Film Review Archives — Page 7 of 37 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Two for the road

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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May 30, 2012

arts@sfbg.com

FILM They met at a comedy club in Brooklyn. Carlen Altman, a nervous comedian who moonlights as a Jewish rosary maker, was doing stand-up when filmmaker and Tisch graduate Alex Ross Perry approached her about collaborating on a project.

"I came down from the experience of having my first movie out there in the world," said Perry, who directed the little-seen indie Impolex (2009) when he was only 24. "I started thinking about success, disappointment and the way that people grow apart from one another."

The idea for a brother-sister movie came to be. Altman and Perry, both 28, drafted the film in the summer of 2009 and shot it a year later. "You feel like you're stuck with someone and have been your whole life," Perry said of his time spent working with Altman on The Color Wheel, a droll and perverse take on vexed lives in transition, tinged with 16mm. Perry directed, produced, and edited the film while co-writing with Altman.

When the film begins, a dopey JR (Altman) shows up at the apartment of her misanthropic brother Colin (Perry). She is met with disdain by his girlfriend and by Colin, blue-balled by his stuffy long-term relationship. JR convinces him to help move her stuff out of her professor ex-boyfriend's place. Inevitably, their Northeastern road trip follows other tangents, taking the pair on a hilarious and sad journey that raises more questions than answers about their fraught relationship. They meet a lot of jerks, but no one more so than themselves.

"We were both really cranky filming," Altman recalled. "It [really] felt like we were brother and sister."

Both characters have had little personal and professional success, though JR, a would-be news anchor, even less than her brother.

Many of the characters' repellant mannerisms and frustrating habits are hewn from the real-life Perry and Altman — with exaggerations, of course.

"JR is more representative of what both of us actually feel and how we perceive ourselves in her creative ideas and lack of shame," Perry said. "My character represents the cautious side, what both of us feel like we should be doing."

Altman took the name of her character from a scrappy tomboy she once met at summer camp. "In terms of personality, my character is kind of my worst nightmare," Altman said of JR, who is really aggressive about success but has no specific passions of her own. "She's like 'Hey, look at me!' but, oh my god, there's nothing to look at. I feel shy about asking for favors, and I wanted to paint a picture of someone who is so not shy about asking."

Though the film is as talky, anxious, and self-revising as anything from the mumblecore school, Perry and Altman possess more maturity and even more cynicism than their profligate classmates. On the converse, their characters, filterless with no desire to grow up or shut up, are far behind everyone they encounter, from Colin's harpy high school crush to JR's haughty celebrity idol.

With all its zeitgeisty humor and lovably awful people, The Color Wheel takes some dark turns. What begins as a charming, dour comedy ends up viscerally queasy and pitiful, with its two leads as mixed-up as ever.

"The ending was my idea from the very beginning. It was easy to build it in a way that was natural and organic," Perry said of the film, which encourages, almost immediately, a repeat viewing.

Applauded by Cahiers du Cinéma and Mubi, among other cinephilic publications, The Color Wheel, a film that begins and ends in transit, no doubt has a long life ahead.

In the meantime, Altman wants to make a documentary about her Lionhead rabbit. And Perry, initially rejected by myriad producers and investors, hopes "there will be some traction after my two films," he said. "Maybe someone will help this guy."

Maybe someone will help these guys. *

THE COLOR WHEEL opens Fri/1 at the Roxie; also plays Sun/3 at the Smith Rafael Film Center.

Far from heaven

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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May 22, 2012

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arts@sfbg.com

FILM Austrian writer-director Michael Glawogger’s narrative features include several comedies, which you wouldn’t necessarily guess from viewing his internationally better-known documentaries — in particular the “globalization trilogy” that began with 1998’s Megacities and continued with 2005’s Workingman’s Death. The first was a global survey of desperate lives on economic bottom-rung, from heroin-addicted NYC con artists to homeless Moscow beggars to sewer scavengers, slaughterhouse laborers, extensively pawed strippers, and so forth. The second was another look at modes of survival no one would choose, if they had a choice, from tapped-out Ukrainian coal mines to abandoned freight ships that Pakistanis risk their lives mining for scrap.

Constantly drawn to the ugly and wince-producing, these films nonetheless had a certain abstract grandeur wrought from cinematographer Wolfgang Thaler’s striking images and the director’s purist refrain from any external commentary. They were also criticized in some circles for questionably staged sequences, and for creating a sort of pornocopia of picturesque suffering halfway between Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and Mondo Cane (1962).

Now Glawogger and Thaler are back with their final panel in the series. The two-hour Whores’ Glory is itself a triptych, this time limiting itself to one profession — the world’s proverbial oldest — as it portrays life and business in three prostitution districts around the world. The services performed may (or may not) be the same, but the ways of conducting trade, and the attitudes toward it, are very different.

In Bangkok’s upscale enterprise “Fishtank,” the invariably young, slim women sit behind a glass partition to be checked out by customers until their number is called; the very non-PC comments uttered on either side go unheard on the other. Employees clock-punch in and out of work, have their own on site beauty parlor, and shrug “A job is a job.” Indeed, they seem more like unusually good-looking office temps than anything else, and are treated as such in an atmosphere of well-scrubbed corporate capitalism.

Faridpur, Bangladesh’s “City of Joy” area, by contrast, is a slum whose professional denizens are quarrelsome, foul-mouthed, high-drama, and often look well underage. Though primly clad by Western standards, they labor under a heavy societal mantle of shame — several we meet arrived here after being “driven out” of multiple prior locations. Others were sold by their impoverished families into one-year contractual obligations that one suspects will drag on much longer. “The crazy girl” is forever wailing, older women hector younger ones, a lot of raunchy talk is heard (“I tell them Allah didn’t create my mouth for that purpose” is the least of it), and johns flee the camera.

One exception is a junior barber who talks about coming here once or twice a day, and says that if prostitutes didn’t exist, horny men would assault “respectable women” on the streets. Therein lies the trouble, of course: the notion that sex (good sex at least) is never respectable, or that men can’t be expected to restrain themselves when faced with that massive cock-tease comprising 51 percent of humanity.

Finally, “La Zona” in Reynosa, Mexico is home to older, hardened, philosophical women as frank as their cheerfully horny customers. It’s a falling-down-drunk party scene in which one customer allows himself to be filmed in the act, while a retired sex worker describes a particular specialty she used to perform with an ice cube (“They bleat like goats”). The men curse and complement the women in the same breaths, Madonna-whore complex operating at maximum speed; one guy cruising around in a truck works himself into such a froth just discussing the local talent that you wonder if he’ll dirty-talk himself to climax. Yet there’s a forlorn quality to it all — even when a pro proclaims “I’m paid for it, I enjoy it. I’m paid to have fun,” the surroundings suggest she’s making the best of a deal that didn’t come with any better alternatives.

As usual Glawogger allows no overt commentary or judgment in another immaculately packaged object d’verite, this one sometimes a little too chicly scored to chill room tracks by CocoRosie, PJ Harvey, and such. More than its predecessors, though, Whores’ Glory could have used a little editorializing, or at least contextualizing. Is it even desirable to artfully yet passive observe this of all trades, so frequently rife with exploitation and complex moral issues? Raising myriad questions it’s too aesthetically clean to hazard addressing, the film becomes less an inquiry into than a scrapbook of prostitution ’round the world — a duty- (as well as STD-) free form of sex tourism for anthropologically inclined First Worlders. *

WHORES’ GLORY opens Fri/25 in Bay Area theaters.

Smalltown confidential

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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May 17, 2012

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arts@sfbg.com

FILM When trial locations are moved, it is generally because the crime is so notorious, or the local populace so riled, that it is not expected the plaintiff can avoid a hostile jury. It is seldom, if ever, moved for the precise opposite reasons: say, because a defendant is wildly popular and the person he’s accused of murdering was considered “possibly the meanest woman in East Texas.”

Nonetheless, that scenario actually happened 15 years ago when wealthy Carthage, Tex. widow Marjorie Nugent, her absence finally a cause for concern rather than relief after several months, was discovered in her garage freezer under various frozen edibles. The immediately confessed culprit was none other than one Bernhardt Tiede II, the town’s beloved assistant funeral home director turned full-time companion to the elderly Mrs. Nugent. The mild-mannered, much-younger Tiede had simply snapped under the weight of her abuse one day, impulsively pumping four bullets into her backside. Trouble was, at least according to the ambitious local district attorney, that pretty much no one in Carthage blamed him, or felt the crime deserved much more than a slap on the wrist.

What might have appeared an obvious case of money-hungry predation to outsiders — after all, Tiede had become the sole beneficiary of Nugent’s will, in theory forever separating the family fortune from already-exasperated relatives she’d estranged herself from — didn’t look that way to townspeople. Bernie was generous to a fault with his own money; once he’d ingratiated himself to Marjorie, he accomplished the impossible and got her to use her money to help the local needy and contribute to charities. (Check forgery allowed this to continue after her death, until he was arrested.) He’d liberated her from a miserly, hermit-like old age, encouraging her to enjoy life on lavish vacations and cultural outings — which he also enjoyed, natch.

But then, Bernie was a tonic to everyone. At the funeral home he’d been a consummate consoler, corpse make-up artist, seller of upscale caskets, and had sung hymns with the theatrical fervor of a musical-theater queen. (He was also highly active in the local community theater.) He doted on all old ladies, while seemingly oblivious to the overtures of women nearer his age. Even if those gay rumors were true, well, conservative Carthage could turn a blind eye in his case.

Ergo the trial was, at D.A. request, moved to more neutral terrain. This bizarre love-story-gone-wrong of sorts is dramatized in Richard Linklater’s delicious new film, an ideal reunion with his School of Rock (2003) lead Jack Black. Bernie has Black as the pie-sweet titular figure, Shirley MacLaine — face like an old leather boot ready to kick a dog — as the formidable Marjorie, and Matthew McConaughey as Danny “Buck” Davidson, the vainglorious D.A. determined to make his name on this case. They’re all great, but in a way the film’s star is its Greek chorus: a colorful array of Carthage townsfolk (many played by actual residents) narrating and commenting on events that, naturally, they still gossip about today.

In town recently for Bernie‘s San Francisco International Film Festival screening, Linklater says the project had a hard time getting financed precisely because of that running pseudo-documentary commentary, nearly all of it lifted from quotes in co-scenarist Skip Hollandsworth’s original Texas Monthly reportage.

“There was so much of it — no one could make the leap with me,” the director explains. “[To funders] it just didn’t seem like a real movie. Yet now [the commentary] ends up a lot of people’s favorite element.” Once his lead actors signed on, things fell into place, although they still had to squeak by on a tight 22-day shooting schedule.

Linklater calls Bernie “my little ambiguous love letter” to East Texas, where he grew up. “It’s a place you get out of if you feel at all different, like I did in moving to Austin,” he says.

Returning homeward to shoot the film, he found locals “suspicious — they think they’re going to be portrayed as hicks — but still very friendly and open. They all had opinions.” He says the case illustrates “how arbitrary our justice system is,” and that once the trial was moved Tiede was prosecuted “for his otherness — [the D.A. describing] him flying first class on vacations to jurors who’ve never been on a plane.”

Wild rumors still swirl in Carthage, from alleged sex tapes (of Tiede and gentlemen friends) to Nugent family members’ belief that Bernie “still has [stolen] millions stashed in Swiss bank accounts.” Linklater scoffs at such unsubstantiated tales — after all, the truth on record is already quite satisfyingly strange enough. 2

BERNIE opens Fri/18 in Bay Area theaters.

For your further consideration

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April 25, 2012

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More reviews of films playing during the San Francisco Internation Film Festival. For more SFIFF coverage, click here.

