• No categories

Film Review

Kucharmania!

-
0

johnny@sfbg.com

PREVIEW I was going to review It Came from Kuchar, Jennifer Kroot’s documentary about George and Mike Kuchar, but a combination of exhaustion, absent-mindedness, and deep innate logic got the best of me. Instead of writing a straightforward appraisal of a movie about two filmmakers who are anything but straight, I’ve decided to pay tribute to a pair of brothers whose filmography and videography is longer and larger and (sorry!) more freely imaginative than all of the pictures in this year’s Frameline festival put together.

For sure, there is an irony at the heart of Kroot’s dedicated endeavor, just as there was one at the core of Mary Jordan’s equally appreciative Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis (2006). Underground filmmaking as preached and practiced by Smith and the Kuchars is too wild to be summarized by a stadium of talking heads, let alone condensed into one of 21st century cinema’s most common manias, the feature-length documentary portrait. In 1997, when George and Mike published the midlife autobiography Reflections From a Cinematic Cesspool (Zanja Press, 182 pages, $19.95), they’d already created at least 300 films and videos. Just as Smith’s unfinished projects tease and outright mock any neat categorization or traditional definition of art work, how could a single film or commentator do justice to the myriad lovely warts and hidden undersides of such a gargantuan filmography? Most likely, Kroot has fashioned an introduction, so I will try to as well, using words instead of a camera.

If you’re a movie-lover in San Francisco, you have some Kuchar memories, and maybe even some bonds forged partly through an admiration of George and Mike Kuchar. I remember planning to wear an ape suit to a Roxie Cinema screening of Curt McDowell’s Thundercrack!, which is scripted by George. I remember how one friend’s private screening of George’s Color Me Shameless (1967) helped jostle me out of a deep depression rooted in embarrassment about past shameless behavior. However silly they might seem on the surface, many Kuchar movies tap into truths about life, and for that I’m thankful.

Another vital aspect of cinema Kuchar is its continued influence on contemporary San Francisco creativity. Kroot’s movie spotlights the Kuchars’ influence on cult icons and iconographers such as John Waters, Bill Griffith, and Guy Maddin. But name a local moviemaker you like, and that person is probably a Kuchar devotee, or even — like Kroot — a former student from one of George’s San Francisco Art Institute classes. When I enjoy a movie by Sam Green, David Enos, Martha Colburn, or the late, great (and currently resurgent) McDowell, I sense the spirit and essence of Kuchar. When I take note of Sarah Enid’s behind-the-camera direction and before-the-camera emotion, I see a Kuchar heroine beginning to tell her own story. Meanwhile, George keeps making whirwlind star-wipe video diaries and cooking up scripted genre goulashes that possess a singularly strange flavor. A couple of months ago, someone near and dear enthusiastically showed me a recent paradisical movie by Mike, and I was blown away by the potent high it derived from the beauty of its male lead actor. Secondhand smoke? Yes please.

It Came From Kuchar is an apt title not just because George and Mike Kuchar take their inspiration from B-movies, but because something about the Kuchar brothers as a phenomenon is not of this world — so of the world as to be almost too good for it. It came from outer space, and it came from beneath the sea, but not until it came — goopily — from the creative intestines and pleasure centers of George and Mike Kuchar did cinema truly phone home.

IT CAME FROM KUCHAR

Sun/21, 6:30 p.m., Castro

The man from camp

-
0

If I had to choose a true SF son of the Kuchar brothers, it might be Gary Gregerson. Unlike a number of great local filmmakers, Gregerson — as far as I know — has never taken a class from George Kuchar. When it comes to wild B-movie imagination, he was born that way. A madcap mainstay whose zines (Fembot), music (with Sta-Prest in the 1990s, and Puce Moment, featuring Jon Nikki, today), DJing (at the Clap) and DIY filmmaking (Mondo Bottomless) make this city lively, Gregerson is currently at work on a movie titled AIDS Camp. I recently jumped on my pogo stick and caught up with him to discuss fashion, the perils of directing, the last days of a landmark, and his role in a film at this year’s Frameline festival.

SFBG What are you wearing?

GARY GREGERSON One of my favorite shirts from the ’60s, baby blue cords, and a button that says, "Tennis is a ball."

SFBG AIDS Camp: please break down the title in all its potential meaning.

GG Originally I wanted it to be set in a place a sci-fi wasteland but outdoors. There’d be a discussion about breaking out and someone would say, "But there’re no walls here," and someone else would say, "Look around, it’s camp! Everywhere you look it’s camp, camp, camp!" Oh, and I have HIV.

SFBG This movie is more of a group effort, with a large cast that needed to be wrangled. How was the experience different?

GG Continuity was a challenge. It was a challenge getting the same people to spend all day in the "internment" area and then another day in Glen Canyon Park for the "liberation" scenes. I didn’t have any problem finding "untrainables" (sex radicals) but it was hard to find "trainables" (straight-laced gays).

SFBG You appear in The Lollipop Generation, which is playing at this year’s Frameline fest. What was that experience like, and what have you learned from the film’s director, G.B. Jones?

GG I was supposed to be flagging tricks from in front of DeGrassi Junior High — that’s the actual location. I had one car honk at me. I learned that Super 8 looks even better when it’s been sitting around for 15 years, maybe in a fridge somewhere. The condensation gives it a neat effect.

SFBG What is your favorite dance?

GG The Hip-o-crite.

SFBG You are a known Sid Krofft admirer. What is your stance on the current film "remake" of Land of the Lost? What are your views on Sleestaks in general?

GG Maybe a "serious" remake would actually be more enjoyable, but we’ll see. I wanted to do a short with Alvin Orloff called H.R. Buff-n-stuff. I can’t weigh in on Sleestaks, but I like guys with Chaka hair.

SFBG If you paid no heed to the words of the Flirts and put another dime in the jukebox right now, what three songs would you choose to play?

GG A jukebox?! How quaint. Let’s see … maybe "Goin’ Cruisin’" by Malibu (another Bobby O group), "Cruising" by Hunx and his Punx, and "Just Like the Leaves" by my friends the Bippies.

SFBG As a host of many events there, tell the people: What is great about Aunt Charlie’s?

GG The scents and sensuality. And Joe and the gang are really awesome for letting me film there.

SFBG What are your thoughts on the closing of the Central YMCA?

GG It’s only two blocks from my house, so I’m ridin’ a bummer. I need a tile from the steam room for a memento.

SFBG Gary Gregerson, is that what you call sockin’ it to me?

GG Well, it is my happening and it’s freaking me out.

AIDS CAMP premieres in August at Homo A Go Go in Olympia, Wash. Puce Moment plays Club Club You’re Dead at the Stud in July.

Hot topic

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

 

If you’ve seen Flesh (1968) or Trash (1970) or Heat (1972), there’s a good chance you’d like to spend an hour alone with Joe Dallesandro. Let’s face it — that’s probably not going to happen anytime soon, so you may have to settle for something a bit less private. As substitutes go, Little Joe is a nice alternative: no, you can’t talk to (or touch) Dallesandro directly, but the experience is certainly intimate.

Little Joe just isn’t your standard documentary. Forget the talking heads or — horror of all horrors — reenactments. This is Joe on Joe: 90 minutes of the Warhol superstar reflecting on his accidental fame and everything that came after. It’s a fascinating story, even without the cinematic embellishments. Of course, it helps that Dallesandro himself does all the talking. For one thing, he’s undoubtedly the best authority on his life. For another, he’s not bad to look at, even pushing 60.

The film was conceived and produced by Vedra Mehagian Dallesandro, Joe’s daughter, and Nicole Haeusser, who also directed. Speaking about their unusual approach, both agree that the close, conversational style gives a better sense of the subject than other films might be able to do.

“Our original goal was to make a great documentary on Joe, because many have tried,” Vedra Dallesandro explains. “And we’re very intimate and connected to him. That’s the reason he did this for us.”

But, as Haeusser elaborates, the filmmakers’ decision to do the film as a one-on-one with Dallesando wasn’t appealing to potential producers, who sought a more conventional documentary technique.

“When Vedra tried to get financing, they were all worried about the third act,” she says. “They were worried that Joe was still alive and wanted to wait for him to die, basically. So Vedra and I were talking, and I was like, ‘Well, we don’t need money. We can just do it ourselves.'”

The decision turned out to be a happy accident: Little Joe’s biggest strength is its almost amateur quality. Which is not to say that the film feels lacking — it’s just an intentionally limited production. There are no experts over-explaining Dallesandro’s overnight success (he was hot) or later substance abuse (it was readily available). Nor are there any TMZ-esque voiceovers highlighting the more illicit aspects of his career. And who needs ’em? The clips of Dallesandro strutting nude through, well, all of his early films speak for themselves.

Of course, the point of all the real talk with Dallesandro is to show that he’s more than just a sex object — and the message definitely comes across. He is, as he puts it, smarter than people give him credit for.

“A lot of times you hear people talk about him like he’s a piece of meat,” Haeusser says. “And he’s a very spiritual person.”

