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Tough stuff

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Tough stuff

SAN FRANCISCO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL Jews are not thugz, an assumption only affirmed when they commit crimes of financial-sector greed (Bernie Madoff). Jews involved in violent Godfather-style mayhem? That flies so against cultural-cliché winds as to seem inherently ridiculous.

Yet Jewish gangs battled Irish and Italian ones for turn-of-the-19th-century Manhattan turf. During Prohibition, they became more businesslike, expanded reach, and powered hitman outfit Murder Incorporated, even brokering syndicate cooperation between hitherto rivalrous “yids and dagos.”

Needless to say, such activities embarrassed mainstream Jews, providing ammo to anti-Semites. But movies seldom portrayed that reality. Hollywood has traditionally been reluctant to embrace the J-word or identity, despite Jewish artists and entrepreneurs’ huge industry contributions from earliest days. The same studio heads who imitated upper-crust goyim lifestyles and Anglicized Jewish stars’ backgrounds were disinclined to let their rare screen representations encompass machine guns and shakedowns.

Curated by former programming director Nancy Fishman, “Tough Guys: Images of Jewish Gangsters in Film” reprises a few times that policy of polite cinematic omission was lifted. Two features showcased are familiar: Howard Hawks’ original 1932 Scarface is included because it “would have had a Jewish subtext” for audiences familiar with star Paul Muni’s Yiddish theater work. Barry Levinson’s 1991 Bugsy has dithery Warren Beatty as pioneering Vegas mobster Siegel, in a soft-focus biopic with swank but little danger.

Two more, however, are seldom-revived B flicks providing pulpy fun. Pre-Fugitive TV star David Janssen plays a real-life gambler-bootlegger in 1961’s King of the Roaring 20s: The Story of Arnold Rothstein. His Rothstein grows up poor and rebellious (dad blames “a dybbuk in him”) alongside BFF Johnny (Mickey Rooney), whom he eventually betrays because winners don’t drag losers up the success ladder. There’s a steep fall for both.

Lepke (1975) has Tony Curtis in one of his edgier roles as Louis Bechalter, sole U.S. mob boss to be executed. A union racketeer turned mob assassin, he gets married in a formal “Heeb wedding,” as Italian-American gangster pals put it. There’s also a scene placing bizarre emphasis on bagels. Uninspired but entertaining Lepke was a relatively prestigious endeavor from Israeli director Menahem Golan, later the ledger-shuffling Cannon Group tycoon responsible for such marvels as 1984’s Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. This series asks if Jewish gangster films are “good for the Jews.” Was Golan? Dunno, but he’s been great for cinematic camp.

Bringing out the dead

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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4
Bringing out the dead

arts@sfbg.com

SAN FRANCISCO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL The question of how to represent the Holocaust is one that rightly haunts film history — rightly, because it was the Nazis themselves who most rigorously documented their destruction of Europe’s Jews, and thus it is to the Nazis that any filmmaker incorporating archival evidence owes a dubious debt. Certainly, documentary contemplations of the Holocaust have been instrumental not only to our philosophical understanding of the history, but also to the development of documentary form itself (I’m thinking of 1955’s Night and Fog, 1985’s Shoah, 1969’s The Sorrow and the Pity, and, less readily available, the works of Abraham Ravett and Péter Forgács). But given the relative invisibility of more recent genocides and the political inflection of what Norman Finkelstein uncharitably calls the "Holocaust Industry," it seems clear that a contemporary work needs a more dimensional rationale than "never forget."

The 30th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival includes several documentaries that at least peripherally touch on the Holocaust, but two are particularly ambitious: Einsatzgruppen: The Death Brigades and A Film Unfinished. The former is an exhaustive cataloging of the Nazi execution squads’ brutal charge to render the Eastern front: Judenfrei, incorporating textbook history, eyewitness accounts (adhering to Shoah‘s trifurcated structure of Jewish survivors, local collaborators and onlookers, and former Nazis on hidden camera), and an unrelenting case of archive fever. The same color footage of starving Jewish children we see in Einsatzgruppen washes up in Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished, but here it’s the provenance of these images, filmed by Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto, that’s being scrutinized.

Director Michael Prazan is primarily interested in how the Einsatzgruppen’s killing was done. This leaves plenty to sort out during the film’s three hours, especially given the still contentious issue of local collaboration — a Ukrainian woman he interviews movingly conveys the shattering realization that the murderers who spoke her language so well were indeed her people. But in Einsatzgruppen, eyewitness accounts like these are tangential to the grand historical perspective glued together by voice-over and traumatic archival images (Claude Lanzmann assiduously avoided both in Shoah). The voice-over speaks from nowhere, while the images of bloody pogroms and fresh corpses viewed from the vantage point of their killers are merely speechless.

Reappropriating Nazi propaganda is an old story — Frank Capra grabbed some of Triumph of the Will (1935) for Why We Fight (1943-1945), as does director John Keith Wasson at the beginning of his fine SFJFF film, Surviving Hitler: A Love Story. Contrary though the meanings may be, it’s difficult to sidestep the totalizing operation of propaganda. Keenly aware of this epistemological trouble, A Film Unfinished‘s Hersonski does everything she can to address Nazi footage in its specificity. Her coordination of primary documents is breathtaking, aligning the Nazi reels with the descriptive (and at times deconstructive) diaries of ghetto inhabitants and the court testimony of one of the cameramen. The invocatory effect acknowledges the gaps of the visible history as it articulates its layers. Hersonski is similarly clever in staging her interviews: she films survivors watching the reels in darkened theaters, alone, offering comments and startling yelps of recognition ("Oy, I knew that woman!")

Before a contemporary filmmaker leans on horrific archival images as self-evident documents, he or she really ought to see the clip in A Film Unfinished of Jewish prisoners being rounded up for a film shoot, terrified that they were being led to slaughter — which they were, of course. The filming was a rehearsal for the murders, and, as Einsatzgruppen shows us ad nauseam, the camera was occasionally present for the final moments as well. The death brigade’s supervisorial role in the Eastern European killings afforded them their "objective" camera positions — a fact that should give any well-meaning documentarian pause.

SAN FRANCISCO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL

July 14–Aug. 9, most shows $11

Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Roda Theatre, 2025 Addison, Berk; CineArts@Palo Alto Square, 3000 El Camino Real Bldg Six, Palo Alto; Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center, 118 Fourth St., San Rafael

(415) 256-TIXX

www.sfjff.org

Here’s lookin’ at you, Vic

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Here’s lookin’ at you, Vic

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM Ah, Friday night at the movies: chatty mobs, unable to detach from their smart phones or fathom seeing a movie that isn’t both brand-new and unnecessarily 3-D’d. With such a bummer scene in the outside world, might as well stay home and watch edited-for-TV Seagal flicks on TBS, right?

Insert screeching needle-on-a-record sound here. Third option: head to one of the city’s most offbeat repertory theaters, collectively-run Haight Street landmark the Red Vic, which celebrates its 30th birthday this week.

“So often we hear people say, ‘Oh, we love the Red Vic! But we haven’t been there in years,'” collective member Claudia Lehan says. “That’s our biggest joke. We’re still here, we’re hanging in, but we need people to come to the movies. We’re doing our best to provide what people want.”

For the past three decades, that has meant a unique space (bench-style seating; organic popcorn and home-baked treats) with programming that reflects the theater’s eclectic spirit. Along with films skating the gap between first-run cineplex and DVD (Kick-Ass, The Runaways), a recent Red Vic calendar also lists the Burning Man Film Festival, local-interest doc It Came From Kuchar, a surf-movie night, a San Francisco Museum and Historical Society-presented program on the Haight, and the cult classic Freaks (1932).

“I think we’re a unique night out,” Lehan says. “The whole experience — the movie itself, it’s such an intimate theater, and it’s community-based.”

On a recent afternoon, I met with current collective members Lehan, Jack Rix, and Susie Bell; the fourth and newest member, Sam Sharkey (who late-night movie fans will know from Landmark Theatres), was out of town. Also joining us was Jack’s wife, Betsy Rix; she, along with Jack, Brad Reed, and Terry Seefeld, cofounded the Red Vic in 1980, with the help of other key players, including Martha Beck (who appears in the Red Vic’s adorable pre-show trailer) and Gary Aaronson.

 

RED HEADS

“We were all door-to-door canvassers in the ’70s,” Betsy remembers. “We’d go out after, and say, ‘There’s gotta be something better out there for us to do.’ We started thinking about starting a business together: a bookstore, or a movie theater. Movie theater seemed like a really good idea. At that time, there was a thriving repertory scene. We talked right away about having couches, nondisposable popcorn bowls — just to make it a totally different kind of movie theater. We plugged away on the idea for over a year.”

After some scouting, the group found its first venue, just down the street from its current location at 1727 Haight. “The Red Victorian Bed and Breakfast had an international marketplace that was closing up. It was a great big space,” Betsy says. “We got a lease for 10 years and renovated it.”

Visit the Red Vic’s cozy lobby, and you’ll see their first calendar hanging on the wall. You might be fooled into thinking the theater opened in 1980 on July 14, with a screening of the 1942 classic Casablanca. That was the original plan — until all of the projection equipment was stolen. Fortunately, the group was insured, but they had to delay their debut until new equipment could be ordered. When it arrived, they opened with the film scheduled for that day, July 25: 1977’s Outrageous!

Within the first month, Betsy says, they had their first bomb (1969 Oscar winner Midnight Cowboy) and their first hit, Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974). From the beginning, Red Vic audiences were determined to support the theater’s more unexpected film choices. A recent favorite has been Tommy Wiseau’s The Room (2003), a terrible-amazing vanity project that’s drawn hoards of devotees to its frequent Red Vic midnight showings. At $25 a pop, Wiseau bobbleheads are an in-demand item at the concession stand.

 

BIG(GER) RED

Though the Red Victorian hotel would give the Red Vic its name, the theater’s address would eventually change. “We’d had a fairly antagonistic relationship with the landlady,” recalls Betsy. “We knew for many years that in 1990, when the lease was up, we had to go.”

