Film Review Archives — Page 13 of 37 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Camera lucida

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October 13, 2009

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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October 13, 2009

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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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October 6, 2009

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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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October 6, 2009

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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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September 30, 2009

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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.

No resolve

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September 30, 2009

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arts@sfbg.com

FILM It was the last Bush administration’s master PR stroke to render terrorism completely abstract while appearing to frame it in layman’s terms. There’s no real choosing sides when the choices are "evil" and "freedom" — who’s going to say slow down there, pardner, when the cause is painted as humanity against the inhuman? That equation bought carte blanche approval for a lot of dumb subsequent moves, with the world arguably no safer as a consequence.

Most Americans have an absolute faith that we’re the good guys. But most bad guys were good guys once — it’s a process, not a natal condition. It’s unpleasant but valuable work to imagine exactly how fanaticism can create a sense of righteousness in violence, as opposed to the zero brain power required to think an entire country or religion might wake up one day and say "Let’s be evildoers!"

We’d like to think our principles would withstand hunger, torture, propaganda, Rolfing, whatever. But who really knows what we’re be capable of after a few weeks, months, years of deprivation or indoctrination? It took Patty Hearst just 71 days to become machine-gun-wielding Tania. Who can blame her if she chose a life of John Waters cameos and never discussed the matter afterward? The woman who robbed a Hibernia Bank must seem like a stranger — the kind who nonetheless can shame you by association, like an embarrassing relative or something said while very drunk. Her personality was bent against her will. Luckily, it sprang back.

The character played by Liam Neeson in Five Minutes of Heaven deals with his terroristic youth in precisely the opposite fashion — it’s become both penitentiary cause and ruination of his life. Neeson is an actor who carries his looks and towering stature like a burden — few stars are so at home communicating guilt, masochism, and rueful sacrifice. His Alistair is an esteemed present-day lecturer, activist, and conflict-resolution mediator of violent group behavior.

His qualifying original sin: in 1974, at age 17, he assassinated a young Catholic local to prove mettle within a midsize Irish city’s pro-England, Protestant guerrilla sect. He served 12 years for that crime. But Neeson’s face knows Alistair’s punishment is neverending. In mind’s eye he keeps seeing his young self (Mark Davison) committing murder — as witnessed by the victim’s little brother, Joe (Kevin O’Neill).

Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, German director of 2004’s Downfall, Five Minutes of Heaven — the ecstatic timespan James Nesbitt’s flop-sweating adult Joe figures he’d experience upon killing Alistair — is divided into three acts. The first is a vivid, gritty flashback. The second finds our anxious protagonists preparing for a "reconciliation" TV show taping that doesn’t go as planned. Finally the two men face each other in an off-camera meeting that vents Joe’s pent-up lifetime of rage.

Heaven has been labeled too theatrical, with its emphasis on two actors and a great deal of dialogue. But the actors are fantastic, the dialogue searing. There’s nothing stagy in the skillful way both rivet attention. This very good movie asks a very human question: how do you live with yourself after experiencing the harm fanaticism can wreak, as perp or surviving victim? Surely we’re better off for understanding what shapes terrorism. The alternative is psychological non-insight as blunt as the concept "evildoer."

FIVE MINUTES OF HEAVEN opens Fri/2 in Bay Area theaters.

Northen high (and low) lights

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September 23, 2009

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>>Check out Jesse Hawthorne Ficks’ TIFF takes here.

FILM FESTIVAL REPORT There weren’t exactly tumbleweeds rolling through Park City, but this January’s Sundance Film Festival did have a becalmed feeling reflecting the economic panic — money, corporate sponsors, and industry personnel weren’t falling from the sky quite so thickly as usual, which naturally made the experience that much more pleasant for those simply there to see movies. There was no such diminished frenzy apparent at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival (Sept. 10-19), even if one of the local papers lamented "parties are smaller and over early." (Cue the Bee Gees’ "Tragedy.")

There’d been more serious lamentation in recent years that TIFF has gone too Hollywood, too average-viewer-unfriendly, its programming now driven by (rather than simply attracting) celebrity and media attention. That’s clearly not true of the program’s bulk. Still, you’ve got to wonder just how the "art" of cinema is being celebrated when one big-noise 2009 premiere was no less (what could be less?) than Jennifer’s Body, which put Diablo Cody’s Oscar in perspective.

Not much more defensible were a slew of hollow costume flicks, from opening night’s kinda-’bout-Darwin Creation to the closing Young Victoria, with Oliver Parker’s latest Wildean crapfest Dorian Gray, Carlos Saura’s frivolous I, Don Giovanni, and Stephen Poliakoff’s silly Glorious 39 among the plush time-killers unveiled like papier-mâché statuary between.

Those are movies likely to underwhelm soon at a theatre near you — though not so soon as the enthusiastically received latest efforts by the Coen brothers, Terry Gilliam, Michael Haneke, Jason Reitman, Michael Moore, Steven Soderbergh, Jane Campion, Pedro Almodóvar, Todd Solondz, and others no doubt already ramping up their Oscar campaigns. Those were easy to put off. But there was a great deal I was very sorry to miss, like Cornieliu Porumboiu’s Romanian Police, Adjective, Raoul Peck’s Haitian Moloch Tropical, and Shirin Neshat’s Tehran period piece Women Without Men, films whose chances of U.S. distribution are variably remote.

Among titles caught, low expectations were more often met with high rewards than vice versa. Das Boot (1981) in a tank, Venice Film Festival Golden Lion winner Lebanon proved an effective but unremarkable war-is-hell statement. There was controversy over Tel Aviv’s spotlight in the inaugural "City to City" sidebar. But if government propagandist efforts secured that slot as charged, other Israeli features here, like Danny Lerner’s lurid Kirot, were hardly goodwill ambassadors.

On the other hand, Lars von Trier’s Cannes scandal Antichrist turned out neither brilliantly here nor appallingly there — though one viewer did upchuck at a press screening, and a publicist called mine the first neutral reaction she’d heard of.

Elsewhere, the flowers of evil bloomed in myriad hothouse forms, some rather wilted on arrival. Perhaps most intriguing was a portrait of a movie that will never fully exist: L’Enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot reconstructs footage from an aborted early ’60s thriller by the French genre master. Experimenting with psychedelic imagery to evoke pathological jealousy, he abandoned ship midway, but the remains still fascinate. Another mental health vacation, Werner Herzog’s improbable Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, won numerous fans. Yet it’s much less fraught with danger than Abel Ferrera’s 1992 original, and for all its gratuitous goofing too often looks/sounds like direct-to-cable product.

Plumbing sillier darknesses were the lamentable latests by George Romero (Survival of the Dead) and Joe Dante (The Hole), not to mention yet more not-different-enough vampire stuff (Suck, Daybreakers), a middling Manson recap (Leslie, My Name is Evil), and one dullish Robert E. Howard adventure (Solomon Kane). Midnight Madness’ one shining light was a nasty little Australian number, The Loved Ones, after which you will never hear Kasey Chambers’ "Not Pretty Enough" without cringing. I mean, even more than previously.