WED/25

Last Screening (Laurent Achard, France, 2011) A bit of an odd duck, 30-ish, nondescript Sylvain (Pascal Cervo) is in denial over the imminent closure of the small French repertory cinema he’s operated and lived in for years. But that’s hardly his most alarming mental hang-up: in his spare time he frequently goes around stalking and killing random women for a grisly purpose that has to do (of course) with his dear, departed, thoroughly demented mother. The only horror item in this year’s slim SFIFF “Late Show” section, Laurent Achard’s pulseless genre homage tips hat to 1960’s Peeping Tom and other, less obvious cineastic objets d’amour — most conspicuously, Renoir’s 1954 French Can Can, which is playing at Sylvain’s theater — but doesn’t seem interested in suspense, or psychology, or even style. It’s coldly unpleasant yet dull. Wed/25, 9:30pm, FSC. Sat/28, 10pm, Kabuki. (Dennis Harvey)

THU/26

Rebellion (Mathieu Kassovitz, France, 2011) The latest polemical film from the director of La Haine (1995) presents National Gendarmerie Intervention Group Captain Philippe Lejorus’ account of his experiences during the 1988 New Caledonia hostage crisis. It’s an election year in France, so all bets are off as to how the unfortunate fiasco will resolve. Striking camerawork distinguishes this tense, morally complex drama, which features Kassovitz as Lejorus, a humane negotiator in the midst of a politically charged battle for hearts, minds, and civil rights. The film is edited to embody its political context, with distancing effects such as voiceover and suddenly reframed shots that emphasize the two sides of a disagreement. Thu/26, 6pm; Tue/1, 9:45pm; May 3, 4:30pm, Kabuki. (Sam Stander)

FRI/27

Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema (Todd McCarthy, U.S., 2007) Legendary French film publicist, programmer, director, and movie junkie Pierre Rissient gets his own filmic homage in this documentary from Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy (1992’s Visions of Light). Rissient, who will receive the Mel Novikoff Award at this year’s festival, is certainly a character — the round-faced septuagenarian oozes a puppy-dog cuddliness cut with a formidable intellect and a hint of tart, old-man pervy-ness. But this collection of talking heads interspersed with classic film clips is unfortunately a bit of a snooze. Considering said talking heads include cinematic firebrands like Werner Herzog and the late Claude Chabrol, and with a character passionate as Rissient at its center, that’s surprising. “No one in the world of cinema can tell you what he does,” Chabrol remarks. After watching the film you probably won’t be able to figure it out either. Fri/27, 4pm, FSC. Mon/30, 6:30pm, PFA. (Michelle Devereaux)

SAT/28

Somebody Up There Likes Me (Bob Byington, U.S., 2012) A textbook illustration of what’s so frequently right and wrong with Amerindie comedies today, Bob Byington’s feature starts out near-brilliantly in a familiar, heightened Napoleon Dynamite-type milieu of ostensibly normal people as self-absorbed, socially hapless satellites revolving around an existential hole at the center in the universe. The three main ones meet working at a suburban steakhouse: Emotionally nerve-deadened youth Max (Keith Poulson), the even more crassly insensitive Sal (Nick Offerman), and nice but still weird Lyla (Teeth‘s estimable Jess Weixler). All is well until the film starts skipping ahead five years at a time, growing more smugly misanthropic and pointless as time and some drastic shifts in fortune do nothing to change (or deepen) the characters. Still, the performers are intermittently hilarious throughout. Sat/28, 6:45pm, Kabuki. Sun/29, 9:15pm, FSC. Tue/1, 6:15pm, Kabuki. (Harvey)

TUE/1

Hysteria (Tanya Wexler, U.S./England, 2011) Tanya Wexler’s period romantic comedy gleefully depicts the genesis of the world’s most popular sex toy out of the inchoate murk of Victorian quackishness. In this dulcet version of events, real-life vibrator inventor Mortimer Granville (Hugh Dancy) is a handsome young London doctor with such progressive convictions as a belief in the existence of germs. He is, however, a man of his times and thus swallows unblinking the umbrella diagnosis of women with symptoms like anxiety, frustration, and restlessness as victims of a plague-like uterine disorder known as hysteria. Landing a job in the high-end practice of Dr. Robert Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), whose clientele consists entirely of dissatisfied housewives seeking treatments of “medicinal massage” and subsequent “parosysm,” Granville becomes acquainted with Dalrymple’s two daughters, the decorous Emily (Felicity Jones) and the first-wave feminist Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal). A subsequent bout of RSI offers empirical evidence for the adage about necessity being the mother of invention, with the ever-underused Rupert Everett playing Edmund St. John-Smythe, Granville’s aristocratic friend and partner in electrical engineering. Tue/1, 9:30pm, Kabuki. May 3, 6pm, FSC. (Lynn Rapoport)

MAY 3

Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey (Ramona S. Diaz, U.S.) The director of 2003’s Imelda returns with this portrait of a way more sympathetic Filipino celebrity: Arnel Pineda, plucked from obscurity via YouTube after Journey’s Neil Schon spotted him singing with a Manila-based cover band. Don’t Stop Believin‘ follows Pineda, who openly admits past struggles with homelessness and addiction, from audition to 20,000-seat arena success as Journey’s charismatic new front man (he faces insta-success with an endearing combination of nervousness and fanboy thrill). He’s also honest about feeling homesick, and the pressures that come with replacing one of the most famous voices in rock (Steve Perry doesn’t appear in the film, other than in vintage footage). Especially fun to see is how Pineda invigorates the rest of Journey; as the tour progresses, all involved — even the band’s veteran members, who’ve no doubt played “Open Arms” ten million times — radiate with excitement. Thu/3, 7pm, Castro. (Cheryl Eddy)

The San Francisco International Film Festival runs through May 3; most shows $13. Venues: Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk.; SF Film Society Cinema, 1746 Post, SF; and Sundance Kabuki Cinema, 1881 Post, SF. More info at www.sffs.org.

Tiger woods

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April 24, 2012

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arts@sfbg.com

FILM The Tasmanian tiger wasn’t a cat at all, but a pouched marsupial resembling a ring-tailed dog, with the most fearsome steel-trap jaws imaginable. It was hunted out of existence as a menace to domestic livestock; the last one died in captivity in 1936. Nonetheless, alleged sightings persist. Like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, the tiger is kept alive at least in the imagination by the fervency of stubborn believers.

The search to prove something now-mythological to be true and extant is always a good hook for fiction. Julia Leigh’s 1999 novel The Hunter is a cool, precise yet ambiguous story — the kind that you’d classify as a “thriller” if it weren’t so pointedly detached — about a lone-gun mercenary of sorts hired by a biotech conglomerate for a top-secret mission. He’s to stalk, kill, and extract DNA of potential great pharmacological value from a last Tasmanian tiger which, purportedly, has duly been sighted.

The chimera of the tiger and its moral weight as yet another sacrifice to corporate greed interests Leigh less than the enigmatic hunter himself, a damaged soul whose past is off-limits (even to the reader), and who’s long since walled himself off by a highly efficient, methodical guardedness both professional and emotional. The current job is his exclusive focus; if someone has to be killed to ensure its completion, he won’t revel in the task, but neither will he hesitate.

His focus is disrupted, however, not just by the hostility of local loggers who assume he’s one of the tree-hugging “greenies” who obstruct their employment, but by the very messy circumstances of the household he’s forced to bunk in between outback treks. Eventually the latter demands his engagement beyond the call of duty, a lowering of self-protective reserve. But Leigh is much less comfortable with that humanizing material; her novel is most at home alone in the wilderness, suiting a protagonist who’d rather avoid contact with others of his species if he can help it.

Leigh is an interesting talent. But on the basis of that first novel, her second, Disquiet, and last year’s debut film Sleeping Beauty — which stirred controversy at Cannes because it centered on a woman who lets men have sex with her when she’s drugged unconscious — or was it because there was disagreement whether the film was more shocking than it was cold and boring? — it’s a good thing she didn’t write or direct the Hunter movie. Daniel Nettheim did both, and he’s been faithful to the source while ultimately creating a much more involving, powerful experience. Like its hero, this Hunter does what Leigh couldn’t, or wouldn’t: it realizes the value of compassion.

Willem Dafoe’s Martin — in the book he doesn’t even have a name — travels incognito to a remote area, posing as an academic researching Tasmanian devils. (That large rodent-like animal is still very much alive, albeit endangered.) Expecting ordinary accommodations, instead he finds himself staying at the hippie-ish abode of a family in crisis. The husband was an actual environmental researcher who disappeared in the woods a year ago, quite possibly killed by those antagonistic loggers. Since then his wife Lucy (Frances O’Connor) has been in a medicated stupor of grief, rarely getting out of bed, leaving their young children — assertive Sass (Morgana Davies) and apparently mute-by-choice Bike (Finn Woodlock) — to fend for themselves. Against all his instincts and professional ethics, Martin finds himself pulled into their obvious neediness.

Nothing else about The Hunter is obvious, though. Some may find it too short on back story, mystery resolution, or genre definition. (Like the book, it’s almost an action thriller.) But from the story’s spare bones Nettheim has built a narrative about overcoming isolation and adversity that is aptly chilly for a while yet finally very moving. The actors, also including Sam Neill as a local of uncertain loyalties, are economically perfect. The diverse Tasmanian scenery is both spectacular and somber in Robert Humphreys’ widescreen photography. The only element too conventional at times is the musical scoring, although it suits the final turn in emotional urgency beautifully.

Confusingly, this Hunter arrives not long after an Iranian film with the same title, one also having much to do with alienation and wild landscapes. That film was very good, but this one might be indelible.

THE HUNTER opens Fri/27 in Bay Area theaters.

Diva in the headlights

Andrew Lam

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April 10, 2012

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arts@sfbg.com

FILM It’s a bit difficult from hereabouts to get a hold on what kind of star Paprika Steen is in Denmark, beyond being a kinda huge one. Here, she’s at most a familiar face from the Dogme 95 movies of a decade or more ago, having appeared in such significant entries as Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration (1998), Lars von Trier’s The Idiots (1998), and Susanne Bier’s Open Hearts (2002), as well as subsequent non-Dogme films by those and other leading directors. From those you might figure she’s a leading light in a sort of loose stock company of people who constantly work in each others’ emotionally unruly, sometimes outrageous, usually satisfying movies.

But at home it seems she’s more ubiquitous, in various media and as an all around personality. There they’ve gotten to see her in films we haven’t (particularly envied is 2007’s The Substitute, in which she plays a space monster posing as the world’s worst elementary school teacher), in TV series, as a skit comic, stage actress, and god knows what else — there’s a mystifying YouTube clip of her gyrating through a “Single Ladies” cover on some awards show, and it does not appear intended as a joke.

The new-ish (it’s taken its sweet time crossing the Atlantic) Applause distills what we might already know and guess at about this skillful, somewhat larger-than-life actress. She plays Thea Barfoed, a duly larger than-life actress undeniably skillful at her job — a flunky gushes she’s “one of the best in the whole country,” causing Thea to bristle not just at “one of,” but at the dinkiness of said country — but a floundering mess everywhere else.

We first see her playing Martha, natch, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? onstage (sequences shot during a real-life production of the Albee play Steen starred in), boozing and yelling, reeling and lashing about. It’s typecasting: offstage, Thea is just out of rehab, having hit a bottom that ended her marriage and handed her husband (Michael Falch) sole child custody. Yet she’s still sneaking booze, even during performances; attending AA meetings she yawns and smokes through while others bare their souls. Snapping “I hate ordinary people” — no one is convinced when she claims that was a joke — she has that unpleasant brat-egomaniac’s manner of suggesting everyone else is wasting her time with their stupidity, and that any attempts to be civil on her part require a Herculean exercise in acting. It’s hard to pity her evident self-loathing when she’s such a complete asshole.

