she accepts his every excuse and fake profession, starting with “dubbing Disney movies” when he actually dupes prints of pornos.

It’s in that capacity that he first meets Roy Demeo (Ray Liotta), a volatile Newark mobster impressed by Kuklinski’s blasé demeanor at gunpoint. He correctly surmises this guy would make a fine contract killer, and his offer does seem to strike a chord. Telling Deborah he’s now an investment banker, or some such, Kuklinski upgrades their lifestyle to suburban comfort on a mafia salary. When he has a falling out with Demeo, he “freelances” his skill to collaborate with fellow hitman Mr. Freezy (Chris Evans), so named because he drives an ice-cream truck — and puts his victims on ice for easier disposal.

For the sake of a basic contrast defined by its ad line — “Loving husband. Devoted father. Ruthless killer.” — The Iceman simplifies Kuklinski’s saga, making him less of a monster. His wife said he frequently beat her, though here the marriage is portrayed as fairly idyllic. You can see why Ryder’s Deborah might choose to overlook so many gaps in her husband’s alibis — Shannon makes Richard someone whose stern dedication to murder can also be applied to the roles of spouse and father. Woe betide anyone who insults his family, as one pool hall loudmouth finds out early on.

The movie only briefly suggests Kuklinski’s abused childhood, and it omits entirely other intriguing aspects of the real-life story. But Shannon creates a convincing whole character whose contradictions don’t seem so to him — or to us. It’s an unflashy performance, everything reined in, very tightly wound, such that you’d never imagine this actor could be loose or funny — though that’s exactly what he is in Mud. Shannon isn’t yet 40, and while there are plenty of actors whose bags of tricks leave little room for surprise, one suspects this guy couldn’t repeat himself if he tried.

 

THE ICEMAN opens Fri/17 in Bay Area theaters.

Joyful noise

-
0
Joyful noise

arts@sfbg.com

LIT If the intrinsic value of an ephemeral experience is its very impermanence, then attempting to capture it for posterity is an exercise fraught with peril. No sanitized textbook description of such chaos-driven movements as Dada, Situationism, and Fluxus could ever hope to capture the raw vibrancy of being a part of the action, and the true value of such movements has really never been in spectating, but from the transformation experienced by the participants while pushing their personal boundaries.

With that caveat in mind, the gorgeously-rendered, scrap-and-patchwork anthology Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society (Last Gasp, 300 pp., $39.95) does a pretty good job of conveying not just the external hi-jinks of a group bound together by a yen for the unpredictable, but also the internal philosophical trajectory of many of its members.

Designed to resemble a hardbound EC Comics collection, boldly adorned with a zombie-green, six-fingered hand further deformed by the presences of a bloodshot, unblinking eye smack in the middle of its lined palm, Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society is a collaborative effort between key cacophonists Kevin Evans, Carrie Galbraith, John Law, and, in a sense, the whole of the multi-faceted, loosely-knit “society” which ebbed and flowed through the secret pathways and deep underground spaces of the Bay Area and beyond from 1986 through the mid-aughts.

The comprehensive yet quirky tome gathers together an abundance of flyers, photographs, descriptions of momentous pranks and experiential escapades, and newspaper columns documenting such shenanigans as a Thomas Pynchon Walking Tour; the bunker-squatting “Atomic Café”; bridge-climbing; sewer-spelunking; art-car parades; a hide-and-chase game of “Smuggler” at Fisherman’s Wharf; and a rowdy afternoon of shopping cart sled-racing known as the Urban Iditarod. Strewn with colorful collages of ephemerabilia designed by Galbraith and brightly illustrated “Cacophony Factoids” by Evans, the densely-layered visuals bear a whiff of the cheerfully Dada-tastic aesthetic of counter-culture classic The Book of the SubGenius as well as the Cacophony Society’s own former newsletter of events, Rough Draft.

Birthed from the relatively short-lived but highly influential prankster cadre the Suicide Club, which operated from 1977 to 1982, the Cacophony Society itself has “spawned” a veritable pantheon of offbeat occurrences such as SantaCon, the Bay to Breakers Salmon Run, and that bloated megalopolis of arts festivals, Burning Man. In fact, it’s difficult to imagine a San Francisco without the insidious influence of an organization dubbed “the Merry Pranksters of the 1990s.” Even organizations and events (local and national) not specifically born of the society such as Improv Everywhere, Atlas Obscura, the Yes Men, and the Maker Faire bear its imprint: a sense of irreverence combined with a belief in the possible.

“There wasn’t anything that we could think of that we couldn’t figure out how to do,” reminisces Galbraith — who is notably the original instigator of the organizations’ iconic, unmediated Zone Trips (which came to include the first expedition to Black Rock Desert with Larry Harvey’s “man” in tow). This sentiment is echoed by Evans when asked his opinion on the key traits shared by cacophonists, “curiosity, creativity, a deep appreciation of the absurd and the silly, [and] an addiction to making something from nothing”.

Although the idea of a book about Cacophony had been floated around as early as the mid-’90s, it wasn’t until Evans called a meeting between some of his former cacophony comrades in 2010 that the idea began to take a concrete shape. A Bay Area-based fine artist and illustrator, Evans came to the meeting with an already thought-out concept for a “visual history” of the Cacophony Society, and though most of the other people at that first meeting decided against participating, Galbraith, who has a master’s degree in book arts, jumped onboard, eventually spearheading the layout and working most closely with publisher Last Gasp on the final incarnation.

Joining the project soon after Evans and Galbraith got rolling, John Law — a founding member of the Cacophony Society, and a long-time member of the Suicide Club before it — brought his extensive archive of flyers, newsletters, and more to the mix, and, with Galbraith, provided much of the written content. In the end the grueling, three-way editorial process became less about finding enough material for a book, but whittling all the available material down to 300 pages, a process Law likens to lopping off fingers.

“We could have compiled a thousand-page book without repeating anything, or becoming dull,” he muses ruefully by email. “My hope is that others who were involved will write their own books about the period.”

Until that happens, however, pranksters, subversives, free spirits, and urban explorers alike will want to go ahead and splurge on a copy of The Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society. And remember, though now technically defunct, the society has always been open to all. You may already be a member. *

TALES OF THE SAN FRANCISCO CACOPHONY SOCIETY

Thu/16, 7pm, free

City Lights

261 Columbus, SF

www.citylights.com

 

Sun/19, 6pm, free

Green Apple Books

506 Clement, SF

www.greenapplebooks.com

For more readings and related events, including a May 31 party at the Castro Theatre, visit www.lastgasp.com or www.talesofsfcacophony.com.

Psycho beach party

-
0
Psycho beach party

emilysavage@sfbg.com

TOFU AND WHISKEY Why don’t more surfers listen to surf music? I found myself in one of those fuzzy-eyed, web-based black holes, frustrated, rhetorically asking the question through the endless prism of social media a few months back. And furthermore, why don’t surfer-musicians play authentic surf rock? While the sound was born in Southern California in the early 1960s, most of the early musicians who incorporated it weren’t active participants in the sport for which it was named, save for Dick Dale. The oft-repeated story is that Dale wanted to reflect the sounds he heard in his mind while surfing. And around that time, Santa Ana, Calif. based guitar-maker Fender even ran ads with beach babes and the tag “Fender makes music to surf by.”

But in the past few decades at least, the more prominent surfer-musicians seem to mostly vacillate between producing pop-punk, reggae, or more commonly, your ubiquitous, folky, banana pancake-loving Jack Johnson boredom block.

Tom Curren is in an elite class, a world champion surfer and son of legendary big-wave rider Pat Curren, he’s an athlete who took all his souped-up energy, and left his sport to pursue…folk rock. He released first album In Plain View in March.

During an ancient ritual in which I participated last week — that would be my honeymoon on Oahu — the bus drivers, tour leaders, cabbies, and general friendly tourist industry folks kept offering up slice-of-life songs for our listening pleasure. You like music? Well, get a load of this beach-ready sound. Cue soft rock (Hawaiian-born) Jack Johnson, or, the late Honolulu singer-ukulele musician Israel “Iz” Kamakawiwo’ole. We heard Iz’s “Somewhere Over The Rainbow/What A Wonderful World” medley no fewer than 15 times in seven days. I asked my husband, who grew up surfing on the Central Coast, what was up with the surfer/surf rock divide and he quietly responded, “I’ve never participated in surf culture, I have no idea.”

When I returned to work this week, I asked local surf musician Donald Bell of Aloha Screwdriver a similar question, and he shut it down more academically, “I can’t speak for surfers. I don’t surf. I grew up skateboarding. I don’t know a single one of our fans who surf. What’s funny is that our biggest fans live in the gloomiest climates. We have a bunch of fans in Seattle.” He added, “I think that Californians have a kind of cultural cringe when they hear surf music, because it’s the kind of thing that always gets played in the background whenever a California beach scene is shown on TV. It can feel cliché. But once you get outside of California, that baggage tends to disappear and you get treated like an exotic import.”

Bell got it though, what I was after. I wanted the explosive electric guitar of Dale and the Trashmen, the wet noodling power of ’90s revival acts like Phantom Surfers and Man Or Astro-Man?, or powerful throwback shock of Guantanamo Baywatch or Trashwomen (those last two, by the way, will play the Burger Boogaloo fest July 6-7 in Oakland). OK, so Hawaii wasn’t technically the place to find the thriving surf rock stuff; if I’m being fair, I knew the style I desired wasn’t based there. Plus, I didn’t exactly plow through underground punk shows while visiting, being buried deep in the sand and fruity alcohol-based beverages and all.

So maybe it doesn’t matter if professional surfer-musicians are out there playing the music of their cultural ancestors, there’s still an avid fan base.

A week earlier, the husband and I walked down the aisle to the Ventures, “Walk Don’t Run” (“Pipeline” was considered but ultimately dismissed). See, this was the music I grew up loving. The vroom-vroom-vroom of wild guitar riffs, heavy reverb, Eastern scales, rapid and escalating drumming peaking, crescendoing, wiping out. Proto-beach punk.

“People forget that before the Beatles hit, surf music was once pop music in this country. Right now, pop music is very focused on a synthetic sound, but everything comes back around,” Bell says.

And there will be a fix of the good stuff nearby this weekend, at radio station KFJC’s Battle of the Surf Bands benefit (Sat/18, noon, $10, all ages. The Surf Spot, 4627 Coast Hwy., Pacifica. www.kfjc.org). Bell’s Alameda-based trio will play the yearly event for the second time. And the 16-band battle also includes Beachkrieg, Deadbeats, Mighty Surf Lords, Tomorrowmen, Frankie and the Pool Boys, Meshugga Beach Party, and more surf acts with cheeky names. The event benefits the station itself, and also will be broadcast using Live Cam.

Given that it does often feel like a maligned art form, the abundance of traditional surf bands participating every year at KFJC’s event (now in its sixth year) seems surprising.

“There are probably more surf rock groups in the Bay Area than any other location in the world,” Bell says, naming off many that will play the battle, and beyond. “A lot of that has to do with the continued support of KFJC and DJs like Phil Dirt and Cousin Mary who really championed the genre…I formed my first surf band when I was 16, and Dirt brought us into the studio to play live on the air for 30 minutes. It was crazy to have that kind of outlet. It’s unheard of.”

Now in his early 30s, Bell has continued to play in surf bands with his musician friends from high school — drummer Steve Slater and bassist Grant Shellen. They grew up together in Fremont and that’s where they formed that first band: Chachi, Boba Fett and the Wookiee. Bell says he initially found the genre through the surf revival acts of the ’90s like the Phantom Surfers and Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, but then, once he was hooked, he tumbled backward toward the Ventures, Link Wray, the Shadows, and of course, Dale.

Aloha Screwdriver began in ’09, and the trio plays all instrumental music. “Sometimes it veers into rockabilly or like a Ennio Morricone spaghetti western vibe, or even like a Disney Haunted Mansion feel, but I’m always holding our songs up to this idea that they could carry a Tarantino-worthy action sequence.”

 

MYRON AND E

Listen to Myron and E’s single “If I Gave You My Love” and you’ll start to feel some involuntary movements, your head bouncing in agreement, shoulders shimmying side to side. It’s the nature of the solid gold soul beast. The duo was recently signed to tastemaker Stones Throw, and will release newest album Broadway, backed by Timmion Records house band the Soul Investigators, on the label July 2. With a handful of 45s already out there, the two — Bay Area bred Myron Glasper and Eric “E da Boss” Cooke — have successfully maneuvered an authentic soul sound that’s at once smooth and celebratory (with the help of some well-placed horns). The duo, which met on tour with Blackalicious, stops by Berkeley this weekend for the East Bay Soul Stomp 2. With Bang Girl Group Revue, New Love Soul Revue, DJ Derek See, DJ Der.

Sat/18, 8pm, $9–$12. Starry Plough, 3101 Shattuck, Berk.www.starryploughpub.com.

 

BLACK PUS

The first thing you need to know about Black Pus is that it’s just a looping Brian Chippendale — he of Lighting Bolt fame. For this project, the madman drummer (and forever art-school kid at heart) uses percussion, a triggered oscillator, and those echoing, distorted Lightning Bolt style vocals you’d expect. Most tracks sound like a spaceship lifting off and exploding into starry darkness, repeatedly. With CCR Headcleaner, Reptilian Shape Shifters.

Sat/18, 9:30, $10. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com.

 

Take it all off

-
0
Take it all off

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER In the downstairs den of her Noe Valley home, director Vidhu Singh and her cast are rehearsing some of the opening scenes in a madcap and punchy satirical revue making its US premiere at the Brava Theater this week. In the center of the room, to the driving beat of some irresistible Eastern pop, an MC (played by veteran improv actor-teacher Mick Laugs) introduces the diverse ensemble in the manner of a runway fashion show, as each character parades to the front of the stage to strike a pose in her or his burqa — because, female or male, just about everyone wears a burqa in this play.

Especially in this domestic setting, the whole project seems a good-natured and relaxed affair. At the same time, it’s impossible to ignore the charge that comes with the satirical appropriation of this politically fraught piece of clothing, or miss the serious intention behind every comical line and gesture. For all its campy humor, Burqavaganza is a defiant piece of political theater — and, it turns out, a critique of much more than an embattled piece of female attire.

Written by award-winning Pakistani playwright, journalist, and human rights activist Shahid Nadeem, Burqavaganza sends up authoritarianism and extremism at large, the burqa becoming a byword for various public masks and ideological certainties thrown around by both sides in the tangled “war on terror.” The word itself is woven obsessively into the dialogue like a ubiquitous fabric, its constant iteration — including in names and titles — making for a comical punctuation that sounds more and more absurd as time goes on. By the end, “burqa” becomes a nonsense word, burbling on the surface of an irrational state of affairs churned by deeper interests and forces that otherwise go unnamed.

First produced in Lahore by the Ajoka Theatre Company — co-founded by Nadeem and wife Madeeha Gauhar (the play’s original director) — Burqavaganza was quickly banned by the Pakistani government after complaints from women members of a fundamentalist political party. That has not stopped it being mounted in various provinces of the country, however. As for its US debut, director Singh thinks it has something to offer local audiences beyond just entertainment.

“It seems to me that people want to talk about issues, but they don’t have a way of addressing the debate about the burqa; and the play does that using humor and satire. That makes it very accessible. It humanizes the characters while highlighting the debate,” Singh says. “I think the divide between the West and Islam is so sharp. The play tries to address both sides of the divide. On the one hand, it offends conservative Muslims, who think basically you’re making fun of the burqa. On the other hand, it’s also a critique of the West and the US’s attitude toward Islam, and parodies the war on terror. So it sort of offends people on both sides — and it’s funny, so it works.”

Positioning itself somewhere between Islamist extremism and Western imperialism, Burqavaganza critiques both from the ground of human dignity and respect for human rights. Such principled critique is more widespread throughout Muslim-majority countries than many here in the West might suspect, according to human rights lawyer and author Karima Bennoune, whose new book, Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism (forthcoming from W.W. Norton), is a far-flung firsthand survey of artists, intellectuals, and activists across the Muslim world combatting Islamist extremism in the cultural realm. Among the artists she profiles are Nadeem and Guahar. (In fact, she adapts her title from a line in another Ajoka Theatre play, Bulha). Bennoune says Ajoka has proved more outspoken in their critique of Muslim fundamentalism “than many liberal circles or diaspora populations in the West dare to be.”

“What is perhaps most remarkable is that the Ajoka Theatre Company debuted this play, complete with its satire of burqa-obsessed extremists, in Pakistan in 2007, as political violence was on the rise — and only about a month after the nearby killing of the 36-year-old Punjab minister for social welfare, the women’s rights advocate Zil-e Huma Usman,” says Bennoune in a recent email correspondence. “Her murderer said she was not sufficiently covered in her shalwar kameez [a traditional South Asian dress]. As I write in my book, the real ‘Burqavaganza’ was right there, just outside the theater door.”

For all its humor and high spirits, Burqavaganza has the potential to provoke questions as well as debate among the Bay Area audiences who come to see it. But that, enthuses Bennoune, is all to the good.

“The importance of a production of this kind in the US now after the Boston bombings — when there is still such a limited space to offer a sharply critical yet non-discriminatory response to the terrible mentality that accompanies jihadism — cannot be overstated. After all, as Nadeem reminds us, ‘We all live in a Burqavaganza.'”

BURQAVAGANZA

Through June 2

Opens Thu/16, 8pm; runs Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm, $20

Brava Theater Center

2781 24th St, SF

www.brava.org

 

Fair play

-
4
Fair play

arts@sfbg.com

VISUAL ART It’s art fair time again. Last year there were three, this year there are only two, though it looks like artMRKT, which is taking over now defunct SF Fine Art Fair’s slot at Fort Mason, has pretty much absorbed the former’s area galleries. ArtPadSF, the more festive of the two fairs, will again be renting out all the rooms at the Tenderloin’s Phoenix hotel. (Both fairs run Thu/16-Sun/19). I can’t help but wonder, will there be synchronized swimming again in the pool this year?

>>View a slideshow of our fair picks here

Say what you will about whether or not art fairs are a reasonable way to actually engage artworks in a serious way (read: they’re not), they do offer exposure to people that are worth knowing more about. With that in mind, here’s our locals only guide to Bay area artists — some emerging, some established — whose work you can catch at the fairs.

 

ARTPADSF

Andrew Benson, Johansson Projects

Benson’s sometimes gooey, sometimes crunkly digital video/experimental software work breathes some ragged, frenetic energy into the standard trope of “relationships between the body and technology.” His piece is scheduled to be projected from the Phoenix onto the six-story building next door at 8pm, Thu/16-Sat/18.

Justine Frischmann, Unspeakable Projects

Frischmann’s paintings look like something that one of those spiders on Benzedrine would make. If it lived inside an Etch A Sketch. And used neon spray paint. During a dust storm. Trust me, these are compliments.

David Hevel, Marx & Zavattero

Hevel makes collaged sculptures and sharp pop abstract paintings, usually riffing on American celebrity. His work at the fair will be very MTV 1983.

Scott Hove, Spoke Art

Will Oaklander Hove be showing one of his intensely drugged up fanged wall cakes, a knotted rope work installation, or a surrealism-on-meth painting? Yeah, it all sounds good to me, too.

Jason Kalogiros, Queen’s Nails Gallery

Kalogiros makes edgy, dense, cerebral, photo-based works, lately by manipulating found commercial images. I’m hoping to see a couple from his series of Cartier and Bvlgari watches.

Ed Loftus, Gregory Lind Gallery

Loftus does photorealism pretty much the right way, by marrying intense attention to detail with an obsessive and neurotic subject matter that crawls under your skin ever deeper the more time you spend with it. While you’re in Gregory Lind’s space, also check out Thomas Campbell and Jovi Schnell.

Matt Momchilov, Unspeakable Projects

Momchilov queers punk and rock fandom in the traditional sense of the word, meaning his paintings and sculpture snatch and redirect standard accoutrements of punk fanboys and girls to point that hardcore laser focus in new directions and at more fey subjects.

Gregg Renfrow, Toomey-Tourell

I won’t blame you one bit if you try to lick Renfrow’s luminous, vibrating color field abstractions. His meticulous, precise, wondrous paintings are like visual everlasting gobstoppers, and I fully expect that by the time I see ’em, they’ll have a layer of saliva all over.