I don’t know if that’s quite the impression I got, but Little Joe does flesh out Dallesandro (pun fully intended) more than frequent collaborator Paul Morrissey ever did. Dallesandro’s early career was about his appearance: the muscles, the hair, the manparts. And that’s all well and good, but no one wants to be defined solely by how good they look naked. This documentary is the ideal vehicle for Dallesandro to prove, as the saying goes, that he’s more than just a pretty face.

Still, there’s no denying Little Joe‘s eye candy status. To its credit, the film never shies away from that. No one appears embarrassed or regretful about the past, and why should they?

“Who he is, is who he is,” Vedra Dallesandro offers. “I think it’s amazing.” Amazing may sound like a stretch, but consider the life of a sex symbol. It takes courage to bare it all — and it takes star quality to turn that into a career. (Louis Peitzman)

LITTLE JOE

Sat/20, 4:15 p.m., Castro ————

ODE TO JOE: A FIRST-PERSON TESTIMONY TO STARDOM OF DALLESANDRO

“Don’t do this to me and leave me, Joe!” So rasps Sylvia Miles as Joe Dallesandro dutifully pleasures her missionary-style in a scene from Andy Warhol’s Heat (1972). When it comes to mid-coital dirty talk, could any line possibly be more comically terrible? Miles’ character is Sally Todd, a past-prime actress with a Beverly Hills mansion whose “game show money” doesn’t keep her in hairspray. Dallesandro is Joey Davis, an ex-child star terminally on the make in an attempt to revive his marooned career. But really, anyone who enjoys Heat — and I’ll come right out and say it’s my favorite movie, ever — is enjoying the people behind the characters.

A key reward of the Warhol movies that star Joe Dallesandro is that he doesn’t just do it to us and leave us — his signature brand of candid male sexuality, something entirely new in American cinema when it arrived, is still available to us today. “Little Joe” brought before the camera the fantasies that biographers and gossip tattle-tales entertained about James Dean and Marlon Brando, and his naturalism helped pave the way for Robert DeNiro’s and Al Pacino’s brands of Italian-American charisma and machismo, even if he wasn’t theatrically trained. Yes, Dallesandro was usually stoic-to-stony, scarcely reacting to the hijinx of the myriad feminine characters with whom Paul Morrissey and Warhol paired him. But he knew enough to realize that he didn’t have to do much, which is more than most actors learn in a lifetime.

Joe Dallesandro played a key role for me in terms of knowing I was attracted to men, and I can hardly be alone in that experience. When I first saw him, it was only a portion of his body — his sculpted chest and abdomen, tinted a plum color on the cover of the Smiths’ self-titled 1985 debut album. This image was too oblique to be lust at first sight, but still images of Dallesandro from Flesh (1968) in Parker Tyler’s book Underground Film and Stephen Koch’s Warhol cinema survey Stargazer resolved any lingering issues or teenage doubts. The treat in discovering the movies behind these images was that Dallesandro’s unapologetically naked good looks were simply the hook on which Warhol, and especially director Morrissey, hooked a fantastic crew of eccentrics.

Little Joe, Nicole Hauesser’s new feature-length biographical portrait of Dallesandro, has as much in common with That Man: Peter Berlin (2005) as it does the legion of documentaries about Warhol superstars. Like the Berlin movie, it fascinates as a study of an icon of masculine glamour, though Dallesandro isn’t as narcissistic (who could be) or as detached and cerebral. Hauesser skims over the coded symbols of Dallesandro’s physique model days, and I wish she’d had Dallesandro sound off more about dearly-departed costars such as the amazing Andrea Feldman.

But Little Joe‘s story can’t help but be dramatic. Who knew Dallesandro had an ill-fated handsome brother — shades of Catherine Deneuve and Francoise Dorléac — or that the love of his life was Suspiria (1976) star Stefania Casini? Still handsome today, Dallesandro addresses the camera with a directness missing from his Warhol performances, wrestling uncomfortably with his manipulation by Morrissey, and reminiscing with little sentiment about latter-era Warhol films such as Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Blood for Dracula (1974), which includes his best and most hilarious performances — as a Marxist servant with a Brooklyn accent in medieval Europe.

“Have you even lived to know what beautiful is?” Lydia (Pat Ast) asks a male stripper jealous of Joe’s good looks during a sunny afternoon scene from Heat. As Joe descends down some stairs for an underwater swim across the length of a pool, she answers her own question: “You’re just a spoiled brat, living the life of Riley.” Watching Joe Dallesandro in Flesh, in Trash (1970), and most of all, in Heat, we’re all spoiled brats living the life of Riley. (Johnny Ray Huston)

 

When we grow up

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

In the 1960s and early ’70s there was great enthusiasm behind the idea of loosening up the public school system. You know, making things more participatory, sparking kids’ imaginations, encouraging those who might have be bored or neglected in traditional classroom models.

Suddenly grade-school veteran Mrs. McGregor was prodded — not that some sterner specimens didn’t resist — to read the hidden signs of each child’s psychological well-being as well as drill ye olde reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic. If the freshly arrived 20-something teacher (or teacher’s assistant) seemed more cool, accessible, and just plain interested, that’s because she or he was; universities had started moulding them that way.

Anyone who grew up in that era remembers the incongruity of old playground games alternating with teacher-led, noncompetitive new ones. Old instructional and filmstrips that seemed prehistoric because they came from the Eisenhower era, offering laughably corny behavioral (not to mention grooming) advice, were shown alongside hip new edutainments urging tolerance, getting in touch with one’s feelings, and treading gently on Mother Earth. (Most of the latter were produced by questionable corporate friends of the planet like Exxon and DuPont.) Where minority students had always had to accept their absence from textbooks and other media, now kids in the whitest small-town or suburb saw rainbow-coalition peers depicted in revised or brand-new materials.

This happened fastest on TV, where much children’s programming seemed to grow sophisticated and viewer-improving overnight. On the commercial networks, there were the likes of Schoolhouse Rock and Fat Albert. The bounty on PBS, then fatly funded and as yet undiminished by cable competition, included Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and ZOOM. All knocked themselves out painting learning as fun, group inclusion and individual differences as neat. The messages were subversive by prior standards: girls could grow up to be astronauts too; boys were encouraged to cry if they felt like it. (And we all know they sometimes do.)

Perhaps the era’s zenith was Free to Be … You and Me, a multimedia phenomenon that hasn’t died yet. (The original album is still in print.) Chosen this year for the annual Sunday kids’ matinee slot at Frameline, it has a special place in the memories of umpteen lesbian, gay, and trans adults — because while it didn’t directly address sexual identity, the emphasis on upending stereotypical gender roles echoed deep for kids who mostly didn’t know yet just how "different" they might turn out to be.

The story goes that Free first grew from liberated That Girl star Marlo Thomas’ desire to create something for her young niece. Something that didn’t reinforce traditional "See Dick! He’s building a mud fort! See Jane! She’s happy just watching him, keeping her dress clean!" sentiments in kid lit.

That idea became a half-million selling 1972 LP by Thomas and starry "friends" including one 6’5 NFL legend (and author of Rosey Grier’s Needlepoint for Men) singing sensitive boy anthem "It’s All Right to Cry." There were also tracks like "Parents Are People," "William’s Doll," and "Helping," performed by everyone from Dionne Warwick and Diana Ross to Tommy Smothers, Carol Channing, and Dick Cavett.

Many of them were back for the prime-time, hour-long special on ABC two years later, joined by Alan Alda, Cicely Tyson, Harry Belafonte, some Muppets, Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge, Roberta Flack and Michael Jackson (still cosmetically intact), and the choral Voices of East Harlem.

A broadcast staple for some years, the show is still pretty great, reflecting the contributions of such brains as Carl Reiner, Shel Silverstein, Sheldon Harnick (Fiddler on the Roof), and Thomas’ major collaborator Christopher Cerf. Mixing sketches and songs, live action and cartoons, it humorously soft-pedals myriad corrective lessons: revising the Greek legend of suitor-outrunning Princess Atalanta so that the happy ending is feminist, not marital; clucking at the selfishness of a superfemme, pink-clad girl who brattily insists "Ladies First" (and gets eaten by tigers as a consequence).

The term "politically correct" hadn’t been invented yet, but it could certainly be levied against Free. As it duly was/is, in some quarters. "Make no mistake, this is propaganda aimed at children. The message is that girls will find happiness only if they mimic boys," harrumphs one current Amazon customer. (He also considers the running skits with wisecracking Muppet infants "disturbing" and "revolting.") Alert Rush Limbaugh, quick!

This dangerous brainwashing tool generated picture books, a belated TV sequel (1988’s Free to Be … A Family), and a 35th anniversary revised-form original print reissue for which Thomas made the publicity rounds last year. These days she may be lesser known in gay circles for public philanthropic expressions than her alleged private despotic ones (see scurrilous unauthorized biography That Girl and Phil: An Insider Tells What Life is Really Like in the Marlo Thomas-Phil Donahue Household, a camp tell-all classic right up there with Call Her Miss Ross.) All gossip aside, however, innumerable grown-up queers are still in Thomas’ debt. A self-Acceptance 101 dose as easy to swallow as Flintstone multivitamins, Free to Be … You and Me remains good for you, and baby too.

