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Film Features

“Kenny”

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REVIEW This first feature by the Jacobson brothers — director Clayton and leading actor Shane, also coscenarists — is about a beleaguered working-class stiff. His disgraceful (to everyone but him) job is delivering and maintaining rental portaloos (read: portable toilets) to various public events, many attracting patrons who can’t keep their aim straight or food down. Kenny has a bratty son, a vicious ex-wife, unreliable coworkers, an endlessly criticizing father, and myriad other woes. But this being an underdog comedy — and a mockumentary to boot — we know that somehow he will come out on top, and maybe even find Ms. Right en route. I know what you’re thinking: either (a) this sounds like (pun intended) crap, and/or (b) what, they let Rob Schneider make another movie? But take a deep breath and overcome those very reasonable fears, because — no kidding — Kenny is one of those films that sneaks up on you, at first seeming "not so bad," then "pretty cute, actually." Then before you know it, you’re grinning ear-to-ear, pants duly charmed off. Its pudgy, pincushion protagonist, with his hilariously tossed-off bits of wisdom, for a while seems to have the odds stacked almost too cruelly against him — indeed, we see him having to eat shit from just about everyone. But when fate unexpectedly sends him on a far-flung business trip, luck starts turning around for Kenny in ways that are raffishly funny and surprisingly sweet. A lot of folks have tried doing the semi-improv Christopher Guest thing in recent years, usually badly. This Aussie effort not only pulls it off, it manages better results than Guest himself has managed since 2000’s Best in Show.

KENNY runs Fri/1–Sun/3 at the Red Vic Movie House. See Rep Clock for times.

Jet boy, jet girl

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>>Also in this issue: A quick guide to the new queer Argentine cinema

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A father sits at the bedside of his child and, when asked what he is doing, softly answers, "I’m looking after you." Words and tone and eyes convey anxiety, fatigue, and overwhelming tenderness, and this complicated admixture quietly telegraphs, to the viewer and the child on-screen, in the aftermath of trauma and terrifying distress, a heart-calming constant: that, as he tells another character, from the moment of her birth, he has always seen her as perfect.

This flawless child, Alex (Inés Efron), the emotional focal point of Lucía Puenzo’s XXY, is also a moody, unpredictable 15-year-old, and her own complicated admixture is spiked by impetuousness, caprice, casual cruelty, and a tendency to press at the boundaries of those in her orbit. She’s also captivating, forcefully intelligent, and unreservedly herself, even while holding the world at bay to protect a secret, even in the process of feeling her way, via impulse and reflection, toward an understanding of what, exactly, that self is.

Decisions made before Alex’s birth have, in a sense, led to this sweet and sorrowful exchange between father and daughter. She was born intersex, with both male and female sexual characteristics, and raised female (perhaps based on test results and the best guesses of doctors, though this is never stated outright). Her parents, Kraken (Ricardo Darín), a marine biologist, and Suli (Valeria Bertuccelli), decided to forgo a so-called normalizing surgery for Alex: in essence, a dubious attempt to impose a firm gender identity at birth. Without ever fully conquering their own unease and fears for a beloved child, they have left her in possession of the facts and the right to make her own choices — an emotional, improvised, and at times visceral process.

The task, grown more difficult with adolescence, takes on a painful new weight when Erika (Carolina Peleritti), an old friend of Suli’s from Buenos Aires; her husband, Ramiro (Germán Palacios); and their teenage son, Alvaro (Martín Piroyansky), come to visit the family’s home on the southern coast of Uruguay, where they moved shortly after Alex’s birth. This other family of three, with its own fraught relationship between father and child, carry with them the social dictates and preconceptions Alex’s parents have sought to shield her from by living in an isolated place. They can’t, of course, shield her, and Alex is changing already, with or without the interference of strangers, but their arrival invests her process of discoveries with a sense of urgency, of necessity. In part this is because Ramiro, a renowned plastic surgeon, has come intending to recommend and advise them on "corrective" surgery. But the attraction that forms between his son and Alex exerts its own force on both of them, and for Alex such a connection inevitably involves the desire to reveal herself (literally and otherwise) and the risk of betrayal that attends such exposure.

Puenzo’s first full-length film, XXY is beautifully shot by cinematographer Natasha Braier and, save for a few false notes, well scripted — its silences and ambiguities and transfixing images engaging our imagination and sympathy. However, much of the credit for its successes (it has won numerous international awards, including several at Cannes in 2007 and Frameline 2008’s audience award for best feature) falls to Efron’s portrayal of Alex, whom we come to view with that same potent compound of emotions that she raises in those who watch over her in the film.

XXY

Opens Fri/1 at Bay Area theaters

www.filmmovement.com

Wilder blooms

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After Burnt Money (2000), Marcelo Pineyro’s conventionally entertaining true crime tale of gay bank robbers, queer blooms began to grow within the wilder garden of new Argentine cinema. Here’s a guide:

Smokers Only (Veronica Chen, 2001) Chen’s debut — about a hustler who sometimes tricks in ATM stalls and the goth girl who becomes obsessed with him — is probably the first chapter of the new queer Argentine cinema. Unfortunately, it’s boring and pretentious, built around an object of affection who isn’t as compelling as he is cute.

Suddenly (Diego Lerman, 2002) B. Ruby Rich (as quoted on Michael Guillen’s Web site the Evening Class): "A queer empathic … lesbian romantic escapade. If you’ve never seen or heard of [Suddenly], you’re missing your chance to see a young woman abducted at knifepoint by the lesbian street punks that desire her."

Ronda Nocturna (Edgardo Cozarinsky, 2005) A veteran director who fled Argentina in 1974 following the reelection of Juan Perón, Cozarinsky returned from exile to make this film. At least partly inspired by Chen’s Smokers Only, he borrows from that film’s night-in-the-life-of-a-hustler scenario. But Ronda Nocturna is hotter, wiser, and more far-reaching in its bottoms-up view of corruption in urban Argentina.

Agua (Veronica Chen, 2006) Chen’s follow-up to Smokers Only isn’t queer in story line, but its gaze at the male body in motion — and masculine psyche — is a beyond–Claire Denis case of female eye for the straight guy in turn for the queer guy. Handsome lead actor Rafael Ferro builds on his memorable appearance in Ronda Nocturna. A burst of pure athletic cinema with moments that match 2005’s Zidane (on a much lower budget) in their intense interiority, Agua refreshes.

Glue (Alexis Dos Santos, 2006) A triumph of intimate collaboration between a trio of young actors and a new director, Alexis Dos Santos’s first movie takes the bi-way to becoming maybe the best — or at least most honest and deep — teen movie of the 21st century so far. Lead actress Inés Efron’s brave gawky beauty reveals what’s been lacking from American cinema since the heydays of Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall.

La Leon (Santiago Otheguy, 2007) Perhaps influenced by Lisandro Alonso, this handsome black-and-white feature scopes out alienation, attraction, and phobic intolerance in the Paraná Delta.

XXY (Lucía Puenzo, 2007) Efron returns in the role of an intersex teenager, delivering another superb performance.

