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THE GUEST opens today! Plus more new movies!

Sue Vaughan
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0
THE GUEST opens today! Plus more new movies!

FINALLY, clever, retro-styled thriller The Guest is here. Check out our interview with the filmmakers and star here, and then go see The Guest this weekend. You’re welcome. 

After you’ve TCB in that regard, you might also want to check out sleek new Patricia Highsmith adaptation The Two Faces of January (review here), family drama The Judge (interview with the director here), or journalism thriller Kill the Messenger. How to decide? Read on for reviews of these and even more films, plus trailers. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccai-E36BfI

Advanced Style Many successful blogs have been turned into books, but few make the leap to film. Street-style photographer Ari Seth Cohen’s online album of fashionable elders translates well to the big screen, as without exception all of the women featured in Lina Plioplyte’s doc are vivacious, quotable (“I’m an artist, and my art is dressing!” “Good style improves the view for everybody!”), and — obviously — wonderfully, uniquely put together. Although at least one subject, 80-year-old Joyce, is wealthy (witness her to-die-for vintage Chanel purse collection), the rest of the women eschew designer for the most part; one owns a vintage store (“Sometimes I’m building an outfit for seven years!”), one owns a boutique (“You either have it, or you don’t … but you can learn it!”), and others are artists, including a former Apollo theater dancer. All are close with Cohen, an access point that allows Advanced Style to dig beyond fabulous hats and into end-of-life issues, including health concerns among the women and their aging spouses. But mostly, this is an upbeat, inspiring look at women who are embracing their later years — and looking rather fab doing it. (1:12) (Cheryl Eddy)

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day In this Disney comedy based on the Judith Viorst children’s book, Steve Carell and Jennifer Garner star as parents to an 11-year-old struggling through, well, see title. (1:22)

Björk: Biophilia Live Those who saw one of Björk’s mind-boggling, futuristic spaceshows for her most recent full-length, Biophilia — performed at only a handful of intimate venues around the world — know the specialness of that experience. At the shows, Björk, everyone’s favorite chirping Icelandic wood-fairy, stood on relatively diminutive stages surrounded by a chilling blonde choir while a Tesla coil vibrated electric shocks of purple lightning. Now those who missed out on these very-special-Björk-moments have the luxury of viewing the full show with concert film Bjork: Biophilia Live. The album was heavily based around imaginative musical apps created for it, making the film an interactive experience as well (play along at home!) The film showcases the complete experience of Biophilia, which touches on nature, music, and technology, during Björk’s showing at London’s Alexandra Palace in 2013. While it would have been nice to see a few behind-the-scenes moments, Biophilia Live still brings up close rushes of electrifying sounds, glittering visuals, and a poufy red-orange cotton candy wig floating delicately above Bjork’s cherubic face. (1:37) Roxie. (Emily Savage)

Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead Beginning moments after the events of the original 2009 Dead Snow, Tommy Wirkola’s sequel has that film’s sole survivor, Martin (Vegar Hoel), fleeing the resurrected Nazi invaders who laid waste to his seven fellow med school students on their holiday weekend. Crashing his car en route, he wakes up in the hospital, where there’s some good news — he’s alive — but also plenty of bad. For one thing, the infected arm he sawed off to escape zombie-bite infection has been replaced; that would be good, if he weren’t now the bearer of an arm belonging to none other than the nefarious Col. Herzog (Orjan Gamst); naturally, the limb has a malevolent mind of its own. Plus, the authorities laugh off his story of undead Nazi attackers, naturally assuming that he killed his friends himself. Worse still, Martin figures out that Herzog and company won’t stop killing (and “turning”) the living until they’ve conquered a sleepy town some miles away — thus completing their direct orders from Hitler 70 years ago. The first film took its time revealing the outrageous premise, poking along as a conventional slasher until turning into an increasingly berserk, hilarious black comedy midway. This follow-up makes an all-too-predictable mistake: It starts out at “over-the-top,” leaving the movie nowhere to go but further into slapstick gore and bad-taste jokes, all scaled bigger but just half as funny as before. (There’s also the really dismal addition of three zombie-obsessed American nerds, additional “comedy relief” presumably aimed at US audiences — but I’m not sure even a Norwegian could find these asinine cartoons amusing.) Dead Snow 2 has high energy and some laughs, but if you haven’t seen the original, that’s the place to start — and perhaps to end. (1:40) Roxie. (Dennis Harvey)

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her/Him The combined version, Them, was released earlier this fall; now, the individual films exploring a marriage in shreds arrive in theaters. Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy star. (3:19)

Dracula Untold Now it can be told: Dracula was super-duper into Game of Thrones! Between the tension-fraught banquet scenes, swordplay, intrigue, ornate costumes and armor, mop-topped children in peril, and dragon references — not to mention the casting of Big Daddy Lannister (Charles Dance) in a key role — the HBO show looms large over this lightweight but enjoyable vampire yarn, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Soulfully goth Luke Evans (the Hobbit series) stars as Count Dracula before, during, and after his transformation into the fang-bearer of legend; turns out he was a bloodthirsty dude even in human form (hence the nickname “Vlad the Impaler”), though the film lets him rationalize this battlefield behavior by pointing out it was an intimidation tactic designed to save lives by encouraging armies to surrender. Uh-huh. Some clever effects (bats galore!) and flashes of wry wit add to the fun of this mostly forgettable but seasonally-appropriate exercise. (1:32) (Cheryl Eddy) 

The Green Prince Nadav Schirman’s Sundance Film Festival audience award winner (and SF Jewish Film Festival opening night film) should make an impression well beyond the fest circuit; it’s edited and scored like a thriller, surging ahead with constant tension despite the fact that most of the movie consists of the same two talking heads. But what subjects: Palestinian Mosab Hassan Yousef, oldest son of a Hamas leader, and Shin Bet agent Gonen Ben Yitzhak, the man who recruited Mosab to spy on behalf of Israel. How this relationship came to be, the sensitive information it yielded, the incredible risks both men took, and how Mosab eventually ended up living in the United States and sharing his tale — for so long, a life-or-death secret — with the world, is an undeniably gripping tale of loyalty, trust, and a most unlikely friendship. (1:41) (Cheryl Eddy)

The Guest See “Go for Goth.” (1:39)

The Judge Crackling chemistry between Robert Downey, Jr. (as Hank, a hotshot Chicago lawyer who reluctantly returns to his rural hometown after the death of his mother) and Robert Duvall (as the stern title character, Hank’s long-estranged father, Joseph) elevates this otherwise heavy-handed look at a dysfunctional family forced to pull together when Joseph is arrested for murder. The rest of the cast in this more mature departure for director David Dobkin (2005’s The Wedding Crashers) ain’t bad, either; there’s Vincent D’Onofrio as Hank’s seething older brother; Vera Farmiga as Sam, the high school sweetheart Hank left behind; and Billy Bob Thornton as a gimlet-eyed prosecutor with an ax to grind. At two hours and 20 minutes, there’s a lot of opportunity for sentimentality, including a recurring narrative device of using home movies — a treasured hobby of Hank’s younger brother, Dale (Jeremy Strong), unfortunately scripted as a “childlike,” vaguely autistic type — to remind us The Way We Were When Things Were Good. And as if the drama of a murder trial wasn’t enough, there’s also Hank’s tentative reconciliation with Sam, relationship-building efforts with his own wee daughter (Emma Tremblay), a tornado, etc. etc. If The Judge tries to be too many genres at once (see also: Cameron Crowe’s lesser filmography), at least it has those marvelously acted Downey vs. Duvall tête-à-têtes — as well as one memorably hilarious jury-selection scene. For an interview with Dobkin, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (2:21) (Cheryl Eddy)

Kill the Messenger Based partly on former San Jose Mercury News investigative reporter Gary Webb’s 1998 book, Dark Alliance, and partly on a posthumous 2004 biography of Webb written by SoCal reporter Nick Schou (from which the film takes its title), Kill the Messenger recounts a grim tale of single-minded muckraking, professional betrayal, and how the federal government’s dubious War on Drugs took an extra-grim turn during the Reagan administration. As the film opens, Webb (Jeremy Renner) is working for the Mercury News, having moved to the Bay Area with his wife (Rosemarie DeWitt) and three kids after some marital trouble back east. In the course of covering a drug dealer’s trial, he gets tipped to a story connecting the CIA, the US funding of the contras in Nicaragua, and the crack cocaine that began pouring into Los Angeles and other American cities in the mid-1980s. Michael Cuesta, who since his directorial debut with L.I.E. in 2001 has been mainly working in television (Homeland, Six Feet Under), attempts to combine an All the President’s Men-style journalistic crime procedural with a portrait of the man who broke the story and was in turn broken by it — or rather, by the CIA and the mainstream press, which turns on him with the vengeance, it’s implied, of a handful of prestigious papers of record that got majorly scooped. The portrait, with Renner giving a nuanced, painfully sympathetic performance, comes out better than the procedural, which feels blurry in places from the speed of the discoveries. (1:52) (Lynn Rapoport)

Kite Based on Yasuomi Umetsu’s cult anime, known for its fetishy sex and violence involving a young girl assassin with a penchant for traditional Japanese school uniforms, South Africa-set sci-fi action indie Kite begins with a bang — and a hail of bone fragments and gray matter splatter when an explosive bullet connects with a baddie’s skull. Set in the dystopic near future, after a global financial meltdown, Kite picks up in the middle of an all-too-familiar seedy scenario: an out-of-it teen hooker in a body-con mini and neon wig is getting dragged into the elevator by a trashy sleazebag. His unnecessary cruelty to an elderly lady sharing their lift forces the damsel to break cover and unleash those exploding bullets. It turn out Sawa (India Eisley) is far from your traditional hapless victim — rather she’s a brutal assassin out to avenge her parents’ murders and jumped up on a military drug designed to dull the pain and memories related to PTSD, administered oh so helpfully by her father’s old law-enforcement partner Aker (Samuel L. Jackson). The catch: a mystery man (Callan McAuliffe) who threatens to disrupt the smooth flow of bloody mayhem with his promise to dredge up Sawa’s past. Kite‘s acting talent — in particular Eisley and Jackson — and cinematographer Lance Gewer do what they can, painting the screen with lurid hues and just as over-the-top emotive moments, with pulpy material that’s high on the ultra violence (and salacious kicks for those into little girls with guns) but low on originality. (1:30) (Kimberly Chun)

One Chance Dramedy about the unlikely rise of Britain’s Got Talent breakout Paul Potts (played by James Corden, who just replaced Craig Ferguson as host of The Late Late Show). (1:43)

The Two Faces of January See “Con and On.” (1:38)

Essay: Revisiting the Coen Brothers’ 2013 ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’

Sue Vaughan
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Essay: Revisiting the Coen Brothers’ 2013 ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’

Joel and Ethan Coen have been creating films for 30 years, dating back to their still-stunning, low-budget debut, neo-noir Blood Simple (1984); it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1985. They followed with the screwball satire Raising Arizona (1987), which contains a pair of timeless (and quotable) performances by Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter.

And yet the Coens’ next three films lost millions: the tough-nosed noir Miller’s Crossing (1990), the darker-than-black comedy Barton Fink (1991), and their surprisingly enjoyable ode to Frank Capra, The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). Luckily, their brilliant mid-Western Fargo (1996) followed, winning them an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and a trophy for Frances McDormand (Joel’s partner in crime) for Best Actress. 

Their next two films were genre twisters: cult classic The Big Lebowski (1998), and Preston Sturges Depression-era homage O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). This approach worked, and both were financial as well as critical successes. And even if critics were mixed about their next three releases (2001 surreal noir The Man Who Wasn’t There, Howard Hawks screwball homage Intolerable Cruelty (2003), and 2004 remake The Ladykillers, an ambitious misfire), the Coens mined more gold in 2007 with No Country For Old Men, which scooped up Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director(s), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor for Javier Bardem. 

While briefly returning to Fargo-esque crime turf with Burn After Reading (2008), a kind of maturing seemed to envelop the Coen’s films after No Country. Recently, they seem to be reaching some sort of apex. Their most personal story, A Serious Man (2009), was followed by their haunting and melancholic remake of the revisionist western True Grit (2010). Last year, they achieved their most powerful film to date with the oddly misunderstood Inside Llewyn Davis. 

MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD. (Only read if you have seen Inside Llewyn Davis.)

Llewyn (played to perfection by Oscar Isaac) is a confused character which led many audiences to deem him unlikeable, giving up on him and ultimately dismissing him to sleep in “the bed that he has made.” Taking place in the pre-Bob Dylan coffee houses of Greenwich Village in 1961, Llewyn is attempting to make folk music, while at the same time hating people who play folk music. This sort of contradicting philosophy runs parallel to many other parts in his life: He gets his friend’s girlfriend, Jean (Carey Mulligan), pregnant and then has the audacity to ask his same friend, Jim (Justin Timberlake) to secretly lend him money to pay for the abortion. He ridicules both Jean and his own older sister for their suburban “square” lifestyles, yet he’s constantly asking them for a place to crash. His seafaring father now “exists” in a rest home, unable to speak or control his bowels, while Llewyn’s mother seems to have passed on. 

The Coens have asked us to spend 104 minutes “inside” Llewyn Davis and if one decides to not just turn their back on this self-proclaimed asshole, one needs to ask, “Why is he acting this way?” One reason is his singing partner, Mike Timlin, has recently killed himself by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. Not only has this left Llewyn a solo act musically, I think the film’s big secret is that this unsettling act has left our antagonist heartbroken. What if they weren’t just making music and for reasons only Llewyn understands, Mike took his own life? The film has numerous (supposedly humorous) references to queerness, and you get the feeling the Coens are practicing what the 1961 culture preached (or rather, refused to discuss.)

When Llewyn puts on their album, If We Had Wings, we see an image of Mike for the only time in the film. A shot of his sweet demeanor on the cover is followed by a quiet gaze from Llewyn that rarely surfaces throughout the rest of the movie. 

