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Film Review

On the (closet) case

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While gay rights have been a hot political button for a solid three decades-plus now, there is at least one arena in American life where the issue remains hush-hush: the corridors of actual political power. Such is the thesis — or rather accusation — of Kirby Dick’s new documentary, which wants to light a shaming agitative fire like his last one (2006 MPAA expose This Film Is Not Yet Rated), and with any luck will do so. His subject is the bizarre, undiminished existence of top U.S. politicos rumored to be gay, living as "confirmed bachelors" or "devoted family men." Despite their carefully groomed public images, however, the D.C. bubble is rife with first-person accounts of their ex-boyfriends and tricks, not to mention sightings at gay bars or even cruisey parks and washrooms. Whether due to inculcated self-loathing, ruthless careerism, or both, they live as if it were still the pre-Stonewall 1950s, their "secret" known only to a reliably zipped few.

Trouble is, the political system and mainstream media collude in maintaining that secrecy, for the sake of both convenience and a wariness toward scandal they seldom exhibit in any other realm. Nearly all of the closet cases Dick selects to out here are far-right Republicans who profit from the worst kind of hypocrisy: enjoying same-sex relations on the sly while publicly feeding conservative hysteria about the homosexual threat to family values. They’ve voted again and again against even partly pro-gay legislation, from anti-discrimination laws and (of course) gay marriage to AIDS services and research funding.

Because Outrage aims to have an explosive breaking-news impact, I won’t name the specific politicians targeted here. Suffice it to say they include a governor, Congress member, house representatives, mayors, and high-powered lobbyists, plus a couple of network news reporters. Is it anyone’s business what they "do" in private? Hell yes, when the public words and actions of these "traitors to their own people" result in hate crimes, disinformation, legalized biases, and worse. There’s nothing particularly elegant about this doc’s presentation, but then the point it has to make is blunt, and its effect is as righteously infuriating as intended. That clanging sound you hear is the closet-door lock in the executive men’s room being boot-kicked off its hinges. (Dennis Harvey)

OUTRAGE opens Fri/8 in Bay Area theaters.

Sita Sings the Blues

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REVIEW A few years ago, independent animator and comic strip artist Nina Paley left San Francisco for India, where her boyfriend had found employment. A while later, during a visit home, she received a surprise, brusque communication from the bf informing her she need not return — the relationship was over. Just what the bf ultimately got out of this episode is unknown. But Paley got posterity: her first feature film, inspired by both the breakup and the ancient Sanskrit epic the Ramayana, is artistic therapy that also happens to be just about the most delightful movie in eons, cartoon or otherwise. Utilizing very different animation techniques, she cuts between a blatantly autobiographical tale of romantic woe and the mythological travails of Sita, beloved of the noble Rama. He rescues her from an amorous, abducting rival, but his chivalry dies when false accusations about her "purity" threaten to tarnish his image. Then, as now, men are pigs. Sita wriggles through her fate like a Bollywood Betty Boop, frequently crooning vintage 78 tracks by Jazz Age blues chanteuse Annette Hanshaw, and the visual wit on display is akin to Max Fleischer’s antics plus intellectual gamesmanship, grotesque streaks, and eye-popping color. Paley breaks the fourth wall in umpteen ingenious ways. Sita Sings the Blues is so full of fun and invention you may start looking forward to seeing it again after it’s barely started.

SITA SINGS THE BLUES runs Fri/8–Tues/12 at the Red Vic. See Rep Clock.

Reel Talk

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At last year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, in his State of Cinema address, Wired cofounder Kevin Kelly spoke of a media landscape inundated with screens, in which you’re as likely to watch a movie on your PDA, or even a grocery checkout screen, as you are in a theater. The message was clear: the way in which we create and consume films is changing. To some extent, we have been living in this brave new world for some time, so SFIFF’s choice of photographer Mary Ellen Mark to deliver this year’s State of Cinema address carries with it an implicit nostalgia for cinema’s old world. Mark, who has frequently turned her camera on marginal subjects — Indian prostitutes, homeless American teens, circus performers — has also periodically worked as an on-set photographer over her four decade career, capturing moments of behind the scene candor on the sets of directors such as François Truffaut, Federico Fellini, Milos Forman, Tim Burton, and Francis Ford Coppola. The images, collected last year in Seen Behind the Scene: Forty Years of Photographing on Set (Phaidon), present Mark as an anti-Annie Liebovitz. She manages to catch her subjects unaware — as with the hilarious image of Dustin Hoffman making faces behind a quite serious Sir Laurence Olivier between takes on 1976’s Marathon Man. Others — among them Marlon Brando caught with a bug resting on his bald pate on the set of 1979’s Apocalypse Now — seem to square off with the camera. Incidentally, two of this year’s major SFIFF honors are going to Coppola and fellow child of the ’60s Robert Redford, so there’s a bit of a love fest for the era going on at this year’s fest. Undoubtedly Mark has as many fascinating stories as she does compelling images, but hopefully her talk won’t just be a stroll down memory lane.

"STATE OF CINEMA ADDRESS BY MARY ELLEN MARK"

Sun/3, 1 p.m., $12.50

Sundance Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF

www.sffs.org

Pretzeled logic

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

Ever since Michael Moore first attempted to meld Woody Allen and Ralph Nader, and Morgan Spurlock made himself the genially comic-lite host of an experiment in culinary consumerism, more and more documentarians have been tempted to star in their own movies. This is dangerous terrain, given that whenever one introduces the Element of Me into examination of a larger issue, Me tends to hog the spotlight. Even in certain films where the filmmaker’s own scarring formative experiences with mental illness (2003’s Tarnation) and so forth are the subject, there are often worrying overtones of narcissism, selectivity, and pursued melodrama. When documentarians are their own casting couch, what often really gets fucked is the unalloyed truth.

On the surface, Kate Churchill’s Enlighten Up! appears to squirrel around that trap. After all, she found a stand-in to occupy the center stage one senses an itchiness to claim for herself. He’s new to the film’s milieu and theme, so its narrative can become his process of discovering what she apparently already knows and would like to share. Meet Nick Rosen, an athletic, attractive New Yorker. A sometime investigative journalist on ambiguous leave from that or any other employment, he has the time and willingness to find out how "yoga can transform anyone physically and spiritually."

Trouble is, Churchill insists that he "transform" — and Rosen resists. Or rather, he just doesn’t "get it," doing pretty damn well by the asanas (poses) yet admitting early on that "spiritual awakening is a concept I cannot even relate to." He’d rather check out the dateable hot chicks nearly every class is packed with — and when he demands one off-camera night after months of celibacy for cinema’s sake, Churchill seems more pissed off than is seemly. (She doesn’t speak to him for two days.)

This is the stuff of Seinfeld-ish comedy. She seeks higher consciousness! He, pressure application to lower parts! But Churchill is fundamentally humorless — you can tell by the way she inserts "humor" with cutesy sound-effects. Her frustration at Rosen’s inability to "progress" as expected feels hypocritical because she doesn’t reveal the intricacies of her own progress. "The purest, most peaceful moments of my life have happened on my yoga mat" she notes. But just what it’s done for her — or why she needed it to — is left unaddressed. She finally vents, "I’m really sick of yoga," allowing that the project began with the hope that if she could "make someone else change, then maybe I would too." A provocative admission. Which is then dropped like a hot potato.

Of course pragmatist Rosen sorta flunks his yoga journey, fine-tuning his torso while remaining averse to "charismatic personalities" and "supernatural ideas." How could he not, when Churchill shops him through a bewildering catch-all array of disciplines, faiths, and techniques variably yoga-esque: Ishta, Bikram, Kundalini, contortionism, numerology, even "laughing therapy." Class instructors, students, and gurus offer evaluations both contradictory and redundant; the filmmaker seldom lets them get more than a sound bite in. Briefly she seems about to address the ethics of commercialization in a 5,000-year-old tradition turned multibillion dollar industry, then kinda forgets to. (See 2006’s superior doc Yoga, Inc.)