Hard as an anvil

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Anvil! The Story of Anvil (Sacha Gervasi, USA, 2008) Screw you if you compare Anvil to Spinal Tap. Yeah, there are moments of eerie similarity (and Anvil’s drummer is named Robb Reiner — how’s that for a coincidence?), but this heartfelt doc at the Jewish Film Festival doesn’t mock. Friends and bandmates since the early 1980s — when Bon Jovi–level success seemed nearly possible — Reiner and vocalist–lead guitarist Steve "Lips" Kudlow have been chasing the rock god dream their entire adult lives, toiling at day jobs and raising families but leaping at every chance to capture glory, be it a poorly planned European tour or an emotional trip back to the recording studio. Even if you scoff at hair bands, it’s hard not to get wrapped up in this tale of success, failure, and power chords. And with no less than Lars Ulrich calling Anvil "the real deal," there’s no need to, uh, smell the glove. (Cheryl Eddy)

Anvil! The Story of Anvil Castro Sat/26, 10 p.m.; Roda Aug 9, 10:15 p.m.

Testimonies

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Italy seldom figures much in Holocaust studies, as its Jewish population was relatively small (just under 50,000) and only about one-fifth failed to survive the war — even after far more anti-Semitic German occupiers and policies wrested power from Benito Mussolini in 1943.

But statistically limited evil is still evil. Italian (even papal) complicity in crimes against Jewry has weighed more heavily on the national conscience lately, if a recent spate of meditations on the subject in various media is any indication. This year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the 28th, includes a program of films devoted to the subject. Titled "Italian Jews During Fascism," it presents a mix of documentary, historical drama, and contemporary fiction.

As elsewhere, the history of Jews in Italy has run a gamut from bad to worse to tolerable and back again. Propelled by basic racism as well as that "Christ-killer" concept favored by early Biblical-text revisionists and Mel Gibson, sacred and secular powers-that-were targeted Italian Jews (among others) during the Crusades and the Inquisition, then literally walled up their Roman populace in a ghetto for 300 years. By the time the extreme ghettoization was abolished, in the mid-19th century, Italian Jews (at least outside Rome) were fairly well integrated into society. They certainly were by 1938, when Mussolini announced a slew of anti-Semitic laws after years of appearing indifferent to Hitler’s particular racial obsession. ("Il Duce" hadn’t been impressed with the Nazis until his own empire-building ambitions required an alliance.)

Italian Jews were abruptly barred from serving in the military, and from attending or working at schools and universities. Thousands lost their jobs due to knee-jerk reactions from employers anxious to toe the repressive party line. These hard times got much worse when the weakened nation ceded primary control to the Nazis, and "Il Duce" became a mere figurehead for the "Republic of Salo." Mussolini rubber-stamped the mass arrest of Jews, mostly in the occupied north. Nearly 7,000 were shipped off to concentration camps. The question of what ordinary Italians — let alone the Vatican — did to oppose this murderous sweep remains a blot on the country’s 20th-century history.

The Jewish Film Festival’s quartet of related features offer various perspectives on these events. Most direct is Mimmo Calopresti’s 2006 documentary Volevo Solo Vivere (I only wanted to live), a compilation of latter-day testimonies assembled from interviews recorded for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation. Focusing on survivors (mostly female) of Auschwitz who were between the ages of four and 30 at the time, it provides first-person stories that range from poignant to hair-raising. Meeting a life love on the train en route to the camp, enduring Mengele’s "medical experiments," being forced to walk one’s father to the gas chamber. These precise recollections are illustrated not just by brutally familiar footage of starved prisoners and piled corpses, but also by earlier photo-album glimpses of family life.

Dubbed "the Italian Schindler" when his deeds first won recognition, Giorgio Perlasca was a Paduan former soldier and disillusioned ex-Fascist working abroad to procure supplies for the Hungarian army in Axis-occupied 1944 Hungary. Posing as a Spanish diplomat, he bullied and bluffed his way into rescuing and hiding thousands of Budapest Jews despite a Nazi policy of deportation and extermination. This extraordinary tale is dramatized in Perlasca: An Italian Hero. With an Ennio Morricone score and Luca Zingaretti in the title role, Alberto Negrin’s 2001 made-for-TV film is compelling. Yet it’s also overworked, painting Perlasca as a one-dimensional superhero — albeit a balding and pudgy one. The result lands somewhere between the harshness of Schindler’s List (1993), the hysterical melodrama of Black Book (2006), and the maudlin treacle of Life Is Beautiful (1997).

A fascinating footnote, the 2007 hour-long documentary Tulip Time: The Rise and Fall of the Trio Lescano tells the story of three Dutch sisters who became enormously popular in Italy as harmonizing swing vocalists. Mussolini was a fan, though even that couldn’t save them from abrupt career termination and poverty once their Jewish background was discovered. The 2003 novelistic drama Facing Windows, which had a theatrical release, finds Turkish Italian director Ferzan Ozpetek departing somewhat from his usual gay themes. Giovanna Mezzogiorno stars as an unhappy working-class Roman woman whose husband brings home a disoriented older man (the late Massimo Girotti, a screen veteran since 1940) who turns out to have concentration camp numbers on his arm. *

SAN FRANCISCO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL

The 28th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival runs July 24–Aug. 11 at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; Roda Theatre, 2025 Addison, Berk.; CineArts @ Palo Alto Square, 3000 El Camino Real, bldg 6, Palo Alto; and the Smith Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St., San Rafael. Tickets (most shows $12) and additional information are available at www.sfjff.org

Repulsion!

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"I like young women, as do most men, I think," Roman Polanski confesses in the opening sequence of Marina Zenovich’s fascinating new documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. Few artists could recite such a controversial preamble as convincingly as this infamous auteur, loved and reviled with equal fervor after a 45-year career. While it focuses on the Hollywood rape scandal that enveloped Polanski in the spring of 1977, and his subsequent flight from the law, Wanted and Desired doesn’t portray the oft-demonized director as a villain or a victim. Instead, it renders him as an inscrutable outsider and poète maudit.

Through an excellent assortment of press footage and interviews, including talks with alleged rape victim Samantha Geimer, Zenovich reviews if not reopens California vs. Roman Raymond Polanski. She does so with a meticulous eye toward correcting inconsistencies and misconceptions. Polanski was no stranger to tragedy and controversy. As a young boy, he survived the Holocaust on the streets of Krakow after most of his family was shipped to Auschwitz. After a successful career in London and Hollywood in the 1960s, he was again devastated when his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered by Charles Manson’s "family." By the ’70s, Polanski had a licentious reputation, abetted by his dark, often Faustian films.

Enter 13-year-old Geimer, a California innocent pushed by her ambitious mother into a nude photography shoot with Polanski. The events of the night that followed would haunt the director and his young victim for decades.

Some critics will probably deride Wanted and Desired as pure hagiography, or worse yet, a legitimization of Polanski’s crimes and subsequent fugitive status. But Zenovich’s intentions circumnavigate any idol worship, as her refusal to err toward his guilt or exoneration makes clear. Rather, Wanted and Desired‘s stinging invective of Hollywood justice places much of the blame on a starstruck media and judiciary. As if fulfilling Polanski’s dystopic vision, the film leaves us repeating some prophetic words from Chinatown (1974): "I see you like publicity … well, you’re going to get it." Polanski, ever the outsider, remains at large.

ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED AND DESIRED

Opens Fri/25

Roxie Film Center

Guy Maddin’s special specimen

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REVIEW We all knew it was his Winnipeg after gobstoppers like Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) and The Saddest Music in the World (2003), but Guy Maddin certainly puts a fine point on it with his latest. Finally, a Maddin film that fully incorporates the homely comic-pathos of his essays and movie reviews. In My Winnipeg, the Canuck filmmaker’s punch-drunk dissolves and superimpositions aren’t just cinematographic cake-frosting; they’re visual portents and analogues of his seasick crawl through the past. While his festival-circuit peers increasingly strive for transcendent realism, Maddin still slops on the Vaseline. Curiously, he ends up in the same place that they do, blurring lines of autobiography and fictional representation. To wit: after Maddin introduces his "sleep-chugging" city in voice-over, he sets in explaining his missive to reenact key episodes of his childhood with stand-in actors in his family home. This meta-"making of" is a wonderful joke on the psychologically overwrought status of the auteur, complete with inflated reminiscences and digressions (segments on Winnipeg’s spiritualists, 1919 labor strikes, and the National Hockey League’s conspiratorial malevolence stand as mini-movies of their own). Casting Ann Savage (the belligerent face of Vera in Edgar Ulmer’s 1945 noir Detour) as his mother renders the psychodrama of cinephilia with florid hilarity. Beneath all Maddin’s Oedipal goofing, there’s a serious reflection on the way that movies seen at an impressionable age — or rather our memories of them — can burnish real experiences with chiaroscuro drama. Maddin’s always deserving of kudos for his bricolage assortments of essay, silent film, lantern show, melodrama, and papier-mâché, but My Winnipeg is a special specimen: his finest testament yet to memory and imagination being a two-way street.

MY WINNIPEG opens Fri/25 in Bay Area theaters.

“Elsa and Fred”

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REVIEW Bombshell Anita Ekberg embodies spontaneity as she playfully wades through the Trevi Fountain in that classic moment from Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960). Inspired by this scene, spry octogenarian Elsa (China Zorilla) has a photo of Ekberg hanging on her wall and confronts each day with the exuberance of a woman a quarter of her age. She speaks her mind and lives with reckless abandon — but not necessarily wreck-less abandon: a fender-bender just outside her apartment building eventually gives her reason to pay a visit to her new neighbor Alfredo (Manuel Alexandre), a recent widower. Aside from focusing on a pair of late-in-life lovers, this Spanish romantic dramedy rarely veers from the expected: Elsa inevitably encourages cautious Alfredo (or "Fred") to make the decision to truly live. Still, you’d be hard pressed to find anything quite as adorable as Elsa and Fred. Whether they’re kissing sweetly or pulling a dine-and-ditch at a swanky restaurant, these elderly lovebirds are an irresistible pair. Both actors deliver delightful performances, but Zorilla in particular is a much appreciated treat as Elsa, breathing life into some of the film’s flatter moments. Director Marcos Carnevale’s recreation of the Trevi Fountain scene is beautiful and heartwarming.

ELSA AND FRED opens Fri/18 in Bay Area theaters.

Diaboliques

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Sex is such an unalloyed force in Catherine Breillat’s films that it actually seems to consume narrative. Among a controversial lot that includes Fat Girl (2001) and Romance (1999), The Last Mistress is unique for its classical trimmings, but its plot points and character development are still no more or less important than the emotional content of a moan. All the French writer-director’s films are anatomies of hell, but this time she’s courting provocations instead of simply imposing them. The thickening of Breillat’s stock may be due to her 2004 stroke, or her decision to adapt an earlier work (the film freely elaborates on an 1851 novel by Jules Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly), or the fact she’s finally snagged an actress who enlarges her take on female appetite-for-destruction.

That actress is Asia Argento. In performances typically labeled raw or animalistic by a mostly male press, the daughter of Dario bottles up the rage simmering underneath every black magic woman and femme fatale in film history. It’s telling that Argento’s daredevil acting style doesn’t conjure other actresses so much as rockers like Diamanda Galás, PJ Harvey, and Courtney Love — women who live on the literal edge of a stage.

In The Last Mistress, Argento isn’t so tongue-in-cheek that she’s willing to slobber a rottweiler (as in a much-discussed moment from Abel Ferrara’s 2007 Go Go Tales). Breillat has given Argento a character who dovetails with her persona. Her Vellini is constantly described as a creature and, in a key moment, as a mutt. Her titular courtesan — rumored to be the illegitimate offspring of an Italian princess and a Spanish matador — is conjured by flashbacks and the looks and idle gossip of others. The film opens with a churlish count and countess plotting to inform Vellini that the object of her longtime amour fou, Ryno de Marigny (Fu’ad Ait Aattou), is marrying the virginal Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida). Our first image of Argento — a double-portrait of actress and character, stretched over a divan in a classic pose of seduction — instantly explodes any element of Merchant-Ivory farce, with the actress already burnishing the angry glow of her character’s typecast destiny.

A moment later, Vellini is relishing Ryno’s porcelain weight, her pleasure-hungry visage adjacent to the glassy eyes and growl of a stuffed tiger head. The shot suggests Breillat is playfully embracing her unsubtle craft. Radical plot offensives aside, she isn’t so different from Joseph Mankiewicz in her camera movements, editing, and composition. Her reactionary feminism might sink into serviceability except for one thing: when it comes to staging and directing her actors’ body language, she’s a master.

Pascale Ferran’s Lady Chatterley (2006) flushed cheeks where Breillat’s dark drama gnashes teeth, but the films are united in loosing their actresses to trammel over history. Ferran crafts an amorous epic; Vellini climaxes only a few minutes into Last Mistress, raising the discomfiting question: what if the enabling (and ennobling) freedom that lets us do as we please only turns us into slaves of desire? The answer might look something like Sofia Coppola’s fizzy tonic of lethargy and shopping, Marie Antoinette (2006), though Argento’s supporting role as Comtesse du Barry in that film practically beggared Breillat’s fleshy rejoinder. Where Sex and the City‘s infantilized Manhattan suggests constant airbrushing, woman directors such as Breillat make Paris drawing rooms, Versailles, and the French countryside shimmer with unsettled agendas.

THE LAST MISTRESS

Opens Fri/18 at Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at sfbg.com

www.ifcfilms.com

Darkest hour

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So much of what will be written about The Dark Knight will focus on Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker, and rightfully so. Every time the character appears onscreen — robbing a bank, crashing a party, gleefully explaining the origins of his perma-smile — the movie veers into supremely sinister territory. But even when the Joker is tucked away for a chunk of time, Christopher Nolan’s sequel to his 2005 Batman Begins is a grim affair, living up to the "dark" in its title in both style and tone.

That’s not a diss, though — Nolan’s Batman, embodied by Christian Bale, faces daunting circumstances. His alter ego, Bruce Wayne, may be a jet-setting playboy, but he ain’t no cheeky, cheeseburger-scarfing Tony Stark. Wayne Manor burned down in the first film, so Wayne’s living in a Gotham penthouse. Ex-squeeze Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, stepping in for Batman Begins‘ Katie Holmes) has taken up with Gotham’s new D.A., Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart, nearly as strong as Ledger in a less showy role), who joins forces with the idealistic Lt. Gordon (Gary Oldman) to rid the city of its gangster element. Operating on his own all-madness, all-the-time frequency, the Joker (who is called a terrorist more than once) manipulates all involved, with utter chaos as his ultimate goal.