Elsewhere, pleasures were scattered and unpredictable, with some uneven films elevated by performances — Woody Harrelson’s delusional superhero in Defendor, Edward Norton as twins in Leaves of Grass, and just about everybody in Rebecca Miller’s The Private Lives of Pippa Lee. Major attention went to Drew Barrymore’s directorial bow Whip It, but Samantha Morton’s own, comparatively overlooked debut The Unloved ranks almost up there with the medium’s greatest horrible-childhood portraits. For originality, nothing quite trumped Corey Adams and Alex Craig’s surreal skateboarder fantasia Machotaildrop, even if its charms eventually wore a bit thin. Which was not an issue for French stop-motion animation A Town Called Panic, 75 minutes of perfect silliness that provided a Gallic heaven to complement Clouzot’s hell.

Come of age

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September 23, 2009

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

FILM A bittersweet tone in movies is an easy thing to flub. The most common culprits are asinine sentimentalism and mock-solemnity, neither of which figures into the graceful cinema of Ermanno Olmi. His early films, Il Posto (1961) and I Fidanzati (1963), still exhibit an impossibly light touch, with a warm humanist core of glances, material texture, and yearning wrapped in a dispassionate view of industrialized alienation.

In Il Posto, a boy’s coming-of-age is rendered a split decision: his entrance into the Milanese workplace is a gloomy premonition of adulthood, but there’s a taste of love for succor. Olmi’s breakthrough would have seemed small even if it hadn’t come on the heels of L’Avventura (1960) and La Dolce Vita (1960). It’s easy to imagine that Il Posto‘s quotidian pleasures might have seemed retrogressive in this context—but with contests for neorealism’s soul laid to rest, it’s easy to appreciate Olmi’s remarkable skill directing amateur actors, his elegant sequencing, and his aching cinematography, as ravishingly revealing as Robert Frank’s contemporaneous photographs. Insofar as the world-weariness of The Exiles (1961) and Killer of Sheep (1977) relate to the Italian style, they travel the Olmi path.

The director has been drawn to simple characters and stories throughout his career, but his own formal means can be surprisingly experimental. In the prolonged opening of I Fidanzati, for instance, Olmi fragments two estranged lovers’ circumnavigation of a dance, stitching together the story of a relationship with a series of elusive encounters plucked from time. The jag echoes Alain Resnais’ early films, but a bookending montage of the lovers reading each other’s letters uses the same technique against the modernist grain, for emotional warmth.

While Olmi’s more highly esteemed cousin in pictorial ennui, Michelangelo Antonioni, absconded with neorealism to the metaphysical realm, Olmi plunged back to earth. To wit: his new film, Terra Madre, is the official documentary of the 2006 Slow Food conference in Turin. A strange hybrid of educational film and poetic reverie, Terra Madre leaves polemics to the conference participants. Olmi’s presence is felt in the digressive close-ups of soil, plants, faces and hands. In a beguiling sequence midway through the film, his camera studies the ramshackle space left behind by a self-sufficient hermit. Does the director see himself in the story of this man who found the world in a small plot of life and tended his own garden for decades? Regardless, the "Life’s Work" retrospective at the PFA is an abundant harvest.

LIFE’S WORK: THE CINEMA OF ERMANNO OLMI

Sept. 25–Oct. 30, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Welcome weirdness

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September 23, 2009

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DNA science has taught us everyone is unique. Art teaches that everyone — even wildly derivative sons-of-bitches — are kinda sorta likewise (at least technically). Still, there’s ordinary "individuality," actual distinctiveness, and then there’s whoa. Belonging to this last category is Swedish writer-director Roy Andersson, who’s made four features in four decades and surely won’t be hurrying up anytime soon.

Does it really take him that long? (Yes: he’s directed hundreds of commercials over the same period, yet took the perceived failure of 1975’s Giliap hard enough to pause a quarter-century before making another movie.) Or is it simply that the unclassifiable gimcracks he now records on film take years to create, not unlike someone’s backyard Lego-built Disneyland or Popsicle-stick Florentine Duomo?

No matter. Andersson’s films are like nothing else in the medium, if anything landing closer to multimedia maxi-minimalist stage avant-gardism like Robert Wilson’s vintage stage spectaculars. Albeit with considerably more humor and warmth, like Meredith Monk’s work both live and cinematic (1988’s Book of Days). But funnier still — like Buster Keaton without the character focus — and cinematically master-diagrammed à la Jacques Tati. Plus droll yet existentially dour in a particularly Scandinavian way.

Which is a long way of explaining You, the Living — finally here for a short theatrical run two years after its Cannes debut — as a bewildering whatsit of immeasurable invention and delight. (Arguably more-awesome Songs from the Second Floor, from 2000, took even longer before it got one week at the Roxie.)

How can one describe You, the Living? Fifty stationary-camera scenes, preceded by a Goethe quote, arrange mostly nonprofessional actors in tableaux of increasing musicality heavy on Dixieland tuba. Characters and settings do occasionally recur, but there’s very little "plot" per se. The highly worked production design (almost entirely studio-bound) is all queasy pastels, with a particular fondness for ’70s grandma-sweater-yarn lime.

There is, however, a slyly escautf8g absurdity in which Nordic miserabilism and fantasy apocalypticism somehow jigger a perfect cocktail. The taste is odd, at first — then it knocks you pleasurably sideways. There’s no easy convincing till you’ve seen it. Then there’s no easy convincing anyone else until you’ve made them see it. That’s worth the effort, though, because they will be so glad, and astonished by your rarefied good taste. (Dennis Harvey)

YOU, THE LIVING opens Fri/25 at the Sundance Kabuki.

Liverpool

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September 15, 2009

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REVIEW Liverpool may belong to the slow club of cinema — long takes, downcast eyes, and monumental landscapes — but the friction between its patient formalism and wild terrain is anything but staid. As with Werner Herzog, Lisandro Alonso sites the existential condition in plainly inhospitable ecologies. But whereas Herzog paradoxically employs grandiloquence to remonstrate the folly of human pomposity, Liverpool‘s withdrawn narration moves with the stealth purpose of a folk tale. The story is unavoidably mythic — a sailor’s return home — but we’re liable to forget this as Alonso’s camera travels to the vanishing point of landscape and labor.

We begin inside a hulking container ship with features indistinguishable from its cargo. Perhaps it’s just the frequent nips of vodka Farrel (Juan Fernandez) takes once he’s left the ship to visit his ailing mother, but non-actor Fernandez imparts a human rawness the hollowed role might not otherwise suggest. After announcing his plans to the captain in a brief strip of exposition, he docks in dirty snow and sets off across mountainous Tierra del Fuego for a home which appears anything but.

Alonso establishes the everyday reality of the sawmill outpost with a few spare strokes, crystallizing a portrait of hardship and taciturnity that outmatches Carlos Reygadas’ similarly remote Silent Light (2007). If that film’s magical realism was self-consciously steeped in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (1955), then perhaps Liverpool is under the sign of John Ford. Farrel echoes John Wayne’s famous Searchers (1956) slouch in the doorway at a crucial moment: a classic outsider pose turns in on itself as the film shifts from portraying the individual solitude to communal isolation. When Farrel disappears into the yonder, Liverpool stays behind. The remainder is both epilogue and revision, with 80 minutes of vast extrication finally condensed into a surprisingly intimate token of distance.

