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Film Review

The filth and the fury

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Apologies to all Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville fans out there, but the American novel didn’t get good until it shook off the last vestiges of Puritanism and risked a certain shock factor. It wasn’t just the authors pushing potentially offensive social-realist (Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair) or unflattering social-elite-portraiture boundaries (Edith Wharton, Henry James, etc.) who made the upstart nation’s lit suddenly comparable to the Old World’s new output. By the dawn of the 20th century, non-rabble-rousing Yank fiction (not to be confused with today’s street-corner favorite tabloid, Yank) had also matured stylistically. Still, it’s those "dirty books" that somehow still stick out in well-read readers’ back pages. American censorship battles in the 20th century were, until well into the sexual revolution, largely fought on literary terrain.

Barney Rosset, the subject of new documentary Obscene, should be canonized by First Amendment fans as the patron saint of key mid-20th-century obscenity cases. As founder of Evergreen Review and Grove Press, this "smut peddler" published everyone from Harold Pinter to Octavio Paz to Kathy Acker, as well as a whole lot of unapologetic porn (mostly the Victorian kind). No wonder Rosset was behind some of the central court struggles against censorious US standards for both literature and movies. He consorted with yippies and Black Panthers, produced close friend Samuel Beckett’s only film (1965’s Film), and was called a "tragic hero" by his own analyst (one of many). He is an interesting enough guy that one wishes codirectors Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor’s admiring portrait was longer — it gets the career highlights down but barely touches on what sounds like an equally colorful personal life.

Weaned on the radicalism of Depression-era East Coast experimental schools, Rosset was an Army combat cinematographer during World War II. He returned home to produce 1948’s virtually unknown Strange Victory — a movie about American racism so incendiary that only one New York City theater would consent to show it. Having been checked out by the FBI as a possible "Communist filth racketeer" while in grammar school, he was on familiar ground when he commenced the first of many legally challenged literary ventures in the late 1950s. Evergreen Press republished Allen Ginsberg’s suppressed epic poem Howl; Grove launched US printings of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, both already decades-old yet still banned on our shores. Other causes célèbres included William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (published just after his assassination), and Che Guevara’s diaries (which angered somebody enough to get Grove’s offices bombed).

As if this wasn’t drama enough, Rosset’s business and personal fortunes experienced considerably more disorder as the turbulent ’60s turned into the oversatiated ’70s. Importing a Marxist quasidocumentary art film from Sweden, 1967’s I Am Curious (Yellow), made cinema safe for sex after protracted court battles. It also made millions, which perversely hurt Grove in the end — forcing an expansion that proved disastrous, particularly when 1968 sequel I Am Curious (Blue) bombed. The CIA put Rosset under surveillance and women’s liberationists assailed his catalog as sexist, yet threatening calls and sniper fire at his home did not exactly discourage his alcohol and amphetamine abuse. He was even fired from Grove itself after a supposedly friendly takeover.

Too bad Obscene just skims over the less-public chapters in its subject’s life, like his four marriages. Now a dapper and delightful old man, Rosset has long since burned through the last of many fortunes made and lost. He’s broke but blithe about it, as if cocooned by admiration — the eccentric lineup of praise-singing interviewees here include Jim Carroll, John Waters, Amiri Baraka, Erica Jong, and Gore Vidal. Perhaps the best testaments to Rosset’s character, however, are priceless excerpts from a cable-TV interrogation in which he responds to actual smut peddler Al Goldstein’s exasperatingly crude questions ("How do you get sucked into marriage?" being the least of them) with charming, earnest self-examination.

OBSCENE: A PORTRAIT OF BARNEY ROSSET AND GROVE PRESS

Opens Fri/5

Nightly at 7, 8:45 p.m. (also Sat–Sun, 3, 5 p.m.), $5–$10

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 431-3611, www.roxie.com

Ballin’

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Best known for her career as a documentarian (she won an Oscar for 1997’s Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien), Jessica Yu makes her narrative feature debut with Ping Pong Playa, an often gut-busting sports fable about a wannabe NBA star who becomes the unlikely hero of his ping-pong-crazed family.

Lead actor Jimmy Tsai’s performance as Christopher "C-Dub" Wang is so dead-on hilarious, I assumed he was a stand-up comedian. Nope: "I met Jimmy because he was the production accountant at [Ping Pong Playa production company] Cherry Sky Films," Yu explains. "I went to a screening of short films where he showed these humorous spots he had made for an online clothing company. I remember thinking this was a great character to use for something. So when [Cherry Sky’s] Joan Huang and Jimmy approached me about working on [a comedy] together, my first thought was we have to put this character C-Dub in it."

The first-time thespian was already a naturally funny guy (he cowrote the film with Yu), but he trained for six months to get his skills in line with the film’s ping-pong storyline. "There’s something inherently funny about the sport," Yu says. "Not to take anything away from it, but no matter how hard you hit a ping-pong ball, it still makes that smack! So the idea of putting somebody who was kind of bombastic into that world was ripe for opportunity."

Yu says her background as a champion fencer influenced her desire to make a sports movie. "I think there were certainly discussions about the kind of sports that Asians are known for being good at — whether it’s diving, or ping-pong, or to some extent fencing. I just think it’s interesting that a character like C-Dub has no interest in excelling at what he sees as marginalized sports — but that tends to be where you see a lot of Asians on the podium."

As for Yu, "My game’s pretty terrible! We had a ping-pong table on set at all times — and if it’s sitting there long enough you’re gonna play. I’m still not good at it, but I enjoy it a little more now."