The script, co-penned by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, offers a tangled, complex plot that asks more of its audience than, say, the relatively straightforward Iron Man does. Knowing this, Nolan staffs even bit parts with familiar faces, including Eric Roberts as a mafioso and Anthony Michael Hall as a talk-show host. But it’s not all talk — there are plenty of sweet vehicles and nifty gadgets (supplied, as before, by Morgan Freeman’s Lucius Fox), car chases, people flying out of windows, and every comic book villain’s dream prop: a giant pile of money.

That said, however, The Dark Knight has more heft to it than the average superhero flick. Some may find it too hefty — besides a few zingers from Michael Caine’s Alfred, its only moments of levity are supplied by a psycho in face paint. Personally, I’m glad to see The Dark Knight presented like a drama (with, uh, capes and explosions) instead of a toy commercial. And though it may ask some obvious superhero-movie questions, it places them in a world where the stakes are too high not to wonder: should Batman have limits? When, if ever, can the "masked vigilante" step aside and let cops and courts take over? And at what cost? There’s a sense of futility in The Dark Knight that feels odd for a summer blockbuster — probably because it so matches the mood of the real world. Maybe the film’s one easy question is when the Joker asks, "Why so serious?" For that, there are plenty of answers. (Cheryl Eddy)

THE DARK KNIGHT

Opens Fri/18 in Bay Area theaters

“Viva”

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REVIEW My eyes were literally popping at Viva, a time-warp back to the days of swingin’ sexploitation films by Radley Metzger, Russ Meyer, Herschell Gordon Lewis, and similarly give-the-horny-people-what-they-want auteurs. Writer-director-producer-costumer-set designer and star Anna Biller plays Barbi, a bored Los Angeles housewife circa 1972. When her Ken doll-like hubby leaves her alone on a so-called extended business trip, adventurous Barbi becomes Viva, a frequently nude muse for every pervy guy in a neck scarf who crosses her path. Plot ain’t really important here, though — Viva is either a parody or an homage (or perhaps both), executed so perfectly it’s almost hard to tell it was made in the 21st century. Bad acting, sleazy dialogue, constant porny background music, incredible outfits and hair, drug-hazed orgies, olive-bedecked finger foods, a nudist colony, a call girl subplot, and musical numbers — Viva has everything you want to see in a movie, rendered in luridly bright Technicolor and filtered through what I can only describe as an XXX-rated scramble of The Brady Bunch. Biller is my new hero. I can’t wait to see what she does next. (Cheryl Eddy)

VIVA opens Fri/11 at the Red Vic. See Rep Clock for showtimes.

Laid, paid, played

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"The problem with you is that you have a shitty way of looking at things. I just look at the dopeness, but you just look at the wackness." Ouch. Tough talk coming from the girl of your dreams, but Stephanie — The Wackness‘s been-there, banged-that uptown teenage heartbreaker — turns out to be right on, in her glibly damaged way.

It’s 1994, a moment simultaneously innocent and ominous, heady and paranoia-stoking: the year Kurt Cobain checks out of this temporal plane, while the Notorious B.I.G., OutKast, Nas, and assorted members of the Wu-Tang Clan check in with name-making first albums. New York City’s new mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, is taking his crackdown on so-called quality-of-life crimes citywide, giving his police department more power to put the kibosh on graffiti, public beer drinking, and loud boom boxes. The threat of imminent arrest hangs, seldom spoken, over Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck), who’s just graduated from high school and selling pot as the summer days melt away before his college years begin. Lonely and socially awkward, Luke either withdraws from reality, playing videogames and listening to rap, or stays at a safe remove, choosing a remote perch above the crowd at parties. The latter tactic comes in handy as he witnesses his parents’ squabbling and increasing money troubles.

Luke’s sole talent seems to be peddling weed from an ice cream cart as he roams the city. That, and making mixtapes, thanks to ideas caught from his supplier Percy (Method Man, who wittily introduces Luke to the Notorious B.I.G. by way of "The What," a Biggie and Method collabo). His only friend appears to be his therapist, Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley), a gray-maned boomer who trades sessions for dime bags and is in dire need of some healing himself. Squires’ stepdaughter Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby) is the hopelessly distant beacon of hope in Luke’s firmament, so when the two are stuck in the city for one last summer before irrevocable collegiate change, Luke can’t help but lose his cool.

Turns out it’s the sweaty, sweltering season for everyone: a time to tell truths and strip away shopworn facades. Squires and Luke bond, roving way out of the office. The teen instructs the counselor in the ways of weed dealing, while amping up his business to save his family from eviction. The pair also look to get laid, Squires’ prescription to all of Luke’s ills. And the women do sail through, including Mary-Kate Olsen as Luke’s jam band–y socialite client, who amazingly gets to second base with Squires, a half-mockable, half-empathetic character that Kingsley disappears into with sweaty, beady-eyed desperation.

Writer-director Jonathan Levine shows he learned a thing or two from a youth spent assisting NYC rhapsodist-anthropologist Paul Schrader. Painting this surprisingly gentle étude to an urban youth in sepia hues, he takes care to get the context right, from the vernacular built on "that’s mad crazy" and "that’s really dope" to a soundtrack laced with tunes like A Tribe Called Quest’s "Can I Kick It?". That song’s "Walk on the Wild Side" bassline conjures the gritty, narcotic lassitude of summer in the city while bridging the years between Squires and Luke.

Luke may not be as brainy and broken as Holden Caulfield or as mortality-fixated and mundane as Andrew Largeman of Garden State (2004), but Peck hits the right notes of cringe-inducing yet pungent realism required to turn this potential cipher into a full-fledged character. Especially when Luke dares to reach for dopeness and call Stephanie on a pay phone, and his "I love you" quickly turns into a defensive "OK, if you can’t handle that, fuck it! Fuck you!" Alternately vulnerable, stumbling, and Teflon-clad, the kid will find his way through the urban jungle of his teens, one way or another. 2

THE WACKNESS

Opens Fri/11 at Bay Area theaters

www.sonyclassics.com/thewackness

Orphan storm

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The orphan was a staple figure in silent cinema. She or he evoked the pathos required in sentimental melodramas, and also highlighted a prevalent social problem. The predicament wasn’t that orphans existed so much as that orphanages did. Dickensian clichés of wicked minders profiting from the ill-keeping of abused and undernourished charges were often not far from the truth.

The notion that flowers of pure innocence might spring from this kind of environmental mire was a popular dramatic conceit. It floated entire careers for such variably waiflike or plucky Pollyannas as Janet Gaynor, Lillian Gish, Mary Miles Minter (until she went down in a murder scandal), and of course, Mary Pickford, who was still playing foundlings in 1926, at 34. Their male counterparts were generally allowed to be scrappier: sad from being misunderstood, but gosh-darn-determined to prove the haters and snobs wrong.

One of the least-known titles in the 13th San Francisco Silent Film Festival, The Soul of Youth is a small delight that hews to and transcends the reigning tropes of screen ragamuffinery circa 1920. It opens on a note of heavy moral correctitude, as titles inform us that "A woman, who pray God there be no more like, has offered for sale her unborn child. Think of it: a helpless little baby, before its eyes have opened on the world, labeled ‘unwanted’ and sold!" Framed only to call the mother’s character into question, it’s no matter that this woman is impoverished, or that she dies after giving birth, or that she was initially tricked into the exchange by an addict who had the goods on her errant politician boyfriend.