LIVERPOOL runs Thurs/17–Sat/19, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Take warning

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September 15, 2009

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The forests are in flames, the desert is advancing, the glaciers have vanished, and in a solar-powered facility towering above the ice-free waters of the Arctic, some 800 miles north of Norway, a solitary older man (Pete Postlethwaite) roams the hallways of the Global Archive, a warehouse sheltering banks of data-storage servers, a civilization’s worth of art and invention, and a Noah’s ark of extinguished species. From this lonely outpost, he gravely explores a stomach-churning inquiry: "We could have saved ourselves. But we didn’t. It’s amazing. What state of mind were we in to face extinction and simply shrug it off?"

Good question, and one that Franny Armstrong’s The Age of Stupid, a hybrid merging documentary material and a fictional frame tale, forcefully suggests we start addressing like we mean it — immediately. That is to say, before runaway climate change makes its debut and some or all of its widely forecasted ecological consequences begin to manifest, along with resource shortages, food and water riots, and massive societal collapse.

Delineating the complex global network of climate-change causes and effects, The Age of Stupid interweaves real-life documentary footage from the lives of six present-day subjects in New Orleans, the French Alps, Jordan, southwest England, a small Nigerian fishing village, and Mumbai, India. Interspersed is real and faux (future) archival footage depicting and predicting the environmental consequences of humanity’s bad habits. And all of it is presented as the digital artifacts of a dying-off civilization, preserved for uncertain posterity in the Global Archive. While covering similar terrain to that of An Inconvenient Truth (2006), the film serves as a kind of "No, but really, folks …" in the face of frighteningly incremental gestures toward sustainability — and continued shortsighted resistance — at the levels of national, state, and local government as well as citizenry.

The film’s opening sequence begins with the big bang and hurtles via countdown clock through billions of years, flying past the earliest stages of evolution, past dinosaurs, past the industrial revolution, and past the present day, the titular Age of Stupid, so fast that we barely have time to notice ourselves on the screen before it’s 2055, the Age of Too Late. The message: in the grand scheme of things, we have about a nanosecond left to kid ourselves as we refill our metal water bottle and press the start button on our Energy Star-qualified washer-dryer or Prius — or to find a way, at the level of populace, not green-minded individual, to radically swerve from our current path. According to Armstrong and her cohorts in the Not Stupid Campaign, the film’s companion activist effort, our fate will pretty much be decided by December’s climate talks in Copenhagen. (The film, which premiered in the U.K. in March, has its 50-country "global premiere" Sept. 21-22.)

So then, do the canvas bags, travel mugs, energy-saving appliances, clotheslines, CSA memberships, cycling, recycling, composting, and other ecologically minded efforts of a smattering of well-intentioned individuals matter at all? Or matter enough — in the face of factories, factory farming, methane-emitting landfills, canyons of office towers lit up 24/7, a continent-sized constellation of plastic detritus in the Pacific, and millions of trips cross-country at an average elevation of 30,000 feet?

Colin Beavan, the subject of Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein’s No Impact Man, is banking on yes, being of the "be the change you wish to see in the world" school of thought (admittedly in good company, with Mahatma Gandhi). Taking its name from Beavan’s book project and blog, No Impact Man shadows the NYC-based writer; his wife, Michelle Conlin, a senior writer at BusinessWeek admitting to "an intense relationship with retail" and a high-fructose corn syrup addiction; and their toddler daughter, Isabella, during a year in which they try to achieve a net-neutral environmental impact.

This entails giving up, in successive stages, with varying degrees of exactitude, packaged food (hard on a family whose caloric mainstay is take-out), nonlocal food (hard on a woman who drinks multiple quadruple-shot espressos a day; impossible, as it turns out), paper products (magazine subscriptions, TP), fossil-fuel-dependent transit (airplanes, elevators, and even the subway), electricity (i.e., the refrigerator), and, to a large extent, trash. The idea is to learn empirically — and demonstrate — which behaviors might be permanently ditched and which are virtually hardwired.

There are, predictably, certain criticisms –- from irritated environmentalists, from semianonymous blog commenters, from the New York Times Home and Garden section. There is the matter of giving up public transportation rather than championing it, and the issue (raised by a community gardener who takes Beavan under his wing) of Conlin’s laboring for a high-circulation publication that trumpets capitalist virtues antithetical to the project of tapering off consumption and waste. And Beavan sometimes comes across, particularly in the book, as well-meaning but stubbornly myopic in his focus on self-improvement.

Then again, the guy and his family gave up toilet paper, electric light, motor vehicles, spontaneous slices of pizza, and many deeply ingrained habits of wastefulness for a year while most of the rest of the country got up each morning and brushed their teeth with the water running. What impact the No Impact project might have on, for instance, the mounds of trash-filled Heftys that line Manhattan’s sidewalks each week remains to be seen. But as the Age of Stupid winds down, it’s probably a waste of time to fault anyone’s attempts to forestall the Age of Too Late.

NO IMPACT MAN opens Fri/18 in Bay Area theaters.

THE AGE OF STUPID plays Mon/21, 8 p.m., SF Center. Visit www.ageofstupid.net for additional Bay Area screenings.

A time to love

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September 8, 2009

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The international independent film community may be sprawling in size — separated by continents, countries, and language — but it’s united by a love for film, and a desire to share that passion. That’s why, during a predawn night in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, a late evening in Slovenia and Europe, and an early afternoon in the United States and Canada, hundreds of people found themselves in shock after learning of the senseless deaths of film critics Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc, killed Sept. 1 as their home was robbed in Quezon City, Manila.

To speak of Tioseco, a Filipino raised in Canada who returned to Manila, and Bohinc, a Slovenian based in Ljubljana until recently, is to speak of film, cinephilia, and love; it is also to speak of how we can create deep bonds with people scattered across the globe whom we see only once or twice a year, if that, but to whom we still feel united due to a common cause. Though I was in yet another part of the world, I was fortunate to have known and counted as Alexis and Nika as friends, even though I had only seen them at festivals here and there and in their Quezon City home. Judging from a fledgling memorial on Facebook, others feel just as connected to the two. That’s partly because of the closeness of the film community, and partly because of the effect they had on people.

Having returned "home" to Manila to assist with the family business, Alexis (ever the good son) found himself running it after his father passed away. His true passion, though, was cinema. It was Lav Diaz’s Batang, West Side (2001) that changed his outlook on film, and a 12-page interview with Diaz that changed his future. After that the early 20-something kid with the bright eyes and brighter mind dedicated himself (or as much of himself as he could spare, after the family business) to film, and specifically Filipino film.

"While I love cinema in general, a passion that has grown exponentially over the years, I feel no need to put myself in service of that which doesn’t need it [Hollywood]," he wrote in a moving article in Rogue magazine. "Philippine cinema has given much to me, and one must pay back one’s debts." He became a film professor and film critic, and was the driving force behind arguably the most influential, intelligent blog on Southeast Asian cinema, www.criticine.com. In 2006 (at 25!), he was named by The Philippine Star as "one of the most important young people in the country today" for his efforts to promote his nation’s cinema.