FREE TO BE … YOU AND ME

Sun/21, 11 a.m., Castro

Quickies

-
0

FRI/19


The Lollipop Generation (G.B. Jones, Canada, 2008) To truly appreciate G.B. Jones’ decades-in-the-making solo follow-up to her 1991 queer punk classic collaboration with Bruce LaBruce No Skin Off My Ass, you probably have to be a fan of Doris Wishman. Jones is on record as a major admirer of the woman behind Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965) and the Chesty Morgan vehicle Double Agent 73 (1974), whose singular directorial style had no need for dramatic momentum, synced-up dialogue, or sensible camera angles. (In a scene with dialogue, Wishman was more likely to lavish close-ups on nearby furniture than on the humans involved.) Lollipop Generation skewers the lust for youth at the rotten core of pop culture through its look at a loose gang of candy-licking teen and preteen trick-turners and the suckers who would like to prey on them. The cast includes writer Mark Ewert and Calvin Johnson, but Vaginal Davis steals a sizeable portion of the movie by throwing her all into a molester role in a sequence that shifts back and forth between Super 8 and video. My favorite aspect of Lollipop Generation is Jones’ eye for funny or dirty signs or landmarks, from giant smiling balls on the sides of freeways to sites with double entendres for names. By placing what story there is within this framework, she creates her own world with no need for special effects. (Johnny Ray Huston) 10:45 p.m., Roxie.


Making the Boys (Crayton Robey, USA, 2008) Whether you adore it as a nostalgic, pre-HIV throwback or despise it for its self-loathing and slew of gay stereotypes, The Boys in the Band was revolutionary for its time as the first play to revolve around a homosexual circle of friends and to present an honest examination of the gay community. In director Crayton Robey’s compelling and insightful new documentary, Mart Crowley, the playwright of Boys, recounts his days rubbing shoulders with the Hollywood elite as a burgeoning screenwriter only to be cast aside after a failed Bette Davis pilot and a film deal fell through. New York theater proved to be his salvation as he struggled with perceived personal and professional failure as well as alcoholism. With nothing to lose, he bravely penned Boys, secured the producer from Edward Albee’s equally controversial Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and released it off-Broadway on April 14, 1968 to commercial acclaim. Robey interviews both Broadway and Hollywood mainstays such as Albee, Terrence McNally, Robert Wagner, and Dominick Dunne, who reflect on the impact of Boys, for better and for worse, and its role in challenging mainstream opinions of homosexuality as a mental illness and in jumpstarting the gay rights movement. In the middle of the film, I started wishing Robey had interviewed more of the cast of Boys. After all, they were the ones who experienced the highs of being in an exciting and subversive new play as well as the lows of later being essentially blacklisted from Hollywood. Then it dawned on me that five of the nine original cast members of Boys have since died from AIDS. Ultimately though, their cause to validate the gay community’s presence in society is forever immortalized with the legacy of Boys, the play that Vincent Canby hailed "a landslide of truths." (Laura Swanbeck) 7 p.m., Victoria. Also Mon/22, 1 p.m., Castro.

SAT/20


Greek Pete (Andrew Haigh, U.K., 2009) A deadpan serving of real-life drama, this night-and-day portrait is a 21st-century update of Andy Warhol’s Flesh, the 1968 movie that made Joe Dallesandro a star. In Flesh, Dallesandro is a hustler named Joe in New York. Here, Peter Pittaros is an escort named Pete in London. In Flesh, we see Joe school comparatively naïve and weak street corner boys on the tricks of rough trade. Here, Pete is a responsible breadwinner in comparison to his drug-spun chicken boyfriend. Both Flesh‘s Joe and the title character of Greek Pete hang with trannies, though Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis are more camera-ready than Pete’s goth gal pals. But whereas a strange optimism radiates from Flesh, which is understandably too smitten with its charismatic star to knock the hustle, Greek Pete has a strong undertow of melancholy. Its sadness doesn’t stem from a moral tut-tut stance about whoring but from a sense of modern emptiness that haunts Pete whether he’s with friends, alone in his apartment, or watching footage of himself winning a competition that’s the male escort equivalent of Miss America. Well-shot and anchored by a performance that’s just deep and ordinary enough to remain compelling, Greek Pete isn’t just easy meat. (Huston) 10 p.m., Victoria. Also Tues/23, 2:30 p.m., Castro.

SUN/21


Training Rules (Dee Mosbacher and Fawn Yacker, USA, 2009) Homophobia in sports is, depressingly, still an enormous issue. But compared to the macho world of the NBA, you’d think that women’s college basketball would be a comparatively safe realm for queer players. In the case of Penn State, you’d be dead wrong. For 27 years, coach Rene Portland intimidated and harassed players who were lesbians — and those she thought might be lesbians, or who had lesbian friends. As players from past teams recall (often through tears), Portland was an outspoken homophobe who revoked scholarships as she pleased and made basketball a joyless pursuit for those she targeted. In 2006, former player Jennifer Harris, a star athlete and standout student, sued the school for discrimination. Though Harris can’t speak at length due to the terms of her settlement (and of course Portland, who resigned in 2007, did not agree to an interview), Training Rules is an eye-opening document, exposing not just the ugly truth about one coach, but a systemwide crisis that those in power (athletic directors, the NCAA) have been painfully slow to address. (Cheryl Eddy) 3:30 p.m., Castro

TUES/23


City of Borders (Yun Suh, USA, 2009) Forty-five minutes away from Middle Eastern "gay mecca" Tel Aviv lies Jerusalem, ancient religious center and, unfortunately, bastion of equally time-tested attitudes toward homosexuality. Many Tel Aviv gays don’t even see the point of living, let alone fighting for rights, in Jerusalem. Yet Jerusalem’s sole gay bar, Shushan, was one place where Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians, mingled as equals. Yun Suh’s documentary focuses on a few diverse patrons, plus Shushan’s owner Sa’ar Netanel, who became Jerusalem’s first openly gay elected official (as a city councilman) on the same day it elected its first ultraright Orthodox mayor. He endures routine death threats, Gay Pride parades attract violent protest, and the other principals here have their problems and flaws too: lesbian couple Samira and Ravit try to stay together despite major cultural differences; Palestinian youth Boddy fears he’ll eventually have to leave for his own safety; Adam, an Israeli activist since being queer-bashed, doesn’t see any ethnical conflict in building a house on occupied territory with his boyfriend. Borders is a vivid snapshot of a gay rights struggle that is still very much an uphill slog. (Dennis Harvey) 7 p.m., Roxie

Patrick, Age 1.5 (Ella Lemhagen, Sweden, 2008) Freshly settled in suburbia, gay couple Goran (Gustaf Skarsgard) and Sven (Torkel Petersson) are eager to adopt a child — or at least Goran is, with Sven reluctantly caving in. But when against the odds they’re informed a native-born boy is available, a misplaced bit of bureaucratic punctuation means they get not the 18-month-old toddler expected but 15-year-old Patrik (Tom Ljungman). He’s a foul-tempered foster home veteran who makes it clear he’s no happier cohabiting with two "homos" than they are with him. Nevertheless, they’re stuck with each other at least through the weekend, allowing a predictable mutual warming trend to course through Ella Lemhagen’s agreeable seriocomedy. While formulaic in concept, the film’s low-key charm and conviction earn emotions that might easily have felt sitcomishly pre-programmed. (Harvey) 7 p.m., Castro

JUNE 24


Prodigal Sons (Kimberly Reed, USA, 2008) When Kimberly Reed (who studied film at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University) set out to make Prodigal Sons, she was probably pretty certain the doc would be deliberately self-focused. The film’s first act takes place in Helena, Mont., at Reed’s 20-year high school reunion — amid former classmates who remember Kimberly Reed as Paul McKerrow, a football star who was voted "Most Likely to Succeed" (and, indeed, a success she has been; though she alludes to a difficult period during her transition, she’s clearly arrived at a happy and confident place in life). But Prodigal Sons is plural for a reason, and not because of brother Todd (who happens to be gay). Instead, it’s adopted brother Marc — who is given to terrifying rages as a result of a personality-altering brain injury; remains eternally resentful of Kimberly’s high school-era smarts and popularity; and (as is shockingly discovered) the grandchild of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth — who becomes Prodigal Sons’ focus. He is the most heartbreaking figure in an intimately personal (sometimes uncomfortably so) film that’s ultimately about identities lost and found. (Eddy) 7:30 p.m., Castro

JUNE 27


Off and Running (Nicole Opper, USA, 2009) Teenager Avery, an African American, was adopted as an infant by a single white mom, who soon afterward meets another single white mom who had recently adopted an African American baby boy. Before long, a family (nicknamed "the United Nations," especially after a Korean child joins the mix) was formed. A track star who dreams of running in college, Avery loves her moms, but she’s curious about her biological parents. She knows she’s from Texas and was originally called Mycole Antwonisha, facts that hint at a cultural experience far removed from her upbringing as a Brooklyn Jew. After a few letters are exchanged with her birth mother, Avery is crushed when the woman mysteriously ends communication. A profound identity crisis ensues. "It’s like something really traumatic happened to her, and nothing did," Avery’s caring if clueless adoptive mother says. But Off and Running suggests otherwise. The doc may not speak for every adopted child’s experience, but it’s eye-opening nonetheless, and is blessed with a subject who is sensitive and articulate even in her darkest moments. (Eddy) 2:15 p.m., Roxie

