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Film Review

“Viva”

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

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

Laid, paid, played

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE WACKNESS

Opens Fri/11 at Bay Area theaters

www.sonyclassics.com/thewackness

Orphan storm

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A rictal dysfunction

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

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

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

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

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

THE MAN WHO LAUGHS

Sat/12, 7:45 p.m.

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

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


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

“Hancock”

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

HANCOCK opens Wed/2 in Bay Area theaters.

Hunter, haunted

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opens Fri/4 in Bay Area theaters

www.magpictures.com

“Chop Shop”

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

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

Far “Encounters”

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

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

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

ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Opens Fri/27 at Bay Area theaters

www.encountersfilm.com

Welcome to the jungle

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MYSTERIOUS OBJECTS

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

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Hurting herders

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

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

What’s a “Mater”?

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1. Unholy howler monkey!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MOTHER OF TEARS

Opens Fri/20 at Bay Area theaters

www.motheroftearsthemovie.com

Have another Soju

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

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

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

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

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

WOMAN ON THE BEACH

Opens Fri/20 at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas

www.sffs.org

Sour sixteen

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Tom Kalin’s 1992 Swoon was a signature feature from the New Queer Cinema movement. Its dramatization of the 1920s Leopold and Loeb case seemed arresting for both its crisp black-and-white photography and flagrant disregard for still-prevalent sentiments that gay screen imagery need always be case-pleadingly positive. Here was talented Kalin, making his first feature about two notorious Chicago thrill-killers — privileged young gay lovers who murdered a 14-year-old boy they vaguely knew simply to fulfill their self-identification as Nietzschean supermen. However, their perfect crime was detected quickly, to public revulsion that no doubt cast a long, dark shadow over gay-rights struggles for decades afterward.

Swoon was striking but superficial — a cool-looking, attitudinal performance piece riding on gallery aesthetics, fashionable moral ambiguity, and Kalin’s professed admiration for the real-life protagonists as anarchic revolutionist souls. (To which I say: bullshit.) It certainly got him enough attention to leg-up a career. Yet he’s only now finished a second feature.

Two feature films in 16 years provide thin grounds for trend-spotting. Still, it’s hard to ignore that Savage Grace is another true-crime dramatization involving murder and decadence within the social elite, one that replaces Swoon‘s amoral Jazz Age gay Chicagoan youths with postwar transatlantic jet-setters. Kalin has a Dominick Dunne–like nose for bloodlust among the powerful and privileged. It led him to the 1972 murder of socialite Barbara Daly Baekeland by her son Antony, an act that subsequently exposed years of incest, adultery, substance abuse, questionable parenting, and rampant craziness — all within the glittering A-list milieux befitting beneficiaries of the Bakelite Plastics fortune

The 1985 book Savage Grace used interviews, letters, and diary entries to tell the gruesome story in first-person pastiche. Redirecting that saga toward conventional dramatic narrative, Kalin and scenarist Howard A. Rodman can’t replicate that tome’s multiplicity of voices, nor do they try — after all, the toxic mixture of lurid acts and privileged environs inevitably compels interest. But just as Swoon displayed a detached appreciation of — rather than deep insight into — its glamorously bent protagonists, Savage Grace exhibits an infatuation with the glitterati who turn out scandalous freakazoids minus any palpable sense of what went wrong.

"Everything that happened, happened because of love," says grown-up Antony (Eddie Redmayne) in voiceover. But love isn’t the precise term one would apply to life with his high-end transient family: codependency, manipulation, and massive narcissism are more apt. Raised poor but pathologically ambitious, ex-model Barbara (Julianne Moore) snagged old money — at least by US standards — when she snagged Brooks Baekeland (Stephen Dillane).

Their union already had degenerated into relentless social climbing and mutual cheating — along with the occasional hatefuck — by the time little Antony arrives. Prone to smother-motherdom and jags of irresponsible neglect, Barbara raises him to become a filigreed rich-hippie Eurail dandy. He gains a male lover, then a girlfriend poached by Dad, then becomes involved in a three-way with Mom and her suave older beard (Hugh Dancy). Meanwhile, scenes shift from Manhattan to Catalonia to Paris to London. A boy could go crazy from so much disorienting change — though you might not realize from this film that the true-life Antony had exhibited signs of schizophrenia at an early age.