Finally, struggling to put a happy spin on a process that didn’t go as planned but that she won’t admit was really about herself all along, Churchill exhales "Nick was right — yoga has no simple definition, and that’s the beauty of it!" This is one tricky pose to sustain, the Self-Canceling Handstand with Delusional Lotus Smile. Perhaps the real lesson to be learned from Enlighten Up! is that if you’re making someone else walk the plank — er, spiritual path — at swordpoint, your own consciousness is the one that really needs lifting. *

ENLIGHTEN UP! is now playing in Bay Area theaters.

American Violet

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REVIEW Lawyer movies can be really entertaining. Tim Disney’s American Violet certainly is. I was sucked in from minute one. Based on true events, it’s the story of Dee Roberts (an awesome performance by Nicole Beharie), a single mother with four little girls living in the projects of a small Texas town. In these particular projects, there are frequent drug raids. The law states that a single informant’s testimony justifies an indictment — and Dee is wrongfully accused. ACLU lawyer David Cohen (a brilliant Tim Blake Nelson), believes Dee’s community is being harassed because residents are black, although the theory is very difficult to prove. The district attorney Calvin Beckett (a sadistic Michael O’Keefe) is tough, and he likes plea bargains. David, Dee, and do-the-right-thing local lawyer Sam Conroy (the great Will Patton) challenge Beckett. American Violet is not only an interesting story, it’s based on a true one. You can’t help rooting for Dee and hoping that justice will prevail.

AMERICAN VIOLET opens Fri/1 in Bay Area theaters.

Lymelife

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REVIEW It’s 1979, and disco isn’t the only thing that sucks for Long Island teen Scott (Rory Culkin). Bullies at school beat up his skinny 15-year-old ass; girl next door Adrianna (Emma Roberts) likes him, but "like a brother." Housewife mom Brenda (Jill Hennessy), neglected by real estate magnate spouse Mickey (Alec Baldwin), has gone kinda crazy. Buying into the paranoia around deer-tick-carried Lyme disease, she won’t let Scott go outside without duct-taping shut all worrisome gaps in his clothing. It’s pretty clear to everyone (particularly older son Jim, played by Kieran Culkin — who here seems a rare live wire in the usually underwhelming Culkin acting dynasty) but her that dad is cheating, though for a while no one guesses it’s with Adrianna’s bitchy mum Melissa (Cynthia Nixon). Melissa has her own problems at home, given that husband Charlie (a strikingly tragicomic Timothy Hutton) really does have Lyme disease, which has turned him from a dynamo into an exhausted, pitiful shell of a man. Yeah, you’re thinking, do we really need another dysfunctional-family flashback with the requisite retro pop hits, pot smoking (back when it came dirt cheap), awkward virginity loss, and nostalgically horrible decor? Sure, why not. Lymelife treads no original territory, but its setting and characters are granted more than skin-deep authenticity, and the tangled conflicts in director Derick Martini and cowriting brother Steven Martini’s screenplay really do lead somewhere interesting, even important. There are some annoying quirks, but the overall the Martinis nail a savvy balance of comedy and drama. Plus, amid numerous good performances, there’s Baldwin giving a smug, surly yet sympathetic one that should be a shoo-in for award consideration if anyone still remembers little Lymelife at year’s end.

LYMELIFE opens Fri/24 in Bay Area theaters.

SFIFF: Shots in the dark

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THURS/23


La Mission (Peter Bratt, USA, 2009) A veteran S.F. vato turned responsible — if still muy macho — widower, father, and Muni driver, 46-year-old Che (Benjamin Bratt) isn’t the type for mushy displays of sentiment. But it’s clear his pride and joy is son Jess (Jeremy Ray Valdez), a straight-A high school grad bound for UCLA. That filial bond, however, sustains some serious damage when Che discovers Jes has a secret life — with a boyfriend, in the Castro, just a few blocks away from their Mission walkup but might as well be light-years away as far as old-school dad is concerned. This Bratt family project (Benjamin’s brother Peter writes-directs, his wife Talisa Soto Bratt has a supporting role) has a bit of a predictable TV-movie feel, but its warm heart is very much in the right place, and the affectionate location shooting makes this an ideal SFIFF opening-nighter. (Dennis Harvey) 7 p.m., Castro.

FRI/24


It’s Not Me, I Swear! (Philippe Falardeau, Canada, 2008) Ten-year-old Leon Dore (Antoine L’Écuyer) is a Harold without a Maude, forever staging near-fatal "deadly accidents" that by now no one blinks twice at — whether they’re expressions of warped humor, cries for attention, or actual (yet invariably failed) suicide attempts). Mom and dad are forever at each others’ throats, while their older son pines for a domestic normalcy that ain’t happening anytime soon. One day mom simply announces she’s splitting for Greece to "start a new life," pointedly without husband and children. This event rachets Leon’s misbehaviors — which also encompass theft and vandalism — up a few notches. Set in kitschily-realized late 1960s Quebec suburbia, director Philippe Falardeau’s adaptation of two linked novels by Bruno Hebert is a very deft mix of family dysfunction, preadolescent maladjustment (or maybe budding sociopathy), and anarchic comedy. (Harvey) 5:45 p.m., Sundance Kabuki. Also Sat/25, 2:45 p.m., Sundance Kabuki; Tues/28, 1 p.m., Sundance Kabuki.

SAT/25


Adoration (Atom Egoyan, Canada/France, 2008) When orphaned teenager Simon (Devon Bostick) writes a paper for French class in which he imagines himself as the son of real-life terrorists, his teacher (Arsinée Khanjian) tacitly encourages its being taken for fact. The resulting firestorm (largely taking place on the Web) raises questions about the boy’s actual parents, free speech, religio-political martyrdom, and so forth. This is the first Atom Egoyan feature based on his own original story — as opposed to literary sources or historical incidents — in 15 interim years. While his fame has certainly risen in the interim, some of us haven’t liked anything so well since that last one, 1994’s Exotica. Adoration recalls such early efforts in the cool intellectual gamesmanship with which characters and technologies are manipulated toward a hidden truth. Yet provocative as it is, there’s something overly elaborate and ultimately dissatisfying about his gambits that makes Adoration less than the sum of its parts. (Harvey) 6:15 p.m, Sundance Kabuki. Also Mon/27, 6:30 p.m., PFA.

Tulpan (Sergey Dvortsevoy, Kazakhstan/Switzerland/Germany/Russia/Poland, 2008) Possible new genre alert: the docu-comedy. Documenatarian Dvortsevoy turns his camera on his native Kazakhstan, and nothing depicted suggests anything Borat might’ve broadcast. The country’s stark, southern steppes form the backdrop for a family of nomads, including married-with-children Samal and Ondas, and Samal’s brother Asa, who returns from his Russian naval service longing for his own flock of sheep. Alas, he can’t get a flock until he lands a wife — and the only local prospect, Tulpan, rejects him on the basis of his "big ears" (and the small fact that she would like to move out of the sticks, into the city, and maybe even attend college). Traditional ways bump up against more ambitious ones (as when Asa dreams of a satellite dish), just as comedic moments trade screen time with grittier scenarios (including actual footage of a sheep giving birth). The end result is an intimate and somehow totally relatable look at a fascinatingly foreign world. (Cheryl Eddy) 6:15 p.m., PFA. Also Mon/27, 9:15 p.m., Sundance Kabuki; April 30, 4:45 p.m., Sundance Kabuki.