Fortunately, “it worked out better for everyone,” Jack Rix says. He and Betsy ended up buying the building that houses the Red Vic today, flanked by Escape from New York Pizza and the Alembic Bar. “Awesome neighbors,” agree the collective members, who tend to cheerfully talk over each other like family members. Though Jack suggests that the success of a collective is “like making sausage — you don’t really want to delve into it too much,” it’s clear the unique structure of the theater’s “management” has enabled it to thrive. The non-collective members at the Red Vic are volunteers who work in exchange for free movies.

The Red Vic’s permanent home holds 143; in keeping with the theater’s cinephile roots, “we remain committed to 35mm. We really try to show things in 35mm,” Jack says.

This dedication can sometimes lead to extremes (thanks to a distributor snafu, they once had to contact director Jim Jarmusch directly to borrow one of his films). But you’ll never see video at the Red Vic, unless the work was specifically made for it.

“If it’s made on video, and meant to be screened on video, we do have a pretty kick-ass projector,” Lehan says. “But if it’s made for 35mm … “

That projector comes in handy when local filmmakers, whose projects are often created using the more accessible video format, are on the calendar. “We really enjoy showing local films that people aren’t going to get to see anywhere else,” Jack says. “Lately something that’s worked pretty well is to rent the theater to filmmakers. It seems to work well both ways, because we get a minimum amount of business that’s guaranteed, and filmmakers get their movie shown.”

 

RED-HOT TICKETS

Though making gobs of money isn’t exactly the Red Vic’s goal, it has had some certified hits over the years. Used to be you couldn’t pick up one of the Red Vic’s signature red-and-black calendars without seeing trippy, time-lapse-heavy Baraka (1992) on the schedule. “We’re taking a break [from Baraka] for a little bit,” Lehan says with a chuckle.

Other success stories (besides The Room, as noted above) include two films coming up in August, El Topo (1970) and Dead Man (1995), plus anything by Werner Herzog, 1998 big-wave surf film Maverick’s (“Lines around the block,” Susie Bell recalls), and The Big Lebowski (1998), which returns every year on April 20, the high holiday for stoners. The Red Vic’s political leanings also draw crowds (“A new Noam Chomsky documentary will always do well,” per Bell), along with “stuff that’s really beautiful that looks good up on the big screen,” according to Jack.

For the past several years, the Red Vic has screened Hal Ashby’s 1971 dark comedy Harold and Maude on its birthday, July 25. It was a favorite of the late Steve Kasper, a friend and regular customer from the Red Vic’s earliest days. “He loved Harold and Maude,” Betsy says. “I don’t think we had really thought about showing it, but he brought it in. He was the one who started handing out daisies [after the film, a tradition that continues]. And it just really caught on.”

For 30 years, its cozy sense of community has remained unchanged. But the Red Vic, like other repertory theaters, has felt the 21st century pinch: DVDs, video-on-demand, and the Internet mean that less people bother seeking out off-the-beaten-path exhibitors. For the most part, though, collective members remain cautiously optimistic about the decades ahead.

“The first time we showed Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), which is a movie I really love, it did really well. I remember being amazed that we could show something like that and people would show up to see pure art on the wall of your funky little movie theater,” Jack says, before turning philosophical. “These are tough times for repertory theaters. To a certain extent, it’s use it or lose it. If people don’t support little theaters, they’re definitely not going to be around much too much longer.” 

HAROLD AND MAUDE

July 25–28, 7:15 and 9:15 p.m.

(also Sun/25, 2 and 4 p.m.; July 28, 2 p.m.), $6–$9

Red Vic Movie House

1727 Haight, SF

(415) 668-3994

www.redvicmoviehouse.com

The woman remembered

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The woman remembered

The changeover from silent to sound cinema revolutionized the world’s most popular entertainment form. As in most revolutions, some heads got lopped off. The industry saw this upheaval as a chance to clean house, getting rid of pricey or difficult talent by claiming they couldn’t make the transition. The public went along, suddenly hungry for all things talking, singing, dancing, and new, eager to dismiss yesterday’s favorites as old-fashioned.

Certainly stardom’s internationalism was largely over — those with heavy foreign or regional inflections were kaput. But myths persisted for decades about native-born stars like John Gilbert whose nasal, “light,” or otherwise unappealing voices purportedly derailed their careers. Heard today, Gilbert seems just fine — was MGM simply punishing him for being an expensive pain in the ass? If so, it worked: by 1936 he’d drank himself to death.

A similar aroma of failure hovers around Norma Talmadge, one of the biggest stars of the silent era yet largely forgotten now. Critics howled at her supposed vocal uncouthness in 1930’s Du Barry, Woman of Passion. Talmadge took equally famous, already retired sister Constance’s advice, quitting while she was still ahead — at least financially, thanks to mama’s trust fund setup. Yet clips from the era reveal nothing at all wrong with her voice. Was she a victim of simple out-with-the-old, in-with-the-new media frenzy? Perhaps an affair with actor Gilbert Roland ended the career support of her husband, powerful executive Joseph M. Schenck. Was she being punished?

She and Roland star in 1928’s The Woman Disputed, her last silent vehicle and one of many highlights in this weekend’s 15th San Francisco Silent Film Festival. She’s an Austrian prostitute — not exactly named as such, of course — who barely escapes a murder charge after a seeming john instead uses her flat to kill himself in. Two wealthy rescuers then become romantic rivals for this hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold, whom they help attain respectability. (The other man is Arnold Kent, an Italian actor fatally struck by a car after playing this final role.)

Directed by Henry King (an A-list Hollywood director through the 1950s), Woman moves from heavy tragedy to disarming romantic comedy and back again — then World War I intervenes. The fervency of its trio’s romantic friendship is very touching. No matter that the concept is typical Hollywood fantasy ignoring class-impasse reality: the film finesses its corn syrup via discreet handling and potent star power. Doing the most emotive heavy-lifting, Talmadge has moments that make her appeal very clear.

Thrust forward by a world-class stage mother, Talmadge was huge throughout the 1920s. According to screenwriter pal Anita Loos’ memoir, her screen retirement was addled by stupefying addiction to arthritis painkillers. It’s said she started the Hollywood Walk of Fame by accidentally stepping into wet cement. It’s also said she inspired the monstrous Norma Desmond in 1950’s Sunset Boulevard, as well as Jean Hagen’s Brooklynese-screeching imploding silent star in 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain. Yet again these may just be derogatory rumors that have had decades to harden into pseudo fact.

SAN FRANCISCO SILENT FILM FESTIVAL

July 15–18, free–$30

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.silentfilm.org

Sicily unbound

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Sicily unbound

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Francesco Rosi once remarked to an interviewer, “A film is always a testimony of the age in which it lives.” It’s one thing to recognize this as an incipient truth and quite another to enact it as a code of filmmaking. Rosi’s films from the 1960s and ’70s evince the common roots of aesthetic and ethic, exhibiting what can only be called an ardor for the analysis of social conditions — both their mechanisms and mentalities. Though still relatively unsung among the major Italian auteurs, of which he is certainly one, a career-spanning retrospective at the Pacific Film Archive makes the case for the writer-director’s staying power.

Rosi studied law at school and film with the Italian directors of the 1940s and ’50s. In his own early features, he placed additional demands upon the conventions of neorealism. Putting aside the tempting notion that the camera will discover a transcendent truth if only stripped of the artifices of professional actors and sets, Rosi’s films are concerned with inventing a public sphere for argument and questioning — this before the age of the Internet and 24-hour news.

Take Salvatore Giuliano (1961), his sophisticated dissembling of the tangled (and at that time recent) history of the eponymous gangster, a Robin Hood figure in the postwar Sicilian imagination who aided the area’s separatist movement. “He took from the rich and gave to the poor,” a local tells a bored reporter. When he finds out the newsman is from Rome, he adds, “What can you understand about Sicily?”

Rosi’s out-of-joint narration of events from before and after Giuliano’s death in 1950 takes at least a couple of viewings to puzzle together, and even then, much remains pointedly obscure. The film recalls Borges’ description of Citizen Kane (1941) as “a labyrinth without a center,” and, as such, contains an implicit disavowal of neorealist orthodoxy (if such a thing ever existed). If “reality” is transparent, why the confusing jumps in time? Why go to such lengths to keep Giuliano himself in the shadows? Why leave so much basic plot material unclear, from major events (the motivation behind Giuliano’s orchestration of a massacre of communists at Portella della Ginestro, for instance) to minor gestures (like when, at the end, one of Giuliano’s associates palms the bottle of medicine that has apparently just poisoned the bandit’s right-hand man)?

The answer has to do with Rosi’s desire to replace the “not knowing” of complacency with that of skepticism. The subject of the film is not Giuliano so much as the Sicilians who presume to know him. We begin with the bandit’s death, in Kane fashion, but even before the plot has insinuated a cover-up, Rosi visually undermines any easy sense of certitude. We watch the inspection of Giuliano’s prone corpse from several striking bird’s-eye-view shots, but soon discover these compositions are not as omniscient as we might first (complacently) assume. In fact, they represent the vantage point of the reporters hounding the carabinieri and citizens for a story quite separate from Rosi’s. Here the director insinuates how difficult it is to find your footing in the Sicilian situation. Taking aim at collusion, he formally imbricates us in its grip.

Rosi’s neorealism is one of provocation. He obsessively stages recent history in the actual locations in which it unfolded, employing eyewitnesses as themselves. Testimony is activated, not relegated to incidental afterthought. Even in later, more traditionally allegorical films like Three Brothers (1981), in which Rosi seems to move toward seeing political discourses as being channeled and contained by subjective experience, his visual and narrative designs mirror the macro controls at work in complex social systems. Watching Rosi’s work, we realize that the news lives inside us, whether we like it or not.

MODERNIST MASTER: THE CINEMA OF FRANCESCO ROSI

July 8-Aug 28, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Pulp vicious

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Pulp vicious

arts@sfbg.com

FILM An entirely fake controversy brewed at the Sundance Film Festival three years ago in anticipation of the "Dakota Fanning rape movie," otherwise known as Hounddog. Fanning was then a cloyingly cute, frequently tearful actor known for family-friendly films — ergo, her appearance as a victim of child abuse in a 1950s rural drama got fanned by hysterical pundits and popular media into terrible child actor abuse. Before anyone actually saw the film, of course.