Little Ed is then dumped into the nearest orphanage, a cruel place where — when next encountered at age 14, as played by 17-year-old Lewis Sergant — he is considered incorrigible and unfairly blamed for thefts and other misdeeds. His rescue of an imperiled black babe (cringingly named Rastus) goes unappreciated. It’s only when he secretly takes in a fellow underdog — a stray canine named Simp — that "for the first time, love enters Ed’s life." When this uninvited boarder is discovered, the pair must escape the orphanage and then the police, landing on that "Mecca of the homeless — the streets."

Meanwhile it turns out the sleazebag who rejected him as a son is now a corrupt mayoral candidate angling to defeat a terribly upstanding one. Ed’s accidental involvement in that race — by risking his neck to preserve the respectability of virtuous rich folk and becoming a hero — proves his ultimate salvation. In classic wish-fulfillment fashion, he ends up (à la Little Orphan Annie) rewarded via adoption by the morally superior luxury class. But Soul of Youth is savvy enough to contrast Ed’s new family with a wealthy neighbor who thinks she can replace her beloved lap-cat with a cherub sporting "blue eyes and golden curls." Just like Paris Hilton and her impulse-buy menagerie!

Soul of Youth was directed by William Desmond Taylor, whose yet-unsolved 1922 murder destroyed the futures of actresses (and intimates) Minter and Mabel Normand. The lovely work he does here makes one lament his too-short career. His protagonist, the floppy-banged, spunkily adorable Sargent, played Huckleberry Finn the same year. He subsequently suffered the usual post-juvenile career slide, resurfacing as a pal of Tarzan in mid-’30s serials and exiting as an unidentified thug in Miss Mink, a beyond-obscure film from 1949. He spent the next 20 years as a California state probation officer.

During Taylor’s youth as a performer, Victorian morality still targeted his own lack of a parent — as well as his outright illegitimacy — as inherently morally suspect and something to be overcome. Simultaneously prim and liberal in teaching its big lesson, Soul of Youth winds up firmly on the side of nurture over nature. "The kind of man this boy will make depends on his surroundings. It’s up to us, dear," the film’s virtuous tycoon tells his vain socialite wife.

Alongside the poorhouse and the asylum, the orphanage was a widespread 19th-century American public entity later disgraced/dismantled by reformists. The orphanage helped usher in the "welfare" era — stressing economic support where parents couldn’t manage rather than pushing abandoned, "bastard," or otherwise problematic kids into warehouse institutions. (Those group and foster homes they were shunted toward hardly fixed all historic problems, however.) Soul of Youth retains charm for insisting class, economic, and other social divisions might well tumble before the sheer force of Ed’s nascent Boy Scout–dom.

THE SOUL OF YOUTH Sat/12, 11:40 a.m., Castro

THE 13TH SAN FRANCISCO SILENT FILM FESTIVAL runs July 11–13 at the Castro, 429 Castro, SF. Advance tickets (most shows $12–$17) are available by calling 1-800-838-3006 or visiting www.silentfilm.org

A rictal dysfunction

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According to Peter Bogdanovich, 1928 remains unique in film history as Hollywood’s greatest year. The latter-day American director cites landmark silent film contributions such as King Vidor’s The Crowd, Victor Sjöström’s The Wind, and Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill Jr. as evidence that synchronized sound — first used in 1927’s The Jazz Singer — initially limited rather than expanded the cinematic medium. Alongside those celebrated pictures, Bogdanovich also praises a 1928 German Expressionist classic produced in the United States: Paul Leni’s macabre mutilation drama The Man Who Laughs.

Based on an 1869 novel by Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs is a mordant and often morose satire about a deformed clown in the Stuart Court. It follows the sad character of Gwynplaine, the son of a British duke who is orphaned and forsaken to die at the command of the British sovereign.

Gwynplaine survives, but with a horribly butchered mouth permanently twisted into a smile, He grows up amid a wandering freak show, becoming its main attraction. His only pleasure comes in the form of his adopted family — carnival mountebank Ursus the Philosopher and the blind beauty Dea, who loves Gwynplaine and remains unaffected by his strange visage. But when word reaches Queen Anne that an heir to the dead duke remains alive, she commands that Gwynplaine be installed as a lord and made to marry the reigning duchess Josiana. Forced to leave Dea and Ursus for the royal court, Gwynplaine soon bears the brunt of a royal freak show whose insidious machinations are alien to the golden-hearted clown.

The Man Who Laughs was produced by Universal in the wake of its increasingly popular horror pictures, particularly the 1925 blockbuster The Phantom of the Opera. Budgeted at the then-unprecedented amount of $1 million, Leni’s film became a flamboyant melding of costume melodrama and Expressionist mise-en-scène. It stars Mary Philbin as the blind heroine Dea and Conrad Veidt — a German Jewish actor featured in Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1919) — as the mutilated clown. Without reliance on dialogue, and beneath a rictus held in place by prosthetic hooks, Veidt produces an extraordinary gamut of emotion through little more than a lachrymose stare. Often mantling his disfigurement with a cape and moving with the rigid gait of a trauma victim, his Gwynplaine becomes a kind of paralytic, living and communicating only from his goitered eyes. He is a casualty of what Hugo declares "an art/science of inverted orthopedics." The film’s image of Veidt influenced comic book writer Bob Kane when he created Batman’s arch-nemesis The Joker.

Leni’s film hasn’t enjoyed the immediate critical attention of Expressionist classics such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) or F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). But its anticipation of the horror genre’s waves of mutilation — from Georges Franju through to David Cronenberg — is remarkable.

THE MAN WHO LAUGHS

Sat/12, 7:45 p.m.

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com


THE 13TH SAN FRANCISCO SILENT FILM FESTIVAL runs July 11–13 at the Castro, 429 Castro, SF. Advance tickets (most shows $12–$17) are available by calling 1-800-838-3006 or visiting www.silentfilm.org

“Hancock”

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REVIEW This summer’s obligatory Will Smith blockbuster has the ever-bankable star playing the titular role in Hancock — a foul-mouthed antihero apt to fly into action while clenching a bottle of whiskey. Though this reluctant superman of unclear origins consistently puts bad guys behind bars, the citizens of Los Angeles are none too thrilled when he arrives on the scene; Hancock’s chaotic brand of crime fighting has been taking a devastating toll on the city’s roads, buildings, ice cream trucks, and beached whales. That is, of course, until he saves the life of Ray (Jason Bateman), an idealistic public relations executive who decides to help Hancock revamp his image. Smith has the kind of charisma that can make even the most poorly-written shlock at least somewhat bearable. This time around, he doesn’t have to work as hard; Hancock is teeming with the fast-paced action and destruction that we seem to crave during the summer months. Plus, it’s surprisingly funny. As you might expect, Smith brings the bulk of the laughter but Bateman exceeds his straight-man role with his playfully wry delivery. Yes, the story is predictable and there is an annoyingly telegraphed "twist" involving Ray’s wife Mary (Charlize Theron), but Smith’s foray into superhero movies manages to entertain. For those keeping track, Hancock is no Men in Black (1997). Thankfully, though, it’s no Wild Wild West (1999) either.

HANCOCK opens Wed/2 in Bay Area theaters.

