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Playtime

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Playtime

“It’s like he was waiting for someone to find him. It was overwhelming at first because I was just this little person trying to write a dissertation, and here was someone I thought needed to be recognized by history.”

Filmmaker and University of San Francisco professor Melinda Stone is telling me about Sid Laverents, the backyard auteur whose Multiple SIDosis (1970) is unlike any other work enshrined by the National Registry. Laverents died last May, at 100, but not before receiving the Library of Congress honor in 2000 — the result of years of faithful barnstorming by Stone and other enthusiasts (notably filmmaker and preservationist Ross Lipman). The 35mm UCLA restoration of SIDosis screening at a Pacific Film Archive tribute fits with Lipman’s ongoing historiographic missive to refurbish exemplars of Southern California’s “minor cinemas.” Charles Burnett, Kent Mackenzie, John Cassavetes, and Kenneth Anger are heady company, but then Laverents may yet be seen as San Diego’s own Georges Méliès.

So then, what is Multiple SIDosis? Film archivist David Francis’ description of the nine-minute short as a “technical comedy” is apt. The film opens in Laverents’ conservative San Diego spread. It’s Christmas morning, and his wife has given him a reel-to-reel machine. He records a little banjo jaunt and listens to the playback, grabbing a few more instruments. Partly due to Laverents’ straight appearance, we begin to think we’re watching an ordinary demonstration. We’re not. Following a slightly psychedelic title card, Laverents’ trusty metronome is telescoped into a masked, locket-shaped image in the top-left of the frame. His banjo, ukulele, and whistling parts are split into three other miniatures, Brady Bunch style. Then, an amazing geometric panoply of six Sids, nine Sids, 16 Sids; chimes over here, harp over there, Sid, Sid, everywhere.

Laverents created these pre-digital effects with a syncing system of his own devising (he honed his one-man band chops touring the Southern vaudeville circuit in the 1920s and ’30s). Multiple SIDosis is not merely inventive; it is, in some real way, an invention. “It’s so perfectly that confluence of aeronautical engineer and vaudeville performer,” Stone gushes. Local film buffs still drunk on a month’s worth of Jacques Tati screenings at various venues may well note a family resemblance in the way Laverents bends modern technology to his own idiosyncratic vision.

Multiple SIDosis is not your typical home movie, but Laverents didn’t work in a vacuum — he was a proud member of the San Diego Amateur Moviemakers Club (motto: “If it moves, we’ll shoot it”), a once-thriving community group that, like many such organizations, provided encouragement, tech support, and elevated expectations. In proper club fashion, Stone graciously brings out tea and cookies when we meet.

“I really came to believe in the cinema clubs and what they might tell us about the longevity of civic engagement,” she muses. But the number of clubs is dwindling. Even before YouTube presented a virtual forum (but definitely no tea and cookies), film schools attracted the young, would-be filmmakers who might have replenished the clubs’ stocks. Without wanting to disparage university programs, their emphasis on specialization comes at a cost — not to mention that the clubs offered a lifetime membership rather than a two- to four-year shot at community.

The Pacific Film Archive’s “For the Love of It” program features a few recent selections from clubs in Cupertino, San Jose, and Los Angeles, along with one minor masterpiece from the now-defunct, SF-based Westwood Movie Club. Moods of a City (1972) may be the closest San Francisco ever gets to its Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927). To make the film, the club split into different teams covering fog, architecture, the sea, public gatherings, and typical San Franciscans.

It’s a patchwork, but one with surprisingly perceptive seams: a perfect graphic match between a gleaming spider’s web and the Golden Gate Bridge’s cables, for instance, or the hard cut between a flock of suits rolling the Financial District and scattered hobos down and out in the urban wilderness. The postcard views all come at a local slant, and the architecture segment, with its minute focus on variations in windows and doorframes, reminds us that the etymological root of amateur is lover. The fog slides off, and we’re treated to a North Beach round of bocce. Better yet are the gestures (spitting, cigarettes held on the lower lip) that have disappeared — like so many buildings, but not so easily memorialized by a plaque.

Moods of a City is a collective work, made during a period when avant-garde circles grappled with questions of authorship and community. Though Stone admits being somewhat resigned about bridging these worlds, she hasn’t stopped trying. When San Jose Movie Club rep Bernard Wood gave her a few rolls of discontinued Kodachrome stock — coincidentally, Nathaniel Dorsky’s last Kodachrome film, Compline (2009), premiers Feb. 23 at PFA — Stone distributed the film to a quartet of top Bay Area experimentalists. Their three-minute rolls will run with the club films at PFA. Refreshments to follow.

“FOR THE LOVE OF IT: SEVENTH ANNUAL FESTIVAL OF AMATEUR FILMMAKING”

Sun/21, 3 p.m.

“SID’S CINEMA: A TRIBUTE TO AMATEUR FILMMAKER SID LAVERENTS”

Feb. 28, 3 p.m.

Both events $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

 

Pit bull in a pony tail

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Pit bull in a pony tail

FILM There’s been a string of movies lately pondering what Britney once called the not-a-girl, not-yet-a-woman syndrome. Two 2009 entries will earn Oscar nominations: Lone Scherfig’s An Education, about a 1960s British 16-year-old who learns a hard lesson about trusting an older, slippery suitor; and Lee Daniels’ Precious: Based on the Novel Push By Sapphire, about a 1980s Harlem girl who’s already learned a lifetime of hard lessons by her 16th birthday. I’m not the first reviewer to compare either of these films to Fish Tank (both it and Precious snagged prestigious festival prizes in 2009), and I’m probably not alone in saying that Andrea Arnold’s gritty new drama is the superior choice among the three. If there’s justice, Fish Tank won’t be forgotten when next year’s award nominations roll out. (Arnold’s no stranger to Academy gold, having already picked up a statuette for her 2003 short film, Wasp.)

I’ll admit it: I’m an Arnold fanatic. If I had to point to one new filmmaker whose work most excites me, I’d likely pick Arnold. Her films are heartbreaking, but in an unforced way that never feels manipulative; her characters, often portrayed by nonactors, feel completely organic.

When I spoke to Arnold before the release of her 2006 Red Road — about a CCTV operator who hatches a slow-boil revenge plot — she elaborated on why she populates her scripts with such ordinary, yet deeply complex, characters: “I think all human beings are very complicated in their circumstances and their environments — sometimes people don’t always behave in the best way. It doesn’t mean to say that they’re bad. I like seeing people who may not be easily likable to start. But then when you get to understand them more, you have empathy for them.”

She was referring to the main character of Red Road. But she could have just as easily been describing Mia, Fish Tank‘s 15-year-old heroine. (In a story that kicks Lana Turner’s famous star-is-born moment in the teeth, first-time actor Katie Jarvis was discovered while arguing with her boyfriend at a train station.) Mia lives with her party-gal single mom and tweenage sister in a public-housing high-rise; all three enjoy drinking, swearing, and shouting. Mia is particularly good at slamming doors and sprinting away from trouble. The other girls in the ‘hood hate her; her only friend is a neighbor’s raggedy pony, whose tied-up existence both frustrates and fascinates her.

But much like sparkly-dreamer Precious, Mia has a secret passion: hip-hop dancing, which she practices with track-suited determination. And much like An Education‘s Jenny, Mia’s stumbling path toward womanhood becomes ever-more confusing with the appearance of an older man — here, mom’s foxy new boyfriend, Connor (Michael Fassbender, from 2008’s Hunger). At first, it’s unclear what Connor’s intentions are. Is he trying to be a cool father figure, or something far more inappropriate?

Without giving away too much, it’s hard to fear too much for a girl who headbutts a teenage rival within the film’s first few minutes — though it soon becomes apparent Mia’s hard façade masks a vulnerable core. Her desire to make human connections causes her to drop her guard when she needs it the most. In a movie about coming of age, a young girl’s bumpy emotional journey is expected turf. But Fish Tank earns its poignant moments honestly — most coming courtesy of Jarvis, who has soulfullness to spare. Whether she’s acting out in tough-girl mode or revealing a glimpse of her fragile inner life, Arnold’s camera relays it all, with unglossy matter-of-factness.

FISH TANK OPENS FRI/29 IN BAY AREA THEATERS.

Peeping Tomás

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Peeping Tomás

Pedro Almodóvar has always dabbled in the Hitchcockian tropes of uxoricide, betrayal, and double-identity, but with Broken Embraces he has attained a polyglot, if slightly mimicking, fluency with the language of Hollywood noir. A story within a story and a movie within a movie, Embraces begins in the present day with middle-aged Catalan Harry Caine (Lluís Homar), a blind screenwriter who takes time between his successful writing career to seduce and bed young women sympathetic to his disability. “Everything’s already happened to me,” he explains to his manager, Judit (Blanca Portillo). “All that’s left is to enjoy life.” But this life of empty pleasures is brought to a sudden halt when Judit reports that a local business magnate Ernesto Martel (José Luis Gómez) has died; soon after, Ernesto Jr. (Rubén Ochandiano), who has renamed himself Ray X, visits Caine with an unusual request. Judit’s son, Diego (Tamar Novas), who is also Caine’s secretary, is a witness to these strange circumstances and inquires into the mysterious past of Caine.