PING PONG PLAYA

Opens Fri/5 in Bay Area theaters

Cinemania

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Mock Up on Mu Craig Baldwin’s latest opus, on rocket science and Scientology in California, with the director in person.

Sept. 2. Pacific Film Archive

Obscene A new documentary about Evergreen Review and Grove Press publisher Barney Russet and his many battles on behalf of free speech and real art.

Sept. 5–11. Roxie Film Center

Lost Indulgence and In Love We Trust A pair of films by up-and-coming Chinese directors Zhang Yibai and Wang Xiaoshuai.

Sept. 6–20. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Wattis Theater, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

"History Stutters: Found Footage Films" Bruce Conner’s John F. Kennedy–assassination film Report (1965) and Ken Jacobs’ Malcolm X. assassination response Perfect Film (1984) is on the same bill; program also includes a movie with Ed Henderson.

Sept. 9. Pacific Film Archive

Leave Her to Heaven The 1947 Technicolor noir — and ultimate swimmer’s nightmare — returns with a demonstration of film restoration.

Sept. 12. Smith Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St., San Rafael. (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org

"MilkBar International Live Film Festival" Three days of experimental cinema, including more than 20 local short works.

Sept. 12–14. Noodle Factory Performing Arts Center, 1255 26th St. #207, Oakl. (510) 289-5188, www.milkbar.org

"Unknown Pleasures: The Films of Jia Zhangke" At last, China’s vanguard contemporary filmmaker gets an extensive Bay Area retrospective.

Sept. 12–Oct. 17. Pacific Film Archive

"The People Behind the Screen" Local programmers contribute to "Bay Area Now": Jesse Hawthorne Ficks presents girl rock; Stephen Parr of Oddball Films shares a giddy taste of his mega-montage project Euphoria; and kino21 puts together performance cinema; Peaches Christ, Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project, and DocFest also have nights.

Sept. 13–Oct. 18. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Shatfest Thrillville’s tributes to the one and only William Shatner continue with his 1968 spaghetti western White Comanche.

Sept. 18. El Cerrito Speakeasy Theater, 10070 San Pablo, El Cerrito. (510) 814-2400, www.thrillville.net

"Taylor Mead: A Clown Underground" The legendary wit Mead visit for screenings that showcase his best starring roles (1960’s The Flower Thief and 1967–68’s Lonesome Cowboys).

Sept. 18–21. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Forbidden Lies The Roxie is distributing this look at con artist Norma Khouri, which gets a theatrical run after a successful trip through the festival circuit.

Sept. 19. Roxie Film Center

MadCat Women’s International Film Festival Ariella Ben-Dov’s fest turns 12 with eight archival greats (including one by Samara Halperin) and silent films with live rock scores.

Sept. 19 and 23. Various venues. (415) 436-9523, www.madcatfilmfestival.org

"Psychotic and Erotic: Rare Films by Tinto Brass" Ass-fixated erotica that includes talking animals and naked cannibals.

Sept. 24. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"How We Fight: Iraqi Short Films" Kino21 kicks off a series with Argentine director Mauro Andrizzi’s feature-length compilation of short videos shot by US or British soldiers, Iraqi militia members, and corporate workers.

Sept. 25. Artists’ Television Access

"James Dean Memorial Weekend" Come back to the five and dime, or failing that, the Castro, and be sure to wear your red windbreaker.

Sept. 26–28. Castro Theatre

Film in the Fog Gene Kelley is singing in the rain — and the Presidio fog.

Sept. 27. Main Post Theatre, 99 Moraga, SF. (415) 561-5500, www.sffs.org

The World’s Largest Shopping Mall The debut or preview of a film by Sam Green and Carrie Lozano is at the heart of a program devoted to psychogeography.

Sept. 27. Other Cinema

Deathbowl to Downtown Coan Nichols’ and Rick Charnoski’s look at the history of NYC street skateboard culture, narrated by Chloë Sevigny.

Sept. 29. Castro Theatre

"Bette Davis Centennial" She’ll tease you, she’ll unease you — all the better just to please you.

Sept.–Oct. Castro Theatre

Dead Channels You can never get enough weird horror and fantasy.

Oct. 2–5. Roxie Film Center

Mill Valley Film Festival The major fall Bay Area festival turns 31.

Oct. 2–12. Various venues. (415) 383-5256, www.mvff.org

Rosemary’s Baby and The Devils Double the demonic hysteria!

Oct. 3. Castro Theatre

"No Wave: The Cinema of Jean Eustache" The series includes 1965’s Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes, his 215-minute masterpiece The Mother and the Whore (1973), his hog-slaughtering documentary — shades of Georges Franju? — The Pig (1970), and a 1997 doc portrait of him.

Oct. 4–22. Pacific Film Archive

"Rediscovering the Fourth Generation" The post-Mao cinema that laid groundwork for directors such as Jia Zhangke gets a SF showcase.

Oct. 4–30. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Wattis Theater, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

Vertigo The greatest San Francisco movie ever — maybe greatest movie ever — gets the outdoor screening treatment from Film Night in the Park.

Oct. 4. Union Square, SF. (415) 453-4333, www.filmnight.org

"Spirit of ’68" and "Know Your Enemy" A pair of programs compiled by Jack Stevenson

Oct. 5. Oddball Films, 275 Capp, SF. (415) 558-8117, www.oddballfilm.com

Manhattan and Muppets Take Manhattan Mariel Hemingway, meet Miss Piggy.