Also missing from Savage Grace are such telling real details as the Baekelands’ refusal to allow Antony therapy, or Antony’s prior knife-wielding threats toward Mom, or her failed attempts to make him heterosexual by hiring dates for him. These elements might have enriched a movie that comes off as entirely outside-in. Kalin’s visual attention to lifestyle particulars doesn’t deepen these characters. It merely accessorizes them.

Moore may be incapable of a bad performance, yet this seemingly ideal role elicits one of her thinnest characterizations. She’s duly alluring and grasping, and unpredictably profane when she’s raging. But Kalin and Rodman haven’t given this monster mother any substance. Considered by many to be the story’s true villain, Dillane’s neglectful Brooks makes a too-vague impression. However, the reliable Dancy is excellent as a dedicated follower of fashion, and Redmayne’s nervous eyes convey the ratcheting instability of a boy-man who instinctively knows his worldview is tragically wrong.

Sixteen years haven’t made much difference for Kalin. Even in color, his shallow vision of imploding personalities feels like tabloid artsploitation. Other New Queer Cinema mavericks have gone on to make films that challenge artistic, thematic, and commercial assumptions. In comparison, Savage Grace is oddly conservative. *

SAVAGE GRACE

Opens June 27 at Bay Area theaters

www.ifcfilms.com

Frameline 32: The Horror, the horror

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CTHULHU

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

THE GAY BED & BREAKFAST OF TERROR

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

OTTO; OR UP WITH DEAD PEOPLE

June 27, 11 p.m., Castro

SOCKET

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

Hypnodrome Theatre

575 10th St., SF

www.deadchannels.com

Frameline 32: Sex changes

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TAKE ONE In Iranian director Tanaz Eshagian’s Be Like Others, fear hovers over a whole nation, leading to schizophrenic behavior. By concentrating on three different individuals before and after they went through sexual reassignment operations in Iran, Eshagian reveals an incredibly sad and asphyxiating society — one where homosexuality is banned and punishable by death but changing one’s sex is legal.

No matter how progressive the act of changing one’s sex might sound, Be Like Others proves that it has conservative and oppressive connotations in Iran. Most of the people considering surgery in Eshagian’s film do so because they feel that it’s their only alternative to a gay male or lesbian identity that involves disrespect, harassment, and the possibility of a horrible death. Yet instead of finding acceptance post-operation, many are even more alienated.

The reason for this insanity, as explained by one official: being gay or a cross-dresser allegedly disrupts the “social order.” In other words, gender-bending blurs the distinctions between the sexes, making Iranian social role-assignment — largely determined by sex — a confusing task.

Mind-boggling and utterly scary, Be Like Others is a great comment on people’s obsessive need to label and compartmentalize, and a statement about our disgusting fear of anything that lacks clear delineation. At first, Eshagian’s documentary might make you feel lucky to live in a country where measures against homosexuality are not as extreme. But as it sinks in, it will make you question how far removed the situation in Iran really is from that in the United States. (Maria Komodore)

TAKE TWO At first the Iranian laws that make Tanaz Eshagian’s movie necessary seem not just cruel, but absurdly and arbitrarily so. How could homosexuality be illegal and punishable by death, while the government not only sanctions sexual-reassignment surgery but acts as its facilitator?

In Be Like Others, the answer comes from Cleric Kariminiya, a so-called Theological Expert on Transexuality, during an information session for prospective patients and their families. While Islamic law explicitly forbids homosexuality, he explains, there is no such explicit restriction on changing one’s gender.

In other words, the binary sexual politics of Iranian authority are undermined by the existence of queer citizens, whose mannerisms or predilections suggest a continuum. Eshagian’s powerful film follows a few citizens who, too visibly close to the middle of that continuum, are forced to decide between the suffering and danger of their current lot and an abrupt surgical introduction into social legitimacy.