To wit, the action retreats 14 years when Caine was a young (and visually abled) director named Mateo Blanco. In the classic noir set-up, Blanco encounters a breathtaking femme fatale, Lena (Penelope Cruz) — an actress-turned-prostitute named Severine, turned secretary-turned-trophy wife of Ernesto Martel — when she appears to audition for his latest movie, Girls and Suitcases. As Lena’s marriage with the aging Martel is one of convenience, she quickly engages in a torrid off-camera affair with Mateo. But their tryst is compromised by the constant presence of Ernesto Jr., who has been tapped by his father to shoot a behind-the-scenes “documentary” of Lena and Mateo for his own private consumption. When the secret is exposed with the help of a freelance lip-reader (in a classic Almodóvarian scene), the fates of Mateo, Lena, Ernesto, and Judit collide with tragic consequences.

If all of the narrative intricacies and multiplicitous identities in Broken Embraces appear a bit intimidating at first glance, it is because this is the cinema of Almodóvar taken to a kind of generic extreme. As with all of the director’s post-’00 films — All About My Mother (1999), Talk to Her (2002), Bad Education (2004), and Volver (2006) — which are often referred to as Almodóvar’s “mature” pictures, there is a microscopic attention to narrative development combined with a frenzied sub-plotting of nearly soap-operatic proportions. But, in Embraces, formalism attains such prominence that one might speculate the director is simply going through the motions. The effect is a purposely loquacious and overly-dramatized performance that pleasures itself as much by setting up the plot as unraveling it. So, throughout the overlong 127 minute film, two distinct types of scenes become readily apparent: those which are Almodóvar at his best — arriving with a striking visual and musical style and leaving one nearly breathless; and Almodóvar at his worst — those which are purely convention, lumber about far too long and veer into dialogic minutiae. If the audience can withstand these long-winded asides, the cinematic prize is great indeed.

For a obsessive appropriationist, Almodóvar has never been so blatantly referential as he is in Broken Embraces. Apart from the most obvious nods to Hitchcock, the director has included scenic love-letters to Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy (1954), and Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950). Those fans of Almodóvar’s 80s comedies will even recognize the director’s send-up of his own oeuvre in Girls and Suitcases, a potpourri of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) and What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984) Whether or not this confirms that the young iconoclast Almodóvar has, in his old age, become an unashamed nostalgic merits some debate. But, regardless of the verdict, Broken Embraces proves itself to be an impressive lexicon.

Broken Embraces opens Fri/18 in San Francisco.

Life out of balance

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Life out of balance

arts@sfbg.com

FILM At the start of The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, its titular character is toasted as a perfect enigma-cum-hostess, "the very icon of an artist’s wife." She accepts this with public graciousness and private dismay. Because now, with two kids grown (but still whiny) and a famous publisher spouse retired yet self-absorbed as ever, the praise only underlines a sense that she’s always served others’ needs while never quite figuring out her own.

Ergo Rebecca Miller’s latest is that seldom-produced thing, the female midlife crisis movie. Miller is daughter to playwright Arthur Miller, a titan of Big Theme manly guilts. Writing and directing for another medium — one differently scaled from dad’s own twilight-of-the-gods project The Misfits (1961) — Rebecca unsurprisingly falls some yards from the tree. Her projects are indie-scaled, about troubled domestic minutae, with whimsical twists of fate that methodical realist Arthur would never have countenanced.

They’re all flawed. But Rebecca Miller has been consistently interesting since 1995’s striking Angela — first among many narratives from the viewpoint of a child struggling in the shadow of an overwhelming and/or unstable parent. In 2002, triptych Personal Velocity‘s best segment had Parker Posey cowed by her celebrity father. In 2005’s The Ballad of Jack and Rose, Miller’s husband Daniel Day-Lewis was a dying hippie so close to his teenage daughter she lacks social skills for anyone else.

In Private Lives, Pippa (Robin Wright Penn) has her own monstrous parental past, revealed in 1970s flashbacks with Maria Bello as a minister’s wife wired to explode on Dexedrine. Like many people hailing from chaos, Pippa has turned self-conscious model citizen. In drifting early adulthood, she glommed onto the first man who respected her mind — or did he just recognize a rudderless, much younger woman susceptible to flattery? Ever since she’s been ideal consort to Herb (Alan Arkin), as well as doting mother to their variably grateful children.

Three heart attacks have forced Herb to retire — more or less — and move to a Connecticut retirement-community condo located near friends Sam (Mike Binder) and Sandra (Winona Ryder). Actually, they’re Herb’s friends; it’s Pippa’s job to smilingly endure Sam’s overtures and provide Sandra a shoulder to cry on. Barely 40 in an old folks’ village, Pippa is starting to think her life a tad ridiculous. Such nagging but inchoate doubt is underlined by the return of a widow neighbor’s shaggy, somewhat surly son (Keanu Reeves) to Chez Mom after his latest failure at adulthood. Opposites attract, though it’s more complicated than that.

Miller’s cluttered canvas also makes room for teensy-to-major characters played by Shirley Knight, Blake Lively, Robin Weigert, Julianne Moore, and Monica Bellucci. As is her wont, she piles on both invigorating insights and a few too many whiplash narrative left turns.

But The Private Lives of Pippa Lee has charm and idiosyncrasy to spare. Wright Penn is a deft actress who’s spent too much time as cinema’s Agony Aunt — pall-bearer for so much worry, dismay, tears, and suffering from Forrest Gump (1994) to Hounddog (2007). Here, she’s immaculately poised yet leavened by the comingling of desire and comedy. She’s larky, witty, even goofy at times. It looks good on her.

THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE opens Fri/11 in Bay Area theaters.

Citizen Welles

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Citizen Welles

FILM It’s 1937, and New York City, like the rest of the nation, presumably remains in the grip of the Great Depression. That trifling historical detail, however, is upstaged in Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles (adapted from the novel by Robert Kaplow) by the doings at the newly founded Mercury Theatre. There, in the equally tight grip of actor, director, and company cofounder Orson Welles — who makes more pointed use of the historical present, of Italian fascism — a groundbreaking production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar hovers on the brink of premiere and possible disaster.

To a layperson, that might not seem like the best time to sub in a player, but luckily for swaggering young aspirant Richard (High School Musical series star Zac Efron), Welles (Christian McKay), already infamously tyrannical at 22, is not a man to shrink from firing an actor a week before opening night and replacing him with a 17-year-old kid from New Jersey. Particularly one who (says he) can play the ukulele. Finding himself working in perilous proximity to the master, his unharnessed ego, and his winsome, dishearteningly pragmatic assistant, Sonja (Claire Danes), our callow hero is destined, predictably, to be handed some valuable life experience.

McKay makes a credible, enjoyable Welles, presented as the kind of engaging sociopath who handles people like props and hails ambulances like taxicabs. Efron projects a shallow interior life, an instinct for survival, and the charm of someone who has had charming lines written for him. While Richard’s seemingly limitless bravura is amusing, the resultant adventures and mishaps don’t seem to elicit much reaction within; what we witness is mild and momentary and bland. Still, he and Welles and the rest are all in service to the play, and so is the film, which offers an absorbing account of the company’s final days of rehearsal, including the hair-pulling frustrations that the cast, the crew, and Mercury cofounder John Houseman (Eddie Marsan, from 2008’s Happy-Go-Lucky) undergo for the sake of working in close quarters with genius.

Absent are the naturalistic talking jags with which Linklater made his name; here it’s largely banter and smooth talk and gossipy stage whispers. But just as the teenagers of Dazed and Confused cruised through a sludgy stoner soup of ’70s rock, the players of Me and Orson Welles flirt and prank and strut the streets of Manhattan with the atmospheric backing of Gershwin crooners and snappy big band numbers. The one jarring moment, both sonically and in the film at large, is the sound of Efron singing mid-production, earnest and plaintive and incapable of banishing that poppy HSM tremble from his delivery.

Me and Orson Welles opens Fri/11 in Bay Area theaters.