Jonathan Runcio, Queen’s Nails Gallery

Runcio makes incisive 2 and 3D work that takes traditional hardedge abstraction in the art concrete vein, shacks it up with remnants of urban architecture, and has a post-formalist lovechild.

www.artpadsf.com

 

ARTMRKT

Johnna Arnold, Traywick Contemporary

The fair’s Collector’s Lounge will be showing Arnold’s video created to accompany the richly saturated, haunting landscape photos that will be showing offsite at the gallery.

Carol Inez Charney, Slate Contemporary

Charney’s complex photographs were the single most outstanding thing I saw last year at ArtPad. That’s complex like a personality, not like your taxes. A year later, I’m prepared for the brainfreeze again.

Amanda Curreri, Romer Young

Curreri’s precisely conceived conceptual color and abstract works are subtle in that they tend to yield only small nibbles at first pass, but they’re deceptive that way, and usually end up smacking you around by the time it’s all over.

Lauren DiCioccio, Jack Fischer Gallery

DiCioccio has recently been applying her super-meticulous needlework to fastidiously x-ing out individual letters in pages of books, as an act of both scrutiny and physical redaction of the received, mediated world.

Joshua Hagler, Jack Fischer Gallery

Somewhere in the Hamptons summer home where Glenn Brown and Lucian Freud are renting with Mark Tansey and Matthew Day Jackson, Hagler is stoned on the couch making fart noises with his armpits. That is also a compliment.

Claire Rojas, Gallery Paul Anglim

Sure Gallery Paul Anglim shows Barry McGee, but I’ll be looking at the Rojas paintings, whose hard edge and off-kilter abstractions of interior architectural spaces are spot-on and mesmerizing.

Diane Rosenblum, Slate Contemporary

Rosenblum switches up hyperanalytical and conceptual works that incorporate research, crowdsourced interactions, and photography. I’m hoping to see images from a series of recent photos that work Flickr comments into the image.

Dana Hart Stone, Brian Gross

I can’t wait to examine Hart Stone’s paintings up close, which in the past have been made by repeatedly transferring or printing antique images in rows onto canvas. Also at Brian Gross are Bay Area stalwarts Roy de Forest and Robert Arneson.

Esther Traugot, Chandra Cerrito

Traugot combines found organic objects with crochet. I know what you’re thinking, but this is not a Portlandia skit. She does it the right way, promise.

www.art-mrkt.com/sf

Crazy sexy cruel

-
0
Crazy sexy cruel

FILM Long before VHS demon Sadako glared one eye through a tent of tangled black hair in 1998’s Ring (American viewers may switch that to “Samara” and “2002”), another angry, swampy-coiffed dame was doing her best to scare the bejesus out of ticket buyers. The year was 1825, and the kabuki play was called Yotsuya Kaidan. Ghost Story of Yotsuya, the 1959 version of that oft-filmed tale — which contains visual motifs made famous by J-horror — kicks off the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ titillatingly-titled “Girls! Guns! Ghosts! The Sensational Films of Shintoho” series (Thu/9-May 26).

Exploitation specialist Shintoho is often described as “the Japanese American International Pictures,” with output likened to Roger Corman’s oeuvre. The comparison is apt, what with the overlapping timelines (Shintoho was active from 1949-1961) and shared love of low-budget productions chockablock with daring, sleazy, violent, racy, and otherwise beyond-the-mainstream themes. Most of the films in “Girls!” are under 90 minutes, and a good portion of them are even shorter. Ghost Story of Yotsuya, directed by prolific Shintoho hand Nobuo Nakagawa, clocks in at a pulse-pounding 76 minutes.

It opens on a kabuki stage, with a macabre song hinting at what’s to come: “the greatest horror there is,” we’re warned, is “the fury of a woman maddened.” Though it takes nearly an hour to get to payback o’ clock, that allows plenty of time to pile up just cause: sleazy samurai Iemon woos pretty, naive Iwa (played, respectively, by studio faves Shigeru Amachi and Katsuko Wakasugi) after killing her suspicious father and shoving her sister’s beau over a waterfall. Unsurprisingly, he makes for a cruel, manipulative husband, using his wife for gambling collateral and feeding her “medicine for your circulation” once a younger, richer girl captures his attentions. The poison does a Phantom of the Opera-style number on Iwa’s face before hastening her death. “I will visit my hatred upon you,” Iwa’s pissed-off ghost declares, and boy, does she — no VCR required.

More cranky spirits populate Ghost Cat of Otama Pond (1960), which leans heavily on (blood) red and (supernatural) green lighting effects to weave its tale of, again, revenge from beyond the grave. This time, it’s revenge so patient it waits generations to cause havoc, cursing a contemporary woman who stumbles into an abandoned house when she and her fiancé keep tracing the same route through the woods in a Twilight Zone-ish frame story. (Pro-tip: maybe don’t declare, “I hate cats!” when you encounter one with witchy powers.) A flashback to centuries prior explores a feud between two families that encompasses forced marriages, haunted hairpins, horrific fires, bodies tossed in the titular pond, and a monster that takes on an oddly feline form.

Of course, not all of Shintoho’s films were period-pic screamers. A trio of black-and-white “Girls!” selections embrace pulpy, seedy, noirish characters and situations. Nakagawa’s Death Row Woman (1960) begins, ominously, as a posh family goes duck hunting. (“You could kill a person!” someone remarks of another character’s shooting skill.) Rebel daughter Kyoko (Miyuki Takakura) doesn’t want to marry the man her father has picked out for her — but her stepmother and stepsister are none too pleased with Kyoko’s own choice, for different reasons. When Daddy Dearest suddenly croaks, it’s a death sentence for Kyoko — who is actually guilty only of being shrill pain in the ass. Lightly lascivious woman-in-prison scenes (this isn’t 1983’s Chained Heat or anything) are followed by a daring, Fugitive-style escape, though ain’t nobody getting justice without suffering through a vat full of melodrama first.

Even more entertaining are the two films in “Girls!” directed by Teruo Ishii: 1958’s Flesh Pier and 1960’s Yellow Line. Both make great use of back-alley characters, with fedoras and fishnets to spare. Flesh Pier‘s action is set in Ginza, as an undercover cop who’s in love with a burlesque dancer investigates the city’s “trade in flesh;” also undercover is a female reporter hoping to get a big scoop on same. (This film contains a fashion-show scene in which nightie-clad models smoke cigarettes on the runway.) Meanwhile, Yellow Line follows a moody hitman (Amachi again) who kidnaps a dancer (a sassy Yoko Mihara) and drags her to Kobe’s red-light “Casbah” district, with her newspaper-reporter boyfriend in hot pursuit. (This film contains a hooker named “the Moor,” played by a white actress in blackface.)

Not available for preview, but likely as mind-blowing as any and all of the above: Michiyoshi Doi’s The Horizon Glitters (1960), described as a “black comedy about a prison break gone wrong;” Toshio Shimura’s 1956 Revenge of the Pearl Queen, about a bodacious, ass-kicking female pearl diver played by Michiko Maeda (a.k.a. “the first Japanese actress to appear in a nude scene in a mainstream film” … this film); and Kyotaro Namiki’s Vampire Bride (1960), in which a scarred young dancer transforms into a horrific, hairy beast. If a picture says a thousand words, the widely circulated still from this film positively shrieks them. 

 

“GIRLS! GUNS! GHOSTS! THE SENSATIONAL FILMS OF SHINTOHO”

May 9-26, $8-10

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

www.ybca.org

Nice builds

-
5
Nice builds

marke@sfbg.com

STREETS ISSUE “Oh, we’re doing pretty well right now,” a hunky contractor with Cahill Construction said with a wink at a chic party a couple weeks ago. He was referring to the building boom that’s hitting SF, its slender cranes teetering across our skyline like a stilettoed bacherorette party drinking its way down Polk Street. In terms of new build, 2010s SF is the new 1990s Berlin (somebody wrap our Reichstag, already). And while some of the design is surprisingly gorgeous, and we thankfully haven’t fallen yet for too much trendy starchitect stuff, a lot of it is a bit perfunctory to say the least. For a region that produced visionary architects from A.G Rizzoli to Ant Farm (and the often gorgeous infrastructure of your personal computer), you’d think we could push beyond stacked glass boxes lined in travertine and looming USB-like forms a tad more.

Practicality intrudes, of course, and while we wait for this, one of the richest and most creative places on earth, to develop a contemporary street vernacular to replace those awful ’90s SoMa live/work lofts, there’s a lot of loveliness hitting our streets, This year’s American Institute of Architecture SF Awards, which took place April 25, were abuzz with great, recently completed projects that focused on ground-up design that was practical, sustainable, inventive, and just plain neato. Here are a few winners that caught my eye, mostly because I had seen them in action on my weekly walks through the city and beyond. Their worth a closer look on your own jaunts. (See more winners at www.aiasf.org.)

RICHARDSON APARTMENTS

Designed by David Baker + Partners (snappy sage of green design Baker is SF’s closest thing to a starchitect) and run by Community Housing Partnership, this Hayes Valley supportive housing complex is named for Drs. Julian and Raye Richardson, who started Marcus Books in the Fillmore, the country’s oldest black book store. It houses 120 formerly homeless tenants as well as several businesses, and its swoop of natural materials and neighborhood-brightening color “seek to repair the site of a collapsed freeway with homes.”

 

OAKLAND MUSEUM ENTRY PLAZA

You usually go to a museum to see (worship?) others’ creativity: Oakland Museum’s interactive entry plaza and event space, designed by Jensen Architects, allows you to express your own. Usable white garden furniture hangs from a giant blackboard — make a space to chill, and write out your thoughts. Simple and stunning.

 

OURCADIA

The parklet movement began in San Francisco in 2010 and has now spread throughout the world, decommissioning parking spaces for more humanely amenable uses. (Maybe parklets are our new native architectural vernacular? Hope so.) Now some of the sharper ones are being institutionally recognized, like this nifty zag outside farm:table restaurant in the Tenderloin, designed by Ogrydziak/Prillinger Architects and Reynolds-Sebastiani landscape architects. Funding by, duh, Kickstarter.

 

HAYES VALLEY PLAYGROUND

Hayes Valley has gotten so congested at this point, its need for some space to breathe is critical — and with patricia’s Green being pretty much overrun and Hayes Valley Farm about to disappear under a cloud of construction, it’s only getting worse. This groovy clubhouse and playground design by WRNS Studio (in association with the Trust for Public Land) updates the 1958 Parks and Rec space with some bright color, fun contraptions, and spacious feel, creating a safe space for kids to “foster an appreciation of nature and social gathering.”

 

LAND’S END LOOKOUT

Perched above Sutro Baths, on a cliff exploding right now with colorful blooms, this exceedingly graceful 4,050 sq. ft. National Park Service visitor center is one of my new favorite places in the world. It contains a smart little cafe, oodles of info on the natural surroundings and nearby historical hot spots, and a superfriendly staff. But the design itself, by EHDD, fits so perfectly into its Point Lobos surroundings (and puts further to shame the industrial barn-like Cliff House next door) that you may find yourself lingering beyond a cappuccino to enjoy the light and light-filled space, waves frothing on the rocks far below.

 

ONE KEARNY LOBBY

A walk through the Financial District at night is a journey into Mad Men nostalgia — further back, even, as elaborately sculpted Neo-Gothic lintels from the early 1900s beckon over entranceways, lit dramatically by the spacious lobbies within. Contemporary takes are worth searching out as well. Redeveloped century-old beauty One Kearny’s tiny new lobby, designed by IwamotoScott Architecture and entitled Lightfold (because we brand our lobbies now), is a wee swooner of luminescent stalactites, a.k.a. “an array of digitally-fabricated wood veneer lanterns” and bright, odd angles. Like all good entryways, it draws you fully in.

 

SFO T2

The glistening, organic-futuristic San Francisco International Airport Terminal Two “elevates the passenger experience with design strategies that reduce traveler stress, promote progressive sustainability measures and highlight the airport’s art installations.” It also kind of makes me not want to leave.

C who we R

-
0
C who we R

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE When Charles Anderson returned from a performing and choreographing career in New York 11 years ago to start a chamber-size contemporary ballet company, it seemed fair to wonder whether the Bay Area really needed another one. In the intervening years he certainly, and justifiably, has put his Company C Contemporary Ballet on the map. He assiduously assembles contemporary choreography that, at the very least, has a tenuous relationship to ballet. If there are missteps, and there are some in almost in every program, he nonetheless manages to offer a generous and broad spectrum of perspectives. You walk away glad that you came.

In the most recent program — which was performed in San Francisco May 2-4 and travels to Walnut Creek this week — his dancers dove into a smorgasbord of world and company premieres with gusto. Only Anderson’s own 2007 Boléro, choreographed to you-know-what, has been previously danced by this well-trained troupe.

What Anderson has not yet found is a good (and affordable) San Francisco venue to showcase his fine company. This season he tried out Z Space, an inviting theater, albeit one that could benefit from updating its lighting system. And for ballet dancers, who often have flying exits, Z Space’s lack of wing space is a problem. Momentum needs to be truncated to avoid crashing into the brick walls.

Company dancer David Van Ligon’s world premiere, Natoma, in particular needs to be seen on a more suitable stage. Set to an odd assemblage of scores by iconoclast composer Zoe Keating, Natoma runs out of steam about halfway through. Yet this is an honest attempt to deal with traditional structures seen through contemporary eyes. Laura Hazlett’s simple costumes (black bathing suits for the women, tights and white top for the men) nicely highlighted the dancers’ lines.

Van Ligon bowed to convention with a central pas de deux (for gorgeous Edilisa Armendariz and Connolly Strombeck), and three couples and a female duo (Laura Dunlop and Kristin Lindsay) that also framed the pas de deux. Yet he reconfigured this set-up into a number of ever-changing variations that gave Natoma a satisfying sense of elasticity. Wisely, perhaps influenced by Keating’s stab at minimalism, he pared down his vocabulary to basic steps and unisons in conjunction with flowing arms. Still, at times one wanted more richly textured choreography. Pleasing was the design’s clarity, though it put in relief both the dancers’ strengths and their weaknesses.

The appropriately-named A Modest Proposal, from John Bohannon (concept and text) and Carl Flink (direction and choreography), was a fresh, clever, and amusing smashing of verbosity against the succinctness of art, entertained without a whiff of Swiftian sarcasm. Trying to explain complex scientific facts with more and more words, and worse, with PowerPoint, is useless, narrator Ryan Drummond. Do it through dance. When the ensemble, having swirled around Drummond, stepped out of their overalls and into Hazlett’s diaphanous white for an airy, fluid finale, you could almost believe him.

Dennis Nahat’s 1970 Ontogeny — named for the process of life forms’ individuation, in case you slept through biology class — received a stunning interpretation. Using Karel Husa’s densely-layered, Pulitzer-winning String Quartet No. 3, Nahat excellently drew on the resources of modern dance and ballet to suggest eroticism and struggle as a biological necessity. With a powerful and nuanced Jacqueline McConnell and a vulnerable and athletic Tian Tan in the leads, Nahat’s angular yet expansive choreography looked as vibrant and edgy as it must been over 40 years ago.

A surprise addition was Anderson For Your Eyes Only, a splendid duet, originally performed for a hearing-impaired audience. Chantelle Pianetta and Bobby Briscoe, he a head taller than she, sensitively explored the give and take of an on/off relationship. Performed in silence, you heard their footfalls, the exertion of their breath, even the swish of their pants.

Anderson’s Boléro closed the program. It’s a good enough Spanish-flavored work for an over-used score. But perhaps it’s one that choreographers just have to get out of their systems.

COMPANY C CONTEMPORARY BALLET

Thu/9-Sat/11, 8pm; Sun/12, 1pm, $23-$45

Lesher Center for the Arts

1601 Civic, Walnut Creek

www.companycballet.org

 

Man up

-
0
Man up

arts@sfbg.com

FILM While frequently spiced by dames alluring and sometimes deadly, film noir has always been intrinsically a manly-man’s world. Elliot Lavine’s latest Roxie noir retrospective, offering 30 features over two weeks, seems particularly heavy on vintage male charisma. Whether showcasing the seldom-noted comic chops of Humphrey Bogart, the seldom-appreciated star swagger of Victor Mature, or Cliff Robertson having an unusually credible (for the era) mental breakdown, the range of familiar and ultra-rare titles in “I Wake Up Dreaming 2013” offers a compendium of variably tough guys in tougher situations.

If you’re wondering where the series’ title comes from, the answer kicks things off: 1941’s I Wake Up Screaming is a most enjoyable murder mystery in which Manhattan sports promoter and all-around hustler Frankie Christopher (Mature) decides on a whim to play Pygmalion and make a pretty but coarse waitress (Carole Landis) his Galatea. Once she’s successfully launched as a “glamour girl,” however, she proves quite the little ingrate — “Why should I go on slinging hash when I can sling other things?” she leers, preparing to bolt for Hollywood. There’s no lack of suspects (including reliable sleazeballs Elisha Cook, Jr. and Laird Cregar) once she’s found knocked off.

The publicity at the time focused on 20th Century Fox’s big wartime pin-up and musical star Betty Grable making her dramatic debut as Landis’ “sourpuss sister” (meaning she’s a nice girl who disapproves of her trampy sib). But the movie belongs to Mature, a big strapping lunk who became a punch line about looks-but-no-brains Hollywood he-men. (Later career highlights include playing opposite Hedy Lamarr in Cecil B. DeMille’s vapid 1949 megahit Samson and Delilah, then getting mocked two decades later in the Monkees’ 1968 Head.) But he’s charming, confident, and surprisingly nuanced here. Oddly, Screaming‘s orchestral score heavily features unaccredited lifts from “Over the Rainbow” — a standard now, but then just a song from a two-year-old movie that everybody had already forgotten.

Similarly playing a semi-respectable Big Apple man-about-town, Bogart gives a master course in magnetizing viewer attention while seeming to do very little in the next year’s All Through the Night. “Gloves” Donahue is a gambler — surrounded by memorable flunkies including Jackie Gleason, Phil Silvers, and William Demerest — reluctantly sucked by his busybody mom (Jane Darwell from 1940’s The Grapes of Wrath) into investigating the death of her beloved local immigrant baker-neighbor. This being 1942, the path leads directly to Nazis — Peter Lorre, Conrad Veidt, and Judith “Mrs. Danvers” Anderson chief among them. Packed with priceless snappy patter, this comedy action hybrid may lack the “classic” cache of the star’s other ’40s vehicles. But it’s enormous fun, even if it goes off the rails a bit toward the end.

Another revelation in the program is Screaming‘s co-feature Blues in the Night, a strikingly ambitious sort of jazz musical melodrama written by Robert Rossen (director and co-writer of 1961’s The Hustler) and directed by another intriguing, now-neglected talent, Anatole Litvak. Following the very rocky road traveled by a combo of white musicians seriously dedicated to “real low-down New Orleans blues,” this starless effort is one of those rare B movies that packs an incredible amount of incident and depth into a relatively short runtime without ever feeling cluttered.

Some of “Screaming”‘s bills are themed by director or performer. May 19 brings a double dose of 1950s Joan Crawford, with her eerie resemblance at the time to Mrs. Potatohead. Female on the Beach (1955) is a fun thriller in which she’s a widow seduced and possibly menaced by Jeff Chandler, one of the era’s several leading blond pin-up boys. But Robert Aldrich’s 1956 Autumn Leaves is something else: a May-December romance that turns into a serious treatment of mental illness, as much-younger suitor Robertson turns out to be unstable in ways less conventionally scary than credibly pathetic. Unusually vulnerable — her nervously babbling curtain speech might be the finest acting she ever did — Crawford knew this was one of her best movies, and later paid due credit to Robertson’s “stupendous” performance.

Another evening pays tribute to the fascinatingly odd oeuvre of longtime industry fringe-dweller Arch Obeler, who famously made the first 3D feature (1952’s Bwana Devil), but is found in more intriguing form here with two earlier black and white cheapies. Bewitched (1945) is an offbeat thriller from the POV of a pretty schizophrenic (Phyllis Thaxter), though that term is never used. Its primitive psychoanalysis is bettered by the post-apocalyptic psychodrama of 1951’s Five, whose titular quartet — including a pregnant woman, a kind African American war veteran, and a fascistic white supremacist — mysteriously survive nuclear disaster but may not survive each other’s personalities. Politically progressive if sometimes dramaturgically simple, it’s a fascinating obscurity.