The decision-making process these individuals face is extremely difficult viewing. Those people who successfully transition often have no other option but sex work to survive. Suicide is rampant.

Eshagian’s project is exceptional because it leaves the viewer enlighteningly confused about Iranian attitudes toward gender and law. The most fascinating character in the film is a transgender woman dedicated to the care of patients in transition. She is supportive, devoted to her patients’ well-being, and fully entrenched in the traditional Iranian views of men and women. (Jason Shamai)

BE LIKE OTHERS

Mon/23, 7 p.m., Victoria

Frameline 32: Anti-pity party

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

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

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

A HORSE IS NOT A METAPHOR

June 27, 7 p.m.

Roxie

Frameline 32:That’s us

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Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell is like an audiovisual kiss from Russell to those who loved him, and to a greater audience who has yet to discover him. That’s the highest praise I can think of for Matt Wolf’s movie about the composer and musician, who died of AIDS in 1992. Clearly enamored with Russell’s wonderful and unique world of echoing sound, Wolf breaks free from the all-too-familiar generic commercial tropes of music documentaries to try a little tenderness. The gesture of affection is more than fitting: though Russell wasn’t a pop sentimentalist, he was capable of writing entire songs (such as "A Little Lost" and "Lucky Cloud" from the 1994 album Another Thought) about equally entire days spent thinking about his lips pressing against those of his beloved. As he sang, "Kissing I go overboard."

That beloved is Russell’s boyfriend Tom Lee, whose generous intimacy while being interviewed is one of the qualities that makes Wild Combination special. Though the Talking Heads are mentioned more than once as Wolf’s movie follows Russell’s idiosyncratic paths through the creative spots of downtown ’80s New York, the film’s chorus of commentators never falls into the kind of talking-heads detachment one associates with documentaries. There is a rare, moving intimacy to the camera’s rapport with Lee and with Russell’s Iowan parents, Chuck and Emily. That rapport only builds in the emotionally powerful final moments, yielding a story about love and family that, through sheer openhearted understatement, is a revelation. Think of it as a nonfiction answer to Brokeback Mountain: more shattering, nuanced, and hopeful because it is based in a commitment to creative life rather than manufactured myth.

"I’m watching out of my ear," Russell’s voice declares, with characteristic quiet softness, as Wild Combination first flickers onto the screen. This synesthetic intuitiveness seems to guide the film as it simultaneously travels his life story and communes with his spirit. The cinematography of Jody Lee Lipes passes like wind through the corn fields of Russell’s youth and the New York piers of his adult life, both of which provided lyrical inspiration. By simply tapping into Russell’s relaxed and meditative creativity (at least when Russell was working solo), Wolf makes the film’s charm and depth seem so easy. But subtly potent structural corollaries emerge, as when Chuck Russell’s remembrance of a physical fight with his gentle yet maddening son is mirrored — same words, but a recollection of a different situation — by musician and friend Ernie Brooks.

Wild Combination is the first feature film by the 25-year-old Wolf, whose Web site (www.mattwolf.info) is a treasure trove of gay sensibility and whose early short films suggested an affinity for this kind of project. Wolf has already made a short fictive documentary about the late artist-writer David Wojnarowicz, a contemporary of Russell’s — in a Guardian article on Russell (see "Prince Arthur, 03/04/04), I compare the two — who followed similar paths. That 2003 film, Smalltown Boys, possesses the acutely critical parodic imagination of early Todd Haynes movies, a rare characteristic. But Wolf has since graduated from Haynes’ academic tendencies. He’s soulfully true to Russell, whose idiosyncratic gifts and personality led him to butt heads with avant-garde heartlessness and dance through underground discos. While alive, Arthur Russell never found a creative home outside of himself and those he loved. But in Wild Combination, Wolf proves those homes are more than enough. *

WILD COMBINATION: A PORTRAIT OF ARTHUR RUSSELL

Sat/21, 9:45 p.m.