They were expendable

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They were expendable

“Camera movement” doesn’t even begin to describe the orchestral coordination of tracks, pans, tilts, zooms, and compositional dimensionality comprising Miklós Jancsó’s boldly vertiginous 10-minute takes. The Pacific Film Archive screens a quartet of the Hungarian director’s influential but rarely shown films from the late 1960s and early ’70s, each a kinesthetic rumination on the awful coordinates of martial law — and perhaps the closest cinema has ever come to the epic poetry of The Iliad.
Raymond Durgnat’s account of Jancsó’s “calligraphic” camerawork helps distinguish the director’s style from formalist theorizations of the long take. From Touch of Evil (1958) to Children of Men (2006), thrilling tracking shots have come to stand as the summit of cinema’s realist plenitude. With Janscó, like Stanley Kubrick, omniscience itself is held in doubt. In The Round-Up (1966), a distressing parable of interrogation set during an 1848 campaign against insurgent outlaws, Jancsó’s free-floating camera paradoxically registers the blinkered confusion of imprisonment. The volatility of view calls attention to the partiality of witnessing. Simultaneously, the repetitive movements of degradation and violence signal a repertoire of human evil surpassing any single individual, nation, or war.
In Jancsó’s dialectical form, a Marxist apprehension of the enduring structures of power jostles against the individual’s frightened namelessness. As with Jean Renoir, the long take is not at odds with montage’s multiplication of meaning. Take the first scene after the opening titles of The Red and the White (1967). The camera glides after two Bolsheviks in flight from the counterrevolutionaries — slowly, as if in foreknowledge of the coming reversal. As they wade into a narrow river (the geography of the scene bears curious resemblance to one in 2007’s No Country for Old Men), the composition opens up terrain where another band of cavalrymen are mounting a charge. The two men beat a retreat, and now the recessing camera leads them on. One man hides behind a tree, becoming a surrogate for our own position; the other is not so lucky. An ushanka-clad counterrevolutionary soldier bullies the Bolshevik into the shallow water. The shot cues the man’s final movement: like a felled tree he topples into the drink, the first of many searing images worthy of Goya’s The Disasters of War.
Unlike most combat films, time does not bend to the casualties of war in this scene. The shot proceeds after the man is shot, the seconds flowing over crime and banality alike. You can watch one of these films a dozen times having only seen it once.
Jancsó’s durational use of Cinemascope means that actors cover a lot of physical ground in his shots. The cracked Martian expanse of the Hungarian steppe is their mortal stage, a no-place that pictorially undoes the idea of historical setting. Jancsó’s early films are often linked to the crushed Hungarian Revolution of 1956, but in truth they offer no such comfort of specificity. To the contrary, the films demonstrate how state-sanctioned violence vanquishes particularization, making them more relevant to our Guantanamo-Abu Ghraib era than anything coming to a theater near you.
It was only while watching Red Psalm (1972) that I realized the utopic possibilities of Jancsó’s reanimation of historical space. The film, composed of 28 shots in Van Gogh color, stages a late 19th century confrontation between peasant socialists and nationalist conservatives as a series of concentric rings in which the Marxist call for an alternative course of history is richly imagined, if still damned. Twelve-minute takes notwithstanding, any talk of “real time” in such film is preposterous. Serge Bozon’s 2007 film La France broached a similarly musical vision of armed struggle, but Jancsó’s swirling analysis of fate, theatre, ritual, song, idealism, God, grain, and horror is something uniquely sublime.

FOUR BY HUNGARIAN MASTER MIKLÓS JANCSÓ
Dec. 5–18, $5.50–$9.50
Pacific Film Archive
2757 Bancroft, Berk.
(510) 642-5249
www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Triumph of the underdog

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Triumph of the underdog

In Frazer Bradshaw’s Everything Strange and New, Wayne (Jerry McDaniel), wears overalls too large and a look of pained, dazed acquiescence. It’s as if not just his clothes but his life were given to the wrong person — and there’s a no-exchange policy. He loves wife Reneé (the writer Beth Lisick) and their kids. But those two unplanned pregnancies mean she’s got to stay home; daycare would cost more than she’d earn.
So every day Wayne returns from his dead-end construction job to the home whose mortgage holds them hostage; and every time Reneé can be heard screaming at their not-yet-school-age boys, at the end of her tether. Sometimes he silently just turns around to commiserate over beer with buddies likewise married with children, but doing no better. Leo (Rigo Chacon Jr.) is in the middle of a very messy divorce, while Manny (the late Luis Saguar, in a beautiful performance) pretends to be maintaining better than he really is. (He has a surprising secret escape valve, and in one great late scene we realize Leo has one too.)
Wayne’s voiceover narration endlessly ponders how things got this way — more or less as they should be, yet subtly wrong. He might be willing (or at least able) to let go of the idea of happiness. But Reneé’s inarticulate fury at her stifling domestication keeps striking at any nearby punching bag, himself (especially) included. Something’s got to change. But can it?
Cue deus ex machina happy ending. Or so one would in another movie, like Katherine Dieckmann’s supposedly gritty recent Motherhood. But veteran local experimentalist and cinematographer Bradshaw’s first feature, which he also wrote, never stoops to narrative cliché. Or to stylistic ones, either — there’s a spectral poetry to the way he photographs the Oakland flats (few movies have captured ordinary landscapes so vividly). The spinning-in-place sense is underlined by Dan lonsey and Kent Sparling and Dan Plonsey’s score, which melds Philip Glass, Irish folk, and noise-rock caterwaul to externalize all Wayne’s suppressed tumult.
The ordinary wear, tear, and occasional rending of relationships you and I might actually know is portrayed infrequently enough onscreen that when it does turn up, the recognition factor is a little startling. Everything Strange and New seemed a tonic at the Sundance Film Festival this year precisely because it was the kind of indie — quiet, serious, intimate, void of stars and buzz — people complain can’t get made, or even into Sundance, anymore.
Seen again, Everything Strange and New is even better — a film about very small (except to the afflicted), banal (ditto), everyday problems that manages to be mysteriously exhilarating.

EVERYTHING STRANGE AND NEW opens Fri/4 at the Roxie.

Pray tell

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Pray tell

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Oh My God? took the words right outta my mouth about 10 minutes in. It was then clear this "multicultural spiritual quest" about religion worldwide illustrated the three worst trends in contemporary nonfiction filmmaking: the gratuitously first person vanity project; the Koyaanisqatsi (1982) school of globetrotting coffee-table pictorialism; and the "These are important questions. Let’s ask a celebrity for answers!" tactic.

Shot in 23 countries, God?‘s luxury do-gooderism might not compensate for its carbon imprint in any judgmental afterlife. The opening montage of Stuff ‘Round the World is meant to dazzle with the breadth of human experience. Instead, such expensive flash raises a red flag: who funded this? De Beers? Exxon Mobil?

Perhaps writer-producer-director Peter Rodger did himself, being maestro of "numerous car, clothing, and cosmetics companies’ print and commercial campaigns in over 40 countries." That explains a lot. The world is so cluttered with striking images — MTV, advertising, and computer graphics have rendered mere visual brilliance trivial. What’s rare now is the providing of context that makes a picture meaningful.

"Truth is being diluted by too many voices all keen to reference the name of God. But what exactly is God? I decided to go around the world and ask people what they think," Rodger says at the start. Albeit not before Hugh Jackman has brushed his chestnut mane back to announce "God is unexplainable!" Whoa. Why is he here? Rodger presumably lives in that fabulous A-list bubble where success is understood to impart wisdom. Because what can’t money buy?

Oh My God? also includes philosophic two cents from Baz Luhrmann, Seal, Ringo Starr, HRH Princess Michael of Kent, and Sir Bob Geldof. (What, no Bono?) These celebs have zero special to say, but are top-billed — unlike the spiritual leaders, leading academics, and mere proles whose profoundities were likely left on the cutting-room floor.

The movie does have plenty of time for Peter Rodger, our intrepid host for no obvious reason. Surely it doesn’t require his onscreen presence to ask questions like "If God really does exist, why does he permit so much suffering in the world?" We certainly don’t need him to call lingering Katrina devastation "pretty sad," a sentiment as trite as the quick cutaway from some New Orleans kids’ very moving statements is offensive.

Shooting with a real eye for travelogue imagery (sometimes at actual tourist events), Rodgers reduces animal-sacrificing African Maasai tribalists ("very colorful people"), Arizona Native Americans (tribe unidentified), Balinese Hindu priests, and more to exotic dress extras in a 93-minute music video scored by Alexander van Bubenheim as one long world beat mixtape. Tonal slants are predictable: born-again Texans = funny/bad; Tibetan monks = serene/good. OMG indeed.

As in so much human history, the use and abuse of religious ideas now urgently affects us all. Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein notes (in a rare moment of permitted garrulousness), "The problem with religion today is that there’s just enough of it for people to learn to hate each other, but not enough to learn to love each other."

Yet Oh My God?‘s Babel of glancingly sampled opinions is just more contradictory noise — a pu pu platter of empty-calorie pictorialism and half-formed big questions at no risk of meaningful exploration. Like that modern lit classic Eat Pray Love, it wrassles eternal issues of being and meaning into the feel-good hollow address of rich people’s problems.

OH MY GOD? opens Fri/27 in Bay Area theaters.

21st Century ‘Fox’

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21st Century ‘Fox’

FILM A lot of people have been busting filmmaker Wes Anderson’s proverbial chops lately, lambasting him for recent cinematic self-indulgences hewing dangerously close to self-parody (and in the case of 2007’s Darjeeling Limited, I’m one of them). Maybe he’s been listening. Either way, his new animated film, Fantastic Mr. Fox, should keep the naysayer wolves at bay for a while — it’s nothing short of a rollicking, deadpan-hilarious case study in artistic renewal.

While the movie’s gorgeous autumnal color palette of saffron, ginger, cinnamon, and pomegranate recalls the Indian location of Darjeeling, Fox explodes that film’s stagnant complacency. A kind of man-imal inversion of Anderson’s other heist movie, his debut feature Bottle Rocket (1996), his latest revels in ramshackle spontaneity and childlike charm without sacrificing his adult preoccupations.

Sporting a double-breasted corduroy suit and velour pullover, Mr. Fox (George Clooney in full suave mode) is the essence of the old duality of man-fox conundrum. The ultimate impish rogue, what he might lack in competence, he makes up for in self-assured, foxlike élan. But Mr. Fox’s true animal nature has been compromised by domesticity. Forced to give up his chicken-stealing and killing ways by his wife (a subtly sly Meryl Streep), he’s also stymied by his only son (Jason Schwartzman), an attention-starved, Max Fischer-esque oddball with a penchant for sporting a towel as a cape.

Based on Roald Dahl’s beloved 1970 book, Fantastic Mr. Fox captures the essence of the source material but is still full of Anderson trademarks: meticulously staged mise en scène, bisected dollhouse-like sets, eccentric dysfunctional families coming to grips with their talent and success (or lack thereof).