TUES/28


In the Loop (Armando Iannucci, England, 2009) A typically fumbling remark by U.K. Minister of International Development Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) ignites a media firestorm, as it seems to suggest war is imminent even as both Brit and U.S. governments are downplaying the likelihood of the Iraq invasion they’re simultaneously preparing for. Suddenly cast as an important arbiter of global affairs — a role he’s perhaps less suited for than playing the Easter Bunny — Simon becomes one chess-piece in a cutthroat game whose participants on both sides of the Atlantic include his own subordinates, the prime minister’s rageaholic communications chief, major Pentagon and State Department honchos, crazy constituents, and more. This frenetic comedy of behind-the-scenes backstabbing and its direct influence on the highest-level diplomatic and military policies is scabrously funny in the best tradition of English television, which is (naturally) just where its creators hei from. (Harvey) 9:30 p.m., Sundance Kabuki. Also May 2, 9:30 p.m., Sundance Kabuki.

APRIL 30


California Company Town (Lee Anne Schmitt, USA, 2008) This land isn’t your land, or my land, and it wasn’t made for you and me — such is the insightful and incite-full impression one gets from California Company Town. Schmitt’s beautifully photographed, concisely narrated, and ominously structured look at the Golden State and the state of capitalism is labor of love, shot between 2003 and 2008; it’s a provocative piece of American history. On a semi-buried level, it’s also an extraordinary act of personal filmmaking that subverts various stereotypes of first-person storytelling by women while simultaneously learning from and breaking away from some esteemed directors of the essay film. (Johnny Ray Huston) 8:35 p.m., PFA. Also May 2, 6:45 p.m., Sundance Kabuki; May 4, 3:30 p.m., Sundance Kabuki.

Rudo y Cursi (Carlos Cuarón, Mexico, 2008) A who’s-who of Mexican cinema giants have their cleats in soccer yarn Rudo y Cursi: stars Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna, and producers Alfonso Cuarón (whose brother, Carlos, wrote and directed), Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Guillermo del Toro. But while Rudo is entertaining, it’s surprisingly lightweight considering the talent involved. Bernal and Luna play Tato and Beto, rural half-brothers discovered by a jovially crooked soccer scout (Guillermo Francella) who gets them gigs playing on Mexico City teams. But athletic achievement seems barely a concern. Of far more importance are Tato’s crooning dreams and high-profile romance with a vapid TV star, and Beto’s left-behind wife and kids — not to mention his raging gambling addiction. Though the drama boils down to one final game (of course), Rudo is really about the bonds and brawls between brothers, not sports teams. Goal? (Eddy) 6:15 p.m., Sundance Kabuki. Also May 1, 4 p.m., Sundance Kabuki.

MAY 1


D Tour (Jim Granato, USA, 2008) There’s been many a band-on-the-brink doc about groups torn apart by substance abuse, or creative differences, or just plain nuttiness (see: 2004’s DiG! and Some Kind of Monster, and any number of Behind the Music eps). In D Tour, local indie popsters Rogue Wave face, and are drawn together by, an entirely different brand of crisis: drummer Pat Spurgeon’s urgent need for a kidney transplant. Director Granato is given full access to subjects who are very open about their feelings (and, in Spurgeon’s case, unpleasant medical procedures). The result is a music- and emotion-filled journey that’ll no doubt inspire many to check off the "organ donor" box on their driver’s licenses. A sadly ironic, late-act twist involving a different band member will come as no surprise to Rogue Wave followers, but D Tour incorporates the tragedy into its storyline without ever exploiting it. (Eddy) 9 p.m., Sundance Kabuki. Also May 4, 3:15 p.m., Sundance Kabuki; May 7, 5:15 p.m., Sundance Kabuki.

MAY 2


The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle (David Russo, USA, 2009) Animator Russo’s first feature is a (mostly) live-action whimsy about rudderless Dory (Marshall Allman from Prison Break) who gets fired from his white-collar job and lands in the much scruffier employ of Spiffy Jiffy Janitorial Services. Its punky artist-type staff clean a high-rise’s offices, including one for a test-marketing trying out "self-warming cookies." When our protagonists develop an addictive liking for these treats, strange things begin to occur — like hallucinations and, eventually, male pregnancies of mystery critters. Depending on mood, this arch quirkfest with an ’80s feel (think of all the similar, mildly surreal indie comedies that rode 1984 release Repo Man‘s coattails) may strike you as delightful or just plain irritating. (Harvey) 11 p.m., Sundance Kabuki. Also May 6, 3:30 p.m., Sundance Kabuki.

Tyson (James Toback, USA, 2008) Director Toback is picking up this year’s Kanbar Award for "excellence in screenwriting," but his latest film is a doc scripted largely in the mind of its subject. To call Mike Tyson a polarizing figure is an understatement (and raises the question: Does anyone really like him except Toback, whom he’s known for two decades?). This film — narrated by Tyson, the sole interviewee — won’t endear him to a public that’s seen him besmirch his glorious boxing-ring talents with an array of bad behavior, from a rape charge (here, Tyson calls his accuser a "wretched swine of a woman") to the chomping of Evander Holyfield’s ear. Though he chokes up on occasion and admits at one point that he starting taking fights just for the money, he’s still about as unsympathetic as humanly possible. Fun fact: a friend convinced him to go tribal with the face tattoo. Tyson himself wanted hearts. (Eddy) 4 p.m., Sundance Kabuki.

MAY 3


Moon (Duncan Jones, England, 2008) The Bay Area’s own Sam Rockwell has quietly racked up a slew of memorable performances in variable films — including 2002’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and 2008’s Choke — so the fact that he’s pretty much the whole show in this British sci-fi tale is reason enough to see it. A one-man space saga à la Silent Running (1972), it has him as Sam Bell, the lone non-mechanical worker (Kevin Spacey voices his principal robot assistant) on a lunar mining station in the not-too-distant future. He’s just about to finish his long, lonely contracted three-year stint and return home to a desperately missed family when strange things begin to occur. First there are hallucinations, then physical disabilities, then finally the impossible — there’s company aboard the station. Debuting feature director Duncan Jones orchestrates atmosphere and intrigue, though despite one major game-changing twist his original story seems a little thin in the long run. Nevertheless, Rockwell commands attention throughout as a character whose exhaustion, disorientation, and eventual panic feel alarmingly vivid. (Harvey) 9 p.m., Castro.

The Reckoning (Pamela Yates, USA/Uganda/Congo/Colombia/Netherlands, 2008) Yates’ latest documentary chronicles the long-delayed launch and bumpy first years of the International Criminal Court, a Hague-based body founded to prosecute (primarily) war crimes that member nations were unwilling or unable to do so themselves. Its authority is not yet recognized by several nations — including the Big Three of U.S.A., Russia, and China — while prosecutions of various military or political leaders who ordered crimes against civilians are often hampered by political minefields. Nonetheless, the still-struggling court is a beacon of hope for peace and justice around the globe. Yates lays out its work so far as an engrossing series of detective stories investigating instances of mass murder, rape, plunder, etc. in Uganda, the Congo, Darfur, and Colombia. (Harvey) 5:30 p.m., Sundance Kabuki. Also May 5, 6 p.m., PFA; May 6, 6:15 p.m., Sundance Kabuki.

Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan, 2008) It’s no joy for Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) to bring his wife and stepson up from Tokyo on an annual visit to his elderly parents. The occasion is to commemorate the passing of an older brother who’s been dead for decades but is still held up as the yardstick by which Ryo will always fall short. Mom (Kiki Kirin) is well intentioned enough, if often insensitively blunt-spoken. But retired dad (Yoshio Harada) is an imperious grump who resents Ryo’s not following him into medical practice, disapproves of his marrying a widow, spurns her son from that prior union as less than a "real" grandchild, and is generally kind of a dick. This latest from Hirokazu Kore-eda (2004’s Nobody Knows, 1998’s After Life) is a quiet seriocomedy with lots of discomfiting moments. Yet it’s suffused with enough humor, warmth and surprising joy to easily qualify as one of SFIFF’s best 2009 picks. (Harvey)

8:45 p.m., Sundance Kabuki. Also May 5, 6:30 p.m., Sundance Kabuki.