Other highlights include quintessential cult object The Monster and The Girl (1941), in which a giant gorilla takes out various corrupt underworld types whilst “Skipper the Terrier” follows its trail; ultra-low-budget 1957 Mickey Spillane adaptation My Gun is Quick, with Robert Bray as a marginally less cretinous Mike Hammer than usual; the very cool 1961 British drama All Night Long, which transposes Othello into a jazzbo context (complete with Brubeck and Mingus); and last but possibly least, a double bill devoted to short-lived blonde bombshell Beverly Michaels. A hammer-voiced minor challenge to Monroe, Mansfield, and Van Doren, she was invariably cast as destructive man bait. But like Victor Mature, her performances in Pickup (1951) and Wicked Woman (1953) suggest a more alert, modern intelligence than she was given credit for.

I WAKE UP DREAMING 2013

May 10-23, $10

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St, SF

www.roxie.com

 

Catch up!

-
0
Catch up!

SUPER EGO Happy 45th birthday to Specs, my favorite bar in the city. The Capitan cocktail at La Mar is drink of the year so far. I think I finally get Daft Punk. There will probably soon be a “high-end” “gay” “strip” club called the Randy Rooster in the Castro, but you can’t make it rain — tips are donated at entry to a favorite charity, the dancers only strip to g-strings, and there’ll be upscale food. (It sounds positively Mormon.)

The winner of How Weird Street Faire was homegrown genius Larry Gonnello Jr.’s Boombox Affair, the back alley stage with the wired-together boomboxes, this killer six-hour set, and a perfect respite from the overflow of looky-loos this year. And that proposal by Mark Leno for bars in Cali to stay open until 4am? It died in committee, much like Roxxxy Andrews’ hair (I don’t even know who that is) — mostly due to the twisted machinations of the California Police Chiefs Association, who said it would mean more drunks on the road. Absolutely untrue! And this is why we can’t ever have nice things. My goddess, even the bars in Anchorage, Alaska can stay open longer than ours. Guess I’ll just have to keep my Scooby Doo flask polished and at the ready in my tubesock.

 

BOO WILLIAMS

I am so very excited for this. A Chicago house legend and true sweetie who knows soul biz like nobody — except maybe his Strictly Jazz Unit partner in crime Glenn Underground. The Housepitality weekly does it again.

Wed/8, 9pm, $10. f8, 1192 Folsom, SF. www.housepitalitysf.com

 

AFROLICIOUS 6-YEAR

Six years of this awesome Latin funk and Afro jazz collective’s dance floor vibes. As always, groovy brothers Pleasuremaker and Senor Oz preside over the festivities, full of live goodies and sweaty hotties, so good it’s taking over two nights.

Thu/9 and Fri/10, $8–$15 per night. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. www.elbo.com

 

DERRICK MAY

Oh hi, Detroit originator of techno.

Fri/10, $20. 9:30pm-3:30am. Public Works, 161 Erie, SF. www.publicsf.com

 

KITSUNE CLUB NIGHT

Poof! It’s the return of that special-smart French hyperdisco feeling, as beloved label Kitsune spreads its pixie dust around with Fred Falke, Chrome Sparks, and our own Aaron Axelsen.

Fri/10, 9pm, $17. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

 

ODYSSEY

The best and most freakish roving house party is at it again, this time bringing in the energetic and gorgeous W. Jeremy and Christy Love of NYC’s House of Stank and Get Up Recordings.

Fri/10, $10, 9:30pm-3:30am. Public Works, 161 Erie, SF. www.publicsf.com

 

PUSH THE FEELING

“An all locals, disco-heavy night of music,” too-cute promoter Kevin Meenan promises, somewhat surprisingly, for this installation of his monthly boundary pushing night, with Beat Broker on decks and plaza performing live.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUsxpZ_xKyg

Fri/10, 9pm, $5. UndergroundSF. 424 Haight, SF.

 

TORMENTA TROPICAL

Everyone’s favorite 808cumbia, electro-salsa, and tech-bachata monthly celebrates a bangin’ new release on its Bersa Discos label from Mexican DJ Quality, with DJ Quality! Sat/11, $5–$10, 10pm. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. www.elbo.com

 

WOLF + LAMB, SOUL CLAP

The two greatest bromances of the retro-rebuild decade, these male duos melted minds when they Frankensteined tunes from the 1950s-2000s (emphasis on the ’90s) into exotic-sounding hybrids of moody funk and deep house. Now everyone’s taken their cues — what will they pull off next?

Sat/11, 9pm, $20. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

 

KIM ANN FOXMAN

She has the tightest style — sound + vision — of anyone going right now, melting late ’80s and early ’90s sonic signifiers into a sophisticated semiotic code that packs the dance floor every time. Funky Mother’s Day!

Sun/12, 10pm, $10. Holy Cow, 1535 Folsom, SF. www.honeysoundsystem.com

 

Not from around here

-
0
Not from around here

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC It was a case of the French pop love that dared not speak its name, as earlier this month rumors roiled about a Coachella coupling — mon dieu, deux! — to truly rave about: headliner Phoenix along with possibly, just maybe, hush-hush special guest Daft Punk, returning to stage de triomphe that it dominated seven years ago. The Phoenix guest that materialized, R. Kelly, wasn’t exactly the faceless freak the audience had imagined springing from the closet, and instead the mob had to cool its jets and content itself with an old-school LP ad from Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo.

The abbreviated 102-second spot saw the duo in glittery soft focus performing new single “Get Lucky” alongside Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers — the kind of clip you’d uncover on late-night TV during Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert — and announcing Daft Punk’s own special guest stars, including Giorgio Moroder, Panda Bear, past Daft Punk collaborator Todd Edwards, Paul Williams (who must have had Phantom of Paradise-tinged flashbacks), and Pharrell Williams. Just a taste, but enough to stir the pot in the lead up to the May 21 release of Daft Punk’s fourth studio full-length, Random Access Memories, on Columbia.

Is it so strange that Daft Punk and Phoenix should find their fortunes so intertwined out in the Cali desert, so far from Old World Paris and Versailles? After all, the two share a past — and a future: Phoenix guitarist Laurent Brancowitz, Bangalter, and de Homem-Christo all started out in a Beach Boys-inspired combo called Darlin’. And much like fellow French native Anthony Gonzalez’s M83, the two groups are managing to find creative juices to grease their wheels out west, in the fantasy industrial complex of LA — with Daft Punk stressing the importance of a West Coast feel à la Fleetwood Mac to Memories guest Edwards, and Phoenix telling MTV that its new CD, Bankrupt!, was inspired by its work on Thomas Mars spouse Sofia Coppola’s 2010 movie Somewhere.

Not to mention the fact that Bankrupt! and Memories are two of the most buzz-ridden releases of the year, particularly judging from the homemade “Get Lucky” remixes and videos already proliferating online. Long gone are the old rockist daze — the same that slurred “Disco sucks” — when French rock was derided as just another thing an entire country does wrong, like loving Jerry Lewis. Thoughts surely far from the minds of Daft Punk obsessives, though from the start the duo’s vocoder-obscured vocals and helmeted visages proudly proclaimed, “We’re alien, a.k.a. not from around here.” That tease is the name of Daft Punk’s space-rockin’ game this time around, taking control with a carefully orchestrated marketing campaign after a humbling day job scoring a sorry Tron sequel.

Working with its biggest crowd of collaborators yet, Daft Punk appears to be bursting the mythic bubble of an enigmatic twosome working solo behind the decks, letting others into the party, circling back to its clubland origins, and reaffirming that, as “Get Lucky” goes, its “ends were beginnings.”

And though indie seems leached of meaning, Phoenix sounds far deprived when it came to ideas for Bankrupt! Nate Chinen of the New York Times may quibble with Mars’s Dadaist “word salad” — why not attack a fellow for singing with an accent? — but then Phoenix isn’t the first band to privilege the sound of lyrics over content. Bankrupt! isn’t as “experimental” as promised early on, but it’s by no means as polished and predictable as your average Killers or Imagine Dragons product.

Starting with title and extending to the cover symbolism of a lucky peach, and the busy little rickshaw of an orientalist motif on opener “Entertainment,” Phoenix sounds as if it’s grappling with a Daft Punky notion of alien-ness, too — and the global economics of pop success, having hit it big at the height of an economic downtown with 2009’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. The distorted, bristling synths grinding beneath songs like “The Real Thing,” in fact, make Bankrupt! one of the noisier mainstream rock albums of recent years. Scope out the lonely cries of the entitled asking to have their names put on lists on “SOS in Bel Air,” the fluty synths opening the languorous “Trying to Be Cool,” and hear the sound of a band conveying the seduction — and anxiety — of too many bright lights, big cities, and marathon tours and responding by mainly turning up on the volume.

So why French pop and why now? In fits and starts, leaps and stumbles, Daft Punk and Phoenix are creating less a pop language of diplomacy than a kind of lingua franca between classic sunny pop hooks, Beach Boys style, and the all-mighty often-electronic groove, be it analog or digital, IDM or EDM, boyish or girlish, human or alien.

LPs like Memories hark to another time, while satisfying on the primal level of da funk. As Pharrell Williams has said of “Get Lucky,” “The only click track they had was the human heartbeat, which makes it really interesting because these are robots.” So how does the sunlit, smoggy terroir of the west touch two French aliens and a band of Versailles refugees? Perhaps we’ll know when Daft Punk unveils Memories even further out West: May 17, at the the 79th Wee Waa Regional Show in Wee Waa, Australia.

Let it all out

-
0
Let it all out

VISUAL ART Dottie Guy had a difficult time in 2006. In addition to the death of her grandfather, she was recovering from surgery for an injury to her ankle and foot that she had sustained on duty in Iraq. She started taking pictures as motivation to walk around and to reclaim a sense of purpose.

This year, Guy is one of the artists participating in a one-night art exhibition presented by Shout!, an initiative to support female veterans in the Bay Area. Primary organizer Star Lara asked Guy to submit a photo to an event that, in its fifth year, will include several different media — photography, painting, sculpture, drawing, writing, and music — made by 22 vets. As a result of Lara’s outreach efforts, this year’s event has grown so much that she had to turn artists away.

Lara is the Women Veterans Coordinator at Swords to Plowshares, a nonprofit that helps veterans transition back to civilian life. Leaving the military in 2007 after serving on active duty for 12 years, she knows the hardships of adapting, particularly those that affect women. As more women enlist, she explains, the gender-specific problems become increasingly defined. Female veterans now represent the fastest growing homeless population, yet they seek help through Veteran Affairs at far lower rates than men do.

Issues also stem from public perception. People understand what it means when they see a man with a military pin, but Lara often hears the question, “Is your dad in the military?” Society resists the idea of a female veteran.

And when civilians do know about a woman’s military service, another problem arises: the tendency to reduce all aspects of her persona to her veteran identity. For Guy, the exhibition provides an opportunity to showcase another side of herself. Though her life revolves around veterans — she works at the VA — she is also a photographer, and her photography does not directly address military service.

Guy snapped her Shout! photo at Bay to Breakers a couple of years ago when she stumbled across a woman in a top hat and fake moustache shouting into a bullhorn next to a man wearing a polar bear mask. It is a quirky image one could find in few places besides San Francisco. “I embrace the ridiculous stuff,” says Guy. “Being in the military, there’s not much room to celebrate that. You’d never see somebody walking around in a mask like that, unless it meant trouble.”

Another Shout! artist, JoAnn Martinez, has only recently begun to experiment with military subjects. For her second year in the show, she has submitted comics derived from dialogues she has heard within the female veteran community. By undertaking this new comedic mode of art, she hopes she can not only share a creation she’s proud of besides her family and work (she started the nonprofit Women Veterans Connect), but also communicate a digestible message to the non-veteran community. “Instead of complaining, let’s laugh about it,” she says.

Not only do Martinez’s comics convey a therapeutic levity, but they also contain an expressive subtext; they are printed on homemade paper created in response to the Combat Paper Project, in which workshops instruct veterans how to create paper pulp from their shredded military uniforms.

Extending the practice beyond Shout!, Martinez is seeking female veterans to submit stories about their uniforms for a Shotwell Paper Mill limited-edition book created using the same fabric-turned-paper method. So far, the stories range in tone, some reflecting a similar lightness to Martinez’s comics; one woman tells how after she painted her toenails, the Iraqi heat melted the polish and she had trouble removing her socks.

Lara has also participated in the project, an experience she found restorative in part because it involved breaking down and reclaiming an object laden with intense experiences, but primarily because of the work’s collectivity. After talking with fellow female veterans while their hands were busy cutting, she says, “It was no longer about the trauma that brought you to the table — it was about what you took from the table.” (The Combat Paper Project also inspired Lara’s contribution to this year’s Shout!, a piece that involved her “painting the shit out of” her last uniform.)

Though Lara does not consider herself a fine artist, Shout! presents an opportunity to share the voice of her small group within a greater context. In the Women’s Building, a hub of action in the Mission, the event will enact her idea that women veterans comprise a subset of larger existing communities and should be reached as such.

Lara says that without focusing on trauma, without involving policy, services, or outreach, Shout! offers a chance for artists like Guy and Martinez to declare, “I am a woman and a veteran, and here’s how I express myself.”

SHOUT!: ART BY WOMEN VETERANS

Wed/8, 6-9pm, free

San Francisco Women’s Building

3543 18th St, SF

swords-to-plowshares.org/shout

 

Yuh look good

Andrew Lam
-
0
Yuh look good

STREETS Only our deep-seated disinclination against street harassment prevented us from hollering at these sterling examples of the Bay’s blazing style sense. We respectfully snapped their pics instead: the trio of gents in town for their 50th high school reunion sporting pencil mustaches and monochrome, Agathe Guttuhaugen’s surreal ombre locks and coordinated cap brim, Amber Asaly’s midriff. All good excuses to take to the sidewalk this season in search of fashion stimulation.

 

Alex Pingis. Photo by Cortney Clift

Amber Asaly. Photo by Stephanie Sesin

Brian McGrath, Jeffrey Tucker, and Donald Owen. Photo by Cortney Clift

Elena Miska. Photo by Jessica Wolfrom

Virgil Gabaldon. Photo by Jessica Wolfrom

Agathe Guttuhaugen. Photo by Cortney Clift

Unidentified filthy objects

Andrew Lam
-
0
Unidentified filthy objects

caitlin@sfbg.com

SEX In an email interview in advance of her Fri/10 appearance at the Center for Sex and Culture, Suzie Silver told me that her interest in alien sex was spawned by a mix of her childhood fascination with Star Trek: The Original Series, NASA’s launch of the Kepler space observatory in 2009, and Isabella Rossellini’s “Green Porno” short film series on the sensual activities of insects and marine animals. Silver recently co-edited (along with Christopher Kardambikis and Jasdeep Khaira) Strange Attractors, a book-DVD project (www.extraterrestialsexuality.org) that explores the notions of extraterrestrial sexuality held by 70 artists, writers, and filmmakers. If that doesn’t inspire you to read the rest of this article, I give up on you.

San Francisco Bay Guardian Please explain your fascination with extraterrestrial sexuality.

Suzie Silver Strange Attractors  asks the participants and audience to try to imagine otherworldly and unknowable life-forms and sexualities. We are imagining sexual possibilities beyond gender, beyond genitalia. In my short story “Donkey Show,” one of the things I describe is a live sex show made up of shape shifting platonic solids that can create pleasurable and climactic responses from all audience members. I’m attempting to envision universal ecstasy and orgasm!

SFBG Have you noticed commonalities related in true-life alien sex experiences? 

SB I have read some accounts, mostly online. For the most part I find them rather unimaginative and not very interesting. The focus is usually on penetration. It all seems rather BDSM, which has its appeal, otherwise how to explain the success of all those 50 Shades books? Strange Attractors attempts a polymorphous perversity: sex outside of reproduction, for pleasure, communication, joy, connection, fun, more complicated power dynamics than dominance and submission. We imagine erogenous zones in, on, and outside of every part of the body and mind.

SFBG Which contributions to  Strange Attractors did you find particularly compelling?

SB I find all of the works truly amazing. Works that I’m particularly compelled by include Vanessa Roveto’s extraterrestrial dating profile where the being’s desirable qualities include “a body comprised mostly of healthy scrotal tissue, the ability to mimic my selves, an oral tolerance for liquid hand sanitizer, a traumatic childhood that will work in your erotic favor, and minimal bloating.” In Michael Mallis and Mikey McParlane’s “Love Puddles:” “In the golden fringe of a far off galaxy, an alien planet teems with exotic life. Twiggy creatures rush to an ominous volcano and rub their bodies against its glittering surface, enticing the volcano to awaken and spray its gooey chaos across the furry world.”

Strange Attractors video screening Fri/10, 7-10pm, $5-10 sliding scale. Center for Sex and Culture, 1349 Mission, SF. www.sexandculture.org

 

THIS WEEK’S SEXY EVENTS

Tricks and Chickenhawks reading Wed/8, 7:30pm, free. Booksmith, 1644 Haight, SF. www.booksmith.com. Sex worker literati — Madison Young, Kitty Stryker, Carol Queen, more — gather to read from a new anthology of sex worker and john experiences.

“How to Create an Effective Online Profile” Tue/14, 7-10pm, $20. Center for Sex and Culture, 1349 Mission, SF. www.sexandculture.org. Hear back from that babe on Scruff, FetLife, or Tinder after taking this one-off seminar.

 

Rep Clock

Andrew Lam
-
0

Schedules are for Wed/8-Tue/14 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double and triple features marked with a •. All times pm unless otherwise specified.

ANSWER COALITION 2969 Mission, SF; www.answersf.org. $5-10 (no one turned away for lack of funds). The Battle of Chile: The Power of the People (Guzmán), Wed, 7.

ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $6-10. "Revelcade Applause Night," shorts by Bay Area filmmakers, Fri, 8.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $8.50-13. •Badlands (Malick, 1973), Wed, 7, and Electra Glide in Blue (Guercio, 1973), Wed, 8:50. San Francisco International Film Festival, Thu. See festival.sffs.org for schedule. •John Dies at the End (Coscarelli, 2012), Fri, 7, and The Rambler (Reeder, 2013), Fri, 8:55. "Marc Huestis presents: Mother’s Day with Mommie Dearest:" Mildred Pierce (Curtiz, 1945), Sat, 2; Mommie Dearest (Perry, 1981), Sat, 7:30. Evening event ($15; www.ticketfly.com) includes a live appearance by actress Rutanya Alda, with host Matthew Martin. •The Red Shoes (Powell and Pressburger, 1948), Sun, 2:55, 8, and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Powell and Pressburger, 1943), Sun, 5. The Master (Anderson, 2012), Tue, 2, 5, 8.

CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.75-$10.25. The Angels’ Share (Loach, 2012), call for dates and times. Blancanieves (Berger, 2012), call for dates and times. In the House (Ozon, 2012), call for dates and times. The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Nair, 2012), call for dates and times. Renoir (Bourdos, 2012), call for dates and times.

GREAT WALL OF OAKLAND West Grand between Broadway and Valley, Oakl; www.oaklandcatvidfest.com. $10-75. "Oakland Internet Cat Video Festival," benefit for the East Bay SPCA with pre-screening events (cat-themed music, animal rescue groups, food trucks, and more), plus an appearance by special guest Dusty the Klepto Kitty, Sat, 3-10.

JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER OF SAN FRANCISCO Kanbar Hall, 3200 California, SF; www.jccsf.org. $8-12. Under African Skies (Berlinger, 2012), Mon, 7.

MECHANICS’ INSTITUTE 57 Post, SF; (415) 393-0100, milibrary.org/events. $10 (reservations required as seating is limited). "CinemaLit Film Series: Paddy Chayefsky: Scenes from American Lives:" The Catered Affair (Brooks, 1956), Fri, 6.

NEW PARKWAY 474 24th St, Oakl; www.thenewparkway.com. $6-10. "New Parkway Classics:" Wild at Heart (Lynch, 1990), Thu, 9pm. "Thrillville:" Mothra (Honda, 1961), Sun, 6.

OAKLAND PUBLIC LIBRARY 1021 81st Ave, Oakl; www.oaklandlibrary.org. Free. Just a Piece of Cloth (Henze), Sat, 2.