Oct. 7–9. Red Vic Movie House, 1727 Haight, SF. (415) 668-3994. www.redvicmoviehouse.com

"French Cinema Now" A new minifestival from the San Francisco Film Society.

Oct. 8–12. Various venues. (415) 561-5000, www.sffs.org

"Superstars Next Door: A Celebration of SF Amateur Sex Cinema from the ’60s" Stevenson looks at that time in SF when everyone would take off their clothes for a camera — with film in it.

Oct. 9–11. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"Midnites for Maniacs: Back to School … in the ’90s" Jesse Hawthorne Ficks serves up Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1991), Romeo and Juliet (1995), and Starship Troopers (1997).

Oct. 10. Castro Theatre

"Envisioning Russia: A Century of Filmmaking" The expansive 16-film program extends across eight decades.

Oct. 10–30. Pacific Film Archive

"Protest-sploitation" A lecture-demo by Christian Divine looking at six "youth" films made in 1970, along with a screening of that year’s The People Next Door.

Oct. 11. Other Cinema

RR James Benning’s train film finally reaches a Bay Area destination.

Oct. 14. Pacific Film Archive

Arab Film Festival The festival turns 12 this year.

Oct. 16–Nov. 4. Various venues. (415) 564-1100. www.aff.org

DocFest IndieFest’s doc extension turns seven this year with a slate of at least 60 films.

Oct. 17–Nov.6. Roxie Film Center and Shattuck Cinema, 2230 Shattuck, Berk. (415) 820-3907, www.sfindie.com

Leslie Thornton A three-program SF Cinematheque series devoted to the director behind Peggy and Fred in Hell (1985–present) and other experimental works, with Thornton in-person.

Oct. 19–26. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

United Nations Association Film Festival Environmentalism is the focus of the festival’s 11th year.

Oct. 19–26. Various venues. (650) 724-5544, www.unaff.org

"I Love Beijing: The Films of Ning Ying" Ning and her acclaimed Beijing trilogy — which spans from the Peking Opera to dogs, cops, and taxi drivers — visit the Bay, capping things a screening of her 2005 "Chinese Sex and the City" feature Perpetual Motion.

Oct. 23–27. Pacific Film Archive

The Werewolf of Washington The president’s speechwriter is a lycanthrope in this Nixon-era flick.

Oct. 31. Pacific Film Archive

"The New Talkies: Bollywood Night" Kino21 presents six works of live narration to Bollywood film scenes.

Nov. 1. Artists’ Television Access

"Occult on Camera" Erik Davis charts out the Aleister Crowley–Kenneth Anger–Led Zeppelin triumvirate-of-evil — what does Jimmy Page’s appearance in the closing ceremony of the Olympics mean?

Nov. 1. Other Cinema

Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine The SF premiere of a new documentary devoted to the sculptor.

Nov. 2–3. Red Vic Movie House, 1727 Haight, SF. (415) 668-3994, www.redvicmoviehouse.com

Ghosts Nick Broomfield’s excellent first non-documentary feature, about the abuse of Chinese immigrants in the United Kingdom.

Nov. 7–13. Roxie Film Center

San Francisco International Animation Festival The burgeoning fest and showcase turns three with a program that includes the Cannes favorite Waltz with Bashir.

Nov. 13–16. Various venues. (415) 561-5000, www.sffs.org

Luther Price New works by one of the more scathing and harrowing filmmakers on the planet, presented by SF Cinematheque.

Mid-November. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

New Italian Cinema Will it include Matteo Garrone’s Cannes critic’s fave Gomorra?

Nov. 16–23. Various venues. (415) 561-5000, www.sffs.org

"Films by Martha Colburn" A night of kinetic works by the collage creator, presented in conjunction with a show at Berkeley Art Museum.

Dec. 2. Pacific Film Archive

Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy Thrillville stuffs your stocking with a gem from 1957.

Dec. 11. El Cerrito Speakeasy Theater, 10070 San Pablo, El Cerrito. (510) 814-2400, www.thrillville.net

James Hong A sneak peek at the local director’s expose on Japan’s rewriting of history, Lessons in the Blood.

Dec. 13. Other Cinema

"At Sea" Peter Hutton’s At Sea (2004-7), about the life and death of a colossal container ship, is the centerpiece of an oceanic SF Cinematheque program.

Dec. 14. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS/OTHER CINEMA

992 Valencia, SF

(415) 824-3890

www.othercinema.com

CASTRO THEATRE

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

ROXIE FILM CENTER

3317 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

www.roxie.com

YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS

701 Mission, screening room, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

>>More Fall Arts Preview

Autumn reels

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

As summer dwindles into, well, Indian summer (this is San Francisco, after all), film fans are all asking the same thing: will The Dark Knight be nominated for Best Picture, or what? Like, what other 2008 release has even come close? As the temperature tries to make up its mind between freezing fog and freaky heat, the only thing to do is haul ass to the movieplex and let Hollywood deplete your brain cells as painlessly as possible. Who knows, there might be some awards-season contenders in the following list of fall movie picks. There’s at least one talking chihuahua, anyway. All dates subject to change.

Sept. 26: Seems like just yesterday that Shia LaBeouf was giving interviews about how he wasn’t going to be a show biz cliché — you know, keeping his head down, concentrating on his career, and avoiding scandalous run-ins with the law. Maybe Eagle Eye, in which the erstwhile spawn of Indy Jones plays a ne’er-do-well mysteriously targeted by terrorists, will make it into theaters before he has his first tabloid-fodder romance. Tick-tock, Us Weekly!