Once they had, however, the scandal quickly slunk into a corner and died. Hounddog was barely released many months later — and not because it was an exploitative shocker. Rather, it turned out to be a ludicrous gumbo of Southern gothic clichés and clumsy good intentions that violated no standards beyond those of intelligence and art.

This January another Sundance controversy broke. It was, coincidentally, over another Deep South period piece, and also wrong-headed. The movie was eclectic English director Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me, the latest screen version of a beloved and spectacularly nasty noir tale by literary pulp hero Jim Thompson. The protest, aired in audience walkouts and complaints, was that the onscreen violence against women was viciously excessive.

In this case, the accusation is as true as the ones against Hounddog were false. But that’s just one reason that Killer is good art while Hounddog is fraudulently bad. In Winterbottom’s film, violence is horribly immediate, sadistic yet matter-of-fact, almost unendurable — everything movie violence almost never is. There’s nothing remotely comfortable about the highly personal, unnecessary cruelty our antihero wreaks. And there’s real deliberateness about the way that brutality escalates when he’s putting down female, as opposed to male, obstacles. S’called misogyny, folks.

The Killer Inside Me is about Sheriff Lou Ford (Casey Affleck), a good ol’ boy (if not yet so old) in his dusty, back-slappy west Texas hometown of the late 1950s. Lou plays the part so well no one in this sleepily, routinely corrupt berg would ever suspect him of being … complicated. Indeed, he is a world-class sociopath who depends on their lazy small-town gullibility and rote suspicion toward outsiders to literally) get away with murder.

Affleck is oddly cast in that he lacks the innate bully heft or lunacy that made Stacey Keach an ideal embodiment of Thompson’s ultimate unreliable-narrator concept in Burt Kennedy’s 1976 screen version. This Affleck can’t possibly be mistaken for John Wayne 4.0. But could the Duke have played the game-changing weenie in 2007’s The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford?

Winterbottom’s Killer Inside Me is all about antiheroic nightmares hidden beneath blinding Texan skies. Outwardly placid, inwardly paranoid, Lou is shagging local Amy (Kate Hudson) — secretly, because she’s a "nice girl" — but gets distracted by Joyce (Jessica Alba), a probable prostitute he’s asked to bum rush outta town. They discover an S–M bond he’s reluctant to sever. Unless, that is, imminent exposures of a criminal, monetary, or moral kind direct otherwise. Which they rapidly do.

Leading ladies Alba and Hudson are widely perceived as spoiled hotties of little talent — hence perfect battering-rams for pulp-machismo movie violence. What’s cool about Winterbottom’s Killer is that it refuses to let you enjoy the abuse they endure, which is viscerally unpleasant as a fist to the gut. Escapist air sucks from the room every time these long-term starlets (both actually pretty good here) get battered. It’s not slasher-flick funny, entertaining, or otherwise easily dismissed. It’s abrupt, grueling, and horrific.

At once folksy-nostalgic and vicious, The Killer Inside Me is unabashedly about men who hate women. It successfully translates Thompson’s gambit of insinuating us into the seemingly pleasant, reasonable viewpoint of a protagonist we are then surprised to discover is psychotic and without a conscience. Offended Sundance attendees should’ve gotten a clue: deliberately misleading in its pulp-nostalgia trappings, this is one movie that upsets not gratuitously, but exactly as it should.
THE KILLER INSIDE ME opens Fri/25 at the Sundance Kabuki.

Sonny dearest

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Sonny dearest

FILM It’s tempting to label Mark and Jay Duplass’ Cyrus as “mumblecore goes mainstream.” Yes, the mumblecore elements are all there: plentiful moments of awkward humiliation, characters fumbling verbally and sometimes physically in desperate attempts to establish emotional connections, and a meandering, character-driven plot, in the sense that the characters themselves possess precious little drive.

The addition of bona fide indie movie stars John C. Reilly, Catherine Keener, and Marisa Tomei — not to mention Hollywood’s chubby-funny guy du jour, Jonah Hill — could lead some to believe that the DIY-loving Duplass brothers (2005’s The Puffy Chair, 2008’s Baghead) have gone from slacker disciples of John Cassavetes (informally known as “Slackavetes”) to worshippers at the slickly profane (with a heart) altar of Judd Apatow.

But despite the presence of Apatow protégé Hill (2007’s Superbad) in the title role, Cyrus steers clear of crowd-pleasing bombast, instead favoring small, relatively naturalistic moments. That is to say, not much actually happens. Mumblecore? More or less. Mainstream? Not exactly.

On the surface, Hill’s character in particular has the ring of an outrageous Hollywood comedic foil, the kind of outsized and broadly drawn (in every sense) clown who ratchets up the action by assaulting the movie’s loser hero, John (Reilly, in lost puppy dog mode) with endless, over-the-top Machiavellian schemes.

Cyrus — a disingenuous 21-year-old schlub who still lives with his mother (Tomei) and engages in creepy, inappropriate activities with her, like wrestling in the park — is actually more sad mouse than psychotic lion. The most heinous crime he ever perpetrates on fellow schlub John — this one painfully sincere, competing for his mother’s affections — is stealing his shoes.

“Molly and I are really best friends,” he tells John, before giving him a steely-eyed stare-down while serenading him on the synthesizer, in one the few moments between Cyrus and John that’s both funny and tension-filled.

Despite playing a character with some serious psychological issues, Hill comes off as likeable. Unfortunately the movie is neither as broadly comic nor as emotionally poignant as it needs to be — the two opposing forces seem to cancel each other out like acids and bases.

Strongly evocative of 1970s new American filmmaking, Cyrus‘ naturalism mixed with absurdity brings to mind great ’70s auteurs like Hal Ashby or even Robert Altman. Even the set and wardrobe (particularly the winsome Tomei’s poodle curls, heavy mascara, and hippie caftans) nostalgically evoke the era. But the Duplass brothers have neither the chops nor the strong point of view of world-class filmmakers. Those great earlier films were shambling and disjointed, yes, but they did ultimately have a destination. Cyrus is content to just spend the day in the park, engaging in some Oedipal wrestling.

CYRUS opens Fri/25 in San Francisco theaters.

Inflated meaning

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Inflated meaning

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Don’t let Air Doll‘s title fool you. Mannequin (1987) or Lars and the Real Girl (2007) this ain’t. This gritty, Tokyo-set fairytale about an inflatable sex doll who comes to life represents a departure on many fronts for director Hirokazu Koreeda, who has become known for such faintly melancholy studies of quiet perseverance as Nobody Knows (2004) and After Life (1998). Despite its fantastic premise and candid eroticism, Air Doll covers similar emotional territory to those older titles, surveying with no less an empathetic eye the fickleness of human connection, the power of adoration, and the loneliness that seems to be a hallmark of urban life.

Saucer-eyed Korean actress Doona Bae (of 2005’s Linda Linda Linda fame) stars as Nozomi, the titular doll who escapes her devoted owner’s apartment and wanders through the densely packed surrounding streets. Eventually she finds employment at a video store, where she falls in love with a coworker (after he gives her one of the best and queerest BJs ever committed to film). Along the way she learns to tell lies, harbor jealousy, and experience what it’s like to have the "heart [she] wasn’t supposed to have" break. In short, what it means to be human.

All the while, Koreeda never sugarcoats Nozomi’s "vocation," letting sexually frank but never prurient episodes stand in contrast to the film’s more lighthearted moments. But, as I found out when I spoke to Koreeda the day after Air Doll screened at the 2010 San Francisco International Film Festival, that’s part of being human too. My thanks go out to Beth Cary for being such a wonderful interpreter.

SFBG You’ve never made an adaptation before. What initially attracted you to Yoshiie Goda’s manga series?

Hirokazu Koreeda There was one scene in particular that attracted me. In the video shop, when the air doll snags her arm on a nail in the wall and starts deflating and the young male clerk comes over and tends to her wound. At first she is shy and embarrassed but then she starts feeling a real sense of fulfillment and satisfaction as he blows air into her. To me it was like a sex scene, but done with the breath. Using a person’s breath as a way that people commingle and communicate was very interesting to me.

SFBG Air Doll has really divided critics. I think it’s because the film doesn’t stick to a certain tone or mood. Is this what you were aiming for?

HK In a way it was. What I discussed with Doona Bae is that the doll is born like a baby — innocent — and then learns various things about the world by imitating humans. In that process, she sees how poetic things are, how pessimistic things are, and how comedic things are, so she changes as well. I think such a mix of elements is present in our everyday lives, so I wanted the film to reflect that.

SFBG How was it working with Doona Bae? Her performance has such a Giulietta Masina-like quality to it.

HK [Laughs] Actually, before we started filming I suggested that she watch La strada (1954) and Nights of Cabaria (1957), not because I was aiming for a certain style, but because I thought they might be helpful. I also spent about five hours walking her through the entire film (with an interpreter, since she doesn’t speak Japanese). During that time even she would tear up and cry during the sad parts and laugh during all the pleasurable parts. Afterward she said, "I’ve got it. I understand the character now." And in the two months of filming, she didn’t waver from what we discussed at all. She was great.

AIR DOLL opens Fri/25 in Bay Area theaters.

Reel groundbreaking

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Reel groundbreaking

FRAMELINE Appropriately enough, Kathy Wolfe — founder and CEO of this year’s Frameline Award winner, Wolfe Video — realized her calling while attending a Frameline screening.

“Somewhere around 1979, I went to a Frameline screening of [pioneering 1977 doc] Word is Out. Within the body of that film, there’s a challenge to make a difference,” she remembers, speaking from her San Jose office. “I started working in my local public access television station, and for four years I studied and worked in every aspect of video production. At the end of that, I actually had a few documentary-style pieces and some women’s music videos I wanted to sell. In order to get more serious, I took out a business license, and that was in 1985. But I very much was inspired by the challenge in the movie. Our mission today is very similar to the mission we had at that time: to make these images more available to the world at large so that people would feel empowered to come out.”