"PLAYGROUND FILM FESTIVAL" Various Bay Area venues; playground-sf.org/filmfest. $10-25. Showcasing Bay Area filmmakers and writers and their short work. Through May 25.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. San Francisco International Film Festival, Wed-Thu. See festival.sffs.org for schedule. "Film and Video Makers at Cal: Works from the Eisner Prize Competition," Fri, 7. PFA closed through June 5.

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $6.50-11. CXL (Gillane, 2012), Wed, 7:15. The Source Family (Demopoulos and Wille, 2012), Wed-Thu, 7, 9:30. Upstream Color (Carruth, 2013), Wed-Thu, 9. The Crumbles (Boch, 2012), Sat, 3, 5, 7, 9. "I Wake Up Dreaming 2013:" •I Wake Up Screaming (Humberstone, 1941), Fri, 6:15, 9:45, and Blues in the Night (Rossen, 1941), Fri, 8; •Under Age (Dmytryk, 1941), Sat, 2, 6:30; Johnny O’ Clock (Rossen, 1947), Sat, 3:15, 8; and The Monster and the Girl (Heisler, 1941), Sat, 5, 9:45; •Fall Guy (Le Borg, 1947), Sun, 1:30, 6:15; Night Has a Thousand Eyes (Farrow, 1948), Sun, 2:50, 7:45; •Club Havana (Ulmer, 1945), Mon, 6:40, 9:30, and Island of Doomed Men (Barton, 1940), Mon, 8; •Nightmare (Whelan, 1942), Tue, 6:15, 9:50, and All Through the Night (Sherman, 1942), Tue, 8.

VICTORIA THEATRE 2961 16th St, SF; www.peacheschrist.com. $30-35. "The Rocky Horror Show 40th Anniversary Concert Tribute," with Patricia "Magenta" Quinn performing live and other special guests, Fri-Sat, 8 (also Sat, 3).

YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; www.ybca.org. $8-10. "Girls! Guns! Ghosts! The Sensational Films of Shintoho:" Ghost Story of Yotsuya (Nakagawa, 1959), Thu, 7:30; Flesh Pier (Ishii, 1958), Sun, 2.

Psychic Dream Astrology: May 8-14, 2013

Andrew Lam
-
0

ARIES

March 21-April 19

In order to progress to the level you want to be at you’re going to need to let go of control, Aries. Taking action is great, but doing it without attachment to what happens next is awesome. You don’t always know what’s best, so leave room for your life to surprise you this week.

TAURUS

April 20-May 20

Your relationships are super important and you need to be treating them that way. The only means to achieving balance in your life is to make choices that support it. Carve out time for the people you care about this week, even if that means mending fences or being a supportive cast member instead of the lead.

GEMINI

May 21-June 21

How many times has something awful happened to you that later turned out to be the best possible thing? This week you need to deal head-on with whatever disappointments are plaguing you because they may turnout to be great assets at the end of the day. Don’t shy away from responsibility, Twin Star.

CANCER

June 22-July 22

Shutting down or forcing your will on others will not yield the kind of results that you’ll be pleased with. Dare to be optimistic, to put yourself and your desires out there, Moonchild. The trick is to stay present and kind even if you receive opposition to your plans. Know what is too much versus not enough this week.

LEO

July 23-Aug. 22

The only way to have clear emotional boundaries is to be vulnerable enough to know the difference between what you are scared of versus what feels inauthentic for you. Your relationships are in a state of flux and you need to be honest with yourself about how you need them to change, Leo. Realness trumps security this week.

VIRGO

Aug. 23-Sept. 22

As you grow and change you will have the opportunity to take the sure path, or the path less traveled. This week you should not choose based on what seems easier, Virgo, instead go for what best matches your needs. Your own history is the best teacher about what is realistic for you to ask of yourself.

LIBRA

Sept. 23-Oct. 22

You always have a choice, no matter how stuck you feel. You may not be able to control your surroundings or circumstances, but you can shape how you choose to deal with them. You are on high alert to not get caught up in a reactive cycle that makes you feel overwhelmed and trapped. Look for unlocked doors.

SCORPIO

Oct. 23-Nov. 21

If you don’t adhere to the conditions you know you need to feel secure and sane then you’ll be the only one who suffers, Scorpio. Instead of blaming things on your self, try taking the lead on project Clean Up Your Life. This week you should correct the ways you have overstepped your own limits.

SAGITTARIUS

Nov. 22-Dec. 21

Your sign is known for enjoying meteoric bursts and instant gratification, so this week’s advice may annoy you. Your greatest rewards will be won with some good old fashion elbow grease and patience. Set your sights on attainable goals and commit your time and energy to achieving them. Might be boring, but it’ll work.

CAPRICORN

Dec. 22-Jan. 19

Taking responsibility for your self is not the same as taking control. Resist all impulses to micromanage this week. Look for the habits and dynamics in your life that are keeping you in a rut. You may need to subtract before you add, but you do not need to stay stuck! Embrace the changes you long for, Capricorn.

AQUARIUS

Jan. 20-Feb. 18

The frustration that you’re feeling is real, Aquarius, and the best way to cope with it is with an open mind. Instead of indulging in anxiety riddled narratives, try dropping the story you’re fixated on and try to calm down. Clarity doesn’t come from fearfulness. Be interested in your situation instead of scared of it.

PISCES

Feb. 19-March 20

It can be unclear what it means to "be yourself"; we are constantly changing and what’s true for you this month may be not be true the next. Don’t look for concrete answers this week, just practice being more self-referential. Either be willing to bend or you’ll break, Pisces.

Jessica Lanyadoo has been a Psychic Dreamer for 18 years. Check out her website at www.lovelanyadoo.com to contact her for an astrology or intuitive reading

Stage listings

Andrew Lam
-
0

Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

THEATER

OPENING

Black Watch Drill Court, Armory Community Center, 333 14th St, SF; www.act-sf.org. $100. Previews Thu/9-Sat/11, 8pm. Opens Sun/12, 7pm. Runs Tue-Sat, 8pm (Tue/14, show at 7pm; also Wed and Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through June 16. American Conservatory Theater presents the National Theatre of Scotland’s internationally acclaimed performance about Scottish soldiers serving in Iraq.

Vital Signs: The Pulse of an American Nurse Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Opens Sun/12, 7pm. Runs Sun, 7pm. Through June 16. Registered nurse Alison Whittaker returns to the Marsh with her behind-the-scenes show about working in a hospital.

ONGOING

Acid Test: The Many Incarnations of Ram Dass Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm (Sat/11, show at 8pm). Through May 18. Playwright Lynne Kaufman invites you to take a trip with Richard Alpert, a.k.a. Ram Dass (Warren David Keith), as he recounts times high and low in this thoughtful, funny, and sometimes unexpected biographical rumination on the quest for truth and meaning in a seemingly random life by one of the big wigs of the psychedelic revolution and (with his classic book, Be Here Now) contemporary Eastern-looking spirituality. Directed by Joel Mullennix, the narrative begins with Ram Dass today, in his Hawaiian home and partly paralyzed from a stroke, but Keith (one of the Bay Area’s best stage actors, who is predictably sure and engagingly multilayered in the role) soon shakes off the stiff arm and strained speech and springs to his feet to continue the narrative as the ideal self perhaps only transcendental consciousness and theater allow. Nevertheless, Kaufman’s fun-loving and extroverted Alpert is no saint and no model of perfection, which is the refreshing truth explored in the play, but rather a seeker still, ever imperfect and ever trying for greater perfection or at least the wisdom of acceptance. As the privileged queer child of a wealthy Jewish lawyer and industrialist, Alpert was both insider and outsider from the get-go, and that tension and ambiguity makes for an interesting angle on his life as well as the complexities of his relationships with a homophobic Leary, for instance, and his conservative but ultimately loving father. Perfection aside, the beauty in the subject and the play is the subtle, shrewd cherishing of what remains unfinished. (Avila)

Boomeraging: From LSD to OMG Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Tue, 8pm. Through May 28. Comedian Will Durst performs his brand-new solo show.

Dirty Dancing: Live! Dark Room, 2263 Mission, SF; dirtydancinglive-fbe.eventbrite.com. $20. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through May 25. Watermelons will be carried, lifts will be attempted, eyes will be hungry, and nobody better put Baby in a corner.

Foodies! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.foodiesthemusical.com. $30-34. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. AWAT Productions presents Morris Bobrow’s musical comedy revue all about food.

Last Love Mojo Theatre, 2940 16th St, SF; www.mojotheatre.com. $17-30. Thu-Sun, 8pm. Through May 19. Will the apocalypse save us from ourselves? Mojo Theater again raises that question as it presents the second installment in director-playwright Peter Papadopoulos’ Love-Gone-Wrong-at-the-End-of-the-World trilogy, the follow-up to last season’s fertile and funny Lost Love. The story centers on a George and Martha-esque couple, Charles (Jonathan Bender) and Lucida (Kimberly Lester), who on the eve of their fifth wedding anniversary declare all-out war, lobbing younger lovers at each other only to find their new partners (played by an increasingly endearing Michael Saenz and an unexpectedly powerful Gloria McDonald) have a past together and unresolved issues of their own. The grimly romantic comedy returns to, without greatly elaborating on, a familiar fantasy: blowing away the haze of our fractious, insecure, and muddled love lives in the clarifying immediacy of disaster. That this may be more than pure fantasy — that the seemingly discrete realms of personal and political trauma may be in some subtle and profound way connected — is an animating dimension of the trilogy, but here in a more superficial and perfunctory fashion than in Lost Love. The strength of the production lies less in its premise than in the penetrating humor and emotional veracity in Papadopoulos’ sure, heightened dialogue, which is played generally well by the cast and exceptionally so by a vibrantly intelligent Lester, Mojo’s co–artistic director. The staging also benefits, albeit inconsistently, from a stylized approach that revels in self-conscious artifice (including a trio of stage managers from “Command Center Communications,” a video-backdrop by Micah Stieglitz, and some light choreography by Lester). These strengths lend a restless, occasionally inspired production a slow-burning charm, but leave one wondering what might be left when all the dust settles. (Avila)

Little Me Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson, SF; www.42ndstreetmoon.org. $25-75. Wed, 7pm; Thu-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 6pm. Through May 19. 42nd Street Moon performs Neil Simon’s outrageous musical.

The Lost Folio: Shakespeare’s Musicals Un-Scripted Theater, 533 Sutter, Second Flr, SF; www.un-scripted.com. $10-20. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through May 18. Un-Scripted Theater Company performs a fully-improvised, full-length musical inspired by Shakespeare.

The Merry Wives of Windsor Buriel Clay Theater, African American Art and Culture Complex, 762 Fulton, SF; www.african-americanshakes.org. $10-35. Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through May 26. African-American Shakespeare Company performs a twist on the Shakespeare classic, set in an urban neighborhood in the 1950s.

“PlayGround Festival of New Works” Various venues, SF and Berk; www.playground-sf.org. $15-40. Through May 26. The 17th fest presented by “San Francisco’s incubator for a new generation of playwrights” includes the PlayGround Film Festival, staged readings of four new full-length plays, a fully-produced program of six short plays, panel discussions, and more.

reasons to be pretty San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post, Second Flr, SF; www.sfplayhouse.org. $30-100. Wed/8-Thu/9, 7pm; Fri/10-Sat/11, 8pm (also Sat/11, 3pm). Completing a trilogy of plays about body awareness and self-image (along with The Shape of Things and Fat Pig), Neil LaBute’s reasons to be pretty begins with a misconstrued remark that quickly gathers enough weight and momentum to tear three sets of relationships apart in the span of a two-hour play. The SF Playhouse production begins with a bang, or rather an awesomely knock-down, blow-out breakup fight between a righteously pissed-off Steph (Lauren English) and her awkwardly passive boyfriend Greg (Craig Marker), who has inadvertently referred to her as “regular” in a conversation with his jerkish buddy Kent (Patrick Russell), which she takes to mean he finds her ugly. English’s Steph is at turns ferocious and fragile, and her comic timing as she eviscerates Greg’s looks in a mall food court zings, while the hyperkinetic Russell elevates the condition of noxiously irredeemable douchebag to an art form. But terrific acting and polished design can only make up so much for a script that feels not only flawed, barely scratching the surface of the whys and wherefores each character has internalized an unrealistic view of the importance of conventional beauty standards, but also already dated, with its circa-2008 pop culture references. Ultimately it gives the impression of being a rerun of a Lifetime television drama that wraps itself up into a too-neat package just in time for the final credits to roll to its admittedly kickass soundtrack (provided by Billie Cox). (Gluckstern)

Sam I Am: A Processional of Short Plays and Prose About Samuel Beckett Bindlestiff Studio, 185 Sixth St, SF; www.pustheatre.com. $10-20. Fri/10-Sat/11, 8pm. Performers Under Stress remounts and revamps its series of short plays and pieces by Samuel Beckett, this time staging it throughout the basement quarters of Bindlestiff Studio, where audiences are led around an economical maze of performance spaces. Opening weekend consisted of too much text and too little in way of staging ideas, especially with several spoken selections of Beckett prose (which have reportedly since been dropped from the program). The best of what remains (in a program of six short plays total) includes Valerie Fachman’s respectable performance as the disembodied “mouth” of the brilliant Not I; and James Udom and Geo Epsilany’s duet in Rough for Theatre I, in which a wheelchair-bound food-hoarder (a softly eccentric Epsilany) strikes up a doomed friendship with a blind beggar (a solid Udom) amid a colorless and barren landscape. The bucket of Beckett dreary gets less satisfying from there, though director Scott Baker’s wordless performance as the titular Joe in Eh Joe proves poised and the doubled voices in his head (by Melissa Clason and Allison Hunter Blackwell) both haunting and intriguing. (Avila)

Sex and the City: LIVE! Rebel, 1760 Market, SF; trannyshack.com/sexandthecity. $25. Wed, 7 and 9pm. Open-ended. It seems a no-brainer. Not just the HBO series itself — that’s definitely missing some gray matter — but putting it onstage as a drag show. Mais naturellement! Why was Sex and the City not conceived of as a drag show in the first place? Making the sordid not exactly palatable but somehow, I don’t know, friendlier (and the canned a little cannier), Velvet Rage Productions mounts two verbatim episodes from the widely adored cable show, with Trannyshack’s Heklina in a smashing portrayal of SJP’s Carrie; D’Arcy Drollinger stealing much of the show as ever-randy Samantha (already more or less a gay man trapped in a woman’s body); Lady Bear as an endearingly out-to-lunch Miranda; and ever assured, quick-witted Trixxie Carr as pent-up Charlotte. There’s also a solid and enjoyable supporting cast courtesy of Cookie Dough, Jordan Wheeler, and Leigh Crow (as Mr. Big). That’s some heavyweight talent trodding the straining boards of bar Rebel’s tiny stage. The show’s still two-dimensional, even in 3D, but noticeably bigger than your 50″ plasma flat panel. (Avila)

Steve Seabrook: Better Than You Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thu, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Extended through May 18. Self-awareness, self-actualization, self-aggrandizement — for these things we turn to the professionals: the self-empowerment coaches, the self-help authors and motivational speakers. What’s the good of having a “self” unless someone shows you how to use it? Writer-performer Kurt Bodden’s Steve Seabrook wants to sell you on a better you, but his “Better Than You” weekend seminar (and tie-in book series, assorted CDs, and other paraphernalia) belies a certain divided loyalty in its own self-flattering title. The bitter fruit of the personal growth industry may sound overly ripe for the picking, but Bodden’s deftly executed “seminar” and its behind-the-scenes reveals, directed by Mark Kenward, explore the terrain with panache, cool wit, and shrewd characterization. As both writer and performer, Bodden keeps his Steve Seabrook just this side of overly sensational or maudlin, a believable figure, finally, whose all-too-ordinary life ends up something of a modest model of its own. (Avila)

Talk Radio Actors Theatre of San Francisco, 855 Bush, SF; www.actorstheatresf.org. $26-38. Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through June 15. Actors Theatre of San Francisco performs Eric Bogosian’s breakthrough 1987 drama.

Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma: The Next Cockettes Musical Hypnodrome, 575 10th St, SF; www.thrillpeddlers.com. $30-35. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through June 1. Thrillpeddlers and director Russell Blackwood continue their Theatre of the Ridiculous series with this 1971 musical from San Francisco’s famed glitter-bearded acid queens, the Cockettes, revamped with a slew of new musical material by original member Scrumbly Koldewyn, and a freshly re-minted book co-written by Koldewyn and “Sweet Pam” Tent — both of whom join the large rotating cast of Thrillpeddler favorites alongside a third original Cockette, Rumi Missabu (playing diner waitress Brenda Breakfast like a deliciously unhinged scramble of Lucille Ball and Bette Davis). This is Thrillpeddlers’ third Cockettes revival, a winning streak that started with Pearls Over Shanghai. While not quite as frisky or imaginative as the production of Pearls, it easily charms with its fine songs, nifty routines, exquisite costumes, steady flashes of wit, less consistent flashes of flesh, and de rigueur irreverence. The plot may not be very easy to follow, but then, except perhaps for the bubbly accounting of the notorious New York flop of the same show 42 years ago by Tent (as poisoned-pen gossip columnist Vedda Viper), it hardly matters. (Avila)

The Waiting Period Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $25-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through May 18. Brian Copeland (comedian, TV and radio personality, and creator-performer of the long-running solo play Not a Genuine Black Man) returns to the Marsh with a new solo, this one based on more recent and messier events` in Copeland’s life. The play concerns an episode of severe depression in which he considered suicide, going so far as to purchase a handgun — the title coming from the legally mandatory 10-day period between purchasing and picking up the weapon, which leaves time for reflections and circumstances that ultimately prevent Copeland from pulling the trigger. A grim subject, but Copeland (with co-developer and director David Ford) ensures there’s plenty of humor as well as frank sentiment along the way. The actor peoples the opening scene in the gun store with a comically if somewhat stereotypically rugged representative of the Second Amendment, for instance, as well as an equally familiar “doood” dude at the service counter. Afterward, we follow Copeland, a just barely coping dad, home to the house recently abandoned by his wife, and through the ordinary routines that become unbearable to the clinically depressed. Copeland also recreates interviews he’s made with other survivors of suicidal depression. Telling someone about such things is vital to preventing their worst outcomes, says Copeland, and telling his own story is meant to encourage others. It’s a worthy aim but only a fitfully engaging piece, since as drama it remains thin, standing at perhaps too respectful a distance from the convoluted torment and alienation at its center. Note: review from an earlier run of the same production. (Avila)

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Sun, 11am. Through July 21. Louis “The Amazing Bubble Man” Pearl returns after a month-long hiatus with his popular, kid-friendly bubble show.

BAY AREA

The Arsonists Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; www.auroratheatre.org. $35-60. Wed/8-Sat/11, 8pm; Sun/12, 2 and 7pm. There’s a lot of humor to be found in Alistair Beaton’s crackling translation of Max Frisch’s The Arsonists, playing now at the Aurora Theatre, but much of the laughter it elicits is of the nervous variety, as the play’s mostly protagonist, the effete, bourgeois Herr Biedermann (Dan Hiatt) inadvertently signs off on his own destruction when he invites an uncouth arsonist to come and stay in his attic (Michael Ray Wisely). “If we assume everyone is an arsonist, where does that get us?” becomes his standard deflection, as one arsonist becomes two (adding in the unctuous, nihilistic Tim Kniffin), and the empty attic a repository for giant drums of gasoline, a detonator, and fuse wire — arousing the suspicions of a chorus of firefighters (Kevin Clarke, Tristan Cunningham, Michael Uy Kelly), who act as the conscience and guardians of the township. Although on the surface the scenario is patently absurd, the message that passivity in the face of evil is like helping to measure out the fuse wire that will eventually claim your life, is relatively clear. “Not every fire is determined by fate,” point out the firefighters right in the first act. Hiatt, as Biedermann, strikes an admirable balance between loathsome and powerless, while Gwen Loeb shines as his socialite wife, Babette, as does Dina Percia as his agitated housemaid, Anna. (Gluckstern)

The Dead Girl Avant Garde, 1328 Fourth St, San Rafael; www.altertheater.org. $25. Wed, 7:30pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through May 19. AlterTheater performs 90-year-old playwright Ann Brebner’s new family drama.