And then there’s that pesky, romantic death obsession. Sure the animals are cute, but at times the stop-motion animation lends them a singularly creepy subtext. Fur routinely flits around in scattershot directions, seemingly independent of body movement. The effect weirdly evokes those time-lapse shots of animals in rapid decay.

As Mr. Fox himself points out, these are "wild animals with true natures and pure talents" — talents that often involve killing one another. After a fatal showdown with a malevolent rat (Willem Dafoe), Fox waxes philosophic. "In the end, he’s just another dead rat in a garbage pail behind a Chinese restaurant," he intones. It’s possibly the most contextually stupefying, hilarious moment in a film teeming with them.

When Mr. Fox finally embraces his essential foxiness once again, ultimately succeeding in gaming the system (more or less), it feels like a victory for Anderson as well. After all, he’s concocted a family film as slyly subversive as its titular character, and done so on his own terms. Let’s hope it’s in his nature to make more movies like this one.

FANTASTIC MR. FOX opens Wed/25 in Bay Area theaters.

What’s hate got to do with it?

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What’s hate got to do with it?

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Like so many recent it’s-true-if-we-say-so slogans, "A Republican is a Democrat who’s been mugged" is smugly, fundamentally misguided on more levels than can be addressed here, suggesting that only conservatives have the horse sense to grasp that it’s a big, scary world out there. Interpreted another way, however, this catchphrase contains a grain of truth: the sense of victimization can be blindsiding. When you begin to perceive all criticism as persecutorial, you might forget it’s possible to be wrong.

That’s the worry driving Yoav Shamir’s Defamation, which opens Friday following a stormy reception at July’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. The documentarian (2003’s Checkpoint) says that as an Israeli Jew he’s never actually experienced anti-Semitism. So he sets out to explore that prejudice’s status quo — or so he claims, somewhat disingenuously. Because Defamation‘s real agenda is positing anti-Semitism as a distorted, exploited, propagandic bludgeon used to taint any critique of Israeli government policies or the foreign lobbies supporting them.

This is a theory bound to inflame angry emotions, not least the "self-hating Jew" accusation. It must be said that Shamir lays himself at risk — à la Michael Moore — of selectively gathering only evidence that supports his agenda. Anti-Semitism certainly does exist today, in many different forms, around the world. But the only folks Shamir finds to spout negative stereotypes are some African American Crown Heights youths — whose complaints about their insular neighbors seem reasonable enough until they cite Nazi best seller The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as an important ethnic expose — and his own granny. (Bizarrely, she opines that Jews are indeed money-hoarding shirkers of "real" work — albeit only foreign Jews, not industrious Israelis like herself.)

Yet if Defamation‘s deliberate omissions and occasional snarky tone hamper its case, Shamir nonetheless makes legitimately troubling points. He views Israeli media as obsessing over any incidents of global anti-Semitism (and ignoring decreases) much as the U.S. media endlessly dwells on certain lurid crime stories — because their public loves to feel indignant.

More than 30,000 Israeli high schoolers now go on field trips each year to European Holocaust sites. But their experience is heavily stage-managed, with Secret Service guards ensuring they have no contact with locals — in Poland a group is kept sequestered in their hotel because (they’re told) this "relatively hostile country" is rife with neo-Nazis.

No wonder when two girls briefly try to bridge the language barrier with some old men in a park, they instantly assume they’re being insulted. (They are not, as the exchange’s subtitled translation reveals.) This thrilling experience of actual, or at least assumed, anti-Semitism reinforces what one student calls "what makes us special: that no one can stand us, but that we are proud of it."

"Everyone knows the Jews are hated. We are raised that way," another proclaims.

Getting ample cooperation (now regretted) from its Manhattan H.Q.’s staff, Shamir suggests the Anti-Defamation League also inflates anti-Semitism’s modern-day realities to exert political muscle, and to dismiss any criticism of Israel as simple Jew-hating "in disguise." When a British academic at an ADL conference rather mildly asserts anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism can indeed be separated — is it racist to think the West Bank settlements and occupation of Palestinian lands unjust? — he’s denounced as an outrageous provocateur.

The most controversial interviewee is Norman Finklestein, whose book The Holocaust Industry got him pilloried as a Holocaust denier (untrue) and quite likely cost him his teaching position. The son of Shoah survivors, he thinks "the Nazi Holocaust is now the main ideological weapon for launching wars of aggression" and that "pathological narcissism" desensitizes many American Jews to other people’s sufferings. (One U.S. rabbi here theorizes that the sense of ongoing historical persecution has replaced religious observance as many Jews’ primarily source of ethnic-cultural identification.)

Finklestein can be persuasively reasonable. To Defamation‘s credit, however, it doesn’t yell "Cut!" when he whips himself into a crank-case frenzy that masochistically self-destructs his credibility. Absolute righteousness ain’t pretty, anywhere on the political spectrum.

DEFAMATION opens Fri/20 at the Roxie.

The call of the weird

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The call of the weird

Consider that ridiculous title. Though its poster and imdb entry eliminate the initial article, it appears onscreen as The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. That’s the bad lieutenant, not to be confused with Abel Ferrara’s 1992 Bad Lieutenant, starring Harvey Keitel as a nameless New York City cop who gambles and grubs drugs until one harrowing case nudges him in a less wretched direction.

The bad lieutenant has a name: Terence McDonagh, and he’s a police officer of similarly wobbly moral fiber. McDonagh’s tale — inspired by Ferrara and scripted by William Finkelstein, but perhaps more important, filmed by Werner Herzog and interpreted by Nicolas Cage — opens with a snake slithering through a post-Hurricane Katrina flood. A prisoner has been forgotten in a basement jail. McDonagh and fellow cop Stevie Pruit (Val Kilmer) taunt the man, taking bets on how long it’ll take him to drown in the rising waters. An act of cruelty seems all but certain until McDonagh, who’s quickly been established as a righteous asshole, suddenly dives in for the rescue. Unpredictability, and quite a bit of instability, reigns thereafter.

A smidge of The Bad Lieutenant actually concerns police work, as McDonagh investigates the slaying of a Senegalese family. Everyone knows who did it, but there’s no evidence, only a teenage eyewitness who’s reluctant to testify against the neighborhood kingpin. But this is hardly a standard-issue procedural drama. Mostly it’s a journey to the edge and back, multiple times, with an unhinged addict who prowls the streets of New Orleans "to the break of dawn, baby!" The storm-battered city provides an uneasy backdrop — this ain’t The Big Easy (1986), and Herzog keeps his N’Awlins cliché-o-meter in check. He does allow for certain Herzogian indulgences, like an extended close-up of an iguana that may or may not be the product of McDonagh’s drug-frazzled brain.

In a movie like The Bad Lieutenant, where every scene holds the possibility of careening to heights both campy and terrifying, Cage proves an inspired casting choice. Lately he’s become more famous for his hair (which has its own Internet meme) and financial troubles than for his talents. His Oscar (for 1995’s Leaving Las Vegas) capped years of cult success (1990’s Wild at Heart), but after a brief late-’90s reign as action star and his success in the (lame) National Treasure films, he’s kinda been off his game. Who, besides the people he owes money to, thought 2006’s The Wicker Man was a good idea?

Basically Cage has nothing to lose, and his take on Lt. McDonagh is as haywire as it gets. McDonagh snorts coke before reporting to a crime scene; he threatens the elderly; he hauls his star teenage witness along when he confronts a john who’s mistreated his prostitute girlfriend (Eva Mendes); he cackles like a maniac; he lurches around like a hunchback on crack. But he’s not entirely monstrous — he cared enough to save that drowning convict, remember? Not knowing what McDonagh will do next is as entertaining as knowing it’ll likely be completely insane. With Herzog behind the camera and Cage flailing in front of it, The Bad Lieutenant is the most fiendish movie of 2009. That’s a recommendation.

THE BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS opens Fri/20 in Bay Area theaters.

Clean freak

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Clean freak

Chilean writer-director Sebastián Silva’s newest "house" film, The Maid, swaps customary debates of bedroom politics for the upstairs/downstairs relations of domestic labor. In an upper-middle class subdivision of Santiago, 40-year-old maid Raquel (Catalina Saavedra), perpetually stony and indignant, operates a rigorous dawn-to-dusk routine for the Valdez family, her employers for 20 years. Although Raquel rarely behaves as an intimate of her longtime hosts, she remains convinced that love, not labor, bonds them. Whether the family shares Raquel’s feelings of devotion is highly dubious: father Mundo (Alejandro Goic) often ignores or avoids her except when giving orders; daughter Camila (Andrea García-Huidobro) actively despises her and lobbies for her dismissal from mother Pilar (Claudia Celedón), whose sense of noblesse oblige is a patronage bound by a mix of affection and pity.

When a rotating cast of interlopers is hired to assist Raquel, the paranoid domestic stoops to machinations most vile to scare them away. She dispatches young Peruvian maid Mercedes (Mercedes Villanueva) by cruelly disposing of her adopted kitten and forces the gruff and hot-tempered Sonia (Anita Reeves) into a violent confrontation before she resigns in disgust. But third comer Lucy (Mariana Loyola) is an altogether different challenge. Her unpredictable influence over Raquel sets the narrative of The Maid on a very different psychological trajectory — from moody chamber piece to eccentric slice-of-life.