Born and raised in Slovenia (about as far from the Philippines as one can get), Nika was also one of those young protégés who make the rest of us feel guilty for pissing away our youth. In her 20s she edited Ekran, a major film magazine, and helped organized the highly-regarded Isola Cinema Film Festival. A huge admirer and promoter of American (and Californian) experimental filmmakers like James Benning, Bruce Conner, and Lewis Klahr, she was also active in the Ljubljana Film Festival and IndieLisboa, and had begun promoting Slovenian films to other festivals.

In 2007 the two met at the Rotterdam Film Festival. Both had been able, fortunately, to overcome the vast difficulties facing writers from "smaller" nations when it comes to attending festivals. There will be Americans, Brits, Western Europeans galore, Japanese, Canadians, and Koreans all over, but unfortunately very few representatives from anywhere else. Both Alexis and Nika were able to finagle funds, festival invitations, and jury memberships to help their travels. "I never expected to have the opportunity to travel for/from film, especially not on the expenses of others, but slowly the opportunities presented themselves," Alexis wrote. "Traveling is a privilege, and not one that I take lightly."

I also met them for the first time at Rotterdam. I was there when they were introduced by our mutual friend, John Torres. I remember bonding with Alexis and Nika immediately. The festival environment, while filled with fellow travelers, is also intimidating, alienating, and totally full of shit, so individuals as grounded, personable, and truthful as the both of them stand out. Both inspired ease and good humor, easy laughter, and most of all talk, not of film or "cinema," but of ourselves, our lives and loves and utter disasters, and, of course, idle gossip about everyone else.

A few days later Alexis told me of a crush he had on someone there. "That tall blonde Slovenian?" I asked immediately. I knew the answer before he confirmed. We all did.

From there the two split their lives across the world, wherever film and whenever airfare could be found. Rotterdam, Berlin, Oberhausen, Paris, and finally, Slovenia and Manila. In 2007 they had had enough of seeing one another only during festivals (there’s more to life than film, after all, but not much more). Nika visited Manila for two months (choosing July and August, a trial-by-fire or sweltering heat if ever there was one).

My wife and I visited them in mid-August of that year, staying with them at the Quezon City home now marked by tragedy. We have many wonderful memories of that time, all capped by Alexis’ and Nika’s amazing hospitality and friendship. We had only spent a few days together over the course of two years, but he treated us like long-time friends (something I would guess he has done to many people). We continued the bond over film. I brought them bootlegs of Nicholas Ray, Aki Kaurismaki, and Milos Forman; he gave me Ismael Bernal, Raymond Red, and, like any proud Filipino film buff, took us to a source of true pride: Manila’s vast pirated-DVD malls.

During one calm moment, Nika, still adjusting to the growing pains of beginning to live with a lover (much less relocating halfway around the world), asked my wife, "How did you know that he was the one for you?"

"I just knew, almost immediately," my wife replied. "You will, too."

My wife and I won’t associate their Quezon City home with the tragedy that befell them. Instead, we’ll remember Nika looking up from Alexis’s bed, across a pile of bootleg DVDs, with a 35mm print of Batang West Side on the floor and copies of Ekran on the chair, and quietly saying, "You’re right. I think I knew, too."

"The first impulse of any good film critic, and to this I think you would agree, must be of love," Alexis wrote to Nika a year later in Rogue. For all of us lucky to be a part of the film community, this love — for film, and for the friends we have made along the way who share it — is what unites us. It’s also what keeps our friendships going, even when we haven’t reached out to one another in months or years. And it’s what will keep people like Alexis and Nika in our hearts for a long, long time. Their true home still exists, in the words they wrote, the friendships they made, and the love they shared with us all. Our condolences to their family, friends, and loved ones.

Jason Sanders is Film Research Associate at Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. A version of this piece was first published in Filmmaker magazine’s blog at www.filmmakermagazine.com/blog.

To read the full article from Alexis to Nika, visit Rogue Magazine at http://rogue.ph/columns/entry/the_letter_i_would_love_to_read_to_you_in_person/P1/

Alexis Tioseco’s Criticine Web site can be found at www.criticine.com, and his writing can also be found as www.alexistioseco.wordpress.com

Mind your own

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September 8, 2009

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There’s no filmmaker working today who more accurately captures awkward moments than Andrew Bujalski. Funny Ha Ha (2002), Mutual Appreciation (2005), and his new Beeswax unfold like fly-on-the-wall documentaries (though they’re all scripted by Bujalski), following ordinary folks doing everyday things: toiling at temp jobs, crushing on a friend’s significant other, bullshitting around the kitchen table, and generally trying to negotiate the dramas of life that are both small and life-changing.

In 2005, Bujalski told me that he bristles every time he hears his films called "Cassavetes-esque." I suspect he’s also weary of the term "mumblecore," though he’s used it in interviews (and, according to Wikipedia, it was coined by a sound editor who’d worked with Bujalski.) But his films are at the forefront of the genre (see also: Humpday, 2005’s The Puffy Chair), and they’ve consistently defined its characteristics, with amateur actors shot using bare-bones techniques in naturalistic settings. Funny Ha Ha, about a recent college grad trying to figure out what to with her life, stayed in theaters for years, popping up in San Francisco more than once. Mutual Appreciation, a black-and-white look at a Brooklyn musician trying, uh, to figure out what to do with his life, opened locally but overall had less exposure.

Beeswax will surely lure Bujalski fans, but even those who think they hate mumblecore won’t be disappointed by this tale. It’s his best and most mature work to date, focusing on Austin, Texas twins Jeannie (Tilly Hatcher) and Lauren (Maggie Hatcher). Bujalski’s in his 30s now, and his characters — while still facing uncertain futures — have slightly more adult concerns. Vintage shop co-owner Jeannie (whose use of a wheelchair is presented matter-of-factly) worries that her aloof business partner is plotting a power grab, a conflict that unfolds alongside mini-crises, like cash register tape jamming or an employee having an emotional meltdown.

Seeking legal advice, she reignites her relationship with Merrill (Alex Karpovsky, playing the Bujalski role since the director doesn’t act in this one), who’s charming though prone to making accidentally rude remarks. Meanwhile, Lauren’s inability to find steady employment leads her to consider taking a spur-of-the-moment teaching job — in Kenya. As they fumble toward decisions emotional and practical, Beeswax simply steps back and observes. And as with all of Bujalski’s films, it’s hard not to get drawn in.

BEESWAX opens Fri/11 in Bay Area theaters.

Lights, camera, kink!

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September 8, 2009

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For most of us, erotic film is more a means to an end than an event unto itself — not to mention something to be enjoyed in private. This month, Good Vibrations offers a prime opportunity to break free from that conception and celebrate erotica in a thoroughly public way. On Sept. 17, the Good Vibrations Independent Erotic Film Festival returns to the Castro Theatre: two hosts, 11 finalists, and countless displays of kink, fetish, and good old-fashioned perversion.

According to festival director Camilla Lombard, Good Vibes received 50 submissions from all over the world. What was once regional has become international, and the formerly one-night event is being spread out across an entire week. Starting Sept. 12, Good Vibes is hosting a series of events, including a "Blue Movie Night" and a screening of the classic The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) — with Miss Jones herself, Georgina Spelvin, in attendance.