Roxie

FRAMELINE

The 32nd San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival runs June 19–29 at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; Roxie Film Center, 3117 16th St., SF; Victoria Theatre, 2961 16th St., SF; and Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, 2966 College, Berk. Tickets (most shows $10) are available at www.frameline.org.

Pixel Vision blog: Johnny Ray Huston interviews Matt Wolf. Plus: an Arthur Russell discography and short Frameline reviews

Blondells have more fun?

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At the start of his 2007 biography Joan Blondell: A Life Between Takes (University Press of Mississippi, 300 pages, $30), film historian Matthew Kennedy introduces the story of one of Hollywood’s forgotten actresses by posing a phenomenological question: what does it mean to always be gazed upon?

In describing Jack Warner’s golden girl of the 1930s, Kennedy looks to the lineaments of her face and body as the first sign of her success. "The architecture of [Blondell’s] mouth, simultaneously sharp and soft, suggested Cupid," he writes. "She had a radiant smile, straight white teeth, pillowy lips, and easy curls in her gamboge blonde hair…. Her figure was voluptuous, at one time measuring 37–21 1/2– 36." As for Blondell’s eyes, "they were spellbinding on screen, and apparently more so in person."

Kennedy’s paean to Blondell is reminiscent of Roland Barthes’ poetic 1957 short essay, "The Face of Garbo." But whereas Garbo’s face represents for Barthes an eternal, unforgettable synecdoche of Hollywood, Blondell’s mystique lies mostly in her erasure. What became of this celluloid icon whose image once defined an era but has since been lost in the canister?

"Joan Blondell: The Fizz on the Soda," playing at the Pacific Film Archive, collects some of the actress’ most memorable performances from a 50-year career. A vaudeville performer turned Warner Brothers ingenue lauded by the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers (WAMPAS) as the most promising performer of her time, Blondell was part of the first generation of talkie actors who blossomed against the moribund backdrop of the Great Depression. After a childhood spent at the mercy of a peripatetic acting family, her endurance and versatility were soon exploited by the Hollywood meat-grinder. Unencumbered by unions, censors, or truculent auteurs, moguls like Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer managed Hollywood like an industrial assembly line, churning out most films in four weeks. By the end of the 1930s, Blondell had completed more than 50 films.

Alongside contemporaries such as Clark Gable, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, and Judy Garland, Blondell was the face of the Hollywood studio system as it began its ascent to the so-called Golden Age. From the art nouveau musicals of Busby Berkeley (Gold Diggers of 1933) and pre-Code cheap thrills (1931’s Night Nurse and 1932’s Three on a Match) of the Depression to the classic melodramas (1945’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) and noirs (1947’s Nightmare Alley) of the postwar era, Blondell’s putf8um performances regularly stole the spotlight. Her greatest onscreen collaboration came after a serendipitous meeting with promising stage performer Jimmy Cagney at a Broadway audition for playwright George Kelly. They would go on to star together in nearly a dozen Warner films, including The Public Enemy (1931), Blonde Crazy (1931), and Footlight Parade (1933).

Despite her constant, almost Puritan dedication to craft, Blondell’s equal devotion to a home life away from the screen might have contributed to her disappearance from the Hollywood A-list. She reportedly hated the spotlight and refused the preening lifestyle of industry players. Three disastrous marriages — to cinematographer George Barnes, actor Dick Powell, and producer Mike Todd — as well as work exhaustion and a predilection for domestic seclusion largely devalued her star status by the 1950s. It would not lessen the impact of her performances, however — 1951’s The Blue Veil, 1957’s Lizzie, and John Cassavetes’ 1978 dramedy Opening Night confirmed that maturity had not diminished her gift.

Blondell represented "the three-dimensional face on a two-dimensional screen," according to Kennedy, who describes her as "full of surprises, one moment as tough as Joan Crawford, the next as fragile as Margaret Sullivan, the next as saucy as Mae West." Her screen image represents a peak moment of Hollywood radiance. But that same radiant image contained a delicate talent yearning for the darkness of obscurity.