Pop Star on Ice (David Barba and James Pellerito, USA, 2009) Yay, Johnny Weir! If you don’t share my sentiments about the sassy, sparkly, outspoken (but not on-the-record out) figure skater, then you might want to skip this documentary, which was filmed over a two-year period and offers an up-close-and-personal (like, you see him in a tanning bed) look at the three-time national champ. Or maybe not, actually — haters might come around after realizing how hard he’s worked to achieve his ice-rink dreams, born after watching Oksana Baiul win Olympic gold on TV and learning to skate (at the ancient age of 12) on the frozen-over cornfield in his Pennsylvania backyard. Competition footage backs up claims by longtime coach Priscilla Hill (with whom he breaks up over the course of the film) and others of Weir’s extraordinary talents; backstage clips and off-the-cuff interviews establish the fact that he’s one of the sport’s most fun personalities, probably ever. Weir pouts, jokes, struts in a fashion show, speaks in a Russian accent, discusses his collection of furs, and lands quadruple jumps with ease. Gay or (ahem) nay, he’s clearly 100 percent comfortable with who he is. (Eddy) 11 a.m., Castro

Wild Thing!

-
0

This year’s Frameline — a.k.a. the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival — is one of the strongest in the event’s 33-year history. The Frameline Award, annually handed over to someone “who has made a significant contribution to lesbian/gay/bi/transgender film,” is being bestowed on George and Mike Kuchar, who in addition to meeting the criteria noted above, have also made significant contributions to filmmaking in general, and San Francisco filmmaking in particular. The Kuchar kudos mesh well with Frameline’s focus on 60s and 70s-themed films, including Guardian cover boy Joe Dallesandro (profiled in the doc Little Joe). Our coverage also includes a look at a long-awaited local project, Cary Cronenwett’s Eisenstein-inspired, transgender-populated Maggots and Men; nostalgic edu-tainment kid pic Free to Be … You And Me; and short takes on festival films, including Centerpiece selections Patrik, Age 1.5 and Prodigal Sons. (Cheryl Eddy)

The 33rd San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival runs June 18–28 at the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Roxie, 3117 16th St., SF; Victoria, 2961 16th St, SF; and Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, 2966 College, Berk. Tickets (most shows $8–$10) are available at www.frameline.org

>>Hello sailor
Cary Cronenwett’s Maggots and Men (re)stages a revolution
By Matt Sussman

>>Kucharmania!
It Came from Kuchar is a splash of foam within a whirling cinematic cesspool
By Johnny Ray Huston


>>The man from camp
Movie maker Gary Gregerson likes guys with chaka hair
By Johnny Ray Huston

>>The man from camp
Little Joe reveals the real Joe Dallesandro — plus: a special appreciation
By Louis Peitzman and Johnny Ray Huston

>>When we grow up
’70s relic Free to Be … You and Me still resonates
By Dennis Harvey

>>Quickies
Our short, opinionated takes on several featured Frameline flicks

Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight

-
0

REVIEW Stroll through New York City and you can’t help but stumble onto one of Milton Glaser’s iconic designs, be it a Brooklyn Brewery label, New York magazine cover, or even the big white nose perched above Trattoria dell’Arte across from Carnegie Hall. Of course, Glaser, one of the world’s most talented, postmodern graphic designers, has also left his stamp, quite literally, with the ubiquitous I Heart NY insignia. Wendy Keys’ new documentary Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight pays homage to this humble, erudite, and mirthful man who transcends traditional lines between high art and commercial design to make art accessible to the public. Keys incorporates anecdotes from students, clients, colleagues, and Glaser himself and highlights not only Glaser’s powerful aesthetic, but also his art’s implicit call for political and social responsibility. Whether encapsuutf8g the psychotropic ’60s in a Bob Dylan profile, rendering the plight of gay men in America in an print ad for Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, or embodying his pacifist beliefs in a poster condemning genocide in Darfur, Glaser informs and delights with his constant reinvention and incredible ability to capture the current zeitgeist.

MILTON GLASER: TO INFORM AND DELIGHT opens Fri/19 at the Roxie.

Domestic disturbance

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

Equal parts Antonio Gramsci and Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Dillinger is Dead (1969) is cultural critique masquerading as a one-man show. Michel Piccoli plays Glauco, with his forehead mostly: the fleeting pleasures of food and gadgetry are registered in satisfied wrinkles, though the slack glaze of boredom is never far off. The film opens with Glauco touring a factory using a gas mask of his design. In case we somehow miss this as a marker of alienation, the factory guide waxes Society of the Spectacle: "The introjections of these obsessive, hallucinatory needs do not produce an adaptation to reality, but mimesis, standardization: the cancellation of individuality."

Subtly may not be Italian auteur Marco Ferreri’s strong suit, but he achieves a weirdly frantic stasis once Dillinger settles in to Glauco’s chintzy bourgeois palace, a masterpiece of set design. Glauco tucks in his lolling girlfriend (Rolling Stones ingénue Anita Pallenberg, mostly naked here), snivels at the meal she’s left him and gets to cooking. Looking for something in the closet, he finds an old gun wrapped in a newspaper covering John Dillinger’s death. The film’s unforthcoming slowness reaches its apotheosis as he painstakingly cleans the revolver, keeping a close eye on the sauce.

Not satiated by his feast for one (Ferreri would later direct 1973’s La Grande Bouffe, a film about four men eating themselves to death), Glauco licks honey off the maid’s bare back, gives his firearm a Pop Art makeover, and finally endeavors to see if it still goes bang. Ferreri’s listless deadpan can’t help but pale after countless Coen brothers knockoffs, but Dillinger is saved from obsolescence by its prescient observations of technology’s ascendance in the domestic sphere. Glauco is ever fiddling with a machine, at one point documenting his sleeping wife with a tape recorder (this guy would be a nightmare with an iPhone).

All this mechanical action has a masturbatory quality to it, especially when Glauco watches his Super 8 home movies. He greedily reaches out for the breasts of a woman he’s filmed and tries to swim in a projection of the sea (a significant image given the film’s nautical conclusion). When a halved watermelon broaches sex, viewers may wonder if Tsai Ming-Liang knew of Dillinger before making The Wayward Cloud (2005). This fleshy interlude is the closest thing to life in Ferreri’s film; even murder, it seems, cannot bring these people back from the dead.

DILLINGER IS DEAD

Thurs/11–Sat/13, 7:30 p.m.; Sun/14, 2 p.m., $8–$10

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

When in roam

-
0

Involving no catatonic housewives, no mortally botched abortions, and no luminous pools of blood in the kitchen either, Sam Mendes’ latest film presents a somewhat happier tale of domesticity than 1999’s American Beauty or last year’s Revolutionary Road, if "tale of domesticity" is a fair description for a road movie in which the stated goal is a home.

In Away We Go — from a screenplay by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida — 30-something couple Verona (Maya Rudolph) and Burt (John Krasinski) find themselves unexpectedly ditched during Verona’s second trimester by the only set of theoretically adoring grandparents available, Burt’s flakily self-absorbed parents (Catherine O’Hara and Jeff Daniels). Thus unsettled, the two set off in search of a place to provide their child with an "epic," "Huck Finn-y" childhood, as Burt wistfully envisions it. Some parents might quibble with this aim, given Huck’s epic stint as a runaway on a river, but some offspring, even grown ones, might find it pleasurable to imagine their parents dreaming for them a heroic, adventurous youth, rather than the anxious rigors preparatory to an Ivy education and a professional life.

In any case, away they go to visit friends in Phoenix, a sister in Tucson, a cousin in Madison, Wis., and so on — each stopover offering interludes with the film’s excellent ensemble cast and presenting Verona and Burt with various slices of parenting life to digest or spit out. We don’t see much of these places; Away We Go is, until the end, only vaguely concerned with geography, focusing its lens on private scenes even in public places. At a Phoenix dog track, Allison Janney provides hilariously, wildly inappropriate commentary on life with pre-postal husband (Jim Gaffigan) and silently resentful children. In Madison, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Josh Hamilton ooze sanctimony as a noxiously evolved couple raising their children via the Continuum school.

During calmer, more sober moments, you may find yourself idly pondering your investment in the drama and domestic arrangements of this financially solvent, utterly in love, ideally suited pair. But the dialogue is clever enough, the protagonists engaging enough to patchily override such cynical thoughts. If you can handle the twee whimsy of a shot in which the itinerant couple’s plane is transformed into a leaping dolphin in the reflection of skyscraper windows, you’re more than halfway home.

AWAY WE GO opens Fri/12 in San Francisco.