SFIFF: Tune boon

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

Before there was Barney or Raffi, the answer to the question, "Who is most responsible for songs most likely to make children sing and push their parents to the very brink of sanity?" was most likely "the Sherman brothers." It might have been enough for Robert and Richard Sherman to write "Supercalifragiliciousexpialidocious," "It’s a Small World," and "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," each of which when heard once — let alone a zillion times — became instantly imprinted on the DNA of several juvenile generations. But no, they also had to write indelible songs for the Disney’s The Jungle Book (1967), various Winnie the Pooh species, Charlotte’s Web (1973), and other things you might have escaped only by being born very recently or growing up in rare media isolation.

World premiering at SFIFF this year is The Boys: The Sherman Brothers’ Story, a feature documentary about the Shermans made by two of their sons, Gregory and Jeffrey — partly to figure out just why these fraternal composers of so many cheerful songs have barely been on speaking terms in recent decades. The answer is complicated and, unlike most Disney movies (or documentaries about them), there isn’t a happy ending. But there are a lot of happy memories in these 100 minutes, with people like Julie Andrews, Hayley Mills, Roy Disney, Dick Van Dyke, and John Williams remembering the Shermans as a joy to work with, if not a joy to one another. The brothers themselves, still alive and variably kicking, cannot quite agree on what came between them. But of course, not agreeing is exactly the thing.

Unless you grew up in pre-Khmer Cambodia (or an ex-pat community), odds are the majority repertoire of L.A.-based Dengue Fever were not your childhood’s soundtrack. But the band’s six members know that is really too bad, because Cambodian pop of the 1960s and early ’70s just rocked, with its Farfisa organ riffs, psychedelic flourishes, and incessantly catchy hooks. In an inspired stroke, the festival’s latest silent film-contemporary music match-up was commissioning Dengue Fever to create a live score for The Lost World, a 1925 superproduction that’s a lot more like today’s mall-flick fantasias than just about anything else you could find from that era.

Adapted from Sir Conan Doyle’s story, it follows a British expedition deep into the Amazon, where one cranky suspected quack scientist claims to have discovered a hidden valley of prehistoric creatures. By gum, he’s right. This restored thrill ride, featuring stop-motion dinosaurs, elaborate miniatures, romantic intrigue, a guy in an ape suit and another (alas) in comedy blackface, was an obvious model for 1933’s King Kong (Willis O’Brien designed FX on both) and an admitted one for 1993’s Jurassic Park (whose sequel, you’ll recall, was 1997’s The Lost World). After nearly 85 years, it’s still at least as entertaining as the latter-day comic-book movies that owe it a colossal debt.

THE BOYS: THE SHERMAN BROTHERS’ STORY

Sat/25, 2 p.m., Letterman Digital Arts Center

THE LOST WORLD WITH DENGUE FEVER

May 5, 8 p.m., Castro

SFIFF: Oaktown fugue

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The stillness inhabiting Bay Area director Frazer Bradshaw’s Everything Strange and New is broken periodically by the sounds of familial battle and the bemused, unemotive back-and-forth of a trio of men perplexed by the circumstances they have drifted into. The most dramatic intrusion, though, is instrumental, an occasional frenzied jigging of horns and strings that seems to signal the internal noise experienced by one of these uneasy men, a carpenter and family man named Wayne (Jerry McDaniel), who is trudging through his middle years in a state of unhappy wonder.

Shot in Oakland, the film uses a series of portrait-like scenes of house exteriors to convey the static emptiness in Wayne’s life, which he describes in voiceover monologues, his voice rising and falling just outside the boundaries of monotone. The contrast between these still lifes and the recurring shock of the soundtrack is almost painfully discordant, though the landscape intruded on is far from idyllic. When the camera moves inside one of the houses, the one where Wayne coexists with his wife, Renée (Beth Lisick), and their two sons, it’s filled with signs of residence but seems as empty and still and dead as the outside world, as if the family has just retreated from some personal apocalypse. Later the camera trails through a gutted Victorian as Wayne and Renée are heard quarreling, then processing as modeled by some couples’ counselor in their past — more emptiness and a sense of unending minor tragedy. Wayne presents a marriage sapped by financial exigencies such as the now-familiar house worth less than their debt.

These signs of trouble are plain enough, but emotionally expressive. Occasionally Bradshaw leans a little heavily on the symbolic, as when we see Wayne as he envisions himself, in the getup of a clown, and when the film runs backward through a trafficked street scene. More problematic, though, is the awkward shift in direction and shape that occurs when the resident stillness is interrupted by something more sharply horrific than the characters’ day-to-day suffering.

EVERYTHING STRANGE AND NEW

Sun/26, 8:45 p.m.; Tues/28, 4:15 p.m.; May 2, 6:30 p.m., Sundance Kabuki

SFIFF: Unhappily ever after

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

We’re living in topsy-turvy, fairy tale times: the mighty have fallen, and the once-marginalized have risen. We’re painting the White House black, while Wall Street high-fliers are hitting the skids and the once-mocked scientists who cried "global warming" are embraced by Main and K streets. A hardscrabble era calls for equally toughened-up tales that provide moral instruction and plunge into the heart of the narrative’s contradictions. Do, er, grittily realistic flicks like Dante Lam’s ADD-paced HK cop thriller Beast Stalker (2008), which skirt the periphery of lost-innocent yarns, count? The filmmaker’s empathy for his monstrously disfigured villain is unparalleled in both the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault.

The former receives a clever tweak with Pil-Sung Yim’s Hansel and Gretel (2007), in which the youthful inmates take over the gingerbread-house asylum. Unwilling to face the fact he’s about to become a father, half-grown man-boy Eun-Soo (Jeong-myeong Cheon) flips his car on a lonely stretch of forest freeway where he’s found by a sweet little girl, Soojeong (Yeong-Nam Jang). She wordlessly leads him to a charming cottage deep in the woods, the House of Happy Children, occupied by the girl, her siblings Manbok (Eun Won-jae) and Jung-soon (Ji-hee Jin), and their unsettlingly cheery parents. The witchery here is embedded in the power of a child’s imagination rather than cannibalism, and it finds a new purpose here: preying on adults with a monstrous, unquenchable will to be loved. The culturally specific shocker crouching in this otherwise gentle shiver-thon fertile with rabbit iconography: a finale of children pleading, cajoling, and whining at the camera directly, which goes on many beats longer than expected. Asian parents and wannabe Octomoms might just want to slice open their wrists and offer themselves to the screen to halt the onslaught.

Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard studies the original tale with a more dispassionate, though no less entertaining, eye. She runs it through a postmodernist’s prism by coolly drawing from period artwork, utilizing an archly detached acting style and distancing devices like recycled footage, and framing it all as an imminently malleable yet still dangerous narrative retold by a pair of somewhat-modern-day sisters. A miniature, girlish version of The Last Mistress (2007) star Asia Argento, as feistily portrayed by Lola Creton, Marie-Catherine is less frightened of her hulking, erudite, and exhausted Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas) than fascinated by his alien world, his exoticism, and her own fearlessness. More surprising is how we comfortable grow with the deepening romance between the murderous lord and his child bride. In tackling the most pointed fairy tale about violence against women and in the process foregrounding the horror and glory of womanly will, Breillat continues to build on her now less naked, yet no less resonant feminist oeuvre, one that tests the tangled, hazardous constructs of female desire.

BLUEBEARD

Fri/24, 7:15; Sat/25, 9:30; April 29, 4:15 p.m., Sundance Kabuki

HANSEL AND GRETEL

Fri/24, 11:15 p.m.; Mon/27, 3:15 p.m., Sundance Kabuki

April 30, 7 p.m., Roxie

SFIFF: In the realms of the real

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Michael Moore may have paved the way for documentary gold, but the most structurally adventurous, ethically demanding nonfictions still reside on the festival block, where they frequently outshine their fictional counterparts for formal rigor and breadth of imagination. If the 2009 SFIFF field doesn’t have a marquee attraction like Standard Operating Procedure, all the better — a year later, I still haven’t lost the bad taste of Errol Morris’s hi-def moral confusion.