A Killer Story Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Thu-Sat, 8pm (pre-show cabaret at 7:15pm). Through May 18. Dan Harder’s film noir-inspired detective tale premieres at the Marsh Berkeley.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2025 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-77. Tue, Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat and May 23, 2pm; no show May 24); Wed and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2). Through May 26. Mark Wing-Davey directs Berkeley Rep’s take on the Bard.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

“Bailout! Or can you picture this prophecy? The temperatures are too hot for me.” Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Fri/10-Sun/12, 8pm. Pay what you can. Navarrete x Kajiyama Dance Theater perform a site-specific multidisciplinary performance inspired by environmental disasters.

“Bitch and Tell: A Real, Funny Show” Garage, 715 Bryant, SF; www.ftloose.org. Sat/11, 8pm. $8-10. Comedy with Tracy Shapiro, Carolé Acuña, Allison Mick, and more.

“Bob’s Burgers Live!” Nob Hill Masonic Auditorium, 1111 California, SF; http://bit.ly/bobssanfrancisco. Sat/11, 8pm. $32.50. The cast of the animated series performs.

“Bound for Glory” Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. Fri/10, 7:30pm; Sat/11, 2pm. $8-50. Marsh Youth Theater’s MainStage Performance Ensemble presents a musical (written by the ensemble with director Lisa Quoresimo) about a Dust Bowl-era family.

Caroline Lugo and Carolé Acuña’s Ballet Flamenco Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; www.carolinalugo.com. Sun/12, 3 and 6:15pm. $29.95-49.95 (includes meal). Flamenco performance by the mother-daughter dance company, featuring live musicians.

“Comedy Returns to El Rio” El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; www.elriosf.com. Mon/13, 8pm. $7-20. Fourth anniversary show with Frankie Quiñones, Dan St. Paul, Aundre the Wonderwoman, and more.

“The Fantasticks” Mission Dolores Academy Auditorium, 3371 16th St, SF; www.16thstreetplayers.org. Fri/10 and Sat, 7:30pm (also Sat/11, 3pm); Sun, 3pm. Through May 19. Free. The 16th Street Players perform the classic musical.

“I Am a Lie that Always Tells the Truth” Garage, 715 Bryant, SF; www.kingdomofnot.com. Fri/10, 8pm. $10-20. The Kingdom of Not (Dan Carbone and Andrew Goldfarb) perform “music, monologues, and emergency dispatches.”

“ImmigraNation” Punchline Comedy Club, 444 Battery, SF; www.punchlinecomedyclub.com. Tue/14, 8pm. $15. Comedy about the immigrant experience with Dhaya Lakshminarayanan, Samson Koletkar, and more.

“Mission Position Live” Cinecave, 1034 Valencia, SF; www.missionpositionlive.com. Thu, 8pm. Ongoing. $10. Stand-up comedy with rotating performers.

“Mortified” DNA Lounge, 373 11th St, SF; www.getmortified.com. Fri/10, 7:30pm. $21. Also Sat/11, 7:30pm, $20. Uptown, 1928 Telegraph, Oakl. The storytelling series, which specializes in all things embarassing, ups the ante with a Mother’s Day theme this month.

“Mutant Creatures and Unlikely Teachers: Short Plays by Short People” Koret Auditorium, De Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, SF; www.stagewright.org. Tue/14, 11am. Free (advance reservations required). Also May 16, 6:30pm ($10) and May 17, 7pm ($50; fundraiser for StageWright program), Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St, SF; www.stagewright.org. StageWright presents plays by fifth graders at Starr King Elementary School, performed by professional actors and museums.

“Once in Love with Loesser” Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson, SF; www.42ndstreetmoon.org. Mon/13-Tue/14, 7pm. $45-70. 42nd Street Moon presents Tony nominee Emily Skinner performing songs by Frank Loesser.

Red Hots Burlesque El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; www.redhotsburlesque.com. Wed, 7:30-9pm. Ongoing. $5-10. Come for the burlesque show, stay for OMG! Karaoke starting at 8pm (no cover for karaoke).

San Francisco Ballet War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness, SF; www.sfballet.org. Wed/8, 7:30pm; Thu/9-Sat/11, 8pm (also Sat/11, 2pm); Sun/12, 2pm. $45-250. Performing the US premiere of Christopher Wheeldon’s Cinderella.

“San Francisco Magic Parlor” Chancellor Hotel Union Square, 433 Powell, SF; www.sfmagicparlor.com. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Ongoing. $40. Magic vignettes with conjurer and storyteller Walt Anthony.

Smuin Ballet Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; www.smuinballet.org. Fri-Sat and May 16, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through May 19. $24-65. Also May 22-25, 8pm (also May 25, 2pm); May 26, 2pm. $52-68. Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro, Mtn View. Also May 31-June 1, 8pm (also June 1, 2pm). $54-70. Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic, Walnut Creek. The company presents the West Coast premiere of Helen Pickett’s Petal and Darrell Grand Moultrie’s JAZZIN’, among other works.

“A Spaghetti Western” Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia, SF; www.clownsnotbombs.com. Fri/10-Sat/11, 8pm (also Sat/11, 2pm). $15-20. ClownSnotBombs performs a circus adventure about pasta and the Wild West.

“Stretchmarks” Creativity Theater, Children’s Creativity Museum, 221 Fourth St, SF; www.themommadrama.com. Fri/10-Sat/11, 8pm. $25. The Momma Drama presents this play as part of a mom-centric event on Mother’s Day.

“Union Square Live” Union Square, between Post, Geary, Powell, and Stockton, SF; www.unionsquarelive.org. Through Oct 9. Free. Music, dance, circus arts, film, and more; dates and times vary, so check website for the latest.

“Yerba Buena Gardens Festival” Yerba Buena Gardens, Mission between 3rd and 4th Sts, SF; www.ybgfestival.org. Through Oct 15. Free. This week: “Asian Improv aRts: 25th Anniversary: Traditions in Transformation,” Sat/11, 1-3pm; “Taiwan in the Gardens,” Sun/12, 1-2:30pm.

BAY AREA

Company C Contemporary Ballet Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic, Walnut Creek; www.lesherartscenter.org. Thu/9-Sat/11, 8pm; Sun/12, 1pm. $23-45. The company’s spring program features Natoma, a world premiere by Company C dancer David von Ligon.

Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg Zellerbach Hall, Bancroft at Telegraph, UC Berkeley, Berk; www.calperformances.org. Fri/10-Sat/11, 8pm; Sun/12, 3pm. $30-92. The company performs the Bay Area premiere of its latest ballet, Rodin.

“A History of the Body” Oakland Asian Cultural Center, 388 Ninth St, #290, Oakl; historyofbody.eventbrite.com. Sat/11, 7:30pm. $15-25. Work-in-progress performance of Aimee Suzara’s new play.

Oakland Ballet Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts, 1428 Alice, Oakl; www.oaklandballet.org. Fri/10-Sat/11, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm). $20-35. The company performs its spring season program, “Diaghilev Imagery.”

“The Shout: Life’s True Stories” Grand Lake Coffee House, 440 Grand, Oakl; www.theshoutstorytelling.com. Mon/13, 7:30pm. $5-20. Ten-minute tales from a variety of storytellers.

“Swearing in English: Tall Tales at Shotgun” Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. June 3 and 17, 8pm. $15. Shotgun Cabaret presents John Mercer in a series of three stranger-than-fiction dramatic readings.

Film listings

Andrew Lam
-
0

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, and Sara Maria Vizcarrondo. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock.

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

The San Francisco International Film Festival runs through Thu/9 at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; New People Cinema, 1746 Post, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Sundance Kabuki Cinemas 1881 Post, SF. For tickets (most shows $10-15) and complete schedule, visit festival.sffs.org.

OPENING

The Crumbles The awkward slackers and damaged hipsters of The Crumbles live in a sun-strafed, paved-over Los Angeles habitat of coffee shops, taco trucks, bookstores, budding filmmakers, and living room band practice. Darla (Katie Hipol) is slouching nowhere fast when her zany, charismatic cool-girl chum Elisa (Teresa Michelle Lee) enters the picture, looking for a place to crash. Elisa’s wacky, erratic, and unreliable, but she’s also capable of generating real excitement — and a mean little keytar hook — and the girls’ band, the Crumbles, gets off the couch and threatens to get all involved to bust out of their shells. Though director Akira Boch never quite dips into the deep background of his characters’ various dysfunctions — the threatened readings of Darla and Elisa’s psychic friend never quite sheds light — the first-time feature filmmaker has a real feel for the drifting, up-for-anything quality of Cali 20-somethings and an appreciation for their highs and lows that makes this familiar, loving, lets-put-on-show-kids update compelling. (1:13) Roxie. (Chun)

The Great Gatsby Baz Luhrmann reunites with his Romeo + Juliet (1996) star Leonardo DiCaprio for this long-awaited 3D adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel. (2:22) California, Four Star, Marina, Presidio, Vogue.

Kiss of the Damned This first feature by Xan Cassavetes isn’t remotely like the Method-y angstfests her late father John used to direct (although he did act in upscale genre movies like 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby and 1978’s The Fury). Instead, it’s an homage to the erotic European horror movies of the late 1960s through early ’80s, with further nods to Dario Argento, 1983’s The Hunger, and other fan-bait. Mysterious Djuna (Joséphine de La Baume) is immediately attracted to hunky screenwriter Paolo (Milo Ventimiglia), and vice versa. But she’s reluctant to follow through, and when he presses, she explains why: she’s a vampire, albeit the respectable kind who only "hunts" wild animals. When he decides that is a drawback he can deal with, they seem set to spend an undead eternity together. Unfortunately, they soon get an unwelcome guest in Djuna’s sister Mimi (Roxane Mesquida), a classic "bad girl" type who has no such compunctions about feasting on "stupid humans," and whose recklessness threatens the cover of any associated fellow vampire. Like its models, Kiss drags at times, and probably will seem too arty and slow to those attuned to mainstream current horror cinema. But if you’re a dweeb enough to know who the likes of Jean Rollin and Jess Franco are, this aesthetically slavish (on a faithfully low budget) salute to their sexy-bloody vintage schlock should amuse, with Steven Hufsteter’s original score an encyclopedia of vintage Eurotrash soundtrack tropes. (1:37) Shattuck. (Harvey)

Love is All You Need Copenhagen hairdresser Ida (Trine Dyrholm) has just finished her cancer treatments — with their success still undetermined — when she arrives home to find her longtime husband Leif (Kim Bodnia) boning a coworker on their couch. "I thought you were in chemo" is the closest he comes to an apology before walking out. Ida is determined to maintain a cheerful front when attending the Italian wedding of their daughter Astrid (Molly Blixt Egelind) — even after emotionally deaf Leif shows up with his new girlfriend in tow. Meanwhile brusque businessman and widower Philip (Pierce Brosnan), the groom’s father, is experiencing the discomfort of returning to the villa he once shared with his beloved late wife. This latest from Danish director Susanne Bier and writing partner Anders Thomas Jensen (2006’s After the Wedding, 2004’s Brothers, 2010’s In a Better World) is more conventionally escapist than their norm, with a general romantic-seriocomedy air reinforced by travel-poster-worthy views of the picturesque Italian coastline. They do try to insert greater depth and a more expansive story arc than you’d get in a Hollywood rom com. But all the relationships here are so prickly — between middle-aged leads we never quite believe would attract each other, between the clearly ill-matched aspiring newlyweds, between Paprika Steen’s overbearing sister in-law and everyone — that there’s very little to root for. It’s a romantic movie (as numerous soundtracked variations on "That’s Amore" constantly remind us) in which romance feels like the most contrived element. (1:50) Embarcadero. (Harvey)

Peeples Kerry Washington and Diahann Carroll star in this Tyler Perry-produced family drama set in the Hamptons. (1:35)

Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s This glossy love letter to posh New York City department store Bergdorf Goodman — a place so expensive that shopping there is "an aspirational dream" for the grubby masses, according to one interviewee — would offend with its slobbering take on consumerism if it wasn’t so damn entertaining. The doc’s narrative of sorts is propelled by the small army assembled to create the store’s famed holiday windows; we watch as lavish scenes of upholstered polar bears and sea creatures covered in glittering mosaics (flanking, natch, couture gowns) take shape over the months leading up to the Christmas rush. Along the way, a cavalcade of top designers (Michael Kors, Vera Wang, Giorgio Armani, Jason Wu, Karl Lagerfeld) reminisce on how the store has impacted their respective careers, and longtime employees share anecdotes, the best of which is probably the tale of how John Lennon and Yoko Ono saved the season by buying over 70 fur coats one magical Christmas Eve. Though lip service is paid to the current economic downturn (the Madoff scandal precipitated a startling dropoff in personal-shopper clients), Scatter My Ashes is mostly just superficial fun. What do you expect from a store whose best-selling shoe is sparkly, teeteringly tall, and costs $6,000? (1:33) Clay, Shattuck. (Eddy)

ONGOING

The Angels’ Share The latest from British filmmaker Ken Loach (2006’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley) and frequent screenwriter collaborator Paul Leverty contains a fair amount of humor — though it’s still got plenty of their trademark grit and realism. Offered "one last opportunity" by both a legal system he’s frequently disregarded and his exasperated and heavily pregnant girlfriend, ne’er-do-well Glaswegian Robbie (Paul Brannigan) resolves to straighten out his life. But his troubled past proves a formidable roadblock to a brighter future — until he visits a whiskey distillery with the other misfits he’s been performing his court-ordered community service with, and the group hatches an elaborate heist that could bring hope for Robbie and his growing family … if his gang of "scruffs" can pull it off. Granted, there are some familiar elements here, but this 2012 Cannes jury prize winner (the fest’s de facto third-place award) is more enjoyable than predictable — thanks to some whiskey-tasting nerd-out scenes, likable performances by its cast of mostly newcomers, and lines like "Nobody ever bothers anybody wearing a kilt!" (not necessarily true, as it turns out). Thankfully, English subtitles help with the thick Scottish accents. (1:41) Opera Plaza, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

At Any Price Growing up in rural Iowa very much in the shadow of his older brother, Dean Whipple (Zac Efron) cultivated a chip on his shoulder while dominating the figure 8 races at the local dirt track. When papa Henry (Dennis Quaid) — a keeping-up-appearances type, with secrets a-plenty lurking behind his good ol’ boy grin — realizes Dean is his best hope for keeping the family farm afloat, he launches a hail-mary attempt to salvage their relationship. This latest drama from acclaimed indie director Ramin Bahrani (2008’s Goodbye Solo) is his most ambitious to date, enfolding small-town family drama and stock-car scenes into a pointed commentary on modern agribusiness (Henry deals in GMO corn, and must grapple with the sinister corporate practices that go along with it). But the film never gels, particularly after an extreme, third-act plot twist is deployed to, um, hammer home the title — which refers to prices both monetary and spiritual. A solid supporting cast (Kim Dickens, Heather Graham, Clancy Brown, Red West, newcomer Maika Monroe) helps give the film some much-needed added weight as it veers toward melodrama. (1:45) SF Center. (Eddy)

The Big Wedding The wedding film has impacted our concepts of matrimony, fashion, and marital happiness more than all the textbooks in the world have affected our national testing average; but it’s with that margin of mediocrity I report from the theater trenches of The Big Wedding. With this, the wedding movie again peters to a crawl. Susan Sarandon (an actress I love with a loyalty beyond sense) is Bebe, the stepmother/caterer swept under the rug by the selfishness of her live in lover Don (De Niro), his ex-wife/baby momma Elle (Diane Keaton) and their racist wackjob future in-laws. When Don and Elle faced the end of their marriage, they tried to rekindle with a Columbian orphan. Cue Ben Barnes in brownface. Alejandro is set to wed Amanda Seyfried and when his mother ascends from Columbia for the wedding, he decides Don and Elle have to act like their marriage never ended &ldots; which makes Bebe a mistress. Surprise! A decade of caring selflessly for your lover’s kids has won you a super shitty wedding you still have to cater! To give you a sense of the conflict management on display, Bebe — the film’s graceful savior —drops a drink on Don before fleeing the scene in her Alfa Romeo; she’s the one character not determined to act out her more selfish urges in the style of an MTV reality show. Despite some less imaginative conflicts and degrading "solutions," this blended family still speaks some truth about the endearing embarrassment of the happy family. (1:29) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Vizcarrondo)

Blancanieves If you saw the two crappy overblown Hollywood takes on Snow White last year, my condolences. This is probably its best cinematic incarnation ever not made by someone called Walt. Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves transplants the tale to 1920s Spain and told (à la 2011’s The Artist) in the dialogue-free B&W style of that era’s silent cinema. Here, Snow is the daughter of a famous bullfighter (a beautiful performance by Daniel Giménez Cacho) who’s paralyzed physically in the ring, then emotionally by the death of his flamenco star wife (Inma Cuesta) in childbirth. He can’t bring himself to see his daughter until a grandmother’s death brings little Carmencita (the marvelous Sofía Oria) to the isolated ranch he now shares with nurse-turned-second-wife Encarna — Maribel Verdú as a very Jazz Age evil stepmother. Once the girl matures (now played by the ingratiating, slightly androgynous Macarena García), Encarna senses a rival, and to save her life Carmen literally runs away with the circus — at which point the narrative slumps a bit. But only a bit. Where The Artist was essentially a cleverly sustained gimmick elevated by a wonderful central performance, Blancanieves transcends its ingenious retro trappings to offer something both charming and substantiative. Berger doesn’t treat the story template as a joke — he’s fully adapted it to a culture, place, and time, and treats its inherent pathos with great delicacy. (1:44) Opera Plaza, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

The Company You Keep Robert Redford directs and stars as a fugitive former member of the Weather Underground, who goes on the run when another member (Susan Sarandon) is arrested and a newspaper reporter (Shia LaBeouf) connects him to a murder 30 years earlier during a Michigan bank robbery. Both the incident and the individuals in The Company You Keep are fictive, but a montage of archival footage at the start of the film is used to place them in the company of real-life radicals and events from the latter days of the 1960s-’70s antiwar movement. (The film’s timeline is a little hard to figure, as the action seems to be present day.) Living under an assumed name, Redford’s Nick Sloan is now a recently widowed public interest lawyer with a nine-year-old daughter, still fighting the good fight from the suburbs of Albany, NY — though some of his movement cohorts would probably argue that point. And as Nick heads cross-country on a hunt for one of them who’s still deep underground, and LaBeouf’s pesky reporter tussles with FBI agents (Terrance Howard and Anna Kendrick) and his besieged editor (Stanley Tucci) — mostly there to pass comment on print journalism’s precipitous decline — there’s plenty of contentious talk, none of it particularly trenchant or involving. Redford packs his earnest, well-intentioned film with stars delineating a constellation of attitudes about revolution, justice, and violent radical action — Julie Christie as an unrepentant radical and Nick’s former lover, Nick Nolte and Richard Jenkins as former movement members, Brendan Gleeson as a Michigan police detective involved in the original investigation, Chris Cooper as Nick’s estranged and disapproving younger brother. But their scrutiny, and the film’s, feels blurry and rote, while the plot’s one major twist seems random and is clumsily exposed. (2:05) Albany, SF Center. (Rapoport)

The Croods (1:38) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness.

Disconnect (1:55) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center.