Oct. 3: Weirdly, there aren’t many horror flicks primed for October releases this year. Guess Beverly Hills Chihuahua, which stars the voices of nearly every known Latino actor in Hollywood (Edward James Olmos, how could you?), is gonna have to fit the bill. Director Raja Gosnell also helmed both Scooby-Doo movies. Far more promising is Ed Harris’ Appaloosa, a Western about two lawmen (Harris and Viggo Mortensen) whose friendship is tested by, natch, a dame (Renée Zellweger). Those of us for whom "Viggo on a horse" is box-office draw enough can work around the Zellweger.

Oct. 10: Ridley Scott, Russell Crowe, Leonardo DiCaprio, and William Monahan, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Departed, join forces for Body of Lies, a political thriller worth seeing based on the above pedigree alone. So what if Leo has a weird Southern accent in the trailer, and Ridley and Russell’s last collaboration birthed the 2006 bomb A Good Year?

Oct. 17: Do we really need to see Oliver Stone’s George W. Bush biopic, W., having just suffered through eight years of the worst president ever to take office? Is it too soon to point and laugh? Judging from the hilarious (and scary-because-it-might-actually-be-true) trailer, the performances of Josh Brolin and others cast as real-life newsmakers will make W. well worth it. Thandie Newton as Condoleezza Rice may be a stretch, but Toby Jones as Karl Rove is particularly inspired.

Oct. 24: Two cunning linguists, Brick writer-director Rian Johnson and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind writer Charlie Kaufman, have new flicks out today. Johnson’s The Brothers Bloom follows the entanglements of con men played by Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo; Kaufman makes his directorial debut with Synecdoche, New York, in which a dying theater director played by Philip Seymour Hoffman aims to create one last great work of art.

Nov. 14: James Bond (extra-buff Daniel Craig version) returns in Quantum of Solace. In Australia, Baz Luhrmann, Nicole Kidman, and Hugh Jackman combine their home-country superpowers for a sweeping epic set you-know-where.

Nov. 21: I realize I already foamed over Viggo Mortensen above, but The Road — directed by The Proposition‘s John Hillcoat and adapted from the postapocalyptic Cormac McCarthy novel — absolutely gets my vote for most-anticipated 2008 release.

Nov. 26: The Castro Theatre gets a two-day exclusive on Milk before it opens wide Nov. 28. Don’t know what Milk is? What kind of a San Franciscan are you?

Dec 12: Keanu Reeves stars in The Day the Earth Stood Still remake. Insert your own Klaatu/Keanu joke here.

Dec. 25: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button reunites Fight Club director David Fincher with star Brad Pitt. Based on a 1922 short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the film explores the curious-indeed life of a man (Pitt, with copious CG assistance) who ages in reverse.

>>More Fall Arts Preview

“Riot on Sunset Strip” film series

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PREVIEW Break out your go-go boots for this four-day flashback to Los Angeles’ 1960s experience hosted by Dominic Priore, author of Riot on Sunset Strip: Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Last Stand in Hollywood and Smile: The Story of Brian Wilson’s Lost Masterpiece. It kicks off with the 1968 counterculture grab-bag You Are What You Eat, a freeform documentary encompassing both the LA and San Francisco hippie scenes, plus appearances by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, David Crosby, Tiny Tim, Paul Butterfield, the Hells Angels, the Greta Garbo Home for Wayward Boys and Girls Too (an actual place), and notorious (and soon to be killed) SF dealer Super Spade. Next up: Roger Corman’s ’67 chestnut The Trip, in which Peter Fonda takes a heavy ride through the windmills of his mind. That same year’s lesser-remembered Riot on Sunset Strip, produced by the inimitable Sam Katzman (1967’s Hot Rods to Hell, 1953’s Killer Ape), tells the shocking story of reckless youth Andy (Mimsy Farmer), looking for kicks you-know-where to escape her broken home. Bummers ensue, not helped by a surreptitious acid-dosing freakout and the fact that Andy’s dad is an LAPD chief! Two great garage bands, the Standells and the Chocolate Watchband, perform onscreen in this epic about those daring (as the advertising put it) "teenyboppers with their too-tight capris." Finally, Chris Hall’s 2006 Love Story documents the brief rise and long fall of Arthur Lee’s Love, the cult-adored psychedelic pop band.

"RIOT ON SUNSET STRIP" film series runs Thurs/28–Sun/31 at the Red Vic Movie House. See Rep Clock for showtimes.

“Warchild”

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REVIEW German director Christian Wagner’s Warchild is a captivating and tragic drama about the psychological repercussions of the Bosnian war. Ten years after the fighting has ended, Senada (Labina Mitevska) comes across evidence suggesting that her daughter Aida, who was lost in the melee, might still be alive. She follows lead after lead with a kind of eerie resolve, undaunted by the fact that everyone — including her estranged husband — thinks she’s behaving irrationally. She eventually makes her way into Germany illegally and discovers that Aida, now 12 and renamed Kristina, was adopted by an affluent couple. Although the girl is clearly enjoying a life of privilege and has no recollection of her birth parents, Senada is determined to take her back to Bosnia. Naturally, this desperation is an expression of maternal love. But Senada also seems to believe that in reclaiming Aida, she will be able to reclaim the life that was essentially stolen from her during the war. Mitevska gives an arresting performance as the guarded but obviously broken protagonist; she is simultaneously sympathetic and unsettling.

WARCHILD opens Fri/22 at the Roxie Film Center. See Rep Clock for showtimes.