If Silva’s film taunts the viewer with the possibility of a horrific climax, either as a result of its titular counterpart — Jean Genet’s 1946 stage drama The Maids, about two servants’ homicidal revenge — or from the unnerving "mugshot" of Saavedra on the movie poster, it is neither self-destructive nor Grand Guignol. Rather, it it is much more prosaic in execution. Filmed almost exclusively in the narrow hallways, bathrooms, and parlors of a Santiago McMansion, Sergio Armstrong’s fidgety hand-held camera captures Raquel’s claustrophobic routine. It also accentuates her Sisyphean conundrum: although she completely rules the inner workings of the house, she remains forever a guest. The more she makes the house into a home, the more it becomes a prison she refuses to escape from.

But while Saavedra’s title role is an interesting case study in the political and emotional complexities of the Latin American domestic, her character’s motivations often evoke as much confusion as wonder. In the absence of some much needed exposition, The Maid’s heavy-handed silences, plaintive gazes, and inexplicable eruptions of laughter feel oddly sterile, and a contrived preciousness begins to creep over the film like an effluvial whitewash. Its abundance makes you aware there is a shabbiness hiding beneath the dramatic facade — the various stains and holes of an unrealized third act.

THE MAID opens Fri/13 in Bay Area theaters.

Hell yeah!

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Hell yeah!

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Before the Halloween and Friday the 13th series made slasher cinema’s top instruments of unstoppable evil, and after Frankenstein, Dracula, and Werewolf pretty much had their day, there was a brief sunny window of opportunity for Satan. Or rather, Satan and his Satanists — sounds like a garage band, yes? — who dominated horror for a few years highlighted by Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), and The Omen (1976). Not to mention 1975’s Race with the Devil, that same year’s The Devil’s Rain (Ernest Borgnine as Satan’s acolyte? Credible!) and 1973’s Satan’s School for Girls.

Ah, those were the days. Who gives much screen time to Beelzebub now, when the multiplexes are cluttered with routine slasher sequels and Japanese horror remakes?

Somebody called Ti West evidently does. Bringing it all back with extra hugs, his new The House of the Devil is a retro thrillfest quite happy to sacrifice that babysitter to the Dark Lord. Without even a tip for her labor.

"Based on true unexplained events" (uh-huh), the buzzed-about indie horror has fanboy casting both old school (Dee Wallace, Mary Woronov, Tom Noonan — all performing seriously rather than campily) and new (AJ Bowen of 2007’s The Signal and mumblecore regular Greta Gerwig). Its heroine (Jocelin Donahue), a 1980 East Coast collegiate sophomore desperate for rent cash so she can escape her dorm roomie’s loud nightly promiscuity, signs on for a baby- (actually, grandma-) sitting gig advertised on telephone poles. For tonight. During a lunar eclipse. Bad move.

The House of the Devil takes its time, springing nothing lethal until nearly halfway through. Even then, things escalate ever-so-slowly. Its 1980s setting allows for ultratight jeans, feathered hair, rotary dialing, a synth-New Wavey score, and other potentially campy elements the film manages to render respectfully appreciative rather than silly.

All freakdom doesn’t break loose until very late, at which point writer-director West effectively abandons all restraint (and hope), much assisted by The Last Winter (2006) composer Jeff Grace’s suddenly panicked score. The best contemporary horror has understood that potency of waiting. Prolonged development of relatable characters, agonizing our dread for their fates, amplifies standard terror to no end in movies like 2005’s Wolf Creek or Paranormal Activity.

House isn’t significantly better than various fine indie horrors of recent vintage and various nationality that went direct to DVD. (Quality, let alone originality, aren’t necessarily a commercial pluses in this genre.) But it is dang good, and that cuts it above most current theatrical horror releases. Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t be watching 1977’s Suspiria, 2005’s Satan’s Playground, 1994’s Aswang (a.k.a. The Unearthling) or 1981’s Possession instead of this deft throwback: now those surreal visions truly gave the Devil his due.

THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL opens Fri/20 in San Francisco.

Cary Cronenwett

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Cary Cronenwett

Cary Cronenwett first heard the cinematic call in 1998. He was volunteering at Frameline, the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, and caught an experimental film, Dandy Dust, by Austrian director A. Hans Schierl. "That made me think, ‘Wow — I could make a film.’ I think it’s a natural reaction that everybody has after watching a shorts program. I was like, ‘I’ll make something five minutes [long] — it’ll be really cool!’"

As Cronenwett soon realized, nothing is easy when it comes to filmmaking. In 2003, after more than a year of work, Phineas Slipped, a 16-minute short about daydreaming schoolboys, screened at Frameline. One of Phineas Slipped‘s main characters is played by Stormy Henry Knight, who also stars in Cronenwett’s debut feature, Maggots and Men. Earlier this year, Cronenwett described Knight to Guardian writer Matt Sussman as "the transgender Matt Dillon" — and the principle Maggots cast is composed of similarly hunky FTM actors, along with a handful of women and biological men (including a Lenin lookalike). The story is based on the real-life Kronstadt Rebellion of 1921, in which a group of sailors organized an ultimately unsuccessful revolt against the Bolshevik government. The style is reminiscent of Russian director Sergei Eisenstein’s most famous film, a chapter of which gave Maggots its title.

"I hadn’t seen Battleship Potemkin [1925] when I had the idea [for Maggots and Men]," Cronenwett admits. "My interest was making a sailor movie and playing with the masculine icon. I wanted to do something that was really romantic and took place in a different time and place."

Five years in the making — including time spent studying filmmaking at City College of San Francisco — the work was first seen by Bay Area audiences as a short film at Frameline 2008. The final, 53-minute version unspooled at Frameline 2009; Cronenwett credits San Francisco’s vast DIY and artistic networks with helping him get to the finish line: "Different people got excited about the project for different reasons. Some people were drawn because they’re interested in Russian history, [or] Super 8 special effects. And then we had trans guys who were interested in working with other trans guys on an art project, which was exciting."

The film’s revolutionary ideas extend beyond historical reenactment. "The film contextualizes the movement for transgender equality in a larger social justice movement," Cronenwett wrote in a post-interview e-mail. "It’s about hope, a vision. It’s about the corruption of power and a system that crushes its opposition. It’s about wanting more from society."

www.homepage.mac.com/gowithflo/krondweb

>>GOLDIES 2009: The 21st Guardian Outstanding Local Discovery awards, honoring the Bay’s best in arts

Know the unknown

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Know the unknown

Straight-to-DVD bio-doc Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown (Cinevolve, $24.95) is stylistically pretty ho-hum, especially for a film about one of the most creative minds in supernatural horror fiction. Talking heads and slow pans over illustrations do most of the heavy lifting, since the author, who died in 1937, apparently didn’t leave behind much in the way of photographs, recordings, diaries, or relatives. Still, the film offers an informative experience. For a guy obsessed with Old Ones and tentacled beasts, H.P. Lovecraft’s life was a fairly prim and stuffy affair: raised by a smothering mother whose old-guard family had fallen on hard times, he rarely strayed from his beloved Providence, R.I. He was a social misfit, a known xenophobe, a lousy husband, and too proud to take a pay-the-bills job (ghostwriting was as low as he’d stoop).

His imagination, however, was anything but ordinary. An early interest in paleontology and astrology informed his later work, which usually ended up being published in Weird Tales magazine for paltry sums ("The Call of Cthulhu" is said to have netted $165). Though his baroque, adjective-happy writing is gently mocked by the doc’s contributors (Neil Gaiman pokes fun at Lovecraft’s overuse of words like "gibbous"; Guillermo Del Toro calls his style "incredibly anal-retentive"), his use of mood is highly praised (John Carpenter notes that the narrators of Lovecraft’s tales "start terrified and end terrified.") In life, he may not have reached a wide audience — as the film points out, in the early 20th century science fiction was far more marginalized than it is today. But the eagerness of Gaiman, Del Toro, Carpenter, Stuart Gordon, and other celebs to chime in here — along with Lovecraft‘s shots of fan-friendly merch, including Cthulhu bedroom slippers — suggests the author of "The Outsider" has forever transcended the fringe.

www.wyrdstuff.com

Into the wilds

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Into the wilds

arts@sfbg.com
One painful component of the ever-escautf8g government service cutbacks, particularly in our own endlessly explorable state, has been the threat to parkland access. The notion that the national park system Wallace Stegner (and Ken Burns’ current PBS documentary series) called America’s "best idea" might someday be sold to the highest bidder seems blasphemous — unless, of course, you’ve never been (like most of the nation’s vacation-hobbled poor) or are in a position to make that buck.

Unintentionally assuaging that unfortunate final-future despoiling is new indie quasi-horror The Canyon, which asks the unmusical question: why, stupid humankind, did you ever think you belonged in wild country? "We don’t belong here," its hero realizes when camping misadventures have gone from rad to worse. Yeah, people should never intermingle with nature. That’s why we are born from robots, plastic afterbirth spilling into a soft cushion of Styrofoam curls then recycled into spin-off products for the Transformers films. "Soylent Green is PEEEEOPLE!!!" Actually that has no relevance here. Just thought I’d drop it in.

A first feature for director Richard Harrah and writer Steve Allrich, The Canyon falls firmly within that vacation-from-hell subgenre recently capped by the very clever, funny, and fairly freaky A Perfect Getaway. (None of which adjectives apply here, alas.) Other examples of late include the supernatural off-trail hazards of 2008’s The Ruins, several organ-harvesting horrors (2006’s Turistas), and numerous more films suggesting it’s best to stay the fuck home — this being a movie world, psychos and predators are everywhere.