The climax (no pun intended) is the Sept. 17 Castro Theatre screening, hosted by Peaches Christ and Dr. Carol Queen. Audience members will vote on the short films, which range from softcore to hardcore, sexy to sexier. The linking characteristic of these pieces is their objectivity — it’s not about what the mainstream porn industry says is hot. It’s up to the filmmakers and, naturally, their audience to decide.

Travis Mathews’ In Their Room finds its eroticism in the reality of male sexuality rather than in the act itself. Mathews interviewed a group of BUTT magazine readers in their bedrooms, getting his subjects to uncover themselves — literally and figuratively.

"I think we’re so desensitized in the traditional realm of what’s erotic and what’s pornographic that it just becomes not sexy," he explains. "The things that are interesting to me in porn are the little glimpses of things that are real or are authentic or mess-ups."

Though more explicit, Let Me Tell You John Cameron Mitchell by Paul Festa is equally unconventional. His piece was edited down from his audition tape for John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus (2006). A "remix" of the original, Festa’s short fits with the festival’s theme of subjective appreciation. As he puts it, "When you remove what you thought was the heart of it, it actually gives the reader or viewer something to do."

And then there are films with no nudity at all, like Nara Denning’s Neurotique No. 4, a strange silent movie that hints at the erotic but remains essentially chaste. Denning shares a sentiment similar to Festa’s: "I left it kind of open for [the audience] to interpret."

Unless you’re an open-minded pansexual hornball, there’s a good chance you won’t find all 11 films arousing, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Good Vibes intends their fest to be about choice and diversity, not about getting off — though standing O’s (pun fully intended) are not discouraged, of course.

GOOD VIBRATIONS INDEPENDENT EROTIC FILM FESTIVAL Sept 12–17, various venues and prices, www.gv-ixff.org/film

Rialto’s Best of British Noir

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September 8, 2009

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PREVIEW That undisputed champ of repertory programming, film noir, is getting a good workout during otherwise sunny September. Elliot Lavine combs the Columbia vaults for a 22-film Roxie bonanza, while the Castro Theatre and Pacific Film Archive look across the pond for a touch of "tea and larceny." Even if it’s disingenuous to label these Anglo entries as noir — the camera angles are right, the mannered scripts not so much — the down-and-out British crime films make for a fascinating mirror image to their American counterparts, not least for the visible evidence of World War II trauma. The rarity-heavy PFA series will better satisfy the buff, but only a fool would pass up a week’s worth of Rialto restoration prints at the Castro. Three of the five films are Graham Greene affairs, including a long-overdue re-release of Brighton Rock (1947). The real discovery of the series, however, is Robert Hamer’s It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), an unusual mélange of kitchen-sink drama, Dostoyevskian moral tale, and on-the-lam thriller. If the steady downpour is pure noir, the film’s narrative is less typical. Instead of concentrating trauma and repression into a single (male) figure, Hamer spreads it around an entire East London neighborhood. There is an escaped convict at the center of the story who looks every bit the seductive part, but in spite of a stylish chase finale, Hamer is more interested in the drab corners of ordinary deceit. His resourceful dramatizations of working class spaces — and specifically their lack of privacy — are consumed with an anxiety far in excess of the film’s serviceable plot.

RIALTO’S BEST OF BRITISH NOIR Sept. 11–16, $10. Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF

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

Nuclear implosion

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September 2, 2009

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Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 1998 After Life stepped into a bureaucratic beyond. His 2001 Distance probed the aftermath of a religious cult’s mass suicide. Likewise loosely inspired by fact, Nobody Knows (2004) charted the survival of an abandoning mother’s practically feral children in a Tokyo apartment. 2006’s Hana was a splashy samurai story — albeit one atypically resistant to conventional action.

Despite their shared character nuance, these prior features don’t quite prepare one for the very ordinary milieu and domestic dramatics of Still Walking. Kore-eda’s latest recalls no less than Ozu in its seemingly casual yet meticulous dissection of a broken family still awkwardly bound — if just for one last visit — by the onerous traditions and institution of "family" itself. There’s no conceptually hooky lure here. Yet Walking is arguably both Kore-eda’s finest hour so far, and as emotionally rich a movie experience as 2009 has yet afforded.

One day every summer the entire Yokohama clan assembles to commemorate an eldest son’s accidental death 15 years earlier. This duty calls, even if art restorer Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) chafes at retired M.D. dad’s (Yoshio Harada) obvious disappointment over his career choice, at the insensitivity of his chatterbox mum (Kiri Kirin), and at being eternally compared to a retroactively sainted sibling. Even more so now that Ryo now has a bride (Yui Natsukawa) and son (Shohei Tanaka) eager to please their new in-laws — though they’re already damned as widow and another man’s child.

Not subject to such evaluative harshness is many-foibled sole Yokohama daughter Chinami (Nobody Knows‘ oblivious, helium-voiced mum You). Simply because she’s a girl — so dim-bulb husband and running-wild kids get the pass stern grandpa denies prodigal son Ryo and company. Small crises, subtle tensions, the routines of food preparation, and other minutae ghost-drive a narrative whose warm, familiar, pained, touching, and sometimes hilarious progress seldom leaves the small-town parental home interior — yet never feels claustrophobic in the least.

There’s a whiff of compromise in a coda that feels compelled to spell out the reconciliatory note already hard-won through inference. (Gratuitous sentimentality is a habit Japanese non-genre cinema often finds hard to kick.) Nonetheless, this is Kore-eda’s most truly naturalistic, let alone Ozu-like film since his first — the comparatively bleak 1995 Maborosi — as well as a dysfunctional-family seriocomedy uncommonly beautiful inside and out. It’s a quietly funny and insightful two hours capable of inducing one pretty ecstatic afterglow.

STILL WALKING opens Fri/4 in Bay Area theaters.

Baader to the bone

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September 2, 2009

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"The Baader Meinhof gang? Those spoiled, hipster terrorists?" That was the response of one knowledgeable pop watcher when I told her about The Baader Mienhof Complex, the new feature from Uli Edel (1989’s Last Exit to Brooklyn). The violence-prone West German anarchist group, otherwise known as the Red Army Faction (RAF), still inspires both venomous spew and starry-eyed fascination (see Joe Strummer’s RAF T-shirt, Gerhard Richter’s paintings of its dead leaders, and Erin Cosgrove’s 2003 satirical romance paperback, The Baader-Meinhof Affair). Edel’s sober, clear-eyed view of the youthful and sexy yet arrogant and murderous, gun-toting radicals at the center of Baader-Meinhof’s mythology — a complex construct, indeed — manages to do justice to the core of their sprawling chronology, while never overstating their narrative’s obvious post-9/11 relevance.

Based on the nonfiction best-seller by onetime Der Spiegel editor Stefan Aust, The Baader Meinhof Complex finds its still, watchful center in Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck). Aust’s onetime fourth-estate colleague makes the dramatic trajectory from bourgeois wife and mother to underground radical crawling through Mideast dust and toting a machine gun under the tutelage of Fatah. She’s shocked by brutal police crackdowns on the student protests against the visiting shah of Iran and America’s Vietnam War — enacted with a cruelty reminiscent of the one-generation-removed SS and a reminder of a not-so-distant fascist past — and somewhat in awe of Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu) and Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek), who emit rock-star charisma.

