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Film Review

Live to tell

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Live to tell

arts@sfbg.com

FILM The most popular feel-good documentary last year was Searching for Sugar Man, Malik Bendjelloul’s film about the somewhat mysterious Rodriguez — a talented singer-songwriter who recorded two major-label albums in the early 1970s, attracted no notice whatsoever, then disappeared from any public view. Unbeknownst to him (or to his bank account, since the royalties seem to have vanished more completely than he did), the records were a big hit in South Africa, where fans eventually tracked him down and informed him that he was, well, a star. So, decades after falling into obscurity, he was playing before large audiences he’d never known he had, and (via the film) getting new ones.

Sugar Man made you wonder how many other such stories might be waiting to be excavated. We’ve probably all seen or heard acts that deserved some commercial success, but never got close to it. More than ever, the musical mainstream seems more about marketing a package than promoting genuine, idiosyncratic talent. And examples of the latter slip through the cracks all the time, hopefully getting re-discovered later — for instance Nick Drake, sainted godhead of sensitive singer-songwriters, was barely a blip on the public-awareness horizon during his life. It was only after he’d died that the cult, and record sales, began to swell.

A Band Called Death is a similar story of recognition delayed so long that the principal vindicated character was no longer alive to enjoy it. Sons of a Detroit Baptist minister, David, Dannis, and Bobby Hackney were enamored with rock music from the time the family sat down to watch the Beatles play The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. By 1971 they were calling themselves Rock Fire Funk Express — but exposure to live hard-rock acts like the Who and Alice Cooper convinced them to ditch the funk part completely. Their father’s tragic death (he was killed by a drunk driver while taking an injured coworker to the hospital) hit all of them hard, but especially guitarist David, who had a spiritual awakening of sorts and insisted their band be named after what he now considered “the ultimate trip:” Death.

It seemed a career-killing moniker if ever there was one. (Though by 1983 Orlando’s death metal pioneers would have no trouble using the same name.) Nor did the trio’s loud, fast, heavy sound — their rehearsals drove the neighbors nuts — make sense for an African American outfit in a city where Motown ruled. Though their parents had always encouraged them, nearly everyone else took a “Why are you playing that white boy music?” stance. Nonetheless, they found a supporter at local studio-music publisher Groovesville Records, recorded some tracks, and shopped them around to every imaginable label here and abroad. After innumerable rejections, they seemingly hit the jackpot with Columbia Records prez Clive Davis, who was eager to sign them … if they’d just change that name. As the band’s “visionary,” however, David Hackney was unwilling to budge on his total “concept.” The offer was withdrawn.

Defeated and exasperated, the brothers accepted a relative’s invite to stay with him in Burlington, Vt., and wound up relocating there — but when they put up Death posters around town, the unamused local cops assumed this was some sort of gang-activity threat. That was the last straw; Dave reluctantly agreed on a name change, to the 4th Movement. In that form they played some gigs and recorded a couple albums — but their new, more overtly spiritual emphasis didn’t play well with rock audiences who really didn’t want to flick their Bics to lyrics about Jesus Christ.

A man with a plan — but no backup plan — Dave eventually slunk back to Detroit, and was dismayed when his brothers moved on musically, experiencing some success with a reggae band called Lambsbread. Death wasn’t just forgotten; it had never really been noticed. Its only material issue was a self-distributed 1974 single of “Politicians in My Eyes” b/w “Keep on Knockin'” that had scored just token local radio play. But three decades later some of its 500 pressings started surfacing on underground DJ’s turntables, rare-record collectors’ wish lists, and on eBay (at $800 a pop). What could be a more fascinating enigma and find than an unknown African American group making music that was precociously protopunk (with some psych influences) well before even the Ramones’ first album in ’76?

Eventually the surviving members saw their ancient masters released at last, and toured clubs as a reformed Death with Lambsbread’s guitarist taking cancer-felled Dave’s place. It was all made sweeter by the fact that three of Bobby’s sons now had their own band, named Rough Francis after their late uncle’s last recording pseudonym.

A bit overlong, the documentary nonetheless ingratiates with its surprising wealth of home-movie footage, commentary from the very genial Hackney clan, and testimony from latter-day fans like Henry Rollins, Jello Biafra, Kid Rock, and Questlove.

 

A BAND CALLED DEATH opens Fri/5 at the Roxie Theater.

Flagging

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Flagging

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM Ah, the mid-1990s: a time when two big-budget movies on the same subject were regularly released within months of each other (1997’s Volcano and Dante’s Peak; 1998’s Armageddon and Deep Impact). When a director named Roland Emmerich ascended into the blockbuster pantheon with Independence Day (1996), a film that’s best-remembered for transforming Will Smith into an action star — and for that iconic shot of the White House exploding under alien death rays.

The intervening years have seen Emmerich plunge ever-deeper into various flavors of disaster: giant lizard (1998’s Godzilla); Mel Gibson (2000’s The Patriot); global warming (2004’s The Day After Tomorrow); the apocalypse (2009’s 2012). White House Down — which reignites that ’90s copycat-rivalry thing by riding the fumes of March’s Olympus Has Fallen — finds its boogeyman in terrorism. Specifically, domestic terrorism, with another 1996 classic, Michael Bay’s The Rock, offering certain inspiration in the villain department. Ex-military goons with axes to grind storming a national landmark? Right this way, please.

It’s a triumphant day for President James Sawyer (Jamie Foxx), who has just ordered all US troops removed from the Middle East. While ID4‘s President Bill Pullman was a Gulf War veteran, Sawyer is portrayed as more of an anti-violence, increase-the-peace type. But wait! Who are those shifty-eyed fellows skulking around the White House theater room, tinkering with the First Lady’s prized surround-sound system? They don’t look ready to make nice.

Into this mix must enter an Everyman. Beefy nugget Channing Tatum plays John Cale, wannabe Secret Service agent. Trouble is, his former college classmate (and fling? It’s never certain, but every woman Cale interacts with seems to have slept with him), high-ranking Agent Finnerty (Maggie Gyllenhaal), doesn’t think he has what it takes. According to the deep truths of his personnel file, Cale — a Capitol policeman tasked with guarding the Speaker of the House (Richard Jenkins) — “has a problem with authority,” despite his seemingly sincere desire to become an astronaut … er, wait, that was Will Smith’s cocky pilot in ID4.

At any rate, there is (as always) a family to impress; in Cale’s case, it’s a plucky daughter (Joey King), always on the lookout for new fodder for her YouTube channel. What better way to win over a kid who blurts out “Wikileaks” with as much excitement as other 11-year-olds say “One Direction” than to take her on a tour of the White House?

That’s the set-up. The remainder of the film encompasses Cale’s sweaty, sardonic one-man-army maneuverings (in John McClane’s undershirt, no less), to keep both Sawyer — a POTUS so cool he pauses mid-ambush to change into Air Jordans — and Li’l Miss Citizen Journalist safe. Meanwhile, rockets are launched; there’s a high-speed limo chase across the White House lawn; we learn the truth about Marilyn and JFK; The Wire‘s Lance Reddick shows up to turn his McNulty-honed glare onto Gyllenhaal; some high-ranking government dudes reveal their sinister true colors; and thanks to evil genius Skip Tyler (Jimmi Simpson), “the greatest hack the world has ever seen” is about to unleash World War III.

Yep, that’s right: 17 years after Independence Day‘s Jeff Goldblum broke into the alien mainframe, thereby saving the White House-less planet, Emmerich has decided that hackers are actually bad guys. It goes with White House Down‘s warning that the enemy is no longer an external threat, but something lurking right under your nose. Better start working out, America — and working on your one-liners.

WHITE HOUSE DOWN opens Fri/28 in Bay Area theaters.

The conversations

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The conversations

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Half a lifetime ago — that is to say, sometime in the mid-’90s — on a train rolling through Austria, a young American man named Jesse (Ethan Hawke) met a young French woman named Celine (Julie Delpy). They were in their early 20s, and maybe that’s why it didn’t seem outlandish when, after some passing miles and some good conversation, he asked her to get off the train with him in Vienna, proposing that they spend the next 12 or so hours wandering the city, until his flight home in the morning. He didn’t scream axe murderer, and he made the case that if she stayed on the train, she might look back on her decision in 20 years, from the vantage of an unsatisfying marriage, and regret it. On paper, it sounds dubious bordering on smarmy. But sometimes it’s all in the delivery, and it didn’t seem too lunatic when Celine said yes.

So for the next hour and a half, we followed them as they traced a meandering itinerary among Vienna’s monuments, cafés, bars, and riverside walkways. Drifting through half a day’s worth of dense conversation (a sort of retort to the typical romantic comedy montage), they told personal anecdotes, took philosophical positions, and did a certain amount of playful flirting, whose intensity crept upward with the passing hours as the parameters of their encounter began to constrict. By morning, we were pretty invested in the last-minute arrangement they made just before Celine boarded her train: to reconvene there, barring personal constraints, in one year’s time. As the sun rose on all the places they’d passed through, empty now, we were left with that ambiguous possibility and our own guesses and projections as to whether Jesse and Celine would ever see each other again.

Since 1995, when director Richard Linklater, Delpy, and Hawke told this story in the film Before Sunrise, they’ve returned to these characters three times: they surface in a disconnected cameo in 2001’s animated Waking Life. The 2004 follow-up Before Sunset, shot in real time, reunites them after nine years in a Paris bookstore, where Jesse, now a successful writer, is reading from his novel about their time together in Vienna; more discursive talk and a beautifully ambiguous ending ensue. And now Before Midnight marks the third installment in a series whose occasional, compressed episodes submerge us so deeply in a particular moment of Jesse and Celine’s lives that we begin to forget how long it’s been since we saw them last.

When the newest film — co-written, like Before Sunset, by Linklater, Delpy, and Hawke; Linklater wrote the first film with Kim Krizan — picks up with Celine and Jesse, another nine years have passed. And it’s possible that they no longer recall with the warm clarity we do that gorgeous, affecting, flirty scene in the last few moments of Before Sunset, when we left them alone in Celine’s Paris apartment listening to Nina Simone, Jesse looking very likely to miss his plane back to the States this time around. It was one of the more perfect movie endings in recent memory, true. But in the intervening years, a lot has happened, including twins, a rancorous divorce and custody fights (for Jesse, whose teenage son lives in Chicago with his ex-wife), another best-selling (and semiautobiographical) novel, various environmental battles (for nonprofit worker Celine), and nine years of steady, unrestricted companionship that have inevitably overshadowed the telescoped intensity and romantic longing of the pair’s early encounters.

Now in their early 40s, Jesse and Celine have formed a web of commitments domestic and professional, and Before Midnight reflects this shift by adopting a more expansive outlook, the camera pulling back to take in a wider circle of family and friends. The film begins with a scene between Jesse and his son, Hank (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick), saying their farewells at an airport in Greece’s southern Peloponnese, where the family have been spending the summer at the home of an older expat and writer, Patrick (played by veteran cinematographer Walter Lassally).

When we finally see Celine, waiting curbside at the car with their little girls, she’s on the phone with a colleague in Paris, and her and Jesse’s exchanges as they drive signal a habitual intimacy (new to us but now commonplace to them) — as well as a few recurring sources of tension. Back at Patrick’s, the camera moves amid a crowded intergenerational scene and, at dinner, circles the table in an extended take as these disparate characters reflect on the stages of love and life in the kind of rambling, associative conversation we’ve come to expect of the series.

There’s a neatness to the generational roll call at the dinner table — a couple in their 20s (whose long-distance affair via Skype is juxtaposed to Before Sunrise‘s romantic, chancy gesture); two couples in their 40s; the elderly Patrick and a female friend, both widowed. But the discussion itself is messy like life, and things get messier still when Jesse and Celine finally manage some alone time. We see the people who met half a lifetime ago, but the shock of recognition comes when the fissures in their relationship are fully exposed, cracks we can follow back nearly 20 years, as well as forward. We remember, and so do they, Jesse convincing Celine to get off the train with that fast-forward glance at a possible future, and wonder if we’ll ever see the two of them again.


BEFORE MIDNIGHT opens Fri/31 in Bay Area theaters.

Tourist trappers

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Tourist trappers

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM From the wonderfully cracked mind of British director Ben Wheatley — whose 2011 Kill List infused the played-out hitman genre with gory verve and folkloric terrors — comes, at last, Sightseers. If you missed it earlier this year at SF IndieFest, here’s your chance to experience Wheatley’s latest mash-up, a black-comedy road movie that follows a pair of infatuated misfits as they visit some of England’s more prosaic tourist attractions. Long before they reach the Keswick Pencil Museum, however, it becomes clear that one of them is a serial killer.

But it doesn’t take frenzied bloodshed to indicate that something’s a little off with both Tina (Alice Lowe) and Chris (Steve Oram; both actors co-wrote with Amy Jump, Wheatley’s wife and frequent collaborator). Tina’s a sheltered, frumpy 34-year-old who still lives at home with her controlling mother (Eileen Davies); their relationship revolves around baby talk and emotional manipulation, as well as a shared sense of grief over losing their much-worshipped dog, Poppy, in a freak knitting-needle accident.

Bitter Mum blames Tina, a compulsive knitter, for Poppy’s demise. “Murderer!” she hisses, as Chris whisks a giddy Tina away (“Show me your world, Chris!”) with his beloved Abbey Oxford Caravan in tow, the upbeat-tempo-meets-cautionary-lyrics of “Tainted Love” blasting on the soundtrack. After these bits of foreshadowing, it’s not a complete surprise when Chris reacts oddly to a man who carelessly discards an ice-cream wrapper amid the sacred environs of Crich Tramway Village. The first death is perceived as accidental, by Tina, the police, the victim’s family — but we saw Chris peep the offender in his rearview mirror before mowing him down, and we also saw the delighted smile creep across his face in the chaotic aftermath.