Today, Wolfe Video is the leading exclusive distributor of LGBT films, which they do via film festivals, video stores, video on demand, and the Internet, including their website, Wolfevideo.com. Their catalog includes hits like Big Eden (2000) and Claire of the Moon (1992), as well as the entire performance catalog of Lily Tomlin — whose early support helped the company make key contacts with distribution networks and retail outlets. According to president Maria Lynn, who joined in 1993, the fact that Wolfe Video is celebrating its 25th anniversary is a testament to the increasing popularity of LGBT films.

“[In 1985] the gay genre, as it were, was considered small and unknown. Now it’s a very significant genre in independent film. Between Wolfe distributing them, and filmmakers making them, and festivals like Frameline screening them, it has created its own category within independent film,” she says. “We have a lot of movies now that have a more mainstream appeal, for example Undertow, which is going to be a centerpiece at Frameline, is a beautiful film from Peru. And the way people talked about Brokeback Mountain as being about love — people will talk about this one similarly. It touches people very deeply and it is not limited to a gay and lesbian audience as well. That’s one of the biggest things that’s changed: the filmmakers have really been able to branch out, whether it’s with casting, or better stories, or bigger budgets.” 

FRAMELINE AWARD: WOLFE VIDEO

With Undertow Tues/22, 7 p.m., Castro

Super stories

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Super stories

arts@sfbg.com

FILM It’s film festival season, which means one thing: stories. Lots of them. And not just the ones that happen on film, but all the ones that happen before, during, and after the tapes get mastered and the crowds go home. While this is certainly true of all films, it’s especially true for the Queer Women of Color Film Festival, held annually at Brava Theater Center in the Mission.

Each year the festival premieres 25 short films made by and for women of color, who travel from across the Bay Area, and sometimes the state, to a small workshop in the Sunset District and learn the ins and outs of video production. The end results are nuanced, gripping, and often hilarious stories of how amazing, awkward, and complex love can be. So even though the festival’s yearly themes may be heavy — last year’s focused on immigration, this year’s celebrates queer indigenous communities — crowds pack the theatre, enjoy free food, and see that there’s more than enough to smile about.

This year’s festival brought a variety of movies. In Ferment Me My Heart, one Korean Canadian woman used animation to explore her love-hate relationship with kimchi and what it tastes like to be an outsider. Home is Where My Mother Is showed that all ain’t pretty in the world of queer families, as one woman confronted her lesbian mother over a traumatic interracial relationship. Bulldagger Women and Sissy Men paid homage to the Harlem Renaissance’s queer characters. A mother and daughter bonded over basketball in Hoops, and Passing Through Like Water followed three generations of Iranian women as they navigated how to deal with change and one another.

The festival also included a sacred ceremony for indigenous queer communities, and related films that unearthed the lessons of Cherokee elders and explored what Proposition 8 means to native women. If you missed out, you still have a chance to see some highlights when “F**king Traditional Values: Queer Women of Color Shorts” screens at Frameline.

F**KING TRADITIONAL VALUES: QUEER WOMEN OF COLOR SHORTS

Sun/20, 4:15 p.m., $8

Victoria Theatre

2961 16th St.

(415) 863-7576

www.frameline.org

www.qwocmap.org 

 

Star on the rise

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Star on the rise

FRAMELINE I’ve had a bit of a crush on the young Argentine actress Inés Efron since Frameline31, when she played one corner of the teen love triangle in Alexis Dos Santos’ Glue (2006). There was something in the way Efron used her gangly build and heavy-lidded eyes to telegraph her character’s mix of trembling desire and adolescent ungainliness that brought to mind Kids-era Chloë Sevigny.

Efron’s ability to allow her physicality to articulate what her characters can’t would be even more fiercely on display when she returned to Frameline the following year, front and center, as the conflicted, intersexed youth Alex in another equally strong Argentine debut, Lucía Puenzo’s XXY (2007). Efron is back at Frameline this year, as is Puenzo, in the director’s sophomore effort, The Fish Child. The film actually made its festival debut last year, in one of the last-minute TBA slots, but fans of the duo’s previous collaboration would do well to catch its proper run this time around.

Part cross-class lesbian love story, part crime telenovella (with a touch of magical realism), The Fish Child is a flashy departure from XXY‘s brooding coming-of-age character study. Puenzo displays a tight grasp of the film’s various narrative strands as it jumps back and forth across time and geographic borders (she did adapt the script from her own novel, after all), but much of the film’s emotional impact comes from the performances of its leads.

Looking ever more the gamine, Efron plays Lala, the teen daughter of a wealthy Buenos Aires judge (Pep Munné), who is as in love with the household’s 20-year-old Paraguayan maid Ailin (Mariela Vitale) as her father is. Lala and Ailin’s dream of escaping to Lake Ypoa in Paraguay, Ailin’s childhood home, becomes complicated when Ailin winds up in jail and Lala flees to Ypoa alone, where she discovers more about her lover’s damaged past. Efron’s Lala lets us be sympathetic to her love for Ailin even as we see the ways in which her star-eyed optimism about their future life is as enabled by the privilege she refuses to acknowledge as it is by raw passion. She’s a rebel with a cause, but she just can’t ‘fess up to it yet.

As Efron grows older, it’s going to become harder for her to keep convincingly playing the hormonally-charged and dissolute (see also her supporting role in another recent Argie art house hit, Lucrecia Martel’s 2008 The Headless Woman). Clearly, though, she has a good agent and even better instincts. I’m excited to see what she does next.

THE FISH CHILD

Thurs/22, 9:30 p.m., Elmwood

Fri/25, 9:30 p.m., Roxie

Get thee to the gym

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Get thee to the gym

arts@sfbg.com

FRAMELINE It’s a little-noted fact that the gay community is absolutely thick with twins. Not biological, but the kind that grow more identical when they take their shirts off.

Whoever said opposites attract clearly never went to the Folsom Street Fair, where every body type runs in packs of two (or several). Sure, mom said looks aren’t everything. But was she a gay man? It’s brutal out there. Combine a sophisticated, compartmentalized urban gay scene like San Francisco’s own with the Internet’s heightened judging-book-by-cover — no actual book reading implied — and you’ve got a recipe for looks obsessiveness that can snare even the safely off-market.

An older friend who said at 40 he’d eventually retire from gym habituation because “I don’t want to be a 50-year-old face on a 25-year-old body” is now a 60-year-old with a 35-year-old bodybuilder’s torso — plus the blown-out knees and other ailments decades of body-sculpting punishment have wrought. What for? Not for his committed partner, one assumes, but for the accustomed thrill of feeling the breeze shift from swiveling heads.

A number of films in Frameline’s 34th edition (Skinnyfat, BearCity, The Adonis Factor, Bear Nation) address the complicated landscape of gay male body image issues. They’re not always pretty — at least emotionally. Although it is generally also the business of people in movies to be pretty. It is also the business of these particular movies to question just what pretty is, and why the hell it has to be so important.

The topic is taken head-on — if also superficially, which is ironically apt — by The Adonis Factor. Its interviewees from various gay terrariums (SF, Palm Springs, West Hollywood) say things like “Gay men tend to have more of an appreciation for beauty in all aspects, whether it is other male bodies or just antiques.”

Leafing through relevant issues magazine-style, from circuit parties to surgery to eating disorders, Christopher Hines’ documentary ponders endemic, sometimes compulsive shallowness while providing a lot of eye candy. “If you’re gonna be gay, you’re just gonna have to experience the wrath of the A crowd,” one perfect 10 in search of an 11 attests. Some of us are just too allergic to house music to hazard that.

A mutable “culture of desire” has spawned myriad subdivisions based on body type, the greatest latest boom being bear-ish. But Malcolm Ingram’s documentary Bear Nation finds fissure in a movement supposedly all about including the excluded. One specialty magazine publisher bluntly insists “bear” means hairy, not big (save musculature), and who asked these fat fucks to the party anyway? If there was a fetish mag focused on the proudly obnoxious, he’d rate the cover.

Frameline34 — so old! who’d sleep with that?! — features a lot of films that in one way or another uphold a beauty standard. Among them are conventional gay romcoms like Is It Just Me?, whose John Cusack-y protagonist — torso more rectangle than triangle — is appalled by the looks-ist superficiality of the L.A. gay scene he’s just moved into. But of course there’s a selfless hunk who, amid Cyrano de Bergerac-inspired contrivances, is eager to love him for his mind.

Foreign films — like such excellent Frameline entries as Undertow, Children of God, or Francois Ozon’s Hideaway — tend to be less rigidly codified in terms of physical casting. Their protagonists are attractive but natural, not conspicuously pumped by hours of gym devotion. Still, their soft-pedaled sexy glamour seems contrite alongside the futurist masculinity line-blurring of Frameline flicks like tranny-band survey Riot Acts: Flaunting Gender Deviance in Music Performance. Or Jake Yerra’s Open, whose ethereal dramatic panoply encompasses a femmy boi in love with a pregnant FTM as well as an intersex couple undergoing surgery to become identical. “Being average in a world of physical perfection is the worst kind of gay purgatory,” a character says in Is It Just Me? Maybe worse: being slave to that sensibility.

FRAMELINE34: SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LGBT FILM FESTIVAL

June 17–27, most shows $8–$15

Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Roxie, 3117 16th St., SF; Victoria, 2961 16th St, SF; Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, 2966 College, Berk.