Comic drama

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Rock me, sexy Jesus — I mean, sexy, sniffle-y Steve Coogan. With a little luck, the British actor’s latest comedy will soon place those lyrics on the lips of teenaged malcontents — the same ilk that Coogan’s hemorrhoid-commercial thespian and high school drama theater Dana Marschz haplessly mentors in Hamlet 2. As a parody of inspirational teacher flicks, Hamlet 2 (see our review) is a rousing success — the type Mr. Holland would toss his opus for. It’s almost completely due to Coogan. In contrast to his brief, blotto turn through that other cinematic lampoon in the theaters, Tropic Thunder, he klutzes, kibitzes, and futzes, hilariously, through nearly every frame.

Hamlet 2 finds Coogan playing an American mired in a monochromatic Albuquerque. Marschz is a pathetic synthesis of ditziness, show-must-go-on hope, and ambition — writing Hamlet 2 seems the perfect way for him to exorcise his own fatherly ghosts and put a feel-good spin on that downer play. Yet it was the character’s bare-faced vulnerability that Coogan — known in the United Kingdom for his TV commentator Alan Partridge and stateside as an independent actor who has appeared in films by Michael Winterbottom, Jim Jarmusch, and Sofia Coppola — found most daunting.

"I think I’m going to fall flat on my face in everything I do, really," allows the actor, congested and "bunged-up" during the San Francisco stop of a press tour. "I’m used to playing comic characters who are often unpleasant people and who you somehow have some kind of empathy for. This guy isn’t awful or nasty. He’s vulnerable and foolish and slightly self-delusional. I could see how you could make him funny. [The trick is to make sure] the audience would care enough about him to see it through to the end. That was the tough thing."

Coogan meets the challenge. Now perhaps kids in music stores will call out for the actor’s drama geek or rocker Christ figure as much as his smirking, überhipster version of Tony Wilson in 2002’s 24 Hour Party People. "I feel very, very close to that film," Coogan says of Wilson, partly because he grew up in Manchester, where he often slipped into Wilson’s Hacienda nightclub. "All the events in that movie, I witnessed as a young teenager. When I did the movie, I felt like I was reliving my youth — except I was playing the guy at the center of the events, rather than the spectator."

Shakespeare and sexy Jesus

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More in this issue:

>>An interview with Steve Coogan

>>More new movie reviews

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Sundance darling Hamlet 2 has been dubbed by at least one critic as this year’s Napoleon Dynamite; but with an R rating and dialogue like, "I feel like I’ve been raped in the face," the movie isn’t nearly as quirky as that assessment implies. This is a good thing. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy comedy served with a side of whimsy just as much as any Juno fan; but brazenly puerile movies that lie on the more ribald end of the humor spectrum have their own undeniable charms.

There is an art to making an enjoyable lowbrow comedy, as bizarre as it may seem. It’s the reason why deceptively dumb movies like Team America: World Police (2004) have achieved cult status and obscenely dumb movies like Hot Rod (2007) should never, under any circumstances be viewed — and incidentally, both were scripted (at least in part) by Hamlet 2 cowriter Pam Brady. There may be a fine line between stupid and clever, but the line that separates silly from moronic is just as — if not more — tenuous. Brady’s good name is happily on the road to recovery, though, with this over-the-top farce. To quote Polonius from Hamlet 1, "Though this be madness … there is method in it."

All of the madness, as it were, revolves around Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan), an inept but undeniably gung-ho high school drama teacher. You see, Marschz (and every consonant is pronounced in that name) is a failed actor who devotes himself to the two students in his class and the low-budget, sparsely attended stagings of recent Hollywood classics like Erin Brockovich. When the school newspaper’s prepubescent, hyperarticulate drama critic gives his latest production a scathing review, Marschz is distraught, but he flirts with the idea of writing something original. It isn’t until the following school year, when funding for drama is cut, that he’s shocked into action. He begins working on what will become a sort of play-within-a-play — a lewd and ridiculous sequel to Hamlet with a cast of characters that includes Albert Einstein, sexy Jesus, a bi-curious Laertes, and everyone else from the original Shakespearean tragedy, brought back to life via time machine.

Though the tone is overwhelmingly absurd, this is a satire. It isn’t a particularly sophisticated satire, but it’s effective nonetheless — offering a critique of censorship and the ACLU; Amy Poehler plays a sassy, foul-mouth lawyer with no qualms about defending a high school play wherein Jesus gets a hand job. Rounding out the cast is Catherine Keener as Marschz’s crass wife, David Arquette as the Marschzs’ virtually silent boarder, who inexplicably follows them everywhere, and Elisabeth Shue as herself. But make no mistake, this is Coogan’s show. He’s a star in his native England, yet as far as American cinema is concerned, he’s consistently been relegated to supporting roles. Finally he’s allowed to shine here, and the movie ultimately owes its success to his performance. He falls down repeatedly in an intersection while wearing roller skates, he exposes his butt, he moonwalks on water as sexy Jesus — all of it inspired. Shakespearean comedies usually end in a wedding: though no one gets married in Hamlet 2, it’s a hell of a lot funnier than anything the Bard ever wrote. *

HAMLET 2

Opens Fri/22 at Bay Area theaters

“Trumbo”