As Tina and Chris’ holiday continues, their relationship settles into a comfortable groove: Chris calls the shots, while Tina — delighted to be dubbed the budding author’s “muse” — follows his lead, spending her downtime decking out the trailer with tacky tchotchkes. The litterbug’s death fades quickly, but it’s not long before things get weird again, when the couple encounters two smugsters who are more or less upgraded versions of themselves: more attractive, more tasteful, more successful, and possessed of both a nicer trailer and a dog who’s a dead ringer for Poppy. Once again, the molecules in the crisp English-countryside air rearrange themselves, and the façade of a peaceful vaycay crumbles. The tone shift is heralded by a slo-mo montage set to Vanilla Fudge’s “Season of the Witch,” a cover so acid-soaked it makes an already-spooky song even more appropriately nightmarish.

Thus zooms forth Sightseers, with two protagonists so snapped from reality that happy, goofy moments continue to shine through the darkness. Though Tina disapproves of Chris’ habits (or does she?), her main concern is making sure the trip continues apace — and that Chris continues to treat her like a muse, even if she’s serving as muse for a creative endeavor that hardly resembles writing a book. The film’s most literary moment comes when a booming voice-over, not heard before or after, chimes in to narrate a key moment with William Blake’s “Jerusalem” (cutting off right after the word “Satanic”).

Not immediately familiar with that poem? Well, the musical version of “Jerusalem” is so popular in Britain that it was incorporated into the opening ceremonies at the 2012 London Olympics. If there’s a downside to Sightseers, it’s that some of its Brit-specific quirks might be lost on American viewers. It’s funny enough even if you don’t have an ear for regional accents (or the ability to sort out the posh ones), an appreciation for Daily Mail jokes, or the slightest knowledge of caravan culture. But the humor in Sightseers, probably more than Kill List and definitely more than exec producer Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004), is aimed more at the hometown crowd.

Still, any Yank with a wicked streak will appreciate Sightseers‘ deliciously deviant, decidedly deadpan point of view, and its take on class wars is obvious enough to translate into haughty vs. tacky. If the pairing of Tina and Chris is a disaster waiting to happen, Lowe and Oram — both British TV stars who developed their characters over a period of years — create comedy gold, with some of the more luridly awkward sex scenes in recent memory. Though Oram got the funniest of Sightseers‘ four promotional posters (tag line: “Death has a ginger beard”) Lowe, in particular, makes the most of Tina’s little-girl-lost shtick, eager to please her man but most certainly not to be fucked with. 

 

SIGHTSEERS opens Fri/31 in Bay Area theaters.

Let’s dance

Andrew Lam
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Let’s dance

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM Noah Baumbach isn’t exactly known for romance and bright-eyed optimism. Co-writing 2009’s Fantastic Mr. Fox with director Wes Anderson is maybe the closest to “whimsy” as he’s ever come; his own features (2010’s Greenberg, 2007’s Margot at the Wedding, 2005’s The Squid and the Whale, 1997’s Mr. Jealousy, and 1995’s Kicking and Screaming) tend to veer into grumpier, more intellectual realms. You might say his films are an acquired taste. Actual declaration overheard at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival: “Am I going to see Frances Ha? Ugh, no. I can’t stand Noah Baumbach.”

Haters beware. Frances Ha — the black-and-white tale of a New York City hipster (Baumbach’s real-life squeeze, Greta Gerwig) blundering her way into adulthood — is probably the least Baumbach-ian Baumbach movie ever. Owing stylistic debts to both vintage Woody Allen and the French New Wave, Frances Ha relies heavily on Gerwig’s adorable-disaster title character to propel its plot, which is little more than a timeline of Frances’ neverending micro-adventures: pursuing her nascent modern-dance career, bouncing from address to address, taking an impromptu trip to Paris, visiting her parents (portrayed by the Sacramento-raised Gerwig’s real-life parents), “breaking up” with her best friend. It’s charming, poignant, it’s quotable (“Don’t treat me like a three-hour brunch friend!”), and even those who claim to be allergic to Baumbach just might find themselves succumbing to it.

Frances Ha marks the second film to feature a dance subplot for Gerwig, after Whit Stillman’s 2011 Damsels in Distress. (She also appeared in Greenberg but is probably best-known for her mumblecore oeuvre: 2008’s Baghead; 2007’s Hannah Takes the Stairs.)

“I love dancing,” she admitted on a SFIFF-timed visit to San Francisco. “I was never a professional, but I danced a lot growing up and I still go to dance class whenever I can. I don’t think there’s enough dancing in movies.”

Like Frances, she studied modern dance in college. “I did this kind of modern dance called release technique. A big component of it is learning how to fall. It’s connected to bouncing back from the ground, or giving into the ground — letting everything flow. It’s a beautiful way to dance, and the dance company that [Frances] wants to be a part of, that’s the kind of dance that they do,” she said. “I also thought it was this incredible metaphor for life: learning how to fall, because you’re going to. At first, as you’re learning how to do it, you get terribly banged up — and then at some point you just are falling and it’s not hurting you anymore.”

Though much of Frances Ha, which was co-scripted by Baumbach and Gerwig, is about its protagonist’s various relationship struggles, there’s another less-expected theme: class warfare (a mild version of it, anyway). Frances scrambles to pay her $1200 rent — previously, she’s seen paying $950 a month to sleep on a couch — while her housemate, who comes from a wealthy family and spends his days noodling on spec scripts, casually mentions the necessity of hiring a maid service. You know, for, “like, 400 bucks a month.”

“We didn’t set out to make a movie about class, specifically,” Gerwig noted. “But I think typically Americans have a lot of trouble talking about class, or even acknowledging that it exists. It operates on a really subtle level. You get out of college and you suddenly realize that some people are paying off loans, and some people aren’t. It can be hard to talk about. I’m very inspired by Mike Leigh’s movies, where it’s always there in the background. I felt like I wanted to have it in the movie, and Noah felt the same way, too.”

Later that day, Baumbach elaborated on the same thought. “Economics were really going to influence a lot of what Frances does, because the movie was structured by finding a home, lack of a home, constant movement,” he said. “Her economic reality had to be a huge component of her story.”

Frances Ha captures twentysomething ennui with the same honesty Baumbach deployed in Kicking and Screaming, though there are some key differences: the Kicking and Screaming guys were mere months post-graduation, while Frances, who is 27, is more removed from college — whether she wants to admit it or not. “It didn’t feel like the exact same territory, but I was aware that it was kind of addressing some of the stuff that I was addressing back then,” Baumbach said. (Not coincidental, one presumes, is the cameo in Frances Ha by Kicking and Screaming star Josh Hamilton.)   

Though he won’t cop to naming his main character after, um, France, Baumbach does admit that the country’s films (he points specifically to works by Truffaut, Rohmer, and Carax) have had a strong influence on him as a director, and on Frances Ha in particular.

“I think [for these filmmakers], the joy of making the movie is somehow evident in the movie itself,” he said. “Sometimes, that can be annoying! But the rush you get from it, you can just feel, like, the pleasure of movies. With Frances Ha, I wanted to push that, and do things like have her run down the street [while David Bowie’s ‘Modern Love’ plays on the soundtrack]. Just go for it, because the movie really could hold it. I think a lot of [the films that inspired me] have that. And because a lot of the music is borrowed from those movies, it feels even more like a clear connection.”

FRANCES HA opens Fri/24 in Bay Area theaters

 

Assassination character

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Assassination character

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Starting in the late 1960s, it was noted that Hollywood no longer necessarily required actors who were conventionally handsome. Dustin Hoffman, George Segal, and others were hailed as representatives of a brave new system in which the idiosyncratic character actor of another generation could now be the star. This was an oversimplification, given that the movies had already made room for the likes of Lon Chaney, Humphrey Bogart, and Bette Davis, among others who wouldn’t be considered conventionally beautiful. Nonetheless, the cult of beauty remains a huge factor in movie stardom — even more so now that we live in an era where the principal cinematic heroes are primarily superheroes of one sort or another, defined by their physical perfection.

Nevertheless, sometimes sheer, striking talent forces someone into the front ranks without their having the benefit of looking like a former model. A case in point is Michael Shannon, who has simply been too intense to ignore in movies since at least 2006’s Bug — through indelible performances in Revolutionary Road (2008), Take Shelter (2011), TV’s Boardwalk Empire, last month’s Mud, and more. He’s such a Method-y changeling that it’s hard to believe he’s six-foot-four — he’s so often, so effectively shrunken himself to play flawed men whose souls are in danger of being shrunken further by irresponsible actions.

He’s pretty much the whole show in The Iceman, about a real-life hitman who purportedly killed over 100 people during his career. Despite some scarily violent moments, however, Ariel Vromen’s film doesn’t show much of that body count — he’s more interested in the double life Richard Kuklinski (Shannon) leads as a cold-blooded killer whose profession remains entirely unknown for years to his wife, daughters, and friends. The waitress he marries, Deborah (Winona Ryder), isn’t exactly a brainiac. But surely there’s some willful denial in the way she accepts his every excuse and fake profession, starting with “dubbing Disney movies” when he actually dupes prints of pornos.

It’s in that capacity that he first meets Roy Demeo (Ray Liotta), a volatile Newark mobster impressed by Kuklinski’s blasé demeanor at gunpoint. He correctly surmises this guy would make a fine contract killer, and his offer does seem to strike a chord. Telling Deborah he’s now an investment banker, or some such, Kuklinski upgrades their lifestyle to suburban comfort on a mafia salary. When he has a falling out with Demeo, he “freelances” his skill to collaborate with fellow hitman Mr. Freezy (Chris Evans), so named because he drives an ice-cream truck — and puts his victims on ice for easier disposal.

For the sake of a basic contrast defined by its ad line — “Loving husband. Devoted father. Ruthless killer.” — The Iceman simplifies Kuklinski’s saga, making him less of a monster. His wife said he frequently beat her, though here the marriage is portrayed as fairly idyllic. You can see why Ryder’s Deborah might choose to overlook so many gaps in her husband’s alibis — Shannon makes Richard someone whose stern dedication to murder can also be applied to the roles of spouse and father. Woe betide anyone who insults his family, as one pool hall loudmouth finds out early on.

The movie only briefly suggests Kuklinski’s abused childhood, and it omits entirely other intriguing aspects of the real-life story. But Shannon creates a convincing whole character whose contradictions don’t seem so to him — or to us. It’s an unflashy performance, everything reined in, very tightly wound, such that you’d never imagine this actor could be loose or funny — though that’s exactly what he is in Mud. Shannon isn’t yet 40, and while there are plenty of actors whose bags of tricks leave little room for surprise, one suspects this guy couldn’t repeat himself if he tried.

 

THE ICEMAN opens Fri/17 in Bay Area theaters.

Short takes: SFIFF week two

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Short takes: SFIFF week two

Prince Avalanche (David Gordon Green, US, 2012) It has been somewhat hard to connect the dots between David Gordon Green the abstract-narrative indie poet (2000’s George Washington, 2003’s All the Real Girls) and DGG the mainstream Hollywood comedy director (2008’s Pineapple Express, yay; 2011’s Your Highness and The Sitter, nay nay nay). But here he brings those seemingly irreconcilable personas together, and they make very sweet music indeed. Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch play two men — one a fussy, married grown-up, another a short-attention-spanned man child — spending the summer in near-total isolation, painting yellow divider lines on recently fire-damaged Texas roads. Their very different personalities clash, and at first the tone seems more conventionally broad than that of the 2011 Icelandic minimalist-comedy (Either Way) this revamp is derived from. But Green has a great deal up his sleeve — gorgeous wide screen imagery, some inspired wordless montages, and a well-earned eventual warmth — that makes the very rare US remake that improves upon its European predecessor. Wed/1, 4pm, and Fri/3, 6:30pm, Kabuki. (Dennis Harvey)

Fill the Void (Rama Burshtein, Israel, 2012) Respectfully rendered and beautifully shot in warm hues, Fill the Void admirably fills the absence on many screens of stories from what might be considered a closed world: the Orthodox Hasidic community in Israel, where a complex web of family ties, duty, and obligation entangles pretty, accordion-playing Shira (Hada Yaron). An obedient daughter, she’s about to agree to an arranged marriage to a young suitor when her much-loved sister (Renana Raz) dies in childbirth. When Shira’s mother (Irit Sheleg) learns the widower Yochay (Yiftach Klein) might marry a woman abroad and take her only grandchild far away, she starts to make noises about fixing Shira up with her son-in-law. The journey the two must take, in possibly going from in-laws to newlyweds, is one that’s simultaneously infuriating, understandable, and touching, made all the more intimate given director Rama Burshtein’s preference for searching close-ups. Her affinity for the Orthodox world is obvious with each loving shot, ultimately infusing her debut feature with a beating heart of humanity. Wed/1, 6:30pm, and Thu/2, 4pm, Kabuki. (Kimberly Chun)