Munyurangabo

-
0

REVIEW Don’t be deceived by the serene, pastoral setting of Lee Isaac Chung’s Munyurangabo (2007), a neorealist drama that follows unlikely friends Sangwa (a Hutu) and Ngabo (a Tutsi) as they journey home nearly a decade after the Rwandan genocide. The film’s hauntingly peaceful veneer and desolate beauty speaks to the hundreds of thousands killed on Rwandan soil and belies Sangwa and Ngabo’s simmering resentment and shame. Refusing to fixate on the war’s carnage, Munyurangabo focuses on its psychological repercussions instead. As the pair arrives home to tend to the decimated farmland and to each other, Sangwa struggles with the prejudices that his estranged family still harbors while Ngabo wrestles with his duty to avenge his father’s murder. Delving into Rwanda’s tragic past, this provocative film that befittingly ends on National Liberation Day wonders if Rwandans can forge new identities unburdened by guilt or vengeance to ultimately find freedom.

MUNYURANGABO opens Fri/12 at the Sundance Kabuki.

Return of the creatures

-
0

Zombies, werewolves, slashers, ghosts, and just plain fucked-up individuals: yep, the usual suspects are on hand for the Another Hole in the Head film festival, an offshoot of the San Francisco Independent Film Festival that’s back for a sixth unleashing of cinematic ghastliness.

David Gargani’s Monsters from the Id, named for the invisible menace in 1956’s Forbidden Planet, takes an earnest, somewhat unfocused look at how scientists were depicted in 1950s sci-fi films. Movie clips and talking heads delve into the ways in which the era’s "futuristic" flicks (Spaceships! Giant ants! Pod people!) were informed by both the era’s sense of wonder and paranoia. Monsters also notes how much less money is spent on space in these post-Cold War days; one scientist wistfully notes that the only way physicists would become heroes again would be in some kind of preventing-an-asteroid-from-hitting-the-earth type of scenario (but, duh, Doc: according to 1998’s Armageddon, oil drillers would actually save the day in that case).

Entries with local ties include James Isaac’s Pig Hunt (which screened a few weeks back as part of the Clay Theater’s midnight series). After kicking off their road trip with a meal at the Pork Store Café, a group of SF friends set out on an ill-advised hunting jaunt (their quarry: a 3,000-lb "Hogzilla," a creature that turns out to be just one of many backwoods adversaries). Even more bloody and bizarre is Oakland filmmaker Jonathan Lewis’s Black Devil Doll, an awesomely campy, proudly low-budget, X-rated cross between Child’s Play (1988) and Dolemite (1975) — the entire cast is basically comprised of strippers and a raunchy puppet that says things like "Holy shit! These white bitches is crazy!"

Also of interest for all you discerning sickos: HoleHead unleashes two films by prolific Japanese cult auteur Takashi Miike, including opening night film Crows: Episode Zero (a manga adaptation) and Detective Story, about a detective and his neighbor on the trail of an organ-stealing murderer.

ANOTHER HOLE IN THE HEAD

June 5–19, see film listings for schedule, $10

Roxie, 3117 16th St, S.F.

(415) 820-3907, www.sfindie.com

Shadowboxing

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

"Explosive action" may be the stuff of soppy pullquotes, but the term takes on fresh life watching the 1950s noirs of Phil Karlson. All action movies give us men and violence, but Karlson’s pictures, to a rare degree, are about men living with violence. Punches aren’t redemptive, they just hurt — the one throwing them too. Take the clenched former prizefighter in 99 River Street (1953), Ernie Driscoll (played by Karlson’s preferred actor, the aggressively nondescript John Payne). "I’m so burned up, I take it out on everyone I see," Driscoll mutters to his loyal friend after tossing him against a car in the white heat of rage. When he finally does have reasonable cause, his maelstrom of punches exceeds the pleasure principle of vengeance by a wide margin.

If this sounds like Scorsese territory, it’s probably worth mentioning that Driscoll isn’t just a broken heavyweight — he also drives a taxi. Karlson’s movies are tightly-coiled enough to make the decades slip just like that: 99 River Street has enough weird transferences and reversals to make me wonder if it’s not a worm-hole to David Lynch’s films as well. The fabulous streaks of paranoia running through the PFA selections are Cold War to the core, but the films hurdle us so quickly and illogically towards the edge of abnegation that the reactionary myth of the vigilante isn’t given time to flourish.

Karlson recouped the debt owed by Dirty Harry and The French Connection (both 1971) with his 1973 hit, Walking Tall, but the ’50s films are more eloquent by far. In them, brutality is simply a fact, like cigarettes or hats. The most severe scenes are sometimes the quietest, as is the case when Eddie Rico (Richard Conte) has to wait out his brother’s death after unwittingly acting as a crime syndicate’s bloodhound in The Brothers Rico (1957, based on a story by Georges Simenon).

Other set-ups — nearly the entire second half of the remarkable semi-documentary The Phenix City Story (1955), cowritten by Daniel Mainwaring (1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers), with the same basic premise as Walking Tall — hardly give us room to breathe. The film’s corrupt Alabama police look the other way as local "vice peddlers" terrorize citizens, rig an election, and — remember this is 1955 — murder the children of a black man with reformist sympathies in broad daylight. The smug veneer of cordiality does nothing to disguise the constant threat of violence. To the contrary, it serves as an extra taunt, a superfluous flexing of power as enraging here as it is in Barbara Kopple’s documentary, Harlan County USA (1976). A trinity of resistance fighters (one of them a lawyer freshly returned from Nuremberg, an encounter with evil that still leaves him unprepared for Phenix City) can and do fight back, but resist administering the final coup de grace. They do so in deference to due process, but we’re long past a constitutional triumph, à la Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). The dark truth lurking just under The Phenix City Story‘s roiling surface is that the noble ideal these republicans embody may not actually exist.

TIGHT SPOT: PHIL KARLSON IN THE FIFTIES

June 5–26, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk

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

Revanche

-
0

REVIEW In the sex industry of Vienna, small-time criminal Alex (Johannes Krisch) has dreams of escape for himself and his Ukrainian prostitute girlfriend, Tamara (Irina Potapenko). With a ski mask and an unloaded pistol, the miscreant schlemiel allows Tamara to accompany him during the commission of a robbery, and disastrous consequences ultimately transpire. After Alex and Tamara cross paths with young policeman Robert (Andreas Lust), his seemingly idyllic small-town life is also upended by the confrontation. Robert’s wife, Susanne (Ursula Strauss) fails to hearten her inconsolable husband. Instead, she finds her only comfort visiting a neighbor, Hausner (Johannes Thanheiser). But this tale of city-to-country anomie transforms into a gripping revenge play when Alex (who is, we learn, also Hausner’s grandson) suddenly appears in the town, seeking bloody satisfaction. Transforming from an urban neo-noir to a village morality play and a bedroom character study, Götz Spielmann’s Revanche (in French, the act of revenge) confronts the fundamental existential conundrum — fate’s random selection of its prey, or, as the film’s tag-line asks, "Whose Fault Is It When Life Doesn’t Go Your Way?"

REVANCHE opens Fri/5 in Bay Area theaters.

MORE AT SFBG.COM


Pixel Vision blog: An extended version of this review.

Senses and sensibility

-
0

"Constant self-negation and transformation are necessary if one is to avoid debilitation and continue to confront circumstances as a filmmaker," filmmaker Nagisa Oshima wrote in a 1961 essay. Oshima’s declaration of restlessness presages what would become a four decades-long career defined by that continual struggle to "confront circumstances" — to challenge postwar Japan’s stagnant social order by pushing filmmaking into new areas of form and content. "In the Realm of Oshima," the first major U.S. retrospective of the director’s work in more than 20 years, is a staggering reaffirmation of the now 77-year old director’s persistence of vision. Frequently hailed as Japan’s answer to Jean-Luc Godard, Oshima’s reputation and stature among a certain generation of cinephiles has often dwarfed the unavailability of all but a handful of his films (Oshima would later counter, saucily, that Mr. Godard should be known as the Oshima of France).

Like his French counterpart, Oshima’s output grazed on familiar genres, such as youth-gone-wild and domestic dramas, while freely incorporating elements from avant-garde and documentary practices. As much as he sought to break from what he saw as the sentimentalism of the previous generation of Japanese filmmakers like Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, Oshima also spent a great deal of time dissecting the struggles and failures of the radical left, as vertiginously condensed in the debates between disillusioned former comrades of Night and Fog in Japan (1960). But Oshima’s larger interest has been with, to borrow the title of Jim Jarmusch’s latest, the limits of control — and those who infract upon the social order. Fittingly, the series comes to a close with Oshima’s most extreme film, In the Realm of the Senses (1976), whose Sadean lovers, Sada and Kichi, are perhaps the most terrifyingly literal embodiment of Oshima’s quest for "constant self-negation."

IN THE REALM OF OSHIMA

May 29–July 18

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk.

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

O.G. sleaze

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

A full range of involuntary facial-muscle responses have already been triggered by the trailer to Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, which premieres at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. First 2008’s Valkyrie, now this: Brad Pitt’s Tennessee-hills-bred Lt. Aldo Raine twangily informing his Jewish-American Secret Service unit, "Each man under my command owes me ONE HUNNERD NAAATSEE SCALPS!" while Hostel auteur-turned-actor Eli Roth smirks in approval.