Helping to bust Baader out of jail on the pretext of working on a book, Meinhof joins her crushes in life on the lam. The three and their followers declare an urban guerrilla war on West Germany until they are nabbed and stuck in solitary at Stammheim Prison. While their trial descends into bitter, kangaroo court-style comedy, the RAF members outside resort to heightened feats of bloodshed and desperation in the so-called "German Autumn" of 1977, killing the chief federal prosecutor, kidnapping a banker, and finally conspiring in the hijacking of a Lufthansa jet.

Edel has absorbed his share of criticism for his RAF portrayal: the director’s far from sympathetic when it comes to these self-absorbed, smug rebels, who relish offending their Muslim hosts by sunbathing nude, yet he’s not immune to their cocky, idealistic charms. Cool-headed yet fully capable of thrilling to his subjects’ eye-popping audacity, the filmmaker does an admirable job of contextualizing the group within the global student and activist movements and bringing the viewer, authentically, to the still timely question: how does one best (i.e., morally) respond to terrorism?

THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX opens Fri/4 in Bay Area theaters.

Bliss

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September 1, 2009

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REVIEW American regional differences and disparities between rural and urban culture have nothing on their Turkish counterparts. Abdullah Oguz’s Bliss (a title that initially seems cruelly ironic) begins in a village in eastern Turkey where Islamic law still dictates that women be killed for breaches of sexual purity, even when they are victims of rape. Young Meryem (Ozgu Namal) shudders in isolation in a shed, receiving food and deprecation from her stepmother. All that is apparent in the beginning is that there has been some sort of transgression which dictates that a young male relative escort her out of the village to be sacrificed in order to restore the honor of the family. That duty falls on Cemal (Murat Han), her seemingly impassive distant cousin who has just returned from military service. What is initially perceived as a simple task by Cemal becomes complicated as he quietly develops affection for Meryem despite his outward hostility. The culture clash becomes evident when they arrive in Istanbul, and Cemal’s task is received with disdain by a family member who declares that Istanbul is no place for his backwoods customs. A military bud is more diplomatic and provides the awkward duo a remote hiding place related to his fishery business, an act of kindness that can hopefully spare Cemal from the rage of the village elder who ordered the honor killing. As the taciturn two — Meryem tremulous and Cemal brooding — befriend a progressive professor (Talat Bulut), on the run from a stiflingly bourgeois existence, who takes them aboard his sailboat, the tone shifts. At once bliss, however improbable, seems possible. Though Meryem and the professor are more readily sympathetic characters, it is Cemal who is the most intriguing and who represents the power of the film — the quiet, conflicted, and gradual revelations that constitute the necessary pains of progress, both psychological and societal.

BLISS opens Fri/4 at the Roxie.

Night repper

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August 26, 2009

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D Tour and Rogue Wave Joe Granato’s award-winning doc about musician Pat Spurgeon, with an acoustic post-screening performance by Spurgeon’s Oakland band. Sept. 3, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; www.sfmoma.org.

"Cocky White Guys" Jesse Hawthorne Ficks of Midnites for Maniacs serves up a triple platter of cockiness: Risky Business (1983), Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), and the very closet-gay Last American Virgin (1982). Sept. 4, Castro; www.castrotheatre.com.

"Speechless: Recent Experimental Animation" The program includes the 3-D amazements of local wonder woman Kerry Laitala’s enticingly titled Chromatic Cocktail Extra Fizzy. Sept. 8, Pacific Film Archive; www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.

SF Shorts This year’s lineup includes over 60 short films and music videos. Sept. 9-12, Red Vic; www.redvicmoviehouse.com.

Bigger Than Life Nicholas Ray’s gonzo look at suburban family ideals gone amok was too weird for 1956. Todd Haynes has stolen from this movie as much as from any Sirk work. Sept. 10, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; www.ybca.org

Lucha Beach Party Will the Thrill takes his showmanship to the Balboa, along with Santo and Blue Demon vs. the Monsters (1969) and longtime contender for best movie title ever, Wrestling Women vs. Aztec Mummy (1964). Sept. 10, www.thrillville.net

Rialto’s Best of British Noir A chance to see Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) on the big screen. Sept. 11-16, Castro; www.castrotheatre.com.

"Top Bill: The Films of William Klein" The great photographer’s underrated film output gets a thorough survey, ranging from his prescient and sharp 1960s portraits of Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali and Eldridge Cleaver to his madcap yet dry looks at fashion in Paris. Sept. 11-Oct. 11, Pacific Film Archive; www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.

Independent Erotic Film Festival Good Vibrations presents the event’s fourth incarnation. Highlights include a potential screening of Gerard Damiano’s The Devil in Miss Jones and a program of 1920s peep show reels. Sept. 12-17, various venues; www.gv-ixff.org.

Spectrology Mad Cat Women’s Film Festival presents a one-off screening of a new work by Kerry Laitala. Sept. 16, El Rio; www.madcatfilmfestival.org

Film Noir at the Roxie You can always count on the Roxie to play host to the less obvious dark alleys of noir. Sept. 17-30, Roxie; www.roxie.com

Liverpool Lisandro Alonso’s highly acclaimed 2008 film finally get a SF gig. Sept. 17-20, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; www.ybca.org.

Iranian Film Fest This year’s festival focuses on women’s roles in Iranian society. Sept. 19-20, various venues; www.iranianfilmfestival.blogspot.com.

"Life’s Work: The Cinema of Ermanno Ulmi" A comprehensive retrospective of films by a director known for his masterful renderings of work, such as 1961’s Il posto. Sept. 25-Oct. 30, Pacific Film Archive; www-bampfa.berkeley.edu.

Grease Sing-Along The San Francisco Film Society presents this key 1978 addition to the canon of Randal Kleiser. Sept. 26; www.sffs.org.

The Room Avoid The Room at your peril. Sept. 26. Red Vic; www.redvicmoviehouse.com.

Dario Argento’s Three Mothers Trilogy Together at last: Suspiria (1977), Inferno (1980) and Mother of Tears (2007). Be there or be violently stabbed by a hand in a black glove. Oct. 1-4, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; www.ybca.org.

The Red Shoes A new print — which debuted at this year’s Cannes Film Festival — of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 gem. Oct. 1, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; www.sfmoma.org.

Found Footage Festival Trash is a treasure as curators Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher host the fourth incarnation of the event. Oct. 2-3, Red Vic; www.redvicmoviehouse.com.

"Julien Duvivier: Poetic Craftsman of Cinema" The lengthy and perhaps erratic career of the man who made Jean Gabin an icon gets a full treatment. Oct. 2-31, Pacific Film Archive; www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.

Barry Jenkins’ Shorts The San Francisco filmmaker shares his work to date, including his feature debut Medicine for Melancholy (2007). Oct. 3, Artists’ Television Access; www.othercinema.com

"Nervous Magic Lantern Peformance: Towards the Depths of the Even Greater Depression" Ken Jacobs in the house, aiming to "get between the eyes, contest the separate halves of the brain" with a magic lantern that uses neither film or video. Oct. 7, Pacific Film Archive; www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.