Still, she wants to be better, sort of, and others are trying to help. Ex spouse Michael and his infuriatingly reasonable new partner (Sara-Marie Maltha) have decided it’s best for all that she have visitation rights to her young sons, despite the past (which included unspecified maternal physical violence). When Thea sees the boys for the first time in 18 months, they’re understandably skittish. Struck by their fearful distance, she goes home and pours every intoxicant down the drain. But she still has the overpowering and impulsive needs of an addict — whether exercised in her way-too-soon demands for custody, a weird and unwise bar pickup (Shanti Roney), or the rant directed at a dim Toys R Us salesgirl who momentarily gets between Thea and the impossible dangling carrot of happiness.

Rather incongruously nostalgic in its Dogme-style aesthetic of shaky camera and jump cuts (editor-turned-director Martin Zandvliet has since made a much more classically polished second feature), Applause is a good movie that’s unimaginable without Steen. Yet it might have been better still if less overwhelmed by her. Like a salad plate supporting an entire roast turkey, its narrative framework is underscaled for such a glistening mass of banquet-sized acting meat.

With her great mane of hair looking magnificent one minute and Medusa-like the next, she’s a glam gorgon, both utterly credible and nearly Joan Crawford-esque in determination to stare the medium down. Paprika Steen is the kind of actress who revels in making herself unattractive, though the ravaged result is less “plain” than its own kind of masochistic spectacle. (Thea is the very picture of a proud 25-year-old beauty two decades and umpteen cosmos later.) It’s a flamboyant, arresting, faultless star turn — even if Applause itself is finally just a vehicle. To really gauge what she’s capable of, we’d probably need to see that Virginia Woolf? in its entirety.

APPLAUSE opens Fri/13 in Bay Area theaters.

Solo mio

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March 30, 2012

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FILM The phenomenon of grown children remaining under (or returning to) mom and dad’s roof well after the customary sell-by date has been a regular topic of late in American entertainment and pop sociology.

In Italy, however, that situation is hardly seen as representing some sort of domestic evolutionary failure. In fact it’s pretty normal, for reasons that include differing attitudes toward real estate (few would sell a flat that’s been in the family for generations), perpetually bleak employment prospects (all the worse sans nepotistic connections), and the umbilical cord seemingly never severed between mothers and sons.

It’s not for nothing that the country where the Pope lives is Ground Zero for the Madonna-whore complex. Art and life have so frequently reinforced notion that for Italian men, there are only two relevant kinds of women: the kind they want to fuck, and Mama.

Gianni Di Gregorio is both a triumph over and cautionary illustration of the aging uomo, racking up decades of experience yet still infantilized by that most binding tie. He’s a late bloomer who’s long worked in theater and film in various capacities, notably as a scenarist for 2008’s organized crime drama Gomorrah. That same year he wrote and directed a first feature basically shot in his own Rome apartment. Mid-August Lunch was a surprise global success casting the director himself as a putz, also named Gianni, very like himself (by his own admission), peevishly trying to have some independence while catering to the whims of the ancient but demanding mother (Valeria De Franciscis) he still lives with.

Di Gregorio thus entered the rarefied realm of writer-director-actors who make lightly fictionalized but essentially autobiographical movies about themselves. That kind of enterprise can go either way — insufferable or delightful, indulgent or insightful. Fortunately, Lunch was charming in a sly, self-deprecating way, and The Salt of Life is more of the same minus the usual diminishing returns. The creator’s barely-alter ego Gianni is still busy doing nothing much, dissatisfied not by his indolence but by its quality. But his pint-sized, wig-rocking, nearly century-old matriarch has moved to a plush separate address with full-time care. That plus her extravagant generosity to friends and employees is eating up Junior’s hopeful inheritance.

Having exhausted his own pension (he was forcibly “retired” at 50, and one senses he didn’t exactly knock himself out looking for other work), Gianni views mom’s spendthrift twilight with whiny but helpless dismay. Under his own roof, there’s more functional disorder: daughter (Teresa Di Gregorio) comes and goes, often less visibly than the on-off boyfriend (Michelangelo Ciminale) who stays here overnight more often than at his own parents’ place. It takes some time to figure out that Gianni’s wife (Elisabetta Piccolomini) lives here too, since their relationship has obviously long ceased to extend co-parenting and tenancy. He is, as they say, at liberty.

Salt‘s main preoccupation is Gianni’s discovery that while he’s as available and interested in women as ever, at age 63 he is no longer visible to them. Surrounded by femininity in low-cut dresses — while lower-key, this movie stares open-mouthed at breasts as fervently as Italian sexploitation king Tinto Brass does asses — he is depressed to find they perceive him in asexual terms. (It is particularly wounding when a sexy neighbor says she had a “beautiful dream” about him … in which he was her grandfather.) A still randy lawyer friend (Alfonso Santagata) trying to get him back into circulation advises, “An old engine that’s been abandoned for years and gone rusty needs time to start working again.” The screenplay attempts lubricating Gianni’s gears via Viagra and, later, an accidental dosing of some party hallucinogenic.

While Fellini confronted desirable, daunting womanhood with a permanent adolescent’s masturbatory fantasizing, Di Gregorio’s humbler self-knowledge finds comedy in the hangdog haplessness of an old dog who can’t learn new tricks and has forgotten the old ones. Nearly as food-focused as his first film, The Salt of Life is like a rich home-cooked meal lent gentle absurdity by the cook’s constant worrying aloud whether his digestion can still take the strain. *

THE SALT OF LIFE opens Fri/30 in Bay Area theaters.

Mister Vengeance

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March 30, 2012

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FILM Iran is the kind of nation where political protest in public art has to be muted or disguised. It was well buried in recent hit A Separation, and is just slightly more apparent in Rafi Pitts’ The Hunter. Shot and set during the contentious 2009 Presidential campaign — Pitts is a rare expat filmmaker allowed to shoot in the country his family left decades ago — it starts as a Kafka-esque portrait of quiet desperation in a cold, empty Tehran, then turns into a sort of existential thriller. The precise message may be ambiguous, but it’s no surprise this two-year-old feature has so far played nearly everywhere but Iran itself.

Ali (Pitts) is released from prison after some years, his precise crime never revealed. Told that with his record he can’t expect to get a day shift on his job as security guard at an automotive plant, he keeps hours at odds with his working wife Sara (Mitra Haijar) and six-year-old daughter Saba (Saba Yaghoobi). Still, they try to spend as much time together as possible, until one day Ali returns to find them uncharacteristically gone all day.

After getting the bureaucratic runaround he’s finally informed by police that something tragic has occurred; one loved one is dead, the other missing. When his thin remaining hope is dashed, with police notably useless in preventing that grim additional news, Ali snaps — think Peter Bogdanovich’s 1968 Targets. He’s soon in custody, albeit in that of two bickering officers who get them all lost in the countryside, the terse but strikingly shot film now recalling elements of Jerzy Skolimowski’s Essential Killing (2010) and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) in its endless pursuit through imposing landscapes.

Pitts, a long-ago child performer cast here only when the actor originally hired had to be replaced, makes Ali seem pinched from the inside out, as if in permanent recoil from past and anticipated abuse. This thin, hunched frame, vulnerable big ears, and hooded eyes — the goofily oversized cap he wears at work seems a deliberate affront — seems so fixed an expression of unhappiness that when he flashes a great smile, for a moment you might think it must be someone else. He’s an everyman who only grows more shrunken once the film physically opens up into a natural world no less hostile for being beautiful.

Ali actually does hunt game, earlier on — but in The Hunter, we glean he’s been the hunted one way or another his whole life. The film’s score is sparse percussion that, like the drums in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, count down toward an inexorable extinction that bears mythological (or authoritarian) fate’s hand.

THE HUNTER opens Fri/30 at the Roxie.

The war at home

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February 24, 2012

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FILM Agnieszka Holland is that kind of filmmaker who can become a well known, respectable veteran without anyone being quite sure what those decades have added up to. Her mentor was Andrzej Wadja, the last half-century’s leading Polish director (among those who never left). He helped shape a penchant for heavy historical drama and a sometimes clunky style not far from his own.

Since the late 1970s the result has been numerous great or at least weighty themes tackled head-on, with variable success. Following some well-received works at home, she commenced her international career with 1985’s Angry Harvest, about the amorous relationship between a Polish man and the Austrian, a Jewish woman, he hides during Nazi occupation. Very seldom inhabiting the present in her films, she’s approached classic children’s lit (1993’s The Secret Garden) and Henry James (1997’s Washington Square) with the same slightly ham-fisted competence.

She’s bolstered the notion of artistic genius being irascible via Ed Harris going Pollock on the ivories in 2006’s Copying Beethoven, and of Rimbaud and Verlaine shocking the bourgeoisie in 1995’s Total Eclipse. To Kill a Priest (1988) and The Third Miracle (1999) dealt with the uneasy relationship between faith, politics, and the Catholic Church in Poland. Less conspicuously, Holland has worked for hire on TV movies (one about murderer Gary Gilmore, another about murder victim Gwen Araujo) and series episodes (The Wire, Treme) that must rate among her least personal projects — as well as her finest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LV4JJPZCwI

Her one indispensable feature is 1990’s Europa, Europa, an ideal vehicle for her favored mix of the grotesque, sober, and factual — following a Jewish boy who passed as Aryan German, to the point of joining the Hitler Youth. The new In Darkness is her best since then, and it can’t be chance that this too dramatizes a notably bizarre case of real-life peril and survival under the Nazis.

Its protagonist is Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), an ordinary family man in Lvov (Poland then, Ukraine now) who’s not above exploiting the disarray of occupation and war to make ends meet. A sewer inspector, he uses his knowledge of underground tunnels to hide Jews who can pay enough when even the fenced-off ghetto is no longer safe. It’s late in the war; all avenues of flight are closed. The dozen or so citizens Socha secretes in the city’s bowels — freezing amidst vermin and waste — run a gamut despite shared panic. They include a professor, a junkie, a philanderer and mistress, and children. Extreme adversity doesn’t ennoble them — even in this dank entrapment there occur betrayals, fights, a bastard pregnancy. It is typical of Holland that when copulation and masturbation occur, the acts are at once furtively shameful and barnyard-frank.

Though both sides risk all, the “Polacks” openly disdain the “Yids,” and vice versa. In any other circumstance they’d happily snub one another. Only the flat brutality of the Nazis, gloating and laughing as they kill, can impose a thin allegiance. Yet as grueling months go by under constant threat of capture, something more than sheer dependency develops. Reluctantly, Socha finds himself unable to abandon “his” Jews even when they can no longer pay, and discovery would cost his life as well as theirs.

Holland will never be a cinematic poet. Her blunt, sometimes graceless approach to any story can leach its emotional subtleties as well as (more usefully) potential forced bathos and uplift. In Darkness has a few sequences poorly shaped enough to seem pointless. It takes us longer than it should to sort out all the major characters, and the sense of time passing is murky at best.

But for such a long, oppressive, and literally dark film, this one passes quickly, maintaining tension as well as a palpable physical discomfort that doubtlessly suggests just a fraction what the refugees actually suffered. On rare instances when Socha or others venture outdoors, sunlight feels as harsh and exposing as bleach.

In Darkness isn’t quite a great movie, but it’s a powerful experience. At the end it’s impossible to be unmoved, not least because the director’s resistance toward Spielbergian exaltation insists on the banal and everyday, even in human triumph.

In Darkness opens Fri/24 in San Francisco.

Hello, Carol!

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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February 3, 2012

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FILM It is close to impossible not to love Carol Channing; those who would protest otherwise are simply heartless. The only adequate response to her is unconditional surrender, as if standing before an oncoming cyclone filled with puppies.

With her saucer eyes topped with false lashes that could give Bette Davis’ a run for her money and a mouth that seems as if it could swallow the world, Channing is a living incarnation of a Muppet (to watch her duet with Miss Piggy just seems natural, somehow). And yet, despite her cartoonish physicality and exaggerated appearance, there is nothing false or put-on about Channing.