A corrective to Standard‘s self-serving auteurism might be gleaned from Avi Mograbi’s Z32. In this case the troubling testimony belongs to an Israeli soldier who participated in a senseless revenge killing of Palestinian innocents, but Mograbi handcrafts the layers of remorse that elude Morris’s smug "interrotron." We never see the ex-soldier’s face, though the digital application of masks produces an uncanny effect in tune with the film’s sliding scale of memory and performance, responsibility and displacement. Mograbi’s willingness to bring the war home (much of the film is set in his living room) is unusual for an investigative reporter, but then most investigative reporters do not narrate their mediating role in song.

Cameroonian-French filmmaker Jean-Marie Téno’s documentary Sacred Places seems more conventional in its blend of interview and ethnographic reflections, but the calm manner in which ideas flow from these encounters makes for a first-rate essay-film. Set in a poor district of Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, Sacred Places centers on two eloquent men: Jules Cesar Bamouni, a djembe maker who makes some of the same linkages between film and the traditional storytelling forms that first incited griot-auteurs like Ousmane Sembène; and Nanema Boubacar, a hopeful entrepreneur who runs a neighborhood film club. The scenes in which Boubacar rifles through DVD deliveries offer an overlapping portrait of community-oriented cinephilia ("When there are spots on the DVD, it’s not good for the film fans") and the vicissitudes of distribution (even in Burkina Faso, African titles are harder to procure than a Jackie Chan vehicle). Sacred Places is light enough on its feet to pass itself as a slice of life, but Téno’s quiet approach constitutes a major revaluation of the aims of African cinema.

Another illuminating interviewer, Heddy Honigmann, returns with Oblivion, her first film set in Lima since 1994’s mobile portrait Metal and Melancholy. There’s also a double-shot of alternative histories from Lee Anne Schmidt (California Company Town) and Travis Wilkerson (Proving Ground), who are both associated with CalArts, an institutional hotbed for hybridized docs. Wilkerson’s An Injury to One (2003) remains one of the great American political films; his live performance of military footage promises more shots from the avant-garde of documentary. Also on SFIFF’s doc-centric slate: 2009 Persistence of Vision winner Lourdes Portillo, art-historical conspiracy theories courtesy of Peter Greenway (Rembrandt J’Accuse), and reality-bending fictions like John Cassavetes’ still-potent unraveling of the domestic melodrama, A Woman Under the Influence (1974).

SACRED PLACES

Fri/24, 8:40 p.m., PFA

Sun/25, 5 p.m.; April 29, 3:30 p.m., Sundance Kabuki

Z32

May 3, 9:15 p.m.; May 5, 8:30 p.m., Sundance Kabuki

May 4, 8:30 p.m., PFA

SFIFF: 52 pick-up

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cheryl@sfbg.com

In early April, a long-range rocket blasted off from deepest, darkest North Korea; according to a Reuters.com news report, the communist country claimed that its satellite was "launched into orbit and [is now] circling the Earth transmitting revolutionary songs." Um, yeah. Most folks say the rocket failed — and that its real purpose was to test North Korea’s dropping-warheads-on-our-enemies capabilities. Recent rumors of ill health aside, North Korea’s Kim Jong-il appeared shortly after the incident to mark his re-election as the chairman of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s National Defense Commission.

As scary as it is to imagine the pompadored, isolationist "Great Leader" with his mitts on nukes, to focus on North Korea’s threat to the outside world takes away from the atrocities committed within its borders, against its own citizens. As NC Heikin’s quietly terrifying Kimjongilia reveals, the dictator’s country is a cruel, brutal place. The doc features interviews with North Korean refugees whose tales of escape are as harrowing as their recollections of life back home — a place where simply listening to music from a capitalist country or dropping a newspaper with a photograph of Kim on the floor were infractions that could mean imprisonment for three generations of a single family. Starvation, torture, and constant fear factor into nearly every story; families are separated, and even those who escape struggle, such as a woman whose "freedom" in China translated into years of sex slavery. For these people, WMDs are the least of their concerns.

Peering beyond what’s obvious is a theme at the 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival, with a slate that’s particularly doc-heavy. For every gesture that’s a little debatable (you can spin that Francis Ford Coppola directing award however you want, but Apocalypse Now came out in 1979, and 2007’s Youth Without Youth sucked), there are many that deserves high praise: groundbreaking local documentarian Lourdes Portillo receiving the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award, for example. Read on for the Guardian‘s coverage of this year’s fest, and keep watching the skies.

KIMJONGILIA

May 3, 3:30 p.m.; May 6, 3:15 p.m., Sundance Kabuki

May 4, 6:30 p.m., PFA


THE 52ND SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL runs April 23–May 7. Main venues are the Sundance Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Clay, 2261 Fillmore, SF. Satellite venues are Premier Theater, Letterman Digital Arts Center, Bldg. B, One Letterman Drive, Presidio, SF; and Roxie, 3117 16th St, SF. Tickets (most shows $12.50; special programs vary) and additional information at www.sffs.org.

More: Reviews, interviews, and more SFIFF 52 coverage on the Pixel Vision blog as the festival unfolds.

Film Festival 52

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Innovative docs, fractured fairy tales, Disney ditties, dinosaurs, and at least one scene-stealing camel highlight the Fest’s fifty-second year. Our critics take a peek at some of the more buzz-worthy entries below.

THE 52ND SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL runs April 23–May 7. Main venues are the Sundance Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Clay, 2261 Fillmore, SF. Satellite venues are Premier Theater, Letterman Digital Arts Center, Bldg. B, One Letterman Drive, Presidio, SF; and Roxie, 3117 16th St, SF. Tickets (most shows $12.50; special programs vary) and additional information at www.sffs.org.

>>52 pick-up
SFIFF rides again, with a quietly terrifying North Korea doc
By Cheryl Eddy

>>In the realms of the real
Sacred Places and Z32 — SFIFF’s unconventional docs
By Max Goldberg

>>Unhappily ever after
The film fest’s fractured, freaky, and feminist fantasies
By Kimberly Chun

>>Oaktown fugue
Everything Strange and New: stillness interrupted
Lynn Rapoport

>>Tune Boom
SFIFF’s catchy ditties and dino-riffs
By Dennis Harvey

>>Shots in the dark
Our short, sharp takes on other SFIFF flicks

Fiends, eyepatches, and femmes fatales

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The cause of showing neglected old films on 35 mm — that vanishing format — is one recently taken up by a number of local presenters, including the Film on Film Foundation and Midnites for Maniacs. We’re not alone in that pursuit, with one notable purveyor of vintage esoteria on celluloid being Austin, Texas’ Alamo Drafthouse. Its Cinemapocalypse programmers are currently on an "Invasion U.S.A." tour bringing disreputable shlock to big screens along the West Coast.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ double bill on Saturday spans the Atlantic with gratuitous violence and toplessness. Fernando Di Leo’s 1976 Mister Scarface is a lively example of the crime thrillers Italy churned out back then for the international grindhouse circuit. Italian-looking German and Fassbinder regular Harry Baer and German-looking Egyptian Fulci/Franco regular Al Cliver play cocky play dudes out to shake down Jack Palance’s titular mob boss. As their flamboyant older sidekick Vittorio Caprioli opines, "That’s a-Scarface. He’s-a bad news, I tell ya. Just-a looking at him and my asshole a-twitches."

Its marginally less obscure co-feature is Paul Nicholas’ incredibly tawdry 1983 Chained Heat, considered by many the greatest of all W.I.P. (Women in Prison) flicks. The cast alone clinches it: Linda Blair, Sybil Danning, Tamara (1973’s Cleopatra Jones) Dobson, Stella Stevens, Edy Williams — you get the idea.