The Canyon sports minor novelty in sticking to mainland U.S.A. terra firma, albeit a world-famous landmark — if a 227-mile long, 5.4-million-year-old, mile-deep gorge can be considered mere "landmark." Introduced in blandly nice/cute terms they never really recover from, swarthy Nick (Eion Bailey from HBO’s Band of Brothers) and perky blonde Lori (Yvonne Strahovski from NBC’s Chuck) are eloped newlyweds anticipating a mule-ride down to the Grand Canyon’s bottom that she’s not too keen on. She’s even less keen once it turns out Nick didn’t get the necessarily permits and their only option is signing on with "guide extraordinaire" Henry (Will Patton), whom they meet at a local bar and who doesn’t look so much a friend of nature as somebody freshly rolled in its excrement.

Nick’s enthusiasm wins out, though. It’s not spoiling too much to reveal that traveling with a slightly creepy guide fast proves better than having none at all, as one nasty incident leaves the trio sans mules, food, water, and worse. Things devolve from there, as our ill-skilled, mapless protagonists find themselves increasingly pressed for survival strategies. Stress (let alone inevitable stress-induced bickering) doesn’t reveal anything more interesting about our dull protagonists. But the eventual vigor with which body parts suffer and wild wolves inflict injury does juice this empty Canyon up, unpleasantly if more memorably. Do they deserve it?

Straining, the filmmakers suggest so. "You screw with Mother Nature, she’s gonna find a way to screw ya right back," Henry portentously intones — the message being that city folk have no business in the all-outdoors. Baby, please: the Sierra Club knows we get along just fine on those trails, leaving no carbon footprint besides.

THE CANYON opens Fri/30 in Bay Area theaters.

Once upon a time in England

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Once upon a time in England

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Some roles wring from an actor something they never had before, or might again. Who now recalls Eric Bana’s Aussie sketch comedian startlingly reinvented as bulked-up Chopper (2000), that native continent’s most notorious psychotic extortionist-killer-jailbird-celebrity autobiographer? Bana killed — more vividly than in any part serving his subsequent, slightly bland Hollywood leading-hunk status.

Tom Hardy is another handsome bloke at risk of looking competent and versatile without fully impressing. Yet here comes Bronson, a film (and role) highly analogous to Chopper — offering up a dramatized "Man. Myth. Celebrity" (as per its ad line) of actual "worst prisoner in Britain." The real Michael Gordon Peterson, better known as "Charles Bronson" (a PR-minded friend fitted the Death Wish star as nom de notoriety), was an extreme anger-management case whose working-class struggle ended when he robbed a post office in 1974.

As the film details, prison spectacularly agreed with the then 22-year-old "Bronson." (At one point he was briefly released because his in-house mayhem was simply costing the government too much.) He enjoyed the tension and violence — between himself and fellow inmates as well as guards — so much that he got sent to a high-security psychiatric hospital. Worry not: even drugged to the gills, he managed to create ruckuses that won national attention. Shaved, tatted, and ‘roided (OK, maybe it was just hard work) up for the part, Hardy has a field day.

This is the second English-language directing effort by Dane Nicolas Winding Refn, of the crime-drama Pusher trilogy starring the formidable Mads Mikkelsen. His next film, Valhalla Rising — again with Mikkelsen — is a Viking survivalist tone poem, less action-adventure than Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972).

Bronson is, by contrast, utterly revved up in a way that’s showy but not at all dumbed-down. Hardy’s prankster-rageaholic portrayal emerges amid several flavors: ironic Pulchinella à la contemporary music-theatre sensation Anthony Newley (Stop the World — I Want to Get Off); Tom of Finland bad-muscle-daddy fantasy (complete with nervously "gay" undercurrent); and adrenaline exercise of mainstreamed, po-mo directorial testosterone.

The frequently full-frontal Bronson (here definitely a shower, dunno about the growing) is a protagonist of scarifying ingeniousness and overpowering egocentrism. He’s a diamond-polished metaphor — miscreant, clown-star, possible bipolar case, all that and less. But Refn’s film itself is pure cinematic inspiration at least half-transcending even a case of snarkish homophobia (Bronson’s most insidious foes are his most snarkily friendly) as you haven’t seen since … well, Chopper maybe?

The elements theatrically winking at themselves lowline a package whose self-conscious dazzle betters any Brit crime flick in decades — not at all excluding anything by that flash pony Guy Richie (whose forthcoming Arthur Conan Doyle desecration we will never speak of again). It’s perhaps the most nastily great, stylish English gangster-type movie since Sexy Beast (2000) or Gangster No. 1 (2000), with an equally, heedlessly past-ordinary-pharmaceutical-help id as protagonist.

BRONSON opens Fri/30 in San Francisco.

Lars loves lars

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Lars loves lars

Will history judge Lars von Trier as the genius he’s sure he is? Or as a humorless, slightly less cartoonish Ken Russell, whipping images and actors into contrived frenzies for ersatz art’s sake? You’re probably already on one side of the fence or the other. Notorious Cannes shocker Antichrist will only further divide the yeas and nays.

Seriously: why does von Trier’s particular misanthropy and misogyny make him an auteur with something to say about the human condition (as opposed to a neurotic whose particular hangups — fear of sex, for starters — might better work out in therapy)?

His endlessly violated, saintly, often pea-brained victims — previously played by Björk, Nicole Kidman, and Emily Watson — embody phony innocence to hammer home indictments of horrible humanity dependent on cartooned melodrama. Dogme 95’s "rules" briefly enlivened international cinema before becoming a tiresome fad. Less liberating than puritanical, their restrictions painted all other cinema decadent.

Antichrist does offers perhaps the most formally beautiful filmmaking von Trier’s bothered with since 1984’s The Element of Crime. Grieving parents Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe retreat to a forest primeval enabling widescreen images of poetic succulence. Yet that beauty only underlines Antichrist‘s garishness. One film festival viewer purportedly barfed onto the next row — and you too might recoil, particularly if unaccustomed to gore levels routinely surpassed by mainstream horror.

Does Antichrist earn such viewer punishment by dint of moral, character, narrative, or artistic heft? Like slurp it does. What could be more reactionary than an opening in which our protagonists "cause" their angelic babe’s accidental death by obliviously enjoying one another? Shot in "lyrical" slow-mo black and white, it’s a shampoo commercial hard-selling Victorian sexual guilt.

Later, Dafoe’s "He" clings to hollow psychiatric reason as only an embittered perennial couch case might imagine. Gainsbourg’s "She" morphs from maternal mourner to castrating shrike as only one terrified of femininity could contrive. They’re tortured by psychological and/or supernatural events existing solely to bend game actors toward a tyrant artiste’s whims.

There’s no devil here — just von Trier’s punitive narcissism. His fuzzed point is finally just old-school, arted-up revulsion toward that gender that both engulfs and births the male member. Antichrist offers the punitive sound of Lars’ one hand, slapping.

ANTICHRIST opens Fri/23 in San Francisco.

Is the truth out there?

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Is the truth out there?

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM Habitual attendees of documentary films in San Francisco might be surprised to see so many familiar titles in this year’s SF DocFest lineup. At least one (American Artifact: The Rise of American Rock Poster Art, which played the Red Vic a few months back) is skippable. Others — like I Need That Record: The Death (or Possible Survival) of the Independent Record Store, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, Off and Running, and especially Johnny Weir portrait Pop Star on Ice — make welcome returns. But the standout film is brand-new to these parts, and since it’s the closing-night film, it screens only once. Fans of true crime, urban legends, twisted suburbia, and serial killers won’t want to miss Cropsey.

For kids growing up on Staten Island — including codirectors Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman — "Cropsey" was the name given to the faceless boogeyman who lurked in the woods, slaking his bloodthirsty urges with disobedient children. (The name spread into popular culture with 1981 summer-camp slasher The Burning, featuring a bad guy named "Cropsy.") Sure, logic dictates that boogeymen aren’t real, but kids of Staten Island might’ve had trouble believing that. First of all, the husk of Willowbrook State School, subject of an infamous 1972 TV expose by a young Geraldo Rivera, loomed nearby; it closed in 1987, years after the horrible conditions within were exposed. Then, that same year, a 12-year-old girl with Down syndrome disappeared, and was found dead a month later. Suddenly, the Cropsey legend no longer felt like fiction.

A multilayered doc that’s clearly the product of a genuinely curious filmmaking team, Cropsey digs into Staten Island’s history to explore the community’s reaction to the tragedy, and to the man eventually charged for it: Andre Rand. Rand’s wild-eyed, drooling perp walk was enough to convince the general public, police, and media (the New York Daily News called him the "Hannibal Lecter of Staten Island") of his guilt. And he was a shady character, a former Willowbrook employee who’d taken to camping out among its abandoned buildings. He also had a history of sexual crimes against children. But, as Brancaccio and Zeman discover, there was no evidence, beyond unreliable eyewitnesses, that tied him to the girl’s disappearance. As Cropsey unfolds in true crime-drama style, fact and folklore become increasingly tangled; the viewer is openly encouraged to consider every angle with equal gravity.