The Strange Little Cat (Ramon Zürcher, Germany, 2013) There’s a strange music to this light-on-its-toes, rhythmic, and ultimately mesmerizing chamber piece by first-time feature director Ramon Zürcher — one seemingly informed by dance, Gerhard Richter, contemporary opera, and Jean-Luc Godard in a latter-day gimlet-eyed state. The arc of a banal yet odd day is traced, within mostly the close confines of a Berlin apartment, as family members enter, interact, and then retreat in a kind of call and response: the mother runs a kitchen machine, a girl cries out as if to mimic its roar, a cousin who looks as if he’s straight out of a Dutch master painting soberly surveys the scene, while the eponymous feline weaves in and out of the action. In fact, that pet is the most domesticated of the lot populating this riveting domestic scene, all of which makes you want to see what Zürcher cooks up next. Wed/1, 9pm; Sun/5, 7pm; and May 8, 4pm, Kabuki. (Chun)

Salma (Kim Longinotto, England/India, 2012) Kept like a prisoner in her in-laws’ house for more than two decades, Salma is more than the most famed woman poet writing in the Tamil language. She’s also an archetypal South Indian woman of her time and place: married as a teen despite her desire to read and write poetry, her body controlled by her husband and family, and her freedom constricted to the point where she was once forced to write on scraps of paper in the toilet and to smuggle her verse out to have it published. What follows is the stuff of fairy tales, as Salma evolves into a politician and heroine who speaks for those otherwise muffled by their burkas and smothered by circumstance. Documentarian Kim Longinotto keeps a close eye on the oppressive culture that once harbored the writer — and inspired her to express herself — yet also takes the time to notice Tamil Nadu’s many small instances of beauty, in mutable pink and purple skies, a gold-flecked green sari, and showy weddings that mark both the beginning, and end, for so many young girls. Documentarian Longinotto whets one’s appetite for more of Salma’s words, while upholding her story’s relevance amid rising consciousness concerning the rights of all women in India. Thu/2, 6:15pm, Kabuki; Sat/4, 2pm, PFA; Sun/5, 3:45pm, New People. (Chun)

Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski, US, 2013) Mumblecore maestro Andrew Bujalski (2002’s Funny Ha Ha; 2005’s Mutual Appreciation) makes his first period picture, kinda, with this stubbornly, gloriously retro saga set at an early-1980s computer-chess tournament (with a few ventures into the freaky couples-therapy seminar being held at the same hotel). The technology is dated, both on and off-screen, as hulking machines with names like “Tsar 3.0” and “Logic Fortress” battle for nerdly supremacy as a cameraman, wielding the vintage cameras that were actually used to film the feature, observes. Tiny dramas highlighting the deeply human elements lurking amid all that computer code emerge along the way, and though the Poindexters (and the grainy cinematography) are authentically old-school, the humor is wry and awkwardly dry — very 21st century. Keep an eye out for indie icon Wiley Wiggins, last seen hiding from Ben Affleck’s hazing techniques in 1993’s Dazed and Confused, as a stressed-out programmer. Thu/2, 9pm, and Sat/4, 4pm, Kabuki. (Cheryl Eddy)

The Cleaner (Adrián Saba, Peru, 2011) An austere take on substitute-parental bonding dressed in apocalyptic sci-fi clothing, Adrián Saba’s Peruvian feature finds the world ending not with a bang but with a sickly whimper. (If you’ve ever breathed the toxic air or looked at the shit-brown sea around Lima, you’ll find this pretty credible.) A middle-aged loner (Victor Prada) tasked with cleaning up the death sites of citizens felled by a fatal epidemic finds a surviving young boy (Adrian Du Bois) in one such apartment. Their forced, awkward pairing — because the death toll is so high city services can no longer taken in another orphan — is poignant and terse in what’s a minimalist companion to the underrated 2008 adaptation of José Saramago’s plague saga Blindness. Sat/4, 6:15pm, Kabuki; Tue/7, 8:40pm, PFA; May 9, 8:30pm, Kabuki. (Harvey)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, US, 1978) Yes, Vertigo (1958) is very nice. But here is my alternate choice for Best San Francisco Movie Ever: 2013 SFIFF tributee Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake of the 1950s sci-fi classic. Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright, and Leonard Nimoy are among the locals who get very paranoid — with no pot brownies involved — when everyone around them starts turning coldly conformist. Given the film’s fond evocation of the city’s loopy, friendly, countercultural vibe at the time, this shift in the psychological weather really is alarming — arguably much more dramatically so than it was the vanilla small-town setting of Don Siegel’s original or Abel Ferrara’s military-base 1994 version. Wonderfully creepy, eccentric, stylish and humorous, it was Kaufman’s first commercial success. He will appear at the Castro screening to discuss it, his career in general, and to accept his Founder’s Directing Award. Sun/5, 7:30pm, Castro. (Harvey)

Waxworks (Paul Leni, Germany, 1924) Paul Leni’s 1924 omnibus horror feature is considered one of the great classics of German Expressionist cinema. A young man (William Dieterle, who went on to a long Hollywood directing career) answers an ad seeking “an imaginative writer for publicity” work at a wax museum. There he’s asked to write “startling tales” about specific wax figures, envisioning himself and the owner’s comely assistant (Olga Belajeff) as hero and heroine in each narrative. The first and longest tale has the two of them as a couple who get unwanted attention from the tyrannical, lusty Caliph of Bagdad (Emil Jannings). It’s an attenuated comic episode sparked by spectacular abstracted “Middle Eastern” sets. Next, Conrad Veidt (of 1920 Expressionist flagship film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) plays Ivan the Terrible in a more macabre story of bloodthirst and madness. Finally, Werner Krauss is “Spring-Heeled Jack” (i.e. Jack the Ripper), terrorizing our protagonists in a brief riot of nightmarish superimposed images. SFIFF’s annual silent film extravaganza at the Castro will be accompanied by a stellar quartet of musicians playing an original score: Mike Patton, Scott Amendola, Matthias Bossi, and William Winant. Expect an eclectic and propulsive evening of sounds equally schooled by punk, prog rock, and jazz. Tue/7, 8:30pm, Castro. (Harvey)

Before Midnight (Richard Linklater, US, 2012) Proving (again) that not all sequels are autonomic responses to a marketplace that rewards the overfamiliar, director Richard Linklater and his co-writers Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke reconnect with the characters Céline and Jesse, whom we first encountered nearly 20 years ago on a train and trailed around Vienna for a night in Before Sunrise, then met again nine years later in Before Sunset. It’s been nine more years since we left them alone in a Paris apartment, Céline adorably dancing to Nina Simone and telling Jesse he’s going to miss his plane. And it looks like he did. The third film finds the two together, yes, and vacationing in Greece’s southern Peloponnese, where the expansive, meandering pace of their interactions — the only mode we’ve ever seen them in — is presented as an unaccustomed luxury amid a span of busy years filled with complications professional and personal. Over the course of a day and an evening, alone together and among friends, the two reveal both the quotidian intimacies of a shared life and the cracks and elisions in their love story. May 9, 7pm, Castro. (Lynn Rapoport) *

The San Francisco International Film Festival runs through May 9 at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; New People Cinema, 1746 Post, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, 1881 Post, SF. For tickets (most shows $10-15) and info, visit festival.sffs.org.

 

Short takes: SFIFF week one

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Short takes: SFIFF week one

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

April 25-May 9, most shows $10-15

Various venues

festival.sffs.org

The Artist and the Model (Fernando Trueba, Spain, 2012) The horror of the blank page, the raw sensuality of marble, and the fresh-meat attraction of a new model — just a few of the starting points for this thoughtful narrative about an elderly sculptor finding and shaping his possibly finest and final muse. Bedraggled and homeless beauty Mercè (Aida Folch) washes up in a small French town in the waning days of World War II and is taken in by a kindly woman (Claudia Cardinale), who seems intent on pleasantly pimping her out as a nude model to her artist husband (Jean Rochefort). As his former model, she knows Mercè has the type of body he likes — and that she’s capable of restoring his powers, in more ways than one, if you know what I mean. Yet this film by Fernando Trueba (1992’s Belle Époque) isn’t that kind of movie, with those kinds of models, especially when Mercè turns out to have more on her mind than mere pleasure. Done up in a lustrous, sunlit black and white that recalls 1957’s Wild Strawberries, The Artist and the Model instead offers a steady, respectful, and loving peek into a process, and unique relationship, with just a touch of poetry. Fri/26, 1pm, and Sun/28, 6:30pm, Kabuki. (Kimberly Chun)

The Daughter (Alexander Kasatkin and Natalia Nazarova, Russia, 2012) Imagine a serial-killer tale as directed by Tarkovsky and you’ll get an idea of this fascinating, ambiguous Russian drama by co-directors Aleksandr Kasatkin and Natalia Nazarova. Someone is murdering teenage girls in what otherwise seems a tranquil village backwater. That’s one reason the almost painfully naïve Inna (Maria Smolnikova) is kept on a fairly tight leash by her gruff, conservative widower father (Oleg Tkachev), who expects her to perform all housekeeper duties and mind a little brother. When brash, borderline-trashy new schoolmate Marta (Yana Osipova) surprisingly decides to make Inna her best friend, she’s both a liberating and dangerous influence. Less interested in narrative clarity than issues of morality, spirituality, and guilt (at one point the killer confesses to a priest whose daughter he murdered — tormenting the cleric who is bound to confidentiality), this often-gorgeous feature is a worthy addition to the long line of somber, meditative Russian art films. Fri/26, 6:15pm, and Sun/28, 1pm, Kabuki; May 6, 9pm, PFA. (Dennis Harvey)

The Kill Team (Dan Krauss, US, 2012) Dan Krauss’ documentary chronicles the shocking case of a US Army unit in Afghanistan whose squad leader, one Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, encouraged his men to kill unarmed, unaccused civilians for fun, then cover it up as alleged self-defense. (He also collected severed fingers for an eventual bone necklace.) When subordinate Adam Winfield was disturbed enough by this to tell his parents (his father a Marine vet), and ponder informing officials, he was threatened with his own lethal “accident.” Once the scandal finally broke, he found himself on military trial for murder along with Gibbs and others. While sometimes a little too slickly made in a narrative-feature kind of way, this is a potent look at the vagaries of military justice, not to mention a military culture that can foster dangerously frustrated adrenaline junkies. As one of Winfield’s fellow accused puts it, Afghanistan was “boring as fuck” because they expected to be “kickin’ ass” when “instead we’re forced to help ’em build a well, or a school, or whatever.” Another shrugs “It was nothing like everyone hyped it up to be … and that is probably partly why, uh, things happened.” Fri/26, 9pm, PFA; May 6, 3:15pm, and May 7, 6pm, Kabuki; May 9, 6pm, New People. (Harvey)

Rosie (Marcel Gisler, Switzerland, 2013) Moms: can’t live with ’em … and can’t live with ’em. Roughly, that’s the predicament of successful gay writer Lorenz (Fabian Kruger) when his hard-drinking independent mater Rosie (Sibylle Brunner) keels over with a heart attack. His heart is with his tough old bird of a mother — unlike his more conventional sister (Judith Hofmann) — though a young, adorable fanboy of a neighbor (Sebastian Ledesma) is intent on competing for his attentions. Director and co-writer Marcel Gisler spares no warmth or care when it comes to filling out the story fully, as when Lorenz discovers that he has more in common with his seemingly inaccessible late father than he ever imagined. While Rosie paints a rosier, slightly more sentimental picture, imagine a warmer and fuzzier yet still renegade Rainer Werner Fassbender nursing a wisecracking, headstrong Emmi post-1974’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Fri/26, 9:30pm, Kabuki; Sun/28, 9pm, PFA; Tue/30, 6pm, Kabuki. (Chun)

You’re Next (Adam Wingard, US, 2011) The hit of the 2011 Toronto Film Festival’s midnight section — and one that’s taking its sweet time getting to theaters — indie horror specialist (2010’s A Horrible Way to Die, 2007’s Pop Skull, 2012’s V/H/S) Adam Wingard’s feature isn’t really much more than a gussied-up slasher. But it’s got vigor, and violence, to spare. An already uncomfortable anniversary reunion for the wealthy Davison clan plus their children’s spouses gets a lot more so when dinner is interrupted by an arrow that sails through a window, right into someone’s flesh. Immediately a full on siege commences, with family members reacting with various degrees of panic, selfishness, and ingenuity, while an unknown number of animal-masked assailants prowl outside (and sometimes inside). Clearly fun for its all-star cast and crew of mumblecore/indie horror staples, yet preferring gallows’ humor to wink-wink camp, it’s a (very) bloody good ride. Sat/27, 11:30am, Kabuki; May 1, 9:45pm, Kabuki. (Harvey)

Thérèse (Claude Miller, France, 2012) Both Emma Bovary and Simone de Beauvoir would undoubtedly relate to this increasingly bored and twisted French woman of privilege stuck in the sticks in the ’20s, as rendered by novelist Francois Mauriac and compellingly translated to the screen by the late director Claude Miller. Forbiddingly cerebral and bookish yet also strangely passive, Thérèse (Audrey Tautou) looks like she has it all from a distance — she’s married to her best friend’s coarse, hunting-obsessed brother (Gilles Lellouche) though envious of her chum’s affair with a handsome and free-thinking Jewish student. Turns out she’s as trapped and close to death as the birds her spouse snares in their forest, and the suffocatingly provincial ways of family she’s married into lead her to undertake a dire course of action. Lellouche adds nuance to his rich lunk, but you can’t tear your eyes from Tautou. Turning her pinched frown right side up and hardening those unblinking button eyes, she plays well against type as a well-heeled, sleepwalking, possibly sociopathic sour grape, effectively conveying the mute unhappiness of a too-well-bred woman born too early and too blinkered to understand that she’s desperate for a new century’s freedoms. Sat/27, 3pm, Kabuki; Mon/29, 6:30pm, New People. (Chun)