Evil Dead "Sacrilege!" you surely thought when hearing that Sam Raimi’s immortal 1983 classic was being remade. But as far as remakes go, this one from Uruguayan writer-director Fede Alvarez (who’d previously only made some acclaimed genre shorts) is pretty decent. Four youths gather at a former family cabin destination because a fifth (Jane Levy) has staged her own intervention — after a near-fatal OD, she needs her friends to help her go cold turkey. But as a prologue has already informed us, there is a history of witchcraft and demonic possession in this place. The discovery of something very nasty (and smelly) in the cellar, along with a book of demonic incantations that Lou Taylor Pucci is stupid enough to read aloud from, leads to … well, you know. The all-hell that breaks loose here is more sadistically squirm-inducing than the humorously over-the-top gore in Raimi’s original duo (elements of the sublime ’87 Evil Dead II are also deployed here), and the characters are taken much more seriously — without, however, becoming more interesting. Despite a number of déjà vu kamikaze tracking shots through the Michigan forest (though most of the film was actually shot in New Zealand), Raimi’s giddy high energy and black comedy are replaced here by a more earnest if admittedly mostly effective approach, with plenty of decent shocks. No one could replace Bruce Campbell, and perhaps it was wise not to even try. So: pretty good, gory, expertly crafted, very R-rated horror fun, even with too many "It’s not over yet!" false endings. But no one will be playing this version over and over and over again as they (and I) still do the ’80s films. (1:31) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Harvey)

42 Broad and morally cautious, 42 is nonetheless an honorable addition to the small cannon of films about the late, great baseball player Jackie Robinson. When Dodgers owner Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford) declares that he wants a black player in the white major leagues because "The only real color is green!", it’s a cynical explanation that most people buy, and hate him for. It also starts the ball curving for a PR shitstorm. But money is an equal-opportunity leveling device: when Robinson (Chadwick Boseman) tries to use the bathroom at a small-town gas station, he’s denied and tells his manager they should "buy their 99 gallons of gas another place." Naturally the gas attendant concedes, and as 42 progresses, even those who reject Robinson at first turn into men who find out how good they are when they’re tested. Ford, swashbuckling well past his sell-by date, is a fantastic old coot here; his "been there, lived that" prowess makes you proud he once fled the path of a rolling bolder. His power moves here are even greater, but it’s ultimately Robinson’s show, and 42 finds a lot of ways to deliver on facts and still print the legend. (2:08) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Vizcarrondo)

From Up on Poppy Hill Hayao (dad, who co-wrote) and Goro (son, who directed) Miyazaki collaborate on this tale of two high-school kids — Umi, who does all the cooking at her grandmother’s boarding house, and Shun, a rabble-rouser who runs the school newspaper — in idyllic seaside Yokohama. Plans for the 1964 Olympics earmark a beloved historic clubhouse for demolition, and the budding couple unites behind the cause. The building offers a symbolic nod to Japanese history, while rehabbing it speaks to hopes for a brighter post-war future. But the past keeps interfering: conflict arises when Shun’s memories are triggered by a photo of Umi’s father, presumed lost at sea in the Korean War. There are no whimsical talking animals in this Studio Ghibli release, which investigates some darker-than-usual themes, though the animation is vivid and sparkling per usual. Hollywood types lending their voices to the English-language version include Jamie Lee Curtis, Christina Hendricks, Ron Howard, and Gilllian Anderson. (1:31) Shattuck. (Eddy)

GI Joe: Retaliation The plot exists to justify the action, but any fan of badass-ness will forgive the skimpy storyline for the outlandish badassery in GI Joe: Retaliation. Inspired by action figures and tying loosely to the first flick, Retaliation starts with a game of "secure the defector," followed by "raise the flag," but as soon as the stakes aren’t real, the Joes outright suck. They don’t have "neutral," which is maybe why a mission to rescue and revive the Joes as a force is the most ferocious fight that ever pit metal against plastic. The set pieces are stunning: a mostly silent sequence with Snake Eyes (Ray Park) and Jinx (Elodie Yung) on a mountainside will leave the audience gaping in its high speed wake, and a prison break featuring covert explosives is nonstop amazing. You’ll notice an emphasis on chain link fences and puddles (terra nostra for action figures) and set pieces conceived as if by kids who don’t have a concept of basic irrefutable truths like gravity. It’s just that kind of imagination and ardor and limitlessness that makes this Joe incredible, memorable, and a reason to crack out your toys again. (1:50) Metreon. (Vizcarrondo)

In the House In François Ozon’s first feature since the whimsical 2010 Potiche, he returns somewhat to the playful suspense intrigue of 2003’s Swimming Pool, albeit with a very different tone and context. Fabrice Luchini plays a high school French literature teacher disillusioned by his students’ ever-shrinking articulacy. But he is intrigued by one boy’s surprisingly rich description of his stealth invasion into a classmate’s envied "perfect" family — with lusty interest directed at the "middle class curves" of the mother (Emmanuelle Seigner). As the boy Claude’s writings continue in their possibly fictive, possibly stalker-ish provocations, his teacher grows increasingly unsure whether he’s dealing with a precocious bourgeoisie satirist or a literate budding sociopath — and ambivalent about his (and spouse Kristin Scott Thomas’ stressed gallery-curator’s) growing addiction to these artfully lurid possible exposé s of people he knows. And it escalates from there. Ozon is an expert filmmaker in nimble if not absolute peak form here, no doubt considerably helped by Juan Mayorga’s source play. It’s a smart mainstream entertainment that, had it been Hollywood feature, would doubtless be proclaimed brilliant for its clever tricks and turns. (1:45) Albany, Embarcadero, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Iron Man 3 Neither a sinister terrorist dubbed "the Mandarin" (Ben Kingsley) nor a spray-tanned mad scientist (Guy Pearce) are as formidable an enemy to Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) as Tony Stark himself, the mega-rich playboy last seen in 2012’s Avengers donning his Iron Man suit and thwarting alien destruction. It’s been rough since his big New York minute; he’s been suffering panic attacks and burying himself in his workshop, shutting out his live-in love (Gwyneth Paltrow) in favor of tinkering on an ever-expanding array of manned and un-manned supersuits. But duty, and personal growth, beckon when the above-mentioned villains start behaving very badly. With some help (but not much) from Don Cheadle’s War Machine — now known as "Iron Patriot" thanks to a much-mocked PR campaign — Stark does his saving-the-world routine again. If the plot fails to hit many fresh beats (a few delicious twists aside), the 3D special effects are suitably dazzling, the direction (by series newcomer Shane Black) is appropriately snappy, and Downey, Jr. again makes Stark one of the most charismatic superheros to ever grace the big screen. For now, at least, the continuing Avengers spin-off extravaganza seems justified. (2:06) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Jurassic Park 3D "Life finds a way," Jeff Goldblum’s leather-clad mathematician remarks, crystallizing the theme of this 1993 Spielberg classic, which at its core is more about human relationships than genetically manufactured terrors. Of course, it’s got plenty of those, and Jurassic Park doesn’t really need its (admittedly spiffy) 3D upgrade to remain a thoroughly entertaining thriller. The dinosaur effects — particularly the creepy Velociraptors and fan-fave T. rex — still dazzle. Only some early-90s computer references and Laura Dern’s mom jeans mark the film as dated. But a big-screen viewing of what’s become a cable TV staple allows for fresh appreciation of its less-iconic (but no less enjoyable) moments and performances: a pre-megafame Samuel L. Jackson as a weary systems tech; Bob Peck as the park’s skeptical, prodigiously thigh-muscled game warden. Try and forget the tepid sequels — including, dear gawd, 2014’s in-the-works fourth installment. This is all the Jurassic you will ever need. (2:07) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Kon-Tiki In 1947 Norwegian explorer and anthropologist Thor Heyderdahl arranged an expedition on a homemade raft across the Pacific, recreating what he believed was a route by which South Americans traveled to Polynesia in pre-Columbian times. (Although this theory is now disputed.) The six-man crew (plus parrot) survived numerous perils to complete their 101-day, 4300-mile journey intact — winning enormous global attention, particularly through Heyderdahl’s subsequent book and documentary feature. Co-directors Joachim Roenning and Espen Sandberg’s dramatization is a big, impressive physical adventure most arresting for its handsome use of numerous far-flung locations. Where it’s less successful is in stirring much emotional involvement, with the character dynamics underwhelming despite a decent cast led by Pal Sverr Hagen as Thor (who, incredibly, was pretty much a non-swimmer). Nonetheless, this new Kon-Tiki offers all the pleasures of armchair travel, letting you vicariously experience a high-risk voyage few could ever hope (or want) to make in real life. (1:58) Embarcadero. (Harvey)

Mud (2:15) California, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont.

No Long before the Arab Spring, a people’s revolution went down in Chile when a 1988 referendum toppled the country’s dictator, Augusto Pinochet, thanks in part to an ad exec who dared to sell the dream to his countrymen and women — using the relentlessly upbeat, cheesy language of a Pepsi Generation. In No‘s dramatization of this true story, ad man Rene Saavedra (Gael Garcia Bernal) is approached by the opposition to Pinochet’s regime to help them on their campaign to encourage Chile’s people to vote "no" to eight more years under the brutal strongman. Rene’s well-aware of the horrors of the dictatorship; not only are the disappeared common knowledge, his activist ex (Antonia Zegers) has been beaten and jailed with seeming regularity. Going up against his boss (Alfredo Castro), who’s overseeing the Pinochet campaign, Rene takes the brilliant tact in the opposition’s TV programs of selling hope — sound familiar? — promising "Chile, happiness is coming!" amid corny mimes, dancers, and the like. Director-producer Pablo Larrain turns out to be just as genius, shooting with a grainy U-matic ’80s video camera to match his footage with 1988 archival imagery, including the original TV spots, in this invigorating spiritual kin of both 2012’s Argo and 1997’s Wag the Dog. (1:50) Shattuck. (Chun)

Oblivion Spoiler alert: the great alien invasion of 2017 does absolutely zilch to eliminate, or at least ameliorate, the problem of sci-fi movie plot holes. However, puny humans willing to shut down the logic-demanding portions of their brains just might enjoy Oblivion, which is set 60 years after that fateful date and imagines that Earth has been rendered uninhabitable by said invasion. Tom Cruise plays Jack, a repairman who zips down from his sterile housing pod (shared with comely companion Andrea Riseborough) to keep a fleet of drones — dispatched to guard the planet’s remaining resources from alien squatters — in working order. But Something is Not Quite Right; Jack’s been having nostalgia-drenched memories of a bustling, pre-war New York City, and the déjà vu gets worse when a beautiful astronaut (Olga Kurylenko) literally crash-lands into his life. After an inaugural gig helming 2010’s stinky Tron: Legacy, director Joseph Kosinski shows promise, if not perfection, bringing his original tale to the screen. (He does, however, borrow heavily from 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1996’s Independence Day, and 2008’s Wall-E, among others.) Still, Oblivion boasts sleek production design, a certain creative flair, and some surprisingly effective plot twists — though also, alas, an overlong running time. (2:05) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Oz: The Great and Powerful Providing a backstory for the man behind the curtain, director Sam Raimi gives us a prequel of sorts to 1939’s The Wizard of Oz. Herein we follow the adventures of a Depression-era Kansas circus magician named Oscar (James Franco) — Oz to his friends — as he cons, philanders, bickers with his behind-the-scenes assistant Frank (Zach Braff), and eventually sails away in a twister, bound for a Technicolor land of massively proportioned flora, talking fauna, and witches ranging from dazzlingly good to treacherously wicked. From one of them, Theodora (Mila Kunis), he learns that his arrival — in Oz, just to clarify — has set in motion the fulfillment of a prophecy: that a great wizard, also named Oz, will bring about the downfall of a malevolent witch (Rachel Weisz), saving the kingdom and its cheery, goodhearted inhabitants. Unfortunately for this deserving populace, Oz spent his last pre-twister moments with the Baum Bros. Circus (the name a tribute to L. Frank Baum, writer of the Oz children’s books) demonstrating a banged-up moral compass and an undependable streak and proclaiming that he would rather be a great man than a good man. Unfortunately for the rest of us, this theme is revisited ad nauseam as Oz and the oppressively beneficent witch Glinda (Michelle Williams) — whose magic appears to consist mainly of nice soft things like bubbles and fog — stand around debating whether he’s the right man for the task. When the fog clears, though, the view is undeniably pretty. While en route to and from the Emerald City, Oz and his companions — among them a non-evil flying monkey (voiced by Braff) and a rather adorable china doll (Joey King) — wander through a deliriously arresting, Fantasia-esque landscape whose intricate, inventive construction helps distract from the plodding, saccharine rhetoric and unappealing story line. (2:07) SF Center, Shattuck. (Rapoport)

Pain & Gain In mid-1995 members of what became known as the "Sun Gym Gang" — played here by Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, and Anthony Mackie — were arrested for a series of crimes including kidnapping, extortion, and murder. Simply wanting to live large, they’d abducted one well-off man (Tony Shalhoub) months earlier, tortured him into signing over all his assets, and left him for dead — yet incredibly the Miami police thought the victim’s story was a tall tale, leaving the perps free until they’d burned through their moolah and sought other victims. Michael Bay’s cartoonish take on a pretty horrific saga repeatedly reminds us that it’s a true story, though the script plays fast and loose with many real-life details. (And strangely it downplays the role steroid abuse presumably played in a lot of very crazy behavior.) In a way, his bombastic style is well-suited to a grotesquely comic thriller about bungling bodybuilder criminals redundantly described here as "dumb stupid fucks." There have been worse Bay movies, even if that’s like saying "This gas isn’t as toxic as the last one." But despite the flirtations with satire of fitness culture, motivational gurus and so forth, his sense of humor stays on a loutish plane, complete with fag-bashing, a dwarf gag, and representation of Miami as basically one big siliconed titty bar. Nor can he pull off a turn toward black comedy that needs the superior intelligence of someone like the Coen Brothers or Soderbergh. As usual everything is overamped, the action sequences overblown, the whole thing overlong, and good actors made to overact. You’ve got to give cranky old Ed Harris credit: playing a private detective, he alone here refuses to be bullied into hamming it up. (2:00) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Harvey)

The Place Beyond the Pines Powerful indie drama Blue Valentine (2010) marked director Derek Cianfrance as one worthy of attention, so it’s with no small amount of fanfare that this follow-up arrives. The Place Beyond the Pines‘ high profile is further enhanced by the presence of Bradley Cooper (currently enjoying a career ascension from Sexiest Man Alive to Oscar-nominated Serious Actor), cast opposite Valentine star Ryan Gosling, though they share just one scene. An overlong, occasionally contrived tale of three generations of fathers, father figures, and sons, Pines‘ initial focus is Gosling’s stunt-motorcycle rider, a character that would feel more exciting if it wasn’t so reminiscent of Gosling’s turn in Drive (2011), albeit with a blonde dye job and tattoos that look like they were applied by the same guy who inked James Franco in Spring Breakers. Robbing banks seems a reasonable way to raise cash for his infant son, as well as a way for Pines to draw in another whole set of characters, in the form of a cop (Cooper) who’s also a new father, and who — as the story shifts ahead 15 years — builds a political career off the case. Of course, fate and the convenience of movie scripts dictate that the mens’ sons will meet, the past will haunt the present and fuck up the future, etc. etc. Ultimately, Pines is an ambitious film that suffers from both its sprawl and some predictable choices (did Ray Liotta really need to play yet another dirty cop?) Halfway through the movie I couldn’t help thinking what might’ve happened if Cianfrance had dared to swap the casting of the main roles; Gosling could’ve been a great ambitious cop-turned-powerful prick, and Cooper could’ve done interesting things with the Evel Knievel-goes-Point Break part. Just sayin’. (2:20) Embarcadero, Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Presidio, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

The Reluctant Fundamentalist Based on Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid’s award-winning 2007 novel, and directed by the acclaimed Mira Nair (2001’s Monsoon Wedding, 2006’s The Namesake), The Reluctant Fundamentalist boasts an international cast (Kate Hudson, Martin Donovan, Kiefer Sutherland, Liev Schreiber, Om Puri) and nearly as many locations. British-Pakistani actor Riz Ahmed (2010’s Four Lions) stars as Changez Khan, a Princeton-educated professor who grants an interview with a reporter (Schreiber) after another prof at Lahore University — an American citizen — is taken hostage; their meeting grows more tense as the atmosphere around them becomes more charged. Most of the film unfolds as an extended flashback, as Changez recounts his years on Wall Street as a talented "soldier in [America’s] economic army," with a brunette Hudson playing Erica, a photographer who becomes his NYC love interest. After 9/11, he begins to lose his lust for star-spangled yuppie success, and soon returns to his homeland to pursue a more meaningful cause. Though it’s mostly an earnest, soul-searching character study, The Reluctant Fundamentalist suddenly decides it wants to be a full-throttle political thriller in its last act; ultimately, it offers only superficial insight into what might inspire someone’s conversion to fundamentalism (one guess: Erica’s embarrassingly bad art installation, which could make anyone hate America). Still, Ahmed is a compelling lead. (2:08) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

Renoir The gorgeous, sun-dappled French Riviera setting is the high point of this otherwise low-key drama about the temperamental women (Christa Theret) who was the final muse to elderly painter Auguste Renoir (Michel Bouquet), and who encouraged the filmmaking urges in his son, future cinema great Jean (Vincent Rottiers). Cinematographer Mark Ping Bin Lee (who’s worked with Hou Hsiao-hsein and Wong Kar Wai) lenses Renoir’s leafy, ramshackle estate to maximize its resemblance to the paintings it helped inspire; though her character, Dédée, could kindly be described as "conniving," Theret could not have been better physically cast, with tumbling red curls and pale skin she’s none too shy about showing off. Though the specter of World War I looms in the background, the biggest conflicts in Gilles Bourdos’ film are contained within the household, as Jean frets about his future, Dédée faces the reality of her precarious position in the household (which is staffed by aging models-turned-maids), and Auguste battles ill health by continuing to paint, though he’s in a wheelchair and must have his brushes taped to his hands. Though not much really happens, Renoir is a pleasant, easy-on-the-eyes experience. (1:51) Opera Plaza, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

The Sapphires The civil rights injustices suffered by these dream girls may be unique to Aboriginal Australians, but they’ll strike a chord with viewers throughout the world — at right about the same spot stoked by the sweet soul music of Motown. Co-written by Tony Briggs, the son of a singer in a real-life Aboriginal girl group, this unrepentant feel-gooder aims to make the lessons of history go down with the good humor and up-from-the-underdog triumph of films like The Full Monty (1997) — the crucial difference in this fun if flawed comedy-romance is that it tells the story of women of color, finding their voices and discovering, yes, their groove. It’s all in the family for these would-be soul sisters, or rather country cousins, bred on Merle Haggard and folk tunes: there’s the charmless and tough Gail (Deborah Mailman), the soulful single mom Julie (Jessica Mauboy, an Australian Idol runner-up), the flirty Cynthia (Miranda Tapsell), and the pale-skinned Kay (Shari Sebbens), the latter passing as white after being forcibly "assimilated" by the government. Their dream is to get off the farm, even if that means entertaining the troops in Vietnam, and the person to help them realize that checkered goal is dissolute piano player Dave (Chris O’Dowd). And O’Dowd is the breakout star to watch here — he adds an loose, erratic energy to an otherwise heavily worked story arc. So when romance sparks for all Sapphires — and the racial tension simmering beneath the sequins rumbles to the surface — the easy pleasures generated by O’Dowd and the music (despite head-scratching inclusions like 1970’s "Run Through the Jungle" in this 1968-set yarn), along with the gently handled lessons in identity politics learned, obliterate any lingering questions left sucking Saigon dust as the narrative plunges forward. They keep you hanging on. (1:38) Opera Plaza, Piedmont, Shattuck. (Chun)

Scary Movie 5 (1:35) Metreon.