Midnites for Maniacs gets into the Texas action with a "Fighting Back in the ’80s" quartet at the Castro Theatre on Sunday. Escape from New York (1981) you’ve seen, and 1983’s Vigilante, a.k.a. Street Gang (Fred Williamson and Robert Forster go Death Wish on the usual cackling punk-scum "animals"), is no rarity. But curious minds really want to know about 1982’s kitchen-sink exploitation blowout (cannibal monks! T&A! Kung fu! Cameron Mitchell!) Raw Force. And you haven’t lived till you’ve seen Lady Terminator, a 1988 Indonesian whatsit about an ancient nymphomaniac water goddess who towels off to wreak havoc on the police force and civilian penises of modern Jakarta. It’s vagina dentaterrific. (Dennis Harvey)

SAT/18, MISTER SCARFACE (7 P.M.) AND CHAINED HEAT (8:45 P.M.)

$8-$10

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

www.ybca.org

SUN/19, VIGILANTE (2 P.M.); RAW FORCE (4 P.M.); ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (6 P.M.); LADY TERMINATOR (8 P.M.)

$10

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.castrotheatre.com

Carolina blues

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cheryl@sfbg.com

Ramin Bahrani is a young filmmaker who’s beloved by critics and whatever arthouse-type audiences have been lucky enough to catch his work, thus far 2005’s Man Push Cart and 2007’s Chop Shop. Born in America to Iranian parents, Bahrani was educated at Columbia University and set both of those films — minimalist marvels that racked up kudos galore at global fests — in New York City. His latest, Goodbye Solo, shifts from gritty NY to depressed Winston-Salem, N.C., where Bahrani was raised. Winston-Salem is home to Wake Forest University, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, and RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company; it’s also where Bahrani met the real-life characters who inspired Solo‘s tale of an elderly Southerner, William (Red West) who reluctantly befriends the Senegalese cab driver, Solo (Souléymane Sy Savané), who regularly shuttles him around town.

In the film’s first scene — which really begins mid-scene, as if the camera just happened to be turned on at an unspecified moment — Solo has laughingly just agreed to take William to the mountain hamlet of Blowing Rock in two weeks’ time. As becomes increasingly clear, it’s a two-hour trip from which William does not plan to return. Solo, who dreams of being a flight attendant despite the disapproval of his hugely pregnant wife (mother to his feisty nine-year-old stepdaughter), reaches out to the lonely William for reasons he doesn’t quite understand. For his part, William would prefer to be left alone as he quietly ties up his affairs, though he does begrudgingly allow Solo to bunk down in his motel room when Solo’s career aspirations cause a marital rift.

West, a high school pal of Elvis Presley and a member of Presley’s Memphis Mafia (until Elvis: What Happened?, a 1977 tell-all co-written with other posse members), was a stunt player during the King’s Hollywood years. (As a big-screen presence, West is perhaps most recognizable as one of Patrick Swayze’s small-town allies in 1989’s immortal Road House.) His William is gruffly taciturn, with a mournful aura that suggests a past full of transgressions and a present choked with regrets.

By contrast, Solo is an ebullient force, working hard and hustling harder to get ahead. He takes to William immediately, dubbing the older man "Big Dog" and convincing him to ride around with him and even kick back with a beer at the local pool joint. It’s only when he interferes with William’s Blowing Rock plans that he understand the difficult choice he’ll have to make, should he want to become the friend William truly needs.

Hollywood films about aging are generally sappy, preachy, and stuffed with cringe-inducing scenes of distinguished actors skydiving (see: 2007’s The Bucket List). Not only does Goodbye Solo approach the subject with dignity, it balances out the grimmer William plot with Solo’s optimistic embrace of everything in his life. Realism, with naturalistic acting and locations, is Bahrani’s technical gift. Along with co-scriptwriter Baharez Azimi, he’s also able to hew giant, honest emotions from tiny moments and seemingly ordinary situations.


GOODBYE SOLO opens Fri/17 in Bay Area theaters.

In a Dream

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REVIEW Jeremiah Zagar’s feature has a subject that’s not just close to home, it’s in his home: father Isaiah is an eccentric artist who’s created extraordinary mosaics covering myriad walls, rooms, and several entire buildings in Philadelphia. Julia, his wife of 43 years, views herself as the necessary "reality base" to his "crazy, self-absorbed but amiable … rare flower." Isaiah is a bit of an exhibitionist, his art a "journal of my life" that might easily embarrass family members less accustomed to his idiosyncracies. His past encompasses childhood molestation and institutionalization, while the present is imperiled by "delusions of grandeur." During the several years Jeremiah shot this documentary — at first intended as a simple tribute to a very creative parent — Isaiah upset the family’s long-term yet still very delicate balance by springing a major crisis. On top of that, the filmmaker’s brother moves back in, his marriage collapsed and substance-abuse problems evident to all. The Zagars aren’t anybody’s idea of a standard-issue nuclear unit, but this quietly engaging portrait transcends train-wreck fascination because for all their quirks, they are functional — close, loving, and supportive. Also, because Isaiah’s epic mosaics of tile, paint, and embedded detritus are so remarkable, you’ll want to book the next flight to Philly to see them first-hand.

IN A DREAM opens Fri/17 at the Roxie. See Rep Clock.

The passion of Agnes

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Director commentaries are de rigueur in the DVD age, but few filmmakers possess the élan to warrant a feature length auto-exegesis. Agnès Varda is one, and her most recent memory piece — she claims it’s her last — cheerfully dissolves the boundaries between memoir, retrospective, and installation. The film caps the Pacific Film Archive’s month-long series, "Agnès Varda: Cinécriture," and faithful attendees will be rewarded by its recollections of earlier works from La Pointe Courte (1954) to The Gleaners and I (2000). The Beaches of Agnès begins with the 80-year old Varda spryly instructing her devoted assistants. These are people willing to enter a reverie on the placement of various mirrors. "If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes," she explains of her motivation for filmmaking, before setting off on an unclassifiable daisy chain of reenactment and reminiscence. The film moves at the leisurely pace of the flaneur’s walk, the better to relish Varda’s joie de vivre and sweet bawdiness. Where to begin? With her color-bending bowl cut or Chris Marker’s grinning cat cameos? With the ephemera of Varda’s innumerable home movies or her defense of the so-called "Manifesto of the 343 Bitches"? With the many things she adores — blurry foregrounds, ancient frescoes, heart-shaped potatoes, neighbors — or her W.G. Sebald-like resuscitation of photographs? "All the dead lead me back to Jacques," she says, referring to her great love, Jacques Demy. Their life together loops Beaches with enough beautiful images to warrant several viewings. A must.

THE BEACHES OF AGNÈS

Fri/10, 8:40 p.m.; Sat/11, 6 p.m., $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk

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

Diamond in the rough

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Co-writer-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck made their feature debut in 2006 with Half Nelson, a movie with an iffy concept — an at-risk Brooklyn middle school student discovers her teacher is a part-time crackhead but they become best buds anyway — somehow rendered utterly plausible. That same keen sense of atmospheric and character detail, as well as resistance to sensationalism or cliché, is on display again in their new film, Sugar. The film has taken its time getting to theaters since premiering at the Sundance Film Festival more than a year ago, but it’s likely to be one of the best films of 2009, as it certainly would have been of 2008.

Sugar is also possibly the best narrative film ever about the world of pro baseball, and that’s an opinion lifted from people who care a lot more about America’s pastime than me. It may not have the sentimental or fantasy appeal of 1988’s Bull Durham, 1989’s Field of Dreams, 1984’s The Natural, etc., but as with Half Nelson, Boden and Fleck create something that’s at last deeply satisfying, though their happy ending isn’t at all one you (or the protagonist) might’ve planned two hours earlier.