Frameline short takes

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Frameline short takes

The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister (James Kent, UK, 2010) A BBC production set in the northern English countryside of the early 19th century, James Kent’s The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister depicts the amatory adventures of a gentlewoman landowner (Maxine Peake) in search of a “female companion” with whom to live out her days. The narrative is somewhat breathless, the seductions equally so and yet a bit anemic, and our strong-willed, fearless heroine is admirable without being entirely engaging. Still, besides tapping into the Jane Austen slash fiction demographic, this tale of pre-Victorian bodice ripping and skirt lifting among the female gentry offers the considerable thrill of being adapted from the actual secret diaries of the titular Miss Lister, decoded by a biographer 150 years after her death. A documentary in the festival, Matthew Hill’s The Real Anne Lister, offers a complementary version of her story. Thurs/17, 7 p.m., Castro. (Lynn Rapoport)

The Owls (Cheryl Dunye, USA, 2010) Expectations are high for The Owls: writer-director Cheryl Dunye again collaborates with Guinevere Turner, V.S. Brodie, and other notable queer performers —compels you to think of classics like Go Fish (1994) and The Watermelon Woman (1996). The Owls isn’t quite at that level, but it’s a fairly thought-provoking piece. Four middle-aged lesbians — played by Dunye, Turner, Brodie, and Lisa Gornick — accidentally kill a younger lesbian and try to cover up the murder. Their ages are central: the fear of getting older is a major thematic concern. So, too, ideas of gender identity, with the introduction of androgynous Skye (Skyler Cooper). But Dunye breaks the fourth wall, staging her film as a pseudo-mockumentary with both the characters and the actors offering commentary. At just over an hour, The Owls can’t sustain all the back-and-forth, and too many intriguing ideas are left unfinished. Fri/18, 7 p.m., Castro. (Louis Peitzman)

Dzi Croquettes (Tatiana Issa and Raphael Alvarez, Brazil, 2009) Whatever magic fairy dust fuelled The Cockettes’ glitter-covered hippy drag must’ve drifted down south to Brazil to inspire the similarly named Dzi Croquettes. Of course, that’s not the real origin of the equally colorful cabaret troupe, whose fantastic story is told in Raphael Alvarez and Tatiana Issa’s riveting and rollicking documentary. Blending Ziegfeld Follies-style glamour with agitprop, Dzi Croquettes were more polished and more overtly political than their North American sisters; something which frequently landed the group in hot water with José Sarney’s dictatorship. Finding an unlikely and unexpected advocate in Liza Minnelli, Dzi Croquettes fled their homeland in the mid 1970s, becoming the unexpected toast of Europe until AIDS began to take its toll. Filled with delightful archival footage and insightful interviews with alumni, Dzi Croquettes is a joyful affirmation of the power of art (and a feathered boa or two) to effect positive change. Mon/21, 11 a.m., Castro. (Matt Sussman)

Undertow (Javier Fuentes-León, Peru, 2009) This sexy and delicate drama is a bisexual triangle that continues beyond the grave. In a Peruvian coastal hamlet, fisherman Miguel (Cristian Mercado) loves his pregnant wife and fellow church leader Mariela (Tatiana Astengo). But he’s also having a secret passionate affair with Santiago (Manolo Cardona), an urbanite who moved there to paint the land and seascapes, and who chafes at the restrictions Miguel places on their relationship. At a certain point, one character dies and writer-director Javier Fuentes-León seamlessly handles Undertow‘s transition to magical realism. The leisurely story doesn’t go where one expects, ending on a perfect grace note of bittersweet acceptance. Tues/22, 7 p.m., Castro. (Dennis Harvey)

Howl (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, USA, 2010) Beatniks get the Mad Men treatment — with a cast that includes that AMC hit’s Jon Hamm, playing the lawyer who defended the publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s quintessential rebel yell, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, against obscenity charges in San Francisco’s most celebrated trial of the 1950s. It’s fun to see that anally nostalgic aesthetic translated to ramshackle North Beach apartments and sophomoric, filthy-mouthed literary heroes. Not so much fun: the overly literal animation chosen by the directors (famed documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman). Yes, parts of “Howl,” the poem, are animated — unfortunately in a style that calls to mind bad 1980s French Canadian pseudospiritual arthouse schlock. Still, this brief slice of beats is juicy, confined to the trial and the tale of Ginsberg’s poetic and sexual awakening. James Franco is wonderful as the young, self-obsessed, epically needy yet still irresistible crank. It was the first time I found myself wishing to see more of Ginsberg naked. June 27, 7:30 p.m., Castro. (Marke B.)

FRAMELINE34: SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LGBT FILM FESTIVAL

June 17–27, most shows $8–$15

Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Roxie, 3117 16th St., SF; Victoria, 2961 16th St, SF; Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, 2966 College, Berk.

www.frameline.org

True grit

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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True grit

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM Winter’s Bone has already won awards at the Berlin International Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival, but it’s the kind of downbeat, low-key, quiet film that may elude larger audiences (and, as these things go, Oscar voters). Like Andrea Arnold’s recent Fish Tank, it tells the story of a teenage girl who draws on unlikely reserves of toughness to navigate an unstable family life amid less-than-ideal economic circumstances. And it’s also directed by a woman: Debra Granik, whose previous feature, 2004’s Down to the Bone, starred Vera Farmiga (2009’s Up in the Air) as a checkout clerk trying to balance two kids and a secret coke habit.

Drugs also figure into the plot of the harrowing Winter’s Bone, though its protagonist, Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), is faced with a different set of circumstances: her meth head father has jumped bail, leaving the family’s humble mountain home as collateral; the two kids at stake are her younger siblings. With no resources other than her own tenacity, Ree strikes out into her rural Missouri community, seeking information from relatives who clearly know where her father is — but ain’t sayin’ a word.

It’s a journey fraught with menace, shot with an eye for near-documentary realism and an appreciation for slow-burn suspense. Who says American independent film is dead? I spoke with Granik and Lawrence when they were in San Francisco before the local premiere of Winter’s Bone at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

SFBG How did you two come together?

Jennifer Lawrence I read the script, and it was the best female role I’d ever seen, and such a good movie. I basically wouldn’t let them not hire me. I was in L.A. — that’s where I auditioned — and then when I heard they were auditioning girls in New York, I flew to New York like a psycho.

Debra Granik She didn’t act like a psycho, but she did have one thing going for her: she came off a red-eye.

JL I did not look glamorous!

DG In my mind I was like, “That’s so right on.” In American filmmaking, the expectations of physical perfection can sometimes be almost a jail cell, if you will. And it can be the one thing that makes a character not believable. Everything about them is shouting, “This couldn’t be your life experience!” So it’s something actors really have to make a commitment to, and be open to that. And not everybody is.

SFBG Winter’s Bone depicts the Ozarks as an extremely closed-off world, even for a character who is born into it. How did you get access?

DG It took a lot of brick-building to get there, and a lot of repeat visits. It took having people read the novel [by Daniel Woodrell]. We had certain proposals: “This is what we’d like to do. Your property has these houses on it. It could really populate Ree’s world, but please read this book and know what it’s about.” Over time, and with the help of a man from the local community, that dialogue continued — we needed someone local, absolutely, to make the discussion meaningful and honest between everybody.

SFBG The supporting cast includes known faces like Deadwood‘s John Hawkes, who plays Ree’s unstable uncle, but also several amateur actors. How was it working with them?

JL I love it. They’re very natural. They’re not straining to think, “What should I say next?” I thought they were terrific. I thought they were better than I was.

SFBG Popular culture loves to portray backwoods folks as banjo-picking hicks, but Winter’s Bone avoids stereotypes. What was your approach?

DG The first thing that comes to mind — the overarching concept — is the word “and.” Ree Dolly can have a chemically dependent uncle who’s a big problem, and he has some very intense loyalties to the family in his own gnarly, difficult, convoluted, tragic way. [The film isn’t trying to] make an ethical or puritanical judgment on drug taking or anything. This has left her in a very raw and difficult position, and she’s got really intense family values of her own. She cares about her two siblings. So I think people recognize the and. That’s our hope — that audiences will vibe off the and of the whole thing.

WINTER’S BONE opens Fri/18 in Bay Area theaters.

Bucharest calling

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Bucharest calling

arts@sfbg.com

FILM In the five years since Cristi Puiu’s improbable epic, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), a small group of philosophically-inclined filmmakers who were still young during the last days of Ceausescu have been disproportionately responsible for the minor masterpieces of world cinema. None of the Romanian films at Cannes (including Puiu’s follow-up, Aurora) nabbed a prize this year. But the three features in the Pacific Film Archive’s “Tales from the Golden Age: Recent Romanian Cinema” series — Lazarescu, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), and Police, Adjective (2009) — were all heavily garlanded. They gain power when seen in series, where their common syntax comes into focus.

All three films unfold as underground odysseys. A character is tested in a series of trials flowing, directly or indirectly, from the state. In Lazarescu, the eponymous figure is sent upon a Styx-like course of hospitals, accompanied first by reproachful neighbors and then a willful medic. By the time the doctors correctly diagnose his original complaint of the stomach and head, his neurological condition has deteriorated to the point that he can no longer form the words himself. In 4 Months, we trace a young woman’s movements through the city as she ensures a safe course for her friend’s illegal abortion (the film is set two years before Ceausescu’s fall). As more and more is asked of her promise, the film’s handheld style comes to seem charged by irreversibility. In Police, Adjective, we watch a quiet young detective trail a dead-end case: he’s been assigned to gather evidence for a uselessly punitive drug bust of a few teenaged hash-smokers. When he finally refuses to order a raid, he gets an unexpected linguistics lesson from his chief (played with appalling charisma by Vlad Ivanov, the abortionist in 4 Months; in both films he seems the very embodiment of the banality of evil) who dismantles the detective’s logic word by word.

With narratives like case histories, peeling back a social situation until its very marrow is exposed, these films take no shortcuts to empathy. Morality is specifically broached, and each centers on protracted, tangled negotiations carried off by wonderful acting. The apparent detachment of the long-take style is deceptive. In fact, the films’ scenarios are rigorously worked out to express moral quandaries with concern for those on the receiving end. The ostensible real time of the long take is easily distended by exigent circumstances; the decision not to cut gives a taste of the agony, powerlessness, and tension that meet the characters. Indeed, the observational camera is an insinuation, drawing us into the complex ethical mechanics at the level of action and plot. They induce the presence of mind required to dislodge a nasty splinter. It’s difficult to imagine an American documentary taking on health care with an unblinking intransigence on par with Lazarescu, and this, more than the formal style, accounts for critics using the language of ethics and truth to describe the film.

By positioning individual characters at the margins of a centralized bureaucracy, the Romanian films certainly do illuminate untruths. Several of the broad shorts in the new omnibus film, Tales from the Golden Age, threaten to turn the gnomic quality of the Romanian films into shtick, but in the context of the PFA series, these “urban legends from the Ceausescu era” put a gentle historical spin on some of the leitmotifs of the earlier features. The best by far is The Legend of the Air Sellers, a tender 4 Months-meets-John Hughes film in which a teenage girl joins up with a scruffy older guy for a decidedly low-tech scam: they take bottles from local residents under the premises of collecting water and air samples for the state and then redeem the glass for change. The con is revealing of a central paradox of the period: that citizens could be frustrated by the state of things while at the same time credulous that the state would fix them. The girl is a natural capitalist, farming out bottle collecting to unwitting landlords; the boy, for his part, only really wants to watch VHS tapes on a prized video player.

Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica’s found footage essay-film, Videograms of a Revolution (1992), is the outlier of the series both in terms of age and form, but in its methodical analysis of the Romanian Revolution of 1989 as a paradigmatic modern event, the film draws very close to the social relevance of the recent Romanian films — much closer than the nostalgia-tinged episodes of Tales from the Golden Age. Two sequences in Videograms loom large for the Romanian films in the PFA series. In the first, Ujica’s voice-over identifies an initial spark for the revolution in a moment of intercessional static, when an official camera trained upon Ceausescu’s scripted reality pans to observe a disturbance in the crowd, “more out of curiosity than resolve.” Then there are those bundled shots depicting newly victorious revolutionaries dug in at the political headquarters and TV station (an important location for Police, Adjective director Corneliu Poumboiu’s 2006 film, 12:08 East of Bucharest). Attempting to forge their initial reforms, they flail at the deeply ingrained restraints of institutional language.

Toward the end of Videograms, we watch dramatic embedded footage of ragtag revolutionaries and other civilians taking cover from sniper fire coming from one of the oppressive high-rise buildings that play such a prominent part in the Romanian cinematic imagination. Ujica’s voice-over takes analytical measure of the scene: that the belief in an enemy is a binding legacy, a “recollected habit,” and that the unspoken fear so long deployed by Ceausescu’s regime as “internal tactic of deterrence” will not simply vanish. The new Romanian cinema was surely born in the shadows of this phantom fighting.

TALES FROM THE GOLDEN AGE: RECENT ROMANIAN CINEMA

June 11–June 27, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2757 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Mama Drama

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Mama Drama

FILM The unusually high proportion of non-native San Franciscans not only underlines our living in a “destination” city, but also suggests that many of us were eager to leave something behind. Certainly it’s no accident The Full Picture’s fraternal protagonists both chose to live here. Yes, it’s a lovely place. It also happens to be 3,000 insulating miles from where they were raised, and where the dragon still dwells.

Unfortunately, she can fly: sensible heels clacking militaristically across airport tarmac first clue us to the personality of monster-mother Gretchen Foster (Bettina Devin), who sweetly announces she’s off to visit “my boys” in SF, then breathes fire when that charm fails to secure a first class upgrade. Clearly it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Jon Bowden’s first feature is based on his original play, and this screen incarnation doesn’t entirely leave the whiff of stagecraft behind. It’s smart, fluid, funny, and biting, as well as a nice addition to the roster of movies that really do convey something about living here.

Braced in fighting stance for mom’s arrival is Hal (Joshua Hutchinson). He’s got a wife named Beth (Heather Mathieson), a toddler, a compulsive wandering eye, and one very jaundiced view of Gretchen’s alleged victimized past and ditto good intentions.

On the other hand, Mark (Daron Jennings) always backed up ma’s side of the story. He sports the terrified geniality of someone who’s long kept the peace by living a lie that might explode at any moment. Live-in girlfriend Erika (Lizzie Ross) is everything mom is not: supportive, truthful, transparent. But the feelings he’s repressed leak out in martial commitment skittishness, not to mention an inability to prepare anxiety attack-prone Erika for the weekend boot camp of subtle evisceration she’s about to receive from her brand-new worst frenemy.

That weekend works through a minigolf obstacle course of logistical meal disasters, temporary sightseeing balm, withering “compliments,” ugly spousal conflict, and climactic reveals about dad’s long-ago departure. Through it all, Gretchen’s frosted Nancy Reagan coif remains as rigid as her revisionist family history. But the emotions she stirs up — not without backlash — grow very messy indeed.

The Full Picture is a small picture, but it would be a shame to let its genuine satisfactions pass you by. As writer, director, and producer, Bowden turns economy into crafty virtues, and his actors are inspired. Nothing here is wildly original, yet it feels fresh — especially the way so much nervous comedy leads to screaming catharsis, only to land on a slightly zen grace note. 

The Full Picture opens Fri/11 at the Roxie.

In the cut

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In the cut

arts@sfbg.com

FILM "If we don’t use human DNA now, someone else will," declares Elsa (Sarah Polley), the brash young genetic scientist bent on defying the orders of her benign corporate benefactors in Vincenzo Natali’s pseudo-cautionary hybrid love child, Splice. From that moment on, it’s pretty clear that any ethical conundrums the movie raises aren’t really worthy of debate: what Elsa wants to do in the name of scientific progress — splice human DNA into gooey muscle masses to provide said corporation with proteins for gene therapy — is, you know, deranged.

A hipster Dr. Frankenstein with mommy issues, Elsa bucks both corporate policy and sound moral judgment and does it anyway, much to the horror of her husband and fellow hotshot research scientist, Clive (Adrien Brody). (His name is a sideways reference to Mary Shelley’s titular mad scientist, played by Colin Clive in 1931’s Frankenstein; hers recalls 1935’s notoriously electro-coiffed Bride of Frankenstein, Elsa Lanchester.) But the potential scientific discoveries prove too seductive even for Clive, who reluctantly plays Elsa’s sad-eyed Igor. After all, these are the type of science weirdos who can gaze upon genetically engineered mounds of unarticulated, writhing flesh and coo, "She’s perfectly formed!" Um, yeaahh.

Elsa’s genetic tinkering soon results in the dramatic birth of something akin to a homicidal fetal chick crossed with a skinned bunny. Clive is horrified by this affront to nature and suggests killing it, but Elsa wants to study its life cycle for posterity. It grows at an alarming rate, and when human characteristics become apparent, Elsa clings to it with the instinctual vigor of a tigress protecting her cub. She gives her female laboratory spawn the name "Dren" ("Nerd" backward, after the acronym for their research facility) and outfits her in oddly anachronistic Holly Hobbie-style dresses. Clive remains largely unconvinced. "None of her animal components have predatory characteristics," Elsa assures him. "Well, there is the human element," he quips.

In a matter of days, Dren develops from a shy child into a precocious teen (French newcomer Delphine Chanéac) with a typically adolescent itch to rebel. The mute, atavistic Dren is like a gorgeous autistic Minotaur, bounding around on incredibly powerful gazelle-like legs while clinging to her stuffed teddy bears and batting her doe eyes in wonder, existential confusion, and (soon enough) quizzical animal lust.

When Elsa and Clive are forced to hide Dren at Elsa’s abandoned family farmhouse to escape detection from prying corporate eyes, Splice evolves into another kind of hybrid: a genetically engineered Scenes from a Marriage (1973) crossed with the DNA of The Omen (1976) and grafted onto the most very special My So-Called Life episode ever. Eventually the movie gets downright lascivious — a particularly cringe-inducing plot twist comes to mind — but a few small moments toy with the transcendent, like Dren’s discovery of her wings on a snow-laden rooftop. Both Brody and Polley seem to be gamely slumming, and their casting does add an aura of respectability to the proceedings. But make no mistake. Splice‘s genetic imprint is pure genre-pulp sleaze and cheese.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Splice may be a ludicrous, cut-rate exercise in Brood-era David Cronenberg — Natali has clearly orchestrated an homage to his fellow Canadian’s enduring obsession with body horror — but it’s a damned entertaining one. It’s also a curious entry considering Natali’s earlier efforts, notably 1997’s relatively austere exercise in Kubrickian Big Think sci-fi nuance, Cube. The only Kubrick evidenced in Splice comes in the form of Clive’s large collection of vinyl hipster toys.

Perhaps this about-face fits somewhere comfortably between Cube and Natali’s rumored next project: a remake of Wes Craven’s Swamp Thing (1982). Splice in some Craven and pretty soon Natali’s DNA will be such a bouillabaisse of sci-fi horror tropes he’ll give his Frankenstein-aping heroine Elsa a run for her money.

SPLICE opens Fri/4 in Bay Area theaters.

Cute is what he aims for

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Cute is what he aims for

FILM Cutie pie. Kissy face. Snuggle bunny. Aren’t you just the sweetest thing ever?

The above pull quote will likely not be showing up in Sony Classics’
ads for Micmacs. Nonetheless, an urge to baby-talk at the screen underlines what is wrong with Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s new film: it is like a precocious child all too aware how to work a room, reprising adorable past behaviors with pushy determination and no remaining spontaneity whatsoever. There will be cooing. There will be clucking. But there will also a few viewers rolling their eyes, thinking "This kid rides my last nerve."

It’s easy to understand why Jeunet’s movies are so beloved, doubtless by many previously allergic to subtitles. (Of course, few filmmakers need dialogue less.) They are eye-candy, and brain-candy too: fantastical, hyper, exotic, appealing to the child within but with dark streaks, byzantine of plot yet requiring no close narrative attention at all. The artistry and craftsmanship are unmissable, no ingenious design or whimsical detail left unemphasized. You can detect influences — Chaplin, Jacques Tati, Jan Svankmajer — but the unified vision is distinctively his.

Actually it was his and codirector Marc Caro’s, through 1995’s The City of Lost Children. That uneven but impressive fantasy greatly expanded on the template introduced by their early shorts and by 1991’s Delicatessen, a perfectly self-contained first feature contraption, a live-action cartoon of the genially macabre and puckishly romantic.

These were cult films, albeit big cult films. The point at which Jeunet supersized — in both popularity and in turning a few stomachs — was his first movie entirely without Caro, plucky-as-fuck Amélie (2001). It was the world’s most ornate cuckoo clock, an entire football field of dominoes falling toward an inevitable je t’aime. Whether it is also a testament to the perils of excessive storyboarding can be argued — but say that and it’s as if you had just kicked a dog. Or "an elf with big eyes," as Jeunet described his "perfect actress" Audrey Tautou. A Very Long Engagement (2004) suggested the limits of what they could do for each other, but at least it was a step away from circusy cuteness and contrivance.