The Source Family Under the guidance of charismatic, luxuriously-bearded leader Father Yod (once named Jim Baker, later known as YaHoWha), the Source Family operated one of the country’s first health food restaurants. They lived in a Hollywood Hills mansion, wore flowing robes, assumed dreamy new names, meditated, and studied Father Yod’s custom blend of Eastern and Western philosophy and mysticism. As the home movies that comprise Maria Demopoulos and Jodi Wille’s documentary, The Source Family, suggest, there were golden moments aplenty, even as the mainstream began to view the group with suspicion (and an aging Father Yod’s decision to take multiple wives confused some members — particularly the woman he was already legally married to). Tapping into the group’s extensive film and psych-rock music archives, as well as interviews with surviving members, The Source Family offers a captivating look at what had to be the most earnest (and most photogenic) cult of the 1970s. (1:38) Roxie. (Eddy)

Trance Where did Danny Boyle drop his noir? Somewhere along the way from Shallow Grave (1994) to Slumdog Millionaire (2008)? Finding the thread he misplaced among the obfuscating reflections of London’s corporate-contempo architecture, Boyle strives to put his own character-centered spin on the genre in this collaboration with Grave and Trainspotting (1996) screenwriter John Hodge, though the final product feels distinctly off, despite its Hitchcockian aspirations toward a sort of modern-day Spellbound (1945). Untrustworthy narrator Simon (James McAvoy) is an auctioneer for a Sotheby’s-like house, tasked with protecting the multimillion-dollar artworks on the block, within reason. Then the splashily elaborate theft of Goya’s Witches’ Flight painting goes down on Simon’s watch, and for his trouble, the complicit staffer is concussed by heist leader Franck (Vincent Cassel). Where did those slippery witches fly to? Simon, mixed up with the thieves due to his gambling debts, cries amnesia — the truth appears to be locked in the opaque layers of his jostled brain, and it’s up to hypnotherapist Elizabeth (Rosario Dawson) to uncover the Goya’s resting place. Is she trying to help Simon extricate himself from his impossible situation, seduce Franck, or simply help herself? Boyle tries to transmit the mutable mind games on screen, via the lighting, glass, and watery reflections that are supposed to translate as sleek sophistication. But devices like speedy, back-and-forth edits and off-and-on fourth-wall-battering instances as when Simon locks eyes with the audience, read as dated and cheesy as a banking commercial. The seriously miscast actors also fail to sell Trance on various levels — believability, likeability, etc. — as the very unmesmerized viewer falls into a light coma and the movie twirls, flaming, into the ludicrous. (1:44) SF Center. (Chun)

Upstream Color A woman, a man, a pig, a worm, Walden — what? If you enter into Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color expecting things like a linear plot, exposition, and character development, you will exit baffled and distressed. Best to understand in advance that these elements are not part of Carruth’s master plan. In fact, based on my own experiences watching the film twice, I’m fairly certain that not really understanding what’s going on in Upstream Color is part of its loopy allure. Remember Carruth’s 2004 Primer? Did you try to puzzle out that film’s array of overlapping and jigsawed timelines, only to give up and concede that the mystery (and sheer bravado) of that film was part of its, uh, loopy allure? Yeah. Same idea, except writ a few dimensions larger, with more locations, zero tech-speak dialogue, and — yes! — a compelling female lead, played by Amy Seimetz, an indie producer and director in her own right. Enjoying (or even making it all the way through) Upstream Color requires patience and a willingness to forgive some of Carruth’s more pretentious noodlings; in the tradition of experimental filmmaking, it’s a work that’s more concerned with evoking emotions than hitting some kind of three-act structure. Most importantly, it manages to be both maddening and moving at the same time. (1:35) Roxie. (Eddy)

Music listings

Andrew Lam
-
0

Since club life is unpredictable, it’s a good idea to call ahead or check the venue’s website to confirm bookings and hours. Prices are listed when provided to us. Visit www.sfbg.com/venue-guide for venue information. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 8

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Andy Cabic and Eric D. Johnson Band, Neal Casal, Bart Davenport Chapel. 9pm, $17.

Michael Barrett Johnny Foley’s Irish House. 10pm, free.

Born Ruffians, Moon Kings Slim’s. 8pm, $17.

Great American Cities, Kallisto, DJ Creepy B Elbo Room. 9pm, $8.

"Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos" Johnny Foley’s Irish House. 9pm. With Michael C. vs. Rags Tuttle.

Laura Stevenson Band, Field Mouse, Haunted Summer Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $12.

Low Magic, Yellow Dress, Jaberi and Deutsch Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $10.

Tom Odell, Cillie Barnes Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $15.

Joshua Radin, My Name is You Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $41.

Teddy Riley and Blackstreet featuring Dave Hollister Yoshi’s San Francisco. 10pm, $39.

Two-Tone Steiny and the Cadillacs Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

Kurt Vile, Steve Gunn Independent. 8pm, $20.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Dink Dink Dink, Gaucho, Eric Garland’s Jazz Session Amnesia. 7pm, free.

Hammond organ soul jazz blues party with Big Bones Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

Edward Schocker Meridian Gallery, 535 Powell, SF; www.meridiangallery.org. 7:30pm, $8-10.

Sophisticated Ladies Rite Spot Café, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 9pm, free.

Terry Disley’s Rocking Jazz Trio Burritt Room, 417 Stockton, SF; www.mystichotel.com. 6-9pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Daniel Seidel Plough and Stars. 9pm.

Curt Yagi and the People Standing Behind Me, Katie Garibaldi, Salet, Lauren Sturm Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 8pm, $8.

DANCE CLUBS

Debut DNA Lounge. 8pm, $5 suggested donation. SFEIC students showcase their work in a hair and make-up show, with DJ C-Lektra.

Timba Dance Party Bissip Baobab. 10pm, $5. Timba and salsa Cubana with DJ Walt Diggz.

THURSDAY 9

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Allah-Las, Blank Tapes Chapel. 9pm, $17.

Chrysta Bell, Emily Jane White Bimbo’s 365 Club. 8pm, $20.

Brasil Couches, Old & Gray Amnesia. 9pm.

Cloud Cult, JBM Independent. 8pm, $17.

Paula Cole Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $32.

"An Evening with Chris Thile and Michael Daves" Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $19.

French Cassettes, Ash Reiter, yOya, Annie Girl and the Flight Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Glitter Wizard, Carlton Melton, Joy Hemlock Tavern. 8:30pm, $8.

Gunshy Johnny Foley’s Irish House. 10pm, free.

"Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos" Johnny Foley’s Irish House. 9pm. With Nathan Temby vs. Michael C.

Machine Gun Kelly Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $28.

Rolando Morales Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $16.

Picture Atlantic, Little Daylight, Finish Ticket Rickshaw Stop. 9:30pm, $10. Plus Popscene DJs.

Spanish Moss, Feeding People, Holy Wave, Mr. Elevator and the Brain Hotel Thee Parkside. 9pm, $5.

That1Guy, Captain Ahab’s Motorcycle Club Café Du Nord. 9pm, $15.

Zodiac Death Valley, Leopold and His Fiction, Sporting Life, Rusty Maples, DJ Neil Martinson Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $10.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Hammond organ soul jazz blues party with Chris Siebert Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

Tin Cup Serenade Rite Spot Café, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 9pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Haesemeyer Lost Church, 65 Capp, SF; www.thelostchurch.com. 8pm, $15.

Tipsy House Plough and Stars. 9pm.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $8-15. Six-year anniversary celebration with hosts Pleasuremaker and Señor Oz, plus the Afrolicious 12-piece band, DJ Smash, J Boogie, and Captain Planet.

DAMSF DNA Lounge. 10:30pm, $10-20. Hip-hop performance showcase.

DJ Kaos, Mozhgan, Jason Greer Monarch, 101 Sixth St, SF; monarchsf.ticketfly.com. 10pm, $10.

8bitSF DNA Lounge. 9pm, $11. Chiptunes with DJ Cutman, A_Rival, E.N. Cowell, and more.

Pa’lante! Bissip Baobab. 10pm, $5. Electro-cumbia, dancehall, and soca with DJs Juan G., El Kool Kyle, and Mr. Lucky.

FRIDAY 10

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso UFO, Tjutjuna, 3 Leafs Bottom of the Hill. 10pm, $12.

B.A.P. (Best.Absolute.Perfect.) Warfield. 7:30pm, $40-100.

Body and Soul Johnny Foley’s Irish House. 10pm, free.

Chris Duarte Group Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

Dead Winter Carpenters, Cody Canada and the Departed Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $16.

Justin Townes Earle Chapel. 9pm, $20-25.

Greyboy Allstars Independent. 9pm, $25.

"Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos" Johnny Foley’s Irish House. 9pm. With Greg Zema, Nathan Temby, and Michael C.

Pokey LaFarge, West Coast Ramblers Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $13-15.

Of Montreal, Wild Moccasins Slim’s. 9pm, $21.

Paul Collins Beat, Courtney and the Crushers, the Cry Thee Parkside. 9pm, $10.

Lydia Pense and Cold Blood featuring Rick Stevens Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $19-26.

Secret Chiefs 3 Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $20.

Technicolors, Fictionist DNA Lounge. 8pm, $12.

Thrive!, Dewey and the Peoples, Sono Vero, Da Mainland Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $15.

Tomihara, Fox and the Law, Tokyo Raid Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $8.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Audium 1616 Bush, SF; www.audium.org. 8:30pm, $20. Theater of sound-sculptured space.

Mike Burns Rite Spot Café, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 9pm, free.

Regina Carter, John Blake, Jr. SFJAZZ, 201 Franklin, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7:30pm, $20-40.

Hammond organ soul jazz blues party Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Big Lion, Rich McCulley Plough and Stars. 9pm.

Underskore Orchestra, Sour Mash Hug Band Amnesia. 9pm, $5.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $8-15. Six-year anniversary celebration with hosts Pleasuremaker and Señor Oz, plus the Afrolicious 12-piece band and DJ Smash.

DJ What’s His Fuck Pop’s Bar, 2800 24th St, SF; (415) 401-7677. 9pm, free. Old-school punk and metal.

Indie Slash Amnesia. 10pm. With DJ Danny White.

Kitsune Club Night Mezzanine. 9pm, $17. With Fred Falke, Chrome Sparks, and Beni.

Makossa West Bissip Baobab. 10pm, $5. Classic salsa, funk, Afrobeat, reggae, and more with DJs Wonway Posibul and Joe Quixx.

That 90s Dance Party DNA Lounge. 10pm, $7-9. With DJs Devon, Netik, Sage, Starr, and Myster C.

TBMA, Syd Gris, DJ Icon, Ultraviolet Monarch, 101 Sixth St, SF; monarchsf.ticketfly.com. 10pm, $10.

SATURDAY 11

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Big Blu Soul Revue Grant and Green. 9pm, free.

Blame Sally, Lia Rose Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $26-31.

Jay Brannan, Rin Tin Tiger, Plastic Arts Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $14.

Bright Grey Wing, Rebecca Pronsky, Eight Belles Amnesia. 6:30pm, $7.

Fonseca Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $38.

Greyboy Allstars Independent. 9pm, $25.

Hanalei, Divided Heaven, Rob Carter, Keeley Valentino Thee Parkside. 3pm, free.

"Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos" Johnny Foley’s Irish House. 9pm. With Michael C., Greg Zema, and Nathan Temby.

K’Jon Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $24-28.

Kids on a Crime Spree, Number One Smash Hits, Manatee Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $7.

Man or Astro-Man?, Terry Malts, Ogres Bimbo’s 365 Club. 9pm, $18.

Meat Sluts, Thee Merry Widows, Dirty Shakers Bender’s, 800 S. Van Ness, SF; www.bendersbar.com. 10pm, $5.

Kate Nash Chapel. 9pm, $18-20.

Rose Windows, Extra Classic, Zig Zags Thee Parkside. 9pm, $8.

Rustangs Riptide. 9:30pm, free.

Secret Chiefs 3 Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $20.

"Slim’s Goes British: Revue #3" Slim’s. 8:30pm, $15. With RaveUps, Blondies, Haunted by Heroes, and Whitecliff Rangers with special guest Girl Named T. 8:30pm, $15.

Lavay Smith and Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

2 Men Will Move You Amnesia. 9pm.

Wild Rumpus Salle Pianos, 1632 C Market, SF; www.wildrumpusmusic.org. 8pm, $15-25.

Wolf + Lamb, Soul Clap, Pillowtalk, Nick Monaco Mezzanine. 9pm, $10-20.

X-Static Johnny Foley’s Irish House. 10pm, free.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Audium 1616 Bush, SF; www.audium.org. 8:30pm, $20. Theater of sound-sculptured space.

Regina Carter SFJAZZ, 201 Franklin, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 11am (family matinee), $5-15, and 7:30pm, $25-60.

Cottontails Rite Spot Café, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 9pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Flux Pavilion, Cookie Monsta, Funtcase, Brown and Gammon, Roksonix Warfield. 9pm, $42.

Fogo Na Roupa, DJs Ras Rican, Sake One, and Epic, live percusion by Quique Padilla Bissip Baobab. 10pm, $5. Fundraiser for Mission Girls Violence Prevention Program.

Lovebirds Plough and Stars. 9pm.

Mision Flamenca Bissip Baobab. 7:30pm, $15.

DANCE CLUBS

Bootie SF DNA Lounge. 9pm, $10-15. Mash-ups with A Plus D and others.

Cockblock Rickshaw Stop. 10pm, $10. Queer dance party with DJs Nuxx and Zax.

Dark Days Eagle. 3-6pm. Lady Bear and her Dark Dolls host this beer bust (tickets benefit the AIDS Emergency Fund) with beats from DJ Le Perv and guests.

Tormenta Tropical Elbo Room. 10pm, $5-10. With resident DJs Shawn Reynaldo and Oro11, and guest DJ Quality.

SUNDAY 12

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Karina Denike and friends Rite Spot Café, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 8:30pm, free.

Hydrophonic, My Victim, Bad Bones Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Jamaican Queens, Maus Haus, Black Jeans Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $7.

Merchants of Moonshine, DJ Quarterman Jack Champion Thee Parkside. 4pm, free.

Buddy Miller and Jim Lauderdale, Max Gomez Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $23.

Dave Moreno and friends Johnny Foley’s Irish House. 10pm, free.

Rotten Sound, Early Graves, Hellbeard, Aurgurs, Parasitic Explosion DNA Lounge. 7:30pm, $16.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Regina Carter and Carolina Chocolate Drops SFJAZZ, 201 Franklin, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 3 and 7pm, $25-50.

Hammond organ soul jazz blues party with Lavay Smith Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Brazil and Beyond Bissip Baobab. 6:30pm, free.

Hipwaders Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission, SF; www.thecjm.org. Sun, 11am. $10-12 (kids under 18 free).

Junior Brown Yoshi’s San Francisco. 7pm, $25.

Darcy Noonan, Richard Mandel, Jack Gilder, and friends Plough and Stars. 9pm.

Thee Old Country Tupelo, 1337 Grant, SF; www.tupelosf.com. 4pm, free.

MONDAY 13

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Damir Johnny Foley’s Irish House. 10pm, free.

Highlands, Orange Revival Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $10.

Yngwie Malmsteen Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $32.

Collin Ludlow-Mattson and the Folks, Casual Dolphins, Air Surgeon, Catharsis for Cathedral Elbo Room. 9pm, $6.

Milk Carton Kids, Barefoot Movement Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $17-19.

Sweat Lodge, Photo Atlas, Father President Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $8.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Toshio Hirano Amnesia. 9pm, free.

"The Pick: Open Bluegrass Jam" Amnesia. 6pm.

DANCE CLUBS

Death Guild DNA Lounge. 9:30pm, $3-5. Gothic, industrial, and synthpop with Decay, Joe Radio, and Melting Girl.

TUESDAY 14

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Buffalo Tooth, Joy, A Million Billion Dying Sons, Disappearing People, DJ Dahmer Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $9.

Go Time, pseudotunesmith, Reliics Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $8.

IAMX, Moto Boy Slim’s. 8pm, $20.

John Garcia Band Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

Kisses, Sister Crayon, Astronauts etc. Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $10-12.

Laurels, Moonbeams, Fleeting Joys Hemlock Tavern. 8:30pm, $8.

Pow, Cold Beat, Cold Circuits, Daisy World, DJ Ack Ack Ack Knockout. 9:30pm, $6.

Stan Earhart Band Johnny Foley’s Irish House. 10pm, free.

Steve Adamyk Band, Needles // Pins, Primitive Hearts, Adam Widener Thee Parkside. 8pm, $7.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Frisky Frolics Rite Spot Café, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 8:30pm, free.

"sfSoundSalonSeries: Xenoglossia/Leishmania (Christopher Burns and Bill Hsu)" Center for New Music, 55 Taylor, SF; www.centerfornewmusic.com. 7:49pm, $10.

Terry Disley’s Rocking Jazz Trio Burritt Room, 417 Stockton, SF; www.mystichotel.com. 6-9pm, free.
DANCE CLUBS
’90s Hip-Hop Sample Night Double Dutch, 3192 16th St, SF; www.thedoubledutch.com. 9pm, free. With Mr. Murdock and DJ Haylow.

On the Cheap listings

Andrew Lam
-
0

For information on how to submit events for listing consideration, see the guidelines in Selector.

THURSDAY 9

Bike to work day Various SF locations. www.sfbike.org. 5:30am-7pm, free. Trade in a cramped morning Muni commute for an open-air bike ride today in honor of bike to work day. The SF Bicycle Coalition knows biking the hills of SF is not always an easy task, which is why it has set up 26 "energizer stations" all around the city to serve free snacks, beverages, and reusable, goodie-filled tote bags to use on your to-and-froms. Check the Coalition’s site to find a station along your regular route.

Thirsty Thursday Toga Party Atmosphere, 447 Broadway, SF. www.a3atmosphere.com. 9:30pm, free. RSVP required. Revive your Animal House-esque days with a toga party. Travelers, locals, au pairs, and international students will be decked out in the finest bed sheets around. Show up before 10pm and score a free bingo card with a $3 shot offered every time you check off a square.

Britweek Design Series San Francisco Design Center, 2 Henry Adams, SF. www.babcsf.org. 4:30-10pm, $20-25 advance. The British-American Business Council hosts this design-driven evening. The event will kick off with a panel of British and American architects and interior designers, followed by a second international panel of innovators working in product design and technology, finishing up with an after party at Project One Gallery, just down the street from the design center.

FRIDAY 10

Spirit: A Century of Queer Asian Activism Mission Cultural Center, 2868 Mission, SF. www.queerrebels.com. 8pm, $12-20. Queer Rebels’ organization for queer artists of color brings movers and shakers of the community together to celebrate 100 years of queer Asian activism. The two-day event begins tonight with performances by Eli-Coppola award winning poet Ryka Aoki, performance artist Genevieve Erin O’Brien, and more. The festivities will continue tomorrow night with a panel discussion and film screenings.

SATURDAY 11

Pet Week kick-off Little Marina Green, Marina and Baker, SF. www.marinatimes.com. 11am-3pm, free. Soak up some sun and get your puppy fix today at Pet Week’s kick-off event. Bring your favorite four-legged friend for free microchipping, watch police K-9s show off their detective skills, pick up some free goodies for Fido, and maybe even adopt a new friend. Pet adoption will be available from eight organizations including Pets Unlimited, Muttville, and Rocket Dog Rescue.

Bluegrass Pickin’ Picnic Dahlia Picnic Area, Golden Gate Park, SF. www.countryroundupsf.com. Noon-6pm, free. If you’re a fan of Golden Gate Park and bluegrass but the giant mobs of the Hardly Strictly festival bruise your gentle nerves, here is your second chance. Sponsored by the California Bluegrass Association, this afternoon is an open jam session for all who play or just like listening to bluegrass. Set up your picnic blanket early and score some free hamburgers and hot dogs while supplies last.

SUNDAY 12

Wanderlust Festival Marina Green. sf.wanderlustfestival.com. 12-5pm, free. Register online. If the daily grind of city life is taking its toll, head over to the Marina for a stress-relieving day of yoga and music. The day will begin with yoga sessions led by Pradeep Teotia and Susan Hauser, Lululemon 2012 ambassador. The evening will conclude with musical performances by DJ Drez and the fittingly named MC Yogi.

TUESDAY 14

Cakespy book signing Book Passage, 1 Ferry Building, SF. www.bookpassage.com. 6pm, free. Ever been stuffing your face with a red velvet cupcake or Girl Scout cookie and wondered where the recipe originated? Self proclaimed "dessert detective" Jessie Oleson Moore has these answers and more in her new book The Secret Lives of Baked Goods: Sweet Stories & Recipes from America’s Favorite Desserts. Head over to the Ferry Building to meet Moore and get a signed copy of this sweet literary treat.

"Ask a Scientist: Origins of the Universe" SoMa StrEat Food Park, 428 11th St., SF. www.askascientistsf.com. In this lecture hosted by UC Berkeley Professor Eliot Quataert science fanatics will learn how the universe evolved from its smooth beginnings to its current state. Quataert will focus on how gravity reigns supreme and builds up the planets, stars, and galaxies required for biological evolution. If digesting all this scientific chatter works up an appetite, fuel up at one of the ten gourmet food trucks at SoMa StrEat Food Park.

Secret San Francisco: Adventures in History Balboa Theatre, 3630 Balboa, SF. www.cinemasf.com/balboa. 6:30pm, $10. The history of the downtown neighborhoods of San Francisco are well photographed and documented, but head further west and things tend to get a bit foggy. That’s where the Western Neighborhood Projects comes in. The nonprofit has been documenting all things west of Stanyan Street since 1999. Head to the Balboa Theatre tonight for a dose of SF history — west and east — short films, archival TV footage, and other historic surprises.

Aquarius rising

-
0
Aquarius rising

FILM Under the guidance of charismatic, luxuriously-bearded leader Father Yod (once named Jim Baker, later known as YaHoWha), the Source Family operated one of the country’s first health food restaurants. They lived in a Hollywood Hills mansion, wore flowing robes, assumed dreamy new names, meditated, and studied Father Yod’s custom blend of Eastern and Western philosophy and mysticism.