Will the whole turn out righteous, raucous, controversial, or just juvenile? We proles will have to wait until the film’s August theatrical release to decide for ourselves. Meanwhile, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is letting inquiring minds do their advance homework by reviving Enzo G. Castellari’s less orthographically challenged Inglorious Bastards, the 1978 Italian action movie Tarantino’s latest pays tribute to — though his isn’t a remake but a separate, newly crassed-up riff on The Dirty Dozen (1967).

That latter all-star World War II caper spawned umpteen "Europudding" imitations, including the QT-beloved Bastards, showing this week in a new 35mm print. A sort of Filthy Five to the original Dozen — budget reduced accordingly, with sharp eyes ID’ing the same extras experiencing different death throes in scene after scene — it centers on a quintet of U.S. Army grunts in 1944 France.

There’s Bo Svenson (who’d become a sorta-star by replacing the suspiciously car-crash-slain Buford Pusser in 1975’s Walking Tall Part II) as swaggering Lt. Yeager; Fred Williamson’s Pvt. Canfield, an incongruous 1940s fount of ’70s Black Power ‘tude; smirking wiseass, murderer, and racist Tony (Peter Hooten), who calls Canfield "Bongo;" Nick (Michael Pergolani), a long-haired hipster aping Donald Sutherland’s similar character in 1970’s hit Dirty rip Hell’s Heroes; and Jackie Basehart as fraidycat youth Berle.

After being sent to the brig for various misdeeds, they escape their captors, intending to flee to neutral Switzerland. En route they pick up a nice Nazi (Raimund Harmstorf, horny hero of 1971’s The Long Swift Sword of Siegfried) and bare collective musculature to some bathing Rhine maidens. But mostly they machine-gun everyone in sight, unfortunately including Yankee spies disguised in Third Reich uniforms.

Penitent, our protagonists vow to take over their late comrades’ dangerous mission. This culminates in an exploded train, and an SS commander foaming "All Americans are mongrels! Negro, Jew, Polish, Italian, Irish — every possible race! And your vimmen are whores! Coca-Cola! Hollyvood! Chewing gum! Stupid cowardly bastards!" just before his ass is whupped by Canfield. Musta been that soda remark.

Inglorious begins with psychedelic-silhouette images underlining two key things about Castellari: 1) he honed his energetic macho action style in spaghetti westerns; and 2) he isn’t considered "the poor man’s Peckinpah" for nothing, being absolutely addicted to balletic slow-mo violence. About a bazillion Germans here do the spastic dance of death, riddled by bullets or leaping from yet another explosion.

Yet the film’s tone is larky, at times even goofy. Hardly a neglected masterpiece, or a campy delight like some of Tarantino’s other retro faves, it’s a good example of another era’s disposable entertainment. Unlike the grim check-cashing air emitted by many similar Europudding exercises, here you can sense the fun that went into making it.

His big-screen career of Westerns, policiers, Mad Max and Escape from New York clones eventually tapped out, Castellari moved on to TV work. But at age 70, Castellari is still capable of rising to the exploitable moment. Currently being hawked at Cannes — alongside the considerably more hyped you-know-what — is his Caribbean Basterds, which appears to cobble together nods to Tarantino, contemporary sea piracy, Point Break (1991), and A Clockwork Orange (1971).

INGLORIOUS BASTARDS

Fri/29, 7:30 p.m.; Sun/31, 2 p.m., $8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

CounterCorp Anti-Corporate Film Festival

-
0

PREVIEW Moving in its fourth year from autumn to an early summer slot, San Francisco’s CounterCorp Anti-Corporate Film Festival now provides an apt alternative-entertainment prelude to Memorial Day — because what, after all, is more patriotic these days than asking the question, "What are we fighting for?" Fittingly, the opener is about Big Oil. Sandy Cioffi (who’ll be present) at one point spent five days in the custody of Nigerian security forces while making Sweet Crude, an investigation of Shell Oil Corp. and other companies’ violence and environmental ruination in Nigeria’s Niger Delta. Likewise, Robert Cornellier’s Black Wave documents the seemingly neverending efforts to exact justice from ExxonMobil over the catastrophic Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska 20 years ago. Other highlights in this year’s all-documentary edition of CounterCorp include Sam Bozzo’s Blue Gold: World Water Wars, about the escalation of conflict and privatization around that most precious (and vanishing) natural resource; Steven Greenstreet’s Killer at Large, which analyzes the industrial agribiz/food processing causes behind an obesity epidemic that has begun reversing Americans’ previously steady trend toward longer life expectancies; and Brett Gaylor’s RIP: A Remix Manifesto, a "mash-up movie" about the wars between copyright law and free expression. No doubting where Gaylor stands on that issue: his entire movie is already available to download and remix yourself at www.opensourcecinema.org.

COUNTERCORP ANTI-CORPORATE FILM FESTIVAL Thurs/28–Sat/30, $5–$10. Victoria Theater, 2961 16th St., SF. www.countercorp.org

Ain’t I a werewolf?

-
0

AFRO-SURREAL Stylistic rigor and as full an embrace of progressive technologies as budgets allow have made Underworld Trilogy (Sony Pictures DVD, $93.95) a pleasurable extension of epics from fang-face past. Yet perhaps the most significant aspect of Len Wiseman’s cycle about immortals warring for supremacy is an updated recognition of the post-1960s liberation strides of blacks and women in our society. It is reflected in the power and intellect of the first film’s heroine Selene (Kate Beckinsale) and her fellow vampiric rebels (like Robbie Gee’s tech-wizard Kahn) and lycan foes ("Razahir/Raze," played by Underworld concept engineer Kevin Grievoux). The last and best installment, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, is a virtual remix of my generation’s seminal televisual event, Roots. If that ain’t Afro-Surreal, then what is?

It was 30 years ago — not long after the historic airing of the adaptation of Alex Haley’s Roots fundamentally changed public perceptions of America’s "peculiar institution" — that I moved to the Sahel and immediately became obsessed with Dogon lore about the Sirius star system and a family of deities including the trickster Pale Fox. Blood debates about antiquity and provenance continue to rage between disdainful classicists, denizens of the moribund field of Egyptology, and independent scholars of varying stripes devoted to Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1987). My view supports linkages between the overlapping subcultures of the Dogon, Amazigh, "Egyptians," Zulu, and others, resulting in a kozmic fusion wherein the primordial werewolf (some would prefer jackal or werehyena) is a key deity from the dawn of civilization in the Motherland.

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans finds the great Irish actor Michael Sheen’s "lycan" leader character Lucian subbing for Kunta Kinte. In the stark, nightmarish Eastern European fiefdom of vampire lord Viktor (Bill Nighy), the decadent, pale vampires are pampered aristocrats guarded and served by their dark, subhuman lycan slaves (hybrids of humans and wolves). Lucian changes from pet house nigger fettered by shackles of the flesh and mind — condescendingly deemed "a credit to his race" by Viktor — into an enlightened, empowered rebel leader who brings deliverance to lycan-kind by forging an alliance with despised animal spawn of William Corvinus in the wooded wilds.

Yet all is not Molotovs and roses — there are sadistic spectacles of whipping at the hands of cruel overseer Kosta, Nubian ally Razahir is forced to submit to lycanthropy, and Lucian suffers the ultimate price for miscegenation with Viktor’s daughter Sonja (the underrated Rhona Mitra). Rise of the Lycans may not be Blacula, but it is often a winking mash-up of Roots and the even more hardcore, honest Mandingo (1975). In a time when America has just elected its first (official) black president but open dialogues on slavery — and reparations for same — remain muted at best, it’s heartening to witness product straight out of Hollyweird somehow serving as an optic Trojan horse for the oft-forgotten and misrepresented radicalism of antebellum culture heroes like Nat Turner, Cinque, and the O.G. Black Moses herself, Harriet Tubman.

Rise of the Lycans has been roundly panned by fanboys and critics alike, which is hardly shocking considering America’s unwillingness to face the major episodes of its bloody past — the enslavement of Africans via the Triangular Trade, and the genocide of the First Nations. Yet to these eyes and ears, the film’s a first sign in the Age of Obama that a willingness to finally address the West’s hateful legacies can emanate from "low" culture, despite the will to bliss out in the opiated mass of post-racial utopia.

Natural light

-
0

REVIEW The abundant drama of natural light is reason enough to see Summer Hours, a family drama by Olivier Assayas aspiring to Proustian profundity and Chekhovian chambering. I prefer Les Destinées Sentimentales (2000) for Assayas’ novelistic mode, but the new film still has plenty to like. This will be especially true for Antiques Roadshow fans, who will have a field day with all the Musée D’Orsay-approved furnishings, even if the characters themselves don’t seem quite so sturdy. The film opens with an annual reunion at the beautiful country estate where matriarch Hélène (Edith Scob, the daughter in Georges Franju’s 1960 classic Eyes Without a Face) has tended the reputation and archive of a long-dead artist relation. When Hélène dies, the question of the house and all those beautiful objects falls to the three adult children. Being an Oliver Assayas film, this a globalization issue. Frédéric (Charles Berling) is the only one who remains in Paris (an economist who doesn’t believe in economics, he’s more susceptible to sentimentality than the other two). Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) has gone after the art market in New York, while brother Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) covers the financial sector in China. A clear opposition — perhaps too clear — is erected between the memory of provincial France and the dislocated pulse of the contemporary, but to Assayas’ credit, Summer Hours doesn’t feel like it has its mind made up between the two: the darting camera courts the promise of speed and movement, while the luxurious play of light nurses what’s been lost. The characters are never more than their scenes, but there are a few breathtaking ones, including two bookending portraits of footloose youth that recoup Summer Hours‘ air of inconsequence.