Into which puddle of cuddle Micmacs leaps back with a vengeance. It took Jeunet five years to painstakingly construct a vehicle he could repeat himself this completely? Our hero Bazil (Dany Boon) is a lovable misfit who lost his father to an Algerian landmine, then loses his own job and home when he’s brain-injured by a stray bullet. He falls in with a crazy coterie of lovable misfits who live underground, make wacky contraptions from junk, and each have their own special, not-quite-super "power." (His love interest is dubbed Elastic Girl — though it’s Julie Ferrier’s facial contortions that really alarm.) It’s like Santa’s Gallic Toyshop, populated by chimney-sweeps and organ grinders and mimes. They help him wreak elaborate, fanciful revenge on the greedy arms manufacturers (André Dussollier, Nicolas Marié) behind his
misfortunes, as well as various human rights-y global ones.

So there’s a message here, couched in fun. But the effect is rather like a birthday clown begging funds for Darfur — or Robert Benigni’s dreaded Life is Beautiful (1997), good intentions coming off a bit hubristic, even distasteful. (It doesn’t help that the sole black characters here feel like racial caricatures dropped into Cirque du Soleil.) Of course the film’s all-important design aspects are impeccably wrought. And using old Max Steiner orchestral excerpts was a terrific idea — one of Micmacs‘ few simple, genuinely charming ones.

The actors make funny faces, some (like Boon, Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon, and the villains) amusingly, others laboriously. They’re just props in a series of Rube Goldbergian set-pieces that are showy, intricate yet somehow stale. If Amelie‘s pursuit of charm could feel incongruously elephantine — like a space shuttle chasing a feather — Micmacs likewise exerts way too much effort just trying to be cute and funny. It’s so overpoweringly delighted with itself that you don’t need to be.

MICMACS opens Fri/4 in Bay Area theaters.

Green is good

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Green is good

FILM How do you make a cult movie? The short answer is, you can’t. Cult movies become what they are not by the efforts of their filmmakers; they must be elevated to second-coming status by fans, superfans who dress in costume and host semi-regular viewing parties, and mega-superfans who get tattoos tributes.

Blessed with the magical combination of terrible acting, zero-budget production values, a laughable script, and directing choices so bizarre they had to be intentional, 1989’s Troll 2 was destined from the start to either wind up in total bargain-bin obscurity or be one of the most backhandedly-praised cult movies of a generation. The documentary Best Worst Movie, helmed by Michael Paul Stephenson (also known as Troll 2‘s freckle-faced kid star), traces the would-be horror flick’s path, from filming in small-town Utah with an amateur cast and a non-English-speaking Italian crew, to straight-to-vid anonymity, to becoming a late-night TV perennial who eventually found a rabidly enthusiastic audience.

Best Worst Movie does a fine job establishing Troll 2‘s cult cred, but it’s also interested in examining what happens to people who are famous only because of their association with one singularly memorable show-biz moment. For Dr. George Hardy — an excitable dentist whose stiff, eminently quotable performance as Troll 2‘s patriarch was his only film gig — his fame, two decades after the larky experience of making a movie he thought nobody would see, is a pleasant surprise (for the most part). For director Claudio Fragasso, who has two dozen non-Troll 2-related credits on his resume, the attention is welcome but also off-putting: he doesn’t seem to grasp that the reason his movie is great is because it’s so bad. Nor is he amused by the fact that his “important film” is considered by many to be a guffaw-inducing joke.

The doc’s worth your time, but Troll 2 is essential viewing no matter what. Screenwriter Rosella Drudi (Fragasso’s wife) penned the script — about a regl’ar family on vacation who realizes they’re under siege by the local goblin population — because she was pissed off at vegetarians. The rest is hard to explain, but gloriously easy to enjoy.

TROLL 2

Fri/4-Sat/5, midnight, $8–$10.50

Lumiere

1572 California, SF

www.landmarktheatres.com

BEST WORST MOVIE opens Fri/4 in Bay Area theaters; Stephenson and Hardy in person at selected opening-weekend shows.

Vow and later

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Vow and later

FILM A friend recently opined that movies about hitched couples stumbling through matrimony were far less fun to watch than movies about unmarried couples fumbling toward commitment. There is a kernel of truth here. The question "Will they get together?" is certainly more tension-filled than "when will they finally concede defeat?"

Agnès Varda, one of cinema’s smartest and slyest observers of gender relations, disproves my friend’s hypothesis and gives matrimonial ennui a gentle ribbing in two early films: La Pointe Courte (1955), her debut, and Le bonheur (1965). Screening as part of the Pacific Film Archive’s showcase of recent acquisitions, "Brought to Light," both films nominally revolve around married couples negotiating crises. Varda, however, is far more interested in observing marriage as a social contract, one that not only frequently skews in favor of men, but that also isolates both participants from the rest of the world as much as from each other.

Arguably the stylistic precursor to what would become the French New Wave, La Pointe Courte cuts between the everyday tragedies that befall the inhabitants of a small Mediterranean fishing village and the urban married couple visiting their community. The couple complains of looking for something new and fresh (hence the vacation), even as they remain oblivious to the villagers’ dramas happening around them. When the two narrative threads join at the film’s end, at the town’s ritual jousting match, the couple’s resolution to continue on is secondary to their finally coming together with the social whole.

In contrast to the black and white pensiveness of La Pointe Courte, Varda’s third feature, La bonheur, is a cheerful affair about, well, an affair. Infidelity has never looked so painfully pleasant. Filmed in a sunny palette with a soundtrack of Mozart chestnuts, Le bonheur revolves around François and Therese (real-life couple Jean-Claude and Claire Drouot), whose picture-perfect marriage includes two adorable kids and Sunday picnics in the country. Enter Émile, a young woman who catches François’ eye. The two start an affair, and François discovers that he has doubled his happiness. Eventually he comes clean to Therese, who, in the film’s most shocking moment, steps down as his "wife," offering Émile her place.

François tries to be an honest husband and have it both ways, but has to make a choice. He chooses his happiness over Therese and the family he has made with her. Varda doesn’t judge him for it, but she doesn’t really have to: he’s effectively tied the rope to hang himself with. After all, as Varda later remarked about her film, "Happiness is a fruit that tastes of cruelty." Perhaps the problem with marriage, then, is the "happily ever after" part.

LA POINTE COURTE

Sun/6, 5 p.m., $5.50–$9.50

Le bonheur

June 10, 7 p.m., $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk

(510) 642-5249

The meme generation

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The meme generation

arts@sfbg.com

VIDEO We’ve got five years, stuck on my eyes …

YouTube is five. In his latest video, Chris Crocker prefaces his birthday wish for the site that effectively birthed him by announcing that he’s speaking as someone who is “part of YouTube history.” This moment of historical self-consciousness seems odd coming from Crocker, whose métier has been the in-the-moment double-blitzkrieg of unmediated emotional outpouring and laser-guided queeniness. If anything, Crocker has refined his androgynous self-presentation and ADD-addled delivery. More important, he has lived to tell. He is a part of YouTube history who seems to have come out the other side of the meme machine with some perspective, in addition to an increased “media profile.”

We’ve got five years, what a surprise …

“I hope YouTube will become more and more like the community it was in ’06 and ’07 (you all know what I mean),” Crocker says. I don’t really know what he means, but he goes on to lament how “corporate” YouTube has become. In the video’s intro note, Crocker writes, “Now with all of the corporate channels, and the constant YouTube FAVORITES featured and on the Popular list, It feels nearly impossible to be heard unless your video is featured or on a popular blog site.” Crocker’s idyllic evocation of “community” is offset by the whiff of sour grapes that his criticism gives off, but I also think he’s getting at something that’s as tangible as it is ridiculous-sounding: YouTube has become a more jaded and self-conscious medium than ever.

We’ve got five years, my brain hurts a lot …

The codes are known for those who want their 15 seconds on YouTube’s front page (and the subsequent gimlet-eyed post from Gawker). YouTube stars are now self-manufactured, no longer born to be discovered. This is a postlapsarian world in which, within a matter of days, “experts” are already raising suspicion that Greyson Chance — the 12 year-old Oklahoman whose show-stopping rendition of Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi” has launched him on the path to become Bieber 2.0 — could be the product of canny media manipulation. Then again, is the question “Is he for real?” even relevant in the context of YouTube?

We’ve got five years, that’s all we’ve got.

I asked myself both questions when I watched PhatGayKID’s videos. PhatGayKID is the username of Jonnie, another extremely effeminate, young white gay man whose videos are starting to get attention from blogs. Slightly chubby and armed with a giggle that could cut shatter glass, Jonnie — who warbles out numbers from Glee and Ke$ha in the oblivious soprano of Florence Foster Jenkins — could be anywhere from 16 to 30 years old (his profile says 20). He claims to live in Beverly Hills and that his friends and family tell him he’s “way too good for American Idol!” Comments are sharply divided between homophobic dismissal and enraptured validation. Then there are those, like me, who wonder about Jonnie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nap2McCq-xk

Jonnie’s mannerisms and delivery seem too perfect and canny a distillation of the kind of fan performances that now comprise one of YouTube’s most prolific genres – a style of performance that, thanks to someone like Chris Crocker, has become codified in certain ways. Both Crocker and Jonnie are naturals at hiding their deep self-awareness of what they’re doing. But Crocker’s accumulated performance of “Chris Crocker” came out of the offline hell of being young, gay, and irrepressibly femme in a small, Southern town (memorably dubbed “Real Bitch Island”). I don’t know much about Jonnie’s life, except that for someone who’s only just getting started he’s already welcoming “business inquiries” on his channel’s home page. Slog, the blog of Seattle weekly The Stranger, posted one of Jonnie’s videos under the title “Trying to Go Viral,” and a clip of Jonnie was used in SkunkPost’s satiric video made in the wake of Chance’s overnight success, “How to make it big using YouTube in five easy steps.” Regardless of who Jonnie actually is, and what exactly it is that he’s performing, he is committing one of the venal sins of YouTube: trying too hard.

The eyes of Skye Thorstenson

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The eyes of Skye Thorstenson

arts@sfbg.com

VIDEO Birds chirp and branches part like curtains in the opening scene of the music video for Myles Cooper’s anthem “Gonna Find Boyfriends Today.” Suddenly the pristine wilderness scene is shattered and, along with pulsating beats, a big-lipped strawberry greets us with Mickey Mouse paws. A Cyclops-peanut runs across the screen and leads us to a stack of televisions; zooming into one we catch Cooper singing, “It doesn’t matter what you wear/It doesn’t matter if you have money/We’ll find guys to buy us drinks/And tell us that we’re young and funny.”