When I hear that voice — dripping with whiskey, smoke, and honey, begging to be imitated — the effect is instant happiness. Everything just feels right. As Roland Barthes writes in his essay “The Grain of the Voice,” I then must face the task of articulating “the impossible account of an individual thrill I constantly experience in listening to singing.”

Dori Bernstein’s sweet if worshipful documentary Carol Channing: Larger Than Life necessarily fails at that task, even as it proves the now 91-year-old Broadway legend more than lives up to the second half of the film’s title.

Now slightly stooped, her hair in a choppy gray bob, which she occasionally pulls into a Peggy Moffitt-esque topknot, and her lips a smear of Malibu pink, Channing is still ever the professional, hilariously impersonating a Russian theater troupe one moment and chatting with young dancers in Times Square the next.

The life Channing recounts is an abbreviated and selective version of the one detailed in her 2002 memoir Just Lucky I Guess: her childhood in San Francisco spent being the class clown and worshiping Ethel Waters; her first big Broadway break playing Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; and her career-cementing role as Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly! And many of the memoir’s same supporting characters, such as frequent TV variety show co-star Loni Anderson and Dolly composer Jerry Herman, also make appearances here.

What Bernstein’s documentary offers is the rare chance to witness the palpable impact Channing has made on others. In personal interactions, she gives her attention equally and wholly to anyone who seeks it (including the camera). Those who have worked with her — particularly the many gay chorus members interviewed here — speak of her as a mother rather than a diva.

The film’s most touching footage is of Channing with her late husband Harry Kullijian, who passed away last year. The two were childhood sweethearts who some 70 years later tied the knot (in Channing’s fourth go at marriage), and seeing them joke together and read aloud poetry passages they shared as love-struck teens is the very definition of adorable.

Curiously, Kullijian’s passing is not mentioned in the film, even as a postscript. You get the sense more generally that Bernstein tried to stay clear of reopening any old wounds with her subject. The awful tempestuousness of Channing’s second marriage to her publicist and manager Charles Lowe is referenced by others but not Channing, who speaks only in passing of the toll life on the road took on her relationship with her son from her first marriage.

Additionally, despite her fame, Channing has always had to share the larger cultural spotlight with Marilyn Monroe and Barbra Streisand, powerhouses in their own right who became associated with the roles she originally made famous on stage (Channing would have her Hollywood comeuppance in 1967 when she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for 1967’s Thoroughly Modern Millie). Larger Than Life attempts to provide a corrective to this, but its motivations for doing so are as transparent as they are understandable. This film is a mash note to Channing as much as it is a gift to her fans, who, rest assured, didn’t need any more reason to love her. *

CAROL CHANNING: LARGER THAN LIFE opens Fri/3 in Bay Area theaters.

The best medicine

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January 24, 2012

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arts@sfbg.com

FILM French actor Valérie Donzelli made her first feature as writer-director with 2009’s The Queen of Apples, which trawled the film festival circuit for a couple of years eventually getting its title tweaked to The Queen of Hearts before making its unheralded U.S. debut at the 2010 Mill Valley Film Festival. It got a minor theatrical release in France and none at all here.
All this goes to show that, contrary to all optimistic wisdom, not every film will find its audience. Not even when it is, in fact, the kind of movie that tends to win audience awards. Queen was endlessly energetic, quirky, and endearing, in the manner of 1960s independent films whose youthful makers needed to prove they could do every trick and break every rule in the book. It was charming despite being almost too cute for words, and a mite too pleased with itself. The slender story aimed for little more than charm: Donzelli played a hapless young Parisian flinging herself from one comically doomed love to another before winding up with Mr. Right, played (as were all the Mr. Wrongs) by Jérémie Elkaïm, who in 2000 was the unstable gay teen in Sébastien Lifshitz’s memorable Come Undone. Queen may have been uneven, but it was frequently so funny that hardly mattered.
Obviously somebody noticed, however, since Donzelli is now back with a second feature she co-stars in, and co-wrote with, Elkaïm. (Evidently other people like this team as well in the interim they got cast opposite one another in Élise Gerard’s 2010 Belleville-Tokyo.) It’s even playing at a theater near you, at least for the next five minutes.
Though more ambitious as (largely) a serious drama, Declaration of War reprises the same flaws as its predecessor, being over-stuffed with stylistic digressions, a little too eager to please at times. But once again it’s a very likable piece of work that largely works on its own terms.
While Queen was primarily content to poke fun at the great French tradition of slender twentysomethings moping lovesick about Paris, War declares itself on something inherently humorless: a child’s grave illness. Juliette (Donzelli) meets Romeo (Elkaïm) yep, that’s a bit much at a punk club, where his pogoing catches her eye. After a very 1960s montage of love al fresco (although they do not run through any flower fields), out pops the no less auspiciously named Adam, and all is well apart from some higher-than normal new-parent exhaustion issues related to the baby crying just about every waking moment.
Eventually, however, Adam’s tendency to barf, cough, and tilt his head leftward while showing no interest in learning to walk raises suspicions confirmed by Dr. Prat (Béatrice De Staël, who was also a standout as the heroine’s neurotic flatmate in Queen): little Adam has a brain tumor, and there’s a long uncertain road ahead that puts infinite strain on the young couple’s individual emotions, collective resources and future together.
Even in this much more sober story context, Donzetti can’t resist cramming in every stylistic whim that comes to mind, from superimpositions to interior voices and multiple anonymous narrators, not excluding a bursting into song. The cost of her chasing after such spontaneity is that sometimes a gamble falls flat, calling attention to itself without adding anything, like the soundtrack choice of some overly gimmicky electronica when Juliette freaks out during her child’s CAT Scan. Eclecticism isn’t always an ideal tactic, especially when a subject like this one demands a certain groundedness.
But many of her tactics work, finding humor in surprising places and refreshing some familiar devices of domestic tragedy. Donzetti has a very sure touch with actors; she and the ingratiating Elkaïm work so well together that we don’t mind their characters remain in some ways underdeveloped. (In fact this seems somewhat intentional Juliette and Romeo plunge into serious commitment before they’re fully formed adults, and the script doesn’t spare them the odd outburst that’s childishly unflattering.) Much less melodramatic than its title would suggest, Declaration of War is uneven but full of life and ideas there’s room for Donzetti to refine her directorial instincts, but one hopes they stay a little messy.
DECLARATION OF WAR opens Fri/27 in Bay Area theaters.

In the realms of the unreal

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January 19, 2012

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FILM/DANCE Watching Pina Bausch’s choreography on film should not have been as absorbing and deeply affecting of an experience as it was. Dance on film tends to disappoint — the camera flattens the body and distorts perspective, and you either see too many or not enough details. Avatar (2009) certainly didn’t convince me that 3D was the answer.

However, improved technology gave Wim Wenders (1999’s Buena Vista Social Club; 1987’s Wings of Desire) the additional tools he needed to accomplish what he and fellow German Bausch had talked about for 20 years: collaborating on a documentary about her work. Instead of making a film about the rebel dance maker, Wenders made it for Bausch, who died in June 2009, two days before the start of filming.

Pina is an eloquent tribute to a tiny, soft-spoken, mousy-looking artist who turned the conventions of theatrical dance upside down. She was a great artist and true innovator whose thinking was crucially shaped by her work in the 1960s with Antony Tudor and the team of Donya Feuer and Paul Sanasardo.

Wenders’ great accomplishment in this beautifully paced and edited document is its ability to elucidate Bausch’s work in a way that words probably cannot. While it’s good to see dance’s physicality and its multi dimensionality on screen, it’s even better that the camera goes inside the dances to touch tiny details and essential qualities in the performers’ every gesture. No proscenium theater can offer that kind of intimacy.

Appropriately, intimacy (the eternal desire for it) and loneliness (an existential state of being) were the two contradictory forces that Bausch kept exploring over and over. There is something absurd about the way her dancers never tire of being curious, silly, cruel, childish, hysterical, loving, and angry. The nobility and desperation comes from not giving up.

By taking fragments of the dances into the environment — both natural and artificial — of Wuppertal, Germany, Wenders places them inside the emotional lives of ordinary people (subjects of all of Bausch’s work), where there is room for a man with rabbit ears to ride public transportation and couples make love at intersections.

In Bausch’s work, sets — deluges, walls that crumble, hippos, mountains, floors made from dirt, grass, and carnations — are the obstacles that challenge and dwarf the dancer. Wenders chose his outside “sets” brilliantly to similar effect. Many locations are huge: gyms, factories, convention halls, and quarries — and the performers are clearly strangers.

The 3D technology Wenders uses rarely jumps out at the viewer. Instead, his space has a sheen and glassy quality that is non-realistic; it seems to pervade the whole film even in its more conventionally-shot sequences. While it’s good to see dance’s physical multidimensionality, perhaps even more satisfying is Wenders’s juxtaposing of different senses of dimensionality into a coherent whole that I suspect Bausch would have approved of. It’s the artifice and not the realism that makes Pina the fine work it is.

Before her death, Bausch had chosen four choreographies as the film’s core material. They were excellent picks, though it’s curious that three of them are quite early while Vollmond is her last complete work, more in the genre of her later “travel-inspired” pieces. Perhaps she meant to tell us something. Café Mueller shows a young Bausch in a dreamy, nightmarish labyrinthine environment; The Rite of Spring starts her investigation of male-female struggles; and Kontakthof is a work about the eternal mating frenzy as danced by her own company, a group of seniors, and an ensemble of teenagers.

Not pre-planned, however, was Wenders’ brilliant decision to include “interviews” with the dancers. They silently look at the camera but their grief-stricken faces speak of loss, loneliness, and a sense of abandonment. They were thinking about Bausch’s death, but perhaps also about her work. *

PINA opens Fri/20 in San Francisco.

Conflict revolution

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January 17, 2012

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FILM Like the Olympics, albeit on a less rigid schedule, the perceived hotspot for evolving cinematic art tends to migrate every few years. Recently we’ve seen the likes of Romania and South Korea thrust into that rarefied limelight, just as decades earlier it had been Italy, France, Japan, or Sweden. Their moment usually occurs when a new generation of filmmakers with shared stylistic and/or political concerns impact as a collective force, reinvigorating the national cinema while making a splash on the international festival and art house circuits.

Iran has had a particularly long vogue, one that officially commenced with Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is the Friend’s Home? in 1987 and has only ebbed slightly in the quarter-century since. Contextualized by knowledge of the difficulties their makers have experienced enduring censorship and even imprisonment under the Islamic Republic’s strictures on free expression, it’s hard not to admire the rigor and range of their work — even if by the same token, expressing ambivalence toward it becomes a political and intellectual faux pas seldom allowed in polite circles. Partly to circumvent the censors, Iranian directors (excluding those making seldom-exported lighter entertainments intended solely for domestic audiences) have leaned heavily toward neo-realist poverty dramas, obtuse minimalist poetics, and stories about those typically least-objectionable protagonists, children. Only a philistine would say that many of these movies might reasonably strike a viewer as aridly uninvolving, tedious, or too precious. But there, I just said it.

Therefore it’s especially rewarding — even more so when fellow award magnets like 2011’s The Tree of Life and Melancholia are so aesthetically elaborate yet amorphous in narrative shape — to have an Iranian film like A Separation, which is both clear and complex in ways most directly connected to audience engagement. The country’s first movie to win Berlin’s Golden Bear (as well as all its acting awards), this domestic drama reflecting a larger socio-political backdrop is subtly well-crafted on all levels, but most of all demonstrates the unbeatable virtue of having an intricately balanced, reality-grounded screenplay — director Asghar Farhadi’s own — as bedrock.