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REVIEW "I have the feeling that if you give most people in the world the choice between enough food for their children and shelter and clothing in return for their freedom of speech, that they will go for the food, the shelter, and the necessities," said Dalton Trumbo, screenwriter of Spartacus (1960), Exodus (1960), Papillon (1973), and a number of other films, including Roman Holiday (1953) and The Brave One (1956), that either were written under an assumed name or (at the time) simply went uncredited. Trumbo and the rest of the "Hollywood 10" — screenwriters and directors who, when suspected of being communists, refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee by invoking the First Amendment, not the Fifth, as justification. They were subsequently blacklisted by Hollywood studios. Trumbo director Peter Askin weaves insightful commentary from family, friends, film historians, and actors (Donald Sutherland, Dustin Hoffman, and Kirk Douglas make appearances) with vintage footage of the Academy Award–winning writer, giving us an eloquent portrait of a stubborn but nevertheless admirable man. Although the documentary is ostensibly about the impact the blacklisting had on the screenwriter’s life, excerpts from speeches, novels, and letters (read by the likes of Joan Allen, Paul Giamatti, Liam Neeson, David Strathairn, and Michael Douglas) are interspersed throughout the film, showing that Trumbo (who died in 1976 at age 70) had a way of making words dance — and that he was deeply invested in everything he wrote.

TRUMBO opens Fri/15 in Bay Area theaters.

Space is the race

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When conservatives wax nostalgic for a family-values America that liberals are hell bent on destroying forever, they’re basically talking about the 1950s — that last oasis of prosperity for guiltless acquisitiveness, formulaic gender roles, and general agreement not to discuss any round peg not fitting into a square hole. It was a simpler era: a time when poor people were kept safely out of majority sight, racial minorities were politely ignored, the existence of gay people was nothing more than a distasteful rumor, and divorce and so-called illegitimate childbirth were properly discouraged by shame.

As far as some Americans are concerned (particularly in retrospect), the ’50s were happy days. One reason, no doubt, was that the enemy — communism — was easy to identify. Two decades ago, when communism in most territories ended with a whimper, the Cold War era officially died with it. But David Hoffman’s documentary Sputnik Mania turns the Way Back Machine to that long moment when it was overwhelmingly, virulently alive.

Sputnik Mania charts those halycon times when the threat of a communist takeover — or a communist-triggered doomsday — seemed so great that our great democracy might not survive. Our country’s women were sure to be raped, and all of our children certain to be zombified by propaganda. As mass delusions go, the Cold War fears of the ’50s were so efficient that you might swear they’re still being recycled.

Hoffman chronicles the history-changing hysteria that ensued when the USSR seemingly came out from nowhere to place a surprising first in the early stages of the space race. The 1957 launch of the Sputnik marked the first time a rocket circled the Earth. Like the Apollo moon landing a decade later, this achievement was celebrated as a great advance for all mankind. Then came panic. Comparing the event to Pearl Harbor, Sen. Lyndon Johnson later wrote, "Another nation had achieved superiority over this great nation of ours. The thought shocked me." The ever-levelheaded Vatican pronounced that such technology was "a frightening toy in the hands of childlike men without morals." Speculations ranged from the sci-fi paranoiac to the biblically apocalyptic and raged like wildfire. If the Russkies could orbit around us, why wouldn’t they soon bomb us to smithereens? (Admittedly, the USSR didn’t allay fears when it test-exploded a hydrogen bomb.)

Sputnik Mania shows how politicos, religious leaders, concerned mothers, and perhaps even your Uncle Fred clambered for the United States to wake up and smell the need to (as one Congress member puts it) "save Western civilization from annihilation." Backyard bomb shelters were dug and prayer groups assembled. Initial Yankee efforts at catching up in the space race went down in flames. Even more embarrassingly, racist protests against school integration in Little Rock, Ark., handed the USSR an easy "Who are you to talk?" riposte to any US accusations regarding communism’s oppressive reality. (As opposed to its originating ideology: Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky would surely have ralphed at the very idea of Stalin as a flag-bearer. Also, for all its internal crimes, post-czarist Russia was and still is a weak superpower — its perceived threat undercut by an economic condition that scarcely sustains elites, never mind the proletariat.)

One fact underplayed in history but underlined by Sputnik Mania is that both Dwight Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev sought to moderate the fearful rush toward space militarization. Ike created NASA as a civilian body committed to peacefully advancing all mankind, rather than as a vehicle for escautf8g defense buildup. Nonetheless, over the long haul, paranoia has proven a potent propagandistic drug, either because America needs enemies or because the corporate military-industrial complex must be fed.

History’s details change. Its patterns? Never.

SPUTNIK MANIA

Thurs/14–Sun/17

Red Vic Movie House

1727 Haight, SF

(415) 668-3994

A passage to everywhere

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On the current season of Weeds, the brother-in-law and erstwhile accountant of pot-dealing MILF Mary-Louise Parker hatch a moneymaking scheme they’re convinced can’t miss: becoming "coyotes," guiding illegal immigrants across the US-Mexico border. Weeds is, of course, a comedy, but its characters’ recent relocation to the San Diego area has made border-crossing (Parker drives across to pick up a shipment … ) and immigration ( … and, unknowingly, brings back a man in the trunk of her Prius) among the show’s focal themes. The same topic, but from a (mostly) more serious angle, informs "Crossing the Border," a film series running Aug. 15–21 at the Roxie Film Center. Joseph Mathew and Dan DeVivo’s 2006 doc Arizona Crossing takes a sobering look at immigration via the harsh, remote, and often deadly Southwestern desert, offering revealing interviews with both advocates and opponents. Of course, US-Mexico ain’t the only high-tension border on the globe. "Crossing the Border" is cosponsored by Goethe-Institut of San Francisco, and many of its selections concern European frontiers — proof that the desire to find a better life (even if it involves a total uprooting of all that is familiar, and introduces almost certain danger) is truly a universal one.