Multiple people speak of missing Mike, one even urging Llewyn to “get back together with him.” A sort of father figure for Llewyn, Mr. Gorfein (Ethan Phillips), refers to Mike as being the “life of the party” and if this theory of them being in love were true it would make their album name If We Had Wings more than just a prophetic reference to Mike’s suicide.

The film is also a diegetic musical, meaning all of the songs performed are in fact involved in the actual lives of the characters themselves (as opposed to someone breaking out into song to express their innermost feelings.) This makes the lyrics of the songs sung by each character even more important.The traditional title track off of Timlin & Davis’ album is in fact “Dink’s Song” and could be read as quite a declaration when listened to closely, “If I had wings like Noah’s dove, I’d fly the river to the one I love. Well fare thee well, my honey, fare thee well. Well I had a man who was long and tall. Who moved his body like a cannon ball.” 

And then there’s Ulysses, the wandering cat. Llewyn accidentally lets this crafty creature out of the Gorfeins’ apartment, watching helplessly as it escapes into Manhattan. Later, he finds a lookalike to sneak into its place. Why is Llewyn constantly confusing the cat’s gender as being female? After an unfortunate dinner-party episode in which Llewyn is belligerent toward Mrs. Gorfein (her crime: singing along with him to “Dink’s Song”), she notices that “Ulysses” is an imposter, shrieking “Where’s his scrotum Llewyn?! Where’s his scrotum?”

At the beginning of the film, a secretary mishears Llewyn’s phone message that “Llewyn has his cat!” and asks “Llewyn is the cat?!” Misunderstanding is a theme throughout Llewyn’s journey, especially during a surreal road trip to Chicago with scene-stealing jazz player and heroin addict Roland Turner (memorably performed by Coen Brothers regular John Goodman.) After establishing that he’s another character who doesn’t get Llewyn (“What does the L. stand for in Lou L. Wyn?”), Roland asks him if he’s queer, since he’s folk singer and and is carrying around a cat. Llewyn does not respond. After the men are abandoned on the highway, Llewyn hitchhikes a ride past Akron, the town that his ex-girlfriend and the two-year-old child he’s never met reside.

As he drives down a long and twisted snowy highway, he hits a tabby cat in the middle of the snow storm while listening to opera on the radio. Was this all a fever dream? Is this a piece of music that Mike loved and should Llewyn personally feel guilty for his suicide? As the limping cat works its way off the dark and snowy path, Llewyn is yet again all alone in the middle of nowhere. Again, lyrics speak volumes: “Well fare thee well, my honey, fare thee well. I remember one evening, in the pourin’ rain. And in my heart was an achin’ pain. Well fare thee well, my honey, fare thee well. Muddy river runs muddy ‘n’ wild. Can’t give a bloody for my unborn child.” 

Llewyn seems to be purposefully sabotaging his own future. And again, the Coens seem to be hiding their main character’s driving issue as carefully as the character himself. Why can’t he just snap out of this self-destructive cycle? When Jean (like his sister) directly questions him about his future, he yet again resorts to sarcastic put downs that leave anyone who attempt to care about Llewyn in a flabbergasted state.

So Llewyn finds himself riding the subway back and forth. And it brings us to perhaps the final piece of this existential puzzle. Early in the film, Llewyn observes a fellow passenger, an older man around 60 with a small moustache, wearing a coat and hat. The man is also watching him. It feels understandable since Llewyn is carrying a cat on the subway. In fact a pair of twins look at him and smile as well. But the older man appears a second time on a late night, when no one else is on the train and Llewyn is now cat-less. This time, the older man is turned and staring directly at Llewyn.

It took me four viewings in the theater (and one on Blu-ray) to confirm that the man shows up a third time, near the end of the film as Llewyn is passing by a movie theatre, which happens to be playing Walt Disney’s The Incredible Journey (1963). The man is walking just a few steps ahead of Llewyn, but this time he is not looking at our character. He is now just another bystander.

Could this be Llewyn Davis, decades later, wandering the streets alone, remembering a time in his life when he lost his lover, his friends, and gave up his passion for playing music? Is this whole film just a looping memory for someone whose heart had been broken so badly that he was never able to put the pieces back together again? Is this a side effect of a society whose condemnation drove Mike to suicide, or did Llewyn break Mike’s heart with one of his casual hookups? “Fare thee well, my honey, fare thee well. So show us a bird flyin’ high above. Life ain’t worth living without the one you love. Fare thee well, my honey, fare thee well.”

Whatever is actually happening “inside” Llewyn Davis, he is for sure carrying the weight of the world on his hunched over, coatless back and it would be all too easy to dismiss him as a selfish and intolerable person. Like many of their characters over the past three decades, the Coen Brothers make sure not to fall for Hollywood’s tropes. They are not always easy to love, but audiences who choose to (re)take odysseys like Inside Llewyn Davis may be confronted with an alternative cinema that isn’t just inspired by film history, but has become film history. Llewyn Davis fought for dignity in his era. And like many of the characters before him (Barton Fink, The Dude, Larry Gopnik, Mattie Ross), no matter how hard he tries, his life does not go the way he hopes and imagines. Fortunately for their fans, the Coens continue to be able to choose their own remarkable adventures.

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks is the Film History Coordinator at the Academy of Art University, curates MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS, and writes film festival reviews for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

“All our families are f-ed up:” Director David Dobkin on his Duvall vs. Downey drama ‘The Judge’

Sue Vaughan
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“All our families are f-ed up:” Director David Dobkin on his Duvall vs. Downey drama ‘The Judge’

With dysfunctional family tale-meets-courtroom drama The Judge (out Fri/10), director David Dobkin is no longer simply “the guy who directed The Wedding Crashers (2005)” — he’s also the guy who got Robert Downey, Jr. and Robert Duvall to go toe-to-toe. Downey plays hotshot Chicago lawyer Hank, who verrrry reluctantly returns to his rural hometown after the death of his mother; he’s met with hostile hospitality from his aging, long-estranged father, the town judge (Duvall), who verrrry reluctantly allows his son to represent him when he’s accused of murder. 

The Judge‘s biggest flaw (besides its nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time and some sentimental tendencies) is that it tries to be too many genres at once. But those marvelously acted Downey vs. Duvall tête-à-têtes — and one memorably hilarious jury-selection scene — can’t be ignored. Prior to its theatrical release, The Judge screened at the Mill Valley Film Festival, and I got a chance to speak with Dobkin about his latest film.

SF Bay Guardian The film opens with quite a comedic scene, with Hank dressing down a fellow attorney in a courtroom men’s bathroom. While there are funny moments throughout, it’s not a comedy. Why did you decide to begin there?

David Dobkin I wanted to open the movie with some sort of unexpected little bang, and I also wanted to start with a character that was kind of the Robert that everyone loves in so many of his movies: the most flamboyant, fun, arrogant, sarcastic guy. Part of the design of the movie was, “What if that guy was a real guy?”, and then had to go through this real journey. What would it be when he strips himself down and gets put through a grinder? How does a guy like that fit into a real family? I think that’s part of what’s cool about the movie — he starts there, and he’s very much that guy throughout, but he does slowly peel the onion back. The layers and layers come out, and you get to see Downey in a different way.

SFBG I’m interested to hear how you approached characterizing a typical American small town. Though Hank hated living there — there’s the scene when he first drives back into town, and is moaning to himself, “This sucks!”, it’s actually an incredibly idyllic place. 

DD I’m psyched that you caught that. These are the things that, as a geeky director, have in your head and you think they’ll work a certain way, and you pitch it to your producers. I said to this to Downey, too: The town is the other glimpse of Hank’s father. It’s about certain values and a certain time period. It’s a world that’s preserved in time, like our memories of being a child, or nostalgia. What’s interesting is when he comes back, it’s something that’s appealing to the audience, but he’s put off by it. It makes us curious about him, so you lean in because of that. And then you slowly discover that he was exiled. There was no way he and his father were going to be able to live under the same roof, and there’s something that makes you sad for him about that. 

But at the end of the movie, without giving away the end, hopefully there’s a way he can reconcile that. I think we all wish we could get back home, to an imaginary home — I don’t think it’s really the home we think it was when we were kids. But the older we get, the more nostalgic we get when we think back on it. Our psyches lie to us to keep us connected.

SFBG One way you bring the past into the story is through the family’s home movies. What inspired you to use that as a narrative device, and how did you decide which scenes to depict in them?

DD We wanted to do it for real. We wanted to make it seem authentic, which meant hitting certain notes that you’d expect to see, but in our own way. Especially for [Hank’s younger brother,] Dale [Jeremy Strong]. The movies are centered around him, and it’s almost like he’s trying to put the family back together again. He’s trying to take these old image and reconstruct the stories, and he’s trying to work out what happened. He’s the innocent. We see the collateral damage of that family through his eyes of what’s happened between Robert Downey, Jr. and Robert Duvall’s characters. And the truth is, if there’s discord in a family on that level, everybody’s fucked up by it. Nobody can heal until that thing gets fixed. I think that there’s an unconscious part of you that roots for them to somehow work it out, so that the family can come together again. But we all have that. All our families are fucked up.

SFBG There’s that line, “This family is a fuckin’ Picasso painting.”

DD Yeah. That was Downey, just off the top of his head.

SFBG I enjoyed the bit in the screenplay about selecting jurors based on their bumper stickers. Who came up with that?

DD [Co-screenwriter] Bill Dubuque. He said to us, “I have an idea for a scene with the jury selection.” I was like, “What? Nobody wants to hang around for that. Get into the trial!” But he knew we were trying to find more comedy. You have to have some fun in a movie like this. We didn’t want to make a serious movie in that way. We knew there was a lot of drama in the film, but there’s a lot of humor because those were the [types of] movies that we love. We’d always talk about Rain Man (1988), or Terms of Endearment (1983), when Hollywood would make movies about people, but with movie stars. Which does not happen anymore for the most part. They happen here and there, but they’re certainly not on the agenda.

Aside from those ones in the 1980s, we all loved those ones from the ’70s, when movies were really about people. Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Ordinary People (1980) — movies that were talking about cultural issues, like divorce and going to therapy, that people hadn’t worked out yet. The films were having the conversation with the audience at the same time. 

The Judge is not an agenda movie, but healing your family and taking care of a parent that’s in trouble is something we’re seeing a lot more of. Certainly for me, I never imagined I was going to have to parent one of my parents. That was the impetus that created the story for this movie — this really difficult experience [in my own life].

SFBG I read that you got the main cast together beforehand for family bonding, or dysfunctional family bonding, as the case may be. Is that a technique you’ve used before, and what does it accomplish?

DD All my movies, I do a three-week rehearsal. I bring the actors in and we build their characters and kind of do a workshop. I never actually perform the scenes all the way — I don’t want to see an emotional scene be on its feet until we’re there on set. But we break it apart, we study it, we talk about it. We talk about our own experiences. I do exercises on back story. It’s kind of like Outward Bound. 

By the time you’re done, everybody has had a shared history, even if it’s only a three-week history. We all get on the same page — I’m able to listen to them talk about stuff, or build things from improvisations into the movie, and everybody gets a chance to be in the room and have a connection that’s real. It’s a sign of commitment. It’s hard to do with big movie stars because their schedules are just really crazy busy, and sometimes it’s hard to do with big actors, someone like Robert Duvall, who is a legend, because they may not want to get down in the dirt and do that kind of work anymore. But for me, I think it informs the work deeply, and part of the reason why the performances in this movie are as powerful as they are is because these guys were all behaving as a family.

THE JUDGE opens Fri/10 in Bay Area theaters.

Festival-sized doses of art, food, and technology at Portland’s TBA fest

Sue Vaughan
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Festival-sized doses of art, food, and technology at Portland’s TBA fest

As the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA) presented the 12th iteration of the Time-Based Art Festival September 11-21, two newer festivals (Feast Portland and XOXO) also peppered the Rose City with foodie events and tech talk galore.

TBA, under the artistic direction of Angela Mattox, formerly the performing arts curator at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, emphasized music and vocal experiments in this year’s program. The international festival is distinct in its presenting platform and density of experimental performance, making it well worth the hour flight to Oregon from San Francisco.

The rather utopian format of a 10-day art binge features rigorous lunchtime conversations about artist processes and concepts, a stacked lineup of daily performances, visual art, and film at venues across the city, and a beer garden for late-night gatherings and conversation, serving as a hub for artists and attendees to mix and digest the work. Additionally compatible with certain Bay Area sensibilities are the possibilities of experiencing the festival by bike and sampling the city’s somewhat precious cuisine, coffee and beer. (Of course, Portland loves to start happy hour at 3pm.)

There’s a choreography to the festival, allowing a sequence of works to rub against each other. After an initial weekend featuring music, sound, and body-based performance, Sept. 15 brought the first text-based work of the festival via a one-woman show. The week moved into personal and self-reflexive modes of storytelling and rounded out with productions of experimental theater tackling rather epic themes such as human evolution and post-traumatic societies.

“We are here for such a short time. We are not supposed to be struggling in our flesh,” Tanya Tagaq commented during her artist conversation. She discussed the release of control as a healing process and her performance was the walk to her talk. Tagaq, who last appeared in San Francisco with the Kronos Quartet in 2012, expanded the Inuit art of throat singing during a highly improvised performance in concert with Robert Flaherty’s seminal silent film Nanook of the North (1922). Tagaq, with violinist Jesse Zubot and drummer Jean Martin, appeared barefoot, frequently assuming a wide stance as she projected her forcefully rhythmic and breathy vocals. Her fully embodied song responded to the vintage footage of an Inuk family projected behind the musicians. The semi-documentary illuminates the harmony and struggle of living off the Arctic land with images of seal hunting, igloo building and child rearing.

Maya Beiser was among the abundant female artists in this year’s festival lineup. A founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Beiser performed Uncovered: electric cello arrangements of cover tunes including Nirvana, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin. Like Tagaq, the glamourous Beiser employed the moving image, playing downstage of a film by Bill Morrison. 