Just as disturbing, but in a marginally less sinister and more overtly entertaining way, is the Johnny Knoxville-produced The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia. Fans of Jesco "Dancing Outlaw" White, take note: Wild follows White’s entire family, all as quotable and lawbreaking as he is, for a year, chronicling births, deaths, jail ins and outs, pill-popping, pill-snorting, public drunkenness, gunplay, DIY tattooing, and questionable parenting (and grandparenting). Fortunately it’s not completely exploitative, though the above description may suggest otherwise.

SF DOCFEST

Oct 16–29, $11

Roxie, 3117 16th St., SF

www.sfindie.com

Camera lucida

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Camera lucida

Film is not really a medium for perfection — too many moving parts, too much equipment. But then, Robert Beavers isn’t your typical filmmaker. For 40 years, he’s done everything by hand, off in the hinterlands of the avant-garde. It’s not every day, or year, that you encounter a retrospective like SF Cinematheque and the Pacific Film Archive’s co-presentation of Beavers’ 18-film cycle, made between 1967 and 2002, "My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure." The title is more literal than you might expect.

The evident perfectionism of the films (all blown up from Bolex 16mm to luminous 35mm) and Beavers’ relative obscurity are not coincidental. In 1967, he and Gregory Markopoulos fled the New York scene for Europe, where they could better exact a cinematic language in view of art history. One of the earliest chronological entries in the cycle, "Early Monthly Segments" (1968-70, revised in 2002), dates from these teenage years and threads a beguiling, if fragmentary, ode to love at the limits, filtered through the auburn and aqua scrims of Mediterranean sky and sea, with in-camera effects wavering the eye.

Though most of the "Winged Distance" cycle depends on a uniquely synesthetic coordination of sound and image, the silent "Early Monthly Segments" already demonstrates Beavers’ thrilling capacity for poetic association, mnemonic arrangements, and sensual representations and enactments of the filmmaking apparatus. In later work, the arresting beauty of his cross-fertilized cinematography and field recordings calms the mind; the alliterative rhythms of color, composition, and touch that multiply and encode that beauty make it race.

Besides being, in his words, "protected by solitude and the spirit that came from our dedication to filmmaking" in his life with Markopoulos, Beavers was able to immerse himself in the long trails of European classicism — its painting, music, literature, architecture. Scholar P. Adams Sitney writes of Beavers, "Nothing is more American than [his] fascination with the monuments of European culture." But the elegant still lives of these monuments are endowed with a weirdly interior, hieroglyphic weight that unbinds the visual patterns of tourism, whether aesthetic or geographic. In Beavers’ work, material touch conducts thought, the human body landscape.

Of all Beavers’ inspirations, it is architecture that best helps me begin to grasp his visionary artisanship. As with a cathedral or ruin, his films possess a beauty to behold and one that beholds you: you admire a curving wall, at a distance, and the space itself takes measure of your senses, curving sight and sound.

"MY HAND OUTSTRETCHED TO THE WINGED DISTANCE AND SIGHTLESS MEASURE"

Thurs/15, 7 p.m.; Sun/18, 2 p.m.; Tues/20, 7:30 p.m.

$5.50–$-9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2757 Bancroft, Berk

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Culture class

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Culture class

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Squeezed between cuts to California’s higher education system and the dizzying price of tuition, students can take heart — as well as some bittersweet heartbreak — with An Education. Comfort yourself with the fact that a dearth of classes will leave plentiful time to sample life lessons of an extracurricular, taboo-testing ilk.

The pursuit of knowledge — both carnal and cultural — are at the tender core of this end-of-innocence valentine by Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig (who first made her well-tempered voice heard with her 2000 Dogme entry, Italian for Beginners), based on journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir. Screenwriter Nick Hornby breaks further with his Peter Pan protagonists with this adaptation: no man-boy mopers or misfits here. Rather, 16-year-old schoolgirl Jenny (Carey Mulligan, justifiably earning praise for her plucky, pluckable vulnerability) is a good girl and ace student, raring for the wisdom she’s only beginning to grasp as she sings along with her Juliette Greco LPs.

It’s 1961, and England is only starting to stir from its somber, all-too-sober post-war slumber. The Twickenham home of Jenny’s parents, Jack (Alfred Molina) and Majorie (Cara Seymour), positively vibrates with their parental aspirations and a dank, tea-cozy-ed conservatism. The carefully cloistered Jenny is on track for Oxford, though swinging London and its high-style freedoms beckon just around the corner.

Ushering in those freedoms — a new, more class-free world disorder — is the charming David (Peter Sarsgaard), stopping to give Jenny and her cello a ride in the rain and soon proffering concerts and late-night suppers in the city. He’s a sweet-faced, feline outsider: cultured, Jewish, and given to playing fast and loose in the margins of society, whether he’s installing a black family in a neighborhood to spur a mini-white flight or making off with vulnerable villagers’ heirlooms alongside pal Danny (Dominic Cooper). The two, paired with Danny’s bubbly, bobble-headed girlfriend Helen (Rosamund Pike), are styled as the UK counterparts of Breathless-era Jean-Paul Belmondo and Purple Noon-esque Alain Delon, seductive and stylish scalawags in the know and on the make, taking advantage of the fluid moment.

The pair purveys a sophistication that sidesteps class — and signals a change that extends beyond the borders of Twickenham and London — as David successfully woos Jenny’s charm-deprived parents with white lies that grow increasingly daring and dire. But can you blame the gentle cad? A gamesman and connoisseur, David can see Jenny for the gem she is and appreciate her innocence with the knowing pleasure of a decadent playing all the angles, even as Jenny’s teacher Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams) battles over her star pupil’s future with protofeminist fervor.

The stakes are believably high, thanks to An Education‘s careful attention to time and place and its gently glamored performances. Scherfig revels in the smart, easy-on-eye curb appeal of David’s gang of outsiders while giving a nod to the college-educated empowerment Jenny risks by skipping class to jet to Paris. And Mulligan lends it all credence by letting all those seduced, abandoned, conflicted, rebellious feelings flicker unbridled across a face reminiscent of those guileless ingénues who came of age in another age: Sandra Dee of Imitation of Life (1959) and Gidget-era Sally Field. This is just one lesson among many, in the life of a girl who pulls back from the precipice.

AN EDUCATION opens Fri/16 in San Francisco.

Seamy dreams

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Seamy dreams

arts@sfbg.com

Sex and violence are old bedfellows in art cinema. A line can be drawn from the sliced eyeball in Un Chien Andalou (1929) through A Clockwork Orange (1971), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and David Cronenberg’s earlier films, right up to Charlotte Gainsbourg’s clitoridectomy in Lars von Trier’s latest provocation Antichrist. The quickest way to expose the hypocrisies of bourgeois morality still seems to be the willful conflation and graphic depiction of bodily harm and bodily pleasure.

The late ’60s and early ’70s films of Koji Wakamatsu — showcased in Yerba Bunea Center for the Arts’ thrilling retrospective, "Pink Cinema Revolution" — present a fascinating case for the political uses of gratuity. Extremely low-budget, alternately frenetic and plodding, frontloaded with sexualized violence, grizzly killings, S&M and rape, and pulsing with the radical politics of their era, Wakamatsu’s films are disturbing, messy, and electric. When, by a fluke, Secrets Behind the Wall (1965) got past Japan’s film rating board and screened at the Berlin International Film Festival that year, the audience couldn’t have prepared themselves for the sight of a stifled housewife hungrily licking the keloid scars of her lover, a Hiroshima survivor.

Although he was a contemporary of Seijun Suzuki, Shohei Imamura, and Nagisa Oshima, Wakamatsu doesn’t slot so easily into the cannon of the nuberu bagu, Japan’s response to the cinematic new waves churning across Europe at the time (noted Japanese film scholar Donald Richie still contends that Wakamatsu "makes embarrassing soft-core psychodramas"). A farmer’s son who had worked odd construction jobs and served time before ever stepping behind a camera, Wakamatsu fell into filmmaking without the formal training or academic background held by many of his peers. Hired by Nikkatsu in 1963, he quickly started churning out pinku eiga or "pink films," the highly profitable genre of soft-core quickies that often displayed wild creativity in the face of a the (still-standing) taboo against onscreen genital realism.

Wakamatsu eventually quit Nikkatsu (after the studio, fearing government action, gave the potential embarrassment Secrets a low-profile domestic release despite the acclaim it received in Berlin) and formed his own studio, Wakamatsu Pro, using the pink film industry mainly as a distribution network for his increasingly extreme experiments, which could barely be described as "soft-core." In Violent Virgin (1969), men and women brutally subject a young couple to all manner of sexual degradations, resulting in the woman’s crucifixion; Violated Angels (1967), based on Richard Speck’s 1966 killing spree, ends with the killer surrounded by a bloody rosette of his flayed victims; Go, Go Second Time Virgin (1969) follows the strange, nihilistic love that develops between two abused teenagers.

Paralleling the growing output of Wakamatsu Pro was the off-screen rise of the radical left wing and student movements. Extremist political groups like the Red Army Faction, and the closely related Japanese Red Army and United Red Army (whose twisted genealogy and downfall Wakamatsu follows in his most recent feature United Red Army (2007), which closes out the series), held the Japanese government accountable for aiding and abetting the U.S. in Vietman and demanded a complete overhaul of the standing social and political structure by any means necessary.