Ernest & Celestine (Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, and Benjamin Renner, France/Luxembourg/Belgium, 2012) Belgian animators Vincent Patar and Stéphane Aubier are best known for the stop-motion shorts series (and priceless 2009 subsequent feature) A Town Called Panic, an anarchic, absurdist, and hilarious creation suitable for all ages. Their latest (co-directed with Benjamin Renner) is … not like that at all. Instead, it’s a sweet, generally guileless children’s cartoon that takes its gentle, watercolor-type visual style from late writer-illustrator Gabrielle Vincent’s same-named books. Celestine (voiced by Pauline Brunner) is an orphaned girl mouse that befriends gruff bear Ernest (the excellent Lambert Wilson), though their improbable kinship invites social disapproval and scrapes with the law. There are some clever satirical touches, but mostly this is a softhearted charmer that will primarily appeal to younger kids. Adults will find it pleasant enough — but don’t expect any Panic-style craziness. Sun/28, 12:30pm, and May 1, 7pm, Kabuki. (Harvey)

Marketa Lazarová (Frantisek Vlácil, Czech Republic, 1966) An extraordinary evocation of medieval life, this 1966 black and white epic — considered by some the greatest Czech film ever made — is being reprised at SFIFF in honor of the festival’s late board chairman and generous benefactor George Gund, for whom it was a personal favorite. The violent struggle between pagan feudalist clans and rising Christian political forces in 13th century Eastern Europe is dramatized in brutal yet poetical form here. You will be very glad you didn’t live back then, or suffer the privations director Frantisek Vlácil and his crew did during an apparently very tough rural, mostly wintertime shoot. But you won’t forget this cinematically dazzling if sometimes opaquely told chronicle based on a classic Czech novel. Sun/28, 12:30pm, PFA; May 3, 8:45pm, New People. (Harvey)

Museum Hours (Jem Cohen, US, 2012) Feature documentaries Benjamin Smoke (2000) and Instrument (2003) are probably Jem Cohen’s best-known works, but this prolific filmmaker — an inspired choice for SFIFF’s Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award, honoring “a filmmaker whose main body of work is outside the realm of narrative feature filmmaking” — has a remarkably diverse resume of shorts, music videos, and at least one previous narrative film (albeit one with experimental elements), 2004’s Chain. Cohen appears in person to discuss his work and present his latest film, Museum Hours, about a guard at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum (“the big old one,” the man calls it) who befriends a Montreal woman visiting her comatose cousin. It’s a deceptively simple story that expands into a deeply felt, gorgeously shot rumination on friendship, loneliness, travel, art history and appreciation, and finding the beauty in the details of everyday life. Sun/28, 5:30pm, Kabuki. (Eddy)

The Patience Stone (Atiq Rahimi, France/Germany/England/Afghanistan, 2012) “You’re the one that’s wounded, yet I’m the one that’s suffering,” complains the good Afghan wife of Patience Stone in this theatrical yet charged adaptation of Atiq Rahimi’s best-selling novel, directed by the Kabul native himself. As The Patience Stone opens, a beautiful, nameless young woman (Golshifteh Farahani) is fighting to not only keep alive her comatose husband, a onetime Jihadist with a bullet lodged in his neck, but also simply survive on her own with little money and two small daughters and a war going off all around her. In a surprising turn, her once-heedless husband becomes her solace — her silent confidante and her so-called patience stone — as she talks about her fears, secrets, memories, and desires, the latter sparked by a meeting with a young soldier. Despite the mostly stagy treatment of the action, mainly isolated to a single room or house (although the guerilla-shot scenes on Kabul streets are rife with a feeling of real jeopardy), The Patience Stone achieves lift-off, thanks to the power of a once-silenced woman’s story and a heart-rending performance by Farahani, once a star and now banned in her native Iran. Mon/29, 6:30pm, and Tues/30, 8:45pm, Kabuki. (Chun)

Peaches Does Herself (Peaches, Germany, 2012) Canadian-born yet the quintessential modern Berlin act — transgressively sexed-up electroclash slash-performance artist — Peaches delivers an expectedly high-concept live show in this nimbly cinematic concert movie. The first 15 minutes or so are absolutely great: raunchy, hilarious, imaginatively staged (completely with an orgiastically inclined dance troupe). But after a while it really begins to bog down in prolonged appearances by elderly burlesque-type standup Dannii Daniels, stilted ones by Amazonian transsexual Sandy Kane, and an attempt at a quasi-romantic-triangle narrative that is meant to be funny and outrageous but just kinda lies there. Diehard fans will be thrilled, but most viewers will hit an exhaustion point long before the film reaches its (admittedly funny) fadeout. Mon/29, 9:45pm, and May 2, 9:15pm, Kabuki. (Harvey) *

The San Francisco International Film Festival runs April 25-May 9 at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; New People Cinema, 1746 Post, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, 1881 Post, SF. For tickets (most shows $10-15) and info, visit festival.sffs.org.

Stop making sense

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Stop making sense

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM A woman, a man, a pig, a worm, Walden — what? If you enter into Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color expecting things like a linear plot, exposition, and character development, you will exit baffled and distressed. Best to understand in advance that these elements are not part of Carruth’s master plan. In fact, based on my own experiences watching the film twice, I’m fairly certain that not really understanding what’s going on in Upstream Color is part of its loopy allure.

Remember Carruth’s 2004 Primer, the DIY filmmaker’s $7,000 sci-fi tale about time travel? Did you try to puzzle out that film’s array of overlapping and jigsawed timelines, only to give up and concede that the mystery (and sheer bravado) of that film was part of its, uh, loopy allure? Yeah. Same idea, except writ a few dimensions larger, with more locations, zero tech-speak dialogue, and — yes! — a compelling female lead, played by Amy Seimetz, an indie producer and director in her own right.

There are YouTube videos of Carruth’s post-screening Q&A at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival (where Upstream Color debuted and won a prize for its innovative sound design), where he answers “What did that mean?”-type questions with fast-paced references to “the architecture of a story,” “speaking with emotional language,” and his interest in how people who’ve been shattered by trauma fumble their way toward creating new narratives for themselves. Or something.

At any rate, “trauma” is a somewhat mild description of what happens to Kris (Seimetz) at the start of the film. Upstream Color‘s first quarter is its most coherent, appropriate since it takes place before Kris’ health and sanity are compromised by an unnamed character (dubbed the Thief in the credits, and portrayed by Thiago Martins). At first, he appears to be some kind of hipster mad scientist, fiddling with plants and worms in his home lab; there’s no apparent connection between the Thief and Kris — a well-adjusted yuppie type, with a fast-paced job and tasteful wardrobe. This makes it all the more shocking when he stun-guns her in a restaurant and forces her to swallow a worm that turns her into a docile zombie. Before long, she’s emptied all of her bank accounts and signed her house over to him. She snaps out of her fugue state remembering nothing, but the aftereffects are grim: she’s fired, her ATM card doesn’t work, and there are weird things wriggling under her skin.

From there, things go from creepy to confusing, and it takes a few beats to get into Upstream Color‘s new rhythm of randomness. A pig farmer who is also fond of making field recordings and exudes zero menace helps, maybe, Kris by hooking her up to a machine that links her to a piglet and … is that a tapeworm? Then the story moves forward an unknown amount of months or years; the formerly put-together and content Kris is now sporting a chopped-short haircut and a skittish expression. On the train, going to her unglamorous job in a sign shop, she meets the haggard, similarly on-edge Jeff (Carruth) and there’s an instant connection.

Were Upstream Color a rom-com, or even a more conventional sci-fi flick, this pair of lost souls would use their new romance as a springboard for healing. But since “there isn’t a molecule of Hollywood” in Upstream Color — per Carruth, in an insightful post-Sundance interview with Wired magazine — there’s way more abstract weirdness to come, with occasional happy fragments sprinkled in to suggest there’s still hope for Kris and Jeff despite all of their multiple layers of damage.

If it hasn’t already been made clear, enjoying (or even making it all the way through) Upstream Color requires patience and a willingness to forgive some of Carruth’s more pretentious noodlings. (You also have to be OK with having a lot of questions left unequivocally unanswered: why is the pig farmer obsessed with making recordings? Why Walden? Aaarrrgghh!) In the tradition of experimental filmmaking, it’s a work that’s more concerned with evoking emotions than hitting some kind of three-act structure.

Upstream Color has been compared elsewhere to 2011’s Tree of Life, in that it uses avant-garde techniques and focuses on one small story to explore Big Themes. A key difference between Carruth and Terrence Malick — whose poised-to-polarize To the Wonder also opens this week; see Dennis Harvey’s review in this issue — is that Carruth is operating, as mentioned above, completely outside of Hollywood. No Ben Affleck or studio bucks here; Upstream Color was made fast and on the cheap, stars virtual unknowns, and is being self-distributed by Carruth (who, in addition to starring and directing, is also credited as writer, co-producer, cinematographer, composer, and co-editor).

There was word some years back that Carruth’s follow-up to Primer would be an ambitious, medium-budgeted sci-fi epic; it was endorsed by A-listers like Steven Soderbergh. When that fell apart, the story goes, he turned to Upstream Color as his on-my-own-terms rebound project. If that back story influenced his uncompromising (for better and worse) vision for Upstream Color, it’s a subtext that makes the end result even more profound; Hollywood would never take a chance on something so risky as this bold effort, which somehow manages to be both maddening and moving at the same time.

 

UPSTREAM COLOR opens Fri/12 at the Roxie.

Rambling man

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Rambling man

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Terrence Malick has had an extraordinary career for a Hollywood hermit making art-house films in an industry that finds him commercially irrelevant and artistically erratic at best. Even his consensus-agreed best movies are the kind that alienate many potential Oscar voters — too abstract, too ambiguous, too poetical, too “European” — so the potential prestige involved is of a marginal critical- and cineaste-appealing stripe no sane US producer would hitch his or her wagon to at this point. Yet Malick’s movies cost money — a lot of money — and it doesn’t all come from international companies willing to take a loss if they can take home some modest returns and major cred toward their next artistic investments.

In a way, it should be a source of joy that Malick keeps getting to make large, personal, indulgent, un-commercial movies when almost no one else does. Other mainstream US filmmakers have had their intellectually or artistically ambitious follies (see: 2006’s Southland Tales and The Fountain, or 1980’s Heaven’s Gate), but they’re generally allowed just one. No one else has had the long ride Malick has. He is indeed a poet, a visionary — but has he ever had more than passages of brilliance? Are the actors and producers who treat him with awe as some exotic shaman actually enabling art, or mostly high-flown pretensions toward the same?

To the Wonder does provide some answers to those thorny questions. But they’re not the answers you’ll probably want to hear if you thought 2011’s The Tree of Life was a masterpiece. If, on the other hand, you found it a largely exasperating movie with great sequences, you may be happy to be warned that Wonder is an entirely excruciating movie with pretty photography. For all but the diehards, it could be a deal-breaker — the experience that makes you think you might very possibly never want to see another by this filmmaker again.

The one movie in which Malick’s variably over-the-top compassion, philosophy, idolatry of nature, and generally spellbound-by-beauty instincts were best supported was 1998’s The Thin Red Line, an abrupt return to activity after two decades’ complete absence. No matter that the reeling narrative bore limited resemblance to James Jones’ novel, or that Adrien Brody’s leading role got almost entirely cut out — he wouldn’t be first or last to cry foul at a Malick edit drastically altered from the original screenplay. To the Wonder apparently employed the talents of Jessica Chastain, Michael Sheen, and Rachel Weisz — all of whom ended up on the cutting room floor. To make room for … what? A movie that could have been wholly shot by the second unit, for all its interest in actual character, narrative, insight, and acting.

Instead, we get handsome shots of Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko (or sometimes Affleck and Rachel McAdams) wandering around picturesque settings either beaming beatifically at each other or looking “troubled” because “something is missing,” as one character puts it in a rare moment of actual dialogue. (Generally we get the usual Malick wall-to-wall whispered voiceover musings like “What is this love that loves us?” delivered by all lead actors in different languages for maximum annoyance.)

Just what is missing? Who the hell knows. Apparently it is too vulgar to spell out or even hint at what’s actually going on in these figures’ heads, not when you can instead show them endlessly mooning about as the camera follows them in a lyrical daze. The “plot” goes like this: Neil (Affleck) meets Parisienne Marina (Kurylenko) and her 10-year-old daughter from a failed marriage. They swan about Europe making goo-goo eyes at each other, then mother and child accompany him back to Oklahoma, but it doesn’t work out. Which allows him an interlude to get involved with old flame Jane (McAdams), but that doesn’t work out. Then Olga returns and … just guess. Meanwhile, Javier Bardem turns up as a Catholic priest, playing the Sean Penn Tree of Life role of a peripheral figure that does absolutely nothing but walk around looking bummed.

These people aren’t enigmas, they’re just blanks the actors can’t fill in because the writer-director won’t let them. He wants to express pure emotion, but emotions have contexts, too, much as Malick might like to think that women are all organic instinct. When Sissy Spacek spoke vacant “poetry” and ignored her (murderous) man Martin Sheen’s faults in 1973’s Badlands, it seemed her youthful inexperience was meant to be humorous. But since his career restarted, Malick has suggested dumb ‘n’ ethereal is his feminine ideal. Kurylenko is the apotheosis of that image: she’s part naked sex puppet; part indulged toddler who knows the adults think everything she does is adorable; part twirly-dancing girl at a Dead show; part family dog that only wants to be loved and played with.