These highly visual music performances bookended a sold-out performance by Tim Hecker, a Canadian noise artist who performed in a darkened house, his arms on the soundboard barely visible. (Gray Area Art and Technology presented Hecker’s San Francisco debut in July.) The darkness amplified visceral and sonic elements of his drones and melodies, a sound bath which rattled the shirt on my body. Hecker’s immersive stasis and wall of sound provided a deviant TBA moment. Resonance over meaning. I wanted to be closer and standing.

The life stories of seniors, both speculative and real, were also featured. Mammalian Diving Reflex’s All the Sex I’ve Ever Had illuminated decades of true stories about intimacy, old age and life milestones revealed by a handful of willing Portland seniors. Cynthia Hopkins’s A Living Documentary took the form of a solo musical in which Hopkins played an elderly experimental performing artist reflecting on her lifetime creating art in a capitalist society. 

“It’s called show business, not show vacation!” Hopkins wailed. Her narrative about labor, resource, and occupation situated artists at the center of the festival, providing the lens of an elderly maker. She was a hobo. Ingredients of the lifestyle included vodka, birth control, and antidepressants. Hopkins brilliantly employed the palatable storytelling devices of the musical — an underdog who moved through adversity — to tell a depressing story audiences may not want to hear. Hopkins’s character mused about her “impulse to do something not about survival” but rather purpose, meaning and identity.

Costume and makeup changes occurred seamlessly onstage. She shined as a rousing motivational consultant telling artists to grow some “spiritual testicles” as they navigate their business. In the end Hopkins walked away from her art, however there are no clean breaks from trajectories lived for decades. 

The Works served as the site of Jennifer West’s PICA-commissioned Flashlight Filmstrip Projections installation. During the performances, which activated the work, a team of artists carrying flashlights illuminated the suspended filmstrips to Jesse Mejia’s live synthesizer soundscape. The flowing white dress worn by Connie Moore performing Loie Fuller’s Serpentine Dance in the center of the space served as an additional projection surface. A deep sense of ritual and archive emerged with the cinematic fragments and live re-performance of a historic choreographic work.

Also at the Works, San Francisco artist Larry/Laura Arrington instigated an iteration of SQUART! (Spontaneous Queer Art), which challenged community participants to rapidly create a work performed the same evening. Bay Area artists including Jesse Hewit, Jess Curtis and Rachael Dichter were among the participants. The routines, which included a jump rope, a small dog and plenty of other tasks and antics, were evaluated live by a team of judges from the art world.

Returning to my bike from Pepper Pepper’s glitterfied Critical Mascara “A Post-Realness Drag Ball” at the Works, I passed another warehouse, the Redd, with similar outdoor food vendors, twinkly lights, and a beer garden atmosphere. This hub belonged to the XOXO Festival. Now in its third year, the conference (Sept 11-14), founded by Andy Baio and Andy McMillan, bills itself as “An experimental festival celebrating independently-produced art and technology”.

Further up the street at Holocene I encountered XOXO attendees gathered for evening music programming. They flashed their orange badges to listen to a lineup of bands including Yacht, John Roderick and Sean Nelson, Nerf Herder, Vektroid, and DJ Magic Beans. XOXO is a closed affair, selling out tickets months prior. According to the Verge, “The number of people who experience XOXO in person is small: the festival is limited to 1,000 attendees, including 750 with all-access passes, and 250 who attend nighttime events but not the talks during the day.”

It was clear after speaking to several delegates at Holocene that few were aware they were blocks away from the dense batch of experimental artists at TBA. I can imagine these guys (and yes most of them were guys) enjoying sound artists like Tim Hecker presented by PICA this year. If XOXO is truly interested in cross field collaborations and self-identifies as an art and technology conference, I hope they consider how to work in conjunction with some of the risk-taking artists with wild imaginations at the simultaneous art festival, TBA, which has been running four times as long in Portland with an international reach.

Trendy food items like pork and the Negroni had moments in the spotlight at a third September festival, Feast Portland, presented by Bon Appetit Sept. 17-20. Founded in 2012 by Mike Thelin and Carrie Welch, Feast Portland highlights local culinary leaders and the bounty of the Pacific Northwest along with top chefs from across the country. And may your conscience be clear while you are possibly pigging out on pig – net proceeds of Feast go toward ending childhood hunger through Partners for a Hunger-Free Oregon and Share Our Strength.

Talent came from as far as Dallas and Atlanta to compete among 14 top chefs facing the challenge of the Widmer Brothers Sandwich Invitational at downtown Portland’s Director Park. Before the lines got long, I visited local favorites including Lardo’s Rick Gencarelli and Salt & Straw’s Tyler Malek (who was making a PB and J with brioche, jelly, and peanut butter ice cream). With three festivals providing such a dense convergence of art, food and technology, one thing’s for sure: September in Portland was made for San Franciscans.

For another take on the 2014 TBA Festival, check out Robert Avila’s piece here.

TIFF 2014: Three more notables, plus a lucky top 13

Sue Vaughan
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TIFF 2014: Three more notables, plus a lucky top 13

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks reports from the recent 2014 Toronto International Film Festival. Previous installment here!

Three films at this year’s Toronto Film Film Festival achieved a consistently exhilarating cinematic aesthetic. 

The first was instant horror classic Goodnight Mommy (Austria), which had critics tripping over each other as they ran out of the theatre. I overheard one woman hailing the psychological terror film as the best movie she had seen at TIFF in five years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fv859onWKPU

With art-porn filmmaker Ulrich Seidel as producer (see 2012-13’s Paradise Trilogy: Love, Faith, Hope), the eerie film evokes high levels of hypnotic and unspoken terror. DO NOT READ ANY SPOILERS about this fiction debut from Austrian filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala. There is not a false note in the film and I cannot wait to watch it again and again and again. 

Next up was Joshua and Ben Safdie’s visceral indie Heaven Knows What (US). Anyone who witnessed their previous panic-inducing ditty Daddy Longlegs (2010) should take note. With the determination of an early-1980s Abel Ferrara film combined with Martin Bell’s seminal homeless youth documentary Streetwise (1984), the Safdies give Heaven star Arielle Holmes a chance to reinact her real life story, in all of its abrasive glory. Also worth a mention: the ear-crushing soundtrack, brimming with sludged-out remixes of Tomita and Tangerine Dream as well as “hardstyle” favorite Headhunterz and Norwegian church-burners Burzum. 

Lastly, Peter Strickland’s follow-up to his 1970s-psychedelic Berberian Sound Studio (2012) is another nostalgic throwback, this time reveling in the psychosexual castles of Jean Rollin films. The Duke of Burgundy (UK) follows the sadomasochistic relationship between two mysterious women. Like its predecessor, in this film Strickland pays a never-ending amount of attention to detail along, with multiple layers of style to burn. Along with burgeoning British retro-genre filmmaker Ben Wheatley (A Field in England, 2013), Strickland seems to polarize cinephiles. Make sure to experiment with these little-films-that-could before making any hasty decisions.

Best of the 2014 Toronto Film Fest

1. Lav Diaz’s From What is Before (Philippines)

2. Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe (Ukraine)

3. Abel Ferrara’s Welcome to New York: Uncut Version (France/US) and Pasolini (France/Italy/Belgium) 

4. Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence (Denmark/Indonesia/Norway/Finland/UK) 

5. Joshua and Ben Safdie’s Heaven Knows What (US) 

6. Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s Goodnight Mommy (Austria)

7. Zhang Yimou’s Coming Home (China) 

8. Sergei Loznitsa’s Maidan (Ukraine) 

9. Eugène Green’s La Sapienza (France/Italy)

10. Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy (UK)  

11. Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner (UK) 

12. Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep (Turkey/France/Germany) 

13. Tsai Ming-liang’s Journey to the West (Taiwan/France) 

Sound sneak preview: Ai WeiWei Alcatraz exhibition

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Here’s a taste from @Large, the exhibition by internationally renowned Chinese artist Ai WeiWei, which will open to the public on Alcatraz Sat/27.

This recording is from Illumination, one of the sound installations, which makes use of the prison hospital – an Alcatraz site not normally open to daytime visitors. 

To hear it, visitors must enter psychiatric observation cells, small tiled chambers with a chilling history: Inmates who had psychotic breaks were held there for observation while in their most acute states.

Step into one of the tiny cells and you are enveloped in sound from a Buddhist ceremony at the Namgyal Monastery, in Dharamsala, India, where monks from Tibetan lineages perform rituals associated with the Dalai Lama.

The musical chanting piped into the observation cell next door is Eagle Dance, a traditional song of the Hopi tribe, recorded in 1964. That has historic significance, too, because Hopi prisoners were held at Alcatraz in 1895 for refusing to send their children to boarding schools set up by the US Government.

The @Large exhibition on Alcatraz Island is the product of a collaboration between the FOR-SITE Foundation, the National Park Service and the Golden Gate Parks Conservancy. The seven sound, sculpture and mixed-media works center on the themes of freedom of expression and the social implications of incarceration.

“The major tenets of this exhibition are the need for basic human rights, freedom of expression, our individual responsibility and the role that we play in helping create a just society,” said FOR-SITE Foundation executive director and @Large curator Cheryl Haines.

“Also, the importance of communication – there’s an interesting parallel in this exhibition about how a prison populace is controlled, and they’re not allowed to communicate with their community, and there are some cases here on Alcatraz, when it was a federal penitentiary, where that was the case. It was a silent prison for a number of years, and some of the works relate to that.”

Extended review: British prison drama ‘Starred Up’

Sue Vaughan
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Extended review: British prison drama ‘Starred Up’

By Haley Brucato

Scottish filmmaker David Mackenzie’s prison drama Starred Up is a brutally raw indie film starring rising actor Jack O’Connell as Eric, a 19-year-old offender who has just been “starred up,” or transferred to an adult prison due to his uncontrollable and dangerous behavior. Though he’s passive when we get our first look at him, he won’t be for long: One of the first things Eric does upon entering his new cell is expertly rig a shank out of a toothbrush and a shaving razor, which he then hides in an overhead light fixture. Clearly, he’s done this before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE4ziBfu0JA

This weapon takes awhile to be deployed, but he’s not so patient with his fists, nor is anyone here; inmates regularly resolve their differences by beating each other to a pulp. Screenwriter Jonathan Asser provides powerful insight with his own history as a psychotherapist in a London jail, an experience that inspired the character of therapist Oliver (Rupert Friend). Oliver has hope for the violent Eric — he’s maybe the only one who does — knowing that this furious creature is likely destined to slip through the cracks like so many before him.

The well-meaning doc attemps to challenge prison authorities who prefer slapping troublemakers into solitary confinement by offering anger-management treatment to the worst offenders. This includes, however briefly, an inmate who happens to be Eric’s surly, long-absent father (Ben Mendelsohn). But there are no quick fixes for any of these characters, especially with shifty allegiances between different factions both in front of and behind bars. 

Although American viewers will likely struggle to understand the thick accents (not to mention the free-flying jailhouse slang), this doesn’t exactly matter in a film that propels itself via physical confrontations rather than dialogue. As for star O’Connell, he’ll soon be seen as a very different kind of prisoner in Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken. 

STARRED UP opens Fri/26 at the Roxie.

TIFF 2014: American standouts

Sue Vaughan
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TIFF 2014: American standouts

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks reports from the recent 2014 Toronto International Film Festival. Previous installment here!

In high school, Hal Hartley was my first cinematic battle. On paper, his existential themes of truth, his French New Wave references, and the stilted dialogue he favored seemed like they would align perfectly with my sensibilities. Like many film students of the era, I gobbled up The Unbelievable Truth (1989), Trust (1990), and Surviving Desire (1993) multiple times. But as Simple Men (1992), Amateur (1994), and Flirt (1995) graced art-house theaters, I found Hartley’s films to be more and more like fingernails shrieking down a neverending chalkboard.

Late-night arguments over Hartley films became full-fledged deal breakers. At least one friendship was destroyed (I apologize, John Powers). And then came the climactic scene in his career-defining opus Henry Fool (1997). I felt like Hartley had finally shed his farcical facade for just one moment, allowing me to feel an overwhelming sense of insecurity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNKU8Jf3eEA

Unfortunately, he went digital shortly thereafter, and wallowed in a series of “mass-media” rants. But after an interesting return with the Parker Posey vehicle Fay Grim (2008), a sequel to Henry Fool, Hartley has concluded the trilogy with perhaps his most accessible and enjoyable film: Ned Rifle (US). Aubrey Plaza is downright hilarious as a suspicious and obsessive fan of writer Henry (Thomas Jay Ryan), perhaps tying all the characters together for one big clusterfuck. What is most refreshing about this return to form is Hartley’s self-effacing humor about his own issues; it’s also elevated by rapid-fire snappy dialogue and enough Robert Bresson references to satisfy his fans. It’s a joy to watch Hartley regulars like Posey, Ryan, James Urbaniak, and Martin Donovan give it one last (?) go in this cinematic universe. In fact, Ned Rifle might even muster up some new Hartley fans … which will hopefully result in a new generation of late-night disagreements.

Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher (US) sports Oscar-bait performances from its stellar cast: Steve Carell, Channing Tatum (yes, that Channing Tatum), and Mark Ruffalo. But it is clearly Miller’s sparse and surprising steady direction that gives this based-on-a-true-story flick its gleam. As its theme of loneliness is hauntingly accentuated across the board, I am curious if repeat viewings will enhance or detract from the film’s purposeful tone?

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

In my opinion, every year should be the year of exploitation pioneer Abel Ferrara’s comeback. Taking Toronto by storm with two feature films, as he did in 2014, is definitely the way to do it. His long awaited tribute Pasolini (France/Italy/Belgium) showcases Willem Dafoe as infamous Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini. While the film is not the epic extravaganza that many were perhaps hoping for (it chronicles the final days of his life), this is most definitely a personal allegory for Ferrara’s own career and should be treated as such. Beautiful cinematography by Stefano Falivene (who shot Ferrara’s overlooked 2005 Mary) gives the film a distinctly classic feel that seemed to baffle some critics. Along with Dafoe’s pitch-perfect Pasolini, Maria De Madeiros fleshes out a wonderfully campy part as Laura Betti, one of the director’s best friends.