Hunter, haunted

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend," says the reporter in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), a film about the importance of living up to one’s image, even when that image is predicated more on fiction than fact. It’s a burden either way, and the dilemma is echoed in Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, a lively new documentary by Alex Gibney, who directed 2005’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and picked up an Oscar this year for Taxi to the Dark Side.

Gonzo focuses on Thompson’s most fruitful professional period — 1965 to 1975, a decade that saw the New Journalism proponent (who committed suicide in 2005) write Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. During that time, he also launched an ill-fated campaign for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colo., and shaped his public persona into that of a gun-toting, drug-crazed, booze-soaked, authority-bashing champion of outsiders, capable of churning out pages of brilliant and utterly unique prose, always written in first person and most often written while under the influence.

Speaking over the phone from New York City, Gibney reflected that he was drawn to his latest subject largely because of that persona. "He was a guy who didn’t play by the rules, and it seems like we need a guy like that around now, when the rules are being used against us by people in power," the director said. "Also, he seemed like a fun character to do, this larger-than-life character that — for at least for a brief period of time — became this outlaw that we all wanted to live by."

Gonzo taps quite a bit of home-movie footage, photos, and audiotapes to flesh out Thompson beyond his words (read by Johnny Depp, who bonded with the author while prepping for the 1998 Fear and Loathing movie). A diverse array of contemporary interviews (Rolling Stone‘s Jann Wenner, Hell’s Angel Sonny Barger, both of Thompson’s wives, Pat Buchanan, illustrator Ralph Steadman, George McGovern, and Jimmys Buffet and Carter) bears out the wide range of Thompson’s influence. According to Gibney, the only interview he would have liked to have gotten but didn’t was with Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who would only speak off the record.

"My first day on the job was to go out to [Thompson’s funeral] — the one Johnny Depp paid for — and hang out, try to get a bunch of people to talk, and then shoot the funeral itself. I shot the funeral, but nobody much wanted to talk to me," Gibney recalled. "But once I let everyone know I was doing this film and that it was really gonna focus on his work, that opened people up, and inevitably they started talking about Hunter the character as well."

The funeral, briefly shown in Gonzo, is a surprisingly tasteful spectacle involving taiko drums, a giant cannon, and glimpses of famous friends (John Kerry, Bill Murray). The film doesn’t spend much time on Thompson’s suicide, though in its first scene it speculates how the writer might have lost his trademark edge. In Gibney’s eyes, Thompson’s Dr. Gonzo alter ego was the reason for both his success and his ultimate downfall.

"Initially [his persona] just grew out of a natural journalistic instinct to supply your own perceptions, to put yourself in the story, to be the lens through which viewers would see whatever you were covering," Gibney said. "But over time it became [less of a] lens [and more of a] bubble in which he got trapped. So I think that was the trick. Sometimes this mythical character he created just kind of took over. As he remarks in the film, ‘Sometimes I don’t know who to be, whether to be Duke or Hunter.’<0x2009>"

Duality also manifested itself in Thompson’s private personality, which Gibney was surprised to discover as being "almost bipolar."

"Hunter’s mood swings kind of represented his ability to see the kind of schisms or splits in the American character," he said. "I knew he was always a very perceptive writer about the American character, but I think maybe he was so perceptive because he — more than a lot of people — is like America. Sort of the best and the worst. I didn’t really understand till I started the film just how many-sided he was."

Visually dynamic and entertaining for Thompson devotees as well as those who only know him from Depp’s portrayal in Fear and Loathing, Gonzo is nonetheless tinged with the melancholy that eventually tempered Thompson’s considerable lust for life. Blame health problems, professional frustrations, the re-election of George W. Bush, or more existential concerns — Thompson’s quest for the American Dream, documented in Fear and Loathing and elsewhere, was never really satisfied. Instead, Gibney speculated, "I think he ended up finding how elusive it is, and how much-desired it is — but how rare it is to ever find it. And that’s what he found in Vegas, I think: what a perfect vehicle for the death of the American dream, this place where you go hoping to fulfill that rags to riches dream, yet in some fundamental way knowing that the house always wins."

GONZO: THE LIFE AND WORK OF DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON

Opens Fri/4 in Bay Area theaters

www.magpictures.com

“Chop Shop”

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REVIEW Ramin Bahrani’s first feature, Man Push Cart (2005) — about a struggling Pakistani service worker selling coffee and bagels from a midtown Manhattan pushcart — signaled the arrival of a genuine talent for atmospheric and absorbing realist drama, and an unpreachy champion of America’s disregarded immigrant working-class. Like a New York City Ken Loach with the anxious psychic interiors of a Cassavetes, Bahrani’s portraits (using nonprofessional actors and an ambient soundtrack) prove so highly attuned to character and evocative of place that you might overlook what a good storyteller he is. Chop Shop, his second feature (cowritten with Bahareh Azimi), delves further into the social terrain limned by the first, while relocating to New York’s urban periphery — the industrial sprawl of Willets Point in outer Queens, a teeming maze of auto shops and chain-linked yards ringed by turnpikes, erector-set bridges, and Shea Stadium. Here 12-year-old Alejandro (Alejandro Polanco), alone in the world but for his sister (Isamar Gonzales), works jobs in and around the auto body shops to save money for a dilapidated food van he hopes will be the economic foothold that will keep them together. Admittedly lacking some of the sureness of Bahrani’s debut, Chop Shop‘s nevertheless compelling exploration of everyday drama on the harried, often undocumented margins of immigrant life has never felt more timely or deserving of attention.

CHOP SHOP opens Fri/27 at the Roxie Film Center. See Rep Clock.

Far “Encounters”

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Last seen playing a priest in Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely (2007), Werner Herzog is back behind the camera with Encounters at the End of the World. Guided by Herzog’s trademark droll narration, Encounters journeys to Antarctica, starting at the McMurdo Station research facility, where the director talks with people who’ve chosen to make a living in the world’s most isolated community. Though grubby McMurdo is hardly picturesque, the surrounding land — where Herzog visits divers who daringly study sea life below the ice, volcano researchers, and penguin and seal experts — is as breathtaking as it is stark.

Filming in Antarctica, Herzog made what he called "a couple of good decisions." One was to hand over his camera for the underwater sequences, leaving the diving to experts. The other was more elemental. "Normally I am a man of celluloid, but filming on celluloid when it’s very cold becomes a clumsy affair," he explained during a recent phone interview. "You have to keep your raw stock warm enough because film doesn’t bend when it’s extremely cold. It’s like uncooked spaghetti that you bend, and then it breaks. So I decided against my normal procedures to film with digital cameras. And therefore there was not much of a challenge — Antarctica is easy. It’s not like the times of [Robert Falcon] Scott."

If you think that title only refers to geography, think again. "[Global warming is] not the predominant subject of discourse in Antarctica. What is all-pervading is that many of the scientists are — rightfully in my opinion — convinced that the human presence on this planet is quite limited and not sustainable," Herzog said. "But it doesn’t make me nervous. Martin Luther said something very beautiful when he was asked once, ‘What would you do if tomorrow the world would disappear?’ He said, ‘I would plant an apple tree.’ And I find this a very good attitude. I don’t plant apple trees, but I make films."

ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Opens Fri/27 at Bay Area theaters

www.encountersfilm.com

Welcome to the jungle

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

THE QUEER ISSUE Mark Twain’s observation (cribbed from poet Thomas Campbell) that "distance lends enchantment to the view" could serve as a guiding axiom for the languorous, enchanting films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Apichatpong shows more than he tells, and his camera often obscures rather than explicates the minute, alchemical operations taking place before it.