Apparently, Malick thinks he’s celebrating femininity, but his appreciation omits the possibility of intelligence. He thinks women are marvelous, instinctual animals, while men bear the burden of emotional and intellectual complexity, even if they can’t articulate it. Could anything be more condescending? (To the Wonder was autobiographically inspired by his own failed marriage to a Frenchwoman; I’d rather see the movie she’d have made about it.)

No doubt some will find all this profound, because they’re primed to and the film certainly acts as though it is. But at some point you have to ask: if the artist can’t express his deep thoughts, just indicate that he’s having them, how do we know he’s a deep thinker at all? 

 

TO THE WONDER opens Fri/12 in Bay Area theaters.

Alternative medicine

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Alternative medicine

arts@sfbg.com

FILM No country exports mainstream films to the extensive success that the US does. To the frequent chagrin of local filmmakers and cultural watchdogs, Hollywood dominates many nations’ box offices, non-English-speaking ones included. Nor do we reciprocate much — there remains a wide separation between what are perceived as commercial entertainments and “art house” films, with foreign-language (or even just British) ones almost invariably limited to the latter category.

We’ve all rolled our eyes at otherwise sophisticated people moaning that they can’t be bothered with even the most accessible movie in another language because subtitles are too much trouble. As a result, ‘murricans seldom hazard big-screen exposure to anything but the most rarefied, prize-winning, serious, or conceptually novel features from other nations. While we feed them plenty of our mall flicks, their less-than-exceptional homegrown genre movies are considered to have little marketable value here. (Save as fodder for remakes, of course.)

So it’s a tiny bit unusual when one week brings openings of two movies unalike in every aspect save their being solid if unremarkable examples of mainstream hits abroad. French-Canadian comedy Starbuck and German crime thriller The Silence are both an uptick or two above “decent,” but they hardly sport the thematic-stylistic edginess or other qualities that usually win US distribution. They’re just kinda fun.

Maybe “fun” is a tasteless way to describe The Silence, which hinges on pederasty and child murder — though in the end this is more an intelligent pulp thriller than serious address of those issues, uneasily as it straddles both at times. In 1986 two men abduct an 11-year-old girl — one the initially excited, then horrified observer to the second’s murderous sexual assault. Twenty-three years later, another young girl disappears in the same place under disturbingly identical circumstances.

This event gradually pulls together a large cast of characters, many initial strangers — including the original victim’s mother (Katrin Sass) and the just-retired detective (Burghart Klaubner) who failed to solve that crime; parents (Karoline Eichhorn, Roeland Wiesnekker) of the newly disappeared teen, who experience full-on mental meltdown; a solidly bourgeoisie husband and father of two girls (Wotan Wilke Möhring), inordinately distressed by this repeat of history; and the erstwhile friend he hasn’t contacted in decades, an apartment-complex handyman with a secret life (Ulrich Thomsen).

Part procedural, part psychological thriller, part small-town-community portrait, director-scenarist (from Jan Costin Wagner’s novel) Baran bo Odar’s The Silence is just juicy and artful enough to get away with occasional stylistic hyperbole. Let alone having enough subplot intrigue and weirdo characterizations — Sebastian Blomberg’s spazzy grieving-widower police detective is a bit much, in the Anthony Perkins tradition — to float a miniseries. It’s a conflicted movie, albeit handled with such engrossing confidence that you might not notice the credibility gaps. At least until thinking it over later. Which, don’t.

There’s no complicated narrative brain-teasing in Starbuck, which has a great (if not entirely original) comedic concept it chooses to play seriocomedically — i.e., less for the laughs it seldom earns than for the heart-tugging it eventually pretty much does. An ingratiatingly rumpled Patrick Huard (a major Quebec star best known for the mega-hit Les Boys series and 2006’s Good Cop, Bad Cop) plays David, erstwhile stellar contributor to a Montreal sperm bank in his salad days. Now older but no wiser, he finds himself confronted by the reality of 533 biologically fathered, now-grown offspring who’ve filed a class action lawsuit to discover his identity even as he deals with mob debt and an exasperated, pregnant semi-ex-girlfriend (Julie LeBreton).

This is one of those “loser man-boy must semi-grow up fast amid crisis, finding family values en route” scenarios tailor-fit for Adam Sandler. That said, the overlong, stubbornly endearing Starbuck is so much less insufferable than anything Sandler has made since … um, ever? Halfway through, this agreeable movie gets clever — as David stumbles into a meeting of his prodigious anonymous progeny — and remains reasonably so to the satisfyingly hard-won happy ending.

It’s still got moments of contrivance, editorial fat (too many montages, for one thing), and more climactic hugs than any self-respecting dramedy needs to get the redemptive point across. Yet it’s also got something few comedies of any national origin have today: a lovely, distinctive, bright yet non-cartoonish wide screen look.

THE SILENCE opens Fri/29 in Bay Area theaters; STARBUCK opens Fri/29 in San Francisco.

Mind-doggling

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Mind-doggling

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM Poor Dolph Springer. His life’s already oozing downhill — he’s been unemployed for months and yet continues to show up at his old job, to the white-hot annoyance of his former co-workers — when his beloved dog, Paul, goes missing. His favorite backyard palm tree is suddenly a pine tree. His alarm clock flips from 7:59 to 7:60 every morning. Pretty much everyone he meets, from a pretty pizza-restaurant cashier to a traffic cop to the “top-level detective” who gets drawn into the search for Paul, behaves precisely the opposite of whatever normal would seem to be. What’s a lonely man living in a permanent state of mindfuck to do?

Wrong is the latest surreal-absurdist-subversive comedy from writer-director-cinematographer-editor Quentin Dupieux, who rightly earned a cult following for 2010’s wickedly funny Rubber (about a tire that goes rogue after summoning Carrie-like powers of destruction). The French filmmaker — also known by his musical pseudonym, Mr. Oizo — attempts a slightly more conventional tale with Wrong; Rubber‘s Jack Plotnick stars as the hapless Dolph. Unfortunately, for all its deadpan weirdness, Wrong contains nothing so genius as that diabolical tire.

However, few movies do, and for every element that telegraphs forced quirk (rain pours down indoors at Dolph’s office, because … why?), there are several that actually do work. As Dolph’s gardener, Victor, French comedian Eric Judor mixes his thick accent with hilariously dry line readings, and the detective character (Eastbound & Down‘s Steve Little) dresses exactly like Indiana Jones for reasons unknown — which is just as nonsensical as the rain thing, but funnier for being more subtle.

The lost-pet narrative that propels the story is nothing original, though Dolph’s quest is perhaps more existential than, say, Diane Keaton’s in last year’s not-dissimilar (but much warm-fuzzier) Darling Companion. Both films put forth the idea that humans and dogs can communicate telepathically — though in Wrong, it’s made out to be hilariously literal. Soon after Paul vanishes, Dolph learns he’s been pooch-napped by one Master Chang (William Fichtner, sporting a rat tail), a Zen-ish self-help guru who steals other peoples’ pets at random to make sure they’re being properly appreciated. Traditionally, he returns the animals once everyone’s attitude has been properly realigned, but there’s been, uh, a complication with Paul, who is now well and truly MIA.

As Dolph rightfully freaks out — amid even more bad news, like when his boss (who already fired him once) tells him he really needs to stop hanging around, or when the pizza clerk turns shrill and decides that Dolph is her destiny — the Master tries to soothe him. See, he happens to be the author of a two-volume series, My Life, My Dog, My Strength, featuring clip-art illustrations (“Diagram 13-D: Mind Link”) that instruct humans on making psychic connections with their canines. Just mind-link with Paul, and he’ll be found!

If that sounds like a lot to take in, it is. I didn’t even get to the subplot about Dolph’s neighbor who goes jogging every morning, but has a mental block against admitting it. (This “joke” is made more than once.) Though Wrong is a mere 90-something minutes, its deliberately slow pace and frustratingly even keel can be off-putting. Clever touches, like the use of ominous sound flourishes at seemingly innocuous moments, enhance the film’s overall bizarro-world milieu. But its overall success likely depends not on Dupieux’s artistic choices, but on the individual viewing it — and whether or not he or she finds its details tedious, twee, or transcendent. Me, I miss the tire. *

 

WRONG opens Fri/29 at the Roxie.

Emotions in motion

Andrew Lam
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Emotions in motion

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Imagine being trapped, No Exit–style, on a city bus — let’s say Muni’s dreaded “Double Deuce” Fillmore for the sake of creative visualization — in the midst of a dozen or so out-of-control teenagers hell-bent on humiliating and terrorizing their peers and, if you have an obvious human frailty, you as well. Sound like fun? Well, Michel Gondry’s The We and the I puts you there (dramatically speaking, at least) and is often surprisingly just that. To paraphrase Sartre, “Hell is other people … on the bus,” but thankfully we get to take the trip from the safety of cushy theater seats and comfy couches.

Arguably minor Gondry (unlike 2011’s abominable The Green Hornet, whose failure can only be described as major), it’s a nice little palate cleanser in anticipation of his upcoming, much-publicized “return to form,” the Audrey Tautou–starring Mood Indigo, a film that looks to be as visually lush and romantic as The We and the I is stripped down.

Almost all of the film takes place on the aforementioned city bus as it crawls around the mean streets of New York City’s Bronx borough, ostensibly to take home kids (all played by nonprofessional actors, all minorities) after their last day of school. One or two of them do disembark early, but most seem stuck on a fossil-fueled existential journey of the damned. At about the 70-minute mark it’s hard not to wonder if the disgruntled bus driver isn’t just tooling around in circles past the same storefronts à la Joel Barish’s mind trips in Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) — just exactly how big is the Bronx anyway? “Drop out, get your GED, join the army. I don’t give a fuck,” the driver tells a confused girl. It’s clear that the kids suffer from this kind of general adult apathy, but most bear it with a hard-edged bravado that belies their vulnerability.

That particularly applies to the trio of bullies at the back of the bus, who treat both the kids and the adults with equal-opportunity disdain. They smash an arty boy’s acoustic guitar, hurl insults while sneaking smokes, and even shame a middle-aged guy with a cleft palette. But most of their ire is saved for Teresa (Teresa Lynn), a slightly chubby, obviously troubled girl who shows up wearing a laughably bad blonde wig after being MIA from school for weeks. Teresa becomes the emotional heart of the story after it’s revealed her relationships with several kids on the bus are more complicated than initially thought.

Those kids include a drama-queen sexpot with apparent self-harming issues, a refreshingly upfront couple of gay teens, and a gaggle of giggling girls who toss around a water bra like a football. (The girls, tellingly, are just as aggressive as the boys.) Geek and bully alike connect regularly through the preferred teen method of communication: social media, specifically in the form of a YouTube video of a local doofus named Elijah repeatedly falling on his ass. Some joys are universal.

Visually, The We and the I marks a departure for Gondry. While his films always have a low-fi, arts-and-crafts vibe full of DIY quirk, this one generally eschews his love of handmade ephemera. (A major exception is the boom box rejiggered to resemble a tiny bus, which tools around to Young MC’s “Bust A Move” during the opening credits.) There is a touch of fast-motion and papier-mâché goofiness, but mostly the whole thing is done in a straightforward, verité style.

The tone, however, is pure Gondry: dopey-funny and sophisticatedly unsophisticated. You get the sense that, unlike his tony New York–loving counterparts Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach, Gondry is a true populist. The We and the I is certainly nothing if not populist. But it’s also about the individual — specifically who we are inside and outside of an often-grueling social system. Despite some hiccups, like an unnecessarily dark third-act revelation, it’s more or less successful in illuminating the joys, cruelties, and uncertainties of life, which remain viscerally real after the sun sets and we finally get off the bus, vulnerable as ever in our solitude. 

THE WE AND THE I opens Fri/22 in Bay Area theaters.

The devil’s business

Andrew Lam
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The devil’s business

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM Ten years after its release (and more than 15 years since Jim Van Bebber started working on it), the legendary cult film The Manson Family returns for special theatrical screenings in conjunction with a remastered Blu-ray release. Also on the bill: short film Gator Green, Van Bebber’s most recent project.

Personal circumstances have the Ohio native living in Florida these days. “I’m like, goddammit, I’m down here — I gotta make a movie! So that’s what I’m up to with Gator Green,” he drawls over the phone. “It’s about a Vietnam veteran who swindles his way into this alligator farm from the Seminole Indians in 1973, and abuses every right. It’s the worst portrait of America I can think of.”

Strong words coming from the guy who made The Manson Family, maybe the most gruesomely realistic study of the hippie cult, crafted with an eye for detail that speaks to true-crime scholarship of the highest order. His fascination with Charles Manson is a long-standing one, having begun in the late 1970s when the Helter Skelter miniseries aired.

“It was a big fuckin’ deal,” he remembers. He was still in elementary school at the time. “This is back in the day when you only had three channels. I was not allowed to watch the film, so I had to ask my friends on the playground, ‘What was that about?’ It kind of haunted me.”

Unlike Helter Skelter, which is based on the best-seller written by Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, Van Bebber’s film focuses on the months of drug-fueled delirium (“a crazy, psychotic rush to absolute zero”) prior to the Family’s crime spree.

“How can you touch Helter Skelter, which is basically a great depiction of the trial? I decided to do everything leading up to that. If you watched them together, it would be a great double feature — Manson 101.”

He began The Manson Family after finding underground success with 1988’s Deadbeat at Dawn, which he wrote, produced, directed, and starred in. (He has a similar stack of credits on Manson, too.) At the time, he’d recently seen Geraldo Rivera’s infamous jailhouse interview with a ranting, tongue-twisting Manson.