SUMMER HOURS opens Fri/22 in Bay Area theaters.

The list in surrealist

-
0

1. Putney Swope (Robert Downey Sr., 1969) The elder Downey’s brilliant, completely irreverent send-up of race, politics and the advertising industry. Smoke a big fat joint and watch this one. You will laugh your ass off. Take special note of the "commercials" for the products by Truth and Soul, Inc.

2. Bamboozled (Spike Lee, 2002) Spike Lee’s dark, squirm-in-your-seat masterpiece brings minstrelsy into the 21st century. Damon Wayans tries to get himself fired from a racist TV station by producing an extremely offensive prime time minstrel show. The show turns out to be a smash hit.

3. The Watermelon Man (Melvin Van Peebles, 1970) One of the great Afro-Surrealists casts Godfrey Cambridge as a white racist insurance salesman who wakes up as a black man after watching race riots on the late night news. Very, very OUT, especially the scene where Cambridge sits in a tub full of milk trying to reverse the color change.

4. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles, 1971) Peebles casts himself as Sweetback, a black stud sex worker who kills a racist cop and has to go on the lam. More allegory than literal narrative, it reminds me of Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970).

5. Black Like Me (Carl Lerner, 1964) Curious writer James Whitmore wants to experience being black so he takes a pill to darken his skin, tests his new identity on his favorite shoe shine man and heads down south. Bad idea. He runs into trouble instantly (near-lynching, bad vibes from every white person) and basically goes insane.

6. Which Way Is Up? (Michael Schultz, 1977) Richard Pryor plays three characters — a jackleg preacher, a dirty old man, and an orange picker who accidentally becomes union hero — in this very funny remake of The Seduction of Mimi (1972).

7. Richard Pryor: Live and Smokin’ (Michael Blum, 1971) Pryor’s first standup film. He’s coming off a coke binge, the film crew is pissing him off, and no one is laughing, but that doesn’t stop him. The highlight is the demented "a wino and a junkie" routine.

8. Space is the Place (John Coney, 1974) Sun Ra, black alien jazz musician for Saturn, lands his spaceship in early-1970s Oakland. His mission is to rescue black people, but strangely, no one wants to be saved. He battles the CIA, apathetic black youth (who think he’s a hippie from Telegraph Avenue) and a character called the Overseer while finding the time to put on a concert at Laney College. Anything by Sun Ra is Afro-Surrealism at its most potent.

9. Ghost Dog (Jim Jarmusch, 1999) Jim Jarmusch’s mystical meditation on the samurai, Brooklyn style. My man Isaach De Bankolé almost steals the movie.

10. Sankofa (Haile Gerima, 1993) Gerima’s off-the-charts take on slavery is disturbing, downright depressing, and utterly psychedelic. A black supermodel on a shoot on Goree Island, the infamous slave trader’s fort, steps into a basement and is transported back to a West Indies plantation. Afro-Surrealism at its best.

The cult of Fanaka

-
0

cheryl@sfbg.com

AFRO-SURREAL Visitors to filmmaker Jamaa Fanaka’s MySpace page are greeted with a clip of Snoop Dogg clutching a pile of Fanaka DVDs — 1975’s Welcome Home Brother Charles, a.k.a. Soul Vengeance; 1976’s Emma Mae, a.k.a. Black Sister’s Revenge; 1979’s Penitentiary; and 1982’s Penitentiary II. He quotes some choice lines and enthusiastically sings the director’s praises: "These movies right here — this is black history."

When I mention Snoop Dogg to Fanaka, he’s delighted. "All the rappers love me," he says over the phone from Los Angeles. "Also actors, like Eddie Murphy. The first time I ran into him, he was with his brother, and they recited [a scene from Penitentiary] verbatim. That happens all the time."

The Fanaka library (which also includes 1987’s Penitentiary III and 1992’s Street Wars) has also earned a following among cult-movie fans. "I love that they’re cult films, because of what a ‘cult film’ means: the film lives because the people want it to live," he explains. He’s not a fan of the term "blaxploitation" — though it’s commonly applied to his films — due to its connotations.

"There were companies that were very profitable, and all they made were ‘exploitation’ films, which meant that they made low-budget films on subjects that Hollywood didn’t want to take on," he says. "It only became a negative term once they put that prefix ‘blax’ on it. No black filmmaker ever liked that term, though it was coined by a black publicist. ‘Blaxploitation’ has evolved into a genre, like a horror film, or an action film. But black filmmakers still resent the term because of its origins."

Born in Mississippi, raised in L.A., Fanaka says was distracted from committing a crime by a pair of UCLA recruiters who made him believe he could realize his childhood dream of becoming a filmmaker. ("They asked me, did I want to go to UCLA? I said, ‘Yeah. I’d like to go to the moon, too, but my chances of getting there are pretty minuscule.’") He was eventually accepted into the school’s prestigious film program, where he also earned a master’s degree; his peers included Charles Burnett, who directed 1977’s Killer of Sheep.

"It was an exciting time to be a black filmmaker," Fanaka says. "People like Charles Burnett were part of my film crew, I was part of his film crew. We helped each other, advised each other. Those were the halcyon days of filmmaking at UCLA."

Even more notably, "I’m the only person in the history of filmmaking to write, produce, direct, and get theatrical distribution for three feature films I made as part of my curriculum at the UCLA film school," Fanaka says. He shot his first feature, Welcome Home Brother Charles, on the weekends when he didn’t have class.

"I felt like, if I had access to all of this equipment, and the wherewithal to make a 10-minute film, why not make a whole feature?" he recalls. "I wanted to reach the widest audience possible, and no matter how good a short film is, the audience is going to be limited. Then I went on to graduate school and I made Emma Mae and Penitentiary."

This kind of determination also extended to Fanaka’s fundraising efforts. His parents invested their life savings into his work (good call — Penitentiary, Fanaka says, was the most successful indie film of 1980), but he wondered why he was rejected for a grant by the American Film Institute. He did some research and learned that only one African American had ever been a part of the grant-awarding committee. "I wanted to give minorities a shot," he says, so he wrote a letter to then-Sen. Alan Cranston suggesting that the committee should be more diverse. The next grant cycle, he got the money to help make Emma Mae; the following cycle, he served on the committee. "That goes to show you how the squeaking wheel gets the oil," he remembers, proudly.

In less-tenacious hands, there’d certainly be no Welcome Home Brother Charles. "White slave owners used to tell white women horror stories about the size of the black males’ sexual equipment," Fanaka explains. "But rather than frightening the white females, it intrigued them. I wanted to make a film that took that myth and exaggerated it to show how ridiculous it was, and I chose to do it in a very surreal, powerful scene."

(Note to readers who haven’t seen the film: uh, think 1997’s Anaconda. The entire Penitentiary series is also a gold mine of surreal moments, particularly part three, which features a prison-dwelling, crack-smoking, snarling killer dwarf. Fanaka sums up that film in one word: "feral.")

Now in his late 60s, Fanaka has been slowed in his efforts to make Penitentiary IV by complications from diabetes. He’s also been working for the last decade on a music documentary, Hip Hop Hope. It’s an apt title for a film by Fanaka, who calls himself "a very optimistic person." He’s enjoyed the resurgence of interest in his work, with screenings at places like San Francisco’s Dead Channels Film Festival and Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse, and frequent airings of the Penitentiary films on cable.

"My most artistic film, in my estimation, was Welcome Home Brother Charles, because I had no axes to grind but to try and use the medium of cinema to attack that myth, and attack it in a way that was quote-unquote artistic. Of course, very few people took that from it because that one scene kind of colors the whole film," he chuckles. "But I think as time goes by, people are gonna realize the value of these films I’ve made and begin to understand them."

From the shadows

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

The cheapest special effect in the world is having one actor fire a cap gun as another cries, "Ow, ya got me!" Ergo crime did pay, in spades, for Hollywood’s "Poverty Row" studios in the disillusioned years between World War II and Eisenhower-era prosperity. Subsequently dubbed "film noir," this period’s myriad violent melodramas were cranked out fast, exhibited briefly, then forgotten.

Yet recent years have left very few stones unturned in the quest for buried gems. Back when he was programming at the Roxie Theater, Elliot Lavine did much to foster their cult with retrospectives showcasing both the genre’s acknowledged classics and dustiest obscurities. When he left in 2003, noir fans wore mourning black — though were consoled by the start of SF’s annual Noir City festival that same year.