A sort of confrontational impartiality is introduced immediately, as our protagonists Nader (Peyman Moadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) face the camera — or rather the court magistrate — to plead their separate cases in her filing for divorce, which he opposes. We gradually learn that their 14-year wedlock isn’t really irreparable, the feelings between them not entirely hostile. The roadblock is that Simin has finally gotten permission to move abroad, a chance she thinks she must seize for the sake of their daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi). But Nader doesn’t want to leave the country — for one thing, his senile father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi) can hardly be uprooted — and is not about to let his only child go without him.

Unconvinced of the necessity of Simin’s argument, the judge refuses to grant a divorce, after which she moves into her mother’s house. While seeing both parents (and being the only party aware that both of them are basically waiting for the other to “come to their senses” and reconcile), Termeh stays at home with dad, who is quickly overwhelmed by having to care for grandpa. To pick up the slack he hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat), who desperately needs the income as her husband Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini) is unemployed. Yet she’s afraid to tell the latter about this job, and fears that it might violate their strict religious observances prove well-founded when what was billed as a simple housekeeping job instead proves much more suited to a nurse inured toward patient nudity and bodily fluids. Worse, her apparent abandonment of duty provokes an argument with Nader that drags all concerned into another, potentially much more serious court battle.

Farhadi worked in theater before moving into films a decade ago. His close attention to character and performance (developed over several weeks’ pre production rehearsal) has the acuity sported by contemporary playwrights like Kenneth Lonergan and Theresa Rebeck, fitted to a distinctly cinematic urgency of pace and image. None of the protagonists would likely consider themselves highly political. Yet the class differences and overlapping pressures experienced by both the white- and blue-collar couples here reveal a great deal about how a fissuring system is failing ordinary citizens, whether governmentally, economically, or ideologically.

There are moments that risk pushing plot mechanizations too far, and the use of both families’ children (esp. the director’s daughter, who looks of voting age while playing an 11-year-old) as silent, accusatory watchers of adult folly borders on cliché. But A Separation pulls off something very intricate with deceptive simplicity, offering a sort of integrated Rashomon (1950) in which every participant’s viewpoint as the wronged party is right — yet in conflict with every other. The escalating tensions that result pull you toward a resolution that might bang or whimper, but even there Farhadi springs the kind of high-wire trick that might seem pretentious or a cop-out in any film less exacting in its juggling act.

A SEPARATION opens Fri/20 in San Francisco.

Lights, Jolie, action

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January 3, 2012

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arts@sfbg.com

FILM The grudging, occasionally outright hostile tone some critics, culture vultures, and fan types have taken toward In the Land of Blood and Honey points toward a fundamental problem most of them have, though few admit it: the belief that Angelina Jolie is just too damn famous, too much a figure of public speculation and private fantasy, to be taken seriously — let alone to make a movie about rape and genocide during the War in the Balkans.

That bleak historical chapter occurred about the same time that Jolie was a Beverly Hills goth teen into knife play, too many recreational drugs, and her brother (eww), with a fledgling professional resume consisting of modeling gigs, music videos, and an inglorious starring role in 1993’s Cyborg 2. Since then she has grown up a lot, and in ways that count (adopting children as well as bearing them, actually working at her “humanitarian causes” rather than using them as photo ops), is sort of a model world citizen as far as ginormous movie stars go. She also paired off with another such example, Brad Pitt — World’s Sexiest Woman, meet World’s Sexiest Man, cue celestial chorus — and while it may be a coincidence, shortly after that event he started consistently behaving onscreen like a real actor and less like an International Male model.

Jolie, too, can act, but since becoming a big star (circa 2001’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider), it’s been disappointing how seldom she’s been called upon to do so — as opposed to bringing the near-cartoonish va-voom and ass-whup in movies like 2003’s Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, 2005’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith, 2008’s Wanted, and 2010’s Salt. Truth be told, when she has gotten a serious part in a serious film such as 2008’s Changeling or 2007’s A Mighty Heart, the stubborn glare of celebrity hobbles our ability to let her disappear into the role. It’s not fair, but there ya go. Those are highly competent, versatile performances that nonetheless might be more effective if delivered by someone whose first name alone seems to call for an exclamation point.

This is all beside the point when it comes to In the Land of Blood and Honey, or ought to be. But the fact is, her narrative debut as writer and director (she’s also credited with a little-seen 2007 documentary, A Place in Time) would probably be getting reviews in the respectable-to-rave range if created by anyone else. It’s certainly gotten some of those, but you’d be hard-pressed not to glimpse a certain “Who does she think she is?” resentment behind others who see the film as heavy-handed do-gooderism from a chick who should leave cinematic commentary about profoundly tragic historical events to people who are less … er, sexy.

Not that Blood and Honey doesn’t have its genuine faults. There’s contrivance in the way that young Muslim painter Ajla (Zana Marjanovic) and Serb cop Danijel (Goran Kostic) have a first date just as the war reaches 1992 Sarajevo — we never do find out how they met or how well they already know each other — then intersect again when she’s a POW and he’s an officer in the Serbian Army. This allows him to save her from the regular rapes other women prisoners suffer at the hands of guards, and eventually to set her up as his protected mistress, a breach of code that is unwelcome news to the ears of his powerful father General Nobosjsa (Rade Serbedzija), a fanatical “ethnic cleanser.” This premise is typical movie exceptionalism, even if it’s still a good step above the usual device of casting a Western character-star as our guide in unpleasant foreign affairs (see: Christian Bale in Zhang Yimou’s new Rape of Nanking drama The Flowers of War). The queasy but passionate love under impossible circumstances between Danijel and Ajla is compelling, but never as powerful as several instances of madness and cruelty that befall subsidiary characters, like the brutalization of a young woman who volunteers her sewing services, or an infant’s thoughtless fate simply for crying. The shocking senselessness of war atrocities depicted in scenes like these have some of the gut-punch impact of similar bits in Schindler’s List (1993). Keeping herself off camera (unlike many an actor turned director), Jolie also keeps stylistic flourishes likewise; Blood and Honey isn’t impersonal, but eschews any vestige of auteurist “personality.” (Comparisons may be odious, but it’s worth noting the seriousness Jolie achieves this way is the diametrical opposite of the superficial showiness displayed by Madonna’s directorial calisthenics to date.) It’s immaculately crafted, though, and the assurance with which the director tempers her own screenplay’s potential for excess suggests a refined intelligence beyond what can be condescendingly explained away by having the funds and ability to hire first-rate collaborators.

While not a great movie, Blood and Honey is a very good one; an honorable achievement, not just a vehicle for honorable intentions. Of course the point is nothing more complicated than “War is hell,” but how often do movies actually punch that across, as opposed to pouting a bit while making war look exciting?

Don’t hate her movie because she’s beautiful, rich, freaky, not Jennifer Aniston, or anything else related to the larger-than-lifeness of being Angelina Jolie. If someone else made In the Land of Blood and Honey, there would be little question about admiring its stark effectiveness. Of course, if someone else had made it, you probably wouldn’t be interested in seeing it, or even able to — the one positive her celebrity brings to bear here.

IN THE LAND OF BLOOD AND HONEY opens Fri/5 in San Francisco.

The unbearable triteness of being

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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December 20, 2011

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arts@sfbg.com

FILM A lamentation frequently heard is that men don’t know how to express their feelings. At least not the theoretically less "manly" ones of vulnerability, self-doubt, weepiness, affection, "do these board shorts make me look fat?," etc. Every once in a while, however, there comes an entertainment that makes you think: better to keep those feelings unexpressed, bud.

"Entertainment" is a term pretty loosely applied to I Melt With You, which careens drunkenly between the obnoxious, embarrassing, and unintentionally hilarious before really jumping off a cliff of unearned, fatal self importance. Seldom has a potential camp classic induced such strong desire to plug in the slapping machine and subject all its principal participants to some aversion therapy.

Amusingly programmed for year-end release well after its heavily hooted Sundance Film Festival premiere — did Magnolia really think it might figure in top ten lists or award races? — its largest potential audience might be snark-seeking Occupy-sympathetic feminists who could treat it as their very own Showgirls (1995). Apart, of course, from ex-golden boys in the upper income percentiles who have "everything" and feel an existential nothing. They will likely be the only folks to grok I Melt as intended, as a mirror held up to My Pain, My Self. The rest of us will be experiencing quite a different sort of pain, in a different location.

Richard (Thomas Jane) is a once-promising novelist whose printed output stalled short of the sophomore slump, and who’s now reduced to teaching actual sophomores. Jonathan (Rob Lowe) has blown his marriage, child custody, and Hippocratic Oath playing Dr. Feelgood to prescription-addicted socialites. Ron (Jeremy Piven) is a symptom of high-flying Wall Street corruption whose lush life is about to collapse under a hailstorm of federal fraud investigation. Tim (Christian McKay) is depressed — hey, somebody has to be fourth-billed and most expendable plot-wise.

They’re gathering at shared age 44 — the horror — for their annual week long bacchanal at an impressive cliffside Monterey manse. They do the conversational equivalent of extended ball-scratching, as well as a whole lotta booze, coke, weed, and miscellaneous pills provided by walking pharmacy Jon. Eventually they invite over some local youth, baiting the dudes with old-fart slurrings of "You don’t know anything!", slo-mo moshing, and sad sex-having with the chicks (including actual porn star Sasha Grey — membership really does have its privileges!)

The sole woman here who’s roughly their age is, naturally, way off the sexual radar. That would be Carla Gugino, stuck with possibly the year’s most thankless female part as a local cop who notices these asshole interlopers and, rather than keeping a nose-pinching distance, becomes increasingly concerned that something bad is about to happen to them.

Of course she’s right. Because it turns out these big swinging dicks made a pact when they were 18 that if adult life didn’t turn out to be as exciting and limitless and whatnot as it seemed then, they’d … well, make like Ian Curtis or Sid Vicious or any other punk-rock flameout they trivialize with their self-pitying, worshipful sense of personal identification. (The soundtrack is packed with punk and New Wave oldies meant to affirm that our protagonists remain rebels — but then, every mid-80s frat boy thought liking the Clash made them cool, too.)

Faced with the unbearable triteness of their being, these quixotically arrogant self-loathers implode in terms just as meaningful as you’d expect from four reasonably privileged grown white men whose primary source of angst is the fact that life didn’t turn out to be as easy or fun as imagined in their freshman dorm.

Credit is due to director Mark Pellington (1999’s Arlington Road) and first-time (possibly last-time) scenarist Glenn Porter for their resolute belief that such crybaby bathos merits tragic grandeur. They take the term "epic fail" seriously, making I Melt the Götterdämmerung of male menopause movies. Seldom has a vanity project (right down to producer Jane’s incessant showcasing of furry abs) backfired so badly, so personally on everyone involved. Because every scorching revelation here falls into the category of stereotypical rich-people’s-problems most Hollywood success stories are smart enough to bare only on their analyst’s couch.

Said therapist is well-paid to at least pretend empathy. That Pellington and co. actually expect us to pay cash money for the privilege of watching them bellow like the arrow-felled Last Buffalo is about as ridiculously far as the Peter Pan syndrome can possibly stretch.

I MELT WITH YOU opens Fri/23 in Bay Area theaters.

Silence is golden

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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December 2, 2011

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FILM With the charisma-oozing agility of Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckling his way past opponents and the supreme confidence of Rudolph Valentino leaning, mid-swoon, into a maiden, French director-writer Michel Hazanavicius hits a sweet spot, or beauty mark of sorts, with his radiant new film The Artist.