JOAN BLONDELL: THE FIZZ ON THE SODA

Fri/13 through June 29, $9.50 ($13.50 for double bills)

Pacific Film Archive Theater

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

bampfa.berkeley.edu

Mr. Miserabilism

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Some of Michael Haneke’s early made-for-TV movies are showcased in the aptly titled mini-retrospective "Bitter Pills" at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. In them, Haneke’s now-characteristic austerity — long static takes, cryptic narrative omissions — is yet undeveloped. But his nihilistic take on society is already present.

The four-hour 1979 Austrian miniseries Lemmings maps out disillusions among the embittered, hypocritical generation of Austrians who "lost" World War II and their suffocated teen offspring. Parent-child relations are toxic. Bonds between peers are no less fucked. Encompassing suicide, infidelity, auto-abortion, vandalism, and joyless full-frontal nudity, Lemmings‘ tragic first part, set in the 1950s, is self-contained. The second part, which takes place years later, finds new ways to rain consequence on its cheerless protagonists and their children.

Black-and-white and Fassbinderesque, 1984’s Fraulein coughs up another fine mess. A German soldier returned from a lengthy Russian POW camp internment finds his family members have long since embarked on brave new paths which range from sell-out capitalism to Elvis-imitative juvenile delinquency. The overall picture is surprisingly quasi-lurid. Today’s Haneke would never allow his miserablism to be diluted by such relative zest.

Adapted from a novel by Joseph Roth, 1993’s The Rebellion is quite different. Mixing archival footage with new material in color and faux-distressed sepia, it chronicles the downward spiral of a one-legged WWI veteran (Branko Samarovski). The whole thing is a classic Teutonic tale of a naive hero efficiently destroyed by the system. Then, as now, Haneke had a gift for making even the bitterest life-lesson pills curiously, even compulsively edible.

BITTER PILLS: MICHAEL HANEKE MADE-FOR-TELEVISION

Thurs/12 through June 19, $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Daddy issues

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REVIEW Stuffy writer Blake Morrison (Colin Firth) struggles to come to terms with his father’s imminent death, hoping that, in their last days together, that they can finally make peace. A dying father? I know the premise is more than a little grim, but what When Did You Last See Your Father? lacks in levity it makes up for in heartfelt storytelling and powerful performances — trusty Jim Broadbent shines as Arthur, the overbearing, attention-seeking (possibly philandering) paterfamilias. We first encounter this force of nature as the film, set in the late 1950s, opens. Blake is eight, and his family is stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. But not for long: Arthur breaks ranks and rides the shoulder, zooming past the long line of cars, waving a stethoscope in the air to justify the blatantly arrogant maneuver. This devil-may-care attitude inspires admiration in young Blake and animosity in slightly older Blake, when he grows into a surly, socially inept teenager. Adapted from an award-winning memoir and directed by Anand Tucker (Shopgirl, 2005), the film flows seamlessly in and out of flashbacks, fleshing out Blake and Arthur’s complex dynamic. Any film centered around a father-son relationship, especially when the father is terminally ill, pretty much lends itself to schmaltzy sentimentality. But When Did You Last See Your Father? avoids slipping down that syrupy slope. Instead, it is a poignant, sincere, occasionally funny — Arthur’s frank discussion of gonorrhea and masturbation during a camping trip had me chuckling — exploration of a man’s complicated history with his often uncouth but always larger-than-life father.

WHEN DID YOU LAST SEE YOUR FATHER? opens Fri/13 in Bay Area theaters.

Ten City

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For the last two years I have been trying to plant the term Afro-surreal into the collective unconscious. Unlike Afro-futurism, Afro-surrealism is about the present. In sound it conjures everything from Sun-Ra to Wu-Tang. In speech, it brings you Henry Dumas, Amie Cesaire, Samuel Delaney, and Darius James. In visual realms, the Afro-surreal ranges from Wifredo Lam to Kara Walker to Trenton Doyle Hancock. Afro-surreal stages are set for new productions of Jean Genet’s The Blacks (1959), George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum (1986) and Leroi Jones’ The Dutchman and The Slave (1964).