Somnambulant features such as the day-tripping Blissfully Yours (2002), the shape-shifting gay fable Tropical Malady (2004), and the double-exposed parental portrait Syndromes and a Century (2006) have left many critics bewildered but entranced. Others just seem confused by the elliptical, dream-like logic of the films, in which local lore and landscape shape the narrative as much as characters’ peripherally observed actions. Viewers hoping for glints of elucidation in Apichatpong’s juvenilia and nonfeature projects will probably be disappointed by "Mysterious Objects," the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ latest program honoring the director, for as its title indicates, his short films may be his most enigmatic.

All of Apichatpong’s signature traits — a fascination with the local and mundane, an unabashed love of syrupy pop songs, and a flair for throwing curve balls — are present in this grab bag of films made between 1994 and 2007. In the gleeful Anthem (2006) three elderly women listen to a supposedly blessed techno-lite number. Inexplicably, they are dropped, table and all, into a busy gym (and into the dead center of a badminton match), around which the camera makes multiple 360-degree circuits. Other such narrative jumps merely frustrate. Malee and the Boy (1999) begins with the scrolling text of a transcribed comic book, then switches to footage of hospital visitors. Whereas Anthem suggests a leap of faith, Malee just feels indecisive.

The program’s heart is Worldly Desires (2005), a half-hour trek across the same superstition-laden terrain of Tropical Malady. Dedicated to his "memories of the jungle," Worldly Desires is Apichatpong’s most meta film yet: a music video, a romantic drama, and a composite document crafted from "behind the scenes" footage.

In the opening sequence, a forest’s nighttime choir of insects is interrupted by a bossa nova groove. Suddenly a spotlight washes out the middle ground, illuminating the camera and lighting rigs trained on a singer and her background dancers as she lip-synchs a love song with familial undercurrents. The next few shots follow a man and woman as they hurry through the brush. It takes a few seconds before one can disambiguate the crosshairs in the center of the frame from the dense foliage.

Apichatpong keeps us at the periphery. Each re-shoot of the video is from the same, distanced vantage point. The couple’s arduous journey to find an enchanted tree unfolds through playback monitors, the director’s instructions, and the grumblings and random musings of an exhausted crew. We’re never told if the lovers cross paths with the pop star, or whether what we’re watching is the staging of something staged or a video diary.

Though Tropical Malady‘s first half focuses on a gay love story, it feels somewhat disingenuous to pin a queer sensibility on Apichatpong, even if he is gay. However, with its humorous foregrounding of the labor-intensive means by which the pop culture industry packages "normal" heterosexual love, Worldly Desires certainly invites queer labeling — if not at least queer readings such as this critic’s.

MYSTERIOUS OBJECTS

Thurs, July 3, 7:30 p.m. (program 1) and Sun, July 6, 2 p.m. (program 2), $8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Hurting herders

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REVIEW Set in Inner Mongolia’s dry and inhospitable plains, Tuya’s Marriage comments on capitalism’s suffocating ability to suppress other ways of living. Tuya (Yu Nan — last seen in Speed Racer, of all places) is a Mongolian sheep herder struggling to make ends meet. China’s growing economy has made it almost impossible for herders to survive — not only has it forced them to leave their lands, it has created industries that exploit the natural resources herders traditionally have taken advantage of. So when Tuya’s husband Bater (played by a real Mongolian herder) is incapacitated while digging a well, things become even harder. Tuya is left in charge of their two toddlers, the flock, and securing their daily supply of water. When the strained woman suffers a physical breakdown that warns of graver consequences if she keeps exhausting herself, everyone advises her to divorce Bater and marry another man. Unable to deal with the hardships surrounding her, Tuya starts looking for a groom on the outrageous condition that whoever agrees to take her for his wife must also be willing to provide for Bater. Having glimpsed the potential outcome of marrying a Mongolian oil tycoon and living in the city, Tuya chooses to continue the life she knows — at a high price. Aesthetically beautiful and emotionally complex, the film records the customs and mores of a culture that’s slowly disappearing, and the sadness of a people who have become marginalized.

TUYA’S MARRIAGE opens Fri/20 in Bay Area theaters.

What’s a “Mater”?

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1. Unholy howler monkey!

2. The first murder victim delivers hilarious faux-archaeologist lines. She resembles Christopher Guest stalwart Catherine O’ Hara.

3. The dark circles under Asia Argento’s eyes and the scour-rough warm wool of her voice. She’s a star.

4. This time, Dario Argento’s trademark homicidal attack on a character’s eyes is a steel version of the nyuk nyuk nyuk treatment that Moe used to give Curly.

5. Daria Nicolodi’s character looks like a video game avatar. Plus, her appearance and her role create an entire other story that surrounds the story onscreen: one in which Asia, her child by Dario, saves the world from occult apocalypse (but dutifully showers before her daddy’s camera and dives into a putrescent soup of corpses first).

6. Best baby-killing scene since Andy Warhol’s Bad (1977).

7. Asia has to fend off Eurotrashy new wave cackling witches, Japanese Goth cackling witches, and International Male–model cackling witches — all of which love public transit.

8. Instead of a Helena Marcos–like Suspiria crone, the lead villain is an underdressed nymphet. Someone I saw the movie with deemed her "Boob Lady."

9. It delivers more gruesome guts and gore than every mechanical Hollywood horror remake of the past 10 years put together. If you walk into the theater in a state of frustration, you will leave it in a state of blood-sated jubilation.

10. It’s the third part of the Three Mothers trilogy, fool!

MOTHER OF TEARS

Opens Fri/20 at Bay Area theaters

www.motheroftearsthemovie.com

Have another Soju

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Drinking with Hong Sang-soo is an intense experience. Supremely awkward conversations transpire over tables littered with empty soju bottles. The primary topic is sex — and the details quickly get personal. It’s exactly like a scene from one of his films. Or so it seemed during a group dinner honoring Hong at last year’s San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. Drinks vanished. Secrets were told. And all present tried to forget about it by the next day.

Scenes of clumsy inebriation are the essence of Hong’s cinema, and 2006’s Woman on the Beach is no exception. Over the course of seven movies (excluding the new Night and Day), Hong has repeatedly examined the complicated romantic entanglements of heterosexual Koreans. His scenes often take place in restaurants or domestic parlors, as people sit, drink, talk, and ultimately either seduce or reject each other during extremely long takes. Reportedly, Hong gets his actors drunk before shooting these scenes.

Invariably, Hong’s films focus on a male protagonist trying to bed a woman. These men are always artists; frequently they are film directors. In these respects, Woman on the Beach is quintessential Hong. It also revives his focus on troubled Seoul-dwellers who leave the city for peace of mind. But there’s an essential shift in emphasis: the woman in the story ends up as complex a creation as the men. A female musician pursued by a film director and his set designer, she’s no virgin stripped bare by her bachelors.

Woman on the Beach isn’t as formally rigorous as Hong’s previous films, and it spells out matters that might have been implicit in an earlier work. But this should only matter to hardcore Hong-heads. The biting observations remain, and they’ve never been funnier.

The woman at the center of Woman on the Beach says she "[doesn’t] respect Korean men too much." Hong’s male characters are indeed selfish, unreliable drunks. But they’re bastards with charm.