“I flipped out,” he chuckles. “I mean, are you kidding me?” Conveniently, he already had a friend who resembled Manson; the rest of the cast — many of whom appear fully nude and/or screaming, covered in blood, etc. — came from the theater department at Wright State University, where he was a student.

“I was very up-front with everybody. I was like, this is gonna be freaky,” he says. “We dove into it without the entire budget in place, and it became this ongoing thing. Thankfully we wrapped the photography within, like, four years. But then it was an eternal struggle to see it fully realized. I got plenty of offers, ‘Ok, let’s just slam this into the DVD market. But first, we gotta cut out this one scene …'”

Determined to stay true to his vision — dark and nightmarish though it was — Van Bebber held out until he met producers David Gregory and Carl Daft. “They got it done the right way. They’re warriors. And I’m pleased that it’s finding its Blu-ray home.”

Looking ahead, he hopes to expand Gator Green into a feature. “I’m just gonna keep going. I was born to make films, and that’s just what I do. Sometimes it takes me a long time, but it’s always worth it.”

 

PERMANENT VACATION

Another sordid tale from the Sunshine State beckons in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers. The idea of enfant terrible emeritus Korine — 1997’s Gummo, 2007’s Mister Lonely, 2009’s Trash Humpers — directing something so utterly common as a spring break movie is head-scratching enough, even more so compounded by the casting of teen dreams Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, and Ashley Benson as bikini-clad girls gone wild. James Franco co-stars as drug dealer Alien, all platinum teeth and cornrows and shitty tattoos, who befriends the lasses after they’re busted by the fun police.

“Are you being serious?” Gomez’s character asks Alien, soon after meeting him. “What do you think?” he grins back. Unschooled filmgoers who stumble into the theater to see their favorite starlets might be shocked by Breakers‘ hard-R hijinks. But Korine fans will understand that this neon-lit, Skrillex-scored tale of debauchery and dirty menace is not to be taken at face value. The subject matter, the casting, the Britney Spears songs, the deliberately lurid camerawork — all are carefully-constructed elements in a film that takes not-taking-itself-seriously, very seriously indeed. Korine has said he prefers his films to make “perfect nonsense” instead of perfect sense. Spring Breakers makes perfect nonsense, and it also makes nonsense perfect.

After a slo-mo opening sequence of generic partying stuffed with the three Bs (boobs, beer, beach), Spring Breakers shifts to a crummy town in Southern Nowheresville, home to bored college students Brit (Benson), Candy (Hudgens), Cotty (Rachel Korine, wife of the director), and Faith (Gomez). (Can you guess which one is the Christian?) The friends moan about the spring break they’re being denied due to lack of funds, until a plan to rob a fast-food restaurant emerges, and Spring Breakers’ prevailing visual motif — ski mask-wearing hot chicks with guns — is born. It’s one of the film’s many “jokes without a punch line” (another favorite Korine pursuit) that the girls’ college life already resembles one big party — they’re already kinda living spraaaannng braaakkke forevaa, as Alien is fond of saying.

That’s important, because there’s a reason spring break is typically just a one-week affair. For most, full-tilt crazy is only a safe state of being when there’s a clearly-defined endpoint. School begins again; as your liver starts to repair itself, you’re left with a peeling sunburn, stories to tell, maybe a questionable new tattoo. For these girls, spring break is elevated into a chance to “find ourselves, to find out who we are,” according to one of Faith’s dreamy voice-overs. For certain among the group, it’s a quest that leads to some very dark places. Is that a good idea? What do you think? But don’t think too hard, now: to quote Alien again, “Bikinis and big booties, y’all … that’s what life is about.”

THE MANSON FAMILY

Fri/22-Sat/23, midnight, $9-10

Clay Theater

2261 Fillmore, SF

www.landmarktheatres.com

SPRING BREAKERS opens Fri/22 in Bay Area theaters.

Family plot

Andrew Lam
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Family plot

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM None of the characters in Park Chan-wook’s English-language debut, Stoker, devour a full plate of still-squirming octopus. (For that, see Park’s international breakthrough, 2003’s Oldboy; chances are the meal won’t be duplicated in the Spike Lee remake due later this year.)

But that’s not to say Stoker — with its Hitchcockian script by Wentworth Miller — isn’t full of unsettling, cringe-inducing moments, as the titular family (Nicole Kidman as Evelyn, the dotty mom; Mia Wasikowska as India, the moody high-schooler) faces the sudden death of husband-father Richard (Dermot Mulroney, glimpsed in flashbacks) and the equally sudden arrival of sleek, sinister Uncle Charles (Matthew Goode). With a translator’s help, I recently spoke to Park about his latest thriller.

San Francisco Bay Guardian Especially with Stoker, it’s clear that Hitchcock has influenced you as a director. Do you have a favorite of his films?

Park Chan-wook Vertigo (1958) was a big film in my life. Before Vertigo, I wanted to be a filmmaker, but I had only thought about it. After seeing it, I decided that I must become a filmmaker. It’s my favorite Hitchcock film. But ever since that first time I saw it, I’m scared of seeing it again, out of fear that it might be less than I remember it.

SFBG Stoker also reminded me of The Bad Seed (1956) — particularly when a voice-over suggests “we are not responsible for what we come to be.” What are your thoughts on that? Is evil hereditary?

PCW I saw Bad Seed when I was little, with my parents on TV. But it was such a long time ago that I can’t really recall any of the details from it. So I wasn’t consciously bringing anything from it here. Maybe subconsciously I was influenced by it, though — if I see it again, I might realize that.

As far as evil being hereditary, I want to leave Stoker open to different interpretations. That’s part of the joy I want to give to the audience. That’s why I don’t really want to define it in any way. But if I was to give you one possible interpretation of what [that voice-over means], perhaps I intended the opposite, which is to say, does India not feel any responsibility about her actions? No, actually — maybe she feels acutely responsible. She knows it very well, but she doesn’t want to admit it. But there are many other interpretations of this.

SFBG A lot of your films, including Stoker, are about families with unusual dynamics. What attracts you to these kinds of stories?

PCW Family relationships are something that every audience member can identify with, and can understand. But a happy family is a boring story to tell!

SFBG Due to the costumes and the production design, I was convinced at first that Stoker was taking place in the 1950s or 60s — but then it’s revealed that India was born in the 1990s, and this is in fact a very contemporary story. Was this a deliberate choice to make the story feel even more otherworldly than it already does? It kind of felt like the whole thing was taking place in a parallel reality.

PCW The moment you see a cell phone, you realize this is a contemporary story — but even then, if you go back and look at the film from the beginning again, you may actually realize that the clothes they wear, and the way the house is decorated, are actually not completely anachronistic. They are still modern-day.

However, I do admit that it’s one of the first things I talked about with the producer after I read the script: the timelessness of this film. And the same goes for the location as well. It was deliberate in how I didn’t tie the story down to any particular location in America; you can’t really tell where the story takes place. That was intentional, and the reason I was trying to achieve this was that I was trying to create a more archetypical story.

SFBG I have to ask: Harmony Korine has a cameo as India’s art teacher. How did that come about?

PCW Well, we shot in Nashville, and Harmony is based there. He’s also good friends with Mia [Wasikowska]. So we met, and became friends. And the high school where we shot the art-class sequence was actually the high school where Harmony was once a student. *

 

STOKER opens Fri/15 in Bay Area theaters.

American horror story

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American horror story

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM “Go look in the refrigerator.” Normally, that’s not a particularly sinister phrase. But if the fridge in question happens to be sitting in Jeffrey Dahmer’s Milwaukee kitchen, circa 1991, it contains the following: a box of Arm & Hammer, condiments (mustard, ketchup, steak sauce), and a freshly severed human head.

With details like that, there’s no wonder the Dahmer case continues to fascinate, 22 years after his capture (and 19 years after he was bludgeoned to death by a fellow inmate). Chris James Thompson’s The Jeffrey Dahmer Files, a documentary with narrative re-enactments, is savvy to the fact that lurid outrageousness never gets old. It also plays off the contrast between Dahmer’s gruesome crimes and his seemingly mild-mannered personality.

And thankfully, these aren’t cheesy, America’s Most Wanted-style re-enactments. We see Jeffrey (Andrew Swant) going about a mix of mundane and fraught-with-meaning tasks: being fitted for new glasses, eating a hamburger, shopping for 10-gallon drums, and buying way more bleach than one man could possibly ever need. We never see him kill, though we do witness him entering a hotel with another young man — and leaving with a suspiciously heavy suitcase. Swant isn’t a dead ringer for Dahmer, but he has the same “serial killers look like everybody else” quality. It’s unsettling, and goes a long way toward explaining why, as real-life Dahmer neighbor Pamela Bass recalls here, the Jeff she knew (“kinda friendly, but introverted,” Bass says) hardly seemed like a murdering cannibal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSzeu6ohgeA

But Wisconsin’s most passionate body-part hoarder (since Ed Gein, anyway) was 100 percent authentic, a fact made abundantly clear to the homicide detective assigned to the case, Pat Kennedy (who made that stomach-turning fridge peek), and medical examiner Dr. Jeffrey Jentzen, tasked with identifying Dahmer’s torn-asunder victims. “We were dismantling someone’s museum,” Jentzen remembers of the crime scene, a tidy one-bedroom in a rough part of town where, months earlier, flippant cops had ushered a dazed teenager back into Dahmer’s clutches, believing his tale that the younger man had stormed out after a domestic spat. Oops.

Since Dahmer is dead and his crimes have been well-documented — in books by Dahmer’s father and others, true-crime specials, and the 2002 narrative film that gave future Oscar nominee Jeremy Renner his breakout role — The Jeffrey Dahmer Files does well to concentrate on people whose lives have been forever changed by the case, two because of their jobs and one due to an unfortunate coincidence. Though Kennedy and Jentzen offer compelling interviews, Bass’ participation is key; unlike the two men, who’ve no doubt told their stories dozens of times before, her emotions still feel raw.

She speaks about getting to know her across-the-hall neighbor — he stood out for being the only white guy living in the Oxford Apartments, a fact made more notable when it was revealed he killed mostly men of color, many of whom were also gay. (As his victims’ families would no doubt agree, if Dahmer’d had a taste for rich white girls, his story would certainly have played out differently.)

Not only did Bass have to deal with the revelation that she’d been living next to a killer (“I remember a stench, an odor”), she found herself surrounded by a media circus, harassed by gawkers, and blamed by strangers for “not doing anything.” Even after she’d moved — the entire apartment building was torn down — the stigma of having been Dahmer’s neighbor lingered.

Kind of like the killer’s own notoriety. Speaking of, the Akron, Ohio house where Jeffrey Dahmer grew up (and committed his first murder) has been on the market for six months. Refrigerator included.

THE JEFFREY DAHMER FILES

March 1-7

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St, SF

www.roxie.com

 

Six pack

Andrew Lam
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0
Six pack

Antiviral (Brandon Cronenberg, Canada, 2012) Yes, that Cronenberg. The spawn of veteran filmmaker David makes an auspicious feature debut with this, uh, Cronenberg-esque body-horror tale. In the stark, gloomy near-future, celebrity worship has become so out of control that healthy people visit special clinics to be injected with diseases gathered from superstars. When he’s not offering “biological communion” via shared flu germs plucked from blonde goddess Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon of Cronenberg Sr.’s 2012 Cosmopolis), medical technician Syd (Friday Night Lights’ Caleb Landry Jones) is working black-market deals on the side, peddling illnesses to a sketchy broker who works out of a butcher shop that sells steaks grown from celebrity muscle cells. And if that sounds gross, just know that as Antiviral‘s clever, sci-fi noir plot twists itself into ever-darker (and gorier) contortions, there’s plenty more stomach-turning mad science ahead. You done good, son. Sat/9, 7:15pm; Tue/12, 9:30pm, Roxie.

Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland, UK, 2012) It’s the 1970s, and frumpy British sound designer Gilderoy (a flawless Toby Jones) has, somewhat inexplicably, been hired by a flamboyant Italian filmmaker to work on his latest lurid genre piece, The Equestrian Vortex — about a girl who realizes her riding academy is haunted by witches. Any resemblance to 1977’s Suspiria is entirely intentional, as writer-director Peter Strickland crafts a meta-horror film that’s both tribute to Argento and co. and a freaky number all its own, as Gilderoy begins to realize that the “vortex” he’s dealing with isn’t merely confined to the screen. Fans of vintage Euro horror will appreciate the behind-the-scenes peek at the era’s filmmaking process, as well as Strickland’s obvious affection for one of cinema’s most oddly addictive genres. Bonus points for the Goblin reference. Fri/8, 9:30pm; Feb. 13, 7:15pm, Roxie.

Bound By Flesh (Leslie Zemeckis, US, 2012) Following up her 2010 burlesque doc Behind the Burly Q, Leslie Zemeckis (wife of Robert, director of 2012’s Flight) tackles another subject sprinkled with the tarnished glitter of a bygone era: conjoined twins Violet and Daisy Hilton, vaudeville and film (1932’s Freaks) stars who were exploited from birth by a series of shady guardians. When they finally earned their freedom in a landmark emancipation trial, their triumph was short-lived; not only were they ill-equipped to negotiate the perils of show biz on their own, they also suffered from grown-up-child-star syndrome, having tasted a level of fame early in life that they’d never reach again, though not for lack of trying. And, of course, they were conjoined twins — so amplify every possible life obstacle by about a million. Though Bound By Flesh suffers a bit from its limited source materials — be prepared to see the same photos of the Hiltons used over and over throughout the film — it nonetheless tells a tragic, fascinating, and utterly unique tale. Feb. 16, 5pm; Feb/ 17, 2:45pm, Roxie.

Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp (Jorge Hinojosa, US, 2012) Ice-T presents this study of a man (real name: Robert Beck) whose early years dabbling in “the second oldest profession” led him first to prison, and then — rather improbably — to the top of best-seller lists, as books like Pimp: The Story of My Life and Trick Baby (which became a 1972 blaxsploitation film) achieved cult status. Though the film’s first 30 minutes lay on the hero worship a bit thick (yeah, pimps are cool cats as far as movies and hip-hop’s concerned, but the real Beck is described as someone who “got a thrill out of degrading women”), the author’s talkative first wife and three daughters soon appear to offer some perspective. Archival interviews with Beck, and a detailed examination of his publisher, Holloway House (which employed only whites but specialized in African American literature), only add to this vivid biography. Sat/9, 5pm; Mon/11, 7:15pm, Roxie.

The Life and Times of Paul the Psychic Octopus (Alexandre Philippe, US, 2012) Eight correct predictions, eight tentacled arms, millions of enraptured cephalopod admirers: who could forget Paul, whose apparent ESP earned him nearly as much vuvuzela-blaring fanfare as the 2010 World Cup itself? This “fairytale” from the director of 2010’s The People vs. George Lucas begins with Paul’s death — he was young for an oracle, but old for an octopus, explains an employee at Sea Life Oberhausen, Paul’s German home. The doc then doubles back to examine how a publicity stunt involving acrylic boxes with taped-on flags and food tucked inside, plus one hungry octopus, could incite a global frenzy: epic lines at the aquarium, scrambling bookmakers, a full-scale media blitz, death threats, a rich Russian offering to buy Paul for a cool million Euros, an “Ask the Octopus” app, YouTube tributes, and more. At 90 minutes the doc stretches a little thin (fellow psychic animal Punxsutawney Phil even puts in an appearance), but this is fun stuff nonetheless. Sat/9, 2:45pm; Sun/10, 5pm, Roxie.

Sightseers (Ben Wheatley, UK, 2012) Ooh, yes, it’s the US premiere of the latest from rising star Ben Wheatley, who exceeds even 2011’s very fine hitman-goes-bananas Kill List with the sick and hilarious Sightseers. Awkward, nerdy couple Tina and Chris (Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, comedians who wrote the script with Amy Jump) pile into an RV and burn rubber toward some of Britain’s lesser-known attractions: Crich Tramway Village, the Cumberland Pencil Museum, etc. But it’s clear from the start that all’s not well in this relationship, and it doesn’t take long before their “erotic odyssey” also includes screaming fights, dognapping, and multiple homicides. So wrong, and yet so right — the evocative Sightseers manages to invent, and perfect, its own genre: the serial-killer road-tip rom-com. Sat/9 and Mon/11, 9:30pm, Roxie. (Cheryl Eddy) *

SAN FRANCISCO INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL

Feb 7-21, most shows $12

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St, SF

www.sfindie.com

West Memphis blues

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3
West Memphis blues

arts@sfbg.com

FILM At this point, it’s hard to imagine a present-day murder trial more painstakingly documented than that of the so-called West Memphis Three. The subject of four documentaries, with a feature film in the works (starring Colin Firth and Reese Witherspoon, no less), and inspiring at least as many books, websites, and countless articles, the story of the three teenagers convicted of the brutal killings of three small boys has never quite dropped from public attention.

Still, despite its relatively high profile, almost two decades have passed since the crime, and the defendants’ quest to have their convictions overturned has taken literally half their lives — a journey they’re still traveling, despite a surprise 2011 deal cut with the state of Arkansas that allowed them to walk out of prison, free men but convicted felons. According to the newest documentary in the canon, West of Memphis, that’s just too long to wait for justice.

West of Memphis can be considered both a crash course for those who somehow missed the Bruce Sinofsky and Joe Berlinger-directed Paradise Lost trilogy of documentaries which preceded it, as well as a telling portrait of a deeply-flawed criminal justice system at work. It’s an evenly-paced montage of talking heads, archival trial footage, and interviews with investigators and legal experts, with additional focus on the personal life and relationship between death row inmate Damien Echols and his wife Lorri Davis, who met while he was incarcerated.

The doc traces the entire case, from the initial news reports of the disappearances of eight-year-olds Christopher Byers, Michael Moore, and Steve Branch, to the supporter-funded, post-conviction investigation and appeals process still unfolding today. Produced by Echols, Davis, and power-duo filmmakers Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, West of Memphis centers specifically on Echols’ case, in distinct contrast to the Paradise Lost films.

“There were a lot of different reasons for that,” director Amy Berg explains. “[One was] because Damien was on death row, he was taking a different journey through the legal system [than fellow defendants Jason Baldwin and Jesse Misskelley Jr., who were sentenced to life imprisonment instead].”

Another reason: access. Echols and Davis were not only central to the narrative of the film, they were also instrumental in getting Berg acclimated to West Memphis. Their contacts became her contacts, and their story became her focal point.

Over the years, Echols’ defense team had gradually amassed testimony from a slew of high-powered experts — profilers, forensic pathologists, and DNA testers — all of which pointed away from the West Memphis Three, and in some cases suggested new suspects. But despite this seemingly compelling material, Echols’ appeal hit a wall in 2008, when then-Circuit Court judge David Burnett, who had presided over the original trials, denied a new hearing, citing “inconclusive evidence.” It was then that Jackson and Walsh, who had privately bankrolled much of the investigation leading to the DNA appeal, began to think about making a documentary.

“We’d been shut down by the court system,” Davis says. “We didn’t know what else to do to get this information about the case out to the public.” That’s when Berg, whose 2006 doc Deliver Us from Evil was nominated for an Academy Award, was approached by Jackson about the possibility of filming the continuing saga of the West Memphis Three. A former investigative journalist, Berg’s experience in the field led to some very interesting interview footage of subjects hitherto undocumented, including two young men — friends of a nephew to victim Branch’s stepfather — whose rather late-in-the-game affidavits may turn out to be the impetus for the state to reopen the investigation that the West Memphis Three have been hoping for.

“Amy just has this amazing ability to wait it out,” Davis says. “People would just open up to her.”

But where were these witnesses before West of Memphis? There’s been a reward offered on new information for years, and it seems like there’s been plenty of opportunity for folks to come forward before now.

“There’s such a culture of fear in Arkansas, and in the South in general,” Berg considers. “I really think everyone was concerned for their own well-being.”

It remains to be seen if breaking the long silence of a cluster of perjurers and procrastinators will translate into a reopening of the case; word is there’s some movement in that direction. But for now, at least, the public finally has a chance to hear the testimonies that the West Memphis Three have waited so long to present.

WEST OF MEMPHIS opens Fri/8 in San Francisco.

Smith happens

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1
Smith happens

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Every year there’s at least one: the adorable-old-coot fest, usually British, that proves harmless and reassuring and lightly tear/laughter producing enough to convince a certain demographic that it’s safe to go to the movies again, just this once. The last months have seen two, both starring Maggie Smith (who’s also queen of that audience’s home viewing via Downton Abbey), and in this case more is probably less.

Last year’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, in which Smith played a bitchy old spinster appalled to find herself in India (hip replacement operations being cheaper there), has already filled the slot. It was formulaic, cute, and sentimental, yes, but it also practiced more restraint than one expected, delivering a certain amount of emotional payoff you didn’t have to cringe over the next day. (Particularly if you forgot how one-dimensional the Indian characters were — and they certainly were forgettable.)

Now here’s Quartet, which is basically the same flower arrangement with quite a bit more dust on it. Smith plays a bitchy old spinster — complete with hip problems — appalled to find herself forced into spending her twilight years at a home for the elderly. It’s not just any such home, however, but Beecham House (actually Hedsor House, a much-filmed estate in Buckinghamshire), whose residents are retired professional musicians.

Gingerly peeking out from her room after a few days’ retreat from public gaze, Smith’s Jean Horton — a famed English soprano — spies a roomful of codgers rolling their hips to Afropop in a dance class. “This is not a retirement home — this is a madhouse!” she pronounces. Oh, the shitty lines that lazy writers have long depended on Smith to make sparkle. Well, even she’s not that much of a magician.

Quartet is full of such bunk, adapted with loving fidelity, no doubt, from his own 1999 play by Ronald Harwood, who as a scenarist has done some good adaptations of other people’s work (2002’s The Pianist, 2007’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly). But as a generator of original material for about a half-century, he’s mostly proven that it is possible to prosper that long while being in entirely the wrong half-century. The highlight was The Dresser, a play (later filmed, in 1983) of that type which throws bouquets at theater itself while handing an enormous slice of ready-cooked ham to the actors playing theatrical archetypes. The lowlight has been 2008’s Australia — for which Baz Luhrmann shoulders the primary blame, but anyone associated with that script should have had their Writers Guild membership suspended at least until the screams of unprepared ticket buyers stopped.

This play, too, seems to have inspired enthusiasm only for its performers in its original West End run. (Oddly, however, it’s been a long-running hit in a Finnish adaptation.) It seems doubtful anyone was chomping at the bit to make a movie version. But then in one of those periodic reminders that the ways of show biz (when not strictly commercial) can be unfathomable, it has found new life as the directorial debut of … 75-year-old American actor Dustin Hoffman.

Which ought to be more interesting than it turns out — with its workmanlike gloss and head-on take on the script’s very predictable beats, Quartet could as well have been directed by any BBC veteran of no particular distinction. The English countryside can be counted on to look pretty; this cast and its hundreds of years of experience (including those members identified at the end as former classical musicians) need hardly break a sweat realizing such soft material.

So, Maggie Smith arrives at Beecham House to the varying delight of former operatic colleagues Pauline Collins (comic ditherer), Billy Connelly (randy old goat), and Michael Gambon (nasty old queen), as well as the initial dismay of Tom Courtenay as the ex-husband whose heart she carelessly broke. Naturally, the joint is in danger of closure and can only be saved by the starry new arrival’s participation in an annual charity performance. Yes, it’s just like the plot of Roller Boogie (1979), and every other hoary “Let’s put on a show to save the [blank]” exercise. You know just what’s going to happen — “How dare you!” turns to “Oh, all right then” turns to triumph, although the film (like the play) cheats by declining to actually show us that triumph — and it does, on cue, for 98 digestion-easing minutes.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with providing vehicles for beloved older actors — but why does it always have to be this kind of vehicle, bland as toast and no more nutritious? Even Dame Maggie Smith doesn’t seem particularly interested; no doubt she’d like to play someone to whom the adjective “bitchy” doesn’t apply once in a while. The classical canon is full of great roles for fully mature actors. But for the movies, it seems, after a certain point you only get to play silly old dears or bitter crones. There’s got to be room for something between condescending trifles like Quartet and the bleak staring-death-in-the-face of Amour. 

 

QUARTET opens Fri/25 in Bay Area theaters.

The damage done

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5
The damage done

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Robert Carlyle is the kind of actor who usually elicits a slow-dawning response in realm of “Oh, right … that guy. What was he in again?” Well, a lot, but if you’re not British (let alone Scottish), his visibility has probably been erratic and infrequent — plus he does that exasperating English thing of taking TV assignments like they’re perfectly OK, as opposed to the US approach of doing series work only when your big-screen career is in the toilet.

His persona, to simplify a bit, is usually that of the aging boy-man sad sack whose self-deprecation and pleading eyes are attractive until you realize he’s as likely to slide out of any commitment with a muttered excuse as easily as he’ll slide off that bar stool. In other words, a long-odds but redeemable loser. In that vein his quintessential role was as the main guy trying not to disappointment everyone yet again in The Full Monty (1997), an unusually bleak and satisfying “feel good” movie that spawned umpteen softer ones. He’s played variants on that part enough times that you might forget just one year earlier he was the terrifyingly vivid psychotic Begbie in Trainspotting.

Indeed, he’s played a Bond villain (albeit in 1999’s The World Is Not Enough), a cannibal (in 1999’s Ravenous), an evil wizard (2006’s Eragon), even Hitler (in a little-seen 2003 TV film), and if you get BBC America you might well think he’s the most versatile actor on the planet. But the projects in which he most frequently surfaces here — discounting American broadcast money gigs like SGU Stargate Universe — are little UK art house dramas. Often directed by people such as Ken Loach or Shane McMeadows, they customarily find him as protagonists who’d have been Angry Young Men a generation or two earlier. But now they’re not even angry; defeat has been bred in since the cradle, and there’s likely to be a good deal of pathos in any attempts to buck the odds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSiiqp5J30w

Bruised losers going down — albeit not without one last noble act or effort — can be a beautiful line for an actor to make his own, from Jean Gabin to Liam Neeson (before he abruptly turned geriatric action hero). If the shabby shoe fits, might as well wear it. So Carlyle is a producer on California Solo, the kind of movie that often prompts critics to evoke ones from an earlier era (1972’s Fat City, 1981’s Cutter’s Way, 1975’s Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins, etc.) No one went to those, either. But they were good, small, “personal” films with a genuine fondness for gritty characters and milieus.

Writer-director Marshall Lewy’s drama revolves around Lachlan MacAldonich, a lanky fortysomething Scotsman who’s somehow found himself managing an organic farm for its cranky but loyal owner (A Martinez) in that deep SoCal nowhere rendered agricultural only by the contortions of water-rights trafficking politicians.