"CROSSING THE BORDER"

Aug. 15–21

Roxie Film Center, 3117 16th St., SF

(415) 431-3611, www.roxie.com

The Gysin file

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I associate the dreamachine with Christmas. The first and only time I’ve directly encountered a version of the device was a holiday five or six years ago. My friend Julien used a turntable to set up a homemade dreamachine in a corner room of his family’s cabin. I took a turn sitting with my eyes closed in front of its stroboscopic play of light and darkness. I didn’t have an epileptic fit; nor did I go into a hypnagogic state. It wasn’t a drugless high, but it was a mind’s eye stimulus. I’d try the dreamachine again.

"I don’t think [the dreamachine] really works unless you’ve smoked a pipe of hash," Kenneth Anger declares during FlicKeR, Nik Sheehan’s documentary about the device and its chief creator, the writer, painter, and mystic Brion Gysin. "I think it’s too dangerous if you’ve taken acid," he adds. You get the feeling Anger is speaking from experience, even if he doesn’t face a dreamachine in front of Sheehan’s camera. Such a meeting isn’t necessary, because FlicKeR‘s first 15 minutes serves up a Who’s Who of dreamachine enthusiasts in action: Marianne Faithfull, Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, and Genesis P. Orridge of Psychic TV are among those Sheehan captures sitting and staring — with eyes closed — before the contraption’s oscilutf8g light.

The dreamachine makes for potent visual imagery, but distilling or truly conveying its effect is a tougher task for a filmmaker, even if Sheehan’s camera briefly stares directly into one (and later, incorporates Tony Conrad’s 1965 film The Flicker, a potent projector-based dreamachine corollary). For Sheehan, the mechanism provides a kinetic introduction to or threshold into, a portrait of the late Gysin. Though Gysin — who invented the Cut-Up literary methods popularized by best friend William S. Burroughs — is a shadowy figure to hang a feature-length film portrait on, FlicKeR‘s hopping, skipping, and jumping approach to his life at least energizes his enigma.

In Victor Bockris’ 1981 interview collection With William S. Burroughs: A Report From the Bunker (Seaver), Burroughs — who also says, typically, "[Gysin] taught me everything I know about painting" — relates Gysin’s description of a milk bar just after a terrorist blast: "People were lying around with their legs cut off, spattered with maraschino cherries, passion fruit, ice cream, brains, pieces of mirror and blood." Without a living subject, Sheehan must turn to various vivid Gysin acquaintances — mirror man Ira Cohen and a spry John Giorno, for example — to bring across similar illustrations of anarchic spirit. In the process, offhand observations come to mind: Genesis P. Orridge has transformed herself into a sisterly peer of rad auntie Faithfull (who praises Gysin’s warmth in her autobiography, where she’s largely disdainful of all men), for one. It’s easy to lose sight of Gysin amid such colorful characters, but FlicKeR is steadfast in its belief that Gysin is influential; a variety of academics use Gysin as a gateway to discussions of everything from the changing nature of terrorism to iPods.

He may not be the center of 20th-century history, but Gysin’s influence on the present is undeniable. This is partly due to another wave of ’60s resurgence. FlicKeR kicks off "Stoned Apocalypse," a Joel Shepard–curated Yerba Buena Center for the Arts series that includes a program devoted to the legendary light shows that overtook late-’60s music concerts. While most people associate such light shows with rock music, the new collection, The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde (University of California Press, 322 pages, $27.50), explores its links to avant-garde cinema and music in the Bay Area.

The dreamachine-like notion and practice of live cinema is building momentum in recent years, thanks to practitioners such as Bruce Fletcher, a new surge of interest in Conrad, and a 2007 San Francisco Cinematheque series that inspired an anthology of writing on the subject. Last year at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Anthony McCall’s installation You and I, Horizontal filtered Conrad’s and Gysin’s ideas about pure light into a communal rather than individual experience so potent it was akin to near-death or first-moments-of-life. That which flickers still illuminates, and it may soon turn into a piercing beam of light.

FLICKER

Thurs/7, 7:30 p.m., $8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2700

www.ybca.org

Predictably good

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REVIEW The year is 1976, the American Bicentennial, and snooty British wine seller Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman) decides to organize a blind taste test, pitting French wine against the then-fledgling California wine. While in Napa he meets Jim Barrett (Bill Pullman), a perfectionist, and his long-haired surf bum son Bo (Chris Pine). Impressed by Barrett’s Château Montelena chardonnay, Spurrier hopes to include it in the competition. It isn’t too difficult to see where all of this is headed, not only because the outcome of the 1976 blind taste test is obvious every time we drink wine produced in the Napa Valley, but also because Bottle Shock isn’t exactly blazing any new territory. The characters are all familiar: an earnest father, his slacker son, and a budding Mexican vintnerready to get out from under the thumb of his white boss. The subplots are equally familiar: a strained father-son relationship and a love triangle. Nevertheless, there is something warm and charming about Bottle Shock. It’s one of those based-on-a-true-story, America-as-underdog movies that are as predictable as they are hard to resist.

BOTTLE SHOCK opens Wed/6 in Bay Area theaters.

“Kenny”

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

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

Jet boy, jet girl

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXY

Opens Fri/1 at Bay Area theaters

www.filmmovement.com

Wilder blooms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hard as an anvil

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

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

Testimonies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SAN FRANCISCO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL

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

Repulsion!