In a feat worthy of Fairbanks or Errol Flynn, Hazanavicius juggles a marvelously layered love story between a man and a woman, tensions between the silents and the talkies, and a movie buff’s appreciation of the power of film — embodied in particular by early Hollywood’s union of European artistry and American commerce. Dashing silent film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin, who channels Fairbanks, Flynn, and William Powell — and won this year’s Cannes best actor prize) is at the height of his career, adorable Jack Russell by his side, until the talkies threaten to relegate him to yesterday’s news. The talent nurtured in the thick of the studio system yearns for real power, telling the newspapers, “I’m not a puppet anymore — I’m an artist,” and finances and directs his own melodrama, while his youthful protégé Peppy Miller (Bérénice Béjo) becomes a yakky flapper age’s new It Girl.

Both a crowd-pleasing entertainment and a loving précis on early film history à la Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, The Artist never checks its brains at the door, remaining self-aware of its own conceit and its forebears, yet unashamed to touch the audience, without an ounce of cynicism. And if you blink, you might miss the allusion to The Artist‘s backstory: in the opening film-within-a-film, Valentin dons a mask and a top hat in a swift tip of the topper to iconic French villain-antihero Fantômas, which provided the initial inspiration for producer Thomas Langmann to approach Hazanavicius.

Langmann wanted the director to do a remake of the 1960s Fantômas movies starring Jean Marais. “I said, ‘No, I can’t do that. It doesn’t interest me,'” recalls the director on a recent visit to San Francisco. Langmann, however, insisted on a movie with the director, who had made the Bond-parody OSS 117 series with Dujardin. “So I said, OK, I’ll do your Fantômas — not your high-tech one, but the 1905 one, the real one, and I’ll do it in black-and-white, and silent.”

In the end, Langmann gave the go-ahead for a silent movie untethered to the Fantômas franchise — “I knew when we met that he was crazy enough to follow me and to support me,” quips Hazanavicius — and with the Valentin character on his mind and two scripts on hand, one for The Artist as it stands and one for the adventure comedy that materializes as the initial film-within-a-film, the director made the silent he had dreamed of, shooting at Hollywood locales such as the Paramount Studio and Mary Pickford’s mansion and utilizing far-from-analog technology when needed (for example, the Hollywood sign is transformed into its original “Hollywoodland” state digitally, and the film’s luminous black-and-white was rendered using 500 ASA color film to get a grainier look).

One of the keys to casting the period spell was keeping everything simple, rather than highlighting obvious tropes. “I put a lot of things out of the frame, always,” Hazanavicius explains, “because when there are too many things, it’s just too much. You show the audience, ‘Look it’s the ’20s! It’s so ’20s! Did you not know we were in the ’20s?’ Sometimes you have to just show a white wall, and that’s enough. The audience is there to believe, so the more you let them believe, the better it is.”

Likewise the lightest touch was required with the actors, who worried about replicating the silent era’s performances and were tasked with conveying everything with the briefest flicker of emotion dancing across the face, or body language (which Béjo memorably plays with in a scene when she mimes an embrace with her would-be heartthrob’s jacket). “I know it was stressful for the actors in the beginning because they wanted to know if I asked for something very special, but I didn’t,” says the director. “They don’t play silent, really — they play ’20s, and I think it’s different. We think [silent film players] overact not because the movies are silent but because the codes of the ’20s are very different from the codes of acting today.

“So what I said to [Dujardin] was very simple: ‘Don’t be upset with the silent thing,'” Hazanavicius continues. “‘You don’t have anything special to do. You have to do what you usually do — you come with your face, your body, your smile, your charm, and you embody the character, and you respect the situation, and everything will be fine.'” Also fueling the feel was the fact that The Artist was shot at 22 frames a second, rather than the standard 24. “It gave us a very small acceleration in the gesture so the way they move is a little bit too fast, so that gives a flavor of the ’20s,” adds the filmmaker.

For Hazanavicius, the draw to make a silent was multipronged. “I wanted to share my experience as an audience member because I love the way the story is told to you in a silent movie,” he says. “There’s a lot of room for you. You can make your own movie. You participate in the storytelling process. I really like it because you’re very close to the story — it’s your voices, your dialogue, your sound design — you’re part of the process, so I really love that.”

Another enticement was the formal challenge of not only assembling the narrative about early film stars, which incidentally echoes that of John Gilbert and Greta Garbo, but shooting in a silent style, playing with era’s visual codes. To that end, Hazanavicius and leading lady (and romantic partner) Béjo did enormous amounts of research, poring through the period’s films and actors and directors’ biographies. “I hope my future movies will be better thanks to this one,” says the director.

“When I wrote the script, I sent it to the script supervisor, and she said to me, ‘You really want to, I don’t know how to say, show off!'” he remembers. “‘You really want to be remarked [upon].’ I said, ‘Yes!’ I think we all want to be remarked [upon]. I don’t want to make a discreet movie that nobody wants to see.”

Sounds like the words of a real artist.

THE ARTIST opens Fri/2 in San Francisco.

Rare and juicy

Andrew Lam

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November 22, 2011

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FILM Longtime San Francisco resident George Kuchar’s death this September was a reminder of how many had been influenced by his loveably eccentric movies, from famous early fans like Andy Warhol and John Waters to the hundreds of students who passed through his San Francisco Art Institute courses over the decades. Among the latter, for a long time his most famous protégé — at least locally — was Curt McDowell, who started out as a teacher’s pet, moved on to heavy petting with teacher, and remained close to Kuchar as both friend and collaborator until his own AIDS-related demise in 1987.

George Kuchar’s half-century-plus output was always joyfully accessible “avant-garde” cinema, its mixture of the personal and the purple drawing on the conventions of those Hollywood melodramas he and brother Mike (who’s taking over George’s teaching responsibilities at SFAI) grew up watching in the 1950s Bronx. His films’ popularity was perhaps most hindered by the simple fact that he only felt moved to direct something in the more marketable feature length form once — 1973’s The Devil’s Cleavage.

McDowell’s films, often heavily influenced by George Kuchar’s (even when the latter wasn’t operating as scenarist and actor on them), also had a wide streak of camp parody, a Warholian mini-constellation of “stars,” a vivid aesthetic, and impulse toward autobiography. They were much more aggressively sexual, and ambitious — during his much-too-short career he made no less than four features, two of which were porn in the graphic-content if not commercial sense. The hour-long Peed in the Wind (1972), the same year’s Lunch, and 1985’s very-long-in-the-making Sparkle’s Tavern are basically forgotten now, the last not screened in the Bay Area for at least a decade, the others possibly unseen since the 1970s.

Thundercrack! (1975) — an even more daft shot at “adult” cinema than the experimental-minded Lunch — is better known, having had at least the beginnings of a midnight movie cult following. But with all its baroque, still-singular The Old Dark House (1932) meets Tennessee Williams charms (there is surely no other porn flick remotely like it), why isn’t it now as well known as, say, Pink Flamingos (1972) or Eraserhead (1977)? Part of that doubtless has to do with the disarray McDowell’s body of work has been in, access-wise, for nearly 25 years now. Some of his films are distributed by (but seldom rented from) Canyon Cinema. Others are in storage, or presumed lost. Nothing is available on DVD, and any videotapes have long gone out of print. Whether this is due to strife, disorganization, or financial limitations among the guardians of his trust remains as murky as it was in the 1990s, when the last, brief issue of Thundercrack! and some shorts on VHS occurred.

Thus, it’s sadly rare to get a McDowell program even here in SF, where his memory should flourish rather than be slowly slipping from public awareness. Just such an occasion arrives this week at the Roxie — co-founded by his longtime creative and domestic partner, Robert Evans — as two shows spread over three days reprise some (relatively) familiar as well as barely-seen material.

The main attraction, as well as the scarcest, is 1980’s 55-minute Taboo (The Single and the LP), which will be shown on projected VHS due to a typical bad-luck hurdle: its original materials, plus those for other films, were sent to New York’s Museum of Modern Art years ago, only to go missing in transit.

While McDowell often echoed George Kuchar’s use of narrative more as an erratic reference point than a rule to follow, Taboo has an unusually abstract relation to story even by his standards, at least those of his longer works. Purportedly crafted over four years — his output slowed considerably after Evans had replaced the incredibly prolific Kuchar as boyfriend — it has buxom, blonde-bewigged sis Melinda McDowell, recently departed Thundercrack! mad diva Marion Eaton, and a glowering Kuchar as three parts of a tempestuous two-couple marital equation variously simmering with unmet desire and boiling over with orgiastic excess.

But it’s the fourth player who dominates the filmmaker’s attention. One of his numerous onscreen Joe Dallesandros, but evidently a source of particular longtime obsession, Fahed (a.k.a. David) Martha hailed from a Palestinian family that owned the grocery store next to the Roxie; his petite yet muscle-bound Sal Mineo-like appeal piqued McDowell, who didn’t mind the frequent presence of an equally young girlfriend. (In fact, he freely admitted “really getting turned on by straight men.”) Throughout Taboo‘s mix of the poetical and camp, the black and white camera salivates over this nearly-naked Adonis’ body and cocky attitude; in turn, he displays an exhibitionist zeal he probably didn’t know he had in him. A producer here and close friend, former Castro Theatre programmer and current San Francisco Silent Film Festival artistic director Anita Monga says McDowell “just saw the deep sexual beauty in everyone,” turning them on with the sheer voracity of his admiring gaze.

In one of the shorts the Roxie is showing in a separate program, 1972’s Confessions, McDowell interviews friends and lovers, asking them to describe his best and worst qualities. Perhaps straddling both, one confides “You’ve always had this energy, it’s like an explosion. I think when people see your films they have to understand, like, sex. It seems like you need so much more sex than other people.” A satyr-like omnivorous seduction and insatiability still sweats off many of his films as if through pores, most notoriously 1985’s Loads (a Dionysian compilation of guys he’d lured up to masturbate and service in his Mission studio).

McDowell was a happily self-corrupted transplant from the Heartland (with typical alliterative flair, Kuchar called him “curt, cute, controversial, and not celibate … poet of the plebeian and perverse”); he enjoyed shocking the staid society left behind — 1970’s A Visit to Indiana is his amusingly sulky chronicle of a most reluctant trip home.

Also on the Roxie bill are such examples of pure, impish silliness as 1972’s Siamese Twin Pin Heads, a short perhaps dated by a “look ma, we’re naked!” glee that looked a lot more rebellious back then. But 1973’s Boggy Depot is a homemade musical anticipating Thundercrack!‘s puppet theater-Gothic look. Its variously scheming and schemed-against protagonists trill their ridiculous operetta-style lyrics to found orchestral tracks. This is one McDowell film in which people keep their pants on, but these 17 sublime minutes are orgasmically pleasurable nonetheless.

“LOADS OF CURT MCDOWELL”

Sat/26-Sun/17, 1 p.m.; Mon/28, 10 p.m., $5-9.75

Roxie

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

www.roxie.com

No bombshell

Andrew Lam

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November 22, 2011

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arts@sfbg.com

FILM There’s a new movie built around a performer’s brilliant evocation of a Golden Age Hollywood star’s charisma, ebullience, and vulnerability. And it’s not My Week With Marilyn — it’s The Artist, the forthcoming French “silent” feature in which Jean Dujardin (of the OSS 117 spy spoofs) miraculously channels the Brylcreem’d charm of pre-sound swashbuckler Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. (with a bit of John Gilbert thrown in). It’s a wonderful performance, but a) who’s ever heard of Dujardin outside France, and b) Oscar is seldom impressed by mere comedy.

Statuette-clutching odds are higher for Michelle Williams, as her impersonation of another famous dead celebrity is “well-rounded” in the sense that we get to see her drunk, disorderly, depressed, and so forth. (Never mind that Dujardin does all these things too, albeit in a pastiche homage rather than a drippily conventional, sentimental biopic.)