Here we have baseball, football, and basketball as rivals, but in the Dominican Republic there’s just baseball, a national obsession as well as major export. There are more Dominicans in Major League Baseball than any other offshore population. For everyone who reaches that status, there are umpteen contenders, their aspirations often fueled by a desire to raise themselves and family members above the poverty line. That’s the case for Miguel (Algenis Perez Soto), a coolly self-possessed 19-year-old whose big eyes are always watchful and guarded, suggesting a mind sharply focused on advancement despite his low-key demeanor. He’s called Sugar because, he brags, "I’m sweet with the ladies" — but more seriously, "I’ve got the sweetest knuckle curve you’ve ever seen." His hopes of breaking into the majors are everybody’s, from his girlfriend and mother to the hometown friends who’ll live vicariously through his success.

His pitching skills get him plucked from Boca Chica baseball academy to a cattle-call camp in Phoenix where a lot of other Dominicans await their big chance — or discover it will never come. Sugar, however, gets hand-picked for the minor league Kansas City Knights where, after a fumbling start, he looks like star material.

But as the dream grows nearer, so does Sugar’s evolving sense of insecurity and isolation. He’s absorbed almost no English, so coaching instructions, teammate camaraderie, and even restaurant ordering remain blank mysteries. He’s housed with a well-meaning farm family whose Presbyterian pieties are equally foreign (despite his own crucifix-kissing before each game). When their corn-fed granddaughter sends mixed signals his way — seemingly more interested in spreading salvation than locking lips — our sexually experienced protagonist can only read her behavior as duplicitous. Having left school at 16, he’s intimidated by teammates like Brad (Andre Holland), a million-dollar draftee who’s always got his Stanford degree to fall back on.

Boden and Fleck did their research and then some. To their further credit, it’s all so fully integrated Sugar feels more verité than instructive. Like the performance of Soto (who’d never acted before, and might not again), the film doesn’t outline its agenda or emotions — indeed, some might find it a little too internalized and averse to melodrama. Yet it does exert a spell, building almost unnoticeably until the cumulative effect quietly exhilarates. Among so many recent movies about immigrants pursuing the elusive American Dream, Sugar is a rare upbeat one, partly because it allows that the dream might best be realized when one settles for less than it first promised.

SUGAR opens Fri/10 in Bay Area theaters.

Go into the light

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In an online interview, experimental filmmaker and violin drone pioneer Tony Conrad relates a story: one night, underground drag superstar Mario Montez wandered into the apartment Conrad shared with filmmaker Jack Smith, and at Smith’s behest began an impromptu performance. When Smith flicked on a beaten up 16mm projector to serve as a makeshift spotlight, he and Conrad became transfixed by the play of light that reflected off Montez’s sequined outfit. While it would be glib — and certainly fun — to declare that 1960s structural film was born from the glittering gyrations of a drag queen, Conrad’s anecdote is but one development in his longstanding fascination with the excessive sensory effects of shooting light out into the void. Conrad’s 1965 16mm film The Flicker is perhaps his purest and best-known manifestation of this — 30 minutes of black and white stroboscopic bliss (or hell) that cast its long shadows over Brian Gysin’s dream machines, and more contemporarily, Anthony McCall’s striking digital light and fog projections. You’ll have the chance to see how much flashing light your eyes can take when San Francisco Cinematheque presents screenings of Conrad’s films in conjunction with the New York-based polymath’s weekend-long residency at the concurrent Activating the Medium Festival. While Sunday night’s program features The Flicker, it also puts it into context as a jumping off point for Conrad’s subsequent process-based films and public access video works, in which activities such as electrocution and cooking take on a rhythm as mesmerizing as staring into the pulsating light of a film projector.

TONY CONRAD: FLICKERING JEWEL

Fri/3, 5 p.m. (Program One: "Window, Perspective Shadow")

Sat/4, 8 p.m. (Program Two, with Conrad in performance)

Sun/5, 7:30 p.m. (Program Three: "Flicker and Process Films/Works on Video"), $15

San Francisco Art Institute, 300 Chestnut, SF

www.sfcinematheque.org

Visceral reality

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Already a veteran Irish Republican Army volunteer serving his second penitentiary term at age 27, Bobby Sands was leader of Republican prisoners at HM Prison Maze, a.k.a. Long Kesh, outside Belfast in 1981. Early that year he commenced a hunger strike joined by numerous other inmates, an action intended to define IRA incarcerates as political rather than criminal prisoners while boosting international attention for the independence cause.

After 66 days, he was the first of 10 participants to die. The strike’s cessation five months later (participants joined in at staggered intervals) was claimed as a victory by Conservative P.M. Margaret Thatcher and the mainstream British press. Yet the inmates won most of their demands, IRA membership surged, and the "Iron Lady" was thereafter target No. 1 for patriotic loathing among Irish free-staters.

Hunger is the first feature by Steve McQueen, the London photographer, sculptor, and maker of often black and white shorts created primarily for the more rarefied atmosphere of museums and galleries. Their minimalist rigor is very much present here in the exactitude of composition as well as their emphasis on physical detail and visceral experience. It took Julian Schnabel until The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) to find a full-length subject that suited his tactile sense while excusing a lack of narrative instinct or interest; McQueen’s got there on the first try. Hunger is completely realized, without compromise. It’s convincingly ugly in an aesthetically beautiful way, cool to the touch, admirably near-perfect, and off-putting.

We’re introduced to Sands only after several lesser figures take brief center stage: Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham), a guard whose work weighs heavily on him; new prisoner Davey (Brian Milligan), who refuses to wear "the uniform of a criminal," thus joining the already in-progress "blanket protest"; and older cellmate Gerry (Liam McMahon), who introduces him to the "dirty protest." That protest consisted of caking walls with smeared feces, directing urine into the corridor, and letting uneaten food rot. We finally glimpse Sands (Michael Fassbender) during visiting hours; he puts up a fierce fight as he and others are violently dragged to a forced shave-and-wash.

Hunger is clinical, politically neutral, almost purely observational — interested in simply displaying rather than commenting on the sacrifices made. It’s not unlike McQueen’s series of postage stamps commemorating British soldiers killed in Iraq — created as part of his role as "official war artist" — that were opposed by the Royal Mail and Ministry of Defense.

Ethical debate is limited to one, 17-and-a-half minute shot in which Bobby and Father Moran (Liam Cunningham) lay out personal, political, and religious arguments for and against a potentially lethal strike. It’s only in the subsequent, equally stock-still sequence — a guard sweeping an entire hall-length of piss — that the director’s severity risks feeling schematic.

Needless to say, the final act is unrelenting, with its hallucinations, open sores, and actors starved under medical supervision to scarifying effect. But McQueen finds unsentimental poetry in surprising places throughout, from the snowflakes falling on Lohan’s beating-scarred knuckles to Sands’ lifeless face as a winding sheet is drawn over it. The institutional palette, bare-bones use of sound, even the fully exposed sinewy-to-sticklike male bodies turn docudrama into a kind of exquisite art project, at once devastating and hermetically sealed. *

HUNGER opens Fri/3 in Bay Area theaters.

MORE ON SFBG.COM

Pixel Vision blog: Johnny Ray Huston’s interview with Hunger director Steve McQueen.

Made in U.S.A.

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REVIEW Rialto Pictures founder Bruce Goldstein will scoop up the Mel Novikoff award at this year’s San Francisco Film Festival, but local audiences have a chance to sample his good work before then during the Castro Theatre’s run of Rialto’s freshly struck 35–mm print of Jean-Luc Godard’s widescreen, red-white-and-blue firecracker Made in U.S.A. (1967). If the picture seems a helter-skelter jumble of contingencies, it’s important to remember it was but one of four Godard movies to wash up on these shores during the otherwise turbulent 12-month period slicing through 1967 and 1968 (the other three were 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, La Chinoise, and Week End). Of these, Made in U.S.A. gives the fullest demonstration of Godard’s aim to create a cinema that could take part in the jagged incongruities of modern life. Listing the film’s tangled referents — its confluence of aesthetics, politics, and violence crucially hinges on American hardboiled pulp and the real-life murder of Moroccan leftist Ben Barka — doesn’t begin to describe Made in U.S.A.‘s unexpected pathos. For all its agitprop overtures and modernist complications, the film is also a reflective, conflicted goodbye to the writer-director’s formative romances with American culture and Anna Karina. The porcelain actress, already divorced from Godard by the time the picture was made, gives a fragmented, emotional performance almost entirely in close-up. As the long day closes on Made in U.S.A., an old confidante tells Karina’s Bogart-like investigator that obsolete categories of Right and Left cannot adequately address political problems, to which she responds, "Then how?" That broken question, the neutron star of Godard’s career, shows no sign of letting up.