Still, watching lurid old B-flicks at the funky Roxie had an extra frisson lacking amid the Castro Theater’s grandiose respectability. Very good news, then, that Lavine is bringing bad guys (and duplicitous dames) back to Valencia Street with "I Wake Up Dreaming: The Haunted World of the B Film Noir." Its two weeks emphasize noir’s lesser-sung efforts from the cinematic sweatshops of Monogram, PRC, Eagle Lion, and other economy-class companies where production values were low and the hard-boiled sleaze factor was often cranked high to compensate. Many of the 29 features haven’t been seen theatrically for decades, and few are available on DVD.

On Poverty Row, young talent proved itself; mainstream luminaries landed there once their box-office clout had expired. Thus velvet-voiced 1930s glamazon Kay Francis briefly descended to Monogram after Warner Bros. dumped her. In Allotment Wives (1946) she’s a socialite coolly fronting a polygamy racket targeting returned GI’s, while enduring Mildred Pierce-like torments from an ingrate daughter whose every action screams "Mother, slap sense into me." (Oh yes she will.)

Another WB castoff, ingénue Joan Leslie, starred in that year’s unique Repeat Performance. She’s an actress-turned-murderess who gets her wish to live the last fateful year over again — only to watch as the same deadly events unfold, only worse. Having outgrown a famous-juvenile heyday, Bonita Granville was ready to play twins — one good, one a "cheap little chiseler" — embroiled in a murder mystery in The Guilty (1947). (And to think just months earlier she’d been crushing on Andy Hardy at MGM.)

These programmer factories promoted personalities who only rated bit parts at the majors. Where else could sneering, square-faced Lawrence Tierney’s bullying malevolence float entire movies like The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1947) and The Hoodlum (1951)? Some noirs risked having no familiar faces at all. The docudrama-style Canon City (1948) uses real locations and (some) real inmates to recreate a Colorado prison break — one thwarted, in part, by a gutsy, home-invaded gramma-with-hammer.

While most titles here are known only to the most fanatical buffs, two come with minor cult status already attached. The craziest among fabled screenwriter Ben Hecht’s odd few directorial efforts, Specter of the Rose (1946) is an amour very-fou tale set in the ballet world, its prima ballerina imperiled by a dancing partner-spouse who experiences homicidal ideations when not husking heavy mush stuff: "Hug me with your eyes." "I am." "Harder!"

Likewise linguistically challenged in the best possible way is 1955’s Shack Out on 101, in which a young Lee Marvin unforgettably limns "Slob," bus boy extraordinaire forever pawing unaroused waitress Terry Moore. Meanwhile, lurking Commies plot to overthrow the American Way of Life, off-ramp greasy spoons included. With its hilariously pissed-off dialogue no obstacle to red-blooded patriotic display, Shack is a Cold War trash classic so plutonium-hot it smokes.

I WAKE UP DREAMING: THE HAUNTED WORLD OF THE B FILM NOIR

May 14–28, $10

Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St., SF

(415)-863-1087, www.roxie.com

Reels and (two) wheels

-
0

What’s a "bike movie?" If you immediately thought of Breaking Away (1979), two upcoming events suggest that your definition is li’l old-fashioned. First up: the Disposable Film Festival is hosting a "Bike-In" outdoor screening. Pedal over and enjoy a selection of films (with an emphasis on bike themes) culled from DFFs past; an after-party celebrates the release of the Guardian‘s Bike to Work issue.

San Franciscans Eric Slatkin and Carlton Evans founded the fest in 2007 to highlight so-called disposable films — "any film made on these alternative devices we’ve seen cropping up in the past few years: cell phones, web cams, point-and-shoot cameras, one-time use video cameras, pocket cams," Slatkin said. "They really democratize the idea of not just filmmaking, but of a filmmaker."

The spirit of the festival lends itself to a bike-in screening. "The core of the DFF is a real DIY aesthetic," Evans said. "I think there’s a similar kind of aesthetic in the biking community in San Francisco. I bike all over the city, and I’m always navigating the city in a way where I’m having to overcome obstacles. You just sort of take on these challenges and come up with your own solutions."

Brendt Barbur, director of the New York City-based Bicycle Film Festival (now in its ninth year, it travels to San Francisco this summer), would likely agree with this comparison. The BFF showcases experimental films, music videos, documentaries, and more, with tie-in art exhibits and live music shows, but it’s powered by the creative energy of everyday cyclists.

"Technology has given the bike movement a tool to express themselves," he said from BFF headquarters in NYC. "That DIY spirit runs through the festival. A lot of people — maybe they’re graphic designers or bike messengers — have something to say, and cameras are now accessible to a lot of folks. Those little gems they produce are, a lot of times, the most popular movies at the festival."

DISPOSABLE FILM FESTIVAL: BIKE-IN

Wed/13, 8 p.m., free

Outside the Good Hotel, 112 Seventh St., SF

www.disposablefilmfest.com

BICYCLE FILM FESTIVAL

July 14-19

www.bicyclefilmfestival.com

“The Beast Stalker”

-
0

REVIEW Missed The Beast Stalker at the just-completed 2009 San Francisco International Film Festival? Make sure you catch its theatrical run at the Four Star, a longtime hotspot for new Hong Kong genre films. (Owner Frank Lee was dishing ’em out long before 2006’s The Departed, a H.K. cops ‘n’ gangstas remake, raked in box office megabucks and Oscar gold.) Where else would I have seen 1998’s Beast Cops, starring the inimitable Anthony Wong and the irritating Michael Wong (no relation)? The Beast Stalker boasts neither Wong, but it does have Cops codirector Dante Lam, who directs solo here and cowrote the script. Prior to a car chase gone horribly awry, Tong (Nicholas Tse) was the kind of police captain his fellow officers hated to serve, thanks to anger issues, petty politics, and other charming attributes. After Tong accidentally causes the death of a child — coincidentally the daughter of an attorney, Ann (Zhang Jingchu), who’s prosecuting a mob boss — he takes some time off to become, uh, less of an asshole. It’s only when Ann’s other young daughter is kidnapped (what are the chances?) that Tong can attempt to redeem himself, though scar-faced baby snatcher Hung (Nick Cheung) proves an adversary as muddy-gray in the morality department as Tong is. Amid the gun battles and tense cell-phone negotiations (wouldn’t be a H.K. action flick without plenty of both), there’s not much beauty to be found in either of these two beasts. The movie, though, is plenty thrilling.

THE BEAST STALKER opens Fri/15 at the Four Star.

The accidental tourist

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

Using dystopian prophet William Burroughs’ landmark essay The Limits of Control as his titular and narrative starting point, auteur Jim Jarmusch meditates on language and travel in his latest cinematic offering. While it’s undeniable that Jarmusch has always worn his Burroughsian influences on his black velvet sleeve, his own Limits of Control is less an explicit pastiche of Burroughs’ theories than a nod to his unique creative methodology.

"[Burroughs’] theories on language and the use of control are really fascinating," Jarmusch explained during a recent phone interview from his downtown New York City office. "But I would say more important for me from Burroughs were his notebooks and scrapbooks, in which he would cut up things from newspapers and magazines. That whole philosophy of the cut-up is very important to me in the construction of The Limits of Control."

Jarmusch’s Limits follows a laconic Lone Man (Isaach De Bankolé) as he travels through the extreme landscapes of Spain, seeking out unnamed contacts and cryptic ciphers that propel him toward some unforeseen climax. Lone Man wanders through the maze of clues with rarely a word spoken. This is not the garrulous Jarmusch of 2003’s Coffee and Cigarettes. Rather, language exists here through an intimate series of picaresque exchanges. Soliloquies are eschewed for images of De Bankolé’s contoured face and the striking architectonic wonders of Madrid and Seville; dialogue is equally parsimonious, with moments of wiry, philosophical meandering and hip, pop-culture musings bubbling up spontaneously between visitors before retreating into long swathes of silence and static.

In their repetitions of catchphrases and rituals, these vignettes — staged by actors Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, and Paz de la Huerta, among others — become increasingly oracular, Rivette-inspired performances communicated in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic. Are these inexplicable codices part of an elaborate conspiracy through which Lone Man will complete his mission, or are they simply coincidental cut-ups leading him toward the lost horizon of the Spanish desert?

With a typically austere, Jarmuschian cool, The Limits of Control cites numerous French and American gangster-outlaw films of the 1960s and ’70s in its hermeneutic, almost mystical, field-study of the nomad. Despite its lack of conventional narrative action, The Limits of Control is largely about the postmodern experience of traveling and experiencing "foreign" lands and languages, a theme recounted in Jarmusch films from Stranger than Paradise (1984) to Mystery Train (1989) to Broken Flowers (2005).

Jarmusch points to Claude Levi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques and Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel as two anthropological inspirations for his own recurring explorations of transition and translations. "[Traveling] used to be a bit more of an adventure," Jarmusch said. "When I was younger and traveled to Europe for the first time, at the airports people would dress up to travel. Now it’s just a frustrating exercise in getting from one place to the next, and the act of travel itself seems almost erasable." *

THE LIMITS OF CONTROL opens Fri/8 in San Francisco.

MORE AT SFBG.COM

Pixel Vision: Erik Morse’s full interview with Jim Jarmusch.

1...141516...37Page 15 of 37

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