While one can see in the radical assaults on the status quo of sexual relations, filmmaking, and normative citizenship staged in Wakamatsu’s films as being in concert with the rhetoric of the extreme political left, he was not above pointing out its ridiculousness as well. More often than not, the leftists in Wakamatsu films are a confused bunch whose political motives are frequently (and humorously) cross-wired to their libidinal impulses. In Ecstasy of the Angels (1970) the hormonal militants (named, perhaps in a nod to G.K. Chesterton’s anarchist satire The Man Who Would be Thursday, after the days of the week) spout secret code meaningless even to them in between having sex at the drop of a hat.

A fitting close to the series, United Red Army finds Wakamatsu taking a sober look back over the era that fuelled his most prolific years as a filmmaker, accounting for both the revolutionary promises and grim dissolution of Japan’s student protest movement. Combining documentary footage with staged reenactments, United Red Army is a stylistic 360 from Wakamatsu’s earlier work. The grueling, three-hour history lesson spares no detail in documenting the titular faction’s descent from idealism into the sadistic purging of its own members to its highly publicized last stand at a mountain ski resort.

Much like Uli Edel’s The Baader Meinhof Complex, another recent film that examines ’60s political terrorism, United Red Army is difficult to watch because of the factual nature of its exposition and its refusal to judge, even when depicting the URA’s darkest hours. It’s a surprisingly objective coda to the wild, dark films that precede it in "Pink Cinema Revolution," which are as much documents as products of their time. As Jasper Sharp writes in his recent survey of pink cinema, Behind the Pink Curtain, Wakamatsu’s films are, "not only visual testimonies to an era of new sexual frankness and a deep uncertainty in which oblivion seemed to lurk around the corner," but they also offer, in retrospect, prescient glimpses of the underlying forces that would propel the radical left to its own dissolution.


"Pink Cinema Revolution: The Radical Films of Koji Wakamatsu"

Oct 8-29, $8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF
(415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

Domestic disturbances

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Domestic disturbances

arts@sfbg.com

FILM "Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed with tenderness in simple, homey places like the kitchen table," Alfred Hitchcock observed.

While Hitch was the doyen of everyday suspense — capturing the foreboding whistle of a boiling kettle or the pendulous noose formed by a necktie — his vision of the violent-domestic was hardly singular. This year’s Mill Valley Film Festival showcases two very different films dedicated to exploring the tenuous relationship between crime and the domestic front, in all its various incarnations.

In Noah Buschel’s traveling noir homage The Missing Person, a case of domestic subterfuge becomes a laconic meditation on loneliness and absolution in the post-9/11 New York City. Starring Michael Shannon (2008’s Revolutionary Road) as gin-soaked private investigator John Rosow, The Missing Person begins with the classic tropes of the Philip Marlowe feuilleton — a mysterious caller, aided by an attractive secretary (Amy Ryan), offers the down-and-out PI a sum of money to follow a unnamed man on a LA-bound express train from Chicago. The surly and self-deprecating Rosow immediately takes the case, though it appears his decision is motivated as much by boredom and a nasty hangover than by lucre. From a nearby compartment, Rosow surveils the very innocuous-looking mark who travels with a young, Hispanic child. Presuming the worst, the PI puts two and two together and speculates that he’s been hired to tail a serial pedophile. However, the story is much more complicated than it initially appears: a family has indeed been torn apart but it is not the one Rosow suspects.

While the meticulous narrative of Buschel’s film takes the de rigeur twists and turns of classic noir, The Missing Person‘s plot is, by and large, immaterial to its penetrating meditation on person and place. Despite his chronic dipsomania, Rosow is charming and witty, spinning slangy argot, gruff one-liners and double entendres around every chance encounter, as if he were some hybrid of Mike Hammer and Noël Coward. "I’m in the hide and seek business," he responds to a potential female conquest when asked of his profession. "That’s a game that kids play," she continues. "Well, if you add some money to it, it’s for adults," he shoots back. "Well, what are you doing – hiding or seeking?" she asks. "I’m drinking," Rosow concludes, finishing off his highball.

But Buschel is careful not to inundate his audience with a wisecracking "talkie;" rather he seduces them with long, silky strands of West Coast jazz — all saxophones and tinkling piano — as Rosow crisscrosses the parched sands outlying Los Angeles, lurches into an anonymous motel room in a drunken stupor, or fantasizes (in the rich cobalt shades of a Blue Note album cover) of a wife and life he left long ago. In other moments, Shannon’s ungainly frame and wall-eyed gaze dominates the frame, reacting and reflecting upon the sadness that appears to pervade his postlapsarian, cloak and dagger world.

If one is tempted to pronounce The Missing Person a unique and innovative form of filmmaking, it is because such deliberate care taken in the details: its soundtrack, cinematography and mise-en-scene are rarities in the slick, post-80s crime drama. Filmed on 16mm and bleached of the sharp hues common to contemporary cinema, the colors and textures of Ryan Samul’s cinematography have the odd, anachronistic feel of mid-70s neo-noir. The Conversation (1974), Chinatown (1974), and The Long Goodbye (1973) come to mind. All the more remarkable is The Missing Person‘s pastiche of cinematic influences in that they mingle seamlessly with images and stories of Manhattan, post-9/11, as the secret of Rosow’s mark is unearthed. When the hallowed spotlights of the WTC memorial appear at the film’s conclusion, they have the painterly senescence of a dog-eared comic book.

If Raymond Chandler bestows the focal literary references for Buschel’s opus, then Agatha Christie is the materfamilias of Larry Blamire’s "old dark house" spoof, Dark and Stormy Night. As Christie once quipped of her metier to a Life reporter, "I specialize in murders of quiet, domestic interest," and that is precisely what screwball director Blamire has in mind in this country-estate, will-reading-ensemble gone amok. Comprised of Bantam Street Film’s stock company, most of whom starred in Blamire’s previous Hollywood send-ups (including 2001’s The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra and 2007’s Trail of the Screaming Forehead), Dark and Stormy Night recreates every riff, trope, and motif of the late 30s genre — from the exterior miniatures to the canned special effects — all situated in a lavishly decorated and seemingly haunted house, replete with winding floor plan and secret passages.

A disparate crew of hopefuls have assembled at said estate to hear the pecuniary bequests of the late Sinas Cavinder during a particularly ominous evening, as the title promises. Among the crowd are competing reporters Eight O’Clock Farraday (Daniel Roebuck) and Billy Tuesday (Jennifer Blaire) hoping to land a hot scoop; demure ingenue Sabasha Fanmoore (Fay Masterson); brooding nephew Burling Famish, Jr. (Brian Howe) and his unfaithful wife, Pristy (Christine Romeo); the very Yiddish psychic Mrs. Cupcupboard (Alison Martin); the epigramming dandy Lord Partfine (Andrew Parks); and the hilariously-christened butler, Jeens (Bruce French).

As might be expected, a serious hitch in the evening arises when the secret addendum to Cavinder’s will is stolen and bodies begin piling up following the requisite "lights out" interlude. Unfortunately, a centuries-old phantom, the ghost of a dead witch, and an escaped maniac are all on the loose and vying for blood … and the only bridge off the estate has been washed away by the storm. So, whodunnit? The answer is not nearly as entertaining as the long night of sight gags, double-takes, screwball repartee, and an inexplicable, wandering gorilla Kogar (played by legendary prop master and gorilla-suit regular Bob Burns). Shot in HD with enough digital plug-ins to simulate RKO-era film stock, Dark and Stormy Night is as much a loving homage as parody. Late-night B-movie fans and nostalgics will enjoy just how light this "dark" comedy can be.


Mill Valley Film Festival

Oct 8-18, most shows $12.50

Various North Bay venues
1-877-874-MVFF, www.mvff.com

My country, my country

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FILM We go to documentaries to learn about the lives of others, but rarely are we put in touch with the patience, sensitivity, and grit required of listening. Heddy Honigmann’s films privilege the social aspect of these encounters and are the emotionally richer for it — I’d bet her hard-earned humanism would appeal to a wide cross-section of audiences if given the chance, but her documentaries remain woefully under-distributed. Oblivion is her first set in Lima since 1992’s Metal and Melancholy, still my favorite film of hers. Honigmann, who was born in Lima to Holocaust survivors but left the city to study and work in Europe, made that first film to clarify the everyday reality of Peru’s economic ruin. Instead of submitting a top-down exposition of the situation, she interviews taxi drivers. This was an ingenious maneuver for at least two reasons: it admits the contingencies of her inquiry and floats a matter-of-fact portrait of the people’s despair on the motor-mouthed musings of actual people. Their informal testimonies are too flush with colloquial wisecracking, cynical tirades, idiosyncratic performances, amateur ingenuity, and tender confessions to qualify for pity.

In Oblivion, Honigmann reverses angle, following children and adolescents as they flip cartwheels for stopped traffic, the crosswalk their stage. She also zeroes in on the more established service class, from a stunned shoeshine boy up to a dexterous master of the pisco sour. Slowly, we realize Honigmann’s interviews are an exercise in political geography: she talks to people in the near proximity of the presidential palace, the long shadow of Peru’s ignominious political history framing their discreet stories. Oblivion exhibits both class consciousness and formal virtuosity in its coterminous realizations of an Altman-numbered array of characters. As ever, Honigmann’s ability to transform the normally airless interview format into a cohesive band of intimate encounters is simply stunning. History consigned them to oblivion, but as Honigmann adroitly shows by periodic cut-aways to past presidential inaugurations, personal memory often outlasts the official record.

OBLIVION opens Fri/2 at the Sundance Kabuki.

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