Pink Cinema Revolution A series for the Japanese genre and industry that has schooled some master filmmakers while titilutf8g audiences. Oct. 7-25, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; www.ybca.org.

Robert Beavers The experimental filmmaker’s fall stint in the Bay Area includes four programs presented by SF Cinematheque. Oct. 8-10, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; www.sfmoma.org, www.ybca.org.

"Eyes Upside Down" Great title. A program of films curated by the writer P. Adams Sitney. Oct. 11, www.sfcinematheque.org.

Arab Film Festival This year’s festival lasts ten days. Oct. 15-24, various venues; www.aff.org

French Cinema Now Contemporary film in France condensed into a series. Oct. 29-Nov. 4, Sundance Kabuki; www.sffs.org.

Halloween Gore ‘n’ Snorefest Thrillville returns to the Balboa with Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (1988) and Zontar, the Thing From Venus (1966). If only the characters of these movies could time travel to meet one another. Oct. 29; www.thrillville.net.

"Running Up That Hill" Michael Robinson, creator of the eye-blinding and hilarious video Light is Waiting (2007), borrows a title from Kate Bush for this program, which he’s curated. Nov. 6, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; www.ybca.org.

It Came from Kuchar Jennifer Kroot’s documentary about the Kuchar brothers hits the screen after raves at Frameline. Nov. 14, Artists’ Television Access; www.othercinema.com.

New Italian Cinema The San Francisco Film Society presents a sample of recent films from Italy. Nov. 15-22, Sundance Kabuki; www.sffs.org.

Recent Restorations: George and Mike Kuchar You can never have too much Kuchar. Dec. 10, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; www.sfmoma.org.

Excitement! Dread! Blatant Oscar baiting!

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August 26, 2009

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cheryl@sfbg.com

Let’s be honest, film fans: summer 2009 hasn’t exactly been an exercise in awesome. Early entries like X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Terminator Salvation were disappointing; hyped projects like Public Enemies and Brüno offered some entertainments, but overall felt kinda meh. The Hangover, Up, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and Star Trek may have been mostly deserving of their $250 million-plus hauls, but think how many poor suckers emptied their wallets at the sublimely awful Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which has raked in a bone-rattling $400 million so far. (That’s a lotta robot balls.)

But in Hollywood, there’s always hope. District 9 kicked ass, and Inglourious Basterds — while not Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece, not by a forehead-carving longshot — at least provoked spirited debate among filmgoers who’ve been chomping on flaccid fare like GI Joe for months. What follows is a selective list of upcoming releases (dates are subject to change), including some surefire Oscar contenders, though I’m still holding out hope for a dark horse Drag Me to Hell nomination or two.

Sept. 11: In behind-the-scenes Vogue doc The September Issue, the devil wears Prada and busts fashionista chops while getting her magazine’s most important issue to press. Anna Wintour takes off her sunglasses! She cooly dismisses headlines, underlings, feathers, and an ugly pink-and-black ensemble! Director RJ Cutler (producer of 1993’s The War Room) gets the ever-so-glamorous dirt. Also out today: The Hills fembot Audrina Patridge brings her ceiling eyes to the big screen in horror flick Sorority Row; and mumblecore master Andrew Bujalski rolls out his third feature, after 2002’s Funny Ha Ha and 2005’s Mutual Appreciation.

Sept. 18: In a clash of the zeitgeists, Transformers thespian Megan Fox stars as a demonic high schooler in the Diablo Cody-scripted Jennifer’s Body. Irony is, like, so hot, y’know? For The Informant!, Steven Soderbergh returns from indieland to "from the director of Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen" mode. His newest is the tale of a goofy, whistleblowing agribusinessman played by a fat-and-mustachioed Matt Damon.

Sept. 25: Proud, profiteering misogynist Tucker Max — a figurehead in the "fratire" literary movement — cowrote the script for I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, based on his book (in turn, based on his blog), which kinda looks like a crasser spin on The Hangover. Fame updates the 1980 high school song-and-dance classic, a remake that actually makes sense given the popularity of the High School Musical series and all those bajillions of televised talent contests.

Oct. 2: Judging by its trailer, Zombieland could be the greatest movie ever made. Also: British footy drama The Damned United, with a script adapted by Frost/Nixon (2008) screenwriter Peter Morgan; and the latest from Michael Moore (the self-explanatory Capitalism: A Love Story) and the Coen brothers (A Serious Man, a ’60s-set black comedy that features no major movie stars).

Oct. 16: At long-friggin’-last, the Cormac McCarthy adaptation The Road — starring Viggo Mortensen and directed by John Hillcoat (2005’s The Proposition )— comes shuffling down the postapocalyptic highway. Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are squares off for its twee-off with Wed Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (out Nov. 13).

Oct. 23: Lars von Trier’s Antichrist shocked Cannes — will it make a splash here, opposite Saw VI (oh yeah, they made a sixth one)? Meanwhile, cult cinema fans won’t want to miss the return of Thai martial arts wizard Tony Jaa in Ong Bak 2. Hold on to your Buddha heads! Finally, when Michael Jackson died, he left behind enough rehearsal footage to fill a backstage doc, named This Is It after his never-launched tour. Celebration or cash-in?

Nov. 6: Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare at Goats is one of my favorite books. If George Clooney and co. mess this one up, I might have to lock them in a small room and blast the Barney theme until they crack.

Nov. 13: Precious: Based on the Novel Push By Sapphire was raved-about at Sundance, with stars like Mo’Nique and Mariah Carey de-glamming for art. On the complete other end of the spectrum, disaster expert Roland Emmerich masterminds the end of the world (again) with 2012.

Nov. 20: The Twilight Saga: New Moon opens. Look, enough people care about this that I don’t have to.

Dec. 11: Three heavyweights, three very different target audiences. Disney unveils its first-ever African American animated heroine in The Princess and the Frog (about time, Mouse House); Clint Eastwood directs Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela in the rugby-themed Invictus; and Peter Jackson takes on Alice Sebold’s bestseller The Lovely Bones, starring Atonement (2007) fabulist Saoirse Ronan as the doomed Susie Salmon.

Dec. 18: I was stoked about James Cameron’s Avatar. Then I saw the trailer. Hmm.

Dec. 25: Now that Guy Ritchie’s no longer married to Madonna, will his filmmaking talent return? With hot property Robert Downey Jr. starring, Sherlock Holmes could be revisionist-tastic. And, strictly for Christmas Day masochists, there’s Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.