At a crisp 86 minutes, Ferrara’s film attempts to communicate with Pasolini’s uncompromising drive and artistic endeavors. There is a stunning scene in which Pasolini, amid an interview with an Italian TV reporter, gives a 10-minute soliloquy about the importance (and difficulty) of holding onto one’s artistic vision; every student of film should watch it on a daily basis.

Ferrara made headlines beyond TIFF with his other 2014 entry: Welcome to New York (France/US), which gives Gérard Depardieu his meatiest role in years. Based on the true story of French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn, infamously charged with the sexual assault of a hotel maid during a visit to New York City, it contains a monster-like performance from Depardieu (who hasn’t been without his own controversies of late). It’s bound to invite direct comparisons to Harvey Keitel’s balls-to-the-wall role in Bad Lieutenant (1992).

The film has garnered ecstatic write-ups, along with downright repulsed responses. The real Strauss-Kahn has announced he will be taking legal action against the film, but what’s most baffling is that according to an Indiewire report, “IFC Films wants him to deliver an R-rated cut” to American audiences. And Ferrara is livid (see the Indiewire article for his colorful quotes). Luckily, Toronto’s Royal Independent Theatre was screening the uncut, international version; as is, it’s one of the best films of the year. Transgressive cinema with a soul has always been Ferrara’s modus operandi. It’s your duty as a film lover to refuse to watch IFC’s censored version and seek out Ferrara’s original cut.

With While We’re Young (US), Noah Baumbach delivered a more sophisticated take on what is fast becoming an Y2Teen sub-genre: white yuppie 40somethings vs. white hipster 20somethings. What started with surprise PG hit Grown Ups 2 (2013) was reconfigured into an R-rated success with Neighbors. Baumbach’s spin on this story pits Ben Stiller and his iPhone against Adam Driver and his laid-back, vinyl collecting, vlog artist. The film works wonderfully on most levels as the aging couple (Stiller and Naomi Watts) find themselves caught in limbo land between adolescence and would-be parents. But with a surprisingly lackluster final act that discards the younger perspective as easily as an unaware 45-year-old might, it felt for the first time like Baumbach has actually lost a step himself.

Mezcal: Mexico In a Bottle fest sets high bar for mezcal lovers

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When it comes to tasting mezcal, the experts have some generally accepted rules. Chief among them is that “you should never taste more than four together,” cautioned Oaxaca’s Graciela Carreño of Mezcal Real Minero at the Mezcal: Mexico In a Bottle event, held at Public Works, Sept. 14. It’s usually good advice: With the spirit’s alcohol content regularly topping 50 percent ABV, and its flavor components so nuanced yet so varied from one bottle to the next, it can be hard to distinguish mezcal’s finer points when your tastebuds are aflame with intense spice, smoke, and minerality.

But when you’re staring down nearly 20 of the world’s absolute best mezcal brands in one room, each of which has at least three or four different offerings on hand (if not plenty more), heeding that first caveat is a patent impossibility.

Events like Mexico In a Bottle are not everyday happenings in the US, so for mezcal aficionados and fans, this was something of a paradise. It wasn’t until the next day that I could even hazard a guess as to how many different mezcals I tasted over the course of those four hours, but it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 40. I, naturally, was not the only one on such a course.

At a table helmed by Arik Torren of Fidencio Mezcal and Esteban Morales, who was properly introducing La Venenosa Raicilla to the US for the first time that night, there were no fewer than 13 expressions to taste — from basic espadín to pechuga distilled with fruits and raw chicken breast to wild-grown madrecuixe to single-distilled Jaliscan raicilla that started off with an almost cheese-like scent before moving into sweeter flavors. All of them were sublime.

Another bit of advice? Mezcal should be “kissed,” rather than drank, but when one considers the blood, sweat, and centuries of callouses that mark these magical hand-made elixirs’ travels from Mexican hillsides to our mouths in a club off of Mission Street, spitting or pouring out your leftovers seems at least guilt-inducing, if not downright shameful. You can see where this is going: No matter how little you kiss, there’s a good chance you leave feeling pretty fucked up.

That wasn’t, of course, the first order of business. It was to simply explore the plentitude of offerings — the explosively tasty spirits from relative newcomers like Mezcal Tosba, La Niña Del Mezcal, and El Jolgorio to the more widely distributed Del Maguey and Mezcal Vago brands. Local restaurants such as Sabrosa, Tamarindo, Loló, and La Urbana also created special mezcal-based cocktails for the celebration, and paired them with small bites.

Upstairs, Max Garrone (who, along with his Mezcalistas.com co-author, Susan Coss, organized the event) hosted a panel discussion with Morales and Wahaka Mezcal’s Raza Zaidi on the history and culture of the spirit, and others like Carreño, Montelobos creator Iván Saldaña, and writer John McEvoy (aka the Mezcal PhD) walked guests through guided tastings. As the evening progressed, and more folks willfully discarded any recommendations of restraint, those informative tastings became less and less formal, to the point where the crowds’ attention was even a little hard to corral — which made for even livelier and more interactive samplings.

Of course, one of the most exciting elements of an event like this is getting your lips on super-unique bottlings heretofore unknown and unavailable in the US. Along with La Venenosa’s debut, Wahaka also premiered its soon-to-be-released line of vegan pechuga mezcals, which involves placing a bag of herbs (Espadín Botaniko) or heirloom apples (Espadín Manzanita) in the still during the spirit’s second distillation.

Mexico City’s Erick Rodriguez, who is known as the Indiana Jones of Mezcal, because of his extreme forays out into the mountains and pueblos in search of the rarest of the rare, also presented a few gems that he sourced for the Oaxaca-based brand/tasting room Mezcaloteca, along with some from his own Almamezcalera line. Due to their extremely small runs and primitive production methods — which can include wild-harvesting and hand-mashing the agave, and fermenting it in leather sacks or hollowed-out tree trunks — many of the mezcals he finds will forever remain in the collectors-only realm, but damn, they’ve got character.

While pondering the larger issues surrounding this oft-misunderstood and mistreated spirit was a big part of why people came to Mezcal: Mexico In a Bottle, it was also, of course, to celebrate its legacy, its cultural importance, and its vibrancy. Mezcal has inspired a cult-like following that only seems to be growing, and while it may be at a crossroads in terms of its sustainability, it’s clearly got a huge support network that has spread well beyond the borders of Oaxaca to points all around the world– one of the biggest of which is, without a doubt, San Francisco. As some of the brand reps echoed during one panel, with an increase in consumer awareness like we’re seeing, there is hope for mezcal despite its current socio-economic challenges. And events like this one can only help.

TIFF 2014: Foreign favorites, part two (Asia and beyond)

Sue Vaughan
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TIFF 2014: Foreign favorites, part two (Asia and beyond)

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks reports from the recent 2014 Toronto International Film Festival. Previous installment here!

Zhang Yimou’s Ju Dou (1990) was an unofficial remake of the American film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) — and it was also a showcase for the 25-year-old Gong Li. I’ve grown up with each of his films over the past decades, including classics To Live (1994) and The Road Home (1999). His latest, Coming Home (China), is his most gut-wrenching film yet. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GsKijZmtlM

Zhang began his studies at the Beijing Film Academy in 1978, after the death of Mao Zedong and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. He quickly blossomed into the leader of the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers, and has gone through his fair share of controversy with the Chinese government and later with audiences who felt his films had lost their contrarian political stances. His latest heartbreaker is set during the Cultural Revolution, as it follows a university professor who is sent to labor camps, leaving his own wife and daughter to fend for themselves along with the negative status of being an “intellectual.” 

Zhang was in attendance for the Coming Home screening, and spoke at length about how China’s youth have never heard any of this history and how this film is not just one family’s struggle, but represents stories of millions of people that are being forgotten. Gong’s remarkable turn as a traumatized peasant ranks as one the year’s best performances and shame on the Oscars (in advance) for not recognizing her (yet again). As an aside: this is Zhang’s 18th feature and eighth time working with Gong; someone really needs to be putting together a complete retrospective. Qigang Chen’s Coming Home soundtrack is still haunting me weeks after the screening. This film is more proof that sentimentality should not be considered a dirty word in cinema. In fact, those that fight nostalgic tendencies are often the ones that have the most to hide.

Hong Sang-soo’s Hill of Freedom (South Korea) is yet another mini-masterpiece from the filmmaker, and another hilarious take on awkward, drunken relationships between 40-somethings. Hong upends linear storytelling, as usual, and showcases the legendary Korean actress Moon So-ri. (Her most recent Hong film was 2012’s In Another Country, with Isabelle Huppert.) With a running time at only 66 minutes, Hill of Freedom makes for the perfect appetizer on any film festival night.

In Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe (Ukraine), an all deaf-mute cast leads the way to one of the most explosive films of the year, and it does so without a single line of dialogue or subtitling. This otherworldly experience forces audiences to pay attention to every action that these excluded teenagers make. While it ruthlessly emphasizes the violent, transgressive, and explicitly sexual nature of the teens, there is an intense structuralist method being utilized here that multiple viewings will be necessary to further pinpoint. 

Belarusian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa’s feature debut was the remarkable narrative My Joy (2010), which consisted of (according to the filmmaker) “140 cuts in the whole film.” With his third film, Maidan (Ukraine), he has created a jaw-dropping observational documentary of the Ukrainian people’s uprising in Kiev from December 2013 to February 2014. It is comprised of a series of fixed long shots that will be burned into your skull for the rest of your life, though your patience may be tested during the film’s 133 relentless minutes. 

Each sequence slowly gathers hundreds of faces, historically patriotic songs, and ultimately a unified people before, during, and after the government’s terrifying late night attacks. The film is not just a testament to the present-day political moment, but is a study in uncompromising cinema. This film has to be seen on a large screen. And if any local film festival to you is brave enough to program it, attend it all costs. Warning: A few audience members I spoke to were furious with the film for not “getting to know” any of the film’s inhabitants up close and personal.

Eugène Green is an American-born, naturalized French filmmaker that I had never heard of until his showstopper La Sapienza (France/Italy) screened on my final day at TIFF. With a plot that must be an homage to Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954), this eloquent exploration of a lifeless marriage caught me by surprise with its direct approach to the couple’s interactions. It follows Robert Bresson’s philosophy of removing cinema’s “masks,” and I found myself incredibly moved as a middle-aged man shared his genuine love for 17th century architect Francesco Borromini. Kino Lorber has acquired the film for a US release later this year — and with it, hopefully a larger audience for Green.

 

This was the first year that TIFF put together an international shorts program (“Short Cuts”), and art-house favorite Claire Denis led the pack with Voilà l’enchantement (France), a 30-minute tale involving an interracial couple and no sets. The mesmerizing actor Alex Descas shines in this wonderfully dramatic exercise. Tsai Ming-liang also continued his short film output with Journey to the West (Taiwan/France) — part of his “Walker” series. This time, Tsai brings his hidden camera to France and places both his regular actor Lee Kang-shang and the iconic Denis Lavant in unison on the streets of Marseille. The film runs close to 60 minutes, and there is truly nothing more enjoyable than watching these two performers hypnotizing the unaware locals (as well as the moviegoers around you). Tsai’s previous announcement of retirement will hopefully be soon forgotten.

 

TIFF 2014: Foreign favorites, part one

Sue Vaughan
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TIFF 2014: Foreign favorites, part one

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks reports from the recent 2014 Toronto International Film Festival. Previous installment here!

** Working steadily for over 40 years, achieving more than 20 features, Mike Leigh has stayed true to his “kitchen sink realism” aesthetic. Contemporary audiences could all too easily take him for granted. His latest, Mr. Turner (UK), is a rigorous and immensely rewarding journey that explores the life of British artist J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851). 

Spall won the award for Best Actor at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, not just for emulating Turner’s cartoonish and almost frightening physique, but also inhabiting and truly expressing the ghastly terror one struggles with after the death of a loved one. Recalling Jane Campion’s dazzling An Angel at My Table (1990), Leigh’s film places emphasis on the immense difficulties that an artists put themselves — and the others around them — through, and cinematographer Dick Pope (who has shot ten of Leigh’s films since 1990, and won a special jury award at Cannes for his work on Mr. Turner) gives every frame an almost spiritual look. 

** Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria (France/USA) feels like a remake of his Maggie Cheung showpiece Irma Vep (1996), with Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart playing out the filmmaker’s latest enchantments. Stewart, who plays the personal assistant to Binoche’s famous-actress character, is an absolute revelation, holding her own during the most fascinating and even erotic scenes of the film.

Clouds is deliciously layered with self-referential mirrorings of its stars’ real-life careers; it also contains ambiguity that left me talking to others about the film for days. The film was shot in 35mm, which is remarkably utilized during the many depth-of-field sequences in its Swiss-mountains setting.

** The Dardenne Brothers have added yet another stunning film to their collective résumé with Two Days, One Night (Belgium/France). The drama follows a woman (Marion Cotillard, in a stunning, panic-driven performance) as she desperately tracks down each of her fellow factory workers in hopes of saving her job, giving the audience an eye-opening look at the state of middle-class Belgian neighborhoods. 

** Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language 3D (France) offers a purposefully playful take on 3D, forcing viewers to constantly readjust their focal points toward not just the images but the subtitles as well. This fast and furious farewell to our language of the past (and present?) is overflowing with so much energy, it should be screened twice in a row. 

** Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure (Sweden/Norway/Denmark/France) lived up to its title when took this year’s Cannes Film Festival by storm, winning the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section. This often surprisingly hilarious look at a Swedish bourgeoisie family slowly spills into much darker terrain, creating a minefield of gut-wrenching gender-politics. Similar to Julia Loktev’s gripping The Loneliest Planet (2011), director Östlund does an astounding job weaving through relationship expectations. With this being the Swedish entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 87th Academy Awards, hopefully someone local will program the filmmaker’s previous three films  — The Guitar Mongoloid (2004), Involuntary (2008), and Play (2011) — which look just as mesmerizing.

** Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden (France), an ode to the 1990s Electronic Dance Music scene, received countless write-ups due to the fact that the film includes the members of Daft Punk in the film. This humorously parallels the movie’s story, as it follows a French DJ who created the “French Touch” but whose legacy — like many in every youth movement — fell short of success. This was definitely one of the hottest cinephile tickets of the festival, and those who were patient with this two-part, 131-minute odyssey were rewarded with quite a poignant punch. 

The director made a splash with her hypnotic The Father of My Children (2009), which won the Special Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival, and followed it up with the coming-of-age Goodbye First Love (2011). Eden has a built-in audience of EDM fans who will be educated on quite a number of unsung heroes from 1990s; added to that is the melancholic role played by Greta Gerwig, which should intrigue many non-EDM fans.

Questions of the week: Who is the walrus? And who is Liam Neeson gonna take down next? New movies!

Sue Vaughan
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Questions of the week: Who is the walrus? And who is Liam Neeson gonna take down next? New movies!

If Jesse Hawthorne Ficks’ ongoing Pixel Vision posts about the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival have you longing for your own festival experience, check out the San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s one-day “Silent Autumn” series at the Castro Theatre, as well as Cine+Mas’ San Francisco Latino Film Festival, which opens tonight at the Brava Theater and runs through Sept. 27 at various venues.

First-run picks o’ the week include Liam Neeson’s latest lone-wolf action movie, an ensemble movie starring Tina Fey and Jason Bateman, and Kevin Smith’s new joint, in which Justin Long turns into a walrus. Yep, you read that right. Read on for reviews and trailers!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ng4MD66WyU

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby Writer-director Ned Benson’s The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby began as separate films about a failed marriage, told from the points of view of the husband (James McAvoy), and then the wife (Jessica Chastain). Because Americans will happily binge-watch entire TV seasons but still get the shakes when confronted with a two-part film, the segments (titled Him and Her) are getting wide release in the edited-together Them. (Diehards will have a chance to seek out the complete work eventually, but for now, this review concerns only Them.) As the film begins, Chastain’s Eleanor (yep, named after the Beatles song) flings herself off an NYC bridge. She survives physically, but her mental state is still supremely fragile, so she checks out of her Manhattan life and her marriage to Connor (McAvoy), and digs in at the chic suburban saltbox occupied by her parents (Isabelle Huppert and William Hurt) and sister (Jess Weixler), a single mother with a young son. Meanwhile, Connor mopes around his failing restaurant with his chef BFF (the suddenly ubiquitous Bill Hader), and pays occasional visits to his own moping father (Ciarán Hinds). The estranged couple circles each other, in flashbacks and occasional run-ins, and the audience is slowly made privy to the tragedy that drove them apart and has them both reeling from grief months later. Even in mash-up form, this is a delicate film, enhanced by Benson’s confidence in his audience’s intelligence; what could have been a manipulative tear-jerker instead feels authentically raw, with characters whose emotional confusion leads them to behave in realistically frustrating ways. The casting is note-perfect, with a special nod to Viola Davis as Eleanor’s world-weary college professor. I’ll be seeking out Her just to catch more of that performance. (2:03) (Cheryl Eddy)

The Iceman A palace guard accused of murder (martial arts star Donnie Yen) and three vengeful brothers are all frozen mid-battle — only to defrost 400 years later and pick up where they left off. (1:46) Four Star.

Los Angeles Plays Itself Remastered and newly cleared for fair use, Thom Andersen’s incisive 2003 film essay on narrative cinema’s many representations and misrepresentations of Los Angeles plays a single night at the Castro. Andersen’s impressively choreographed montage zigzags through a vast litany of film history, submitting erotic thrillers, middlebrow Oscar bait, and avant-garde outliers to the same materialist protocol. Observing Hollywood’s tendency to falsify geography and transform landmarks of modernist geography into villainous hideouts, Andersen’s treatment of mainstream ideology is acidly funny but never condescending. To the contrary: Los Angeles Plays Itself is driven by an unshakeable faith that another kind of film — and with it another kind of world — is possible. In methodically deconstructing countless car chases and phony denouements, the native Angeleno lays groundwork for the fresh appreciation of the diverse neorealisms found in the work of directors like Kent Mackenzie (1961’s The Exiles), Nicholas Ray (1955’s Rebel Without a Cause), Fred Halsted (1972’s LA Plays Itself), Charles Burnett (1979’s Killer of Sheep), and Billy Woodberry (1984’s Bless Their Little Hearts). A true work of termite art and an impassioned argument for “a city of walkers, a cinema of walking,” Los Angeles Plays Itself is the closest thing to a cineaste’s Death and Life of Great American Cities. (2:49) Castro. (Max Goldberg)

The Maze Runner In a post-apocalyptic world, a youth (Dylan O’Brien) finds himself among a group of boys trapped at the center of a mysterious maze. Based on the YA novel by James Dashner. (1:53) 

This Ain’t No Mouse Music! See “Joyous Blues.” (1:32) Elmwood, Roxie, Smith Rafael.

This Is Where I Leave You Jason Bateman plays Judd Altman, the hollow center of a clan of snarky, squabbling siblings — Wendy (Tina Fey), fractiously married with kids and pining for her high school sweetheart (Timothy Olyphant); Paul (Corey Stoll), who runs the family sporting goods store; and Phillip (Adam Driver), a philandering über-fuckup currently dating his former therapist (Connie Britton) — reunited somewhere in eastern seaboard suburbia by the death of their father. This vaguely sketched individual’s last wish, they are informed by their mother (Jane Fonda), a therapist turned author who mined their adolescence for pop psych bestseller gold, was that, his atheism notwithstanding, they conform to Judaic tradition and sit shivah for him. A seven-day respite of quiet reminiscing and clarifying reflection, broken up by periodic babka-and-whitefish-salad binges, could be good for Judd, whose recent misfortunes also include coming home to find his wife (Abigail Spencer) between the sheets with his shock jock boss (Dax Shepard), resulting in a divorce-unemployment double whammy. But there is no peace to be found at the Altman homestead, where fuses blow, siblings brawl, in-laws conduct high-volume international business transactions and reproductive rites, and Wendy’s latchkey toddler wanders the property with his portable potty. Director Shawn Levy (2013’s The Internship, 2010’s Date Night) and writer Jonathan Tropper, who adapted the script from his novel, don’t want any of the siblings, or satellite characters, to feel left out, and the story line is divvied up accordingly. But the results are uneven — lumps of comedy and genuine pathos dropped amid the oppressive exposition, pat resolutions, and swings in pacing from slack to frenetic. (1:43) (Lynn Rapoport)

Tusk Michael Parks has a gift for looking like he’s in a different movie than everyone else, and it’s possible that ineffable skill of his has found its best use to date in Kevin Smith’s new fuck-you horror-comedy Tusk. When jerky podcaster Wally (Justin Long) finds a video that begins like “Star Wars Boy” but ends with dismemberment, Wally flies to Canada to interview the “Kill Bill Boy” (so named for the sword wielding and spurting stump). Wallace reaches his destination and is importuned by the funeral. This is one of a handful of scenes that exists to make us happy when Wally meets magical storyteller Howard Howe, an ex-sailor full of sea tales and an dark plan to turn Wally into a Franken-walrus. The story is based on something Smith hashed out in his sModcasts (excerpted during the credits) and when you look for author surrogate (not that you should) Wally’s impossible to distinguish from Smith. Asshole podcaster? Fights for permission to work freely? Body issues? All Wally needs is a dachshund and a jersey. Tusk isn’t up to the level of Smith’s early output, but it’s right in line with the decline in quality he’s been facing since critics broke his spirit, studios turned cold shoulders, and cynicism naturally set in. I hope whatever soul coughing Tusk represents will provide Smith momentum and license to leave any transformative hardships behind him — there are always beacons of hope (an uncredited Johnny Depp provides a good one here). Despite fundamental frustrations, Tusk has some deep and inky moments. When Howe takes Wally’s leg from him (leveling him to a “Kill Bill Kid”-styled punch line) Wally wails impotently, and Howe laughs — at what, it’s not certain (perhaps it’s really Parks, guffawing at Long’s performance?), but whatever that gloriously complicated motivation was, in the mingling of cries emerges an eerie but profoundly communal squall. (1:42) (Sara Maria Vizcarrondo)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6Ttj9tXzCA

A Walk Among the Tombstones The latest in Liam Neeson’s string of films in which he plays a tough guy uncannily adept at hissing orders (or threats) through a telephone is as pitch-black as its eerie title suggests. Set conspicuously in 1999, when Y2K and far more sinister threats loomed (see: a poignant shot of the World Trade Center), Tombstones is the grim tale of Matt Scudder, a loner with both an NYPD career and a prodigious drinking habit wedged 10 years in the past. He maintains his bare-bones lifestyle by doing off-the-books PI work, but none of his dirty-deeds experience can prepare him for his next case, a nightmarish pile-up of missing women sliced to pieces by a van-driving maniacs. Working from Lawrence Block’s novel, writer-director Scott Frank (2007’s The Lookout) emerges with surprisingly layered characters that extend beyond the archetypes they initially seem to be at first; besides Neeson’s Scudder, there’s a street-smart youth who becomes his sorta-helpful sidekick (Brian “Astro” Bradley), and a vengeful drug dealer (Dan Stevens) with a junkie brother (Boyd Holbrook). Even the murderers behave in unexpected ways. And if its story hews a bit too closely to Urban Noir 101, it’s bleak as hell, and has the guts to make relentlessness one of its primary objectives. (1:53) (Cheryl Eddy)

Wetlands It begins, like many a classic coming-of-age tale, with an unbridled case of hemorrhoids, followed by a barefoot meander through possible sewage to the vilest public restroom captured on film since 1996’s Trainspotting. None of this seems to faze Wetlands’ outspoken heroine and narrator, 18-year-old Helen (Carla Juri), a skateboarding, sexually adventurous young maniac who admits to having a markedly lax attitude toward personal hygiene. Viewers of director-cowriter David Wnendt’s film, however, may want to refrain from visiting the concession stand just this once — chewing on Milk Duds is likely to become negatively evocative as Helen embarks on a round of tactile explorations involving a tasting menu of bodily excretions. The biotic high jinks continue when she winds up in the hospital in the wake of a viscerally enacted shaving incident, from which vantage point, occasionally under general anesthesia, she revisits scenes from both her fraught childhood and her teenage exploits, wandering between the homes of her divorced parents: an anxious, uptight germophobe mother (Meret Becker) and a checked-out, self-indulgent father (Axel Milberg), whose inadvisable rapprochement she hopes to engineer from her hospital bed. Impressively, amid the advancing waves of gross-out, a poignant story line emerges, and, like Helen’s handsome, bemused nurse Robin (Christoph Letkowski), the object of her wildly inappropriate advances, we find ourselves rolling with the shock and revulsion, increasingly solicitous and bizarrely charmed. (1:49) (Lynn Rapoport)

The Zero Theorem See “Waltz Work.” (1:46) 

Dave Chappelle kept me up until 5am this morning and I’m still trying to process what just happened

Steven T. Jones
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The first time I saw Dave Chappelle perform live was 10 years and three months ago, in a large, echo-y gymnasium at UC San Diego. It was my 20th birthday and I was so excited. 

This was June of 2004, and the comedian was at the absolute peak of his Chappelle’s Show fame, which meant he suddenly found himself performing for sports arenas full of college kids who had neither the patience nor the decorum (nor the sobriety) to actually sit and listen to a standup comic performing material, choosing instead to holler “I’M RICK JAMES, BITCH!” or “WHAT!” and “YEAH!” in Lil Jon voices at random — in reference, of course, to their favorite Chappelle’s Show impressions. They did this without provocation or logic. They interrupted him constantly. They did not care. He was pissed. Every audience member who wasn’t doing it was super pissed.

Two weeks later, encountering a similar audience in Sacramento, he left the stage for two minutes, then came back and said: “This show is ruining my life. This is the most important thing I do, and because I’m on TV, you make it hard for me to do it. People can’t distinguish between what’s real and fake. This ain’t a TV show. You’re not watching Comedy Central…You know why my show is good? Because the network officials say you’re not smart enough to get what I’m doing, and every day I fight for you. I tell them how smart you are. Turns out, I was wrong. You people are stupid.”

Less than a year later, mid-production, he took off for South Africa and the show came to an abrupt end.

I have always felt a strangely personal guilt about this. I’m sorry about the idiots at UCSD, Dave, I have wanted to tell him. To this day, I can’t think of another instance in which such an intelligent brand of comedy has amassed such an astoundingly high percentage of morons as its fan base.

This being the case, I went into Dave Chappelle’s midnight performance at the Punch Line in SF last night (the fourth of four gigs in two nights announced Tuesday morning; he’ll do another one tonight at 10:30pm) with, well — I don’t want to say great expectations. But it’s a small club; I’ve heard great things about his smaller shows in SF over the past year or so, and I was ready for something like a redemptive Dave Chappelle experience.

“All of those 20-year-old idiots have grown up,” some part of my brain believed. “These shows sold out so quickly. These are super-fans. This will be great.”

You know what happens to drunk 20-year-old idiot college kids who get an ego boost from yelling stupid shit at standup comedians? They do grow up. They get jobs. They move to SF. They buy expensive collared shirts. And they become drunk 30-year-old idiot startup bros who get an ego boost from yelling stupid shit at standup comedians.

“DAVE who’s the hottest celebrity you’ve slept with!” (“That question assumes I’ve slept with a celebrity.”)

“DAVE you lift, bra? You lift!” (“No, this is actually just a really small shirt.”)