“I think Myles’ video tells it best, because it’s this kinda caffeinated euphoria,” explains Skye Thorstenson, the mastermind behind the wild imagery of the video. “It’s unrealistic and there’s a little melancholy imbued in it, because this is sooo not the way life really is. There are no cupcakes who are going to help you find boyfriends.”

WHAT? No, wait, hold up. But I thought … So the mountain topped with lollipops looking like Candyland isn’t real? Without realizing that he’s burst my bubble, Thorstenson continues, “But I like that. I like to hide the fact that life is boring. What the world needs is some more color.”

“I never imagined myself doing music videos. For Myles, it was all about the music,” Thorstenson explains. “I wanted to do some visual thing. I told him it won’t be a music video, but it might be like a short film.” In the course of the narrative, Cooper finds puppet lovers, a chorus of gassed angels, and becomes the man-in-the-moon. In the end, a vagina dentata resembling Aunt Charlie’s Lounge — a dive-bar at Turk and Taylor streets— literally eats itself. “I feel like an Aunt Charlie’s is always going to be there, and it’s always going to eat its predecessor,” Thorstenson says. “And there are always different nights there, and sometimes they survive and sometimes they don’t. But what Myles and Alexis [Penney, who cohosts the club night High Fantasy with Cooper] created will always be there, or some essence of it.”

Throughout Thorstenson’s repertoire, he constantly plays with the notion of a fragmented past and explores how essences persist into the present. He is currently filming an experimental documentary that he named after Roland Barthes’ S/Z. It’s an extension of his earlier film, called Gunk Land, which starts at Wisconsin’s Oneida Indian reservation where Thorstenson’s mother lives. “I wanted to do a documentary on my identity: who I am and where I come from,” he explains. Highlighting the ambiguous — possibly fake — moments of documentaries, as in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, which glamorizes pre-World War II Germany, or The Thin Blue Line, which reenacts a murder scene, Thorstenson utilizes reenactments with different edits and different actors playing him to construct an ambiguous reality. “With S/Z, it’s going to be more how I imagined it and colored in some ideas based on what my mom told me about my past.”

As with “Gonna Find Boyfriends Today” and Gunk Land, S/Z finds Thorstenson working with a mess of “floating fragments” left over from a childhood spent watching PBS specials and Disney movies. Pieces of puppets, stereotypes or songs — “like the plastic floating in the middle of the ocean,” as he puts it — are smashed together. In the 1970 book S/Z, Barthes explores how narrative works and how we recollect memories. Instead of linearity, Thorstenson explains, memory offers “more of a pastiche of experiences and sensations that are pulled together to bring an experience.” This, he adds, is how authors often work: the reader fills in the gaps and links the situations together.

Thorstenson’s take on S/Z turns this idea into a visual experience. It will be released online in pieces that can be navigated like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and a path through separating branches might reveal the same scene reenacted with different actors, or the same scene with alternative edits. In this way, varied connections and present-versions of Skye are constructed, based on how the past is perceived. “You’re meant to know it might’ve gone differently,” Thorstenson says, “and you can’t trust anything.”

Even the way Thorstenson speaks parallels this fragmented pattern, as he seamlessly jumps from one memory to another or from one project to the next. “The music inspired that video and we worked closely together for four months,” he explains about his work with Cooper. He also has done videos set to Xiu Xiu and Antony and the Johnsons’ songs, to local music-maker Adam Finken’s “Firebird,” and is about to undertake a movie-themed project for San Francisco electronic duo johnathan. In all of the music videos, there’s an interaction between the mood, beats, and lyrics of the music and the visual narrative. “With me, it’s more about improvisation, and something magical happens. I have no idea how it happens, but I don’t intend for people to react. I’m always surprised at how people react to something.”

In undergrad film school at the Academy of Art, Thorstenson was taught how to look at film from a business perspective — it has to look clean, polished, and intentional. Grad school at CCA, along with a filmmaking crew he befriended, dubbed Nightmare City, allowed Thorstenson to think more about process, forcing his aesthetic to evolve. “I decided I’ll show faux interpretations of my process because I was curious about what is actually real.” These are readily featured in his work and create meta-moments, which make the viewer aware. “So I’m playing with this fake façade, and the truth hidden behind all these bright colors,” he said. “It’s the same thing with Myles’ video. There’s something behind all that happiness.”

www.skyethorstenson.com

Infectious

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Infectious

arts@sfbg.com

VIDEO What brings down a presidential campaign, makes Stephen Colbert break out his lightsabers, and inspires protest in Oakland and Tehran? The alpha and omega of online video: YouTube and my camera phone equal a jillion eyeballs and our itchy mouse finger clicking “Play” and passing it on. All those moments, all those sticky little memes, are now forever linked and embedded in the cultural fabric, touchstones certain to become engrained in our collective unconscious as the grainy image of the Beatles playing Ed Sullivan or the Challenger exploding on camera.

At all of five years old, YouTube can claim more than 2 billion views a day. Twenty-four hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute and admittedly few of those snippets find traction in the stream of life. Yet the evolution of online video is just beginning. So say knowledgeable observers like Jennie Bourne, author of Web Video: Making It Great, Getting It Noticed.

“Viral has become a dirty word in Web video because people’s concerns in going viral tend to be linked to trying to monetize a web video, and very often a video that’s getting a lot of views is not making a lot of money,” Bourne explains. And while the rise of citizen broadcast journalists and DIY documentarians is laudable, she adds, “I have to say the flip side of that — people walking around with cameras on their foreheads all the time video blogging — can get a little boring without a structure and style. I think there will be a shakeout at one point, and Web video will mature. It’s not there yet — it’s effective as a distribution medium and effective as a social medium but still developing as a commercial medium.”

For now, what do some of the last five or even (gasp) 10 years’ most widely distributed viral videos say about this generation’s particular sickness?

With the advent of camera phones, the revolution will be webcast Is it any surprise that moving images activate us more than words? The outrage over the BART station shooting of Oscar Grant was fueled by the sights captured by viewers with camera phones. Six months after Grant’s death, the killing of Neda Agha-Soltan during the Iranian election protests was captured by multiple observers, causing it to become a flashpoint for reformists and activists. The videos depicting what one Time writer described as “probably the most widely witnessed death in human history” ended up winning last year’s George Polk Award for Videography.

Pre-online video, the mainstream news media likely would have shielded the public from these images in the interest of so-called public decency. But the availability of these videos online — and the reaction they generated — triggered a rethink. The shadowy online presence of the beheading videos made by Islamist terrorists following 9/11 might have prepared some for the horrors of the very real faces of death, but obviously the intent behind more recent spontaneous acts of DIY documentation has been radically different. Consider this the nonviolent, amateur response to Homeland Security-approved surveillance — a quickly-posted flipside to the filter of traditional journalism.

We appreciate raw talent There’s the professional article, like the demo tape of Jeremy Davies’ lengthy Charles Manson improvisation. But viewers often prefer to feed on more unvarnished talent-show-esque efforts: the stoic, high-geek style of Tay Zonday’s “Chocolate Rain,” or Eli Porter of “Iron Mic” infamy. As one aficionado said of the latter, Porter is an “enigma, for no one knows where the FUCK Eli is! His battle was done in 2003, and he sort of vanished, leaving legions of fans wanting more.” The invisible — both the private ritual and the would-be performer striving for a public — is made visible. This is why recent clips such as a little girl dunking through her legs or the “Dick Slang” video of circle-jerking hip-hoppers shaking their penii like hula hoops are so wickedly sticky.

The reveal can’t be concealed You can’t hide your anger management issues, whether you’re a Chinese woman punching and kicking on Muni or Bill O’Reilly flipping out about getting played out with a Sting song (“We’ll do it live! Fuck it!”). Nor can you forget that pesky Katie Couric clip if you’re Sarah Palin: the notorious snippet of the wannabe vice president attempting to explain her nonexistent foreign policy experience lives on in a YouTube feature box. If you decide to get more than 1,000 prisoners in the Philippines to replicate the “Thriller” video, rope a slew of tarted-up tots to do the “Single Ladies” routine, or organize a flash mob of dancers for your (500) Days of Summer-cheesy proposal in New York City’s Washington Square Park, you can bet it won’t stay a secret. Especially when a good portion of the bystanders blocking your shot are hoisting up cameras and phones of their own.

We like to play with our food and gobble pet vids The dancing fountains of “Diet Coke and Mentos” and the elegiac meltdowns of so many innocent, candy-colored sundaes and ‘sicles in “The Death & Life of Ice Cream” rock our pop, though they’re no match for sneezing baby pandas, dramatic chipmunks, very vocal cats, and dogs either verbalizing, skateboarding, or balloon-munching.

Passion counts Especially when it comes to Chris Crocker’s “Leave Britney Alone” protestations, Obama Girl’s undulations, the kakapo parrot shagging a hapless nature photographer’s skull, and Zach Galifianakis’ hilariously bad “Between Two Ferns” interviews. Even Soulja Boy’s vlogs, in which the pop tell-’em-all cranks the virtues of the Xbox, seem obsessed — with getting the viewer’s attention. That also goes for the “Numa Numa” xloserkidx singing along to O Zone’s “Dragostea Din Tei” and the twirling, ducking, and capering Canadian high-schooler in the “Star Wars Kid” video, which marketing company the Viral Factory estimates has been viewed more than 900 million times.

Just gird yourself for the edit “Star Wars Kid” is one primo example: it inspired Stephen Colbert to kick off a viral loop of his own, challenging viewers to edit and enhance the green-screen video tribute of his own lightsaber routine. No one is exempt from a little creative tinkering, an inspired tweak or 2,000, be it “Longcat”; Ted Levine in Silence of the Lambs; or pre-YouTube animated vid “All Your Base Are Belong To Us,” the classic mother of all video hacks, where images ranging from beer ads to motel signs are Photoshopped with the Zero Wing Engrish subtitle. And you thought the remix was dead.

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