He lives alone, he drinks alone; whatever past he’s got is one he’s cut himself off from. He does have an interesting “hobby” that might provide a clue: boozily hosting a weekly podcast from his kitchen table called Flameouts, “the show where we discuss the tragic and sometimes spectacular deaths of the world’s greatest musicians.” If anybody actually listens, we aren’t told, and he probably doesn’t care.

But Lachlan’s genial not caring much about anything, it seems, when he’s stopped careening home down the highway after bar-time. The resulting DUI charge, even its four-month drivers’ license suspension, wouldn’t be such a big deal if it didn’t turn out that a long-prior pot conviction makes him eligible for deportation despite his green card. And Lachlan really, really does not want to go back to the UK He’s buried himself here precisely to avoid the massive fuckup that no one there would be likely to have forgotten — that he was once the guitarist in “Britain’s biggest band” (at least for one NME minute), and that the major casualty of his stupid rock-star antics was the “British Kurt Cobain,” his brother Jed. When he crawls to the Beverly Hills manse of erstwhile music biz associate Wendell (Michael Des Barres, disturbingly well cast as an oily industry survivor) to beg for immigration lawyer money, the latter snaps “I was never your manager. I was never your friend. Jed was the band.”

Cue further self-destructive impulses, not at all eased by the pleading cow eyes Lachlan makes at sympathetic Beau (Alexia Rasmussen), a much younger customer he chats up at the farmer’s market each Sunday. (It’s even more embarrassing when Danny Masterson as her age-appropriate DJ boyfriend realizes “who he is,” and pours on the hero worship.) Even more painful are Lachlan’s attempts to re-establish some relationship with the bitter mother (Kathleen Wilhoite) of his now-teenaged daughter (Savannah Lathern) so he can claim his deportation would be a hardship to them.

Those last sequences are truly squirm-inducing, because the gap between Lachlan’s desire to do something right for a change and his haplessness at actually doing it is so palpable — we know it’s unfair he’s looking like a “reet eedyut,” but we also know he’s entirely brought it on himself. This is where an actor like Caryle knows how to go for the throat without seeming to reach for effect at all. He makes the depth of Lachlan’s self-loathing so palpable you want to hug him. After you’ve slapped him … but still.

Lewy also wrote and directed the very astute indie drama Blue State (2007), and if he didn’t craft Solo specifically for its Carlyle’s floppy-haired, ever-apologetic charm — well, didn’t he? This is the kind of very good movie that surprises when it actually turns up in theaters, however few. No matter that whoever actually sees the undeniably depressing-sounding California Solo will likely find it — and its star — endearing, poignant, ultimately upbeat. It’s even sort of a perfect early-date movie, softening up the emotions with male fragility redeemable by female generosity and forgiveness.

 

CALIFORNIA SOLO opens Fri/11 in Bay Area theaters.

Still the fairest

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1
Still the fairest

arts@sfbg.com

FILM One of the few upbeat by-products of the increasing infantilization of popular movies is that the same impulse to dumb down live action for permanently adolescent tastes also raises the bar for animation, which no longer has to target grade schoolers as its primary audience. Even not-so-special 2012 had more sophisticated and interesting animated features than you’d find in any given year a couple decades or more ago. Wreck-It Ralph won’t win the Best Picture Oscar. But it will almost certainly be better than whatever movie does.

The notion that adults actually want to see full-length cartoons, however, seemed preposterous to myriad soon-to-be-crow-eating people 75 years ago. That was when Walt Disney unleashed Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on the public — to an enormous success no one had predicted. In fact, all bets were placed on “Disney’s folly” sinking the studio that had foolishly invested all its resources (and a lot of borrowed money) in a venture whose cost overruns and dim prospects had been the talk of Hollywood. (No doubt a few studio heads were happily anticipating hiring Walt’s newly at-liberty talent at cut rates for their own animation divisions.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kWr9e4JN5I

Of course, the naysayers were proven wrong — opening up the floodgates to more cartoon features, then Disney live-action films, nature documentaries, TV series, theme parks … a whole empire of “brand” that for better and worse has shaped American culture (and its perception abroad) ever since. The double-disc 2009 DVD release of Snow White features, among its extras, one latter-day observer calling the film “one of the great American success stories of all time.” (The official Disney history offered up in such self promotional products is relentlessly hyperbolic. The same package also offers an “all-new music video” rendition of “Someday My Prince Will Come” by one Tiffany Thornton that is so horrifyingly kitsch you can be sure it will be erased from the official Disney history forthwith.) Snow White would set a record for being the highest-grossing film of all time — but not for long, since a little thing called Gone with the Wind came out in 1939 and stole that title for another quarter-century.

I doubt Mr. Disney could have imagined the world in which his Snow White — which plays the Castro in a newly restored digital print this week, by the way — would be celebrating that septuagenarian anniversary. One in which prevailing tastes decreed two big-budget live-action spins on that same Bavarian fairy tale would be among 2012’s major releases for grown-ups; a mass murder of his target demographic would dominate year-end news; and the unions he famously opposed would be popularly vilified.

That ripple effect is more than this movie should have to bear — let alone that it was apparently Hitler’s favorite. Because Snow White is still a charmer, gorgeous in the depth and detail of its backgrounds, seamless in traversing the bridge between score and song, and timelessly adorable (to use the heroine’s favorite adjective).

It seems less dated than just about any other movie from 1937, even if Snow White herself remains an insipid blank with the voice of Betty Boop doing operetta. (Subsequent Disney cartoon heroines would be feistier, though heroes would remain problematic — Walt’s animators found Snow’s Prince Charming so difficult to depict they wound up simply cutting his screen time to the bone.) The most one can say for her is that she seems to have majored in Home Ec, though the evil queen hooked on being “fairest of them all” kick-started a fine legacy of excellent Disney villains. (Notably absent were such grisly original fairy-tale details as the step mum’s death from dancing in red-hot iron shoes at Snow’s wedding.)

You can blame Snow White for cementing Disney’s transition from the rambunctious to the harmless. But 75 years later that formula still works — in this instance, at least. The art itself remains near-timeless, even if the subsequent Pinocchio (1940) and Bambi (1942) are arguably much better films. Few movies had anywhere near the same impact, on the medium’s development or life in general.

It had a more direct impact on the Radio City Music Hall, whose seats had to be replaced after a record-breaking run because children kept wetting themselves during the scarier sequences. Adorable! 

SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS

Wed/2-Sun/6, 1:30, 3:45, 6, and 8:15pm

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.castrotheatre.com

 

The awful truth

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132
The awful truth

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM Early last week, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the 15-film shortlist from which the five Best Documentary nominees will be culled. There are some strong contenders — including The Waiting Room, set at Oakland’s Highland Hospital — but two of 2012’s highest-profile docs were oddly absent: Amy Berg’s West of Memphis (which opens locally Feb. 8) and Ken Burns’ The Central Park Five, which opens Friday. It might be ironic that both films are about injustice.

The exclusion of Memphis could simply be due to thematic fatigue. No amount of producer Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth millions could massage away the fact that 2011’s Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory — the final entry in Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s series of West Memphis Three docs going back to 1996 — was nominated, and lost to a feel-good flick about high school football. (Atom Egoyan’s narrative film based on the case is due in 2013.) The only chance for a WM3 doc to win an Oscar, it seems, will be if the real killers are ever discovered — in which case, place your bets on which movie will be made first: Paradise Lost 4 or West of Memphis 2.

The case at the heart of The Central Park Five is different from the West Memphis ordeal in several notable ways: it was a rape and beating, not a triple murder; there were five teens convicted of the crime, not three; instead of “Satanic Panic,” it had racial overtones (the victim was white; the accused were African American and Latino) inflamed by NYC’s screaming-headline press; and no celebrities bothered to take up the Central Park Five’s cause, unless you count veteran documentarian Ken Burns (who co-directed with his daughter, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon, Sarah’s husband). Also, the real rapist has been found — his confession, corroborated by DNA evidence, is played at the beginning of the film — though he came forward after most of the accused had finished serving their time.

The filmmakers do well to contextualize the case, using news footage and interviews to reconstruct the mood of 1989 New York City. It hardly resembled its glittering present incarnation: there was a crack epidemic, rampant street crime, and an average of six murders a day. Even still, the Central Park jogger attack was sensational enough to spark intense, racially-biased media coverage; the fact that Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise, and Yusef Salaam had confessed to the crime just exacerbated the public hysteria.

But as The Central Park Five makes clear, those confessions were coerced from scared young men who’d already been interrogated for several hours. As the accused recall in present-day interviews, they all had been in the park that night, as part of a larger group whose misdeeds included rock-throwing and harassing passers-by. There was no physical evidence tying them to the jogger (who had no memory of being brutalized), and the timeline of her assault and their movements in the park didn’t quite line up. But “the confessions seemed genuine,” remembers a juror. “It was hard to understand why anyone would make that kind of thing up.”

None of the NYC police or prosecutors involved in the case are interviewed in The Central Park Five. Two reasons: an ongoing civil rights lawsuit filed by the wrongfully convicted men (which now involves the filmmakers — in September, they were subpoenaed for footage of the accused discussing their confessions); and really, who wants to go on record admitting that they failed, and ruined multiple lives as a result? Unlike the WM3, the Central Park Five’s “innocence never got the attention that their guilt did,” historian Craig Steven Wilder points out. Academy Award nomination or not, The Central Park Five may help change that.

Like the injustice doc, another late 2012 trend is the presidential biopic. Weeks after the release of Lincoln, Hyde Park on Hudson arrives with a lighthearted (-ish) take on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1939 meeting with King George VI (of stuttering fame) and Queen Elizabeth at FDR’s rural New York estate. Casting Bill Murray as FDR is Hyde Park‘s main attraction, though Olivia Williams makes for a surprisingly effective Eleanor.

But the thrust of the film concerns FDR’s relationship with his cousin, Daisy — played by Laura Linney, who’s relegated to a series of dowdy outfits, pouting reaction shots, and far too many voice-overs. The affair has zero heat, and the film is disappointingly shallow — how many times can one be urged to giggle at someone saying “Hot dogs!” in an English accent? — not to mention a waste of a perfectly fine Bill Murray performance. As that sideburned Democrat bellows in Lincoln, “Howwww dare you!” *

 

THE CENTRAL PARK 5 opens Fri/14 in the Bay Area; HYDE PARK ON HUDSON opens Fri/14 in San Francisco.

father and law

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0
father and law

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM With a running time of just under three hours, writer-director-star Patrick Wang’s In the Family rewards patient viewers with its quietly observed tale of a man battling for custody of his son.

Wang’s debut feature has already earned local acclaim, picking up both the Best Narrative Feature Award and the Emerging Filmmaker Award at the 2012 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. It returns in an expanded engagement right when Hollywood is rolling out its flashiest year-end fare, which In the Family neither resembles nor aspires to resemble; its story unfolds via remarkably low-key scenes, most of which are shot using extremely long single takes. Not many films, even self-produced indie dramas, dare allow so much breathing room into each sequence.

This technique works, for the most part, because the story is so compelling. Joey (Wang) and Cody (Trevor St. John) are a well-matched couple in small-town Tennessee, busy with jobs — Joey’s a contractor; Cody’s a teacher — and raising six-year-old Chip (Sebastian Brodziak, who delivers a natural performance that’s thankfully more precocious than precious). Their home life is relaxed and routine, focused on their lively, dragon-obsessed boy. In the Family takes its time revealing their relationship’s origins, with flashbacks so briskly edited they stand out in contrast to the film’s otherwise unhurried pace. Chip’s mother, it turns out, is Cody’s late wife; some time after her death, it’s Cody who initiates a romance with the laconic, truck-driving guy who’s been helping renovate his house.

But even before we learn this, tragedy strikes: a car accident gravely injures Cody. The first sign of In the Family‘s looming drama occurs at the hospital, where Cody’s sister Eileen (Kelly McAndrew), brother-in-law Dave (Peter Hermann), and mother Sally (Park Overall) have gathered. When a nurse insists that “only family members are allowed to visit,” nobody stands up for Joey. When Cody dies, grief washes over everyone. Tempers flare when it’s revealed that Cody’s will is six years old, written before his relationship with Joey. When they were together, Joey admits, “We didn’t talk about the big stuff” — and the legal consequences are devastating. Guardianship of Chip, it seems, goes to Eileen.

“Nothing makes sense,” Cody weeps to Joey during a flashback that takes place right after his wife’s death. It’s a sentiment Joey fully understands, but Wang avoids scenes of tear-stained arguments or other typical melodrama clichés to convey the depths of his character’s despair. A particularly moving flashback recalls the night the two first kissed after bonding over Chip Taylor tunes (the songwriter cameos in the film, and his melancholy music is a recurring motif). In the next scene, set in the film’s present, Joey is wearing the same striped shirt Cody had on that night.

In the Family‘s biggest contrivance is containing most of its last act in a deposition scene, complete with a cartoonishly slick lawyer whose cruel questions make sure the viewer knows that homophobia (and racism) are both themes here. Joey’s response is a lengthy monologue loaded with exposition (and probably more words than the rest of the script’s pages, combined). It’s a bottom-heavy ending to a film that otherwise prefers observing at a distance — shooting Joey from behind rather than showing his face when he learns that Cody has died; allowing important action to occur off screen or behind closed doors; and using its long, wordless scenes to convey delicate, organically-shifting emotions. It’s a “message movie” that prefers subtlety over speechifying, and is all the more powerful for it. *

 

IN THE FAMILY opens Fri/7 in San Francisco.

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