“Hey Dave! HEY DAVE! Are you gonna get the iPhone 6?” (Blank stare of disbelief. “Uh, probably.”)

Have you ever cringed so hard in a public place that it takes all your strength not to actually pull your shirt up over your head and crawl under your chair? Imagine a club full of people sharing this feeling. Now sit with it. For four hours. Now add a two-drink minimum and stressed-out waiters serving mandatory drinks that mandatorily must be downed within the next 10 minutes because it’s 1:45 in the morning.

To be fair: Chappelle was asking for it, quite literally. He opened with some SF-centric bits — a story about how he got mugged for the first time ever in San Francisco, and it was by a gay man. There was a quick, sweet anecdote about hanging out with the “startlingly funny” Robin Williams at the Punch Line, followed by a thought about Joan Rivers (“Joan Rivers was a great comedian, the problem is, she died a couple days after Robin Williams. Great comedian, but that’s bad timing.”) And then the evening became a neverending Q&A session, with very loose interpretations of both Qs and As.

“What do you guys wanna talk about?” he repeated at least a half-dozen times, leaning forward on his barstool in a short-sleeve black button-up shirt (looking, yes, noticeably buff), chainsmoking an entire pack of yellow American Spirits that he stubbed out in succession on his sneaker, drinking tequila and Coronas, and, at one point, ordering shots for a couple in the front row.

Fresh from appearances the past couple months at the traveling Oddball Comedy Festival, Chappelle — who, most of the year, lives in a farmhouse in Ohio with his wife and three kids — acknowledged that he was using this handful of last-minute SF performances as “practice” before heading to Chicago this weekend, where he’ll host Common’s Aahh! Fest, with Lupe Fiasco, De La Soul, MC Lyte (!), and others. And either he was plain sick of repeating material he’d performed three times in the last 48 hours, or he doesn’t have any new material, because most of what he did last night — sorry, what he did this morning, from 12:30am until just shy of 5am — is not what most people would refer to as “material.” This is also likely one reason the most sober he appeared all night was in the couple instances he caught people holding their cell phones, which were strictly and clearly prohibited from the moment he walked on stage. (“YouTube ruins comedy.”)

Also to be fair, Dave Chappelle is one of the few comedians alive who could get away with straight-up, absolutely non-planned riffing for that long — on current events, on domestic abuse and football, on race relations, on Ferguson, on run-ins with OJ, on sex, on marriage, on fame and its perils — and actually, for the most part, hold an audience’s attention.

For all his sloppiness (the last half-hour or so was largely Chappelle realizing and vocalizing how badly he needed to pee), the man possesses a spark of something undeniably genius, and it’s most visible in his social commentary, when he lets himself get dark — like the running gag of him being a “quinoa-eating” black person, the kind that makes white people feel safe. Or like when he unleashed a lucid torrent of facts about the shooting of unarmed young black men in the US over the past three years, including the grossly under-publicized killing of 22-year-old John Crawford III by white cops in a Walmart in Chappelle’s home state of Ohio last week. Crawford had picked up a BB gun inside the store — a gun that was for sale, naturally, at Walmart.

“The store never closed! They haven’t even shown the tapes!” Chappelle said incredulously. “And the worst part is that you’re allowed to carry a gun in Ohio. I’ve gone to Denny’s packing a gun! (Pause.) I’ve had a lot of cash on me at certain points in my life.”

At times you could almost see the sharpest version of him shining through the beer and weed haze, gauging the audience’s temperature, seeing how much more serious and guilt-inducing shit a mostly white audience would tolerate, before bringing everybody back in with his (still excellent) white suburban neighbor voice or a dick joke punchline. 

Around 4am, after maybe half the audience had left (“What if I just wait all of you out? I’m going to be the last one standing”) and Chappelle became less and less articulate, the pauses in his riffing got longer, as he (and we) sat listening to the sound of cars driving through freshly rain-washed streets outside. Everybody had gotten their dumb questions out, or else had gotten too drunk and indiscriminately yelled for a while and then had their embarrassed friends drag them home. It was awkward the way any straggler-at-the-party-at-4am interaction is awkward. A little bit like a hostage situation, but with an incredibly funny and intelligent albeit unfocused kidnapper.

“It will take you years to understand what happened here tonight,” he said with a self-deprecating laugh, as someone asked about his show tomorrow (tonight). “Oh yeah, it’ll be great,” he said. “You should come. Based on how it went tonight, you won’t hear this shit again.”

—

Q: “Bring back the show!”

A: “Problem with that is, when you quit a show the way I did, networks don’t exactly trust you ever again. You realize I didn’t tell anyone I wasn’t coming in, I just left. So it’s like ‘Yeah, sure, I’ll see you Monday…'”

Q: “What’s the funniest insult you’ve ever heard?”

A: “My 5-year-old kid told me that I had a vagina on my back, with a butt for a mouth, with a hot dog in it. Five years old! I was like, the force is strong with this one. My wife got mad at me for laughing, but come on…I wasn’t even gonna laugh until the hot dog bit. He got me with the hot dog.”

TIFF 2014: Joshua Oppenheimer’s ‘The Look of Silence’

Sue Vaughan
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TIFF 2014: Joshua Oppenheimer’s ‘The Look of Silence’

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks reports from the recent 2014 Toronto International Film Festival. Previous installment here!

News broke earlier this week that Joshua Oppenheimer — the Texas-born, Copenhagen-based filmmaker who scored an Oscar nomination for 2012’s harrowing The Act of Killing — received a MacArthur “Genius Grant.” Not a bad follow-up to the Toronto screening of his latest Indonesia-set doc, The Look of Silence (Denmark/Indonesia/Norway/Finland/UK), which is both a direct sequel to Killing and a complete stand-alone work. Either way, it’s one of the most powerful documentaries I have ever experienced. (It’s due in theaters in summer 2015.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqLLhoIrp8E

In this film, Oppenheimer teams up with Adi — an optometrist whose older brother died in the mid-1960s Indonesian genocide — and tracks down former officials to confront them about their horrific actions. Each interview pits Adi against his darkest demon and it only goes deeper from there. The theater echoed with sobbing throughout the entire 98 minutes and reports say that all three screenings concluded in standing ovations (though everyone on my row needed time to recover emotionally before they could even move). 

As in Killing, Oppenheimer’s co-director and countless crewmembers are credited as “Anonymous,” due to the risks they take by still living in Indonesia. Hailed (and executive produced) by Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, Silence is poised to earn Oppenheimer another Oscar nomination — and probably a win this time, too. But more importantly, it has the power to give a therapeutic experience to the many victims around the world of irresolvable atrocities.

Hockey! Drums! Pianos! And TRASHY MOVIES! Passions ruled TIFF 2014

Sue Vaughan
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Hockey! Drums! Pianos! And TRASHY MOVIES! Passions ruled TIFF 2014

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks reports from an epic Toronto International Film Festival. Read his first installment here.

Despite notable entries like George Roy Hill’s defining Slap Shot (1977) and Michael Dowse’s remarkable Goon (2011), hockey films have always been a little more overlooked in the US than they should be. Gabe Polsky’s blood-pumping Red Army (US/Russia) is begging to be adapted into a rip-roaring narrative, à la Catherine Hardwick’s Lords of Dogtown (2005) take on Stacy Peralta’s skateboarding doc Dogtown & Z-Boys (2001).

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

Red Army takes a look at the Soviet Union’s famous Red Army Team of the 1970s and ’80s; it’s a powerful account of the personal and political plights endured by the team’s five stars. Outrageous human-interest story interlaced with gripping flashback sports footage, and all compacted into 85 minutes? Puck yeah!

When Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash (US) won both the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, critics began the inevitable debate: Is it really that good? (Catch it at the upcoming Mill Valley Film Festival, or wait until Oct. 17, when it gets its Bay Area theatrical release.) But for anyone who has questioned their own education methods, whether they be student or mentor, child or parent, artist or technician, writer-director Chazelle’s deeply personal story will hit close to home. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvOksqh1Td0

Star Miles Teller has steadily built a cult following with memorable performances in John Cameron Mitchell’s Rabbit Hole (2010), Craig Brewer’s underrated remake of Footloose (2011), and a slew of Hangover knockoffs (including this year’s That Awkward Moment.) But it was his role in James Ponsoldt’s The Spectacular Now (2013) — speaking of Sundance accolades, that film won a Special Jury Award for Acting for Teller and costar Shailene Woodley — that cemented his status as a next-generation one to watch. His turn as a young drummer in Whiplash should continue the trend, alongside another memorable performance by J.K. Simmons as his explosive music teacher.

Whiplash wanders into darker terrain than even film festival audiences were prepared for. Like free jazz, the structure of the film may feel faulty at times, but perhaps that is exactly what this audacious little number was aiming for.

More for music fans: Ethan Hawke’s Seymour: An Introduction (US) is a wonderful documentary celebrating Seymour Bernstein, who is not just an unsung pianist who withdrew from performing publicly, but also an artist who devoted his life to teaching and mentoring generations of students. Beautifully shot, this fascinating and strongly inspirational film is a perfect dose of medicine for middle-aged moodiness. 

 And Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (Australia/US/Israel/UK) is the third film that director Mark Hartley has made about off-the-beaten-path genre films. His Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (2008) and Machete Maidens Unleashed! (2010) fleshed out an overwhelming onslaught of low-budget gems made in Australia and the Philippines. This latest is aimed squarely at fans of low-budget 1980s legends Cannon Films, which produced countless action films starring Charles Bronson and Chuck Norris. 

Cannon’s overseers — Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus — often boldly knocked off whatever genre was hot at the box office, as quickly and cheaply as possible. While Electric Boogaloo is packed with tons of wonderful clips from many of the studio’s best films (Andrey Konchalovskiy’s 1985 Runaway Train, anyone?!), the real punch line of the documentary is something that doesn’t even happen in the film: when Golan (who passed away last month) and Globus were told about about Hartley’s film, they refused to be in his movie and immediately started making their own. The Go-Go Boys: The Inside Story of Cannon Films (2014) premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, three months before Electric Boogaloo. Because there’s no such thing as too much Cannon love — and since Go-Go Boys supposedly contains a monumental interview with Jean Claude Van Damme — here’s to one last Golan-Globus masterpiece!

Toronto International Film Festival report: in defense of the long, long movie

Sue Vaughan
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Toronto International Film Festival report: in defense of the long, long movie

The unstoppable Jesse Hawthorne Ficks keeps his eyes open 24/7 through another Toronto International Film Festival, and lives to tell the tale (but shares no spoilers!) Read on for the first in several reports back from the 39th TIFF.

Starting on a high note: Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep (Turkey/France/Germany) won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, so it arrived in Toronto with its share of hype. I can report Sleep is the director’s funniest and most satisfying film to date. That said, it does run 196 minutes, and more than a few critics walked out early, which poses an ever-important question about the current trend toward slow-moving, observational, and meditative narratives: Who’s actually watching ’em? 

With characters that come together through long sequences in which intense emotions are slowly drawn out through passive aggressive actions, this immersive class study — similar to Akira Kurosawa’s High & Low (1963) — clearly polarized audiences’ immediate interests. My own interests lead me to wonder what long-term effects that this type of cinema will have on contemporary audiences. Has it always been this divided? If TIFF critics don’t have the energy or enough time to experience this masterpiece, how will it come up in conversation when Oscar fans are debating which film had the best acting? What about those more mainstream moviegoers who went to see Guardians of the Galaxy more than once? 

Looking back 40 years, Milos Forman swept the Oscars with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) was luring in audiences for second and third helpings. Meanwhile, an Algerian master named Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina won the Palme d’Or at Cannes with his 177 minute Chronicle of the Years of Fire, an exploration of the Algerian War of Independence as seen through the eyes of a peasant. I guess there has always been a cultural gap between Oscar-bait, popcorn entertainment, and political art cinema … and there probably always will be.

Also relevent to any discussion of very, very long films: Lav Diaz’s follow-up to last year’s 250-minute Norte, the End of History is yet another long-form master work — and in my opinion, the best film at this year’s Toronto Film Festival. The Filipino director made a surprise appearance to introduce his 338-minute From What Is Before. TIFF programmer Andréa Picard seemed even more surprised than the audience when Diaz’s humble introduction consisted of  “I hope you brought a pillow and some blankets.” 

Committing to a Diaz film is comparable to joining a motion picture religion. Not just due to the length of his films, but because of his conviction in delivering something truly profound. Like some of his own characters, Diaz has the power to astral project the viewer into another world. From What Is Before takes place in 1972, just before President Ferdinand Marcos’ announcement that he was putting the entire country under martial law. A forgotten farming community in the provinces must immediately shift its focus to survival. 

As the story unfolds much like the chapters of a novel, each character (and the dilemmas he or she faces) slowly comes into focus, sequence by sequence. Many of the film’s most devastating scenes featured Itang (Hazel Orencio), a young woman taking care of her mentally challenged sister. At the Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival, Orencio rightfully won Best Actress, and From What is Before took home the top award, the Golden Leopard. 

For TIFF audiences and beyond, the biggest question is: Will you take the time to learn Diaz’s artistic language? His films blend the convoluted past of the Philippines with the mysterious depths of human beings. Yeah, 338 minutes is long. But like Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Claire Denis, Lav Diaz is speaking a cinematic vocabulary unique to the world. Don’t let your laziness get in the way.

Tenderloin upstart Book & Job aims to level the art-gallery playing field

Sue Vaughan
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Carson Lancaster is tired of the bullshit. He’s tired of watching the same handful of mainstream galleries hang the same artists and shun a majority of San Francisco’s young, talented artists. “It’s like that scene in Scanners. You know, the one where the guy’s head explodes? That’s what it feels like every time I walk into one of those places,” he said.

Lancaster is the owner of Book & Job, an art gallery that seeks to do exactly the opposite: make San Francisco’s art market accessible to both artists and consumers. Located on Geary and Hyde Streets, Book & Job blends into the grit of the Tenderloin and in no way resembles the blue-chip megaliths huddled toward Union Square. The space is tiny. There’s no team of attractive sales people standing at the entrance, no bubbly event photographers milling around, no tuxedos, and no free champagne.