I’m always looking for an Afro-surreal movie. Maybe I’m the last of a dying breed.

The 10th San Francisco Black Film Festival (SFBFF), is billed as a bridge between worlds. But which worlds? Sirius and Earth? Black and other? Local and global? Oakland and San Francisco? San Francisco and itself? Dammit, they all apply.

Most of the SFBFF is taking place in the Fillmore District, and many sites are redevelopment showcases. Opening night at the Sundance Kabuki Cinema presents Nogozi Unwurah’s Shoot The Messenger (2006), a UK import about paranoia, self-loathing, love, and redemption. The after-party is at Rassales, so I might get a haircut and brush off the derby.

Yoshi’s Fillmore is hosting Donnie Betts’ Music Is My Life, Politics My Mistress: The Story of Oscar Brown Jr. (2005). Despite its connection to ongoing gentrification debates, the venue will be an apt and stylish location for a bio on Brown, an overlooked poet-singer-playwright-composer-social activist who penetrated the zeitgeist with his song "Forty Acres and a Mule." Certain other issues also spring to mind: The black derby again? The brown? Pin-striped wool pants and well-shined shoes, or suede boots?

The Melvin Van Peebles Awards Brunch (props to the festival for naming its short film award after the Afro-surreal mastermind behind 1971’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song) is taking place at 1300 Fillmore, which will also host a screening that includes the 2007 short film Lifted. Directed by Randall Dottin, it’s a magical realist piece about a dancer on the edge who finds herself on the wrong side of a subway platform, trapped by a spirit named "High John." The actors are great, which is just one reason why the supernatural story takes simplicity to the brink of facile schmaltziness without tottering over.

A housewife realizes she has superpowers in Chad Benton’s Women’s Work (2008), a warm, funny sitcom short with animation screening at the African American Art and Culture Complex. Around the same time, Yoshi’s is showing Nijla Mumin’s Fillmo (2008), a documentary about the gentrification currently taking place in the Fillmore. How’s that for mixed signals, homey?

Footsteps in Africa (2007), showing at the Museum of African Diaspora, is about the lives of the beautiful, mysterious, and enduring Taureg/Kai of Mali. These African nomads have survived thousands of years of drought, flood, and famine, and withstood acts of genocide. Director Kathi von Koeber’s portrait reveals the wisdom and strength of some of this planet’s greatest human survivors.

Considering the documented decline of black people in San Francisco, it’s a minor miracle that SFBFF continues to grow. Like MoAD, the festival is a testament to the artists and benefactors who’ve come to San Francisco, as well as to the aesthetes among SF’s native population. This year’s festival promises glimpses of vast black realities — the kind that appear to be diminishing locally, yet somehow still manage to thrive.

SAN FRANCISCO BLACK FILM FESTIVAL

Wed/4 through June 15

See Rep Clock for listings

(415) 771-9271

www.sfbff.org

Demy more

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Jacques Demy’s raindrops keep falling on the heads of French filmmakers. While Jean-Luc Godard has to be the French new wave’s historical and critical favorite, the legacy of Demy has arguably inspired more imitation or homage. In the past decade, François Ozon (2002’s 8 Women) and Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau (1998’s Jeanne and the Perfect Guy) have mined or mimed Demy’s distinct use of color and musicality, though even Ozon’s bright red is blue-blooded, and the charms of Ducastel and Martineau’s effort don’t include Demy’s graceful staging and assured storytelling. Now, with his third feature Love Songs, new wave lover Christophe Honoré has forged an uneasy marriage. He’s set out to connect and update the romantic wisdom and classical dramatic structures of Demy with the arch political wit of ’60s Godard.