WOMAN ON THE BEACH

Opens Fri/20 at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas

www.sffs.org

Frameline 32: The Horror, the horror

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Will queers ever get the horror movie they deserve? Granted, with the recent coast-to-coast ratifications of same-sex marriage, LGBT folk have more pressing issues than debates over genre cinema on their mind. Besides, that intransitive verb — deserve — provides an extra soupçon of tastelessness to an already loaded question: wasn’t the golden age of the celluloid closet defined by giving onscreen queers "what they deserved," doling out silent suicides and grisly homicides as the price of representation? And aren’t we faced with enough real-life horrors? Homophobia and AIDS are still killers on the loose. So why appeal for terror?

To put it simply, there is pleasure in being scared. And to put it more complicatedly, there can be empowerment in that pleasure. Two of New Queer Cinema’s most lauded films — Todd Haynes’ Poison (1991), and its "Horror" section in particular, and Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1992) — critically queered horror’s generic conventions and Hollywood’s coded positioning of gay men as monstrous. A few years later, queer critic Paul Burston and feminist critic Amy Taubin separately penned defenses of Cruising (1980) — arguably the first gay slasher film — and Basic Instinct (1992), based on then-contrarian grounds of personal enjoyment.

Since then we have entered a post-Scream world where everyone knows horror’s hanky codes. Rewiring them for LGBT audiences doesn’t always yield a film the caliber of Poison, just as enjoying "bad" images of gays and lesbians doesn’t necessitate a printed confession. While casual homophobia is still permitted in mainstream releases such as Hostel, the price of representation, at least for most of the handful of horror films that tour the LGBT festival circuit, seems to be mediocrity. I know I wasn’t the only one woefully disappointed with the West Hollywood bloodbath HellBent (2004). And let’s not even get into Scab (2005).

Luckily for all the rainbow-colored Fangoria fans still bloodthirsty after catching local director Flynn Witmeyer’s Imp of Satan earlier this year at Another Hole in the Head, late June is bearing an unexpected slasher crop of queer horror films. It includes Dead Channels’ one-off presentation of Sean Abley’s Socket (2007) and some scary fare at Frameline’s SF International LGBT Film Festival. (Full disclosure: I was on the staff of last year’s festival.)

A sexy sci-fi tinged thriller whose ideas are sometimes brighter than its execution, Socket puts a queer twist on Cronenberg-ian body horror. After surviving a freak electrocution, Dr. Bill Matthews (butch thing Derek Long) strikes up a relationship with his hunky caretaker, hospital intern Craig Murphy (Matthew Montgomery), and sparks literally begin to fly. Craig reveals that he is a fellow survivor and introduces Bill to a covert group of energy junkies who juice up together via a portable generator. Talk about a circuit party! Now insatiable, Bill surgically enhances his and Craig’s socket fetish — and adds an extra jolt to their sex life — but his increasingly manic behavior leads to the kind of shock he never could have anticipated.

It is perhaps too easy to read Bill’s degenerative energy dependency as an allegory for meth addiction, and the film certainly invites such comparisons. More interesting is Socket‘s rewiring of gay sex, with Bill and Craig’s retractable, fang-like wrist plugs and dorsal wrist sockets multiplying the permutations of top and bottom as orienting poles of identity and desire. It’s something I wish the film spent more time on.

Abley also produced and has a supporting role in Jaymes Thompson’s The Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror, one of three horror features screening at this year’s Frameline fest. What Socket has in brains, the sophomoric and arch Bed makes up for in buckets of blood. A Showtime original series’ worth of gay and lesbian stereotypes roll up to the remote Sahara Salvation Inn, only to find out too late that the B ‘n’ B is a front for the Bible-thumping proprietresses to do "God’s work." There is a certain glee in watching the asshole Mr. Leather or naive lesbian folksinger characters get violently disposed of — if only because they’re so obnoxious — but Thompson’s film wheezes through its final 20 minutes with all the faux-hilarity and dull-edged political commentary of a Mad TV sketch.

Dan Gildark’s ambitious Cthulhu more successfully mobilizes horror’s ability to reflect the zeitgeist back at us as something uncanny and unsettling. Screen adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft’s writings usually don’t work out well (perhaps because of "the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents," as the author wrote at the opening of 1926’s Call of Cthulhu), but Gildark is smart enough to stop short of showing the full-tentacled monty. Instead, he cultivates an atmosphere of mounting dread and unstoppable evil that is extremely faithful to Lovecraft’s bitter misanthropy — and applicable to the last dark days of the Bush régime. Did I mention Tori Spelling appears as a Dagon-worshipping baby mama?

Another Frameline fest brings another hot mess of a Bruce LaBruce movie, Otto; or Up With Dead People! This one can be summed up in three words: gay zombie sex. Really, the gash-fucking scene is both the film’s highlight and LaBruce’s lasting contribution to porn and horror. There’s a loose story here about the titular incredibly strange gay twink who stopped living and became a heartbroken zombie (and the ridiculous goth auteur who makes him an underground film star), but as with all LaBruce films, that narrative thread mainly stitches together a series of amateurish sex scenes. Still, I would take LaBruce’s messiest effort over another Hellbent any day.

Coda: it’s worth pointing out that some of the most radical LGBT reinterpretations of horror in recent memory have occurred off screen. Kevin Killian’s Argento Series (2001) and Daphne Gottlieb’s Final Girl (2003) both energize horror cinema to create a queer poetics of loss. Killian finds a way of writing about the AIDS crisis through Dario Argento’s bloody and supernatural gialli, while Gottlieb ventriloquizes a dozen slasher film heroines who got away — along with a Greek chorus of academics — to reframe "what it feels like for a girl" as a matter of posttraumatic survival. Read them and be frightened, and inspired.

CTHULHU

Sat/21, 11:15 p.m., Castro

THE GAY BED & BREAKFAST OF TERROR

Fri/20 11:45 p.m., Castro

OTTO; OR UP WITH DEAD PEOPLE

June 27, 11 p.m., Castro

SOCKET

Wed/18, 7 and 9:15 p.m., $5

Hypnodrome Theatre

575 10th St., SF

www.deadchannels.com

Frameline 32: Anti-pity party

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Films about people dealing with serious diseases are often hard to watch and frequently difficult to criticize. They make for rough viewing because of the empathy a viewer has for the suffering subject. Perhaps due to this same sense of compassion, admitting that such movies are cheesy — as they sometimes are — is sort of taboo.

Feminist and experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer bypasses such niceties and constraints with A Horse Is Not a Metaphor. The title of Hammer’s movie might have ties to Susan Sontag’s writings on illness, but it also connects to the dreamlike imagery of horses that she mixes with footage of her stay in a hospital. Structurally, A Horse Is Not a Metaphor‘s chapters correspond to the stages of ovarian cancer treatment. Hammer reinforces all these elements with the magnificently strange music of Meredith Monk to create a very personal retelling of her experience. Her movie is a highly relatable testimony of feelings that rage from sheer darkness to happiness and hope.

Horse‘s visceral quality makes it a different and almost cathartic response to the subject of disease. Each ingredient conveys a desire to connect with the physical and emotional world on a basic sensory level. In doing so, Hammer and her movie relinquish pity and fear.

A HORSE IS NOT A METAPHOR

June 27, 7 p.m.

Roxie

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