However, it isn’t uncommon to see a small throng of young people spilling from the entrance on a given Saturday night, or passers-by (likely coming from galleries down the street) stopping in their tracks to gander at the commotion — looking for something, anything, that slightly resembles uncharted territory: candid photographs from inside of a ramshackle San Francisco mosque, say, or a couple of naked male performers feeding each other wedding cake while dancing to Celine Dion. That, Lancaster feels, is an art scene.

Which is why Lancaster is all ears if an artist wants to show work at Book & Job. Though it began mainly for photographers, in the past couple of years the small gallery has broadened its horizons to include just about anything — paintings, zines, and performances. “People come in all the time and say, ‘I like this place because it’s pure, because it’s real, because it’s no bullshit,” he continued. “It’s known in the community as the no bullshit gallery.”

Sat/13, Lancaster’s walls will feature work from an analog photography club called Find Rangers, which sent out an open call to artists around the world. Lancaster and a group of colleagues started the club for many of the same reasons he opened his gallery. “It’s a grassroots affair,” he said. 

As a former photography student at Academy of Art University, Lancaster wondered why many of the best students would flee San Francisco after graduating, but he eventually came to a realization: “The San Francisco art scene sucks. It is very close-minded, unfriendly, not open to interpretation, set in the same ways. And for young artists at CCA [California College of the Arts], SFAI [San Francisco Art Institute], and Academy of Art, to go to an art gallery in the city [and inquire about showing their work], they’re going to be told to go fuck themselves in so many words.”

Lancaster spoke of a disconnect between San Francisco’s relatively insular gallery scene and the high number of art students in the area. From 2002 to 2012, San Francisco received more art funding per capita than any another city in the nation, according to a 2014 study released by the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago. And yet, the city’s abundance of talented artists cannot break in and are thus forced to seek greener pastures, usually in New York or Los Angeles.

Lancaster believes that this is largely because art galleries in San Francisco have tight business models, and that giving artists a chance just doesn’t allow them to stay afloat. These galleries, he said, would rather show artists they know can sell. “They have their roster of artists,” he explained. “December is Ferris Plock, or September is Jay Howell or Mike Giant, and it’s the same names over and over again. It’s more like a meat factory. It’s the meat aisle.”

This is especially prevalent nowadays, Lancaster explained, as many of the higher-end galleries are struggling themselves with out-of-control rents and the city’s shifting cultural values. In the past year, particularly downtown, a rash of galleries have either relocated or completely shuttered.

But Lancaster isn’t worried about Book & Job. His lease is written such that his rent stays fixed — and relatively low — until 2022. For next eight years, Book & Job cannot be priced out, even as the neighborhood continues to transform around it. “This is place is blowing up,” he said, pointing out the new cafés and restaurants that are now sprouting up around the Tenderloin. All the same, in the coming years Book & Job will serve as a small preservation of what remains of city’s DIY ethos, a channel through which local artists can be discovered without having to flee the city. 

“It’s a really nervy thing to do,” Sarah Barsness, one of Lancaster’s former Academy of Art teachers, says of the gallery. She explained that it’s extremely difficult to open a successful art gallery in the city, let alone one as “subversive” as Book & Job. “He’s doing the thing that you’re never supposed to do, which is having a lot of work that he sells for nothing, and spreading it out to a different, broader population — younger people and fellow students,” she explained. 

She even compared Lancaster to Andy Warhol and other pioneers of the pop art movement, who sought to strip art of its “preciousness” and “elitism” by selling prints for pennies on the dollar. Ultimately, Barsness explained, this made art more democratic. “It’s really important right now because we’re at a high point of elitists,” she said. “It’s over the top.”

By making art more democratic, she explained, galleries like Book & Job “bring artists back into the conversation,” making art more about art and less about business. But Barsness believes many San Francisco galleries have always operated this way. “San Francisco collectors are notorious for not buying San Francisco art,” she said, explaining that galleries have had to survive by bringing in work from other cities. 

While Barsness feels that the economic cards are not stacked in Lancaster’s favor, she feels that Book & Job embodies much of what art stands for. “Art is not supposed to preach. It’s supposed to show you an alternative way of thinking, so that questions emerge,” she said. “[Book & Job] is a little work of art, in that sense, making you ask: Do galleries have to operate this way? Is it wrong to have galleries operate this way? And why is it wrong?”

For Lancaster, however, Book & Job’s place in the art world isn’t so much subversive as it is deeply personal. In March, Lancaster found his close friend, renowned San Francisco artist Shawn Whisenant, dead from a health issue in the back room of the gallery, where he had been sleeping. Whisenant was a San Francisco street artist and photographer and one of the last “true” San Francisco artists, according to KQED’s Kristin Farr, who remembered him fondly after his passing.

And for Lancaster, Whisenant’s artistic ethos of “no B.S.” will always shape how Book & Job is run. A day doesn’t go by in which Lancaster doesn’t think about what Whisenant would have done. “He’s the angel and devil on my shoulder,” he said.

The room in which Whisenant died has been converted into a dark room, and for now Lancaster plans to share it with other like-minded photographers and use it to hone his own skills. “If someone is checking their phone and they see my open call [for a Find Rangers Camera Club exhibit], and they dust off their camera and buy a roll of film, I’m doing something right,” he said. “That’s not just me selling a booklet to help pay rent, that’s helping someone’s creativity … and that’s really cool.”

Find Rangers Camera Club exhibit

Sat/13, 7-11pm

Book & Job Gallery

838 Geary, SF

www.book-job.com

Catching up with burlesque star and fashion icon Dita Von Teese

Sue Vaughan
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With a seductive and sexy nod to the past, modern pin-up and burlesque queen Dita Von Teese has been at the forefront of reviving a once nearly lost art form for two decades.

Bringing back the sense of classic style and glamour of the golden days of Hollywood and meshing it with the tantalizing teasing of the old-time burlesque circuit, Von Teese wraps up a two-night stand at the Fillmore tonight with her Burlesque: Strip, Strip, Hooray! show, a live revue featuring not only her own titillating talents, but a host of other performers as well, including Dirty Martini, Catherine D’Lish, and Lada Nikolska from the Crazy Horse Paris.

When Von Teese (real name: Heather Sweet) first got interested in retro styles and the bawdy and risqué performances of the past, there was just a small community of performers around the world that she recalls encountering; two decades later, she has watched the scene flourish and rapidly expand.

“It’s been really interesting to see the gradual unfolding of the burlesque revival and how massive it’s become. People are starting to get the message that this is inspiring and empowering [for] women that maybe can’t relate to other modern standards of beauty,” says Von Teese. 

“When I started making these shows, I started styling myself after retro looks because I felt that I couldn’t relate to any Victoria’s Secret models, or Sports Illustrated swimsuit models. That’s part of why I look to icons of the past like Marlene Dietrich, and Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable — I felt that created glamour was something I could maybe capture the spirit of.”

When her tour dates end later this year, Von Teese is looking to take some time off from the road and focus more on other successfully growing parts of her creative output, including makeup, perfume, clothing, and a new line of lingerie, which she will be promoting via an in-store appearance at Bloomingdale’s in San Francisco Tuesday evening.

“It’s important to evolve. I have a 20-year career as a burlesque dancer, and I have to think a lot about my personal evolution. I don’t want to keep doing the same show over and over,” says Von Teese. “I don’t like to claim to be a fashion designer, but I think what I really do is take retro style and find the very ‘best of,’ and find the things that translate to modern times and don’t look like they’re dated or just retro style clothes. I love things that are like classic silhouettes: they stand the test of time and still look elegant and classic and glamorous, but they don’t make you look like you’re in a costume drama.”

And unlike many other performers or stars who are content to simply attach their name to a product, Von Teese chooses to be involved with every aspect of whatever project she is working on at the moment.

“I’m very hands-on, in a sense I am an aesthetic control freak, that’s what I do. With a lot of celebrity lines or celebrity-endorsed products they’ll just sign off, or say, ‘Oh, yeah, that looks good,’ but I’m completely hands-on during the entire process,” she says.

“I base the collection on my vast archive of vintage clothing and lingerie, so there’s a lot of work that goes into that. It’s the same as my burlesque shows. It’s me creating something that I believe in, and that I think is beautiful.”

It’s clear that Von Teese has an ever-growing fan base that appreciates and is inspired by what she does both on-stage and off. She says she’s seeing people of all backgrounds coming to her shows and enjoying themselves.

“I think people are starting to understand it more. It’s been great when people come out and see the show, and to see the diverse audiences,” says Von Teese. “I think that’s why we have such an interesting, eclectic group of people coming to these shows: they’re seeing this attainable way of creating beauty and sensuality.”

“Burlesque: Strip, Strip, Hooray!”

Mon/8, 7:30pm, $45

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

www.ticketmaster.com

 

Dita Von Teese in-store appearance

Tue/9, 6pm, free

Bloomingdale’s

845 Market, SF

www.dita.net

Joel Daniel Phillips illustrates the overlooked in ‘I Am Another Yourself’

Sue Vaughan
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Joel Daniel Phillips draws people. He draws them with charcoal and pencil and is known for his life-sized renderings of eccentric, seemingly homeless men and women he meets on the corner of Sixth and Mission Streets in San Francisco.

His debut solo show with Hashimoto Contemporary, “I Am Another Yourself,” opens Sat/6 (opening reception 6-9pm; the show runs through Sept. 27). I met up with Phillips to talk about his work and to see his 14 pieces in person.

As we hung out in his roomy studio in East Oakland, the BART train lumbering by every so often, Phillips’s towering life-sized pieces captured my awe and attention. The details he emphasizes in his work — whether it’s a wrinkled pant leg, a takeout container, lines on a face, or a waning pack of Newport Lights — illustrate the attitude and honesty of his subjects. 

“I think of [my work as] a bit like journalism in that the goal is for me to honestly understand something else or someone else and then show it to my audience,” Phillips says. 

Phillips moved to San Francisco three years ago. Not knowing a whole lot about the city, he accepted a live-work studio space on Sixth and Mission. Once he arrived in the neighborhood, he realized it was — well, different. So he started his own artistic exploration of the street corner, which involved approaching people he found particularly intriguing, asking if he could take their photographs, and creating life-sized drawings of them.

When considering whom to approach for a photo, Phillips looks for “people who carry their story on their face” or demonstrate their story in the way they dress. These types of people embody the honesty and vulnerability he aims to capture in his pieces. 

 “I’m fascinated with vulnerability,” Phillips says. “If I approach most people in the street and ask them, ‘Can I take your photograph? I’m an artist,’ they’ll stand in a certain way, pose in a certain way, and have a projected sense of how they want to be perceived. But this particular subset of society doesn’t do that. They allow me into a deeper sense of who they are.”

While people may look at Phillips’s work and assume his drawings are of homeless men and women, that’s not necessarily the case. “A lot of people assume they are all homeless, but I have no idea if any of them are homeless,” Phillips says. 

And he doesn’t care to ask his subjects about their living situations, either. “Part of the reason I isolate my subjects from their backgrounds is because I want to remove certain information,” Phillips says. “I want you to take each person out of context and see them as an individual, rather than place them in a certain box.”

A unifying attitude that links Phillips’ subjects seems to be that “these people are in a place, for whatever reason, where they don’t really give a shit. They’ve gone through a lot of things — maybe hard, maybe just different than your average suburban white kid’s experiences — that have put them in a place where they are comfortable,” Phillips says.

He describes his goal as building an emotional and mental bridge between two disparate cultural groups and allowing people to see themselves in these individuals, who are often from a completely different world than their viewers.

Phillips motions toward Spaceman, who’s sporting Ugg boots, a motorcycle helmet, and a creatively tied tie, and is holding a broom in a way that makes it look like a badass accessory. “I’ve drawn Spaceman several times,” he says. Tinesha, another subject of a life-sized drawing, wears dramatic eye shadow along with a puka shell necklace and is holding a to-go container. Phillips speaks highly of Tinesha and says she is incredibly sweet. 

Then he shows me Billy, one of his smaller drawings. Billy has a long beard and contemplative eyes. His shirt is tucked into his baggy cargo sweatpants, the cuffs of his light button-down shirt are undone, and his crossed arms frame his layered beaded necklaces. “This is Billy the Prophet,” he says. “I’m not sure if anyone other than me calls him that, but he’s definitely a prophet.”

After perusing his pieces, you might think Phillips is trying to impart some type of social justice-driven message or a call to action against poverty or homelessness. But Phillips says his goal is more about perception than social change. His hope is that if you see these pieces and grapple with this idea of how and why you treat certain people a certain way, then “hopefully the next time you walk by someone on the street you might think about this work and say, ‘Hey, I might not be able to fix shit, but I can at least smile; I can at least say hi.’”

After spending almost three years living at the corner of Sixth and Mission, cheaper rent lured Phillips out to East Oakland in April. He still comes back to his street corner, though. Not just for the next photo, but to continue his friendships with the people he’s photographed. He routinely runs into his subjects – now friends – and buys them lunch or art supplies.

“They know who I am on the street corner now. I’m that guy who draws people. And sometimes people even ask me to draw them,” he says.

Being the guy who draws people has allowed Phillips to become a part of the community. “I’m no longer this gentrifying white presence; I’m not the person who’s trying to change Sixth and Mission from what it’s been. I’m somebody who’s trying to understand what Sixth and Mission is,” Phillips says.