Her Monroe is a conscientious performance. But when the movie isn’t rolling in the expected pathos, it’s having other characters point out how instinctive and “magical” Monroe is onscreen — and Williams doesn’t have that in her. Who could? (Actually, Theresa Russell came closer despite a much looser physical-vocal resemblance 26 years ago in Insignificance, but then that movie eschewed historical literalism for a fantasia wherein Love Goddess, Einstein, and Joes DiMaggio and McCarthy meet one night.) Williams is remarkable playing figures so ordinary you might look right through them on the street, in Wendy and Lucy (2008), Blue Valentine (2010), Brokeback Mountain (2005), etc. But as Monroe, all she can do is play the little-lost girl behind the sizzle. Without the sizzle.

Which is, admittedly, exactly what My Week — based on a dubious true story — asks of her. It is true that in 1956 the Hollywood icon traveled to England to co-star with director Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) in a fluff romance, The Prince and the Showgirl; and that she drove him crazy with her tardiness, mood swings, and crises. It’s debatable whether she really got so chummy with young production gofer Colin Clark, our wistful guide down memory lane. He’s played with simpering wide-eyed adoration by Eddie Redmayne, and his suitably same-aged secondary romantic interest (Emma Watson) is even duller.

This conceit could have made for a sly semi-factual comedy of egos, neurosis, and miscommunication. But in a rare big-screen foray, U.K. TV staples director Simon Curtis and scenarist Adrian Hodges play it all with formulaic earnestness — Marilyn is the wounded angel who turns a starstruck boy into a brokenhearted but wiser man as the inevitable atrocious score orders our eyes to mist over.

Meanwhile, a roll call of wasted A-list British acting talent includes Dame Judi Dench, Dougray Scott, Dominic Cooper, and Toby Jones, wringing their hands in the background. Branagh is good and Williams works admirably hard, but it’s his Sir Larry who unintentionally nails the pandering movie’s relationship to real life when he snipes that coaxing Monroe to act is “like teaching Urdu to a badger.”

MY WEEK WITH MARILYN opens Wed/23 in Bay Area theaters.

I don’t want to grow up

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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November 15, 2011

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TRASH The 1980s U.S. hardcore punk scene was one refreshing bastion of opposition in the Reagan era of militaristic, monetary, and quasi-“family values” conformism. But it was also increasingly a turn-off for folks who liked the music and the message but not the violence at shows.

Rather than leaving the rest of us to pogo in peace, inevitably a few shirtless yobbos would turn the mosh pit into an ever-widening demolition derby that typically devolved into punches. First girls left, then finally bands depressed by every gig turning into Fight Club. Sure, the perps wore mohawks, maybe even waxed pious about being straight-edge. But the sentiment applied: frat bratz, go home.

Still, it was a fairly harmless outlet (if also a factory) for all that excess testosterone. Boys will be boys, etc. Sooner or later they’d have to grow the fuck up. Right?

Well, wrong. Punk became punk-pop, embraced by the musical product divisions of multinational corporations everywhere, and while the chords didn’t change much, the lyrics stopped being angry about political-economic injustice — now they were about the kind of dubious injustice one might summarize as “I know I was a jerk but I’m a rebel and anyway who does that bitch think she is leaving me without a girlfriend WHAAAAAAAAAH.” The Adolescents were one thing; permanent adolescence is another. How (let alone why) do you grow up when label execs and fans want you to stay the guy who causes shoulder dislocations worldwide?

Illustrating one gun-to-head route toward responsible adulthood is Andrea Nevins’ The Other F Word, a fun if superficial new documentary in which the missing unmentionable is (gasp) fatherhood. Punks become dads! Like whoa! Break out the swear jar!

Much of this is cute. But the notion that getting older and more sedate is any more revelatory in a 45-year-old man from a 20-year-old band than it is for the rest of us seems questionable. Our principal guide is very likeable Pennywise leader Jim Lindberg, seen getting less and less happy with his road-to-family-time ratio, given an endless touring schedule and three daughters who miss daddy (and vice versa). Many lifers came to punk from broken homes; Art Alexakis from maybe-not-so-punk Everclear, who endured horrific childhood abuse, touchingly stresses “I’m raising my kids the way I wish I’d been raised.”

Some other interviewees here — I won’t name names — look like parental recipes for future therapy. A deeper documentary might have probed that, while asking wives and kids for their two cents. But F Word seldom gets past the surface “shock” appeal of heavily tattooed, aging bad boys changing nappies and joining the PTA. It’s still stuck in a testosterone zone most of its subjects have at least learned to compartmentalize. (Dennis Harvey)

THE OTHER F WORD opens Fri/18 in Bay Area theaters.

Let’s get lost

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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November 15, 2011

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FILM Dragonslayer tags along with Josh “Skreech” Sandoval, a Fullerton, Calif. skater celebrated for shredding pools and living a vagabond’s life. First-time director Tristan Patterson fronts with the kind of side-winding portraiture that prizes sensory impressions instead of back-story, but whittle away Dragonslayer‘s loose ends and you end up with an unremarkable lost generation romance, a Bonnie and Clyde with lower stakes. If Dragonslayer‘s Sundance awards and Christine Vachon executive producer credit are any indication, Patterson’s combination of familiar character packaging and cool reality effects has already been a lucrative one.

The film meets Skreech at 23: he’s turned his back on sponsorship gigs and a romance that produced a son (no trace of the mother here). In an arbitrarily defined chapter structure, Skreech investigates freshly abandoned pools, squats in a friend’s backyard, shows off his medical marijuana license, and cracks tallboys in Southern California’s magic light. He’s stunned by a pretty girl’s red lipstick and fades into a relationship with her (it takes a while before the movie treats her as anything more than scenery). He takes a few earnest stabs at fatherhood and rehearses his principles of no principles to the soundtrack’s well-stocked bangs.

There are a few genuinely poignant moments — Skreech’s taking a call from his estranged mother in a bus full of punks — but in general Dragonslayer is too caught up in its own glossy reverie to register emergent emotions. Patterson’s tendency to use editing as dramatic shorthand is evident in an early sequence of Skreech muffing a skate contest abroad: repeated shots of Skreech wiping out are cut with the eventual winner’s triumphs and then back to our hero’s defeated expression. Arranged in the foregone style of reality television, the actual event is given no room to breathe. This kind of telescoping becomes even more calculating when Patterson treads into Skreech and Leslie’s garbled romance. Patterson seems eager to place the movie in the tradition arty wasted youth pics (take your pick), but Dragonslayer‘s riskless form makes like Real Skaters of Orange County.

Skreech’s interesting face is the only thing that counts. Like a punk Giacometti, he appears very differently from one angle to the next. His rotating hairstyles and t-shirts provide visual fizz, and he’s also good for sweetly stoned bits of dropout philosophy. With all that said, it’s difficult to imagine Patterson pulling off the same frictionless portraiture with one of the punks squatting in Oscar Grant Plaza — someone, that is, who would necessitate difficult editorial decisions. I didn’t love Matthew Porterfield’s 2010 Putty Hill — another portrait of lost youth with plenty of other elements in common — but its canny diffusion of grief and formally inscribed layers of knowledge make for an instructive comparison with Dragonslayer‘s shallow depths. The filmmaker’s hand is both invisible and inescapable in Dragonslayer, its main purpose to score the artistic equivalent of a contact high.

After inking Skreech with a tribute to his son, a tattooist speaks wistfully about how the young man’s wild style hearkens back to the days before skateboarding was another ESPN sport. For his own part, Skreech listens to the Germs when he’s cruising Fullerton with his infant son. There’s an interesting question of punk nostalgia lurking here, but Dragonslayer is too caught up banking a pretty picture to address it.

DRAGONSLAYER opens Fri/18 at the Roxie.

Blue Hawaii

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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November 15, 2011

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arts@sfbg.com

FILM Alexander Payne turned 50 this year, and surely ranks somewhere on the list of American directors (and scenarists) whose efforts are counted on as a reliable plus. Yet he’s only been at it for 15 years, making just five features — a decent number, until you realize it’s been seven years since the last one. By contrast, since 2004 Woody Allen has made eight features, a couple his best in some time. Still, not one of those is as good as Sideways.

Like all Payne’s films save 1996 debut Citizen Ruth, The Descendants is an adaptation, this time from Kaui Hart Hemmings’ excellent 2007 novel. It’s the kind of book whose story scale is ideal for a movie — nothing important need be cut — even if its very literary pleasures of tone, style, and voice might resist translation.

Matt King (George Clooney) is a Honolulu lawyer burdened by various things, mostly a) being a haole (i.e. white) person nonetheless descended from Hawaiian royalty, rich in real estate most natives figure his kind stole from them; and b) being father to two children by a wife who’s been in a coma since a boating accident three weeks ago. Already having a hard time transitioning from workaholic to hands-on dad, Matt soon finds out this new role is permanent, like it or not — spouse Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie, just briefly seen animate) will not wake up, and her living will requires life support end should such a circumstance arise.

The Descendants covers the few days in which Matt has to share this news with Elizabeth’s loved ones, mostly notably Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller as disparately rebellious teen and 10-year-old daughters. (Also notable, for less poignant reasons, is Robert Forster as the wife’s obnoxious, bullying, blindsided father.)

Meanwhile, there is the inconvenient and pressing business of 25,000 inherited Kauai acres — a last great chunk of unsullied “paradise” — which most of the extended King clan want sold to a big developer for a cool half billion bucks. Matt’s reluctant status as primary trustee makes him appear like the very definition of haole greed, even if his family’s roots go back here 150 years.

Last, there’s the unpleasant discovery that the glam, sporty, demanding wife he’d increasingly seemed “not enough” for had indeed been looking elsewhere and found it, in a casting surprise I’ll leave unspoiled.

The novel’s sly, self-deprecating wit is posited as Matt’s own. Reading it, Paul Rudd seemed a perfect choice. When has George Clooney suggested insecurity enough to play a man afraid he’s too small in character for a larger-than-life spouse? But dressed here in oversized shorts and Hawaiian shirts, the usually suave performer looks shrunken and paunchy, like any middling h.s. athlete turned desk jockey; his hooded eyes convey the stung joke’s-on-me viewpoint of someone who figures acknowledging depression would be an undeserved indulgence. Clooney has only fairly recently become as much an actor as a movie star. He’ll probably never have great range. But if this is his Oscar turn, we could all do a lot worse. (Such as Leonardo DiCaprio’s J. Edger Hoover, the showy-miscasting antithesis to nuanced understatement.)

Payne’s film can’t translate all the book’s rueful hilarity, fit in much marital backstory, or quite get across the evolving weirdness of Miller’s Scottie — though the young actors are fine, not least Nick Krause as Sid, the boorish yet useful teenaged tool Woodley’s Alex insists on bringing along as an ally.

These are small quibbles, anyway. The Descendants is hardly The Tree of Life — yay — but its reined-in observations of odd yet relatable adult and family lives are all the more satisfying for lack of grandiose ambition. There are moments here when Payne’s restraint itself is a thing of beauty, like a discreet late cut to some landscape shots where shameless tearduct-milking would normally go. The oil-and-water seriocomedy of a well-intentioned recent movies like 50/50 reveals how tricky this director’s customary feat really is, of making the serious and the comic blend together seamlessly.

THE DESCENDANTS opens Fri/18 in San Francisco.

A decade of DocFest

Andrew Lam

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October 11, 2011

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cheryl@sfbg.com

>>Read even more Docfest reviews here!

FILM The San Francisco Documentary Film Festival (Oct. 14-27), now in its 10th year, is probably my most-anticipated local film event. One of my favorite docs of all time, Cropsey, first crossed my path at the 2009 fest. This year, I didn’t even try to come up with a coherent theme or find one film to focus on — I just started grabbing titles and watching as many of them as possible. It’s been a gluttonous feast of true stories, friends. Short takes follow, with more online at Guardian blog Pixel Vision.

Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters (Adam Cornelius, U.S., 2011) I can’t think of anything more boring than watching someone else play a video game. Especially Tetris. The goofy, good-natured Ecstasy of Order skirts that basic dilemma by focusing on its subjects, all contenders at the 2010 Classic Tetris World Championship. Most everyone involved was a full-on teenage geek back in gaming’s early days; now, with years of experience under their belts, they’re far more skilled and (for the most part) way less dorky. Trouble is, there’s no villain — unlike 2007’s mighty The King of Kong (an obvious inspiration here), a film elevated by its epic good-vs.-blowdried-evil central conflict. By contrast, Ecstasy‘s crew is comprised of friendly misfits who seem to genuinely enjoy playing against each other; without much drama, the stakes don’t seem as high. Oct. 23, 12:30 p.m., and Oct. 25-26, 9:30 p.m., Roxie.

The Furious Force of Rhymes (Joshua Atesh Litle, France/Germany/U.S., 2010) San Francisco native Joshua Atesh Litle’s vivid, cross-cultural study of contemporary hip-hop offers ample examples of how and why, as one German rapper says, music has become “an international language for those without voices.” After a brief recap of hip-hop’s Bronx, NY origins, the film jets to Paris and Berlin, the West Bank and Israel, and Dakar, Senegal, highlighting performers who rhyme about social injustice, political unrest, racism, immigrant struggles, and other issues affecting their daily lives. Kinda makes you sorry that mainstream American hip-hop has become so superficial and swag-obsessed. Fri/14 and Oct. 20, 9:30 p.m., Roxie; Mon/17, 9:30 p.m., Shattuck.

Holy Rollers (Brian Storkel, U.S., 2010) For a time, one of the most successful card-counting outfits in America was “the Churchteam,” a group of 20-somethings who mapped out a businesslike way of relieving casinos of millions of dollars. Two managers trained a pack of players, who would then travel to Las Vegas and other places, armed with stacks of bills (contributed by investors) and the cojones to cheat until they were “backed off” from the blackjack table. (As 2009’s The Hangover, excerpted here, points out, counting cards isn’t illegal — it’s merely “frowned upon.”) Neat story, but the real hook here is that the Churchteam was comprised almost entirely of practicing Christians; their shared faith insured that nobody would steal from the team’s profits. (Of course, when the team started losing, and theft was suspected, all eyes fastened upon the single non-Christian in the pack.) The fast-paced Holy Rollers tends toward the highly enjoyable, but the Churchteam members are so self-satisfied that they prove difficult to root for at times. Holy smugness, bro! Sun/16 and Oct. 20, 7:15 p.m., Roxie; Tues/18, 9:30 p.m., Shattuck.

Scenes of a Crime (Grover Babcock and Blue Hadaegh, U.S., 2011) Scenes of a Crime proves that “good cop/bad cop” interrogation techniques are used in the real world, not just crime films. It also affirms, distressingly, that the American justice system often travels through murky waters. When a baby dies under mysterious circumstances, his father is taken into custody; after an epic interrogation, he confesses to causing his child’s death, complete with a harrowing demonstration. At his trial, experts argue over the medical evidence, but the police-station videotape remains the case’s most pivotal factor. Was the father guilty, or did he deliver a false confession, egged on by the cops’ manipulative questions? The verdict says one thing; after watching Crime, you may believe another. Oct. 22, 12:30 p.m., and Oct. 24, 9:30 p.m., Roxie; Fri/14, 2:45 p.m., Shattuck.

With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story (Will Hess and Nikki Frakes, U.S., 2011) DocFest’s closing-night film defines “hagiography,” but if you don’t love Marvel Comics maestro Stan Lee, you might not have a pulse. Basically everyone ever associated with a Lee-based project (movie stars, directors, artists) pops up to fawn over the 88-year-old dynamo, but most delightful is the man himself, a hilarious, heartfelt character who has clearly spent his entire adult life working at a job he loves, influencing and entertaining millions along the way. With Great Power doesn’t quite come out and say it, but I will: he’s a real-life superhero. Oct. 23, 9:30 p.m., and Oct. 27, 7:15 p.m., Roxie; Oct. 20, 9:30 p.m., Shattuck.

The Woodmans (Scott Willis, U.S., 2010) Francesca Woodman jumped off a building in 1981 when she was 22, despondent over the fact that her photographs hadn’t found a niche in New York’s competitive art world. She was no stranger to competition — she’d grown up with a parents who placed art-making above all other obligations. Fast-forward to the 21st century, and Francesca remains the most-acclaimed Woodman; her haunting black-and-white photos, often featuring the artist’s nude figure, have proven hugely influential in the realms of both fine art and fashion. She was, as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art website says (an exhibit of her work opens Nov. 5), “ahead of her time.” Scott Willis’ documentary features extensive interviews with her parents, George and Betty, and to a lesser extent Francesca’s brother, Charles (also an artist); the film is both Woodman bio and incisive exploration of the family’s complex dynamics. Most fascinating is Charles, who remarks of his daughter’s posthumous success, “It’s frustrating when tragedy overshadows work.” But after her death, he took up photography, making images that resemble those Francesca left behind. Sat/15, 7:15 p.m., and Oct. 22, 12:30 p.m., Roxie; Sun/16, 12:30 p.m., Shattuck.

SAN FRANCISCO DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL

Oct 14-27, $11

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St, SF

Shattuck Theatre

2230 Shattuck, Berk

www.sfindie.com

A new England

Andrew Lam

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October 4, 2011

2

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Recent urban unrest in London and elsewhere induced the same shocked response England has rolled out some years now at signs of what’s been termed “Broken Britain” — as if it were a complete surprise that the poor won’t always be content to suffer in polite near-silence. Propriety and gentility may be shrinking in the U.K., but they still have a powerful grip on the nation’s sense of itself.

Similar tremors were felt five decades ago when things were at last waking up both economically and artistically after the long post-World War II slough. Back then, the “Angry Young Man” school excited international interest even as it triggered alarm and disdain from various native bastions of cultural conservatism. Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) discomfited many by depicting a young factory grunt who frequently wakes in a married woman’s bed, chases other available tail, lies as naturally as he breathes, calls neighborhood busybodies “bitches and whores,” and on one Friday night entertains himself by drinking till he falls down a pub staircase — deliberately. “What I’m out for is a good time. The rest is propaganda,” sneers beady-eyed Albert Finney in the 1960 movie version, airing his contempt for all things cozy, dull and complacent.

Today British movies (at least the ones that get exported) are still more or less divided as then, by a sort of class system. There’s the Masterpiece Theatre school of costumed romance and intrigue on one hand, the pint-mouthed rebel yellers practicing gritty realism on another. Except contemporary examples of the latter, from Fish Tank (2009) to Attack the Block now allow that Angry Young Men might be something else beyond the radar once tuned to cocky, white male antiheroes.

The “something else” is gay in Weekend, which was shot in some of the same Nottingham locations where Finney’s Arthur Seaton kicked against the pricks in Saturday Night. The landscape has changed — street level is now 14 floors down in a council flat building — but still nondescript, the boozy clubs still loud but with different bad music. It’s at one such that bearded, late-20s Russell (Tom Cullen) gets loaded, waking up next morning with a hangover next to no married lady but rather Glen (Chris New). You get the feeling Glen has been the guy a lot of Russells have woken up next to; he enjoys the upper-hand power of remembering more about last night than they do.

It would be unfair to reveal more of Weekend’s plot, what little there is. Suffice it to say these two lads get to know each other over less than 48 hours, during which it emerges that Russell isn’t really “out,” while Glen is with a vengeance — though the matter of who is more emotionally mature or well adjusted isn’t so simple.

Writer-director Andrew Haigh made one prior feature, a semi-interesting, perhaps semi-staged portrait of a male hustler called Greek Pete (2009). It didn’t really prepare one for Weekend, which is the kind of yakkety, bumps and-all romantic brief encounter movies (or any other media) so rarely render this fresh, natural, and un-stagy. Both protagonists are average in their way — even Glen’s cynical pretensions are pretty standard-issue, such that you might decide he’s full of shit if in more-kindly-disposed Russell’s position — but the somewhat improvised ways they talk and act aren’t banal or predictable, just credible. They fuck (the movie isn’t graphic, but it’s frank about stuff like wiping splooge off one’s stomach), do too much cocaine, argue, and face a paths-parting deadline imposed by the fact that Glen will shortly leave to study for two years in the U.S. This may not be true love, but even the frail possibility of that is enough to usefully unsettle them both.

Weekend makes its small but somehow stirring impact for a number of reasons, but not least because it’s British working-class anti-miserabilism — the Angry Young Man conventions so taken for granted that simply being working class no longer means anyone actually has to be angry. Despite a fag-baiting catcall or two, the problems these blokes face aren’t social (they’ve both got accepting straight friends, if not family) but internal. Two strangers connecting despite themselves is such an intricate thing it’s no wonder movies seldom get it this right. *

WEEKEND opens Fri/7 in Bay Area theaters.

Twang on

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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September 27, 2011

0

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM Hillbilly horror is nothing new. Some might mark its heyday as the 1970s, a decade containing Deliverance (1972), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), and I Spit On Your Grave (1978). Others might point to Herschell Gordon Lewis’ immortal Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), probably cinema’s most persuasive example of why Yankees road-tripping below the Mason-Dixon Line should never, for any reason, detour off the main highway.

Twenty-first century hillbillies are still scary, at least on the big screen; this is one stereotype that’ll never die. Any number of recent horror films — most of them remakes of the films noted above (or directed by Rob Zombie) — have drawn their clichéd plots from a checklist that always includes city slickers, cars that break down, cell phones that don’t work, and inbred locals. The lesson remains the same: stay the hell out of the backwoods, yuppie!

But what if, asks Eli Craig’s Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, you were totally misjudging those sinister-seeming whiskey-tango yokels? What if, despite being a little unwashed and fond of sharp objects and power tools, they happened to be really nice guys? The film — about a couple of blue-collar dudes (Tyler Labine and Alan Tudyk) hanging out at their mountain cabin who unwittingly terrify a group of vacationing college kids — finds a sense of humor in the tired genre. The result is blood-spattered comedy gold.

“The initial premise was: what if Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre was really just a good guy with an unwieldy chainsaw? It’s the good-looking college kids that have been terrorizing him!” explains first-time feature director Craig (he also co-wrote the script). “In order to pull this off, there has to be a series of misunderstandings. My writing partner, Morgan Jurgenson, and I made a rule that Tucker and Dale would never hurt the college kids. They just kept on accidentally killing themselves and leaving their mangled corpses in Tucker and Dale’s yard to deal with.”

The accidental suicides (most memorably, via wood chipper) are gruesome enough to please genre fans — but are also pretty goofy. The label “splat-stick” has rarely been so aptly applied.

“The film satirizes and often pays homage to the clichés of the slasher-horror genre. So it has the look and feel of a horror film, but I think of it as a comedy,” Craig explains. “I always erred on the side of big laughs, and for the stuff that was meant to be more horrific, I tried to push it into a realm where it was so big that it wasn’t quite believable, and hence allowed people to still laugh.”

Horror comedies may not traditionally rake it in at the box office, but they often become cult sensations — see: 1985’s Re-Animator and 2004’s Shaun of the Dead. For Craig, whose film is firmly in the midnight-movie tradition, the lasting appeal of the genre (which goes back even farther than hillbilly horror — see: Abbott and Costello) is obvious.

“To me [horror comedies are] a subcategory of black comedy which basically deals with the farce that is human existence,” he says. “We are all stuck within these hopeless limitations — we can only see life through one pair of eyes, and we will all face our own demise. But to laugh at it all, to see that the world is both cruel and hilarious, to find joy in the hopeless, that allows us to transcend our problems. Good horror-comedy is about laughter amid despair, [which] really is the best option we have sometimes.”

TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL opens Fri/30 in Bay Area theaters.