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

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

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

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

ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED AND DESIRED

Opens Fri/25

Roxie Film Center

“The Exiles” on Main Street

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TAKE ONE For a sharp perspective on Kent Mackenzie’s neglected 1961 classic The Exiles, push aside most contemporary reviews heralding the film’s rerelease. In the spring of 1962, Benjamin Jackson reviewed Mackenzie’s debut feature for Film Quarterly, and began by noting something no one today seems to think worth mentioning: only 28 years before The Exiles came out, the American Indians who starred in the movie weren’t even considered citizens by the US government.

That basic fact should be at the center of any appraisal of The Exiles, and yet, with the exception of Armond White in the New York Press, most 21st-century critics don’t contextualize the racist history and cultural prejudices the film confronts; forces that have since threatened to erase it. Almost 50 years and countless Sundance Film Festivals after Mackenzie’s look at Native American life in the city and off the rez, it’s still — unfortunately — a one-of-a-kind work. Just as Milestone Films’ successful release of Charles Burnett’s 1977 Killer of Sheep exposed American independent cinema’s lack of artistic imagination and societal insight, the return of The Exiles is partly inspired by the utter failure of American filmmakers to follow Mackenzie’s lead.

In Another Country (Vintage), first published one year before The Exiles‘ release, James Baldwin writes of a New York “so familiar and so public that it became, at last, the most despairingly private of cities,” adding: “One was continually being jostled, yet longed, at the same time, for a human touch; and if one was never — it was the general complaint — left alone in New York, one had, still, to fight very hard in order not to perish of loneliness.” The Exiles tracks a similar fight in Los Angeles, as waged by pregnant Yvonne (Yvonne Williams) while her husband Homer (Homer Nish) goes carousing through bars at Third and Main. Mackenzie follows both with a Weegee-like attention to detail that alights on everything from mechanical monkeys that blow bubbles to boisterous queens at a bar.

This major work of American cinema was created from film stock salvaged from a plane crash and short ends from I Love Lucy. Its potent original score of lip-biting rock ‘n’ roll is by the Revels, whose “Comanche” was exploited by Quentin Tarantino in Pulp Fiction. Its restoration is by Ross Lipman, who has also rescued Killer of Sheep and the work of Kenneth Anger. Further credit for The Exiles‘ revival belongs to Thom Andersen, whose 2003 survey Los Angeles Plays Itself first brought the film to the attention of a new generation. One year before Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1963), Mackenzie made an unsentimental movie about a woman who goes to the movies — in fact, The Exiles reaches its midway point just as Yvonne watches an intermission jingle that urges people to raid the concession stand. Both Yvonne’s night and this film’s are far from over. (Johnny Ray Huston)

TAKE TWO One reason we watch film noir is to look at the forgotten city. As American crime pictures got grittier, they stumbled from the plush nightclubs of Gilda (1946) to the sticky bars of Kiss Me Deadly (1955). First shot in 1958, Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles is set in the same dilapidated Bunker Hill neighborhood valorized by John Fante and Charles Bukowski. Mackenzie’s ethnographic focus on a small group of urbanized American Indians would seem to place his film in a different league, but then many noir films open with statements not so different from his voice-over: “What follows is the authentic account of 12 hours in the lives of a group of Indians who have come to Los Angeles, California.”

Noir comparisons only go so far in elucidating The Exiles‘ enduring appeal. By focusing on a sloshed night-in-the-life of this group, Mackenzie locates urban malcontent rather than inventing it. After the first of many exquisite evening shots of a long-extinct LA funicular, we’re introduced to Yvonne: her moony face is inexpressive, and her voice-over amplifies her solitude in a bustling marketplace. She explains she’s pregnant and is glad to be having the baby away from the reservation, but worries about her husband Homer’s commitment. Homer’s boys’ club favors a Keroauc-ish jive-talk — with disenfranchisement for heritage, they adapt the “wherever I may roam” frontiersman-speak of the hipster.

Mackenzie wasn’t a native Angeleno, much less an American Indian, but his outsider perspective enlarges The Exiles. If the location details in Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep seem incidental, here they are part of a broader lyrical-documentary design. The fact that we can make out so many prices — mackerel for 21 cents a pound, gas for 27 cents a gallon — is symptomatic of the characters’ hand-to-mouth milieu and Mackenzie’s aesthetic calculus. The filmmaker’s anachronistic tendency to play the peripheries reaches fullest bloom when Homer burns with unnamed anomie, surrounded by the Café Ritz’s unsavory characters. The moody scene is a vivid if intense evocation of the kind of democratic mixing place Mike Davis eulogizes in his 1990 LA history, City of Quartz (Vintage).

If The Exiles anticipates both Jim Jarmusch (the outsider-as-hipster and jukebox soundtrack) and Gus Van Sant (the bender crawl and the combination of voice-over and neorealism), it’s more a sign of Mackenzie’s intuition than his priorities. The bitter irony of the title is that Mackenzie’s characters are exiles from both the past and the future. The director was well aware of City Hall’s redevelopment slate for Bunker Hill when he framed his long-take vistas. “Time is just time to me,” hep-cat Tommy (Tommy Reynolds) muses on voice-over. “I’m doing it outside, so I can do it inside.” Not so for Mackenzie, a true preservationist whose work has now been treated in kind. (Max Goldberg)

THE EXILES

Aug. 1–7

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

 

Guy Maddin’s special specimen

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

MY WINNIPEG opens Fri/25 in Bay Area theaters.

“Elsa and Fred”

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

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

Diaboliques

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

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

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

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

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

THE LAST MISTRESS

Opens Fri/18 at Bay Area theaters

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Darkest hour

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

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

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

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

THE DARK KNIGHT

Opens Fri/18 in Bay Area theaters

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