 

“I Am Another Yourself”

Through Sept. 27

Opens Sat/6, 6-9 pm

Hashimoto Contemporary

804 Sutter, SF

www.hashimotocontemporary.com

For inquiries, contact Hashimoto Contemporary: hashimotocontemporary@gmail.com

Follow Phillips on Instagram here

A master of observation: chatting with author Sean Wilsey

Sue Vaughan
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A master of observation: chatting with author Sean Wilsey

“We used to call this Café High,” author Sean Wilsey says of Café International, our meeting spot, before letting out a hearty chortle. By “we” he means his late-80s classmates at the Urban School, the private prep school 10 blocks or so from the Haight and Fillmore coffee shop. By “high” I assume he’s alluding to marijuana in some form or another, but I’m too intrigued by Wilsey’s instant openness and nostalgia to probe. Despite four other high schools (he never graduated), myriad other cities (he doesn’t come back to San Francisco very often anymore), and 25 or so intervening years (he’s pushing 45), Wilsey still grasps the vibe of his native hood with the exactitude of a lifelong resident. 

“A lot of places used to look like this …Café High only stands out now because it’s a relic.” The joint, which plays reggae tunes, has scuffed floors, and whose waiters delivered a gorgeous mango smoothie to Wilsey, is no longer the stereotypical SF hangout spot. Instead, the boutique and artisanal bars and coffee houses of the tech boom are the preferred haunts for most interviews and meetings of the literati. As he discussed his own evolution on gentrification, his wide and incisive eyes, usually full of exuberant twinkle, squinted in judgment. “When it first started happening, I said, ‘Shit, yeah!’” But then it loses its edge of interestingness,” Wilsey says. “The Haight used to feel totally wild and nuts. Now I wouldn’t think twice about bringing my grandmother here at any hour of the day.”

Wilsey’s ability to instantly contextualize San Francisco’s commercial shifts despite his absence is testament to the depth of his analytical mind. The writer has managed to become a magazine mainstay, wildly successful memoirist, and, most recently, author of the McSweeney’s essay collection More Curious, because of this uncanny observational ability. He’s had a prolific and varied career and is only picking up steam. Yet, like the stories of many artists, Wilsey’s journey is one built more on compulsion than pure bliss, calling than serendipity. 

Given his background as the son of San Francisco socialites Al Wilsey and Pat Montandan, Wilsey is astonishingly self-made. “I have endured a certain amount of ridiculous preconception, especially in this town, out of the fact that I have a family that casts a shadow here,” he explains. “But I don’t feel like I have anything to do with it.” Despite his feelings of distance from his family’s legacy, Wilsey appears anything but bitter — he talks of his parents with a smile. Instead, he simply seems to have fought to find his own road.

After his tumultuous and often delinquent high school journey, he began honing his writing and eventually moved to New York City with the express desire to get a job at the New Yorker. “I said, ‘I’m not leaving until it happens.’ There was a lot of determination,” he says. Wilsey sent his portfolio to the New School, got in, and happened to find a professor who worked at the New Yorker. Wilsey had been at Newsweek organizing responses to letters, but eventually, after a year of calling the head of the messenger room, finagled a job as an in-house deliveryman at his dream publication.

“It had to be one of the favorite jobs that I ever had, because they would literally be like, ‘run this down to Norman Mailer’.” Despite the high-profile deliveries, Wilsey’s life was scrappily exhilarating as opposed to glamorous. He lived on a ferryboat that had docked at Pier 25, did restoration work in exchange for habitation, and got by on the $18,000 messenger salary.

I couldn’t help but think that the author’s early years in the industry were ripe for some sort of further artistic exploration, so it wasn’t surprising when Wilsey revealed that he is working on a new memoir that will incorporate his New York years. Our conversation began to transition from the biographical to the philosophical as we discussed his initial trepidation at the endeavor. “Until recently I’ve felt kind of intimidated about writing about New York, most notably because my editor — I love her, but she’s a badass — said, ‘Oh, you think you can write about New York?’”

While Wilsey delivered the quote with a hilariously sassy tone, he was clearly serious about the pressures of self-criticality and perfectionism in the writing world. He told me a bit about the plight of legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, whom he got to meet while at the magazine and talked extensively about in the introduction to More Curious. At the height of his powers in 1964, Mitchell stopped writing and, until his death in 1996, still came to the New Yorker almost every day without ever publishing anything significant.

Relative mystery still exists about what exactly happened in Mitchell’s mind that led to his silence. Wilsey, however, has gleaned ideas from the memoirs of one of the writer’s secretaries. “They had these flirtatious lunch dates — she was a very good-looking woman — and eventually Mitchell would tell her about what he was working on and how hard it was.” The empathy that Wilsey felt for Mitchell was palpable in his voice as he recounted his literary idol’s struggles. “He tried to bring every piece he wrote to the next level and it became harder and harder for him to do it …a bit of it has come out and its not as amazing … there’s a kind of mania in it.”   

Wilsey’s candor is so without pretense that I found it difficult to maintain a critical eye while we discussed. As he told the Mitchell story, I remembered to take in his appearance — a blue messenger cap (which appeared so poetic given his “in” at the New Yorker), a button-down, jeans. His dress and light, baritone voice both evoked a lasting youth — while he spoke with authority and maturity, his vigor and presence quelled all supposes that he is approaching some sort of Mitchell moment. 

Wilsey battles the pitfalls of self-doubt through several writing strategies. While he was immensely appreciative of my review of More Curious, he called me out for suggesting that his immaculate fact checking was “of the Wikipedia age.” “I over-research to an incredible degree, but I actually try to avoid web research altogether.” The personalized investigative process, much of which he chronicles within his pieces, seemingly keeps Wilsey focused. The compressed timing of magazine writing also appears to help the writer keep energized in his detective work and retain perspective about the inevitable imperfection of his articles. “When you have an editor and a deadline it’s harder to get caught up in the potential craziness of working in a vacuum,” he says.

Wilsey also generates genuine interest in all of the subjects that he takes on and manages to imbue them with a philosophical depth that usually isn’t instantly obvious. While we discussed “Some of Them Can Read,” his frightening treatise on New York’s rat population, Wilsey recounted a surreal piece of information that, while not making it into the essay, buoyed its thesis. “Some explorers in South America entered a crater that no one had ever entered before. They found these huge dog-like rats, but they were like, pure love, extremely friendly, and vegetarian.” Using the rats as the uncorrupted variable against their more vicious and conniving New York equivalents, Wilsey came to a startlingly deep conclusion about the beasts. “Rats are reflections of us. They are our alter egos.”

While Wilsey can’t help but uncover facts and endlessly theorize about rats, NASA, World Cup soccer, and the other facets of contemporary society that he explores, he doesn’t necessarily want to. “You have to be called to do this thing. This is what I do. Otherwise it’s very lonely and frustrating to have a literary view of the world and not be able to set it down and stop analyzing.” The moxy that Wilsey showed in climbing the literary ladder and the attention he pays his focuses is not as much a desire so much as a necessity.

After discussing his powerful impulse to write for several minutes, Wilsey grabbed the copy of More Curious that I’d brought with me and flipped to its centerpiece, “Travels With Death.”

“I never wanted to write [this as] the main essay, but this dude we met went on this insane monologue.” The dude in question, an eccentric San Antonian interested in the architectural work of Wilsey’s traveling companion, the architect Michael Meredith, presented the duo with a multi-hour tirade about Texas history. Wilsey read his response to the surreal scene out loud: “It put me on alert. I started expecting I’d have to write about all of this, and there’s no surer impediment to a good time than knowing you have to write about it.”

Marfa, Texas, an artist enclave of around 2,000 people where Wilsey lives much of the time, offers the writer shelter from the emotional burden of his constant analysis. “Marfa, though overwhelming in its natural grandeur, allows me to step outside of my mind and just chill, and that’s almost a subversive act for me.” While Wilsey’s first and last essays in his collection focus on Marfa, he doesn’t feel the same internal expectation to chronicle its happenings.

That hasn’t stopped him from receiving a fair amount of derision in the local press. He explains a particularly damning piece: “It basically said, ‘Why does he get to write the book that is going to in some way define or advance the conversation about what this place gets to be?’” Thus, even when Wilsey manages to turn off his internal self-judgment in Marfa, his neighbors sometimes manage to pick up the slack. Despite the stress, however, Wilsey is still in love with the locale. “That’s not the Marfa that I know. Marfa can be edgy, but usually very kind.”

As we left Café High and walked up Haight Street to his reading at the Booksmith, I couldn’t help but think that Wilsey is like his home — full of sharp and often biting insight, but immensely generous and restrained, lacking almost entirely in cruelty. As he regaled me with stories of ’80s quasi-brothels on Haight that were frequented by Urban students and sighed at the sight of another steel-tinged bar with stylist mixologists, I could tell that the mania of Wilsey’s life and mind were all worth it — he’s doing what he has to do.  

Check out David Kurlander’s review of Sean Wilsey’s More Curious here.

To boldly go…beyond the grave! This week’s new movies

Sue Vaughan
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To boldly go…beyond the grave! This week’s new movies

A mask-wearing musician, a Star Trek alum, coming-of-age tales, a rom-com with a sci-fi twist, a rom-com with a zombie twist, and a romantic drama (rom-dram?) with a metaphysical twist are all part of the weekend movie outlook. Read on for reviews and trailers!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wk-hWzq67w4

Frank Who doesn’t want to be a musical savant, visually riveting, naturally gifted, freed from convention, and liberated of linear thought? The exception might be the doll-headed, damaged namesake of this comedy loosely inspired by the life of late English musician and comedian Frank Sidebottom (real name: Chris Sievey), and real-life Sidebottom sideguy Jon Ronson, who co-wrote the screenplay. And if this loving, very funny, bromantic take on the so-called creative process of rock seems a bit forced at times, that’s only because the movie is so clearly filtered through the archetypal wannabe, made likable by Domhnall Gleeson. His office worker Jon is struggling to write songs when he stumbles across a band, Soronprfbs, after watching their keyboard player attempt to drown himself at the beach. Manager Don (Scoot McNairy) taps the bystander to contribute to the chaos happening onstage, then drags him off for the making of the album. Mysterious leader Frank (Michael Fassbender), who never takes off his massive, faux-happy head, finds inspiration in threads protruding from upholstery. As Jon’s nest egg gets sucked into the recording budget and theremin player Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal) rages against the interloper, he posts the band’s, er, artistry to YouTube, obtaining the group a coveted gig at South by Southwest. But who really wants this shot at fame? The sideman with a will to power, or the damaged true talent? Director Lenny Abrahamson and Ronson wisely place Frank squarely in the viral video/GIF/Vine-poisoned multiplatform miasma of today, put across all the more powerfully by Gleeson and particularly Fassbender, who reveals a fine singing voice. While cleverly referencing outsider artists big and small by way of right-on original songs by Stephen Rennicks, Frank asks vital questions about motivation and art-making in an era when it seems like everyone is getting their 15 minutes of fame — and we’re getting increasingly weary of eyeballing it and filtering the wheat from the gone-in-a-nanosecond chaff. Some make music because they want to be stars, while others, Frank says, do it because they have little other choice. (1:34) (Kimberly Chun)

If I Stay Chloë Grace Moretz stars as a teen caught in limbo between life and death in this adaptation of Gayle Forman’s best-selling YA novel. (1:47) 

Island of Lemurs: Madagascar Morgan Freeman (who else?) narrates this IMAX documentary following scientist Dr. Patricia Wright as she studies lemurs on the island of Madagascar. (:40)

Life After Beth See “(Un)Deadpan.” (1:28) DIRECTV.

Me and You See “Cruel Stories of Youth.” (1:43) Roxie.

The One I Love Sophie (Elisabeth Moss) and Ethan (Mark Duplass) have hit a speed bump in their relationship — they don’t have fun together like they used to, and even direct attempts to replicate that past magic fall completely flat. Ergo they take the advice of a couples counselor (Ted Danson) and book a weekend at a country getaway he swears has done “wonders” for all his previous clients in relationship trouble. Things get off to a pleasant enough start, but the duo’s delight at recapturing their old mojo becomes complicated when they realize … well, it’s best to know as little as possible going into The One I Love, a first feature for director Charlie McDowell and scenarist Justin Lader that approaches a fantastical narrative idea with a poker face and considerable ingenuity. Duplass and (especially) Moss are terrific in roles that eventually require some very complicated (and subtle) nuances. (1:31) (Dennis Harvey)

Rich Hill See “Cruel Stories of Youth.” (1:31)

Sin City: A Dame To Kill For Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez co-direct this sequel to 2005’s Sin City, based on Miller’s graphic novel series. (1:38)

To Be Takei The erstwhile and forever Mr. Sulu’s surprisingly high public profile these days no doubt sparked this documentary portrait by SF’s own Jennifer Kroot (2009’s It Came From Kuchar). But she gives it dramatic heft by highlighting the subject’s formative years in World War II Japanese-American internment camps, and finds plenty of verite humor in the everyday byplay between fairly recently “out” gay celebrity George and his longtime life and business partner Brad Altman — the detail-oriented, pessimistic worrywart to his eternally upbeat (if sometimes tactlessly critical) star personality. We get glimpses of them in the fan nerdsphere, on The Howard Stern Show, at Takei’s frequent speaking engagements (on internment and gay rights), and in his latter-day acting career both as perpetual TV guest and a performer in a hopefully Broadway-bound new musical (about internment). Then of course there’s the Star Trek universe, with all surviving major participants heard from, including ebullient Nichelle Nichols, sad-sack Walter Koenig, thoughtfully distanced Leonard Nimoy, and natch, the Shat (who acts like a total asshat, dismissing Takei as somebody he sorta kinda knew professionally 50 years ago.) We also hear from younger Asian American actors who view the subject as a role model, even if some of his actual roles weren’t so trailblazing (like a couple “funny Chinaman” parts in Jerry Lewis movies, and in John Wayne’s 1968 pro-Vietnam War film The Green Berets). Even if you’ve tired of Takei’s ubiquity online and onscreen, this campy but fond tribute is great fun. (1:30) Sundance Kabuki. (Dennis Harvey)

When the Game Stands Tall Jim Caviezel, Laura Dern, Michael Chiklis, and Alexander Ludwig star in this football drama, based on the real-life 151-game winning streak held by Concord’s De La Salle High School. (1:55)

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