Love Songs proves few movies are entirely terrible or terrific. Its crushworthy final half-hour is touching and sometimes magnificent. But much of its initial hour is maddening. It begins well, because Honoré is attuned to the mood-setting power of well-deployed credits. Handsome, last-name-only opening titles are the first of the film’s textual nods to Godard, which continue when various books play cameo roles much as they do in Godard’s 1961 musical A Woman Is a Woman. Tomes by Henri Michaux and Hervé Guibert become effective shorthand for characters’ desires. But novelist and playwright Honoré’s sole moment of spine-chilling — as opposed to groan-inducing — wordplay takes place when he simply makes his protagonist Ismaël (Louis Garrel, attempting to channel Jean-Pierre Léaud) read the nighttime signs of the 10th Arrondissement.

Garrel’s character is the focal point of Love Songs, but the film’s hidden star is Honoré’s longtime musical collaborator Alex Beaupain, who appears in a pivotal scene, performing the lovely piano ballad "Brooklyn Bridge." Beaupain is stuck with the job of bringing Michel Legrand’s jazz-inflected pop orchestrations for Godard and Demy into the 21st century. Melodically, he’s up to the task, especially when evoking the neo-Gainsbourg rock of Benjamin Biolay. But he isn’t helped by Honoré’s libretto contributions, because Honoré seems to misinterpret the pop opera of 1964’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg as a basic copying of old Hollywood musical traditions, when in fact it was a radical yet classical revision. Honoré assumes the casual multigenre musicality of Love Songs is more contemporary, but that’s arguable.

In their previous film together, 2006’s Dans Paris, Honoré and Beaupain discovered naturalistic, inventive intersections between drama and music sequences. Love Songs is more traditional in form, saving its radical aspect for a view and presentation of sexuality that’s far more fluid than one finds in contemporary cinema, straight or gay. Honoré is out to disavow exactly those kinds of divisions, and if he’s not helped greatly by Garrel, he’s aided immeasurably by Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet, whose arrival in the film’s second half takes the story out of a tritely fatalistic ménage-a-trois realm. He’s also saved by Chiara Mastroianni. Her presence is Honoré’s ultimate invocation of Demy, since she’s the daughter of signature Demy star Catherine Deneuve. (She also brings the off-camera baggage of a recent breakup from chanson specialist Biolay to her part.) Her role might appear secondary, but her solo number signals the return of the melody at the film’s heart. Her melancholic understatement testifies that Honoré hasn’t lost the attraction to eroticism that inspired his brash attempt to bring Georges Bataille to the screen with 2004’s Ma mère. He’s just made it as pop as he possibly can by setting it to music.

LOVE SONGS

Opens Fri/6 at Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at sfbg.com

www.ifcfilms.com

Slamdance elegance

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"Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?" Rock critic Simon Reynolds opens his recent survey Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 (Penguin, 432 pages, $16) with that famous piece of invective, courtesy of Johnny Rotten from the stage of San Francisco’s Winterland. Rotten sneered those words during a Sex Pistols show. Tellingly, they arrived at the end of an American tour that contained both a zeitgeist and its own annihilation — or so it seems from Lech Kowalski’s documentary D.O.A. (1980), one of four features comprising the Pacific Film Archive’s "Louder, Faster: Punk in Performance" series.

Even before the blowup, Rotten’s question had already been answered — first by the art school oddballs and city poets who pre-dated then capitalized on punk’s groundswell, and later by the younger acolytes who reclaimed the false prophets’ call for "louder, faster" with their authenticity-obsessed rebel yells. Punk was made to be photographed — Sex Pistols guru Malcolm McLaren ensured that much — but the spirit of the frame depended on who was doing the shooting. The same three-chord assaults could make for social documents (1978-’88’s Target Video) or hipster scrawls (1976’s Blank Generation). They might inspire science experiments (Bruce Conner’s 1978 Mongoloid; Graeme Whifler’s 1978 Hello Skinny), or lyrical love streams (1979’s Deaf/Punk).

Blank Generation is the earliest punk film essay, a given since its New York milieu was already codified and oozing latent celebrity before punk moved to the provinces. Directed by Patti Smith bassist Ivan Kral and future No Wave saint Amos Poe, the film’s chapbook portraiture is heightened via a Hollis Frampton-like use of non-synched sound. Grainy black-and-white 8mm footage floats over the skips and starts of the soundtrack’s mix, creating a jilted effect perfectly suited to the push-pull of Television and the Talking Heads, as well as the tense erotics of Smith and Blondie.