Somers Town

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August 25, 2009

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PREVIEW Black and white photography born out of technical necessity transforms Somers Town into a stark and poignant portrait of the drudgery and displacement of two wayward youths in modern-day England. Tomo (Thomas Turgoose), a cheeky runaway who perhaps in a past life was a Dickensian street urchin, flees Nottingham and hops aboard a train bound for London, seeking refuge from the banality of life in the Midlands. Cornered in an alleyway, robbed, and beaten, Tomo finally finds a reluctant and unlikely friend in Marek (Piotr Jagiello), a Polish immigrant who just moved to the U.K. Unbeknownst to his father, Marek begins hiding his homeless friend in his flat. Joining forces, the two boys bond by working odd jobs for their cockney landlord, stealing clothes from a local launderette, and fighting for the affections of a charming French waitress. Director Shane Meadows (2006’s This is England) instills Somers Town with humanity and humor mined from class and culture shock, with his subtle comedic stylings springing from simple interchanges like when Marek’s landlord insists that he remove his Manchester United jersey to avoid getting roughed up by soccer hooligans. Despite these comedic moments, Meadows does not shy away from the pain of feeling adrift in a new city or country and beautifully captures the melting pot mentality that is London. From their low-rent apartment overlooking a train station that holds the promise of Paris and love and friendship, Tomo and Marek slowly but surely build a brotherly camaraderie, awakening a dreamlike, limitless world that, in the end, is a little less black and white.

SOMERS TOWN opens Fri/28 in Bay Area theaters.

Band of blabbers

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August 19, 2009

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With Inglourious Basterds Quentin Tarantino pulls off something that seemed not only impossible, but undesirable, and surely unnecessary: making yet another of his in-jokey movies about other movies, albeit one that also happens to be kinda about the Holocaust — or at least Jews getting their own back on the Nazis during World War II — and (the kicker) is not inherently repulsive. As Rube Goldbergian achievements go, this is up there. Nonetheless, Basterds is more fun, with less guilt, than it has any right to be.

The "basterds" are Tennessee moonshiner Pvt. Brad Pitt’s unit of Jewish soldiers committed to infuriating Der Fuhrer by literally scalping all the uniformed Nazis they can bag. Meanwhile a survivor (Melanie Laurent) of one of insidious SS "Jew Hunter" Christoph Waltz’s raids, now passing as racially "pure" and operating a Paris cinema (imagine the cineaste name-dropping possibilities!) finds her venue hosting a Third Reich hoedown that provides an opportunity to nuke Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and Goering in one swoop. Additional personalities involved are played by the disparate likes of Diane Kruger, Hostel (2006) auteur Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender, Daniel Bruhl, Til Schweiger, Rod Taylor, Mike Myers, and more.

Tactically, Tarantino’s movies have always been about the ventriloquizing of that yadadada-yadadada whose self-consciousness is bearable because the cleverness is actual. That balance started to slip in Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004) and Grindhouse‘s Death Proof (2007) passages where you just wanted the actors to quit shooting QT breeze so something could happen. Brief eruptions of lasciviously enjoyed violence aside, Basterds too almost entirely consists of lengthy dialogues or near-monologues in which characters pitch and receive tasty palaver amid lethal danger. When the movie’s too-brief climax is followed by un petit closing punchline, one feels a little less yappin’ and a tad more payoff could have pushed Basterds from highly to career-cappingly enjoyable. Still, even if he’s practically writing theatre now, Tarantino does understand the language of cinema. There isn’t a pin-sharp edit, actor’s raised eyebrow, artful design excess, or musical incongruity here that isn’t just the business. (Dennis Harvey)

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS opens Fri/21 in Bay Area theaters.

This is your film on drugs

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August 18, 2009

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

Movies and drugs were made for each other — depiction-wise that is, beyond experience-enhancing audience and creativity-enhancing (or canceling) maker usage. Too bad legality and morality so frequently messed with that perfect union. Herewith a highly selective, hardly definitive list of the medium’s

resulting greatest freakouts. It excludes the following: really obvious stuff, like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Reefer Madness (1936); most horrific withdrawal sequences (that’s another article); and scenes in which performers really do appear very high (inevitably, Dennis Hopper).

Case Study: LSD (1969) Your friends at Lockheed Aircraft Corp. crafted this cautionary educational short in which our heroine, already "pretty jacked up on marijuana," drops you-know-what. She then goes downtown for a hot dog. But when she’s about to consume that tasty snack it turns into a troll doll on a bun, begging for mercy because "He had a wife and seven kids at home to support." Then the screaming starts.

The Big Cube (1969) A spoiled stepdaughter and predator playboy attempt to drive wealthy widow Lana Turner insane by serially dosing her. What’s perhaps most amazing about this awesomely awful potboiler is that Turner’s acting is even worse when her character is straight.

The Trial of Billy Jack (1974) Before he’s ready to shelve pacifism once again to kick fascist butt, Tom Laughlin’s counterculture vigilante must go deep into his New Age White Dude’s identification with Native American spirituality by doing peyote in the desert. This attempt to separate ego from self is in fact the most egomaniacal drug trip in the history of cinema, equating Tom/BJ with the soaring national bird and Jesus Christ.

Go Ask Alice (1975) There may be no wrong-trip scene freakier than this TV movie’s one in which our teen runaway protagonist and a temporary traveling companion are made to bark like dogs for an older couple — the "winner" getting a new boost, the loser getting "punishment" horribly left to our imaginations.

Blue Sunshine (1976) Never grab the wig off a secret U.S. government LSD experiment veteran whose secret baldness "covers" homicidal psychosis. And if you do, this cult horror classic teaches, stay the hell away from the fireplace.

Desperate Teenage Lovedolls (1984) This DIY punk parody’s all-female band members avenge themselves on their greedy manager by mega-dosing him, resulting in horrific hallucinations of Taco Bell ads and Barbra Streisand Yentl (1983) posters inspire unfortunate delusions of flight.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) On everything, Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro’s Duke and Dr. Gonzo visit Circus Circus — an environment that could induce anxiety attacks in the soberest tourist.

Cookers (2001) This vastly underrated quasi-horror is a one long paranoid wigout. Its three characters are meth cookers holed up in an abandoned rural house until their batch is done. Unfortunately, madness, sexual competitiveness, and the questionably supernatural intervene. The other great meth horror movie so far is Pop Skull (2007), which doesn’t even specify the substance being abused.

Knocked Up (2007) Paul Rudd. Shrooms. Five different types of hotel chairs. Plus "Love, the most beautiful shiny warm thing in the world!"

Pressure Cooker

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August 18, 2009

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REVIEW "Some of you will not remain. Whatever you heard, it is five times worse," announces the ruthless but deeply well-intentioned culinary arts teacher Mrs. Stephenson. It’s the first day of the class she teaches at a high school in an underprivileged area of Philadelphia. Pressure Cooker focuses on three seniors who are hardworking chefs-in-training, all chasing the generous scholarships that success in a final competition would award them. Two of them are desperate for an economic leg up and physical escape: Fatoumata is an African immigrant who is disciplined and grateful for the opportunities the U.S. has offered her so far, but in order to realize her career goals she must escape the overbearing hand of her father. Erica, an amiable cheerleader who cares for her blind sister and laughs good-naturedly at her friends’ undeveloped palates — they can only appreciate Fritos and Cheetos — also cannot escape stifling familial expectations without assistance. The third, Tyree, is a football star when not sharpening his cooking skills. The high-stakes drama in the kitchen-cum-classroom is entertaining enough — particularly Mrs. Stephenson’s hilarious shouting and encouragement masked as jeering — but it is the homelife struggle of the subjects that makes this story worthwhile.

PRESSURE COOKER opens Fri/21 in Bay Area theaters.