As the home movies that comprise Maria Demopoulos and Jodi Wille’s documentary, The Source Family, suggest, there were golden moments aplenty, even as the mainstream began to view the group with suspicion (and an aging Father Yod’s decision to take multiple wives confused some members — particularly the woman he was already legally married to). Tapping into the group’s extensive film and music archives, as well as interviews with surviving members, The Source Family (opening here with a big gala Thu/2 and running through May 9 at the Roxie) offers a captivating look at what had to be the most earnest (and most photogenic) cult of the 1970s. I spoke with Demopoulos and Wille to learn more.

San Francisco Bay Guardian When did you first hear about the Source Family, and how did you hook up with “Family historian” Isis Aquarian?

Jodi Wille In 1999, a friend showed me a CD box set with all nine of the original Family records. I’d been obsessed with cults, communes, and radical groups from the 1960s and ’70s for 20 years — but I’d never heard of the Source Family. I was shocked that this existed, and that they had this kind of musical output. Also, there were pictures of them looking very beautiful and stylish. But I went online and there was nothing there [about them].

One day, my then-husband, [Feral House publisher] Adam Parfrey, came home with a DVD he’d found at Amoeba Records: a very limited-release student film on the Source Family. We watched it, and I was struck by how thoughtful and charming the Family members were in the interviews.

I went online again, and this time there was a website. I’m a book publisher, too — I put out books on counterculture, sustainability, and things like that [on Process Media and Dilettante Press] — so I emailed, asking if they’d ever considered doing a book. Isis Aquarian wrote back and said [she and her Source Family brother Electricity] had been working on a book for seven years. So I started going through her massive archives with her; we worked to expand the book, which had been written for Family members, for the public. As we were doing that, we were filming interviews with other Family members. When Isis let me know about the film component to her archive, I realized that this was an extraordinary story that had all of the elements we would need for a great documentary.

At that point, I brought in Maria, a close friend of mine who had become a very talented commercial director. Before the book, [The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13, and The Source Family], people were really private about their experiences, and I think some of them were uncomfortable about going public. But the book was received positively; it told the story from the believers’ point of view and I think that helped develop their trust. So we were very lucky to get incredible access.

SFBG You were friends with Isis, who’s credited as an associate producer, by the time you started working on the film — yet it offers a balanced portrait. How did you stay objective?

JW Isis has done an enormous amount of work helping us in many ways, but she was not involved creatively. That was really important to us, to have that freedom, and she agreed to that. But I became close to some Family members, so I think bringing Maria in was really essential to help with the balance.

Maria Demopoulos I think, objectivity aside, we just focused on letting the Family members speak for themselves, and trying to go for as much authenticity as possible, hearing all perspectives. We worked hard to represent as many Family members as possible and really tell the story from an insider’s point of view.

JW We tried to reflect the overall feelings that we were getting from Family members, because everyone had completely different experiences within the Family, and everybody had strong opinions about it.

And it’s not really about being objective — no filmmaker or documentary is ever truly objective. It’s just about being open and letting people come to their own conclusions.

SFBG Since you had access to all of that footage, what was the editing process like?

MD It was extremely difficult, but honestly, we hit the jackpot. It was just like an incredible gift and honor to go through the archive. We had a three-and-a-half-hour cut, and we just kept whittling it down. Often times, we just had to stay focused; even if we had some fantastic footage, if it didn’t absolutely serve the story, we had to pull it out. It was difficult, but that’s actually a great problem to have.

JW And I’d like to give credit to Isis Aquarian for preserving that archive. There were hundreds or maybe thousands of groups like this that existed. But most of them didn’t document themselves, or if they did, they didn’t hold on to the artifacts or preserve the documents. She’s a true documentarian, even now.

SFBG Did you encounter any resistance from former members, or anyone who thought the documentary shouldn’t be made?

MD From the Family members’ perspective, no. They were extremely cooperative. [On the other hand,] since the Source Family existed in Hollywood, they had many connection to celebrities. We approached a lot of celebrities who were around at that time, and we had a tough time getting access to them.

JW The Source Family members all knew about the book, and they knew that people in their 20s and 30s had become fans of the Family. So I think that made them a lot more open to talking to us. But as far as people like Warren Beatty and Donald Sutherland, who were actually friends with Father Yod, I don’t think they were aware of that phenomenon. They were still thinking about how the Source Family was perceived with a lot of controversy back in the ’70s. I think it’s possible that those people, besides being really busy, weren’t quite sure what we were doing with the material, or if they wanted to associate themselves with it.

SFBG Also, now that decades have passed, when people hear “Southern California cult” and “the Family,” they automatically think “Manson.”

JW For me, that was an important inspiration to make this film. Again, when you speak with the participants, or even with scholars, you find it’s a very different story. We have such a primitive understanding of what these radical, social, and spiritual experiments were really doing back in the 1960s and ’70s, and the kinds of effects that they were having on the participants’ lives.

Maria and I interviewed about 40 of them just for The Source Family, and I’ve gotten to know members of other groups over the years. I find that these groups, more often than not, were very important cultural incubators. A lot of progressive ideas came from them, including the slow food movement, the mind-body-spirit movement, the natural birthing movement. A lot of tech-industry people came from these experiments — San Francisco was a hotbed for them. And many of them were harmless. They didn’t create any major havoc. They were high-risk experiments, of course, but a lot of what people took away was deep and transformative.

SFBG Music plays a huge part in the film, and again, you had a lot of material to choose from. How did you decide which songs to match with the footage?

JW I knew the music really well, and then our editor, Jennifer Harrington, did an incredible job working with the music, and Maria pitched in, too. We did it by knowing the music and thinking about the mood, and just playing with stuff to see what fit.

MD We often chose songs that actually lyrically fit with what was happening in that particular scene. The music was incredibly well-suited to what was happening, because they’re basically singing their own story.

SFBG I missed The Source Family when it played the San Francisco International Film Festival last year, but I heard the Q&A got pretty colorful. How have screenings been going overall?

MD Response has been great. We’ve been selling out shows, and the Q&As have been very lively. A lot of people who participated in social experiments or lived in communes have been coming to the Q&As, but we’ve been getting a lot of younger kids as well. It’s been intergenerational.

JW That was the fun part in San Francisco, because there were two or three people in the audience who were in different communities who spoke up during the Q&A, and it became this really interesting group therapy session. And it’s not about us saying, “Oh, it was this way.” It’s us opening up new ideas so people can have new discussions about what was really going on back then.

SFBG What’s the opening event going to be like?

JW For the various premieres, we have Source Family members showing up to do Q&As in eight cities. We’ve got three in San Francisco: Isis, Electricity, and Galaxy — who was the fashion designer in the family. Also at the Roxie, we’re going to have food made from original Source Family recipes.

We’ll also have tribute bands in six cities. In San Francisco, after the screening, the Source Family tribute band is going to be playing at the Chapel [at 777 Valencia] — they’re called the Penetration Blues Band, with Michael Beach from Electric Jellyfish and Colossal Yes, Noel von Harmonson from Comets On Fire and Sic Alps, [and others]. It’s going to be a really fun night! *

THE SOURCE FAMILY

Opening event Thu/2, 7pm (complete experience with food, film, and concert, $40; film only, $10; concert only, $15)

Film runs May 3-9, 7:15 and 9:30pm (also Sat/4-Sun/5, 2:45pm), $6.50–$10

Roxie

3117 16th St., SF

www.roxie.com

Take the plunge

-
0
Take the plunge

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE FACT/SF’s new Falling is a conceptually demanding, convincingly realized 70-minute sextet that annoys, puzzles, and ultimately persuades. Choreographer Charles Slender set his work on six beautifully-trained, well-rehearsed women. He also engaged excellent collaborators.

Falling asks questions that resonate beyond the physicality of what Slender has said he wanted to look at: the human need to stay upright and the reality of falling. That’s what the dancers do. They walk, stand, wobble, turn, and they fall — like rocks, sponges, and leaves. And then they get up. Again, and again, and again.

Repetition and unisons are the work’s most effective strategy. At first they are also annoying. A dancer bourrées across the stage like some Swan Queen, another joins her, then another. One starts an in-place stepping pattern, companions pick it up. A daisy-chain run calls up responses.

After a very short time this domino effect defocuses attention the way a déjà vu does. It also threatens to paralyze Falling’s thrust. But Slender keeps it going, and the set-up becomes uncomfortable because the process seems unstoppable. Then he shifts gears, with Shannon Leypoldt at the head of a diagonal shooting up her arm into the air as if delivering a manifesto.

That single gesture, besides elongating the body, becomes perhaps a leader’s command, an invitation, or a greeting among equals. It will be repeated over and over again, and everyone responds to it. To watch this process recalls cults and causes, rigid beliefs, and military indoctrination. In Falling, it’s insidious because not force but seduction sends those arms into the air. The initiation is made gently with a close body-to-body encounter as if in a tango. Tender hands help you take off that monkish, hooded robe to reveal the pretty dress, just like everyone else’s, underneath. Subjugation becomes possible because you really want to belong, no matter how hesitantly your arm responds.

There is a cool sense of inevitability about the way Leypoldt accrues these acolytes, until only Catherine Newman is left as the outsider. Desperately trying to hang on to her gown, and yet trying to step into the existing unisons, she attacks one of the dancers but crumples. That’s when hands reach out and welcome Newman to the brave new world accompanied by Dan Cantrell’s “angelic” voices. However, in that section, with its quasi-militaristic, though bare-foot stepping pattern, Falling stepped rather too close to literalism.

When Newman becomes the last acolyte and Leypoldt goes into a tailspin, Falling’s emotional temperature rises to something like a fever pitch. For the most part Slender keeps overt expressiveness in the cooler. The choreography stresses clarity and unity of purpose; there is little room for individual phrasing. Some of the floor patterns look as if they were designed on graph paper. Even when the dancers squirm flat on their backs and look like beasts about to expire, Darl Andrew Packard throws a harsh light on body parts as if they were on a dissecting table. Even in pretty phrases, elegantly rendered, the women look impersonal, primarily engaged in tasks — not in communicating. The dancing exists within strict parameters, yet not oppressively beyond the implications of the thematic material. The finale could have become melodramatic, but it didn’t; the dancers just walked away, leaving us with more questions than answers.

Falling benefits greatly from excellent production values. Packard suspended dozens of reflectors across the stage that blink on and off, suggesting a vast but dark space. Together with Slender he designed a simple set of dark woods in the beginning that became something like a world aflame at the end. Cantrell’s score, often fractured, is first-rate. Often you sense that the music, or its absence, serves as a comment to what’s happening in front of our eyes. Miyuki Bierlein designed two outstanding costumes, one a dark body-hiding robe, the other a subtly colorful summer frock that enhanced turns and suggested common ease. In addition to Leypoldt and Newman, the praiseworthy performers included Liane Burns, Michaela Burns, LizAnne Roman, and Amanda Whitehead.

Short takes: SFIFF week two

-
0
Short takes: SFIFF week two

Prince Avalanche (David Gordon Green, US, 2012) It has been somewhat hard to connect the dots between David Gordon Green the abstract-narrative indie poet (2000’s George Washington, 2003’s All the Real Girls) and DGG the mainstream Hollywood comedy director (2008’s Pineapple Express, yay; 2011’s Your Highness and The Sitter, nay nay nay). But here he brings those seemingly irreconcilable personas together, and they make very sweet music indeed. Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch play two men — one a fussy, married grown-up, another a short-attention-spanned man child — spending the summer in near-total isolation, painting yellow divider lines on recently fire-damaged Texas roads. Their very different personalities clash, and at first the tone seems more conventionally broad than that of the 2011 Icelandic minimalist-comedy (Either Way) this revamp is derived from. But Green has a great deal up his sleeve — gorgeous wide screen imagery, some inspired wordless montages, and a well-earned eventual warmth — that makes the very rare US remake that improves upon its European predecessor. Wed/1, 4pm, and Fri/3, 6:30pm, Kabuki. (Dennis Harvey)

Fill the Void (Rama Burshtein, Israel, 2012) Respectfully rendered and beautifully shot in warm hues, Fill the Void admirably fills the absence on many screens of stories from what might be considered a closed world: the Orthodox Hasidic community in Israel, where a complex web of family ties, duty, and obligation entangles pretty, accordion-playing Shira (Hada Yaron). An obedient daughter, she’s about to agree to an arranged marriage to a young suitor when her much-loved sister (Renana Raz) dies in childbirth. When Shira’s mother (Irit Sheleg) learns the widower Yochay (Yiftach Klein) might marry a woman abroad and take her only grandchild far away, she starts to make noises about fixing Shira up with her son-in-law. The journey the two must take, in possibly going from in-laws to newlyweds, is one that’s simultaneously infuriating, understandable, and touching, made all the more intimate given director Rama Burshtein’s preference for searching close-ups. Her affinity for the Orthodox world is obvious with each loving shot, ultimately infusing her debut feature with a beating heart of humanity. Wed/1, 6:30pm, and Thu/2, 4pm, Kabuki. (Kimberly Chun)

The Strange Little Cat (Ramon Zürcher, Germany, 2013) There’s a strange music to this light-on-its-toes, rhythmic, and ultimately mesmerizing chamber piece by first-time feature director Ramon Zürcher — one seemingly informed by dance, Gerhard Richter, contemporary opera, and Jean-Luc Godard in a latter-day gimlet-eyed state. The arc of a banal yet odd day is traced, within mostly the close confines of a Berlin apartment, as family members enter, interact, and then retreat in a kind of call and response: the mother runs a kitchen machine, a girl cries out as if to mimic its roar, a cousin who looks as if he’s straight out of a Dutch master painting soberly surveys the scene, while the eponymous feline weaves in and out of the action. In fact, that pet is the most domesticated of the lot populating this riveting domestic scene, all of which makes you want to see what Zürcher cooks up next. Wed/1, 9pm; Sun/5, 7pm; and May 8, 4pm, Kabuki. (Chun)

Salma (Kim Longinotto, England/India, 2012) Kept like a prisoner in her in-laws’ house for more than two decades, Salma is more than the most famed woman poet writing in the Tamil language. She’s also an archetypal South Indian woman of her time and place: married as a teen despite her desire to read and write poetry, her body controlled by her husband and family, and her freedom constricted to the point where she was once forced to write on scraps of paper in the toilet and to smuggle her verse out to have it published. What follows is the stuff of fairy tales, as Salma evolves into a politician and heroine who speaks for those otherwise muffled by their burkas and smothered by circumstance. Documentarian Kim Longinotto keeps a close eye on the oppressive culture that once harbored the writer — and inspired her to express herself — yet also takes the time to notice Tamil Nadu’s many small instances of beauty, in mutable pink and purple skies, a gold-flecked green sari, and showy weddings that mark both the beginning, and end, for so many young girls. Documentarian Longinotto whets one’s appetite for more of Salma’s words, while upholding her story’s relevance amid rising consciousness concerning the rights of all women in India. Thu/2, 6:15pm, Kabuki; Sat/4, 2pm, PFA; Sun/5, 3:45pm, New People. (Chun)

Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski, US, 2013) Mumblecore maestro Andrew Bujalski (2002’s Funny Ha Ha; 2005’s Mutual Appreciation) makes his first period picture, kinda, with this stubbornly, gloriously retro saga set at an early-1980s computer-chess tournament (with a few ventures into the freaky couples-therapy seminar being held at the same hotel). The technology is dated, both on and off-screen, as hulking machines with names like “Tsar 3.0” and “Logic Fortress” battle for nerdly supremacy as a cameraman, wielding the vintage cameras that were actually used to film the feature, observes. Tiny dramas highlighting the deeply human elements lurking amid all that computer code emerge along the way, and though the Poindexters (and the grainy cinematography) are authentically old-school, the humor is wry and awkwardly dry — very 21st century. Keep an eye out for indie icon Wiley Wiggins, last seen hiding from Ben Affleck’s hazing techniques in 1993’s Dazed and Confused, as a stressed-out programmer. Thu/2, 9pm, and Sat/4, 4pm, Kabuki. (Cheryl Eddy)

The Cleaner (Adrián Saba, Peru, 2011) An austere take on substitute-parental bonding dressed in apocalyptic sci-fi clothing, Adrián Saba’s Peruvian feature finds the world ending not with a bang but with a sickly whimper. (If you’ve ever breathed the toxic air or looked at the shit-brown sea around Lima, you’ll find this pretty credible.) A middle-aged loner (Victor Prada) tasked with cleaning up the death sites of citizens felled by a fatal epidemic finds a surviving young boy (Adrian Du Bois) in one such apartment. Their forced, awkward pairing — because the death toll is so high city services can no longer taken in another orphan — is poignant and terse in what’s a minimalist companion to the underrated 2008 adaptation of José Saramago’s plague saga Blindness. Sat/4, 6:15pm, Kabuki; Tue/7, 8:40pm, PFA; May 9, 8:30pm, Kabuki. (Harvey)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, US, 1978) Yes, Vertigo (1958) is very nice. But here is my alternate choice for Best San Francisco Movie Ever: 2013 SFIFF tributee Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake of the 1950s sci-fi classic. Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright, and Leonard Nimoy are among the locals who get very paranoid — with no pot brownies involved — when everyone around them starts turning coldly conformist. Given the film’s fond evocation of the city’s loopy, friendly, countercultural vibe at the time, this shift in the psychological weather really is alarming — arguably much more dramatically so than it was the vanilla small-town setting of Don Siegel’s original or Abel Ferrara’s military-base 1994 version. Wonderfully creepy, eccentric, stylish and humorous, it was Kaufman’s first commercial success. He will appear at the Castro screening to discuss it, his career in general, and to accept his Founder’s Directing Award. Sun/5, 7:30pm, Castro. (Harvey)

Waxworks (Paul Leni, Germany, 1924) Paul Leni’s 1924 omnibus horror feature is considered one of the great classics of German Expressionist cinema. A young man (William Dieterle, who went on to a long Hollywood directing career) answers an ad seeking “an imaginative writer for publicity” work at a wax museum. There he’s asked to write “startling tales” about specific wax figures, envisioning himself and the owner’s comely assistant (Olga Belajeff) as hero and heroine in each narrative. The first and longest tale has the two of them as a couple who get unwanted attention from the tyrannical, lusty Caliph of Bagdad (Emil Jannings). It’s an attenuated comic episode sparked by spectacular abstracted “Middle Eastern” sets. Next, Conrad Veidt (of 1920 Expressionist flagship film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) plays Ivan the Terrible in a more macabre story of bloodthirst and madness. Finally, Werner Krauss is “Spring-Heeled Jack” (i.e. Jack the Ripper), terrorizing our protagonists in a brief riot of nightmarish superimposed images. SFIFF’s annual silent film extravaganza at the Castro will be accompanied by a stellar quartet of musicians playing an original score: Mike Patton, Scott Amendola, Matthias Bossi, and William Winant. Expect an eclectic and propulsive evening of sounds equally schooled by punk, prog rock, and jazz. Tue/7, 8:30pm, Castro. (Harvey)

Before Midnight (Richard Linklater, US, 2012) Proving (again) that not all sequels are autonomic responses to a marketplace that rewards the overfamiliar, director Richard Linklater and his co-writers Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke reconnect with the characters Céline and Jesse, whom we first encountered nearly 20 years ago on a train and trailed around Vienna for a night in Before Sunrise, then met again nine years later in Before Sunset. It’s been nine more years since we left them alone in a Paris apartment, Céline adorably dancing to Nina Simone and telling Jesse he’s going to miss his plane. And it looks like he did. The third film finds the two together, yes, and vacationing in Greece’s southern Peloponnese, where the expansive, meandering pace of their interactions — the only mode we’ve ever seen them in — is presented as an unaccustomed luxury amid a span of busy years filled with complications professional and personal. Over the course of a day and an evening, alone together and among friends, the two reveal both the quotidian intimacies of a shared life and the cracks and elisions in their love story. May 9, 7pm, Castro. (Lynn Rapoport) *

The San Francisco International Film Festival runs through May 9 at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; New People Cinema, 1746 Post, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, 1881 Post, SF. For tickets (most shows $10-15) and info, visit festival.sffs.org.

 

1...424344...279Page 43 of 279

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org