Crappy audio and video smears aside, Joe Rees’s Target Video compilation reveals Bay Area post-punk in full bloom as it moves between Black Flag’s pummeling hardcore and Flipper’s art-damaged sludge to Devo’s proto-Teletubbies weirdness. The austere, one-camera setups anticipate a billion YouTube transmissions. I’ve driven by San Quentin Prison dozens of times wondering how Johnny Cash scored his famous gig there, but that was before I saw Rees’ footage of Crime at the same site — thrashing away in mock police uniforms under the harsh glare of the afternoon sun.

Before it is art or communion, punk is permission. For a zenith-like picture of this freedom flight, one should look no further than John Gaikowski’s modest short Deaf/Punk. Gaikowski’s film uncorks a long-forgotten performance at San Francisco’s Deaf Club, using slow motion to revel in punk’s limitless potential energy. This music wasn’t designed to be elegant, but I can think of no better word for Gaikowski’s shocked vision of a singer standing in repose among a small crowd of daydreaming slamdancers.

"LOUDER, FASTER: PUNK IN PERFORMANCE"

Thurs/5 through June 26

Pacific Film Archive Theater

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-1124

Incredible hulks

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Competition is seemingly bred into Americans, along with an obsessive-compulsive desire to win that neighbors around the world find variably admirable, amusing, and bewildering. We aren’t team players — we’re capable of finding logic and necessity in the phrase "US out of UN." Not so coincidentally, recent US cultural attitudes toward sport and sportsmanship have caused even team athletics to become focused on arrogant and overpaid lone superstars. Why think about the collective good when the whole point, obviously, is to become an American idol?

In taking a trip down just such a road to self-betterment, the unexpectedly delightful and deep documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster bumps up against cosmetic surgery, steroid usage, and wheatgrass juice. As it questions the points at which an investment in exterior or physical perfection might constitute cheating, it holds up a mirror to the American way of life.

Somewhat to the bewilderment of their nebbishy parents, Bigger, Stronger, Faster director Chris Bell and his older brothers, Mike and Mark, developed a childhood fascination with size and strength training that continues to this day. Disillusioned by the youthful realization that all his ’80s tough guy heroes — Hulk Hogan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stallone — injected steroids to get their bulked, cut physiques, Chris refused any chemical assistance in the pursuit of powerlifting titles. But his siblings felt no similar need to constrain themselves. As "Mad Dog" Mike strived for World Wrestling Federation stardom and "Smelly" Mark trained for powerlifting events, they lied to their loved ones about continued drug use. They were unable to break their habits, because their habits worked for them.

Frequently onscreen, Bell — whose mid-’30s waistline is now as expansive as his biceps — provides an ingratiating everyguy perspective on steroids and related complex issues. He’s not so quick to judge, either. Bigger, Stronger, Faster empathizes with the thirst for Superman and Superwoman excellence by any means. It also debunks many myths regarding "’roid rage" while spotlighting the still-unclear health consequences of long-term steroid use, via the cancer battle of NFL star and exploitation flick thespian Lyle Alzado.

Tiger Woods had LASIK eye surgery. Does that constitute dishonest tampering with nature? What about Gramps downing Viagra to reach for Olympic gold in the boudoir? The lines between unfair advantages and the simple good fortunes of technological and pharmaceutical progress can be blurry.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster is no apologia. Ultimately it’s less about steroids than about the never-ending American drive to grow über-masculine and dominant — a conviction applicable to select variations of women as well. Bell and his exceptional offscreen collaborators milk considerable parodic joy from deft archival montages and clever graphic elements. The narrow focus of this terrifically entertaining documentary winds up encompassing a much larger cultural truth.

BIGGER, STRONGER, FASTER

Opens Fri/6 at Bay Area theaters.

biggerstrongerfastermovie.com

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