MADE IN U.S.A. opens Wed/1 at the Castro. See Rep Clock.

Cat’s cradle

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Independent, slyly defiant, and given to zigzags, the cat is the spirit animal for a certain breed of cinematic gleaners. The films of Warren Sonbert and Chris Marker are packed with the feline kind. A kitty or two shows through the lucid abstractions of Nathaniel Dorsky’s recent work, and Agnès Varda’s La Pointe-Courte (1954) uses the animal as a structural device. Accordingly, Ben Rivers’ This is My Land (2006) opens with a lithe creature snapping its head to face the camera. There are several other such mysterious cameos across the 14-minute film, one of several bricolage studies Rivers has composed of off-the-grid settlers who are themselves catlike in both appearance (the whiskers and quick smile) and manner (gentle wildness).

Rivers must appreciate the cat’s association with the gothic, given his propensity to label his shorts as either horrors or portraits. The London-based filmmaker and programmer comes to town this week for two rare programs split along these lines, though it isn’t as stark a divide as it might first sound. The films are all exquisite documents of overgrown spaces, the kind in which the past is made palimpsest, audible in the creak of floorboards and everywhere apparent in the makeshift and ajar.

There are traces of Murnau, Dreyer, and Herzog in Rivers’ work; the films are welcome demonstrations that Expressionism is nothing so much as a feeling for how the physical world relates to the spiritual one, though musical references are equally revealing. The beards, spirits, and foliage evoke the deep English folk of the Incredible String Band and Roy Harper. In addition, the field recording quilt-work done by Lucky Dragons and the Books provides a useful analogue to Rivers non-sync style. Shot with a wind-up Bolex, Rivers processes the film stock himself, leaving grain and light flecks unpolished, with sound and image each representing an autonomous, well-portioned montage. The films open the same rich interstices of avant-garde, documentary, and ethnography as Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s work, but with an intense intimacy that makes them seem like home movies of the highest order.

The old dark house imagery of Rivers’ gothic curios strike a particularly English chord, but the back-to-the-land portraiture has a special resonance in California. We too know these beards, this tumble of wilderness, this particular migration. If these figures seem to age differently, it’s because their living choices represent a decisive approach to both space and time, something Rivers represents with great cinematic adroitness. The specter of global warming and natural disaster thickens these reclusive reliefs. Rivers has admitted his fondness for ’70s postapocalypse moves, a ripe genre rearticulated in the lunar landscapes and scrapyard play of Ah, Liberty! (2008). Horror, in this context, is a kind of awe. It is inseparable from nature — it is, in fact, nature reclaiming civilization.

"[There are] all kind of wild animals [here], and it’s only because I let it get wild. And that’s my point, but nobody will get it," the central figure of Astrika (2006) explains. Rivers, of course, does get it. The homesteaders’ scattered debris suggests Rivers’ own secondhand materials, improvised objects like a birdfeeder made from a milk container reflect his films construction, and the ethos of self-sufficiency is admired and enacted. The human warmth of his filmmaking emanates from these affinities, which go beyond sympathy to touch the elusive nerve of experience. Rivers’ wind-up camera means that no single shot can exceed 30 seconds. But when the pitter-patter of his images settles on something strange and moving, like a distant view of a horse rolling in the snow, it reminds us that beauty is often a humbling drama of the glimpse.

"THE POETIC HORROR OF BEN RIVERS"

Sat/28, 8:30 p.m., $6

Other Cinema at Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

(415) 824-3890, www.atasite.org

"THIS IS MY LAND: BEN RIVERS’ PORTRAITS AND LANDSCAPES"

Sun/29, 7:30 p.m., $10

San Francisco Cinematheque at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

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

Outsider art

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Kiyoshi Kurosawa, director and cowriter of Tokyo Sonata (2008), is likely best known stateside for his contributions to the J-Horror genre (like 2000’s Pulse). But the scruffily low-key director is the first to admit, with assistance from translator Taro Goto, that his kindred Nipponese overlords of the urban-chills are generally regarded in their homeland as "eccentrics." It’s peculiar, he observes wryly, "that [J-Horror directors] are seen as the representatives of Japanese cinema around the world!"

Yet one suspects Kurosawa relishes his outsider label. Following the trajectory of Hollywood craftsmen like Sam Fuller, he has worked within genre to reach for a more acutely poetic, fantasist’s reality. It has allowed him to pursue lines of inquiry that extend beyond commercial concerns and strictly scary story arcs, though his association with J-Horror has somewhat obscured a continuing fascination with capturing a rapidly changing Japan. The tenderly isolated parents and children of Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953) would recognize with shock the disintegrating recession-era family in Tokyo Sonata, but the horror here stems from the unspoken context of a country where once-ironclad norms concerning patriarchal power and filial piety are melting along with the boundaries between the virtual-spiritual-fantastic and the physical-mundane-realistic.

When Tokyo Sonata‘s lost, laid-off salaryman Ryuhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa) goes through the motions of leaving for an imagined office, he’s like a ghost deprived of his machine. Intriguingly, Kurosawa empathizes: "I’m in a rather unstable position myself, as a filmmaker, so it’s possible I’m projecting some of my own experiences onto my characters. But I don’t see it as a completely negative aspect of my life. I think it gives me the chance to potentially achieve freedom from certain elements of society, morals, laws, interpersonal relationships, and those things that do tend to constrict us in life." (Kimberly Chun)

TOKYO SONATA opens Fri/27 in Bay Area theaters.

Ballerina

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REVIEW If comparisons between Bertrand Normand’s Ballerina and Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine’s 2005 Ballets Russes are inevitable, it’s perhaps mostly indicative of how infrequently a feature-length ballet documentary gets made and distributed. Then again, one could argue that the stark differences in subject and scope are historically significant. Richly researched and packed with archival footage and modern-day interviews, Ballets Russes depicts the milieu of dancers, choreographers, and impresarios exiled from postrevolutionary Russia in the early years of the 20th century. Ballerina trains its focus on the world they left behind, or what became of it, concentrating on the grueling, somewhat circumscribed lives of five female dancers making their careers in present-day, post-Soviet Russia, in St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre, where the world-renowned Kirov Ballet has its home. Where Ballets Russes describes the historical arc within which modern ballet as we know it was created, Ballerina describes the smaller, personal arcs of two newer dancers making their painstaking way out of the corps de ballets and three principal dancers, one who is returning to work after a lengthy injury. Interviews and footage of unending classes, rehearsals, and performances clarify the single-minded conviction and commitment with which these young women approach their vocation, accepting physical pain and deprivation as a daily reality, while instructors and artistic directors sketch the larger picture of a profession in which early retirement is a fact of life. Still, the film has a flatness of tone that is literally conveyed in the somewhat run-of-the-mill narration ("A ballerina’s work is never done") and paralleled by the flat affect of most of the subjects. The performance footage is lovely — though also offering ample evidence of the Kirov’s aged repertoire — but perhaps the most visually startling moment occurs during an admissions exam at St. Petersburg’s premier ballet school, in which 10-year-old aspirants are put through their paces virtually naked, their limbs manipulated by ballet masters attempting to divine the future.

BALLERINA opens Fri/27 in Bay Area theaters.

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